Trick or Treat

by Lesley Glaister

  She turns to Jim, and brushes her fingers against her lips and then against his frame. ‘Good-night, my dear,’ she says.

  Nine

  ‘Mum, there’s a frozen chicken in the garden!’ shrieks Wolfe. Tom is in bed with Petra, and both raise their heads slightly and peer at him over the quilt.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Petra mutters and flops back. Tom moans, turns over and buries his face in the pillow.

  ‘There is, honest, you look if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Eight o’clock, Mum,’ calls Buffy. ‘Aren’t you getting up? It’s school. Bobby’s gone.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Tom murmurs.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Wolfe sits on the side of the bed, looking at the little he can see of Petra. Her eyes are closed again and her hair is streaked stickily across her forehead.

  ‘We were up half the night,’ she whispers through dry lips. ‘False alarm.’

  ‘Alarm?’

  ‘False … nothing doing?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh nothing, never mind. Are you ready for school? Ask Buffy to bring us a cup of tea, will you?’

  ‘I’m not going to school. My skin’s bad, look.’ Wolfe holds his poor scaly hands in front of her face. The skin is thick and red and cracked and weeping. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying not to scratch.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Petra squints at his hands. ‘Oh no … that’s all we need. Poor Wolfie, I wonder what brought that on?’

  ‘And what about the chicken?’

  ‘What chicken?’

  ‘The one on the lawn, I told you.’

  Buffy comes in. ‘It’s gone eight,’ she complains. ‘Aren’t you getting up?’

  ‘Bring us a cup of tea, love,’ pleads Petra.

  ‘Have you seen the frozen chicken on the lawn?’ asks Wolfe.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ says Buffy, admiring herself in the mirror, ‘we’re vegetarian.’

  ‘We’re not. We eat fish and chips.’

  ‘But not chicken.’

  ‘Anyway look out of the window.’ Buffy pulls a face at him before she draws back the curtain and looks out. ‘I can’t see … oh wait a minute, there is something … and it does look a bit like a chicken. Plucked.’

  ‘See, told you so!’

  ‘Tea,’ Petra begs weakly.

  ‘Coming up, the kettle’s boiled.’ Buffy clatters downstairs.

  Tom sits up, yawns and stretches to reveal wads of thick damp black hair in his armpits. Wolfe looks away.

  ‘And the backs of my knees are bad, too,’ he says. ‘I must have been scratching in my sleep … look …’

  ‘OK, OK, you’d better stay off today,’ Petra says, opening her eyes properly at last.

  ‘Come into town with me, mate,’ Tom says. ‘I’m going to do a picture.’

  ‘And you can pick Wolfie up some more cream from the chemist’s while you’re at it.’

  ‘But what if someone sees me in town when I’m meant to be ill?’ asks Wolfe. It is bad enough with none of the kids at school liking him without getting into trouble with the teachers too.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Petra, ‘I’ll write you a note. Anyway …’

  ‘Anyway what?’ But Tom has silenced her with a look. ‘What? insists Wolfe. Tom raises an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Pass me my glasses, mate,’ he says.

  ‘State of flux again?’ Wolfe asks grumpily.

  ‘That’s about the size of it. Clever little bleeder aren’t you?’ Tom smiles at him in a warm way, quite a friendly way, and Wolfe half forgives him for letting him down.

  ‘Can I come into town with you then?’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  ‘Here you are.’ Buffy pushes through the door with two slopping mugs of tea. ‘And get this …’ she dashes downstairs again and returns with a bald cat. ‘Here’s your chicken, Wolfe.’ She drops it on the bed. ‘I’m off.’ She bends over and kisses Petra. ‘Look after Nothing, Mum.’

  Wolfe looks at the creature with a mixture of wonder and pity. It is a bluish colour, smudged with grey ash, and its skin is smooth as a baby’s. Its sharp ribs, knobby spine and the points of its leg bones show yellow through the stretched skin. Its face is weird like a space creature’s, half human, half cat, grey-white and stretched and wrinkled at the same time. It blinks blue eyes at Wolfe, clever eyes, not frightened at all, and then it creeps towards him, its skin cold against his own.

  ‘It’s frozen, poor thing,’ Petra observes, sipping her tea.

  ‘It’s bloody disgusting,’ Tom says. ‘What is it do you think, a freak, or bred like that?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Well it gives me the willies,’ Tom says, and Wolfe giggles.

  The cat begins to purr, a high-pitched clockwork sound.

  ‘And before you start,’ Petra says, ‘we’re not keeping it. We’re already landed with Buffy’s kitten.’

  ‘First my hat and then my cat,’ moans Olive. ‘What’s happening, Artie?’

  ‘Nowt, Ollie. We’ll find him.’ Arthur stands at the back door looking out, hoping that the half-witted creature hasn’t gone and frozen to death somewhere. He wears his corduroys and holds the godstone in his hand. ‘I’ll go out and look in a bit.’ Today, somehow, he must get up to the allotment, just for an hour, just to see whether the bean seedlings are showing yet. He must get up there to breathe, and to think. ‘I’ll fetch a few parsnip back today,’ he says, ‘and I’ll make a stew for your tea. Fetch some scrag-end from butcher. Eh Ollie?’

  ‘All right, Artie, as long as you find Mao. Poor little blighter. He’ll be crying. He’ll be wanting his breakfast.’ She tucks greedily into her own bread and lime marmalade. ‘He’ll have been frightened by the, by the, by the …’

  ‘Fireworks,’ supplies Arthur. ‘Maybe, maybe not. He’ll be back. Don’t fret, Ollie, he’ll be back, you wait and see. And it weren’t cold last night. No frost.’

  ‘And I was terrible last night, wasn’t I, Artie? You said I was terrible. A disgrace.’

  ‘You were that, Ollie,’ agrees Arthur sternly. She catches his eye and together they laugh.

  Tom kneels on the pavement of the city-centre shopping precinct. He has roughed out the shape of a leaping fish, a salmon, on the smooth paving stones and now he shades intently, the chalk-dust billowing around him and speckling his wire-rimmed glasses and his black curly hair. Already people are gathering to watch, and Wolfe feels proud to be a part of it. Before he started, Tom put a few coins in an old hat – to get the ball rolling, he said, and he gave Wolfe some coins too and told him to wander about, stroll past, and toss a few in now and again to encourage the other punters, that’s what he called them, punters. But Wolfe is fascinated, rooted to the spot watching Tom’s chalky fingers busying away, watching the white and blue and green and yellow and pink of the separate chalks mixing and blurring and then becoming a fat glistening salmon, leaping upwards against the water streaming down.

  ‘It’s a fish!’ cries a little girl.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ her mother says, resting her shopping bags on the ground, and Wolfe swells with pride.

  ‘I could fancy a bit of fish for my dinner,’ says another, and Tom looks up and winks at Wolfe.

  ‘That’s grand, lad, first-class,’ a man says, and Wolfe walks away and back and flings his money into the hat and it is followed by a few other embarrassed clinkings.

  ‘That’ll do.’ Tom stands stiffly up. ‘Oh my knees,’ he groans, ‘it does them in kneeling like that … and my back.’ He puts his hand to the small of his back, leaving a chalky smudge.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asks Wolfe. They both stand looking at it critically for a moment.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Wolfe says. ‘I wish I could draw like that. Nothing ever looks right when I draw.’

  ‘Not so bad, is it? You’ll learn. I had to learn, I wasn’t much cop at drawing myself when I was your age.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The secret is, you have
to get inside when you’re drawing, get inside whatever it is. Bloody exhausting it is. I feel like I’ve been hurling myself upwards all morning, pushing up against the weight of that water.’

  Wolfe gazes at the glistening fish and then at Tom. ‘I’ve never thought of it like that,’ he says.

  ‘Well, there you are then.’ Someone flings a handful of silver into the hat. ‘Thanks, mate,’ Tom calls. ‘Go in the Wimpy and get me a coffee,’ he says to Wolfe, scooping some coins out of the hat, ‘and get yourself a Coke or whatever.’

  Wolfe goes off feeling bigger then usual, swollen with importance, off school, spending the morning with an artist, and an artist who is practically his father. He has to reach up to pay for the drinks, and he notices the way the woman who serves him looks at his scabby cream-smeared hands, but he doesn’t care. He feels happier than he has for ages. When he gets back, Tom is talking to a very small woman.

  ‘Hello,’ Wolfe says. She has curly brown hair and big eyes and a little nose, turned up at the end, like a pretty pig’s.

  ‘This is Petra’s child?’ she asks Tom, in a voice that is not English.

  Tom nods. ‘Wolfe. This is Eva,’ he explains to Wolfe. ‘A friend.’ She seems to be a very good friend. She laughs a lot and she touches Tom’s arm and never takes her eyes off him.

  ‘How about a drink?’ she asks him.

  ‘Not today … I’ve got the kid.’ Wolfe scowls at them, shrunk back into just a child, a nuisance.

  ‘He could wait outside,’ Eva says, wrinkling her little nose at Tom. ‘You wouldn’t mind that, would you, Woof?’

  ‘Wolfe,’ Wolfe says crossly, ‘and I would mind.’

  ‘Good on you,’ Tom says, grinning at him. ‘Anyway, Eva, I’m sticking around a bit longer. More room in the hat yet.’

  ‘It will only rain,’ Eva says, ‘and ruin your wonderful fish.’ She pouts her lips.

  Tom shrugs. ‘That’s the way it goes.’

  ‘If that’s how you feel,’ Eva says. She stands on tiptoe in her brown boots and kisses Tom crossly on the lips. ‘You know where I am.’ They both watch her walk away. Her jeans are very tight. She is about the half the size of Petra.

  ‘Who’s she?’ Wolfe demands.

  ‘Just someone.’

  ‘Where does she come from?’

  ‘Oslo … Norway.’

  ‘Why did she kiss you?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ Tom takes a sip of coffee out of the polystyrene cup and pulls a face. ‘Crap,’ he grumbles. ‘And that’s enough of the third degree. And you needn’t mention Eva to your mum.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Oh mate, just take my word for it, all right? I’m knackered. Been up all bleeding night.’

  ‘What is a false alarm, anyway?’

  ‘We thought the baby was coming early … got in a proper tizz. She decided she didn’t want to go into hospital, and we had a bit of a barney … and then anyway it stopped, thank Christ. We were up the rest of the night talking. We got off to sleep just before you lot woke us up this morning.’

  ‘Is that what Mum was going to say this morning? Something about what you’d been talking about?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’ Tom drains his cup, grimaces again and then screws it up in his hand.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Well …’ Tom hesitates. ‘I suppose you’ll know sooner or later. It’s not working out …’

  Wolfe feels suddenly cold and sick. He looks at the salmon struggling like a landed fish on the pavement. ‘So you are leaving us.’

  ‘No, it’s all right, me old mate, don’t look like that!’ Tom puts his arm around him. ‘What I mean is, it’s not working out here, like this. Your mum’s been a bit down. She hasn’t got any mates here, and she hasn’t been feeling like getting out much …’

  ‘I haven’t got any mates either.’

  ‘No. That’s another thing she’s been worrying about. What with her fretting about you being unhappy at school and your skin flaring up again; and us worrying about this baby, well …’ Wolfe holds his breath. ‘We’re thinking of moving. All of us together. I’ve been here long enough, anyway. Quite fancy moving on. We’re staying together, Pet and me – and you kids – but not here.’ More money clinks into the hat. ‘Thanks,’ calls Tom, and lifts his hand in a friendly wave.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Wolfe.

  ‘I haven’t told you this,’ Tom says, ‘understand? But Petra’s ringing Col today.’

  ‘Col at the Longhouse?’ Wolfe pulls away from Tom excitedly.

  ‘Just to see what the scene is there.’

  ‘The Longhouse! We’re going back to the Longhouse!’ Wolfe dances around Tom’s legs.

  ‘Hey, mind my fish! Cool it a bit, mate, we don’t know yet. To have the baby, probably, yes. Petra was really freaked at the idea of going into hospital last night. And once the baby’s here we’ll see. If it works out, if I fit in, then maybe yes. If not maybe a cottage somewhere near, or even a caravan. Not a word though,’ Tom warns. ‘I told Petra I wouldn’t tell you, not till it’s certain.’

  Wolfe looks at the lovely strong salmon struggling upwards into the streaming water. He feels stupid because in his eyes are tears of relief and he keeps his head down to hide them from Tom. Through his tears the salmon looks more real than ever; it seems to wriggle and gleam.

  Nell watches Petra with narrowed eyes. There she is, pegging the washing out all higgledy-piggledy on the line, and never a glance over, never a wave. She hasn’t brushed her hair by the look of it – all greasy rats’ tails – and she is outside in her slippers treading in all the ash from last night’s fire which she will, no doubt, tread into her house, onto her sticky kitchen floor. Still, it was something last night to see the fireworks, a bit of a treat – and for all of them to see Olive making such a spectacle of herself. And it was something to witness the burning of the hat.

  What Petra is doing stretching her arms up like that in her condition, Nell doesn’t know. And all those grubby-looking clothes. There is no order about it. The white things are greyish, the coloureds faded. These automatic washing machines are no progress at all, not if they make a muddle like that. Nell swears by her old twin-tub. Old faithful. Like a part of the family, Jim used to say, groaning and churning away in the kitchen, and though Nell never said, she quite agreed. She felt quite fond of the thing, if you can be fond of a machine. Though why she never said, she doesn’t know. She tutted when Jim said things like that, jokey things, and sometimes she wonders now if she wasn’t a bit tight-lipped with him, a bit on the stiff side. It wouldn’t have hurt to laugh now and then when he made one of what he liked to think of as his jokes. Still, water under the bridge.

  Nell’s yellow rubber gloves reach her elbows. She is cleaning the insides of her windows, and later she’ll get Rodney to get out the old ladder and do the outsides. He is still in bed, and Nell’s face tightens as she wipes her wet leather over the windows, smearing Petra and her washing line into glittering suds. Rules are rules, after all, but what can she do? She knows what she ought to do and that’s march into his room with a bucket of water and throw it over him. That would wake him up. Still in bed at ten o’clock indeed!

  Petra goes back into the house. Nell screws a page of newspaper into a tight ball and goes over the window again, pressing so hard that the paper shrieks against the glass. But it is no good. Unless the outsides are done equally well, what is the point?

  She goes upstairs and hesitates outside Rodney’s room. All is quiet. She almost turns away, but then she knocks. She cannot be, will not be, afraid of her own son, in her own house. There is no answer. She turns the handle and pushes open the door. Rodney is in bed and he is reading. Nell cannot see, has no wish to see, precisely what it is that he covers up so quickly, so furtively. She does not wish to see or know, but she does know she can’t have that sort of filth in her house. However.

&n
bsp; ‘Are you thinking of getting up today?’ she asks. ‘Only we did talk about the windows after all the smoke last night.’

  ‘In a bit, in a bit.’ Rodney slumps back against his pillow and Nell lets her eyes wander round his room. His clothes and God knows what else are in heaps all over the floor. The curtains are drawn against the closed windows and it is dim and fusty. It smells like an animal’s den.

  ‘And once you’re up I’ll do your room out,’ she says. ‘You’ve got an appointment at the Job Centre this afternoon, don’t forget.’

  ‘Don’t start at him,’ he says. ‘He’s getting round to it.’

  ‘Well see that you do,’ Nell snaps. ‘And see that you put those dirty things in the linen basket.’ She goes out and closes the door. It is going to be difficult having Rodney here, a real trial. He is not under control, not properly. The house is not even under control now that he is in it. It was controllable when there was just her, just her own things to clean and tidy. In Nell’s head there is a kind of intricate diagram, a grid, of the house and all its nooks and crannies, all the places dirt and grime collect, and she cannot rest if they are not patrolled regularly. When she was alone, that was easy – well, manageable. But now another body – and a big and grimy one at that – invades her space. She cannot be there every time he puts a cup down, every time he uses the lavatory, every time his outside shoe touches her floor. She cannot always be there with her wet cloth, and so she worries. It may be irrational. She suspects that the extent of her fear of dirt is irrational, but it cannot be helped. It is real, as real as the dirt, as real as the creatures that need the dirt to mate in.

  No, she cannot always be there. It may be good to have Rodney there for appearances. She is not an old woman living alone any more, no longer the prey of thugs. And what a good mother, what a warm-hearted woman she must seem to be that he should choose to return to her. But it is not comfortable. Not with those children next door either, that sneaky little lad with his scabby skin and his shifty eyes. A constant reminder to Rodney. Although he is cured. Oh yes he is. They wouldn’t have let him out, if he wasn’t cured. They know what they are doing, the authorities. They must know what they are doing or wherever would we be?