The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

  ‘I haven’t got anything to bloody say.’

  There went another step, Sheila thought. Another few inches further away.

  *

  ‘Is this a bad time?’

  Sheila turned to the doorway. Dorothy Forbes dressed in alternating layers of taupe and concern. Bloody typical.

  ‘Dorothy,’ she said. ‘How lovely. Of course it isn’t.’

  Keithie stood next to Dorothy, a broken pen in his hand. He looked up at her and smiled. Arse, arse, arse, he said.

  *

  ‘I don’t mean to be a bother.’

  They sat in the kitchen. It was better there. Out of the way of Keithie and his arses, and Lisa’s sharp eyes. She tried to keep Dorothy’s attention on the conversation, instead of on last night’s pots and the ashtray on the draining board, but the sunlight fell through the window and seemed to point at everything she would rather forget.

  ‘Never a bother, Dot,’ she said.

  She watched Dorothy cough and smile at the same time, but neither of them was very successful, and then she remembered that Dorothy didn’t like being called Dot. It made her feel like an ending, she said, like a piece of punctuation.

  ‘Did you want a drink, Dorothy?’

  ‘Oh no. Not for me, thank you.’

  They smiled at each other through a silence.

  ‘Is it Keithie? Has his football been annoying Harold again?’

  ‘Oh no. Nothing like that.’

  ‘Lisa?’

  ‘No. Nothing to do with Lisa.’

  This was Dorothy. This had always been Dorothy. Travelling all around the houses, taking a long ride to get to somewhere nearby. Yet she couldn’t be rushed. If you rushed her, she would become flustered and deny everything, and no one would ever know what was waiting to be said. Sheila sometimes wondered if Dot would go to her grave with thousands of unspoken words in her mouth. Whole encyclopaedias of information that no one would ever get to hear.

  She waited.

  ‘It’s Margaret Creasy,’ Dorothy said eventually. ‘Well, it’s John Creasy, really. Well, it’s everyone. I’ve tried talking to Harold, but you know Harold, he won’t hear anyone else’s opinion. And Eric Lamb isn’t much better. I didn’t know who to turn to. You were there, you see. You understand.’

  When the words did arrive, there were busfuls of them.

  Sheila reached for the ashtray. ‘We were all there, Dorothy. The whole avenue was there.’

  Dorothy tried to rest her hands on the table, but there were cups and newspapers and Keithie’s Etch A Sketch in the way. Instead, she left them sitting on her handbag. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘it feels like yesterday.’

  ‘It was nine years ago, Dot. What on earth makes you think it’s got anything to do with Margaret.’

  ‘Because that’s how it works, doesn’t it?’ she said.

  Sheila took a cigarette from the packet and tapped it against the table. ‘How what works?’

  There was always a glaze of anxiety to Dorothy, even when she was younger. She combed the landscape for the next catastrophe, whittling at her thoughts until she’d shaped a problem out of them and then grooming herself with the satisfaction of worrying about it.

  Dorothy gripped the handbag like a fairground ride. ‘Fate,’ she said. ‘Whatever choices we make. They always come back on us.’

  There was a flicker. A very small flicker.

  ‘Now you’re being daft.’ She lit the cigarette. Cigarettes always calmed her down. ‘You’re running away with yourself again.’

  ‘The police came back. Did you see them?’

  ‘I heard about it.’

  ‘They must know something. They’ve been asking questions, looking for Margaret, and they’ve found out.’ Dorothy’s words were sliding in a chorus from her mind to her mouth. ‘Perhaps they’ve already found her. Perhaps she’s told them everything and they’re going to come back and arrest us.’

  ‘Would you calm down! Margaret knew nothing, she wasn’t even here.’

  ‘But she talked to everyone on the avenue, Sheila. She was the kind of person you couldn’t help opening up to.’

  Sheila picked at the faint tracks of polish still left on her nails. ‘She was a good listener.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Dorothy’s fingers travelled along the straps of her handbag. ‘And people like that sometimes end up listening to things you don’t mean them to.’

  She looked up. ‘Oh God, Dot, what did you say to her?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t say a word.’ Dorothy frowned. ‘At least, I don’t think I did.’ And then she blinked – far too slowly.

  Sheila dragged her fingers through her hair. She could feel last night’s hairspray pulling on her hands. ‘Jesus, Dot.’

  Sheila lit a cigarette, then saw the last one still glowing back at her from the ashtray.

  ‘She spoke to everyone, Sheila, not just me.’

  Dorothy took a breath so sharp and so unexpected, it made Sheila flinch.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘What if Margaret worked everything out? What if she confronted someone and that’s why she’s disappeared?’

  ‘Would you calm the hell down!’ Sheila knew she was shouting, but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘We don’t even know why she went!’

  ‘We need to talk to John. We need to find out what she said before she left.’

  Sheila drew on the cigarette. Short, brief breaths that pulled smoke towards her lungs in tiny pieces.

  Lisa pushed her head around the door. ‘Everything all right?’ she said.

  ‘Everything’s fine. Just fine.’ Sheila still looked at Dorothy. The smoke wandered between them. It twisted lazy patterns in the sunlight and curled itself towards the ceiling.

  ‘Only if anyone’s interested, someone needs to go to the corner shop,’ Lisa said. ‘We’ve run out of milk.’

  Sheila reached for her purse. ‘Take Keithie with you, there’s a good girl.’

  Lisa started to protest, the noise of a wild animal stirring at the back of her throat.

  ‘Don’t start, Lisa, just take him.’ She handed her the coins. ‘I need to pop out for ten minutes. He’s only six, he can’t stay here on his own.’

  ‘Nearly seven,’ said a voice from the hall.

  She turned back to Dorothy. ‘Wait out the front for me while I get my shoes.’

  *

  The pantry was cool and dark. She could hear Dot pulling at the front door, and Lisa bribing Keithie to his feet.

  It was behind the flour. Crouching in a tin filled with spilled rice and pasta shells.

  She was supposed to have poured it away. She’d told Margaret she’d poured it away. She reached into the tin and felt it reach back to her. One more and then she would. Just one more, because right now she really needed it.

  *

  He didn’t answer at first. Dot climbed over the flower bed and pressed her face against the glass. Sheila could hear her pointing at the mess and whittling.

  She took the chewing gum out of her mouth and shouted through the letterbox. There was nothing, although she thought she heard a door open somewhere deep in the house.

  ‘John, I know you’re in there,’ she shouted again.

  Dorothy climbed back. ‘Perhaps he’s out,’ she said. ‘He might be looking for her.’

  ‘He’s in there.’

  Sheila looked through the letterbox. She could see cardboard and paper, towered into piles, and the corner of a table filled with carrier bags. It looked like he was packing to move out, except nothing was packed. It had just spread itself out over the surfaces.

  She shouted again. ‘I know you’re in there, and I’m not leaving, so I’ll just stand out here until you decide to open the door.’

  It opened.

  It took a moment for her vision to adjust, the darting orange black to fade away, but then she saw John, standing at the bottom of the stairs. It looked as though the clothes he wore held a week’s worth of sleeping, and his eyes were bruised and
doubtful.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, John. What are you playing at?’

  Sheila pushed the door further open, and it caught on yellowed newspapers and a spatter of unopened mail. He stood back, like a child, and let them walk through. Dot held her hand to her mouth, feeding on the chaos.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Sheila lifted the edge of a carrier bag, but it seemed as though it might start a chain reaction and the whole house would collapse around them, and so she let it drop again. ‘What are you doing?’

  He chewed at his nails, like a rodent. ‘I’m trying to find it.’

  ‘Find what?’

  ‘Whatever made Margaret leave. She must have discovered something. The house must have told her what happened.’

  She took a long breath. The air smelled of sweat and desperation, and Dorothy was slowly adding to it behind her left shoulder. She went to pick up an umbrella from the chair by the door.

  ‘Don’t touch that!’ John reached forward and returned it to its place. ‘I left it there. For Margaret. She might forget it otherwise.’

  She watched him. She could see the fear ticking beneath his skin, his thoughts so tightly packed they had begun to warp and fracture. He had been like this before. Everyone had faltered then. What had happened had reduced them all to a silence, quietening their lives for months afterwards, but it was John who seemed to migrate even further than anyone else. Taking himself to the very edges of his life, and staying there out of harm’s way.

  ‘Let’s go and sit in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘let’s make a drink and talk about it.’

  *

  They drank black tea from cups Sheila had washed with a paper towel. Dorothy sat as far away as possible from hers, as though she thought it might possess some kind of toxic property, and John stared down into his every time Sheila asked him a question.

  ‘She must have said something, John?’

  ‘Nothing. She didn’t say anything. Why do people keep asking me the same questions?’

  ‘So you woke up, and she just wasn’t there? No warning?’

  ‘I went to bed first. When I woke up, I thought she’d nipped to the shop, or popped in to see one of you. She was always in and out of other people’s houses.’

  ‘She was,’ Dorothy said, ‘everyone’s.’

  Sheila caught Dot’s eye, and then turned back. ‘And she didn’t say anything about anyone else on the avenue? Nothing anyone had said to her?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing about Walter Bishop?’

  Their eyes matched for a moment, and there was silence.

  He looked back into his tea. At the edge of the room, she could hear Dorothy begin to hyperventilate.

  ‘John?’

  ‘She must have been to see him. His glasses – they’re in her handbag. She was taking them to be mended.’

  ‘I knew it.’ Dorothy stood and her cup rattled against a stack of plates. ‘I knew I’d seen her coming out of number eleven.’

  A whimper was carried into the room from the bottom of John’s throat. It sounded like there was an acceptance about it, a death rattle. Sheila felt a swell of panic, and she wasn’t sure if she had caught it from everyone else, or whether it belonged somewhere inside herself.

  ‘Let’s just calm down. Let’s think it through,’ she said, but the words were swallowed by the stream of panic that poured from the rest of the room.

  Dorothy was still on her feet. You could tell that she wanted to pace, but the room was too small, and what little space there was left was taken up by John’s searching. She twisted her hands instead, trying to free the adrenaline.

  ‘Margaret’s worked it out,’ she said. ‘She’ll have gone to the police.’

  Sheila looked at John. ‘Would she? Without speaking to you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Sheila closed her eyes and measured out the breaths. She could feel her hands start to tremble, and she put them into fists to try and make it stop.

  ‘We’d know if she’d told the police.’ She tried to make her voice steady, reasonable. ‘They would have questioned us by now.’

  ‘So if she hasn’t gone to the police,’ said Dorothy, ‘then where has she gone?’

  John looked up. ‘Perhaps she found out the truth. Perhaps she confronted someone.’

  ‘She spoke to everyone, Sheila. She knows all our secrets.’ Dorothy was an endless wave of panic now. Her eyes a terrified white.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Sheila. ‘We did nothing wrong!’

  ‘How can you say that?’ John gripped the edges of the table. ‘How can you say that we did nothing wrong. We killed somebody.’

  *

  It was there again. The darkness.

  Despite the crush of heat, despite the sunlight which needled at his skin, the avenue still seemed to be wrapped in a shadow. John stood at the front-room window and watched Sheila and Dorothy leave. They got as far as the middle of the road, when Dot started throwing her arms around and semaphoring out her anxiety with a handkerchief.

  He shouldn’t have said it. He shouldn’t have said they’d killed someone.

  But it was the truth. They had.

  It didn’t really matter, did it, whether anyone had intended to? Some things were so bad, so very wicked, it didn’t make any difference at all whether you meant them or not. If that were not the case, then anyone could get away with anything, just by claiming they hadn’t really planned to do it.

  He glanced up at number eleven, and number eleven glanced back at him.

  When he returned his attention to the avenue, Sheila Dakin’s fingertips were pressing into her temples, and Thin Brian had wandered over from his dustbin to see what all the handkerchief-waving was about.

  John was sure they couldn’t see him.

  He had taken refuge behind a vase of flowers Margaret had placed on the windowsill. Margaret didn’t believe in artificial flowers. She said there was too much fakery in the world as it was, without putting it in a jug and introducing it into your living room as well. They were fresh then, of course, but now he could smell it, the inevitable, strange sweetness of decay that always seems to break through, no matter how much you might try to cover it up with all sorts of other smells.

  He watched Dorothy’s handkerchief fluttering in the afternoon sunshine, and Sheila admit defeat and lean against her garden wall.

  There were forty-seven bricks in Sheila Dakin’s garden wall. He knew this already, of course, but it never did any harm to double-check these things. When Margaret was here, he hadn’t felt the need to double-check anything. She’d stolen his worrying from him, and packed it away and made it silent. But since she disappeared, it hadn’t taken very long at all before it had unpacked itself again and returned to his life like an old friend.

  There were sixty if you counted the half bricks.

  Dorothy was pointing her handkerchief in the direction of his house, and Brian was staring at it and frowning.

  Do something, Margaret used to say. Don’t just count things, do something purposeful instead.

  Thirteen half bricks. Thirteen. It made him uneasy.

  Don’t stand there, John, counting your days away.

  Perhaps if he’d spoken up sooner, perhaps if he’d found his courage in the beginning, the shape of his life would have been different.

  Take action, John.

  As he turned, his shirtsleeve brushed against the edge of the flowers, and the smell crept its way into his mouth. A new attitude, that’s what was needed. If he altered his ways, if he stopped counting everything, perhaps Margaret would somehow sense it and come home to him.

  He slammed the living-room door, and the echo jumped around the house. It sprang from the walls and the ceilings. It shook the tables and the chairs, and the little vase which sat on the windowsill began to tremble. A handful of petals quaked and shivered and let go of their stems, and a trail of decay leaked itself on to the paintwork.r />
  *

  ‘You took your time.’ Brian stood at the edge of the pavement with his hands jammed into his pockets. ‘I thought you were going to hide behind those dead flowers all afternoon.’

  John looked back at the house. Sometimes Brian seemed to know things and John could never work out how he managed to do it.

  ‘You’ve set her off something good and proper.’ Brian nodded over at Dorothy, who was throwing her arms around in front of Sheila. John couldn’t catch every word, but he heard finished, and done for and Holloway. ‘Whatever did you say to her?’

  ‘I just told the truth. Sometimes you need to be decisive. Sometimes, it’s important to speak up.’

  John stood up a little straighter, and used his new attitude to tighten his jaw.

  ‘Is it now?’ Brian tapped the side of his nose and smiled. ‘And sometimes, my friend, it’s important to say nothing at all.’

  John untightened his jaw and stared at his shoes.

  ‘And don’t think you two will get off scot-free, either.’ Dorothy stopped spinning and pointed at them. ‘The police will be after all of us as soon as they cotton on to what happened, so you can take that stupid grin off your face, Brian Roper.’

  Brian coughed and stared at his own shoes.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dorothy, will you quit with the bloody theatricals.’ Sheila heaved herself from the wall. ‘It isn’t helping anybody. If the police want to come after us, they’ll come after us. They can’t prove a thing.’

  Brian bit into his lip, Sheila dug her fingers further into her temples and Dorothy began to wail and wave her handkerchief around again. The noise made John’s head ring, and he covered his ears and closed his eyes and tried to make it go away.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  None of them had heard the postman. He leaned against his pushbike and scratched the side of his head with the edge of an envelope.

  Sheila looked up and folded her arms. ‘Perfect,’ she said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Brian.

  ‘Perfectly fine,’ said Dorothy. She tucked her handkerchief into the sleeve of her cardigan and smiled.

  The postman frowned. ‘Right you are, then,’ he said, and began to push his bike along the avenue. The wheels squeaked in the heat, and John wondered if the Post Office gave them a little can of oil to carry around with them, or whether they were expected to provide their own.