by Ruth Jacobs
To fill the expanding hole inside her, she needed heroin, but she couldn’t have a hit, not yet. She still had to go to her mother’s flat, and go shopping. After what she’d found out from Tara last Thursday, she’d arrived at her mother’s on the Friday without the groceries.
She swerved into the supermarket car park and pulled into a space. Repositioning the rear view mirror downwards, she inspected the damage. Her eyes were black, and grey tracks marked her cheeks.
She took a tissue from the supply usually used to press on the entry point of a needle and wet it with the water kept in the car for cooking up a hit. As she cleaned her face, she reconsidered making up a shot. She decided against it. She’d save the little she had left for when she got home. Then she could call Jay to ensure she didn’t run out completely.
***
At the top of Hammers Lane, Shelley tussled with the grocery bags weighing her down. She’d bought more than usual. She needed to make sure her mother had extra supplies. The rapist could be entrapped within days of her meeting with Angel. The meeting was on Sunday.
Looking above the hedge, she saw her mother’s curtains were closed, and there didn’t appear to be any light peeping through the gaps. At eight-thirty in the evening, Rita may have gone to bed early or perhaps not been up at all.
She lifted the gold knocker and tapped it down hard on the plate. Her mother didn’t come. Not wanting to disturb the neighbours at night by shouting, she used her own key. She tumbled over something in the downstairs hall. Steadying herself, she felt in the dark for the light switch.
Under the bright hundred-watt bulb, she saw mountains of files and loose papers stacked up in the tiny hall. One by one, she swung the bags of shopping from outside the front door onto the only floor space available – the stairs.
“Mum, it’s me,” she called. There was no reply.
Bending like a branch in a gale, she made her way up the stairs, resisting the heavy bags pulling her back down. After she’d dumped the bags in the kitchen, she trudged through to her mother’s bedroom.
In the darkness, her mother lay in the bed. As Shelley got closer, she saw her mother’s eyes were open. With both her hands, she was holding a picture of William pressed to her heart.
Shelley stroked her mother’s hair away from her forehead. “Mum, I’m going to turn on the light now, okay?”
Her mother didn’t respond. Apart from her breathing, rapid and shallow, she didn’t make a sound.
Shelley switched on the bedside light and sat on the edge of the bed. She wrapped her hands over her mother’s hands holding the picture of William. Her head fell, and silently, she cried.
13. Not the Order Life Should Take
“Please, let my mother leave the flat. Please, let my mother leave the flat.” Driving up Hammers Lane, Shelley prayed aloud to God. Exactly what she had said to her mother on Wednesday night, she wasn’t sure, but Rita had agreed that, on this Friday’s visit, she would accompany Shelley to William’s grave. She could hardly believe it. If she’d been doing more crack recently, she’d have been sure it was an auditory hallucination. Her mother hadn’t been outside in months.
Having set the central locking with the key fob, she looked around, ensuring no one was watching her. Then she circled the car and counted aloud as she pulled on both door handles five times, ran her fingers over the top of both windows five times, and depressed the catch on the boot five times.
She walked between the hedges that concealed the path to the red door. The midday sun was bright. Though it wasn’t warm, it looked like a beautiful day; the trees were brimming with blossom.
There was no answer at her mother’s door. Rather than using her own key, she tilted her head skywards and shouted, “Mum, open the door.”
An upstairs window opened and Rita popped her head out. “Come up. I’m getting ready,” she called.
A warm feeling, like the mildest of heroin hits, streamed through Shelley’s body. She opened the door with her key. At the top of the stairs, her mother stood in daytime attire. She hadn’t seen her like that in months. Like Aunt Elsie, Rita was also trapped in the time warp. But in her blue and green geometric-print dress, she was a vision of beauty to Shelley.
“I’m sorry I’m using up all your holiday allowance again,” Rita said.
“You’re not. I’ve got a day off in lieu.” Why that came out of her mouth and where it had come from, Shelley didn’t know. “You look lovely. Shall I brush your hair before we leave?” she asked.
Shelley hopped up the stairs and followed Rita into the bedroom. The curtains were open and the sun was beaming into the room. Rita sat down on a stool at the dressing table and applied an orange lipstick.
After Shelley had made the bed, she stood behind her mother and gently brushed her hair, all the while, smiling at her in the triple mirror.
“Have you had any breakfast?” Shelley laid the paddle brush on the dressing table.
“Not yet, dear.”
“I’ll make us some before we go.”
Shelley strolled to the kitchen and prepared breakfast. With a tray of toast and tea, she walked through to the lounge and placed it on her mother’s lap. Then she went back for her own breakfast tray and joined Rita on the grey settee.
“Have you had a tidy up, Mum?” Reluctantly, Shelley took a bite of her toast. She wasn’t hungry but she wanted her mother to see her eat.
“Not really, I just moved things around. That stuff’s more in the way up here.”
“But you can hardly get in and out with it stored in the hall.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear.”
Shelley swallowed down her toast a little too quickly and choked. “It’s not safe. You need to be able to get in and out.”
“I don’t need to do that.”
“What if there’s an emergency?” Shelley guzzled her tea to clear the toast stuck in her throat. “Do you mind if I move it all into the spare room?”
“If you must,” Rita replied, shaking her head.
Shelley made umpteen trips up and down the stairs, carrying the files and loose papers into the spare room. She didn’t understand why her mother hadn’t moved them there in the first place. That room was never used and she’d been asking her mother for years if she could move them in there and out of the lounge. She’d also wanted to sort through it all and throw out the rubbish, which she suspected most of it probably was, but today was not a day for that.
***
“Are you ready, Mum?” Shelley asked, as Rita stood static at the front door.
“I don’t know, dear. It’s been such a long time since— I shouldn’t have left it so long.”
Shelley took her mother’s hand and guided her over the threshold. After she’d locked the front door, she linked her arm with her mother’s and together they walked slowly along the pathway, then down the steep steps that led to the pavement.
As they got closer to her car, Shelley felt as though she was being drawn back to the front door, pulled by an invisible chain anchored in her gut. Because she never allowed her mother – or anyone else – to see her checking, she fought the compulsion with a cigarette.
“You shouldn’t smoke, Shelley-Margaret. It’s not good for you,” Rita said, opening the passenger door of Shelley’s car.
“Please don’t call me that, Mum.” Shelley switched on the engine then drove off, heading to the cemetery in East Finchley.
When they stopped at the red traffic lights at the junction of East Finchley High Road and East End Road, Shelley turned her head to see the familiar pub on the corner. The Bald Faced Stag was the last place she’d seen William and his band play before he died. She’d beaten him at pool that night and she’d felt guilty, and still did, for not letting him win in front of his friends.
Once Shelley had parked in the cemetery, she stretched her arm round to the back of the car and picked up one of the two bunches of pink carnations she’d brought with her. She handed the flowers to her
mother, then reached back over for her own.
From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a man watching them. Locked safely inside the car, she turned her head fully to see him. It was the same man again. It had to be. She rarely saw anyone in the graveyard, and he was the only person she’d ever seen in the cemetery wearing a shell suit. As it always did, his staring made her feel uncomfortable. Though since she’d started referring to him mentally as the Resident Cemetery Lurker, she found it difficult to take him as seriously as she thought she should.
The next time she turned her head, he’d vanished. She stepped out the car and walked round to the passenger side. She held out her hand to her mother. Rita was weeping. Shelley pulled her close.
“They say tears nourish your soul. Like the rain makes flowers grow. You’re watering your garden.” Though she was unsure it was a fact, Shelley couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“It’s my fault this happened. It’s my fault he’s not here. I should have known.”
Shelley felt her mother’s body shuddering against her. “It’s not. He never blamed you. I’ve never blamed you. It’s not your fault.”
After a short while, they set off through the expanse of headstones. Shelley felt, as she often did, that the buried souls were there with her in the graveyard. She felt their presence, not individually, but as a collective whole as if she was sensing their parallel world.
She knew there was a heaven and she knew her brother was up there. He wasn’t under the earth. His bones were, but not his soul. That all he was was flesh and bone, Shelley refused to believe. He had to continue to exist. She could think of no other way to explain how she heard him and felt him around her so often.
Rita stumbled over the corner of a grave and as Shelley helped rebalance her, she noticed her mother’s hands were trembling. Although she couldn’t see her mother’s legs for her long coat, she imagined they too were unsteady. They had reached William’s grave.
In Loving Memory
Of
William Roderick Hansard
Born September 12th 1972
Died July 19th 1994
A Beloved Son, Brother and Nephew
You Will Forever Live On In Our Hearts
In her head, Shelley could hear Will singing Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. A song he used to sing with his band and the one that had inspired their name – Numblivion. ‘But I have not become comfortably numb,’ she told him.
Rita knelt at the headstone and placed the pink carnations on the ground. “My boy, my beautiful boy...” She cried as she laid herself face-down on the grave with her arms outstretched over his body below. “Please come back, son... Please come back...”
Shelley struggled to inhale as she suppressed the sobs firing in her throat.
Holding on to William’s headstone, Rita pulled herself up and on to her knees. She looked up to the sky. “God, I’ll do anything, just bring back my son. Please God, bring him back. Why didn’t you take me? Bring him back and take me...”
Shelley couldn’t speak. She wanted to. She wanted to say something to comfort her mother, but she couldn’t think of any words. What words could console a mother who had buried her child? It wasn’t the order life was supposed to take. So wrong, that a word had never been created to describe a mother who’d lost a child. There should be a word for it. Like there is a word for a child who’s lost their parents; they are an orphan. And there’s a word for a spouse whose spouse has died – a widow or widower. What of a mother who has lost her child? There should be a word. And there should be a word for a sibling who’s lost her sibling. Shelley needed a word. There should be a word. Why was there no word for those left alive when a child died?
Shelley knelt on the grass, beside her mother on William’s grave. She rested her head on her mother’s arm. Then she placed her arms on top of her mother’s, intertwined and wrapped around the headstone. Shelley and her mother stayed like that for what may have been ten minutes, or perhaps it was twenty or more. It was hard to judge time passing in such a timeless place.
14. Asking For Help
On Sunday afternoon, Shelley meandered along Pilgrim’s Lane. Although running late, she couldn’t stop herself slowing down to peek through the windows of the grand houses.
Feeling the chill in the air, she tightened the scarf around her neck. The cold found another route to her bones, through the holes in her jeans. She stopped under a cherry tree in bloom and fastened the hook and eyes that were undone on the lower half of her faux-fur coat.
Standing at the door of The Magdala, she saw Angel sitting at a table in the back of the saloon. As she sashayed past the shabby, wooden furniture, making her way over to the corner, she felt as though she’d entered a bygone era. It was more like a Sunday afternoon in April 1957, than in 1997.
She bent down to kiss Angel’s cheek and tripped on the leg of her chair.
Angel caught her arm. “You missed.”
“You missed out.” Shelley smiled. “I’m sorry I’m late. I got stuck on a call with a punter,” she lied. Of course, it was her checking that held her up. Due at three o’clock and arriving at twenty past, she was like Railtrack, lacking the commitment to resolve the issues responsible for delays.
Angel picked something out of Shelley’s hair. “Very pretty,” she said, holding the pink cherry blossom under her nose.
Angel was so obviously meant to be a woman. Had Shelley not met her on a job, she would never have known. She had a delicate bone structure, light brown skin and large brown eyes. Every part of her body curved naturally, with the exception of her breasts, which Shelley recalled felt rigid and rocklike. In contrast to the evening dress in which Shelley had last seen her, Angel was wearing tight jeans and an equally tight, white jumper. Apart from lip-gloss and mascara, her face was bereft of make-up. She was striking.
At the bar, Shelley bought herself a pint of snakebite and blackcurrant, and a vodka and coke for Angel. She joined Angel at the table, and sat on the bench opposite.
During their call a week earlier, Shelley hadn’t gone into detail. She hadn’t said anything other than asking Angel a hypothetical question. What would she do if she knew of a madam who was sending a rapist to working girls?
Sat at the corner table in the quiet end of the pub, tucked away from the sparse clientele, Shelley told Angel the situation. She explained what happened to her and to her friends and the call that Tara had overheard.
Angel’s expression turned cold. Her soft eyes hardened.
Shelley felt the toxin twisting in her stomach. The pain caused by the rapist piled on top of the pain the other warped excuses for men had caused her throughout the past thirteen years. The poison pushed up to her heart, and when she began to cry, Angel came around to the other side of the table and sat next to her. Shelley cried into her shoulder.
“It’ll be all right. We’ll put a stop to this, Kiki. I’ll make sure of it.”
Shelley looked into her deep brown eyes. She felt like she was sinking. She’d be safer in those eyes.
***
After two more pints of snakebite and black, in conjunction with numerous cigarettes, her tears stopped and the conversation veered in a less macabre direction. Shelley asked Angel about her job in Ibiza. Angel told her she’d hardly had to do any work. She’d enjoyed most of the stay on her own even though she was being paid a good few thousand pounds to be there.
“I go away with him five or six times a year. You should come with me on the next trip. He’s really nice, not a fascination fuck. He bought me this,” Angel said, showing the gold, solitaire diamond ring on her slender middle finger.
“That would be amazing. I’d love to. Thanks.” It was the truth, but Shelley knew she couldn’t go. She couldn’t work through cold turkey, let alone travel through it. She’d have to ride it out in London before she left the country. And with her recent attempts being unsuccessful, she had little hope for those yet to come.
She could have done with the mon
ey one high-fee booking would pay. Since The Lanesborough job, she’d been working infrequently and spending her way through her savings, which were meant for university. Even though she doubted she’d be embarking on that plan now, a tiny part of her wouldn’t totally admit the idea had no legs. She reminded herself to call the madams when she got home. She had to start putting herself out to work more often.
Once she felt ready, she returned to the subject of their meeting. Quietly, she shared the idea she’d devised with Nicole and Tara.
“You’ll need to meet them before we can do anything,” Shelley said. “I’ll sort it for in the week, if that’s okay with you.”
Angel nodded, twirling the end her sleek, black ponytail in her fingers. “I’m not sure about the one who uses her real name and address. That madam can get to her any time she wants.” She sipped her vodka and coke. “I know she’s your girl, but she could be a liability. We can’t afford a weak link in something like this.”
“She’d never grass us up, I’m sure.”
“You need to be. This ain’t a small thing. Our liberty’s at stake.” Angel laid her hands flat on the table. “If she doesn’t know exactly what we’ve done and where we’ve done it, she can’t nark on us.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Whether she wants to or not, it’s irrelevant. That madam or the police could put pressure on her, but they can’t force her to tell what she doesn’t know.”
Shelley tried to reassure her, but Angel wasn’t to be assured. She did agree, however, to withhold her final judgement until she’d met Tara herself. And Shelley verbally agreed that Angel had a point about Tara staying out of it, saying she’d mull it over – but really, she wouldn’t be mulling anything. The probability of pulling it off successfully increased with the number of them participating.
Shelley took her cigarette packet and her Clipper from the table and put them inside her handbag. “I’m Shelley by the way,” she said, standing to leave.
“Hello Shelley.” Angel’s pink-brown lips swelled into a smile and dimples appeared in her cheeks. “I’ll be Angel for a while if you don’t mind, ’til I know you better.”