The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

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The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Page 14

by Joanna Cannon


  They all watched him lean his bike against the wall of Walter Bishop’s house and disappear.

  ‘New,’ said Dorothy, without taking her eyes off number eleven.

  Sheila folded her arms a little more tightly and leaned into Dorothy’s gaze. ‘Is he?’

  ‘Not from round here,’ mouthed Dorothy.

  ‘Isn’t he?’

  Dorothy tutted. ‘You’ve only got to listen to his vowels.’

  A few moments later, the postman appeared again and retraced his steps back down the road. He still had the envelope in his hand.

  ‘Second delivery?’ said Dorothy, when he reached them.

  The postman nodded. ‘No one in at number eleven, though. I’ll have to take it back.’

  They all stared at the envelope. It was fat and white, and Dorothy strained her neck so much to read the postmark, John became concerned it might dislocate.

  ‘Kodak?’ she said.

  ‘Looks like photographs.’ The postman squinted at the packet.

  Dorothy stretched out her hand. ‘I’ll take them if you like?’ She smiled, and the tips of her fingers wavered ever so slightly.

  The postman hesitated, then he pointed to his badge. ‘More than my job’s worth,’ he said. ‘Royal Mail, you see. We’re a public service. Like the police.’

  ‘The police?’ said Dorothy.

  ‘And the fire brigade,’ said the postman.

  ‘The fire brigade?’ said Sheila.

  He smiled and turned his bike around. You could hear it squeaking all the way to the bottom of the avenue.

  ‘I wonder what that was all about, then?’ Brian nodded into the space where the postman had stood.

  ‘Photographs,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Evidence!’ Dorothy took her handkerchief out again. ‘So much for not being able to prove anything. I bet he’s got photographs of heaven knows what still hidden away in that house!’

  ‘Oh Lord.’ Sheila sank back on to her wall.

  ‘I’m not sure how much more I can take of this,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can feel one of my headaches coming on.’

  ‘What do you think, Brian?’ John could feel the tingling wake at the bottom of his throat. ‘Do you think we’re in trouble?’

  Brian stared at him. He stared so hard, John couldn’t meet his eyes, and he had to look over at Dorothy Forbes’ driveway instead.

  ‘I think that if we’d done something when we had the chance, then we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.’ Brian was still staring at him. ‘I think if you’d listened to me, if you’d spoken up, then everything would be different.’

  John turned to him. ‘But you just said that sometimes it’s important to keep quiet.’

  Brian started walking, his hands still in his pockets. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is the most important thing of all.’

  ‘What is?’ John shouted.

  ‘Knowing the bloody difference,’ he shouted back.

  John watched Brian walk across the avenue to Number Two. He stopped by Dorothy Forbes’ driveway and kicked a chipping across the tarmac.

  There had been one hundred and thirty-seven chippings, but now there were one hundred and thirty-six.

  John knew this, because he’d just counted them.

  *

  Sheila closed her front door. She could still hear Dorothy wailing and waving her handkerchief, just like the night of the photographs.

  Even now, Sheila could replay it all in her mind. It was like a cine film she brought out for special occasions, occasions when she needed to reassure herself that they were all blameless and well-intentioned. There were children to think about. She hadn’t had Keithie then, but there was Lisa, and you had to set an example to your kids. The days of teaching them with a belt had gone, thank Christ, and you needed to show them how to survive, show them how to avoid tempers and bruises, and men who were determined to get what they could out of you.

  Men like Lisa’s dad.

  Men like Walter Bishop.

  If she didn’t show her kids, who would? It wasn’t just taking the baby, either. It was everything else. It was the way he stared pieces out of you as you walked past. It was the way wisps of grey hair fell on to his shoulders, and how his jacket was threaded and shining with blackened grease. It was the very look of him. Then it was the photographs. They were the last straw. Those boys wouldn’t even have been there if Walter hadn’t stolen the child, so he’d brought everything on himself. It was a chain reaction. They were just being kids at the end of the day, and they meant no harm. She’d known that as soon as she saw them.

  2 December 1967

  The shopping bags rattle as Sheila carries them home. No matter how straight she keeps her arms, and how carefully she holds them away from her body, they chime like church bells, ringing out her failings.

  Although there is no one else to hear, only Lisa. The roads are abandoned for Saturday dinners, beans on toast and tins of soup, steamy food to break the sharp frost of a December sunshine.

  ‘What are we having for lunch?’ Lisa says. She is toggled into her duffel coat. It pulls across her back and Sheila wonders if it will even last the winter.

  ‘What’s all this “lunch” business?’ she says. ‘What happened to “dinner” and “tea”?’

  ‘Posh people say lunch.’

  ‘Do they, now. And what would a six-year-old know about being posh?’

  Lisa doesn’t reply. Instead, she drags her feet along the pavement.

  ‘Don’t scuff your boots, they’re new on.’

  ‘I want to be posh.’ A loose chipping skitters along the concrete.

  ‘Well, we’re not,’ says Sheila, ‘so we’ll stick with “dinner”, thank you very much. Or people around here will stop speaking to us.’

  They cross over by the bus stop, and this is when Sheila first sees them. Two young lads, standing outside number eleven. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. Since word got around about Walter, kids from the estate pass by from time to time. They shout occasionally, throw a handful of gravel and run off. Once, Sheila thought she saw one of them take a piss in Walter’s garden, but she chose to turn a blind eye.

  They mean no harm.

  They’re staring up at the windows, these two. One is tall and skinny, the other shorter, with his jumper tucked into his trousers. They can’t be more than twelve, either of them.

  She shouts across the road and asks them what they’re up to.

  ‘Just messing around,’ shouts Tall.

  Short turns around and smiles at her. He has a football, but it’s not being kicked anywhere.

  ‘Well, just watch yourselves.’ She takes Lisa’s hand and steers her towards the front door. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘No need to worry about us,’ shouts Tall. ‘We can look after ourselves.’

  She didn’t doubt it for one second.

  *

  They are still there, even after she packs away the shopping and finds a tin of oxtail soup for Lisa. There are three boys now, and as she watches from the window, another turns up to join them. The tall one goes into Walter’s garden, and when he jumps back down from the wall, there is a branch in his arms. He waves it about, like the spoils of a war, and the others push and shout and try to grab at it. Short has abandoned his football on the side of the verge, and it rolls from the grass and knocks against the leaves in the gutter.

  Eric Lamb is watching them too. Sheila can see him, and they stare at each other in silence from behind the glass.

  When she looks back, there are more boys. There must be nearly a dozen now, and the noise creeps into her front room. Some of them are in Walter’s garden, calling up at the windows, finding encouragement in each other’s faces. She can see older boys in there as well, maybe fifteen or sixteen.

  Bastard, one of them shouts.

  A smile traces itself around Sheila’s mouth before she can think any better of it.

  Lisa is pulling on her coat and pushing her feet into roller skates.

  ‘Wh
ere do you think you’re off to?’ Sheila turns from the avenue.

  ‘Out,’ Lisa says, ‘playing.’

  She looks back at the boys. ‘No, you’re not,’ she says. ‘Not right now.’

  Walter has appeared at one of the upstairs windows. He is shouting about trespassing and calling for the police. The kids are just laughing at him, mimicking his voice and finding words only their parents should know. Walter looks small and irrelevant, leaning out from the woodwork. His face is red and puffed with anger, and his arms swim into the air, achieving nothing except to make him redder and angrier. Sheila wonders, for one brief moment, if someone so weak and so bland could really be that much of a threat, and then she remembers Lisa’s father, and her own father, and all the other men who came wrapped in harmless packaging.

  She sets her jaw and watches. Her knuckles lie white on the windowsill.

  The boys settle. A couple of them kick at the gravel on Walter’s drive, but most are sitting in a line on his garden wall. Occasionally, they look up and shout, but there is a naivety about it – children who don’t know why they’re shouting, only that their parents have been the ones to shout first.

  Walter pulls the window shut and disappears, but when he returns a few moments later, he is holding something up against the glass.

  A camera. He is taking photographs of them.

  The boys don’t notice at first, they’re too lost in their own energy. Limbs pushing against limbs. The physical conversation of adolescence.

  Walter follows them with the lens. He wanders along the line. Stops. Goes back. Clicks at the shutter.

  He captures all of them, taking each boy into the curve of the glass, copying their image on to the film. Stealing their childhood as they look the other way.

  ‘Bastard,’ says Sheila, ‘dirty bastard.’

  She is about to bang on the glass and warn them, when one of the kids looks up and sees Walter. The boy points, and it scatters them all within seconds. They leave in a commotion of bikes and jumpers, running down alleyways and along pavements, until the only sign they were ever there to begin with is a long, dead branch, resting on the end of Walter Bishop’s wall.

  ‘Bastard,’ says Sheila.

  ‘Who’s a bastard?’ Lisa looks up from her roller skates.

  ‘Never you mind.’ Walter is still at the window, staring down at where the boys had sat. ‘And don’t say “bastard”. It’s not a word for children.’

  *

  Sheila is angry all afternoon. She concentrates her anger into cupboard doors and teapot lids, but the anger chews into her thoughts and won’t let go. She wants to march round to Eric’s and see what he makes of it all, but Lisa trails around the house at her feet, and she knows there will be an afternoon of questions if she does.

  ‘I’m not angry at you, Lisa,’ she says for the tenth time.

  ‘Then who are you angry at?’

  ‘The strange man with the long hair. The man in the big house at the top of the road.’

  ‘The one who took the baby.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sheila says, ‘the one who took the baby. He’s a bad man, Lisa. You’re not to go near him. Ever. Do you hear me?’

  Lisa nods. ‘He’s a bad man.’

  She repeats Sheila’s words and goes back to her drawing, but every so often she looks at her mother and looks out of the window, and clouds her face with thinking.

  *

  It’s an hour later when Sheila hears the voices. There are a lot of them, dark and angry and closing in, like a storm. The December sky is slated and solemn, but it leaves just enough light to see the figures move along the avenue. It’s mainly men, but there are a few women on the edge of the group, and following, a distance behind, are a crowd of children. They’re the same kids from earlier. She can see Tall and Short, only there’s no pushing and shouting now, just small boys and quiet steps, and worried arms folded against the cold.

  ‘Stay here,’ she says to Lisa, and she stands on the doorstep and pulls the door to behind her.

  Sheila has never seen so many people on the avenue at the same time. It looks like a football crowd. These are working men, factory men. Men who claw at a pit face all week, or spend their days lifting earth and stone. They are travelling towards number eleven, their boots heavy on the tarmac, their fists closing around their tempers.

  The first man reaches Walter Bishop’s door and hammers into it with his knuckles.

  There’s not a single movement at number eleven. Just a silent, crouching darkness. It might look as though Walter isn’t at home, but Sheila knows he is. Everyone knows he is. Although Walter Bishop’s door remains still, each of the others on the avenue opens one by one. Eric and Sylvia and Dorothy Forbes all appear on their doorsteps. Even May Roper pulls back the curtains in her living room and peers out.

  The man hammers again. His fists sound like bullets. He steps back and yells up at the house, shouting for Walter Bishop to show himself. ‘You take photographs of my kids, you come out here and you fucking answer to me.’

  Sheila looks back at the door and pulls it a little closer.

  The crowd circles Walter’s house. The men hunger for a confrontation. The women are tighter, more controlled, but their eyes have a quiet threatening about them. It’s obvious the kids have been told to stay away, because they walk at the edges of the group, trying to find a way in unnoticed. Short turns and stares at Sheila. It looks as though he’s been crying.

  The man is kicking at Walter’s door. The others are shouting, urging the boots a little faster, a little harder. From the edge of her eyes, Sheila sees Dorothy Forbes rush along the pavement, tugging at her coat as she walks.

  ‘I’m going to the phone box to ring the police,’ she says, as she trots past Sheila’s fence.

  ‘What on earth are you doing that for?’

  ‘It’s a mob, Sheila. A mob. Heaven knows who they’ll be after next.’

  ‘They’re only after Walter,’ Sheila says. ‘They wouldn’t start on any of us. We’re all respectable.’

  But Dorothy has disappeared around the corner of a hedge, and Sheila stares back into the crowd and frowns.

  *

  The police arrive. Dorothy is standing next to Sheila on the doorstep, twisting the belt of her coat around her fingers. She pleats the material one way, and then the other, pulling it tight against her flesh.

  ‘Oh, do stop fidgeting, Dot.’

  ‘I can’t help myself. It’s my nerves.’ Dorothy lets the belt concertina from her hands, then immediately recovers it.

  The police are out of the car, and it’s only a moment before their uniforms are swallowed by a mass of shoulders and shouting.

  ‘Why are they so angry?’ Dorothy says. ‘I was in the middle of Emmerdale Farm.’

  ‘He was taking photographs. Of the children.’

  She hears Dot take in a mouthful of air. ‘I’ve seen him do that before, in the park. He sits in the bandstand with that wretched camera slung around his neck, snapping away.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘Oh, not just the children, he takes pictures of everything,’ says Dorothy. ‘Flowers, clouds, bloody pigeons.’

  ‘What kind of a man takes photographs of other people’s children?’

  ‘What kind of a man lives with his mother until he’s forty-five?’

  ‘Or doesn’t ever open his front-room curtains.’

  ‘He needs a good haircut as well.’

  They both lean forward on the step and try to listen.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see what’s happening, Dot?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ says Dorothy, ‘I might be set upon. People like that lose all sense of perspective.’

  They lean a little further in silence.

  ‘Then I’ll go.’ Sheila looks back at the front door. ‘Just watch Lisa for me.’

  *

  Sheila picks her way through the crowd. She dips under elbows and around arguments, edging her way to the front, until she finds t
wo policemen and Walter Bishop, who has been summoned to his doorstep by the sound of a uniform.

  ‘It’s quite ridiculous,’ Walter is saying. ‘As if I would do something like that.’

  His eyes find no one. Just a damp coat of moss on the porch step and the dozens of feet which surround it.

  ‘These gentlemen are under the impression that you’ve been taking photographs of their children. Are you denying that?’ says the first policeman.

  Walter Bishop doesn’t speak. His lips move slowly around yellowed teeth, but no words appear. Sheila looks around. Short has found his father. The boy presses into the man’s shadow. He looks too young. Too young to hear this kind of conversation.

  ‘Mr Bishop?’ said the second policeman.

  ‘I do like photography, yes. I like taking pictures.’

  ‘Of children?’

  Boots catch on concrete as the crowd pushes forward. Sheila doesn’t look at the men’s faces. She doesn’t need to.

  ‘Amongst other things.’ Walter removes his glasses and takes a handkerchief from his pocket. ‘It’s a hobby, Sergeant. I have a darkroom.’

  ‘Do you, now?’

  The handkerchief is grey and creased.

  ‘We’ve had words about children before, haven’t we, Mr Bishop?’ The Sergeant’s face is a mask of control, but Sheila can see a tic of irritation in the corner of his mouth. ‘We discussed the appropriateness of your behaviour a few weeks ago, when a baby went missing.’

  Walter’s eyes meet the policeman’s for the first time.

  ‘As you very well know, those were false accusations. And as far as I’m aware, there is no law against taking pictures of people.’ Walter’s eyes seem to find the spark of an escape. ‘Especially if you have good reason.’

  The policeman’s hands rest behind his back, and Sheila sees him close a fist.

  ‘So you admit to taking photographs of these children without the consent of their parents?’

  Walter replaces his glasses. He remains silent for a moment, and when he does speak, his words are framed by a tremor.

  ‘It was evidence, Sergeant. Evidence of their wickedness.’

 

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