by Thorne Moore
I recall a lot of horns blasting and brakes screeching, and swearing from lorry windows high above me. Changing lanes on a motorway was a major triumph of will over sheer terror for me. It was a miracle I didn’t cause a serious pile-up with multiple fatalities. Perhaps the spirit in the glass was watching over me, determined to make me drink, to the full, the cup of gall that was waiting for me in Wales. So I found myself travelling towards Manchester, not London.
At least I was aware enough, this time, to notice the petrol light coming on. I just made it to a service station as it started to flash in panic.
I needed to fill the tank. It would cost the earth and I couldn’t remember what was in my bank account but I knew it was next to nothing. My debit card would probably be refused.
Malcolm’s jacket was in the van, flung across the passenger seat, along with some unopened mail and an empty grease-stained paper bag. Wincing with painful guilt, I checked it over. Malcolm’s credit card was in his pocket, along with a helpful note reminding him of his own pin number. I think this was why Malcolm was always so sympathetic to my hopelessness. He was just as bad.
I used the card, because I had no choice, but at least I had the decency to feel ashamed. To steal, from Malcolm of all people. It was selfish, mean and despicable. But what else could I do? I’d already stolen his van. No use telling myself I’d only borrowed it. I was supposed to be delivering some books to an address a mile from the shop and instead I was driving to Wales. I had taken without consent. Malcolm would probably have the police on my tail by the end of the day.
No, not Malcolm. He wouldn’t do that to me. But it was probably the end of his willingness to employ me, or offer any sort of refuge at Gem’s Books. He couldn’t employ a thief. But then, I was worse than a thief. I was a murderer. Future employment would not be an issue if I spent the rest of my life in prison. Because, of course, once I was sure of the truth, I would confess. The notion of a trial and a life sentence was a strange comfort. It would solve everything. But first I needed to establish that truth. I needed to find Wales. How hard could it be?
I managed to avoid finishing up in Liverpool. I was on the M6 and going south. Surely I needed to be going west by now. I stopped again at the next services and bought a road atlas. The cheapest on the WHSmith shelves and I used my own money this time. My card was accepted. I sat in the van, studying the map. So Wales was there. And there was Hay-on-Wye. And Brecon. Yes. I really didn’t want to be on the M6.
So I got off it and headed west, with the atlas on my knees. I must have gone in circles a few times, lost my bearings completely, came perilously close to getting back onto the M6, heading north, nearly found myself in Birmingham, and finally, deep in the middle of nowhere, in pitch darkness, I accepted that I was lost and there was no point in struggling on. Apart from anything else, no one was going to open their doors to a madwoman in the middle of the night. Better to stop now, and try to find Hay or Brecon at first light. So I pulled into a lay-by – more of a farm gateway, really, and switched off the engine. No help for it but to wait till morning.
I didn’t think I’d sleep, but I did.
*
First day back at school. The weather is raw, the sky grey and I am miserable. Our mother packs Hilary and me off together every day, and we don’t usually part company until we meet up with her friends. Then she runs off with them and I go on with Janice. But today, Hilary runs off as soon as we’re out of Linden Crescent and Mummy can no longer see us. She’s had enough of me, over Christmas. She hates me and won’t speak to me ever again. She runs, pigtails flapping, to be away from me, but she needn’t run. I am dragging. Dreading the meeting with Janice at the prefabs.
I see her. She’s coming along Brontë Road, dragging just like me. Perhaps, she’s hoping, if she goes slowly enough, I’ll go on, up to the Parade, and miss her. I think she must be thinking that because I’m thinking the same. Let her go past first.
But we’re both dragging so much, it’s pointless. We give up the struggle and come together like we always do. She looks at me sadly, scared.
I’m scared too. It’s not fair.
‘I won’t kill you if you promise not to kill me,’ I say.
Wide-eyed, she just nods.
‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’
She nods again. ‘And you.’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die, I promise.’
We hold hands and walk on, our entwined fingers gripping like vices, clinging on for dear life.
Cross my heart and hope to die.
*
I woke with a crick in my neck and one leg so numb there was no feeling whatsoever. I struggled into a sitting position and pushed the van door open onto a fresh, sparkling morning. I was surrounded by fields, some lush, some newly harvested. The trees were heavy with dusty summer, aching to turn. A line of blue-purple hills rimmed the western horizon.
I stood up, supporting myself against the van until blood and sensation returned to all my limbs. I was thirsty. There was a half-consumed bottle of water in the door pocket. I don’t know how long it had been there. Quite a while, from the stale taste, but I drank it anyway. I found a cereal bar in Malcolm’s jacket. He was a perpetual nibbler. I ate it. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t want to reach Angela and be diverted by endless comments about anorexia and self-starvation. I hadn’t been starving myself for the last month or so, but I was still thin. More than thin by most people’s standards. I couldn’t afford to arrive looking transparent. My present mission took precedence over my desire to be invisible. That could wait. I could be invisible for evermore in prison.
It was seven o’clock and cars were beginning to pass. That was good. The day was waking up and I’d be able to knock on doors without causing a major panic. I studied the map again, but it didn’t have a helpful sticker saying, ‘You are here.’ I drove on until I reached a junction with a signpost. I thought it might give me a clue to where I was, but it did better than that. It pointed to Hay and Brecon. I could breathe again.
I’d always wanted to go to Hay-on-Wye. The book town. I’d fantasised about moving there, and disappearing into an inexhaustible kingdom of books. It was living up to the fantasy in my mind: I had to cross a drawbridge to reach it and bribe the guardian of the gate. Or at least cross a wooden bridge and pay a toll. The town itself was a bit of an unglamorous disappointment. Just brick and concrete and tarmac like any other. Warehouses, yards and car parks. A supermarket. I don’t get that. Why would anyone want to buy food when they’ve got bookshops?
A lot of bookshops. But I wasn’t in search of books, I was in search of Angela Bryant.
I parked up by a clock tower. Still too early, I realised. People were on the move but the shops weren’t open yet. I wandered the streets, looking for the gallery that had advertised Angela’s work, and found it, still dark, locked. A couple of her photographs were displayed in the window – a river in a deep gorge, black and white, which made it ominous and dramatic, and a fish, in weed, the colours so mingled you had to stare hard to see which was which. I thought they were quite good.
I carried on walking, up and down the streets. Mothers began to appear, taking their children to school. It was September. New term. Some looked reluctant and sullen, going back to the grind. Some, the tiniest ones, looked terrified. I don’t remember being terrified when I was five. Only when I was ten.
Doors began to open, signs appeared on pavements. The gallery opened at last and I went in.
There were still a few of Angela’s photographs on the walls, but a new exhibition was being installed. Paintings, this time. As I stood there, staring round, looking for inspiration, a young woman asked if she could help.
‘Angela Bryant, the photographer. I need to see her. Do you have her address?’
‘Oh, sorry. We can’t give out addresses. But I can give you a leaflet. She has a studio, I think. Or she did. Where are they, now?’ She unearthed a bundle from behind the counter, and handed me one.
‘Tha
nks,’ I said, and found a quiet corner in which to scrutinise it. Angela Bryant grew up in Lyford and attended… yes, yes, yes. She has exhibited in…. Go on. Her studio near Brecon. Oh very helpful. How near Brecon? There was a photo of the studio in the leaflet, mountains rising behind it, Angela standing in front of it. It was a carefully posed photo, of a woman looking arty and mysterious. I couldn’t say I recognised her. I peered closer at the picture, hoping to detect a house name, or even a number. A road sign? Nothing. I could hardly drive round and round Brecon, waiting for that mountain and that slate-roofed studio to appear. Why couldn’t they just give me her address?
While I watched, unobtrusive in my corner, the young woman unhooked a couple of Angela’s remaining photos, took them to the counter, and started to wrap them in tissue. The first went into a crate, standing ready. She was interrupted before she’d wrapped the second, by the doorbell as someone came in. Not a customer, but a local, because they were immediately in deep gossip. I sidled up to the counter and peered round at the crate. It had a large label.
Angela Bryant, Holly Cottage, Llanyfain, Brecon.
Enough.
I took my leaflet and headed back for the van. Llanyfain wasn’t much of a village. A scattering of stone houses along narrow lanes. Holly Cottage stood on a rise at a point where one of the lanes finally petered out into a grass-grown track. The man at the garage on the nearest thing to a main road had directed me, and once I reached the gateway through the towering, untrimmed hedgerow, I could see the house and recognise the studio illustrated in the leaflet.
I walked up to it, but stopped short of the door. The studio was an old barn that had been converted, with skylights and French windows, through which I could make out some packing cases, a table and a lot of cobwebs. Whenever the conversion had been done, it was long enough ago for nature to have begun to reclaim it. Moss was peeling off the paintwork, and brambles, invading from the nearest hedge, were tugging at the lower slates. Nettles had virtually engulfed the door, and I couldn’t see any point in fighting through them. It was obvious that the studio had been abandoned. The photo in the brochure must have been taken years ago.
I turned to the house, which looked a little more lived in. Paint was peeling on the woodwork here, too, but there was a lot less moss. A milk crate outside the front door was filled with empty bottles. Whisky rather than milk.
No response to my knock, but I could hear, distantly, a radio. I went round the back, pushing aside unpruned buddleias, and found a small weedy patio. Two mugs stood on a rusting castiron table, and a kitchen door was ajar. I could hear the radio louder now, and a woman’s voice, raised, not in anger, but shouting to another room.
I knocked on the open door.
A woman bustled into view. Nothing at all like the Angela Bryant in the photograph. That was because she wasn’t Angela Bryant. She was short, round-faced, with an upturned nose and a childish look that hadn’t changed one bit in thirty-five years.
‘Hello, Denise.’
Denise Griggs stared at me, opened mouthed for a moment. ‘It’s her,’ she said. She clasped her hands together and shut her eyes, her lips moving in silent prayer and then she crossed herself.
‘Her, who?’ said Angela, appearing in the inner doorway, looking at me without a glimmer of recognition. But then Angela Bryant probably wouldn’t have recognised her own mother, from the look of her. She was either on very heavy medication, or she was nursing a very heavy hangover. Judging by the empty bottles, scattered round the kitchen, it was the latter.
‘Karen Rothwell,’ I said.
‘Oh yes. Right. Of course you are.’
— 14 —
Angela Bryant looked twenty years older than her studio picture. Nothing artistic about her. She was dishevelled and gaunt. At school she’d been tall and lithe, athletic, the exact opposite to the short, round Denise. They’d made a comical pairing, but they hadn’t given a damn. Thirty-five years on, Angela was still tall, but she stooped, or was it just that she had trouble standing upright? Her hair was unbrushed and she was wrapped in a dressing gown. Partly wrapped. It kept falling open and she’d grab at it and miss. ‘Karen the Undead. Best come in. Where are the fags, Denny?’
‘Where I’ve hidden them. Go and get dressed.’ Denise shooed Angela away and then turned back to me, drawing a deep breath. ‘Yes. Karen. We’ve been waiting for you. You saw Barbara, didn’t you? We need to talk, of course we do. There’s so much we all need to clear off our consciences. Only that way can we hope to find peace. To be cleansed. To be pure again.’
I don’t know what sort of greeting I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. I couldn’t think of any reply, so I let her usher me into a sitting room. It looked tired, tidy enough but it smelled stale.
I watched her busy herself with opening windows, removing a bottle, plumping cushions, like a woman with a mission. Slightly hysterical in every gesture. I remembered her as a rather gushing, officious child, always eager to remind us what Teacher had said, what we had agreed to do, what we were supposed to be wearing. She was the one who’d tell on other children. Never on us, Serena’s disciples, because Serena’s unspoken rules of love and loyalty wouldn’t permit that sort of intimate treachery, but anyone else was fair game for this one-girl Stasi.
She told on Janice once. I can’t remember what Janice had done. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Denise to identify some transgression and carry it on a silver platter to Miss Hargreaves. I saw her go up to Miss as busily as she was now tidying up the living room, and Janice was hauled off for a five-minute torture session. I found her later, in the corridor, crying. I think I would have hated Denise, but I didn’t know how to hate someone who was Serena’s friend.
There was something desperate about Denise, as if she too had been taken off by teacher and left crying in the corridor. Chastened. Her hair was cut short, in a pudding basin style that made her face look even rounder. No make-up. She wore a matronly blouse, a high-necked navy cardigan and a plain grey skirt that might have looked elegant on someone Angela’s height, but on someone as dumpy as Denise it almost reached her ankles and made her look as if she had a stout tree trunk instead of legs. No jewellery except for a crucifix, which she touched every few seconds.
I’d forgotten she was a Catholic. There hadn’t been many of them at Marsh Green Junior, but we all knew who they were; they didn’t come in to assembly with us, because they had a different god. Like Jonathan Gold, who was Jewish. Denise had worn a crucifix back then, too. A cross with a writhing figure. She busily encouraged us to do the same. ‘If you don’t wear a cross, you’ll go to hell. It’s true. It says so in the Bible, so there.’ Angela, who hadn’t worshipped anyone, unless there was a God of Running and Jumping, had started to wear a crucifix after that, just to be on the safe side.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Karen?’ Denise spoke like a nurse. I wondered if she was one. It would explain her presence.
‘Please.’ I said it to get her out of the room, while I tried to get my own head straight. I’d come prepared to beg for answers from an alcoholic, who’d probably want nothing to do with me. I hadn’t prepared myself for a reception committee.
Angela shuffled back into the room, dressed in an old jumper and older jeans. She still hadn’t combed her hair but she had found her cigarettes. I noticed a limp as she walked. Perhaps it wasn’t just alcohol that made her unsteady. She slumped into a sofa. ‘So then. Karen Rothwell.’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes fixed on me, and through the alcoholic haze there was a brief flash of clarity. ‘Come to play parlour games, have you?’
Six fingers on a moving glass.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No parlour games.’
She appeared not to hear the second part of my answer, her eyes wandering off again. ‘Where’s that crazy Denny?’
‘Making tea.’
‘Oh Christ. Not more tea. Did you know you could reach a state of grace by the eternal swilling of lukewarm tannin? Isn
’t there a war on, somewhere? She could be out there, making tea for the troops. Ever in the service of others, our Denny.’
To be honest, I am paraphrasing. I actually caught about one blurred word in two.
‘Wanted to be a nun, you know. But the convents wouldn’t have her. Kept going in as a postulant. Pissy postulant. Then they’d chuck her out again a month later. They thought she had suspect motives. Not a vocation so much as an immolation. I don’t think they go in for self-flagellation any more. Or hair shirts. Now she just pretends to be a nun and devotes herself to impossible causes. Like me. I’m the next best thing to a hair shirt.’
‘I see.’
‘But you saw Barbara, so I suppose she told you all about us.’
‘Not exactly. She said Denise was married to Jesus.’
‘Yeah. That’s about it. Bride of Christ. Or maybe just the first mad Mrs Christ in the attic. So what did our Babs say about me?’
‘That you were a photographer. That you’d been married a few times…’
‘Three. We don’t count Warwick, do we?’ Angela raised her voice to let Denise hear. ‘Don’t think that one was strictly legal, he being already married and it being bigamous and all that. So three proper ones. Average life expectancy of marriage to Angela: two years and one month. Or was it one year and two months? Babs worked it out. It’s only that long because Trev stuck it out for nearly eight. Don’t know why they can’t cope with me. Any ideas?’
It seemed pointless to state the obvious, so I said nothing. She did it for me.
‘Because I can’t cope with them. Five minutes of marital bliss and I have an irresistible urge to start throwing things at them, and then get very, very drunk.’
‘Yes. Barbara said ‒ something about…’
‘My being a lush? A dipso? A sot. Imb ‒ imbiber of the fruit of the… Oh, anyway, however she put it.’
‘I can’t remember how she put it.’
‘But she put it. Always to the point, our Babs. Sad old cow, isn’t she? Just as sad as me, but I know I am and she pretends she isn’t. Look at her, up there all alone in Cumbria, writing wills. Her speciality, wills. Poking around in the dusty relics of the imminently dead. Negotiating the inheritance rules for Granny’s teapot.’