The Hope by James Lovegrove

Stan through. Tommy made me go next and he kept guard with his knife, but somehow we all knew the danger was over.
    We took Stan straight up to Dr Macaulay. He was a good doc, not like this new jerk, and we told him exactly what had happened. We were too rattled even to think of inventing a cover story. And he listened good and nodded and we made him swear never to tell anyone and he promised. He did the best he could with Stan and Stan knows he’s lucky to be walking at all.
    Then we went back down and got hold of a rivet gun, the one we’re supposed to use for repairs. I hesitated, signing to Fred that some of the others might be alive back there, but he shook his head slowly, avoiding meeting my eyes.
    We riveted the steel over that hole tighter than a nun’s pantyhose.
    “You think this is a pile of horseshit, don’t you?”
    “Do you want me to be honest?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes.”
    “Fine. That’s your privilege.” Charlie rolled one of his cigarettes in that slick-fingered way of his and struck a match. The whisky bottle was half empty or half full, depending on how you want to see it. I was floating in a pleasant haze.
    “Go and look at the hole,” he said, “far corner. You can’t miss it.”
    “Wouldn’t convince me.”
    “Have I ever lied to you?”
    “Well…”
    “OK,” he said, waving his cigarette at me, “perhaps I did make it up. But perhaps I didn’t.”
    I asked Stan about his leg later that night, and he said he’d broken it falling off a ladder and it had never healed right. But then, he could have been lying.
    Now then, I believe there are places where you don’t go, where only a wrong turn can take you, and I don’t cling to my religious idea of hell any more. Sometimes, when I see that sheet of steel pinned to the wall with melted wedges of rivet, I think about Charlie’s squidgy creatures and I laugh.
    But not too loudly. If those things exist behind there, they don’t want to be here just as much as we don’t want to be in there.
    Because before I left the playroom, Charlie said this: “When I grew old enough, Big Fred threw himself overboard. He was letting me take over, I guess, but maybe meeting that thing on the pipe had been too much for him. Too much like him. Maybe being boss isn’t such a great deal, huh?”
    Maybe.
    And maybe there is a secret better left riveted beyond my understanding.

PERFECT CADENCE
     
    Punctually at six the orchestra struck up the lolloping oom-pa-pa of the waltz, the four violinists scraping out the melody for all it was worth. Dancers took to the floor on cue, as seagulls will take to a shoal of fish. The men were beautifully uncomfortable in tails and white tie (a white that had seen better days; now the colour of sea foam) and the women were uncomfortably beautiful in shot silk and faded crêpe-de-chine. The women crackled as they moved, the men’s shirtfronts creaked. They knew the old dances perfectly and each couple waltzed like a clockwork figurine, stiff, formal, elegant. They whirled in individual patterns, locked in a larger pattern of which none of them was wholly conscious, embraced as they were in a world stretching no further than the partner in their arms. They danced easily and swiftly. Stiff knee-joints were forgotten; twinges of lumbago were ignored; arthritic fingers found courage to clasp other fingers. The tune was impossibly sweet, almost sickly, a surfeit of major chords and perfect cadences. No harmonic was left unused.
    And above, the great crystal chandelier showered light to all corners of the ballroom and the chairs ranged along the sides reflected the light feebly in their gilt. On one sat a woman, unaccompanied. She had a thin, fine-boned face that wore old age with dignity. Triple rows of crescent-shaped wrinkles on either side of her mouth promised frequent smiles, as if she was about to offer you one any second now if you went up to her and asked her to dance. No, thank you, that smile would say with so