by S. E. Lynes
Graham sucks hard on the joint, screws up his eyes. ‘I don’t give a t-t-toss. That’s how I t-take it.’ His voice is reedy, like he doesn’t have enough air to finish the sentence. The words sting.
‘All right.’ She tries to make her voice soft. ‘But Graham, love, you’re smoking that stuff in my garden as if that’s a normal thing to do. And it’s not. The food is barely cleared away, your daughter’s still eating and the neighbours’ll smell it a mile away.’
His face creases in what looks like disgust; something superior and full of hate. ‘I’m sure Tom and Pauline have w-witnessed much worse c-c-coming through these walls. Don’t think a bit of w-weed is gonna shock ’em, do you?’
‘Son. When you had this baby, you said you weren’t a kid, didn’t you? So stop acting like one.’
Her cheek blazes. Instinctively she puts her hand to it.
Graham’s mouth has dropped open, his eyes shining and sinking and sorry. His arrogance has vanished. In its place, there is only horror. Her face burns. Her cheek is wet. She brings her hand away. There is blood on her fingertips. Understanding seeps in. Graham, her son, has slapped her. Her son has slapped her hard, across the face, and drawn blood.
‘Oh my God, Mum.’ He steps towards her, reaching for her. She backs away. ‘Mum … it was the ring … it was Dad’s signet ring.’
No words come. She isn’t angry. She isn’t scared. She isn’t anything. Her son has hit her. There is blood on her hand. Blood. It’s all in the blood. It’s in his blood. It’s in him. Her son is standing in front of her and all is clear.
‘Get out.’ Everything stalls. She realises that she can say these words again if she has to, and she does. ‘Get out. Take Tracy and the baby and don’t come back until I say you can. Do you understand? Not until I say.’
All his swagger is gone. He is crying, his mouth gaping, miserable. ‘Mum, I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.’
‘No, you won’t. Now off you go. Go on. Get out of my house. Now, please.’
He sobs into his hands, the joint burnt out between his fingers. She watches him as if through glass. He throws the filthy stub onto the wet grass and, still crying, stumbles into the house. She waits in the garden, listens to the commotion inside, feels nothing. How funny it is, she thinks. When all ability to cope with another human being leaves you – a human being you love more than your own life – how funny that calmness should come into you and fill you up, replacing all that worry, all that dread, all that waiting anxiety. Calm. Calm is all she feels. ‘No more,’ she says softly. ‘No more.’
When the front door shuts, the house is silent. Wherever Nicola is, she is keeping her distance. Carol lights another cigarette and stares at the brown leaves mulching in the flower bed. Today her son has pushed her to a limit they both know is final. What he needs is tough love, the kind she never showed his dad. Telling him to go is the only way to help him. He will not murder Tracy over years the way Ted murdered Carol, not on her watch.
Her son will not become his father.
He will not become a murderer.
Forty-Four
Carol
The Globe flats rise from the concrete. Porthole windows like shocked mouths gape from its brightly coloured walls. It is nearly three weeks since Carol has seen Graham, Tracy and the baby. She has tried to resist, but with Christmas just over a week away the need to make peace with her son and to see her grandchild has begun to make her feel ill. She has come up to the flats with the excuse of bringing a cottage pie but has decided to call in when she knows Graham will be at work. She can leave the dinner with Tracy, see the baby and go. Graham will know she has been, that she has not disowned him. One step at a time.
The plastic handles on the carrier bag have cut into her hands all the way from the bus stop. At the bottom of the flats, she puts down the bag and puts on her gloves. She walks down Macbeth Way, up the steps to Othello Crescent, then up again to Hamlet Walk. At the top, she turns right, relieved to be out of the stench of the stairwell.
Out over the chest-high wall, clouds hang above the white hulk of the Shopping City. It looks like an enormous Airfix spaceship has landed on the scrub, just missing the expressway that loops around it. Scalextric, she thinks. The world is cheap as plastic.
Up ahead, a man appears from the doorway of what looks like Graham’s flat. Head cocked to one side, he begins to walk towards her, whistling a tuneless jumble of notes. A red baseball jacket with white leather sleeves hangs off one shoulder. She recognises the jacket before the face. Barry. She recognises the walk now, the swagger, like he’s won the pools. She adjusts her handbag on her shoulder, rehearsing the piece of her mind she will give him once he’s in range. She can see him quite well now. Not just the jacket and the walk, but the face starts to appear – smug, ferrety, pleased with itself.
She is grabbing him by the scruff of the neck as he passes. She is putting her hands around his neck, strangling him. She hears the choking sound he makes.
Nearer he comes, in all his horrible detail: low-slung jeans, pricey trainers, sovereign rings on all but one of his fingers. He sucks at his ciggie like it’s a straw in a carton of juice, wincing as he draws back the nicotine and showing a big gap on the right side of his teeth. She doesn’t remember that. Two, maybe three teeth missing now. She hopes someone punched them out. Her footsteps echo, bounce around the concrete walkway. His rubber soles make no sound. She feels her guts fold, and under her ribs a burning pain like a poker end pushed into her sternum. He is almost level now, almost passing by.
‘All righ’?’ He nods to her from down to up.
He does know her, then, as she knows him. His small green eyes she remembers, his sickly sweet manners – Is Graham in, Mrs Green? How are you today, Mrs Green?
Just as quickly, there’s the back of his head, dark and spiky, a scar to the right of his crown. She has not grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, not strangled him. She’s done nothing.
She stops, puts down the bag. The burn from her chest moves into her throat.
‘Oi!’ she shouts after him. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t break his stride. ‘Barry, I’m talking to you.’ Still he doesn’t turn or slow. ‘Whatever it is you’re giving our Graham, stop it, all right? Leave him alone or I’ll call the police, d’you hear me? I’ll call the police.’
He reaches the stairwell. He is still whistling. Without so much as glancing at her, he disappears from view.
She runs to the mouth of the stinking stone steps. He heard her, she knows it. The top of his head goes first one way, then the other, down and down. Whistling away, trying to pretend he’s in no rush, but his miserable, scurrying feet give him away.
‘Barry!’ she shouts down. ‘You’re a coward, love. Did you hear me? You don’t know right from wrong. I’m warning you. Leave our Graham alone. He’s got a kid.’
The whistling fades. She clatters down the stairwell and onto the ground floor, just in time to see a door bang shut. Bastard. Weasel. Coward.
She trudges back upstairs to her bag and heads to Graham’s flat. Never, she thinks, never ever did she imagine she’d end up walking through a place like this, let alone to visit family. Never ever did she imagine she’d shout in public like that, like she was as common as muck.
The doorbell crunches under her finger. She isn’t sure whether it has rung inside and is about to press again when Tracy opens the door, but only wide enough to show half of her face. She looks frightened, but it is just a flash, a moment, before she smiles.
‘Hiya, Carol,’ she almost shouts.
‘Blimey, Tracy, no need to yell, love, I’m only here.’ Carol laughs, nerves jangling.
‘Sorry,’ Tracy says, though her voice is no quieter. ‘It’s just a surprise to see yer, that’s all.’
‘Are you going to let me in, then, or what?’ Carol falters, no longer sure whether she is welcome, why Tracy won’t open the door. Barry has something to do with this, she feels sure. ‘Peace offering.’ She hold
s up the cottage pie. Gravy has spilt thick and brown against the inside of the carrier bag; she curses at it.
Tracy retreats into the flat, still gripping the door handle. Carol edges inside and finds herself up against the girl in the gloom.
‘Sorry.’ She pulls at her sleeves, but there seems to be hardly enough room for her to take off her coat.
Tracy shifts but stays between Carol and the rest of the flat. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ Christ, the volume. As if she’s calling across a football pitch.
‘Stop shouting, love, you’ll wake the baby.’ As the words leave her, Carol senses a strangeness in the air. She isn’t imagining it. Yes, she’s fallen out with Graham, but she’s not had words with Tracy. Tracy, who usually gives her a hug, who tells her she loves her every five minutes. As Carol hangs her coat up on one of the hooks behind the door, it dawns on her: Barry has been here. Barry has been here while Graham is at work.
‘Oh, I see,’ she says, her heart quickening. ‘I get it.’
She steps over the cottage pie and nudges Tracy to one side.
‘Carol?’ Tracy calls after her, her voice quavering with worry.
Round the L of the hallway Carol marches, past doors closed to her, cramped together, like something from Alice in Wonderland. There is only one door she needs: the bedroom.
‘Carol, Carol.’ Tracy is scuttling behind her, though Carol can hardly hear the girl for the humming in her ears. ‘Don’t go in there. Please, Carol—’
‘That’s exactly where I’m going, love.’ She grabs hold of the door handle. Tracy has given her the right to do this. Cheating. On Graham. With Barry, of all people. She opens the door.
Graham. Graham lying on his back, fully clothed, legs wide apart, still as a dead man. The air is thick and grey, sweet and strange. Graham.
‘Graham?’ She approaches the bed, not understanding. She was expecting crumpled sheets, the smell of sex, but not this, not her son. ‘Graham?’ His belly pushes his T-shirt into a dome. ‘Graham.’
He opens his eyes. His eyelids are slabs, gravestones. He rolls his head towards her and gives the start of a laugh through his nose. His eyelids give up, close.
Carol staggers backwards, ears roaring, eyes clouding. On Graham’s bedside table is the black Casio watch he’s had since he was thirteen, some foil, some odd bits and pieces. The room rises up in front of her – what should be dark is light, what should be light, dark. She blinks and waves at the air, feels herself falling, falling, fall …
* * *
‘Carol?’ Tracy crouches in front of her. She is holding out a glass of water.
There is pain on the top of Carol’s head. She finds she is half lying, half propped up against the bedside table.
‘You fainted.’
Carol sits herself up, sips the water.
‘It’s since last month,’ Tracy says. ‘When we saw you that day, he’d already lost his job. He just missed work too many times. He couldn’t tell you. He was too ashamed, like.’
Carol’s head aches. Her eyes sting, her eyelids are heavy. It’s the thick air; it’s making her stoned. ‘Hang on, slow down. I thought he wasn’t too bad.’
‘He got worse. Barry’s always round here and … he scares me. He gives Gray the stuff but I can’t say owt to him – I wouldn’t dare. And Gray’s got a lot worse since … since he lost his job.’ She frowns. She looks miserable, lost, like a child. She is a child. ‘He told us not to tell you, like.’
Carol lets herself be helped up, then led into the lounge. The sight of Jade in the basket on the floor makes her want to yell, but instead the tears come silently.
‘He just about got it together to collect his dole this week,’ Tracy says. ‘But I can’t see him keeping it up if he gets any worse.’ She reaches for Carol’s hand. Together they sit down on the sofa.
‘What’s happened to his stomach?’
‘What?’ Tracy is biting her thumbnail.
‘It’s all swollen.’
‘Oh, yeah. He eats. In the night, like. Clears the fridge out. He ate all the beef mince the other night, and I’d only browned it. I don’t know how he didn’t chuck it up. He eats jam out of the jar. I find the spoon on the side. He eats crisps and that, Frosties, Jammy Dodgers, you name it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Tracy sniffs, looks away. ‘He kept saying he’d stop.’ She starts to cry.
Jade snuffles in her wicker basket. Her head and feet touch the ends. They need a proper cot.
‘Carol?’
‘What, love?’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Tracy bows her head. Her shoulders shake and she hides her face in her hands. It is not her who should be sorry. Graham has knocked her up and now he’s not standing by her, not rising to his responsibilities. Just like his bloody father.
‘Come here.’ Carol puts her arm around the girl and pulls her close. Gently she rocks with her back and forth, kisses the top of her head. After a while, Tracy calms down enough to break away and sit back. Carol stays perched on the edge of the sofa.
‘Carol?’
‘You don’t need to be sorry, love.’
‘No. I mean, thanks. But I think … I think he’s stealing.’ Tracy hunches her back as she speaks, flinches almost. Why would she do that? Why would she flinch?
‘What d’you mean? When?’
‘It’s just that, with Barry and that, you know, at night. They go out. They go down the new estate.’ She folds her arms. ‘It’s just that sometimes there’s money on the table and I don’t know where it’s from and he won’t tell me. He tells me to keep out of it.’
‘And you think he’s stealing?’
‘I don’t know. Or dealing. I’m too scared to ask.’
‘Why scared, love?’
She shrugs. ‘He’s just – weird, like. I feel like I don’t know him sometimes. He turns.’
Turns. Carol reaches for her cigarettes, pulls out two and hands one to Tracy. What a mess, she thinks. Her own fault, letting them move here; she should’ve made them stay with her. They’re kids, the pair of them, nothing but kids. Too much too soon. She lights Tracy’s ciggie, then her own. ‘I’ll bloody kill him.’
‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry, I just don’t know what to do.’ Tracy begins to cry again, holding a tissue to her nose.
‘Is it just the pot he’s on?’
‘No … no, it’s not. It’s just got so much worse since … well, since before we came to yours last time, you know, when … Whatever he’s on, he just can’t seem to get enough of it. I can’t not let Barry in – he scares me half to death. I’ve heard he killed some lad who grassed on him. It’s supposed to be a secret but everyone knows. Except the police, like.’
Carol takes a drag of her ciggie. Another. It isn’t like he’s injecting, hopefully. Or is he? What is he doing? That foil, that’s something to do with needles, she thinks now. And the state of him, like he can’t be bothered even to live. Is that what this is about? The weight of life too much for him after everything? He looks so like Ted when the whisky had finished him off for the night and he’d collapsed, dead to the world, on the sofa. He’s even getting fat the same as Ted, all belly, legs still skinny, a boiled egg in a cup. What is she supposed to do now? Leave them here? No. Impossible. They’re family.
In her mind’s eye, her thumbs press down on Barry’s throat; she watches his eyes bulge and blacken, his stupid grin give way to a blue, lolling tongue. She should have killed him while she had the chance. She should have chucked his horrid little ferrety face over the balcony.
She stands up and holds out her hand to Tracy. ‘Go and wash your face and get your coat on, love. Let’s get Jade in the pram.’
‘Are you going to call the police?’
‘No, I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to order you a cot bed from Argos before our Jade’s toes start poking out through that basket.’
Forty-Five
Carol
Carol leaves
Tracy at five and takes the bus home. Outside, it is pitch dark and bitterly cold. At the lights, another bus pulls up alongside. In the window, she sees only her own face, staggered and ugly, with two sets of eyes. The bus lurches forward. The seat shudders beneath her. She thinks about the mountain that lies ahead. Graham is not well. Ted never got the help he needed. Graham must. She just has to work out how to give him that help, how to get him to let her.
She will call Jim, she decides. She will call him and ask him to come. She will admit to him that she thinks about him all the time, that she can’t do another day without at least knowing that he is, in some way, a real part of her life. He’s been part of her life since she saw him at Pauline and Tommy’s wedding. Part of her. She doesn’t even know what she’s keeping him away for anymore. Some guilt she’s decided to make herself feel, some loyalty – to what? To the past? To the memory of her kids when they were little? Something, anyway, that helps no one. As Pauline said to her the other day, what is Jim if not her other half? He knows as much about her as if he’d been living under her roof, and here she is, rushing home with no thought other than to tell him what has happened.
Making the decision only makes her more desperate to act on it. Meanwhile, the thought of getting through the next few hours makes her wish she could tuck up her arms, lie on a grassy bank and roll away down the longest of hills.
Later, when Nicola asks why she’s not eating her cottage pie, Carol says she’s got a dicky tummy. Nicola doesn’t ask after her brother. Carol can’t remember when she stopped. She’s lonely, Carol thinks, watching her load the meat and mash into her mouth as if it were a task she had to get through. It’s as if she’s grieving for a brother she’s lost. Whatever happens in all of this, her daughter, her too-clever-for-me girl must at all costs get away. She must have her education. She must fly.