Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek succour, but of thee, O Lord?’ He cast a meaningful glance at the twenty still gathered. Sylvie was gazing down into the trench, looking for worms, her eyes held by a bright skein of royal-blue wool which seemed to shine artificially against the grey-brown of the crumbled earth. She knew without being able to say that there was a hand holding the wool. In the middle of the space left for the coffin, she could see a footprint and on the other side, half submerged, a shoe. No-one else looked into the grave: all eyes turned elsewhere, even those indifferent to the deceased did not wish to examine the depth to which she would descend. Sylvie’s gaze ranged the length and depth, looking for the other shoe, saw instead more threads of the same, blue wool, and then her whole, small, punchy little body arched itself into a piercing scream. Sylvie had no real idea of why she screamed as she was hoisted away, kicking as the prayer continued and the coffin descended effortfully, held by straps, everyone ignoring the extraneous sounds.

  ‘… We therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’

  ‘No!’ Sylvie screamed. ‘No! No! No!’

  With a soul full of anguish and guilt and one hand strained with the dirt of the earth she had just thrown, Sylvie’s mother turned back from the side of the grave and slapped her daughter on the face. The blow was automatic and the sound of it as loud as the silence which followed.

  The current of the shrieking was abruptly stopped: the child’s face was white with one dirty imprint to the left of her nose. Scooped into her father’s arms, she did not turn the other cheek, but remained speechless for a minute more and silent until he had walked her back towards the entrance with his hand steadying her head against his shoulder. Then she muttered, ‘No, Daddy, no, someone down there, Daddy. There is. Don’t put the box on top, Daddy.’ He cooed at her and patted her back, out of his depth and blushing for shame at the behaviour of his family in front of others. His anger embraced the whole world except his child, but it did not mean he listened to what she said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one mourner backing away from the edge of the crowd, a faintly familiar figure, looking towards him. He felt Sylvie stiffen in his arms and hold tighter.

  ‘It’s that man,’ whined Sylvie. ‘That one, the sing-songing man with the funny hands.’

  ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘We’ll all go home now, shall we? Nice cup of tea?’

  In the early evening of Thursday, Rose sat in Debenhams’ coffee shop, chewing her nails and letting her tea grow cold. She had raced down into the bowels of the Central Line to get here in time, and Margaret was late. Rose remembered the old lady teaching her how rude it was to waste all those particles of someone else’s life, by being late. Then she thought, with a greater panic, how Margaret did practise what she preached, unfailingly, and this was nothing to do with tardiness, accidents or bombs. She simply wasn’t coming. After that, Rose ceased to think in any consistent way at all. What she felt among the plastic ferns and wooden seats was merely a numbing hurt, followed by loneliness and finally fear. Margaret hated her, had decided she did not want to know her, had defected finally, did not care, had told her father about this meeting. On this thought, Rose was unable to move, even to pick up the cup. Shop tea, Margaret had said, not like I make in front of my oh so cosy little fire. Telling Daddy all about it. Oh no, surely she would never do that, could always, always keep a secret. And she isn’t a bitch.

  Daddy. In court yesterday with his malevolent, pale blue eyes and his tiny, destructive little self, his face like a coloured balloon, but still his face, passing her, reaching out to touch her, surrounding her with the smell of his dirt and his curses. That was fear incarnate, and yet she had pitied him too. As if she had not tried, tried to extract his papers and put them in the shredder, as she would the next time, so that their paths might never cross. But she could not do it, could not leave Helen West to face the music, had done her errands on Daddy’s case like a good girl, and then hidden, wrenchingly sick, among the graffiti of the public loo, where the walls bore last week’s legends. Level with her eyes as she sat staring, there had been a fading felt-pen scrawl which said, poignantly, ‘Is there anybody out there?’ and Rose knew there wasn’t. Now that Margaret had failed to arrive, she knew it even better.

  Rose looked round, surreptitiously, beset with a brand-new fear. Would Margaret have told her old friend Logo? Was he lurking round here now, waiting to follow her home to an address he’d already found from a postmark? Was that why Granny had not come, displacing one loyalty with another? It was dreadfully possible.

  Rose felt safe in company, in shops and in large buildings. Dad used to take her with him office cleaning: it somehow dictated her present choice of destination. She picked up her bag with a degree of decorum she did not feel, catapulted down to the ground floor and bought a toothbrush and a shawl, waiting with bated breath to see if they were daft enough to take her overstretched credit card. Then she dived back on to the Central Line, still full of shoppers. At the other end she ran from the train, stopped at the hamburger shop on the corner and the off-licence next door just before it shut, spending her last pence. Then she bounded up the steps, past the comforting railings, to the office entrance where the night doorman sat blearily.

  ‘I bought you something,’ she said, handing him the bottle in blue paper. ‘Oh, and I’m going to be working ever so late, don’t mind me, will you?’ He smiled, bemused. Rose tramped upstairs. There was something corrupt about earning a man’s goodwill with a half-bottle of whisky, particularly a horrible, leery man like that, but it had worked between her mother and her father.

  A chill began to descend on the place. Rose did not mind. The office was eccentric, but it was big and above all, it was safe.

  Helen met Redwood in the corridor at about five. He was looking aimless and defeated and she found room to feel sorry for him. He did not see her until she was upon him and it was too late to turn back.

  ‘What’s new about the office thief?’ she demanded. All of them had been ready to confer, then they got the message, Don’t bother and don’t ask why. It was her best-natured sharp tone, but he still shrank.

  ‘Oh, nothing to report, I suppose, that’s why,’ he mumbled. ‘No point in having you all sit down to tell you that. Besides, I’m busy, I’ve—’

  ‘So you’ll let the office saboteur ride his bike, will you?’

  ‘What else can I do? No-one else has complained. I can’t disrupt the whole ship with an official inquiry, we’re sinking as it is.’

  But you were ready to blame Rose to make it look as if you’d done your duty, Helen thought furiously. Sack someone to make it look as if you’ve tried.

  ‘Won’t do,’ was all she said, firmly. Redwood scowled. Challenges only frightened him initially; after that he remembered to become aggressive.

  ‘What do you mean, it won’t do? It’s got to do. But security’s being tightened up, dramatically overhauled, electric locks, that sort of thing.’

  ‘When?’ she asked stolidly.

  ‘When? Over the next month or so.’ He was getting angrier the more defensive she made him feel. ‘Look, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to work here. Or you can find out who or what is playing with the system. I give you my blessing. We’ve decided it might be some kind of computer virus—’

  ‘Which also removes the paper? Clever little bug.’

  ‘It fits the bill. But as I say, if you want to find out more, feel free.’

  ‘All right, I shall. As long as you aren’t busy blaming the clerks. I’ll report back if I find the virus lurking in a cupboard, shall I?’

  ‘Oh, very funny.’

  They parted on almost friendly terms. Avoiding Dinsdale’s room with a feeling of discomfort, Helen set off to find Rose. Their conversations in and out of court today had been all too brief, perfunctory almost, but Helen did at least know about darling Michael going to his parents’ home that evening, a
nd she had it in mind to grab Rose before she left, suggest a drink, a shop, or something to prevent their recently broken ice from forming all over again. Her own passionate curiosity for Rose was far from satisfied; it defied logic and had been there for a long time. It was Helen’s unerring instinct for vulnerability in people who hid it by shouting. She stopped at the door of the clerks’ room. Too late. The bird had flown, unaccustomedly early.

  A note on the desk, defiant. ‘Gone shopping.’

  It didn’t seem a bad idea at that. Helen was ludicrously calmed by crowds, warmed by lights, seduced by displays, could sit in a shop for hours. The tawdry splendours of Oxford Street beckoned and she moved towards them like a pilgrim.

  She went down the escalator to the Central Line. It was late already, half six. The office was empty, her flat at home was empty, and she longed for that populated vacuum in between. It was an old escalator which protested at the weight of feet as she descended with a thinning stream of people at Holborn. Passing on the other side, ascending to the air and looking like a person distracted, was Rose, clutching a bag and staring straight ahead. Helen shouted and waved to no response. Other people looked, then kept their eyes fixed on the posters. ‘Pregnant and happy? Fine’, or other pictures describing the magic effects of alcohol, pizza, books and clothes, trundling by as they sniggered at Helen’s gestures as if they were the sudden, funny aberration of a madwoman.

  Helen lost her taste for the shops.

  Geoffrey Bailey realised that he missed things like shopping in this structured existence where all was found, but he did not miss it to any great degree. Shops had become so alien that when he and Ryan sat in the local hostelry which had become their regular haunt, with the same two, attractive women, he did not immediately realise that the older one was wearing something so obviously brand spanking new he fancied he could almost smell the tissue paper and see the marks of the hanger. The woman, called Grace, had a house near by: they’d been there before, why not again now? Plenty of drink in. The invitation had been sidestepped for a while until, with an operation which was so smooth as to be painless, they had seemed to transfer themselves from the snug of the pub to the splendours of her living room via the mechanism of Ryan’s scented car which had acted rather like a time capsule. It was only when they sat on a moquette sofa, which Bailey both noticed and hated without quite knowing why, perhaps because it was so deep it immobilised him completely, that he realised what it was all about. He craved beer and skittles. Or the prospect of Helen, guiltily and noisily home from the Thursday shops to sit with her nose in papers on a worn, chintz settee while he sat reading a book in her armchair with its springs straining against his behind, not minding the habits of her furniture. Helen had a cat, so did he, both of them the independent, alley cat, beaten-up variety which could never have house room here. The impressions passed like quicksilver, leaving no visible mark on his face. Where he was now, there were three bedrooms upstairs, one each and one for their consciences, should any of these considerations apply. Bailey thought of the homework he should do before the rigours of tomorrow, remembered the opportunism of his relative youth and decided Grace wasn’t such a bad alternative, conscience was soluble, she reeked of perfume and sympathy. He might not like her furniture, but she was from the same stable as himself with the same humour; she smelt of uncomplicated generosity.

  At what point Ryan and his lady disappeared upstairs, Bailey did not quite gauge, midnight or thereabouts. ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Grace, with a yawn like a cat. ‘I think you may have lost your lift back to school. You’d better stay. The bathroom’s on the right at the top of the stairs. You can either come in with me or sleep on this thing.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not—’

  ‘Used to doing this?’ She hesitated and he knew it was not feigned. ‘Nor me. Which is why I’m wearing a new dress and being so brisk.’

  He could not bear the risk of humiliating her and yes, he liked her. He liked a woman with an accent who spoke her mind and talked his own language.

  ‘Yes, it’s all right,’ he said.

  There was silence on the upstairs landing of this new house in a new estate full of picture windows mirroring closed lives. One of the rooms full of teddy bears gave witness to an absent child. The door to Mother’s room was open, she was in there, taking off her new clothes. Bailey went into the bathroom. He was depressingly sober, depressingly helpless and he wanted to stay in there as long as possible.

  The crash from downstairs hit him like a blow. His face, with all its multiple lines, stood solid as a map as he stared into the mirror with the fixity of a ghost. A door slammed. It took him several seconds to move and feel grateful he was still dressed. Out on the landing, Ryan’s plump torso with the bottom half clad only in a fluffy towel, cannoned into his own thin and steely rib cage. It was bone meeting flesh; he knew Ryan’s fist yearned to punch him for the stranger he was.

  ‘Shit,’ said Ryan. ‘I think we got burglars.’

  ‘Put some bloody clothes on, said Bailey. ‘For Christ’s sake.’

  The stage-whispers alone could have won them an Oscar. Grace appeared at her door, the stage-left entrance in négligé somewhat impaired by her white face.

  ‘Stay put, I would,’ said Bailey, mildly. It was years since he had seen a woman deliberately déshabillé to please, an uncommonly pretty sight. She did as she was bid and shut the door. Ryan re-emerged, with an unbuttoned shirt, a jacket on top, trousers zipped as he moved, shoes, no socks and, as Bailey rightly sensed, no underpants.

  Talk to me, Chief,’ Ryan said in the same hoarse whisper. ‘But make it loud.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Make a noise. Sing or something.’

  ‘We’ve got burglars.’

  ‘Naa. This house might have burglars,’ Ryan hissed, grabbing his arms. ‘But we mustn’t catch them. What do you want? A headline in the paper? Sing, will you? Give them time to get away.’

  Bailey coughed, loudly. Coughing seemed to be infectious. Ryan coughed, but only as a preliminary to yelling, ‘Is there anybody there?’ in a voice so loudly artificial it made Bailey wince and then want to laugh. Then they went downstairs.

  It was an awful room, Bailey thought sadly in the absence of its owner. A room which tried and failed to be all things at once, a comfort, a luxury, potted both inside and out. The glass doors led to a version of the tropics beyond. One of the palms had fallen through the window in nothing more than a fit of pique. Two huge plants lay embracing one another among broken glass.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ Ryan muttered fervently. ‘It’s only the wind. Time we were going. Sir.’

  ‘In a minute,’ said Bailey. ‘In a minute.’

  The women appeared as he was Sellotaping cardboard to the glass while Ryan swept up the broken fragments. They all did what they could whilst making the noises that go with the end of a party, laughing with a cup of coffee in one hand before, all desire spent, Ryan and Bailey left in a silent, cowardly posse.

  ‘Sleep well,’ said Bailey, something he said automatically to Helen if he should leave her late at night.

  ‘I shall,’ said the woman, smiling without a trace of bitterness. ‘See you soon.’

  Bailey blushed.

  Sleep well, my sweet, be good tomorrow, awake refreshed, the aim of every man. Logo sat back on the cold kerb, gazing at the lights which still blazed in the windows of the building he surveyed. Didn’t they ever turn off lights? Yes, they did. They turned off most lights on each floor, but forgot to extinguish them all. In the narrow street which flanked the back entrance to the vastness which he watched, Logo could see the silhouettes of clumsy furniture behind the net curtains of the huge ground-floor windows. There was a doorman dozing in there, but Logo knew how to get in; one or two sash-windows had already welcomed him, but he had doubted the point of the exercise. The offices of the Crown Prosecution Service whose address was so easy to elicit from the big-bottomed usher, or even from an ol
d alibi notice, guarded itself against terrorists only. He was not one of those. Logo was only a man who wanted his daughter and had come to collect her from kidnappers. And, had he doubted her presence here, his doubts were soon destroyed. There were symmetrical windows in the basement below his eyes, all lined in a row, all dark save one, where the light flickered against dirty net curtains, and someone, against the back wall, was conducting a little concert.

  She might have had head phones plugged into her ears: she was acting out a rhythm, but she knew about shadow play. There were long thin fingers in that room making an eagle against a yellow wall and Logo could see it, clearly.

  He moved towards the railings, looking into the well of the basement, easy, with time, but a huge post office van rumbled by with radio blaring and stopped at the door. Logo retreated.

  Tonight, tomorrow night, another night; rest up first, what did it matter when he was so close? He liked the expectation. The shadow play went on.

  Now there was a rabbit: now, a church with a steeple.

  She was still his own child.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The office building was the only place where Rose had never been afraid of the dark, but nothing could prevent her from missing the comfort of all her frills and teddy bears. Down in the bowels of the basement, she had been able to select from a number of rooms, each more private than the next. The cabin she chose out of this luxurious suite was the size of a cupboard with a smeared sash-window below the railings which flanked the front door of the building. The top of her head was well below the outside wall, the glass so dirty and the view of the street so restricted, the feeling of safety was complete. The yellow-painted walls were lumpy with layers; the stone floors had been painted with red tile paint, the whole brutal effect subdued by age. Outside and down the hall, the central-heating boiler for the whole vast palace hummed with harmonic fury behind a locked door, clicking disapproval from time to time. In the subterranean space, Rose felt she might have been in the bowels of a ship, with all the reassurance of noise and the vicarious life of the engine to chase away ghosts. Lighting in the cabin took the form of a single bulb hanging dolefully, augmented by the anglepoise lamp Rose had borrowed from Helen’s room to illuminate her bed. Here, the mattress consisted of piles of old papers taken from store and formed into an oblong, covered with an abandoned curtain shaken free of spiders and on this makeshift arrangement Rose lay and aspired to sleep after playing games with shadows on the wall. Fully clothed except for shoes, covered with a winter coat and the shawl, she turned off the lamp into a darkness which was suddenly complete and then, before terror struck, her eyes adjusted to the oblong of light from the window and her ears to the roar of the boiler, and she was able to close her eyes.