Crime Story

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Oh yes. Very satisfying. Athol’s happy, in his way. Don’t feel sorry for him.’ She waited for a moment. ‘What made you … why did you marry him?’

  ‘Surely, Gwen, I am allowed to be in love.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But as you know there are other things. One of them – I saw him on the ferry the first time. In the wet. The big waves. Standing in the bow, crossing the strait.’

  ‘Like a Viking,’ Gwen said. ‘He had that sort of head, when he had his hair.’

  ‘So I went and stood with him and we talked. Yes, enough.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing that I remember. And I said silly things. But the occasion … ’

  ‘It got you started?’

  ‘It took us long ways. Past many things. Me at least. Very foolish.’

  ‘Foolish things have to be said.’

  ‘Athol did not make love very well. I had to teach him. Yes, on that same night, straight off the ferry. With me he thought it was Christmas and New Year rolled into one.’

  ‘You probably terrified him.’ It was Ulla who bought the water bed, to try and bring him back. What a foolish thing. Gwen felt like weeping for them. ‘Tell me about Sweden. When you were a girl.’

  ‘I am Stockholm. From Stockholm. A city girl.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Yes, Gwen, I am. We came in from the country when I was eleven. I am Södermannagatan. On Södermalm. I lived there all the time I was in my teens, in an apartment that looked at other apartments across the street. Yellow walls, red walls, green window frames. That sounds romantic to you? You must punch your code at the door and walk up many steps. And then live in little rooms with the windows closed.’

  ‘But you went out into the country?’

  ‘We went to my grandmother’s summer house in the skärgård.’

  ‘That’s the islands you’ve told me about?’

  ‘When I came back to town I would walk up to Mosebacke and stand on the cliff where the ferries come in. Where Strindberg stood. He has some famous lines in the start of Röda Rummet. Every Swedish child reads them, they are compulsory – about the wind in May blowing from the islands and the lilac trees breaking into bloom and snowdrops coming up through last year’s leaves.’

  ‘Did you feel that wind?’

  ‘I felt it, and smelled the flowers in it – or I imagined that I did. And I went there again when summer was over and felt the cold wind coming from the north. I liked that just as well.’

  ‘You must have been a strange girl.’

  ‘I believed in both of them. Winter and spring.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now it is all winter for me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go back? Just take the children and go?’

  Ulla ran her tongue along her lip. ‘I would like a drink, please.’

  Gwen held the container and watched her sip from the straw. ‘Too sweet,’ Ulla said.

  ‘I’ll tell them.’

  ‘And with the straw you cannot wet your lips. My lips are dry.’

  Gwen poured some water in a glass. She dipped her finger in and wet Ulla’s mouth.

  ‘Thank you. Water is best. A little sip.’ She swallowed. ‘When I lived in Södermannagatan,’ she said, ‘there was a man living over the street; he used to watch me. His window was on the same level as mine. He was the father of my best friend.’

  ‘Did he … ?’

  ‘No, Gwen, nothing bad. He did not show himself or do anything nasty. He just turned his light off and stood in the back of the room where he thought I could not see him, and watched. But I could see him standing in the shadows.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. It was like he was waiting for something to happen to me. It was like he was watching my life.’

  ‘How long did it go on?’

  ‘Oh, not long. Two or three months. I would not let it change me. I would do nothing. I said to myself “He is not there.”’

  ‘But he was there.’

  ‘Oh yes. So, I was nineteen. I came to see the world. I came to New Zealand.’

  ‘And met Athol on the ferry.’

  ‘He, the man, Mr Gullberg, is why I did not take the children back. Athol said I could go, did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘But I said no, they will grow up here, and one day I will go home by myself and see if home is still there.’

  ‘Mr Gullberg would be gone.’

  ‘Perhaps. He was a nice man when I met him in the daytime. But he just wanted to have my life.’

  ‘No one can.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The rest of it, all the rest, you would still find that. The islands … ’ She took the books out of her bag and held them in front of Ulla.

  ‘That one,’ Ulla said. ‘Hold it still.’

  The jacket showed a night, blue, a lake, a sky, a balcony with a table and a jug – no one there.

  ‘Yes,’ Ulla said, ‘it is beautiful. It is Norwegian, you know? But a little bit kitsch, don’t you think? So much that little countries do is good, but then not quite good enough. It is sad.’

  ‘Shall I leave them?’

  ‘No, Gwen, take them away.’

  ‘Will you let the children come one day. Properly, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I will. When I know what I have become.’ Her eyes made the gesture that her hands would once have made – indicated her body.

  ‘They love you,’ Gwen said.

  ‘Of course. And I love them. One day I will know what to do. But not soon, I think. Now read to me. Read something that makes me laugh.’

  ‘Not Strindberg?’

  ‘Oh no, not him.’

  Gwen read from The Vacillations of Poppy Carew, and made Ulla smile, if not laugh. Then she went home, and met Athol standing by his gate.

  ‘Did the police come to the hospital?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘They showed me some beads. Were they hers?’

  ‘No, they weren’t. What’s it all about?’ Athol seemed hollower, and grey, like a pencil sketch.

  ‘They took them from an old woman who was murdered last night. She was the one – did you read the paper?’

  ‘The woman in Cuba Street? In the second-hand shop?’

  ‘He chopped her – tried to – chopped her with a spade. I don’t want – any connection with that.’ He started up the path.

  ‘Athol!’ She stopped him with her voice, a slap. ‘Have they caught him? Was he the man who came here?’

  He stepped up the path again, sideways. ‘No, they haven’t. They found some fingerprints that matched. I don’t want to have any – ’

  ‘Athol.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does Olivia know about the murder?’

  ‘They showed her the beads. I don’t think they told her why. How did we – get into this?’

  ‘We’re not in it, Athol. It happened to us. Don’t tell Olivia if she doesn’t know.’

  She watched him disbelievingly as he went up the steps on to the porch. Not a question about his wife – or his daughter, or his mother – just shock, or was it grief, about this new incursion of violence into his world. Oh Athol, she wanted to cry, where have you gone? Before he went from sight she called, ‘I’m taking your Post.’

  ‘Yes, have it, I don’t want it,’ he answered, and went inside.

  She pulled it from the box and read it before going into her own house. The man was not named but the identikit picture that Olivia had made was published again in a special box. Ulla’s attacker was wanted for questioning about ‘the spade murder in Cuba Street’. Spade murder. It made her sick and dizzy. Spades were for gardens and for making things grow. And for burying the family pet. She read how he had chopped the woman – Amy Louise Ponder, sixty-six – tried to take her head off, and sliced all the fingers off one hand. That boy, that squirrel boy, had done all this? That boy walking up the road with his bag on his
shoulder? She could not connect him with the act.

  Gwen put the paper under her cushion, hoping Olivia would not find it there. She locked both the doors and checked the windows, then called upstairs, ‘Olivia, I’m home.’

  ‘Yes, coming.’

  Gwen waited. She heard the girl moving about, jumping down from something, hammering. Worry was her mode of relating now – what worry should be taken from this activity?

  Olivia came down the stairs, stepping light and fast, and took the last half dozen two at a time. Gwen had thought she would never see carelessness on stairs in this family again.

  She smiled and said, ‘Olivia?’

  ‘I vacuumed my room,’ Olivia said. ‘And I washed my blankets. I didn’t realise how much they stank. Poor old Butch.’

  ‘He’s safe underground. Lucky fellow.’

  ‘Why lucky?’

  ‘No, sorry, I was just being smart. Ulla seems happier today.’

  ‘Good. Tell her – no, I’ll tell her tomorrow. About that picture. Thanks for that. All that shiny skin and soap and lovely round boobs. We should have a sauna.’

  ‘We can get one.’

  ‘I’ve never really looked at it before. It’s real neat, Gwen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said once I should call you Gwen instead of Grandma.’

  ‘Yes, do.’

  ‘But what I did, I changed it to the other wall, where the windows don’t make the glass all shiny. There’s some new holes. I hope that’s no problem.’

  ‘No problem,’ Gwen said, using a phrase she had despised but found attractive now. She made a wish of it. No problem for Olivia. Let it be solved by an assertion of youth; by a change of attention. And keep the spade murder away from her. Let her go and smile like this, with that brand new curve on her mouth – smile at Ulla. And save me from standing at the back of the room, in the shadows, in the dark, like Mr Gullberg, watching her life.

  Save her. Save us all, please.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jasmine wore leopardskin tights and a green jacket of nylon fur. Her hair was the colour of tomatoes.

  ‘Jasmine’s gunna live here,’ Danny said.

  She had shoulders like Hulk Hogan on TV, and grunted as she lowered herself into a kitchen chair. ‘I don’t do any cooking, tell her that.’

  ‘She doesn’t cook. You cook. And make the beds, all that shit.’

  ‘What about the rent? That goes up,’ Leeanne said.

  ‘No way. I’m paying what Jody paid, same rent.’

  ‘But that’s not fair. There’s two of you.’

  ‘Shut up, Leeanne. Just make with the cooking. And keep the kid away from her. She don’t like kids.’

  ‘They irk me,’ Jasmine said.

  ‘Hey, irk, I like. You put ’im in the bedroom. Keep ’im out of the kitchen, okay?’

  ‘He’s got to be here. I can’t cook and look after him too.’

  ‘So you better learn. Go to school and learn.’

  ‘Tell her not to let him howl. That irks me too.’

  ‘Hee,’ Danny said. ‘So keep ’im quiet. Stuff a fucken rag in his mouth.’

  ‘Steak remember,’ Jasmine said.

  ‘Steak, Leeanne, that’s what she likes. You buy porterhouse and rump.’

  ‘T-bone.’

  ‘T-bone too. You got it?’

  ‘I can’t buy steak, there’s not enough money.’

  ‘Argue and you’ll get fucken done. What’s tonight?’

  ‘Stew.’

  ‘Last time, eh. No more stew.’

  Leeanne took Sam to the bedroom and went back and forth to keep him quiet. She served the meal, then sat with him and talked to him in his cot. ‘You and me are getting out of here. We’re going to run away like Molly Whuppie. I spat in the stew, Sam, they’re eating my spit. Let’s see how they like that, eh?’

  When he was asleep she washed the dishes.

  ‘Jasmine don’t wash dishes.’ Danny picked up one of her hands, fat and white, with nails the same colour as her hair. ‘See that? Look, you bitch, when I say look. That’s the sort of hands you gotta have. Not them fucken things for washing dishes. Fucken bones is all you got. See how skinny her arse is, Jas?’

  ‘Yeah, skinny,’ Jasmine yawned. ‘We going out?’

  ‘Sure we’re going. When I say. She don’t dry dishes either.’

  ‘I bet there’s other things she’s good at though,’ Leeanne said.

  ‘No fucken lip,’ Danny said, but he was pleased. ‘Come on, Jas, shift your arse. We’re going up the Herm.’

  ‘That dump?’

  ‘So where you want, the fucken Ecstasy?’

  ‘It’d be a change.’

  ‘No lip from you either. Come on, let’s go.’

  Leeanne finished the dishes. She wiped the bench. She put Sam’s nappies in a bucket to soak. Then she went to bed.

  Good things: no more Danny with his slobbering and stinking and his twisting any bits of flesh he could find. Unless, she thought, and went cold, he tried to get her in there for fun, to make it three. But Jasmine wouldn’t; she wouldn’t stand for that. Leeanne relaxed. No more Danny. She could breathe and get real air into her lungs. But that was all; the rest was bad, and she knew that even more than before she had to get out. There must be a place; and she found herself thinking of a little house somewhere, with carpets for Sam to crawl on and shades on all the lights; and a shower with a glass door, warm water and shampoo, and big fat towels when you came out. There’d be a girl next door to babysit and she could go to the pictures, maybe once a week. And have enough for porterhouse and fillet and, yeah, smokes. And there’d be a man, maybe, to take her to a private bar for a gin and tonic – drive her home afterwards and not try to come inside. Wouldn’t that be nice? No noise, no fights …

  ‘Sio,’ she said. But it wasn’t him. In the end what she really wished for was to be alone with Sam, be safe somewhere.

  She slept until Danny and Jasmine came in. They slammed around in the kitchen and flushed the toilet – had she taught him to flush? – and ran water and spat and gargled and went to bed, where they creaked and groaned for half an hour. Then toilet again. Then some sleep.

  Leeanne made Danny’s breakfast and got him away. She would say this for Danny, he kept his job. She left cornflakes and milk on the table for Jasmine and washed the naps and swept the house, with Sam close behind her all the way, and taking two steps between the table and the sink before flopping down on his behind. Hey, brilliant. Hey, choice. His first real steps. She wanted to tell someone, tell even Jasmine, but told Sam instead, hugging him, ‘You’re on the way, Sammy. You’ll be as fast as your dad.’

  She walked him out to the front steps, where the sun was shining full bore, and sat down and watched him play in the dry flower bed by the fence. Lovely brown, her Sam, and round as peaches, quick and strong. ‘What a boy.’ He worked his way along the pickets, hand after hand, and looked at her and walked two steps, and sat down hard and grinned. ‘Try again.’ And he did. She clapped her hands. She fetched him a biscuit from the kitchen. Then she made a cup of tea and drank it watching him. She wished she had a camera to get photos of this. Sam taking one step, two, with his mouth closed tight and his hands up high for balance and his fingers going in and out. God he tried. It was like a spider climbing out of the bath. ‘Hey three, hey three, good boy.’

  ‘Shut up out there,’ Jasmine said from the bedroom.

  ‘Shut up yourself. Great, Sam. You’re going to be a winger.’

  The postman worked up the street, three houses one side, back on an angle, five the other. Leeanne was sixth. Funny how you kept on saying postman even when a woman did the job. Maybe, she thought, I could be a postman and get Sam minded half the day. You could finish by twelve o’clock when you got the hang of it, the last one said.

  ‘None for me, I bet.’

  ‘Yes, one,’ and handed her a letter in a window envelope.

  More trouble, Leeanne thought. Department
of Social Welfare. She sat down and warmed her hands on the wood, leaving the letter in her lap.

  ‘Hey, you got some tea?’ Jasmine called.

  ‘Make it yourself.’ She heard Jasmine get out of bed and rustle and grunt into her clothes. The hall door opened.

  ‘You gotta make me tea. Danny said.’

  ‘The kettle’s hot. Make it yourself.’ She did not look round even though the woman, with shoulders like that, could come up behind and strangle her.

  ‘I’m telling him.’

  Leeanne said nothing. Jasmine slapped away, bare feet, into the kitchen. Poor bitch, getting Danny. But I suppose you might just take him on if you got a servant too. She picked up the letter, opened it.

  ‘ … received information that you are living in a de facto relationship … changes in domestic status must be notified … benefit discontinued from this date … ’

  It knocked all the sense of where she was out of her.

  ‘Jesus. Jesus.’

  She sat on the step, rocking back and forth. Sam climbed up and held her knee.

  ‘Jesus, Sam, they want us dead.’

  Biscuit on his face. He grinned at her.

  ‘I’m supposed to be living with Danny.’

  He wiped his face on her. Spit and biscuit on her thigh.

  ‘Someone’s potted us. God, what date?’ Yesterday. And the benefit was due next week. ‘We got no money.’

  ‘ … if you wish to discuss … ’

  ‘Fucken right I wish to discuss.’ She lifted him away and sat him down. Went to the bathroom, washed her face and wiped her thigh. She took the flannel out to the porch and cleaned up Sam. ‘You wait, my baby.’ Anger, like a headache, throbbed in her. ‘We’ll have some lunch, eh. Early lunch. Then we’ll go down there and towel those bastards up.’ She went to the kitchen.

  ‘This what you call breakfast?’ Jasmine said.

  ‘Eat it or stuff it up your arse, I don’t care.’ She ran hot water in a pot and put an egg in for Sam’s lunch. Mashed egg he loved. ‘I eat it. Danny eats it. You can eat it too.’

  ‘He said bacon and eggs. I got a right.’ She was in her leopard tights again, with a black T-shirt that showed her shoulders bulging with muscle and fat. Forty, Leeanne thought. Forty-five, and getting Danny. But I’m stuffed if I’ll cook for her, not now.