Michael, Michael

by Wendy Perriam

  A sudden bray of laughter exploded over the wall – Julie’s party trespassing even here. Tessa veered away to the far corner of the cemetery, where she’d be safely out of earshot. She’d hide inside the long dark skirt of her favourite copper-beech tree, whose branches hung so low they seemed to enclose the tombs beneath them in a second mausoleum. She squeezed between the burnished leaves, entering a cool refuge, like the inside of a tent; the ground rough beneath her feet from last year’s crackly beech-nuts; the smells of earth and leaf-mould. The noises here weren’t threatening – rustlings in the twigs; the swoop and thresh of birds’ wings; a squirrel’s acrobatics as he shinned from branch to branch.

  She forced herself to sit down, squatting on a dismembered plinth of stone. Its cross had broken off and was lying on the ground in a tourniquet of ivy; jagged cracks bandaged with green moss. She used it as a foot-rest, wiped her clammy hands before unfolding the four sheets, resting the letter on her stomach, so as to involve her child, as well. ‘Okay, Michael,’ she said to both of them. ‘Here goes.’

  She read the first page quickly, eyes devouring the words, then gradually slowing down, as if those words had sapped her strength. The third page slipped from her hand, seemed to be wilfully recoiling from her, fluttering to the ground. She let it lie where it had fallen, sinking back herself, peering through the branches at the ugly factory wall. Alex was right – this place was quite grotesque – a dilapidated cemetery standing next to an eyesore of a factory. How could she not have noticed those stained and broken windows, those dangerous-looking wires looped across the dirty brick, the air of desolation? And her ‘romantic’ graves were little more than ruins, dunghills for old bones. She had been wrong about so many things – the ludicrous and high-flown way she’d modelled herself on Heloïse; her fatuous naivety in regarding Juxon Street as home. The house was just a dump – and a prohibitively expensive one – full of rowdy strangers at this moment. It was time she went back to her real home, became a child again.

  She returned the letter neatly to its envelope, then scrabbled at the parched and stubborn earth, trying to dig a shallow grave where she could bury it for ever. It belonged here in this cemetery, with dead things and abandoned things – and so did she.

  He’d killed her.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Come on, Jack, get your finger out, mate. I’ve got a thirst like the Sahara, and you’ve not bought a round all evening.’

  ‘Jack’s not buying nothing. He’s just blown his whole year’s salary on that poncy BMW.’

  ‘It’s not a BMW, it’s a Merc.’

  ‘Hey, that reminds me of the one about the chauffeur and the schoolgirl. This rich bloke hires a chauffeur to take his youngest daughter to …’

  Tessa tried to block her ears. She had moved seats twice already, but there were no quiet secluded corners in this vile suburban pub; nowhere she could escape the muzak and the fruit-machines, the beery guffaws drowning every punchline. She wondered how her mother could stand the ghastly place – the dreary decor, where everything was fake: pretend-wood panelling, leatherette banquettes, ‘antique’ pictures, circa 1990, olde-worlde carriage lamps from some modern hypermarket. Even the plants were plastic, as if nothing green and sappy could survive the smoky atmosphere, the reek of greasy food and stale spilt beer.

  Everyone around her seemed to be laughing, telling jokes – a voluptuous hennaed female spilling gin and giggles on to her partner’s cardboard pizza; a balding man with a boozer’s red-veined face thinking it hilarious to remove his socks and shoes. A boisterous group was playing darts, every double-top greeted with a crescendo of cackles, cheers and shouts. She felt a completely different species from these flushed and practised drinkers – an alien, an intruder, who had no right to be here. If a creature from another planet should walk into the pub, he would pick on her immediately as the odd one out, the grey and silent one, with a great boulder lodged inside her. The heavy stone was pressing on her stomach and her voice-box, so that she could neither eat nor speak. She was drinking, though – a double Malibu and Coke – a present from her mother, who’d been too busy yet to do anything but hug her, kiss her, and express wonder and surprise at seeing her darling daughter in the flesh.

  ‘Toots, you’ve made my day! I was beginning to think you were avoiding me, or maybe even ashamed of your old Mum. I mean, after getting that first-class degree, it’s probably half a crown to speak to you.’

  ‘It wasn’t a degree, Mum – just my first official exam. I don’t take my degree for another two years.’

  ‘Never mind the name. It was first-class honours wasn’t it? – just as I expected. I’d like to meet those big wheels at your college and tell them what you said to me the moment you were born. Well, you didn’t speak exactly, but it was the nearest thing to talking I’ve ever seen in a kid two seconds old. You were still all wet and slimy, seeing as you’d only just popped out, but I’ll never forget how you opened your huge eyes and gave the place the once-over. You looked just like you were about to put in a complaint – ‘‘I don’t think much of this joint. I’m made for higher things.’’’

  Tessa hadn’t joined in April’s laughter, too startled by the instant talk of birth. Was her mother psychic, able to pick up vibes from the stomach she’d concealed in a loose-fitting summer dress? No. It was purely a coincidence. There was nothing yet to show. But once her mother had stopped running round with plates of cottage pie, and could sit down for a minute without Sergeant Major Connie breathing down her neck, she would have to steer the conversation back to babies and maternity wards – except that this time it wouldn’t be a laughing matter.

  She sat sipping her expensive drink, aware of all the warnings she’d read about drinking during pregnancy. But a few mouthfuls of white rum were nothing like as lethal as the damage Michael had done. He had destroyed the baby somehow, so that she no longer felt pregnant, no longer even felt a woman – just a reject and a freak. She rummaged in her bag for his damp and dirty letter, which she had rescued from its grave. She kept reading and re-reading it, as if hoping that some miracle would change the words and sentiments when she ploughed through it for the twelfth or twentieth time. How terrible his writing was – sloppy, barely formed – an insult, in a way, to feel he’d spent so little trouble on making it less raw.

  ‘All right, darling?’ her mother asked, teetering up to Tessa’s table in her scarlet slingback shoes, which were ridiculously high for waitressing and cramped her pudgy feet. ‘I’m afraid Shirley’s off sick tonight, so I’m busting a gut trying to keep up with all the orders. But we stop serving food at ten, so after that, maybe we can …’

  She wheeled round as someone hollered for their scampi, lurched away with her loaded tray; hair tumbling from its lurex clip, skirt so tight it hobbled her. Tessa watched her put the plates down, then scrabble for a Kleenex and start dabbing at her nose, blowing surreptitiously when the customers weren’t looking. Her mother must be suffering from another of her summer colds, which she caught every year unfailingly. She never seemed to have the time to look after herself or feed herself – too busy feeding others. She had dashed back to the kitchen, and was returning with two plates of egg and chips; her leopard-print blouse (fake, to match the pub) splattered with a second pattern of what looked like Bisto gravy. Yet even the most boorish of her customers received their food garnished with a smile, and her regulars got more – a fond pat on the shoulder, a saucy squeeze of the arm. April stinted no one but herself. There was a ladder in her tights, but tights cost money, and so did vitamin C, though it might have prevented her colds.

  Tessa chewed the orange-slice which had been floating in her drink. Single parents married Tyrant Poverty – she knew that from her own case. She’d been shattered by the price of prams, even second-hand ones; the price of nappies, baby clothes. How dare her father live it up in Croydon, in a house twice the size of theirs! Okay, he wasn’t loaded, but he did have a car, a video, and holidays abroad – all the things
that Michael had as well. She thrust the letter back into its envelope, tempted to rip it into shreds. He had offered not to support their child, but to get rid of it instead. He hadn’t put it quite so bluntly, but there was a whole page about his ‘contacts’, and ‘not wasting any time’, and how if she was worried about the money side, just to leave all that to him. She wouldn’t touch his money – not for murder. She already had the cheque from Dave, which now seemed tainted, shameful, although her father hadn’t known what it was for. She couldn’t help wondering if he had offered cash to April, nineteen years ago; dashed off a similar letter, rejecting and denying her when she was still a helpless blob. It was only now that the trauma of her own conception had really hit home – fury with Michael curdling in her head with resentment towards Dave. How could she have repeated the whole unhappy saga? And the irony was worse when she reflected on the fact that April had sacrificed everything to give her daughter the chance in life she’d never had herself.

  She had decided not to tell her mother about that part of Michael’s letter. April would only brand him as a butcher – the term she used for anyone who advocated abortion. There was so much she’d have to censor: the Brighton clinic; the lies about her stay with Charlotte; the amazing, almost frightening heights she and Michael had reached together, the last time they’d made love. Her hand was sweating on the envelope, crumpling it to nothing, while the other hand longed to smooth it out. She might never get another letter, so maybe she should keep it as the last dregs and husks of Michael, a precious, sickening relic.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ April puffed, pausing for a moment with her arm on Tessa’s chair. ‘Things are slowing down, thank God, but that damn-fool of a dishwasher is playing silly buggers, so’s I’ll have to do the washing-up by hand. But once I’ve finished here, you can sneak into the kitchen with me, and we’ll have our little natter over the sink.’ She fished inside her blouse-sleeve for a damp ball of lilac Kleenex, mopped her nose again. ‘Connie’s on the warpath, but she’s leaving at half-ten, so at least I can relax when she’s pushed off. She gives me the heeby-jeebies, the way she watches me like a hawk. And she’s told me to stop getting colds. I ask you, Tessa! – as if they’re something I pick off the shelf at Tesco’s – two tins of soup, one sore throat, and a stinker of a cough. I suppose she’s worried about germs – some health inspector on the snoop, reading her the riot act – although I keep swearing blind it’s hay-fever.’

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I love you.’

  April leaned over to kiss her daughter’s cheek; the middle button on her blouse popping open to reveal a strip of bosom, a flash of black lace slip. ‘That deserves another drink! Same again?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well, how about a burger? Or we’ve got those turkey whatsits – though the only turkey in them is the picture on the packet. Or you could always have an egg. Mind you, even eggs is dodgy. I was reading in the Mail last week that male cocks are laying eggs now. They stuff them with these hormones and …’

  ‘I’ve eaten, Mum, honestly.’ ‘Honestly’ was a lie, but she was well aware that anything she ordered would be charged (full-price) by Connie. Anyway, the thought of food sent shock-waves through her stomach, especially turkeyless turkey and ‘male’ eggs. The man opposite was tucking in to prawns, tearing off the shells and whiskers, then relishing each moistly naked body. His face had changed to Michael’s – dark stubble, Latin eyes, full lips slicked with butter as he crammed in a bread-roll. There was another Michael next to him, mouth moustached with Guinness foam; the coarse hairs on his hands running right down to the fingertips, and tangled at the wrists. Everywhere she looked, Michael preened and guzzled – swilling whisky, stuffing whelks, leaning forward to paw the barmaid’s cleavage, his own shirt open to the waist.

  She tried to keep her eyes down, fix them on her beer-mat – Carlsberg Special Brew – but even that reminded her of Michael. He had drunk it in the hotel lounge, their last weekend together. She glanced up again, to the shields and shining silver cups displayed above the dartboard – silver cups for services in bed; shields to keep her safe, protect her from his poison-darts. Except they’d already found their target – stabbing through her womb, stinging in her bladder. She blundered to the toilet, wincing as she peed. If it hurt to pee, then it probably meant she was going down with cystitis – another hazard of pregnancy. She slumped back on the toilet-seat, suddenly noticing a graffito scribbled on the wall: ‘CASTRATE P.H. A.!’ Abelard’s initials, with an H stuck in the middle – H for Heloïse, and horror. Abelard’s castration had stunned the whole of France; appalled her when she’d read his own description of it.

  She scratched at the initials with her thumbnail; couldn’t shift the crude black biro, and didn’t have a pen to cross them out. She fumbled for her lipstick, twisted up the cheap gilt sheath until she could see the scarlet phallus – a brilliant greasy red. Red was Michael’s colour – the poppy-red of his favourite sweater, the crimson of his car, the hot red of his blood. Using the lipstick as a crayon, she drew a scarlet stroke right through the initials, then wrote ‘M.E.’ instead. The ‘CASTRATE‘ looked too small now, not murderous enough, so she deleted it as well; began again, higher up, on a pristine stretch of wall. ‘CASTRATE MICHAEL EDWARDS!’ The letters seemed to scorch and sear, throbbing with the agony Abelard himself had felt – the pain and outrage, disgrace and disbelief, which he had poured out in his terror-crazed account.

  Yet Abelard had also written that the punishment fitted the crime, and the same was true of Michael. She could see the victim writhing on his bed, hear his howls of pain, but suddenly the movements changed, and he was heaving, thrusting, circling with his thighs, teasing her by pausing, sliding almost out, then slowly, slowly in again; his cries no longer anguished, but ecstatic.

  She looked up at the wall again, began frantically to rub the lipstick off, smearing it and smudging it, until the letters were illegible, but her fingers stained deep scarlet. At the basin, she scoured her hands with soap, watched the water running red, like blood. Even now, there was still a faint red tinge left – Michael’s red, which would stain her life for ever.

  She stumbled from the ladies’ room, fought her zigzag way across the packed saloon bar, and out into the street, gulping down the darkness, trying to drown herself in black. She dived into an alleyway, a narrow faceless cul-de-sac which smelt of damp and cats; gradually slowing down her pace, regaining her control. Despite the dark, the air outside was still close and very muggy, as if this last stifling day of August was determined to extend itself, rather than be swallowed up by a cooler and more kindly month. She checked her watch – exactly ten. Two hours to go until the first of September. That was autumn, more or less, and then came ruthless winter – cold, dark, fading days; her baby’s birth.

  She trudged back to the pub, scanning the ‘What’s On’ notice tacked up on the door. ‘Drag Nite’, ‘Golden Oldies Nite’, ‘The Guv’nor’s Birthday Bash’. All more work for April, who was now clearing tables, piling trays with dirty plates and lugging them into the kitchen. Singing as she worked, though – some happy carefree love-song. Wouldn’t it be unfair – and even cruel – to break the bombshell news, capsize her mother’s rosy mood by dumping a huge problem on her doorstep? April was euphoric because the affair with Ken was blossoming: the first of her romances to last beyond a few casual months. Had a daughter any right to destroy that fragile happiness?

  She stood dejected at the door, gazing out at the dark confining alley, uncertain what to do. She’d planned to tell her mother in the hope of lightening her own load, and hungry for some sympathy and comfort; had spent half the bumpy coach journey imagining April magicking her pain away with a Band-Aid or a Bounty bar, a kiss, or bedtime story, as she had done in the past. Yet now it seemed …

  ‘Right, love, Connie’s buggered off now, so the kitchen’s all our own.’

  Tessa started at the throaty voice rasping just be
hind her; let April link her arm through hers and lead her back into the bar. She found herself shrinking from the noise – the clink and slam of glasses, the muffled roar of yakking mouths, shrill warbles from the games machines. She looked round at the faces, all cracked by stupid grins. Even the Toby jugs were smirking on their ledge above the bar, and on the walls Victorian Lolitas simpered in their fake-wood frames. She would have gladly wiped the smiles off those smug faces – Michael’s most of all – the gloating smile he’d flashed her when she’d told him she adored him.

  It was a relief to reach the quiet and empty kitchen, though under normal circumstances she would have been appalled by all the mess: worktops overflowing with unwashed pots and pans; giant catering packs discarded on the floor. She knew she ought to help, but felt exhausted, even dizzy. She mooched towards the only chair, watching April kick her shoes off, rub her aching feet.

  ‘Mum, d’you want to sit down? You look as if you could do with …’

  ‘No, you park your bones. It’s odd, you know. I’ve been asking Father Christmas for a brand new pair of pins every year since you were born, and he keeps on sending soap or scarves instead. That’s typical of men – they don’t get the bunions.’ She tied an apron round her waist, a comic one, printed with a suspender-belt and bra. ‘Well I’d better make a start, I suppose, or we’ll be here till kingdom come.’