But then, as September approached, I found that the whole subject of the count was making me restless. Each evening we could only square it with the stock sheets by writing ‘15 in back’ at the end of the dresses and jackets column, and it occurred to me that in all my grovelling and delving I’d never run across these oddments. ‘You know,’ I said to Daphne, ‘where we always write “15 in back”? Where are they?’
‘In back,’ said Daphne. We were in her office, a scant wedge-shape partitioned off from the sales floor.
‘But where?’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen them.’
Daphne slotted a cigarette into her mouth. With one hand she flipped a page of a stocklist, in the other hovered a dribbling ballpoint pen. A thin plume of smoke leaked from her lips. ‘Don’t you smoke yet?’ she said ‘Aren’t you tempted?’
I had wondered, a time or two, why people try to trap you into new vices. Ours was a home that was militantly anti-tobacco. ‘I haven’t thought about it really… I don’t suppose… Well, if your parents don’t smoke… I couldn’t at home anyway, it would be very bad for my brother.’
Daphne stared at me. A little hoot issued from her, like a hiccup, and then a derisive shout of laughter. ‘What! Your mother smokes like a chimney! Every break! Every lunchtime! Haven’t you seen her? You must have seen her!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have never.’ I was the more deceived.
A gobbet of ink dropped from Daphne’s pen. ‘Have I spoken out of turn?’
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
I told myself I welcomed information, information from any source.
Daphne looked at me glassily. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘why should it be bad for your brother?’
I looked at my watch. ‘Mrs Segal’s lunch,’ I smiled. I headed back to the sales floor. I said to myself, it can’t matter. Tiny household lies. Pragmatic lies. Amusing, probably: given time. Trivial: like a needle-point snapped under the skin.
But later that afternoon, I sought the 15 in back. I tunnelled my way into lightless holes, where my toes were stubbed by bulging rotten boxes of unknown provenance. The cartons I had made myself, and bound with twine, had never been dispatched by Daphne, but left to squat in collapsing stacks. Now the wire hangers nipped at my calves as they worked their way out. Levering aside the bulky winter stock, thwacking the llamas away from me, I burrowed my way to the farthest corner. Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron.
Nothing. I named every garment I saw, scrabbling inside their shrouds: lifting them by their collars to peep at their labels, or, if I could not lift them, shredding their plastic frills into ruffs around their throats. I saw labels and I saw things that might have been Dress & Jackets but I did not see Dress & Jackets with the label I wanted. The 15 were nowhere to be found. I fought my way back to the air. I never looked back. I scratched it on my pad: zero, nix, nought. Diddly-squat, as the men said. Dress & Jackets, nil. If they had ever been known to exist, they didn’t now. I saw how it was; they were to be conjured into being, the 15, to cover a mighty embarrassment, some awesome negligence or theft that had knocked the count to its knees gibbering. They were a fiction, perhaps an antique one; perhaps even older than Daphne. They were an adjustment to reality. They were a tale told by an idiot: to which I had added a phrase or two.
I re-emerged on to the floor. It was three o’clock. One of those dead afternoons, adumbrated, slumberous: not a customer in view. Limp from lack of regard, the stock hung like rags. A long mirror showed a dark smudge across my cheek. My sandals were coated with poisoned grime. I limped to the battered bureau where we kept our duplicate books and spare buttons, and took a duster out of the drawer. I rolled it up and brushed myself down, then moved out on to the floor, between the rails, and dusted between the garments: parting the hangers and polishing the steel spaces between. Somehow the afternoon passed. That night I declined to write ‘15 in back’ at the end of the count; until my colleagues became too upset to bear, and one showed signs of hyperventilating. So in the end I did consent to write the phrase, but I wrote it quite faintly in pencil, with a question mark after it that was fainter still.
When the new school term began, it emerged that there was nothing wrong with my brother any more. He was eleven now, quite fit enough to go to high school. We digested this surprising fact, but no one was quite as glad about it as they should have been. Within months my mother was headhunted, her services sought by mackintosh purveyors and knitwear concessions; she had her pick of jobs, and moved to bigger stores, becoming blonder year by year, rising like a champagne bubble, to command larger numbers of girls and bigger counts and attract even more animosity and spite. At home she pursued her impromptu housekeeping, scouring the bath with powder meant for the washing machine and, when the washing machine broke down, throwing a tablecloth over it and using it as a sort of sideboard while she trained my siblings to go to the launderette.
A few year later Affleck’s closed, and the whole district around it went to seed. It was taken over by pornographers, and those kinds of traders who sell plastic laundry baskets, dodgy electric fires and moulded Christmas novelties such as bouncing mince pies and whistling seraphim. The building itself was leased by a high-street clothing store, who traded briefly from its crumbling shell. I was long gone, of course, but I kept friends in the north, and had in my chain of acquaintances a Saturday girl who worked for the new occupiers. They only used the lower floors; from the second floor upwards, the building had been sealed. The fire doors had been closed and locked shut, the escalators had been removed, and the back staircases now ended in blind walls. But the staff were disturbed, said the Saturday girl, by noises from the bricked-in cavity above their heads: by footsteps, and by the sound of a woman screaming.
When I heard this I felt cold and felt sickness in the pit of my stomach, because I knew it was a true ghost story, as true as these things go. It had been no dizzy imp that came down from above and pulled buttons off the frocks, or walked them across the floor and mixed them in with the Jaeger. It was something staler, heavier, grossly sinister and perverse. But I only knew this in retrospect. When I looked back from, say, the age of twenty-three to the age of eighteen, I realised that, in those years, everything had been far worse than it seemed at the time.
The Thing in the Forest
A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt (b. 1936) is a British novelist and poet. In 2008, The Times named her on its list of the ‘50 Greatest British Writers since 1945’. She won the Man Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel Possession: A Romance, and was shortlisted again in 2009 for The Children’s Book, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She has published five collections of short stories.
There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest. The two little girls were evacuees, who had been sent away from the city by train, with a large number of other children. They all had their names attached to their coats with safety-pins, and they carried little bags or satchels, and the regulation gas-mask. They wore knitted scarves and bonnets or caps, and many had knitted gloves attached to long tapes which ran along their sleeves, inside their coats, and over their shoulders and out, so that they could leave their ten woollen fingers dangling like a spare pair of hands, like a scarecrow. They all had bare legs and scuffed shoes and wrinkled socks. Most had wounds on their knees in varying stages of freshness and scabbiness. They were at the age when children fall often and their knees were unprotected. With their suitcases, some of which were almost too big to carry, and their other impedimenta, a doll, a toy car, a comic, they were like a disorderly dwarf regiment, stomping along the platform.
The two little girls had not met before, and made friends on the train. They shared a square of chocolate, and took alternate bites at an apple. One gave the other the inside page of her Beano. Their names were Penny and Primrose. Penny was thin and dark and taller, possibly older, than Primrose, who was plump and blonde and curly. Primrose had bitten nails, and a velvet collar t
o her dressy green coat. Penny had a bloodless transparent paleness, a touch of blue in her fine lips. Neither of them knew where they were going, nor how long the journey might take. They did not even know why they were going since neither of their mothers had quite known how to explain the danger to them. How do you say to your child, I am sending you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am staying here, in what I believe may be daily danger of burning, burying alive, gas, and ultimately perhaps a grey army rolling in on tanks over the suburbs, or sailing its submarines up our river, all guns blazing? So the mothers (who did not resemble each other at all) behaved alike, and explained nothing, it was easier. Their daughters they knew were little girls, who would not be able to understand or imagine.
The girls discussed on the train whether it was a sort of holiday or a sort of punishment, or a bit of both. Penny had read a book about Boy Scouts, but the children on the train did not appear to be Brownies or Wolf Cubs, only a mongrel battalion of the lost. Both little girls had the idea that these were all perhaps not very good children, possibly being sent away for that reason. They were pleased to be able to define each other as ‘nice’. They would stick together, they agreed. Try to sit together, and things.
The train crawled sluggishly further and further away from the city and their homes. It was not a clean train – the upholstery of their carriage had the dank smell of unwashed trousers, and the gusts of hot steam rolling backwards past their windows were full of specks of flimsy ash, and sharp grit, and occasional fiery sparks that pricked face and fingers like hot needles if you opened the window. It was very noisy too, whenever it picked up a little speed. The engine gave great bellowing sighs, and the invisible wheels underneath clicked rhythmically and monotonously, tap-tap-tap-CRASH, tap-tap-tap-CRASH. The window-panes were both grimy and misted up. The train stopped frequently, and when it stopped, they used their gloves to wipe rounds, through which they peered out at flooded fields, furrowed hillsides and tiny stations, whose names were carefully blacked out, whose platforms were empty of life.
The children did not know that the namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt – they did not think it out, but somewhere inside them the idea sprouted – that the erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find the way back. They did not speak to each other of this anxiety, but began the kind of conversation children have about things they really disliked, things that upset, or disgusted, or frightened them. Semolina pudding with its grainy texture, mushy peas, fat on roast meat. Listening to the stairs and the window-sashes creaking in the dark or the wind. Having your head held roughly back over the basin to have your hair washed, with cold water running down inside your liberty bodice. Gangs in playgrounds. They felt the pressure of all the other alien children in all the other carriages as a potential gang. They shared another square of chocolate, and licked their fingers, and looked out at a great white goose flapping its wings beside an inky pond.
The sky grew dark grey and in the end the train halted. The children got out, and lined up in a crocodile, and were led to a mud-coloured bus. Penny and Primrose managed to get a seat together, although it was over the wheel, and both of them began to feel sick as the bus bumped along snaking country lanes, under whipping branches, dark leaves on dark wooden arms on a dark sky, with torn strips of thin cloud streaming across a full moon, visible occasionally between them.
They were billeted temporarily in a mansion commandeered from its owner, which was to be arranged to hold a hospital for the long-term disabled, and a secret store of artworks and other valuables. The children were told they were there temporarily, until families were found to take them all into their homes. Penny and Primrose held hands, and said to each other that it would be wizard if they could go to the same family, because at least they would have each other. They didn’t say anything to the rather tired-looking ladies who were ordering them about, because with the cunning of little children, they knew that requests were most often counter-productive, adults liked saying no. They imagined possible families into which they might be thrust. They did not discuss what they imagined, as these pictures, like the black station signs, were too frightening, and words might make some horror solid, in some magical way. Penny, who was a reading child, imagined Victorian dark pillars of severity, like Jane Eyre’s Mr Brocklehurst, or David Copperfield’s Mr Murdstone. Primrose imagined – she didn’t know why – a fat woman with a white cap and round red arms who smiled nicely but made the children wear sacking aprons and scrub the steps and the stove. ‘It’s like we were orphans,’ she said to Penny. ‘But we’re not,’ Penny said. ‘If we manage to stick together… ’
The great house had a double flight of imposing stairs to its front door, and carved griffins and unicorns on its balustrade. There was no lighting, because of the black-out. All the windows were shuttered. No welcoming brightness leaked across door or windowsill. The children trudged up the staircase in their crocodile, hung their coats on numbered makeshift hooks, and were given supper (Irish stew and rice pudding with a dollop of blood-red jam) before going to bed in long makeshift dormitories, where once servants had slept. They had camp-beds (military issue) and grey shoddy blankets. Penny and Primrose got beds together but couldn’t get a corner. They queued to brush their teeth in a tiny washroom, and both suffered (again without speaking) suffocating anxiety about what would happen if they wanted to pee in the middle of the night, because the lavatory was one floor down, the lights were all extinguished, and they were a long way from the door. They also suffered from a fear that in the dark the other children would start laughing and rushing and teasing, and turn themselves into a gang. But that did not happen. Everyone was tired and anxious and orphaned. An uneasy silence, a drift of perturbed sleep, came over them all. The only sounds – from all parts of the great dormitory it seemed – were suppressed snuffles and sobs, from faces pressed into thin pillows.
When daylight came, things seemed, as they mostly do, brighter and better. The children were given breakfast in a large vaulted room. They sat at trestle tables, eating porridge made with water and a dab of the red jam, heavy cups of strong tea. Then they were told they could go out and play until lunch-time. Children in those days – wherever they came from – were not closely watched, were allowed to come and go freely, and those evacuated children were not herded into any kind of holding-pen, or transit camp. They were told they should be back for lunch at 12.30, by which time those in charge hoped to have sorted out their provisional future lives. It was not known how they would know when it was 12.30, but it was expected that – despite the fact that few of them had wrist-watches – they would know how to keep an eye on the time. It was what they were used to.
Penny and Primrose went out together, in their respectable coats and laced shoes, on to the terrace. The terrace appeared to them to be vast, and was indeed extensive. It was covered with a fine layer of damp gravel, stained here and there bright green, or invaded by mosses. Beyond it was a stone balustrade, with a staircase leading down to a lawn, which that morning had a quicksilver sheen on the lengthening grass. It was flanked by long flowerbeds, full of overblown annuals and damp clumps of stalks. A gardener would have noticed the beginnings of neglect, but these were urban little girls, and they noticed the jungly mass of wet stems, and the wet, vegetable smell. Across the lawn, which seemed considerably vaster than the vast terrace, was a sculpted yew hedge, with many twigs and shoots out of place and ruffled. In the middle of the hedge was a wicket-gate, and beyond the gate were trees, woodland, a forest, the little girls said, to themselves.
‘Let’s go into the forest,’ said Penny, as though the sentence was required of her.
Primrose hesitated. Most of the other children were running up and down the terrace, scuffing their shoes in the gravel. Some boys were kicking a ball on the grass
. The sun came right out, full from behind a hazy cloud, and the trees suddenly looked both gleaming and secret.
‘OK,’ said Primrose. ‘We needn’t go far.’
‘No. I’ve never been in a forest.’
‘Nor me.’
‘We ought to look at it, while we’ve got the opportunity,’ said Penny.
There was a very small child – one of the smallest – whose name, she told everyone, was Alys. With ay she told those who could spell, and those who couldn’t, which surely included herself. She was barely out of nappies. She was quite extraordinarily pretty, pink and white, with large pale blue eyes, and sparse little golden curls all over her head and neck, through which her pink skin could be seen. Nobody seemed to be in charge of her, no elder brother or sister. She had not quite managed to wash the tearstains from her dimpled cheeks.
She had made several attempts to attach herself to Penny and Primrose. They did not want her. They were excited about meeting and liking each other. She said now:
‘I’m coming too, into the forest.’
‘No, you aren’t,’ said Primrose.
‘You’re too little, you must stay here,’ said Penny.
‘You’ll get lost,’ said Primrose.
‘You won’t get lost. I’ll come with you,’ said the little creature, with an engaging smile, made for loving parents and grandparents.
‘We don’t want you, you see,’ said Primrose.
‘It’s for your own good,’ said Penny.
Alys went on smiling hopefully, the smile becoming more of a mask.
‘It will be all right,’ said Alys.
‘Run,’ said Primrose.
They ran; they ran down the steps and across the lawn, and through the gate, into the forest. They didn’t look back. They were long-legged little girls, not toddlers. The trees were silent round them, holding out their branches to the sun, breathing noiselessly.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 117