“We’ve been ratted out to the feds,” Ree says. “Except we haven’t done anything. It’s that fucking lying Gavey bitch. I swear to God, she ought to just die.”
Yes, thinks Sally.That would be helpful.
5
I said before that Lamberts aren’t liars. It’s true. Gaveys are liars and enemies, and Lamberts are truthful and good. Which means I need to be as honest as I can, as soon as I can: There’s something I’m not telling you. It’s about me. I’m not saying anything that isn’t true, but I’m leaving out something that is—a big, important detail. I’m allowing, creating significant omissions.
Would anything I’m leaving out make you think much less of me if you knew it? Almost certainly. I’ll tell you eventually, but I need you to like and trust me more, and hate and fear the Gaveys more, before I do. If I approached it in any other way, you might drop this book in disgust, and I need you to keep reading.
(Oh my God—am I writing a book? I hope that’s a quick and easy thing to do, because going through the nightmare our family’s just been through in real life, real time was long and grueling, and I’m nowhere near fully recovered, so I’m only really looking for quick, easy experiences for the foreseeable future.)
Why do I need other people to know the truth? Partly because I can’t bear the thought of being the only one, but that’s not all it is. The main thing is: This is my next assigned task. Just as I was sure from the start that dealing with the problem our family faced was mainly my job, I’m sure now that sharing my first-person, firsthand account with the world is my next mission, assigned to me by a force more powerful than myself.
No one will ever understand exactly what happened unless I tell them, because I’m the one who made it happen.
Also, and of equal importance: Why does no one ever question why we need to know about 11 September 2001, or why the Second World War started? Old people like Mum and Dad are always going on about the importance of knowing all that stuff (How often has Dad gone off on one of his “The trouble is, young people these days don’t get taught proper history, so they can’t see the dangers” rants?), but what almost no one realizes is that history is the Lamberts versus the Gaveys as much as it’s the Brexit referendum or Henry VIII’s six wives. None of those things is a more or less significant element of the battle between good and evil than any of the others.
That’s why people need to hear this story—and I also happen to believe there’s a moral duty to spread the word whenever you hear of good winning and evil losing. That’s Enjollification in action. As Mum said once, after she’d identified her purpose in life thanks to that podcast, “Only Enjollification can bring salvation to the nation.” She was being silly, but she was right.
So, yes, I am currently withholding a few important facts, and I have a powerful and good reason for doing so. I’m meant to tellthe story of the Lamberts and the Gaveys in exactly this way, just as the Gaveys were always meant to come for us. Mum would hate this idea and try to persuade me out of believing it, but it’s true. She’s not the only one with a purpose. The Gaveys arrived in our lives for a reason: so that we could do what was required of us and become who we were always destined to be—and, what’s more, I was certain of this from the moment Mum and I first saw Lesley Gavey outside our old house, before I’d ever heard the nameGavey. I knew instantly that the appearance of this crying woman in our street somehow represented the start of the battle that would be the making of me. (Well…to be strictly accurate, I kind of both knew it and didn’t know at the same time. I definitely sensed it on some level, though.)
I can’t remember at what point I began to appreciate that our names sounded too good together for it to be a coincidence: “The Lamberts and the Gaveys.” Doesn’t it sound like a pairing that’s bound to have a war of substance behind it? I think it’s up there with the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Montagues and the Capulets, the Starks and the Lannisters. (Also the farmer and the cowman from the musicalOklahoma!, though they’re not families.)
There’s a reason why these enemy name pairings work so well when you say them together, though for ages I couldn’t work out what it was. It’s partly the balance of syllables and sounds, but it’s not only that. The main thing, I think, is that with each pair, you can’t tell simply from hearing the names which side is good and which evil, so the intrigue factor is massive. “Both sound as if they could be lovely,” you might think, and you can’t wait to find out what went wrong between these normal-soundingpeople. You tell yourself that maybe their feud is the result of a misunderstanding.
It’s important that you don’t misunderstand the wickedness of the Gaveys. Might they have done less harm in different circumstances? Of course. Appalling life experiences might lead any of us to do terrible things with great regret, but they don’t make a person innately evil. Trust me when I say the Gaveys had to be crushed, and don’t quibble when you find out the full truth later on. I promise you, no immunity or favors are ever granted to quibblers once evil has taken hold of a village or a country or a world.
Repeat after me:
Alastair Gavey, CEO of a telecommunications consultancy that has words in its name likeCore,Network, andRefresh(trust me, they don’t make any more sense in their correct order), fifty-eight years old. Address: The Stables, Bussow Court, Swaffham Tilney, Cambridgeshire, CB25 0TS.Evil.
Lesley Gavey, self-proclaimed (unconvincingly: see several previous failed career attempts) podcast producer/sponger-off her husband. Fifty-four years old. Address: as above.Evil.
Tess Gavey, A-level student at Bottisham Village College, seventeen years old. Address: as above.Evil.By far the worst of all the Gaveys. (In my opinion only, I should say. Mum would strenuously disagree.)
6
Monday 17 June 2024
Sally
Mark’s face is a mixture of impatience and confusion. “Who?” he says. “Which bitch?”
At first he assumedthe Gavey bitchmust be the mother, not the teenage daughter. Yet it was Ree who said it, and Sally is the one who thinks Lesley Gavey is a crazy bitch; it’s Sally who theorizes, speculates, and invents scary scenarios around Lesley as if it’s her favorite hobby. Whereas Ree hasn’t ever said much about Lesley and has said plenty about what a justifiably unpopular loser Tess Gavey is. Tess is in Ree’s class at sixth-form college; they have two A-levels in common, English language and literature (combined) and sociology.
So Ree knows everything, thinks Sally; she heard what Detective Chantree said. In which case, why the hell didn’t she come downstairs straight away to check Sally was okay?Maybe because Ree’s not okay herself.
Has silent crying been happening on both floors of the Hayloft? Yes. Ree’s eyes are watery and red. She’s as imaginative as Sally is,perhaps more so: She too will have brought all the worst-case scenarios to vivid life in her mind.
Perhaps she hoped to stay and weep in her room for a while longer, but Sally scuppered that plan by maintaining her uninformative silence in the face of the quite reasonable questions that have been aimed at her.
“Ratted out for what?” says Tobes.
“Nothing! He didn’t do it!” Ree wails. “Right, Mum? I don’t get it: Why didn’t you tell the cop he didn’t do it? I mean…didhe do it?” She bursts into tears, which she tries to scare away with a string of obscenities. “Please tell me he didn’t.”
“Of course he didn’t,” says Sally. Thank God Champ is completely, indisputably innocent. That’s something good she can hold on to. Gratitude is so important, even at a time like this.
“Then why thefuckdidn’t you say that to the policeman?” demands Ree.
