‘Harold must have taken it,’ she said. ‘After the fire. When you went to look round number eleven.’
Eric dragged his fingers through his hair. He left them there, static and staring.
‘We didn’t take anything,’ he said.
‘He must have done it when you weren’t looking. When your back was turned.’
He looked up at Dorothy. ‘We didn’t take anything,’ he said again.
‘Perhaps it’s just slipped your mind? People get confused, don’t they? Harold says I get confused all the time.’
‘I remember everything.’ Eric sat back and folded his arms, and took a long, deep breath. ‘The smell of the smoke, the blackened walls. The way the kitchen was untouched, even the ticking clock and the tea towel folded up on the draining board. I haven’t forgotten a thing.’
He picked up the camera and turned it over in his hands. ‘And why would Harold take this?’
‘For safekeeping,’ Dorothy said, ‘in case of looters?’
‘So why did he never give it back?’
They sat in silence. The only sound was the kettle, tapping and spitting in the corner.
‘It’s boiling,’ Eric said, and nodded at the cooker.
Dorothy reached her hand to her throat. ‘Did you put it on?’ she said.
‘No, Dot, you did.’
Eric reached over and switched off the gas. He picked up one of the envelopes.
‘There’s nothing interesting in there,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ve already looked through. Pigeons. Clouds. One of a blackbird sitting on a milk bottle.’
‘He took a lot of photographs.’ Eric picked up another envelope. ‘What’s in this one?’
Dorothy glanced at it. ‘I can’t remember. Brian emptying an ashtray into his dustbin, I think. Beatrice Morton tying her shoelaces. Nothing very interesting.’
‘I used to see him when I walked back from the Legion,’ said Eric. ‘Wandering around in the dark with his camera.’
Dorothy sat very still. ‘I know,’ she said.
Eric shuffled through the photographs. ‘Heaven knows what he saw out there.’
‘I know,’ Dorothy said again.
He stopped shuffling and looked up. For a moment, their eyes matched in the silence.
‘Put it back where you found it, Dot.’
‘I just want answers.’ Dorothy took a tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘I just need to know how it came to be here. I don’t understand any of it.’
‘Sometimes all answers do is fill you up with more questions. It’s a long time ago now. Just let it lie.’
‘But Margaret Creasy’s brought it all back up, hasn’t she? I swear she knew something, Eric. I swear she knew all our secrets.’
Dorothy began folding the tissue into a square. Over and over, until it became so small, it would stand no more folding.
Eric Lamb put his hands over hers. ‘Stop it, Dorothy. Stop whittling over something you can’t change. Put it all back where you found it. Hide it away.’
‘I’m going to have to, aren’t I?’ She began straightening the pictures and sliding them into the envelopes. ‘I just wish I knew why Harold stole it.’
‘What difference does it make, Dot? What does it matter?’
‘It matters,’ she said.
Eric stood up and pushed the chair back under the table.
‘My advice to you’, he said, ‘is to forget that you ever saw it.’
‘I can’t.’ She held on to the box. It felt heavy and difficult. ‘You can’t ever forget what you’ve seen, can you? You don’t even need photographs. You can just pull it out of your mind whenever it might be useful to you.’
Number Ten, The Avenue
18 July 1976
Eric Lamb walked across a deserted avenue, although he was swimming so deep in his own thoughts, he probably wouldn’t have noticed if someone had stood on the pavement right in front of him.
He knew he was right about number eleven. They’d walked around it, looking at the damage. He hadn’t wanted to, but Harold had seen him and shouted him over.
‘Check the place is safe,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t want it falling down on one of us.’
A dozen firemen and half the police force had already done that, but there was no point in arguing with Harold. It was much easier to agree with him in the first place, rather than spend the next few days batting him away.
They had walked around number eleven with their hands in their pockets, staring at the walls and the ceilings, and repeating to themselves how awful it was.
They had taken nothing. They hadn’t even touched anything.
And then they had left everything as it was, and told the rest of the avenue what they’d found.
But Dot was right about one thing. She was usually confused and neurotic and irrational, and sometimes her whittling could make you want to tear flesh from your own skull, but on this occasion she was spot on. You could always pull things from your mind when you needed them. The only problem was, they sometimes pulled free all by themselves. Things you would rather forget; things that shifted your view and made an uncertainty creep into your head, no matter how hard you might try to push them away.
23 November 1967
Elsie is upstairs in bed. She has spent more time sleeping lately, although Eric tries not to think about how much, because if he does, he knows he will have to come up with a reason for her tiredness. Something to explain it away, other than her health. It’s colder now. The cold makes people more tired, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it’s because the days are shorter, or because they have been backwards and forwards to the hospital so much just lately. He seems to spend his days searching for explanations and evidence, and reassurance. Rummaging through Elsie’s life for a straw he can cling to.
While Elsie sleeps, he has made a very quiet lunch, and now he sits at the very quiet table in the very quiet living room and stares out into the avenue and tries to distract himself.
They have agreed to watch Walter Bishop, each of them in turn. Since the baby went missing, there has been a soundless panic in the street. He has seen it in people’s eyes. In the way they hurry themselves indoors. No one passes the time of day any more. No one stands on the corner of the road or leans against a garden fence. Whenever he sees anyone, they are always on their way to somewhere else, and even though they’re all watching Walter, it feels as though it’s everyone else who has become the prisoner.
Sheila’s little girl is in the middle of the avenue, unlacing her roller skates. He’s sure Sheila must be watching with him from her own window. The child has been skating across the pavements, stealing handfuls of fences and walls to steady herself, circling the abandoned coat in the middle of the tarmac as her confidence increased. He has listened to the wheels grow with assurance, cutting across the concrete in slow, steady pushes. Now she sits on the edge of the kerb, pulling her feet from the skates, the wheels still spinning, reaching for her coat and dragging it across her shoulders.
There is a noise from upstairs. He wonders if Elsie is waking, and he wants to march up the stairs and help her. Lift her out of bed, find her slippers, button her cardigan. But he knows, deep in the corners of his mind, that there will be many days ahead of doing these things. There will be no wanting or wondering then, only inevitability, and if he starts to do these things now, he will take away the very last slice Elsie seems to have left of herself.
This is when Eric sees him – when he looks back into the avenue.
He can’t have been there more than a minute.
Walter Bishop.
He has the child’s arm. Pulling it, forcing her backwards.
Lisa is crying, shouting. Trying to get away from him.
As Eric pulls open the front door, he hears his cup smash to the living-room floor.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ Harold is there a few seconds before. He’s pulling the little girl away, loosening Walter Bishop’s grip.
The child is scr
eaming now. ‘You’re a bad man. A bad man. My mam says you steal children.’
Walter jumps back. He loses his footing and stumbles against the kerb. Eric has to stop himself from reaching out to help.
‘It was a simple misunderstanding. That’s all it was.’ Walter’s voice can barely be heard above the child’s crying. ‘I was trying to help.’
‘Help?’ Eric can hear himself shouting. ‘How in God’s name were you trying to help?’
‘Her coat,’ Walter says. ‘She was struggling to put it on. It’s too tight, you see. I stopped to help.’
He points to the pink duffel coat, which lies at the side of the kerb. Harold snatches it up, as though it might need protecting from Walter as well. As he does, the door of number twelve pulls open and Sheila Dakin rushes across the avenue, her arms trying to fight through the distance more quickly.
When Sheila reaches them, Lisa pins herself to her mother, hiding her tears in the folds of Sheila’s sweater.
‘How dare you,’ says Sheila, ‘how very bloody dare you.’
The child acts as a shield, Eric thinks, because without her, he was sure Sheila would take a swing at Walter Bishop.
‘I was trying to help, that’s all. I’d never hurt a child. I love children.’
‘Just go. Get out.’ Harold’s words spit from his mouth. ‘Leave us all in peace.’
Walter Bishop is gone. He picks up his bag from the side of the road and hurries away. His head down, his hair stroking at the collar of his coat. Even as he rushes away, he still seems to shuffle. Rounding his shoulders and pulling in his arms, as though he’s trying to take up the smallest amount of room he can manage within the world.
Eric turns to Sheila. He asks if she’s all right, and when she replies, the sentence has to fight its way out of her mouth.
‘I’m fine. I’m just not feeling too well. It’s been a bad day.’ She falters, steadying herself against Lisa.
‘A bad day?’ he says.
‘An anniversary – of sorts.’
He can smell it – the brandy – wrapped around each word.
‘You should get home,’ Harold says. ‘Try to get some rest.’
‘How can I rest?’ Sheila holds on to Lisa a little more tightly. ‘How can I rest when that monster is living a few feet away from my child?’
They all look over at number eleven. Walter has disappeared, vanishing his life back inside its walls.
‘We’ve got to get rid of him, Harold,’ Sheila says. ‘We can’t live like this. I’ll be damned if that bastard’s going to drive me out of my own house.’
She turns away and Eric watches as she walks back with Lisa to number twelve, their arms wrapped around each other for support.
And he wonders which of them needs it the most.
*
After that day, Walter is never left in peace. It moves quickly, the news that he had tried to take another child. With each speaker, it grows in force and fury, gathering hatred as it travels through the estate.
Eric watches it, but says nothing. People ask him about what happened. They try to edge his opinion into the conversation, but he refuses to be trapped. If they want to execute Walter Bishop, then so be it, but he isn’t going to provide the ammunition. Harold Forbes, however, seems happy to fashion as many bullets as they might require.
In broad daylight, he hears him say. Oh yes, pulling her across the road to his house. No child is safe while that man is around.
The bullets are fired. Eric sees the evidence. The contents of Walter Bishop’s dustbin, scattered around his garden each morning. Clothes taken from his washing line and dragged across the mud. Everyone watches, follows, waiting for the slightest stumble, the faintest permission that the trapdoors can be opened.
*
Eric is in the corner shop, a few days after the incident with Lisa. He’s trying to find something that might tempt Elsie into eating, custard creams perhaps, or some tinned fruit. She seems to have completely lost interest in food, which is understandable really. The weather has turned, and the nights are long and miserable. It doesn’t do much for your appetite, this kind of weather. Everyone says so. He scans the shelves. Cyril doesn’t stock much, but you can generally find something amongst the tins of custard powder and boxes of Cornflakes. Behind a pyramid of vegetable soup, Eric can hear a group at the counter. He can make out Sheila Dakin and Harold Forbes, and other voices he doesn’t recognize.
They’re discussing Walter Bishop. Eric wonders what people talked about before Walter Bishop came along.
‘Of course, if it was up to me, he would have been gone the minute all this started. He wouldn’t have had a chance to do anything else.’
It was Harold’s voice, asserting itself over the loose-leaf tea.
‘The police are next to useless. If he touches my Lisa again, I’m going to be the one they’ll have to arrest.’
Sheila Dakin.
Eric walks to the till. There are two others there, men he recognizes from the British Legion, and Lisa, buttoned into her coat. It looks as though they’ve been putting Walter to rights for a while, because the child has sunk to the floor in order to bite her nails in peace.
‘We’re just discussing Bishop,’ Harold says.
‘So I hear.’ Eric puts his biscuits down and nods to Cyril behind the counter.
‘Terrible business, isn’t it?’ Sheila says.
Eric knows this is an invitation to dance. ‘It is,’ he says.
‘We were talking about getting up a petition,’ says Harold, ‘handing it into the council.’ The words are delivered as a question.
Eric counts out his coins.
‘I don’t think a petition will get that man moved,’ Sheila says. ‘The only thing that’s going to shift him out is brute force.’
The child looks at Eric with listening eyes, and he smiles down at her.
Sheila is talking about brute force and considering the appeal of its many flavours, when the little bell on the door interrupts her with a whispered chime of apology. When they turn, it’s clear they expect to see someone with an opinion to underpin their own, a fellow supporter of brute force and neighbourhood petitions, but standing in the doorway of the corner shop is Walter Bishop, his coat wet from the rain, the steam already creeping across the surface of his glasses. Their words die in the silence.
Sheila lifts Lisa from the floor, and she takes the child’s breath with the force of her grip.
Walter Bishop walks the length of the shop. His shoes squeal across the lino, his bag knocks against tins on the bottom shelves. When he reaches the counter, he takes off his glasses and wipes them on a stained, grey handkerchief. Eric can see the tremor in his hands, the gathering of sweat on leathered skin.
‘I wonder,’ says Walter Bishop, ‘I wonder if I could trouble you for a pint of milk?’
No one speaks.
Behind the counter, Cyril folds his arms, setting his jaw in a line of battle.
Walter Bishop waits. He smiles. It’s a faded smile. One fashioned out of optimism rather than happiness, but it’s a smile nonetheless. Eric can’t decide if Walter Bishop is foolish or just plain stupid.
‘We don’t have any milk,’ Cyril says.
They watch in silence, the others, the conversation ticking in their eyes.
‘Just the one pint.’ Walter points to a row of milk bottles in the fridge behind the counter.
‘We don’t have any milk,’ Cyril repeats his words. ‘In fact, I don’t believe we have anything for sale at all in this shop right now.’
Walter holds the shopkeeper’s gaze, the smile still hanging on his mouth, but very slowly it begins to drain away, until all that is left in its place is an emptiness. A face looking for a way out, an expression with which it might be able to save itself.
Walter hesitates. Eric can hear the fold of Harold’s arms and the tap of Sheila’s fingers on the counter.
‘Will that be all?’ Cyril says.
Walter turns. There are
murmured apologies and thank yous, and sentiments so whispered Eric can’t even tell if they are real words or just the sound of a man’s defeat. After the door has closed, and the little bell has quietened, they all stand together in the silence.
Sheila bangs her fist down on the counter.
‘That’s what we need,’ she says, ‘someone to show Walter Bishop what being civil bloody looks like.’
*
They walk back through the estate. Harold is talking, and Sheila is taking in his words, together with lungfuls of Park Drive.
Eric is trying not to listen.
They are weaving plans and petitions, talking about meetings in the Legion, phone calls to the council. Eric has more important things to think about, bigger worries he can use to paper the inside of his head.
He stares ahead. Lisa is climbing on the walls that run alongside the pavement. She’s reaching up, trying to touch the lower branches of the trees, stretching to find the twigs with the ends of her fingers. She can’t quite manage it, always falling an inch or two short. He watches her. Strange, really. She’s a tall girl, you’d think she’d have no problem.
Then he realizes why she’s struggling. The reason she can never quite reach. The pink material pulls across her shoulders, holding her back, stopping her from lifting her hands into the branches.
This is the reason she’s struggling. It’s her duffel coat. It’s far too tight.
Number Fourteen, The Avenue
20 July 1976
‘I suppose it doesn’t really bother you?’ said Mr Forbes.
We were all watching Mr Kapoor clean his very big car. I was sitting on the grass, next to Mr Forbes’ feet.
Mr Kapoor looked up from his bonnet.
‘Doesn’t bother me?’ he said.
‘The heat.’ Mr Forbes pointed at the sky, and I watched his heels lifting up from the back of his sandals. ‘I don’t suppose it gets you down? Like the rest of us?’
Mr Kapoor frowned and rubbed his cloth at a circle of bird poo. He wasn’t using any water, or Mrs Morton would have been on to him in seconds.
‘Harold means that where you’re from, it must be like this all the time.’ May Roper was leaning against the fence behind me. I could hear the wood quarrelling with her bosom every time she spoke.
The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Page 21