Trick or Treat

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Got him!’ cries Petra. ‘Come on, Wolfe … whatever are you doing up there?’

  Wolfe shudders violently. Warm wetness creeps from between his clutching fingers. He quietly closes the door. He walks softly to the stairs. And then he rushes down as if there is a ghost behind him, panting down his neck.

  ‘Mum!’ he cries and throws himself at her.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she asks, holding him against her with her free arm and then pushing him away. She is red-faced with the effort of holding onto Kropotkin’s collar.

  ‘I saw …’ begins Wolfe and then stops. ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ he says.

  ‘Are you sure? What did you see?’ Her face is creased with worry.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Wolfe says. The blue frozen man with the silver coins in his eyes is private. It is nothing to do with Wolfe, and nothing to do with Petra. It is horrible. There are horrible things going on here and the picture of Rodney will stay in his mind for ever. But they are going away. In a few hours they will be gone.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I’ll take Potkins back,’ Wolfe says.

  ‘You look to me as if you need to use the toilet first,’ Petra says, frowning at the wet patch on his trousers. ‘Really Wolfie!’

  ‘Sorry Mum,’ says Wolfe.

  Nell is scandalised by the state of Jim’s allotment. She stands shaking her head at the weeds, at the frosted dying vegetables, and remembers the show-piece it used to be. ‘I hardly like to get you out,’ she says to Jim. ‘Tragic, that’s what I call it. A tragedy.’

  ‘Don’t fret,’ replies the muffled voice of Jim. ‘Times change.’

  ‘But your lovely plot … rack and ruin. Now. I’m going to make you proud, Jim,’ says Nell, setting the bag down and opening it to give him a bit of light. ‘“Time to make your peace,” you said, and you were right, Jim. I mean to make my peace today.’

  ‘That’s good to hear.’

  ‘I’m going to dig up the cup, Jim, the silver prize cup that you buried for me. And I’m going to give it back.’

  ‘You can’t go digging. The ground must be like rock.’

  ‘Don’t worry, love. I know the spot. It’s under the boundary and it’s not very deep, only just under the turf. I’m not afraid of a spot of hard work in a good cause.’

  Jim is silent in the handbag.

  Nell looks at Arthur’s plot. He hasn’t made a bad job of it, considering. Kept it up all these years. Couldn’t hold a candle to Jim’s, as it was, of course. She chooses the spot where she remembers Jim telling her he buried the cup. She forces the prongs of the fork down with her boot. It is difficult make any impact at all at first, for the ground here is compact from years of being walked upon, and the frost has made it harder still. But Nell is nothing if not determined. ‘Remember the war, Jim?’ she says breathlessly, as she rests for a moment, one foot on the fork. ‘How you said it was me, people like me, that kept up their standards in the war, people like me that were the backbone of Britain?’ She presses all her weight on the fork. She has at last broken through the roots of the turf and now she peels it back to reveal the brown of the earth. ‘Lipstick every day. Hitler had no effect on me!’

  Once she is through the frosty top layer the going is easier, but still very hard work. Nell grows hot. She looks around, there’s no one about to see, and she takes off her coat and folds it neatly beside her handbag. She swaps to the spade and a pile of earth soon grows beside her and she begins to perspire. This alarms her, the intimate trickling of it. She likes things cold and dry. But she will not give up now. It’s deeper than she thought, but this is definitely the spot, one stride from the end of the boundary. Jim had pointed it out to her more than once. ‘Safe as houses, Nell,’ he’d said. And he is awfully quiet in the handbag.

  Arthur enjoys his small freedom. Bless the lad for cheering Olive up with the hat so that he had been able to escape for a short stretch on the allotment. He breathes deeply. The sky is as clear and cold as a blue china bowl. The air invigorates. He stops at the top of the allotment looking down across the busy patchwork of green and yellow, grey and brown, the ramshackle sheds, the rusting water-butts, to the busy flow of the brown river below. His hand squeezes shut in his pocket. It closes on emptiness, for of course the godstone is gone. ‘Bless the lad,’ he murmurs.

  ‘Ah,’ says Nell. She is feeling dizzy now and the skin on her palms burns. ‘I think I’ve got it, Jim.’ In the ground is a tin. It is an old biscuit tin that she recognises from all that time ago, with a picture of King George VI’s coronation on the lid. She bends down and reaches distastefully into the dirty hole. She has to force her fingers down actually into the earth beside the tin in order to ease it out. The earth gets between her fingers and under her nails and under her wedding ring. She will not think of the mindless seething of the soil, the seething spawning beasts upon her skin. She will not think. She bites her lip in order not to think, and tastes a bright bead of salty blood.

  She sits down stiffly on her folded coat. Her head aches, and her back, and her arms, and her palms smart. The tin opens surprisingly easily. Inside is the cup. It is tarnished but it will shine up a treat. She traces the inscription with her dirty finger. It is a cheap thing, tawdry. To think she ever cared so much about such a trifle!

  Under the cup are other things. Old letters and photographs. Puzzled, Nell lifts out the soft and slightly damp bundle and unties the neat string bow. She sighs, remembering Jim’s neatness with knots and strings and so on. It is these little things you forget. The string falls away. There is a photograph of Olive. There is a photograph of Olive with an obscene smile on her face, ear to ear, as if her face is about to split in two. The smile is obscene and her bosom is uncovered. Nell suddenly feels cold. The sweat hardens on her skin like crystals of frost.

  ‘Jim,’ she says. Olive’s exposed bosom is large, her nipples huge and dark. Her eyes are bright, half-closed. She teases. ‘Jim?’ Jim always did love his photography, loved pottering about down in the cellar, evening after evening. She puts the photograph down and then she unfolds a letter. My dearest Jim it begins, and it is Olive’s handwriting all right, messy and sprawling and loopy, Olive’s handwriting all faded to brown on paper that is almost translucent with age, that feels like old skin. My dearest Jim it begins, and it is filthy. It goes on in a kind of exaggerated filthy way that is typical of Olive. Nell lets her eyes jitter over it quickly. She does not need to know the detail. There are words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘sex’, there are words of the sort that no decent woman has any need to use. Nell screws it up. It is silent paper, as soft as skin in her hand. Nell closes her handbag with a snap, shutting Jim into its darkness.

  There are other letters. There are other photographs. Nell does not wish to know any more, but one slips provokingly out of the bundle in her hand and as she snatches it up she cannot help but see. It is the two of them, Jim and Olive, together and they are grinning and … Nell breathes in sharply. Olive is expecting and Jim has his hand on her belly just like the father, just as if he is the proud father of her baby. Nell’s heart struggles violently against her ribs. But it was Arthur’s child, the one that died, it was Arthur and Olive’s. She had had only one child and it was Arthur’s. It was not Jim’s, never Jim’s, could not have been. She stands up. She looks this way and that, turns about as if searching for something, looks wildly around her but there is no help to be had.

  She feels that she is slipping again, losing control. She clutches the handle of the spade and closes her eyes and her father’s face looms suddenly in front of her, and she sees his disdain. His mouth is drawn into a tight pucker as if with a wire, and his brow lowers like a storm-cloud. It is as if he always knew. He always knew she had it in her, beneath the china-doll exterior, she always had it in her to kill. She tried so hard to be a perfect girl. She fitted the mould around her snug as a pink and white porcelain shell. But now the mould had shattered. From inside it has shattered with the force of her rage an
d she stands loose and light, insubstantial. She shivers, and yet strangely it is heat she feels rather than cold on this frosty morning. She opens her eyes and dispels, once and for all, her father’s disdain. She is all rage, all surging glorious rage. The shards of her shell lie scattered all around her on the earth and the sun glints upon them.

  She opens her handbag again and takes Jim out. ‘Nell?’ he says, his voice puzzled, as if recognition is gone. She tries to look at him but all there is is the brightness of the sky reflected in the glass, and the reflection of her own wild strange face. ‘Nell?’ the voice is faint. She picks up the letters and the photographs and throws them in the hole. She flings Jim in after them, and then the cup. Olive’s prize lands with a clunk, as if there is something else buried there, not far down, some metal thing. Nell peers into the earth. She can see nothing at first, just the stony earth. She grits her teeth and grips the handle of the spade between her burning hands. If there is something else, she might just as well know what it is.

  Arthur squints. Surely it’s a trick of the light. It looks as if there is someone on his plot, someone digging on his plot – no, Jim’s plot – no, the boundary. It is a tall grey-haired person: a woman. It looks like … no, surely it can’t be … it looks just like Nell. She is bending over a hole. And it is Nell. Arthur will not approach. He will let her be. There is something wild about the way her head is jutting forward, the way she jerks the spade, and he will not encroach upon her trouble. He stands at the top of the slope and watches her lift the spade.

  Something that is not blood, that is more like quicksilver than blood, rushes through Nell’s veins. The energy that surges through her arms is terrific. It feels as if one jump is all that it would take to soar. In her mind fly balsa planes and cups and hats and perhaps it is madness but she doesn’t care. The smarting of her hands is wonderful. She rips the wedding ring from her finger and flings it into the hole and laughs at the cheap chink it makes against Olive’s cup. Jim lies in the earth, and his glass is cracked. He reflects the sun at her in sharp flakes and the brightness makes her blink and squint, makes her eyes water. There he lies in the earth and his cracked glassy face merges for a moment with that of her father, with Rodney. He lies in the earth. It is about time.

  She scrapes the soil from the buried thing but she still cannot see. The sun reflecting from Jim’s glass gets into her eyes and she cannot see. She lifts her spade to give it a whack. It is old and metal. She blinks. It is a blunt-nosed thing. She lets her spade fall and as it falls she realises what it is. It is a bomb, of course, left over from the war.

  There is not much left when Arthur gets there. And there are soon people swarming: police, Army, the press. He stands back. His allotment is in ruins. Everything vanished into the crater, all the lovely seedlings, all the roots, everything. His hand in his pocket is empty. Yes, the godstone is gone. All those years, is all he can think, all that time, all the lovely earth and what was buried there all that time …

  On Remembrance Sunday, while the bells toll and people wear their scarlet poppies to church, Arthur takes Kropotkin to the allotments for a walk, for a snuffle in the winter earth. All the fuss is over by now. The allotments stand empty and cold. Arthur finds a scrap of a photograph. It is old and faded and dampened by the rain and muddied by the soil. It is a photograph of a young couple and the man is Jim in his uniform, and the woman is smudged and torn. He can see that she is pregnant, though he cannot see her face, but of course, it is poor Nell. He screws it up and throws it down. He gives Kropotkin a tug. Olive will be waiting for him in her lipstick and her cherry hat, and they’ll shuffle up to the Lamb for a glass of stout before their dinner. And that will be a pleasure. The sound of the river hurrying over the stones is loud. Arthur gazes down at the park, at a boy on a bicycle, and he thinks of Wolfe. He thinks of the godstone in Wolfe’s pocket all that way away, working its magic for the planting of his tree.

  About the Author

  Lesley Glaister (b. 1956) is a British novelist, playwright, and teacher of writing, currently working at the University of St Andrews. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Society of Authors. Her first novel, Honour Thy Father, was published in 1990 and received both a Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award. Glaister became known for her darkly humorous works and has been dubbed the Queen of Domestic Gothic. Glaister was named Yorkshire Author of the Year in 1998 for her novel Easy Peasy, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award in 1998. Now You See Me was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002. Glaister lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her husband, author Andrew Greig.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Lesley Glaister

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-9412-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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