The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

  PC Green had just stared at him and breathed with an open mouth, which – as John had pointed out to him quite correctly – was a principal cause of halitosis and proven to lead to a more than significant increase in the risk of oral cavities.

  Since then, PC Green had left him alone. He knew he should ring DI Hislop and tell the truth, but there was no way any of them would understand. He’d only get himself into a whole lot of trouble.

  It was actually just as well if he didn’t ring. John didn’t trust himself with policemen. He really didn’t trust himself with anyone, because his mouth always seemed to run away with him. He always ended up saying something he wished he hadn’t, and if he hadn’t rabbited on to Brian when he was twelve years old, he wouldn’t be in the mess he was in now.

  16 November 1967

  There is a darkness on the avenue.

  Long shadows creep over silent, frosted lawns and heavy skies press into the slate-grey roofs. John Creasy watches through the glass. He stirs his tea very carefully, keeping the edge of the spoon away from the china, worried that the noise might somehow wake the darkness and allow it to roam free.

  The tea is too hot and too sweet. Since his father died, his mother has filled his life with starch and sugar. He wonders if it’s a way to keep him here, to slow him down with so much butter and cream, so that he will be too full and too drowsy to ever consider the idea of leaving her.

  We’ve got to keep our strength up, she says.

  Although he isn’t entirely sure what for.

  He can hear her now, kneading stoicism into a thick pastry, and measuring out spoonfuls of endurance for the mixing bowl.

  He wipes the rim of the cup with a clean handkerchief and looks back at the window.

  Since last week, the avenue has turned in on itself. He has watched it happen. He has watched Eric Lamb lift the collar on his coat, and Sheila Dakin tighten a cardigan around her shoulders and bury her thoughts into the wool. He has watched milk bottles snatched from doorsteps and the snap of curtains as they are pulled to in the earliest dusk of a November evening. He has watched the silence grow. He has watched it creep into every corner of the street, and now the avenue seems to have drifted into one long silence, stitched together only by nods and stares and wordless eyes.

  He watches Brian cross the street and stand in front of number eleven. Most days, he sees Brian do this.

  Sometimes Harold Forbes wanders across and joins Brian, his arms folded, his gaze set on the dusty quiet of Walter Bishop’s front door. John has seen Sheila do the same, too. He has seen her put bags of shopping down in the middle of the road and look up at the windows of number eleven, and pinch her lips into a thin streak of loathing.

  They seem to take it in turns, John thinks. Brian, Harold, Sheila, Derek. A clockwork of people, a timetable of staring and watching, of trying to pull Walter Bishop out into an well-lit arena where he can be prodded and examined, and assessed.

  Despite their best efforts, Walter has stayed in the shadows. No one has seen him.

  John wonders if Walter only comes out at night, if he finds a reassurance somewhere within the darkness, a beat of comfort from footsteps echoing on a blackened pavement, and although he would never admit it to Brian or Harold or Sheila, John can understand how that feels.

  He wipes the cup again and places it in the middle of the table, away from the edge, an edge where it might be in danger from a careless elbow or the brush of a newspaper. The movement seems to catch Brian’s attention and John finds himself waving back through the glass, even though he does his very best to disappear behind an artificial Paradise Palm his mother has placed in the centre of the windowsill.

  Unbelievably realistic – you will fool everyone! The ticket still hangs from one of the stalks.

  John disengages himself from a frond and makes his way outside.

  *

  Brian has moved a few steps back and is leaning against the fence which runs between Harold Forbes’ house and the Bennetts’. John leans against the fence as well. He doesn’t even want to think about how many germs are on there, but he’s discovered over the years that it’s sometimes less trouble to go along with what everyone else wants you to do.

  When he asks Brian what’s going on, Brian’s reply is a nod at Walter Bishop’s house.

  John stares over at Walter’s house as well, because this is what Brian is doing and it seems to be expected of him. John has done this since school, this watching and copying of Brian. Brian was his reconnaissance, his only template for what the world might eventually require of him.

  They continue to stare at number eleven, although John isn’t sure what it’s achieving.

  ‘He’ll get what’s coming,’ Brian says eventually.

  The fence is uncomfortable. John can feel the wood scuff and scratch his legs, even through the material of his trousers.

  ‘You really think Walter took the baby?’ he says.

  Brian folds his arms. ‘Who else would it be?’

  John glances around the avenue, but says nothing.

  There are forty-seven bricks in Sheila Dakin’s garden wall – more if you add up the half bricks, but they could falsify the result, so he decides to ignore them.

  Sylvia Bennett is walking up the avenue with bags of shopping pulling at her arms, and they move their legs to allow her past. She notices, but keeps her eyes to the pavement. As she walks next to them, John can smell her perfume. It’s heavy and dark, and it clings to the air long after she has disappeared. Brian is still looking at the space she has moved through.

  ‘You’re still sweet on her, aren’t you?’ says John.

  A flush creeps across Brian’s face. ‘Don’t be so bloody daft,’ he says. ‘She’s married.’

  ‘You’ve always been sweet on her. Since school.’

  John knows Brian used to wait in corridors, planning his day so he could steal awkward stares. A congested childhood, stuffed with a quiet desperation and not knowing where to stand. Neither of them had a template for girls. They still didn’t.

  John nods back at number four. ‘She looks a bit like Julie Christie.’

  ‘Julie Christie my arse,’ says Brian.

  They go back to staring at Walter Bishop’s. The afternoon is edging away, taking the silhouettes of the trees and the wet, grey streak of distant rooftops. The streetlight clicks and buzzes and starts to glow pink.

  ‘How long are you going to keep this up?’ John says.

  ‘As long as it takes to flush him out. Harold’s taking over at four.’

  ‘And then what? What are you going to do once you’ve got him?’

  Brian just stares.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘He’s a nonce, John, a bloody pervert. He doesn’t belong on this avenue. Everyone wants him gone.’

  Brian shifts his weight against the wall. ‘I would have thought you’d be the first to want to see the back of him.’

  John feels a twist of anxiety find its way into the bottom of his throat. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

  ‘You know. What with your dad.’

  For once, John is glad he is leaning against something, because he can feel his legs pull away from him in waves. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he says.

  Brian stares at him and looks back at number eleven. ‘Yes, you do.’

  Yes, he does.

  He can remember the conversation, rushed and whispered, in the school changing rooms after everyone had left. He was only looking for another template, for reassurance – for someone to tell him that this happened to everybody. He should have done what his dad told him to and kept it to himself.

  He doesn’t look at Brian as he speaks. ‘You got it wrong. I was confused,’ he says. ‘It was just a misunderstanding.’

  Brian’s eyes are still on Walter’s house. ‘No, it wasn’t, John.’

  If you count the half bricks, there are sixty. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. It’s a good number is sixty
– safe and reliable. You can’t really go wrong with sixty.

  The sound of a front door makes them both look across the avenue. Harold is walking along the pavement, in a pool of orange streetlight, his hands behind his back, his spine as straight as time will allow. He looks like an old soldier, although John knows Harold has never served even a minute for his country.

  His country didn’t want him, apparently. Touchy subject, Dorothy always says, whenever anyone mentions it.

  ‘Reporting for duty, sixteen hundred hours,’ says Harold, as he reaches them. ‘Any movement?’

  Brian pushes himself back off the fence. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘John and I were just saying how much we want this pervert out of here, weren’t we, John?’

  Brian stares at him, but John says nothing.

  There are thirteen tiles on top of Sheila Dakin’s wall.

  John starts to walk away. Away from the stares and the questions, and the past creeping its way into his present.

  Thirteen has always been a bad number for him. There were thirteen steps, but there were only twelve if you didn’t count the one just before you reached upstairs, because that was more of a mini landing.

  He closes the gate behind him, and starts to walk back up the garden path.

  He was confused. It was just a misunderstanding. His mother had said so.

  The Drainpipe

  31 July 1976

  It was before ten, but Jesus had already pulled quite a crowd.

  Mr and Mrs Forbes were sitting at a fold-up card table which Mr Forbes had carried over from their garage, and they were teaching Sheila Dakin and Eric Lamb how to play Canasta.

  No, eleven cards, Sheila. The pile is frozen now, do you see?

  A river of ants poured themselves over Mrs Forbes’ discarded cereal bowl, which lay at her feet on the grass, and a rogue wasp lazed around Eric Lamb’s head.

  But I don’t understand why I can’t take a card. You just took a card.

  Mrs Morton stood before Jesus with a glass of orange juice and the Daily Telegraph wedged under her arm.

  ‘What I don’t understand’, she said to no one in particular, ‘is why we didn’t notice Him in the first place.’

  Eric Lamb leaned back in his deckchair, and it gave a growl of discomfort. ‘We don’t always see things, though, do we?’ he said. ‘We walk past the same scenes every day without ever looking at them properly.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She walked a few paces to the left, stared at Jesus and sipped some more orange juice. ‘He’s just so obvious, though, isn’t He?’

  Eric Lamb’s deckchair growled again. ‘It’s often the most obvious things that we miss.’

  ‘Plus,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘it might be the heat.’

  Mrs Morton turned around and her shoes shuffled around in the chippings. ‘The heat?’

  ‘The heat might have brought Him out,’ said Mr Forbes. ‘It does strange things, does the heat.’

  Sheila Dakin readjusted her T-shirt, and Mrs Morton walked around the duster, which had fallen from Mrs Forbes’ waistband the previous day and had never been picked up.

  ‘It does indeed,’ she said.

  ‘It brings you out in a rash, doesn’t it, Mam?’ said Thin Brian.

  ‘Does it?’ May Roper lifted her face to the sky and smiled. ‘I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed.’

  *

  It was mid-morning. Mrs Morton had decided to take a nap and Eric Lamb had rolled his trouser legs up a little more, and Mrs Forbes went to fetch some biscuits, to keep everyone going. My father sat staring at a newspaper and my mother sat staring at my father, and Mrs Dakin had positioned Keithie at a safe distance. I could hear him, kicking the ball against the far wall of the garages and rummaging around for it in the hedge bottom a few minutes later.

  Tilly had arrived with a packed lunch and a clean cardigan, in case the newspaper reporters turned up, and we sat on the grass reading an old copy of Jackie I’d found under the settee. Tilly didn’t read as quickly as I did, and every few minutes I was forced to stare at the page and pretend, whilst I ate the packed lunch and waited for her to catch up. Sometimes, I made her wait instead, so she would never suspect.

  I was just in the middle of pretending, when I heard footsteps.

  ‘Well, I never did,’ said the footsteps. ‘This is where you all are.’

  It was Mr Kapoor. He walked over to the drainpipe, bent down and stared at it. ‘Whatever do we have here?’

  Mr Forbes got up from his deckchair and joined him. ‘This is Jesus,’ he said, and jabbed his finger towards the wall. ‘From the Bible.’

  Tilly looked up. ‘Is Mr Kapoor deaf?’ she said.

  I frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

  My father stood up as well, and all three of them gathered in front of the drainpipe.

  ‘He’s the Son of God.’ My father smiled and nodded at Mr Kapoor. ‘I know it’s a bit confusing to an outsider.’ He kept smiling and nodding, even after his words had finished.

  Mr Kapoor bent down a little further and squinted. He moved around the drainpipe and leaned in a little further, and then he straightened up and turned to my father and said, ‘To be honest, I think it looks more like Brian Clough.’

  My father said, Ha! and laughed, and slapped Mr Kapoor on the back.

  It was a bit unfortunate, but in fairness, my father doesn’t always know his own strength.

  *

  The vicar arrived at four o’clock, just in time for macaroons, which Mr Forbes passed around, along with some milky tea and half a packet of Malted Milks. Mrs Forbes stood up from her deckchair, to give the vicar a better view, and he paced around Jesus with his hands behind his back. Every so often, he rocked backwards on his heels and nodded. He was wearing ordinary trousers and an ordinary shirt. I could still smell candles.

  ‘Where’s his cloak?’ whispered Tilly.

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Dunno,’ I said, ‘perhaps he only wears it for God.’

  Someone coughed and I heard chippings move beneath people’s feet. Mrs Forbes said Well?

  The vicar frowned and drew air in through his teeth. ‘I don’t think Jesus has ever dropped in on the East Midlands before,’ he said eventually.

  May Roper beamed, as though she were personally responsible for arranging the visit.

  ‘But you see Him, don’t you?’ Sheila Dakin took a step forward. The vicar drew more air between his teeth and she stepped back again.

  ‘The thing is,’ he began to say. And then he stopped and looked at everyone.

  Mr Forbes was handing the macaroons around. Eric Lamb had taken off his wellington boots and was lying on the grass in rolled-up trouser legs. Sheila Dakin was pouring him another glass of lemonade. Mr Kapoor and my father were playing Canasta, and Mrs Forbes was smiling. Everyone was smiling.

  The vicar frowned, but his face became softer. ‘I think it’s a very special thing you have here,’ he said eventually.

  Mrs Forbes applauded.

  After a few seconds, she stopped very abruptly. ‘I do hope we’re not going to be overrun with pilgrims,’ she said. ‘They’ll make a terrible mess.’

  *

  Jesus gave us all a routine.

  Mrs Forbes would always be there first, to claim her deckchair next to the drainpipe, although one day Mrs Roper almost beat her to it and they had a race in their slippers along the pavement. Mrs Kapoor taught my mother how to make Indian biscuits, and Sheila Dakin became a champion at Canasta. Eric Lamb brought us all tomatoes and sweet peas from his garden, and Clive from the British Legion walked down with his dog and handed out pork scratchings. Keithie played football with Shahid. It was better for him, really. He didn’t lose the ball so often, because whenever he kicked it away, there was always someone there to kick it back to him. When my father and Mr Kapoor got home from work, they would sit in the corner on their deckchairs, and Mr Kapoor would tell my father all about India. Not about the poverty and the squalor, but about the temples and the gardens,
and about a country filled with so much colour and light and music, we all said we would like to visit one day. Of course, everyone knew we never would, but that wasn’t really the point.

  Tilly said everyone was happy because of the weather. She said it was the warmth of the sun on people’s faces and the whispery breeze that came through the leaves of the alder trees. She said it was the smell of summer that made people smile, as it pushed out of the flowers and the grass, and Eric Lamb’s bags of tomatoes. I didn’t think it was, though. I thought it was something else. I liked to think Walter Bishop was right, that it was because everyone had found something they could believe in. I watched them from time to time, when they thought no one was looking – they would each glance across at the drainpipe and smile, as if they had made an arrangement with Jesus, as if they had all suddenly found another way of seeing everything.

  Looking back, I can’t remember when it all started to go wrong. It was difficult to tell, but I know that you could smell it travelling through the air. Like rain.

  The Drainpipe

  2 August 1976

  ‘It’s been six weeks,’ said Sheila Dakin.

  Mrs Forbes looked up from her puzzle book. ‘Since what?’ she said.

  ‘Since Margaret Creasy went missing.’

  Tilly and I were lying on the grass under the alder tree. I nudged her with my spare elbow.

  Mrs Forbes didn’t reply. She returned to her puzzle book. For someone who always looked very puzzled, she didn’t seem to be doing much puzzling.

  ‘I mean, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ said Mrs Dakin.

  ‘It makes you wonder what?’ said Mrs Forbes.

  ‘It makes you wonder if she’s ever coming back.’