The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

  Mrs Roper opened one eye. ‘It takes more than a duster and a can of Pledge to make somebody respectable,’ she said, and closed it again.

  Mrs Forbes took in a large amount of air between very pursed lips, and we all sat forwards in our deckchairs.

  ‘Of everybody here,’ she said, ‘I am the most entitled to sit next to Jesus.’

  Mrs Roper opened both of her eyes and shuffled herself higher in her seat. ‘I think you’ll find if anyone is entitled to sit next to Jesus, then it’s me.’

  ‘I think you’ll find’, said Mrs Forbes, ‘that I was sitting next to Jesus first.’

  ‘Anyone who has two coats should share with the one who has none.’ May Roper folded her arms.

  ‘Luke, Chapter 3, Verse 11,’ said Mrs Forbes, and folded her arms back again.

  Mrs Dakin criss-crossed her way over the road and tipped herself into a deckchair next to me. ‘What are those two arguing about?’

  ‘Who deserves Jesus more,’ I said.

  Tilly sat up and lifted the brim of her sou’wester. ‘I thought God was supposed to bring people together.’

  ‘I have not “stolen” your seat. It wasn’t yours to begin with,’ Mrs Roper was saying.

  ‘As a thief is ashamed when he is caught,’ said Mrs Forbes.

  ‘Jeremiah, Chapter 2, Verse 26. And don’t you start with your lies, Dorothy Forbes. Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour.’

  ‘Ephesians, Chapter 4, Verse 25.’

  John Creasy began to rock in the corner. ‘I can’t deal with all the numbers,’ he said.

  ‘I came over here for a bit of peace and quiet,’ said Eric Lamb. ‘Not to listen to a bloody argument about which one of you is the most respectable.’ And he started to pull on his wellington boots.

  ‘No, Dorothy. Jesus Christ wasn’t crucified just so you could get to choose your own deckchair.’ May Roper’s voice lifted itself higher into the air. ‘He was crucified so we can all make our own bloody decisions about where we want to bloody sit.’

  I was in the middle of enjoying Mrs Forbes and Mrs Roper having their argument, when I realized that everyone else was turning round and staring. Even the argument stopped, when Mrs Forbes tapped Mrs Roper on the elbow and pointed to the pavement.

  It was Walter Bishop.

  He stood watching us all from the edge of the kerb, a loaf of bread in one hand and two boxes of fish fingers in the other.

  ‘I was just on my way back from the shops,’ he said. ‘I heard about Jesus, and I wondered if I might take a look.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Mrs Roper leapt from the deckchair and stood shoulder to shoulder with Mrs Forbes in front of the drainpipe. ‘This is private property.’

  Walter Bishop looked at the council garages. ‘Is it?’ he said.

  Mr Forbes marched over to the little gap between the alder trees and the chippings, to where Walter stood and waited with his shopping.

  ‘There’s nothing to see here,’ he said. ‘Nothing you’d be interested in. I’d get off home if I were you.’

  He pointed to the top of the road, and I could see the tip of his finger shaking very slightly as I watched.

  I wondered if Mr Bishop might try to argue, or at least say that he was as entitled to look as anyone else, but he didn’t. He just nodded at Mr Forbes, and then he turned away and started to walk.

  Mrs Roper spread her arms and covered the drainpipe with her dimples. ‘Jesus isn’t here for just anyone, you know,’ she shouted.

  As Mr Bishop walked away, Eric Lamb turned to me and Tilly, and he smiled.

  ‘Take no notice,’ he said. ‘Grown-ups sometimes say confusing things.’

  Tilly sighed. I knew there was a question coming, because whenever she wanted to ask one, Tilly had to do a very big sigh first in order to prepare for it.

  ‘Can I ask a question?’ she said.

  Eric Lamb said yes, and we all waited.

  ‘You know what Mrs Roper said about why Jesus was crucified?’

  We watched Walter Bishop walk up the pavement into the sunshine.

  ‘He wasn’t crucified over deckchairs, Tilly,’ I said.

  ‘I know that.’ She did another sigh. ‘But why was he really crucified, Mr Lamb? Why did they have to kill Him?’

  Walter Bishop paused by Mrs Forbes’ wall and looked across the avenue.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Eric Lamb. ‘It’s because He had different beliefs, different views on life. In those days, people were very hard on anyone who didn’t think the way they did.’

  I could hear Walter Bishop’s shoes as they ate into the gravel on his driveway.

  ‘He was an outsider, Tilly.’ Eric Lamb looked down at us both. ‘An unbelonger. That’s why they crucified Him.’

  ‘So really,’ said Tilly, ‘if that’s the case, then Jesus was a goat as well, wasn’t He?’

  ‘I suppose He was,’ said Eric Lamb.

  ‘In fact,’ said Tilly, ‘He was probably the biggest goat of them all.’

  We stared up the road and watched Walter Bishop disappear into number eleven.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Eric Lamb. ‘Perhaps He really was.’

  *

  We all settled down after the excitement of Walter Bishop and the argument. Tilly smoothed her dress a little more and Mrs Morton sorted out Tilly’s bobbles. Eric Lamb was persuaded to take his wellington boots off again, and Mrs Forbes appeared to have renegotiated her deckchair, although every half an hour Mrs Roper walked up and down in front of Jesus and got in everyone’s way.

  I was just thinking about having a little doze, when Lisa Dakin stamped across the chippings in her mules.

  ‘Finally,’ said Mrs Dakin, ‘you’ve decided to come to see Jesus. Did curiosity get the better of you?’

  Lisa Dakin circled her mother like a wasp. ‘I haven’t come to see Jesus,’ she said, glancing over at the drainpipe. ‘I’ve come to let you know that we’ve run out of milk.’

  Mrs Dakin tried to find her purse. It was actually on the grass, right between her feet, but she didn’t seem to be able to see it properly until I passed it to her.

  ‘At least go and have a look, Lisa, while you’re here,’ said her mother.

  I watched Lisa Dakin trail across the grass. She stood in front of the drainpipe with her hands on her hips, sending out little tutting noises and kicking at the chippings with her mules.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Why are you all so interested in a stain on a garage wall?’

  Tilly looked at me and traced a pattern in the grass with the tip of her finger.

  I pretended not to notice.

  Lisa kicked at a few more chippings. ‘I mean, why would anyone bother?’

  I got up and walked over to the drainpipe. ‘If you stand back a bit and squint,’ I said, ‘you’ll be able to see Him.’

  ‘I don’t want to see Him.’ She said the words like they belonged to someone else. ‘It’s just a bloody creosote stain, Grace. It’s a joke.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it is only a creosote stain, I suppose.’ My words faded in my mouth, because they couldn’t decide if they wanted to be true.

  *

  ‘So this is where Jesus is hanging out these days?’

  The voice was loud and unfamiliar, and it stretched out its vowels, as though it would like to be American but hadn’t quite worked out how to go about it.

  We all turned to see a small man in a big suit. It hung in folds around his frame, and there were dusty marks on the hems where the stitches had escaped. Around his neck was a giant camera on a thick strap, and the weight of it pulled his neck forward and made him look slightly uneasy.

  ‘Andy Kilner-localpaper.’ He said it all at the same time, as if it had become part of his name. He nodded at everyone and at no one, and then he smiled at me and Lisa Dakin. ‘And you must be the two girls who found Him. Brilliant. If you just stay where you are, I’ll take a few shots now if that’s all ri
ght? Fantastic, great, brilliant.’

  I could see Tilly. She had stopped tracing patterns and was looking straight at my face. Mrs Morton sat forward and started to say something, but her voice disappeared into a frown, and instead she just stared with heavy eyes.

  When my gaze found Tilly again, she looked pale and alone, and although we were only a few feet apart, she seemed to be very far away.

  I tried to hold on to her, I tried to keep her with me, but she became lost in Lisa Dakin’s smile.

  *

  Lisa Dakin and I made various poses around Jesus, guided by Andy Kilner and a ribbon of fantastic, great, brilliants.

  All the time, Tilly watched from the grass.

  ‘Quite a find, eh?’ said Andy Kilner.

  ‘Yes.’ Lisa Dakin flicked her Quatro flicks and pressed ChapStick into her lips. ‘Quite a find.’

  Lisa Dakin’s smile switched on and off with the click of the camera. She put her hand on her hip and pointed her knees together, and got lots of fantastic, great, brilliants.

  And I just stared across the grass at Tilly.

  *

  Afterwards, I only saw the photographs once. My mother always cut out the important bits from the local paper – the top of my head on the carnival float and half of my face at the Jubilee party the following year. She even cut my father out when the police pulled him up for speeding. But she didn’t save any of me and the drainpipe. I saw them in the window of the local newspaper offices a few weeks later. Lisa Dakin switching on her smile and Jesus sitting in between us looking disappointed, and me staring into the distance, searching for Tilly. And losing her.

  The newspaper quoted Eric Lamb and Mrs Forbes, and spelt both of their names wrong. And ‘quite a find’ said Lisa Dakin (15) who discovered Jesus with her friend Grace Bennett (10). ‘The Second Plumbing’ the headline read.

  *

  By the time Andy Kilner had finished taking his photographs, Tilly had disappeared. I searched the faces in the crowd, but I couldn’t find her, and so I looked over at Mrs Morton instead.

  She stared back at me, but something had left her eyes.

  Number Ten, The Avenue

  6 August 1976

  Harold and Clive stood at the far end of the avenue.

  Eric Lamb could see them at the edges of his view, but he made the mistake of thinking if they didn’t find his eyes, then he wouldn’t have to stop and talk to them.

  ‘Eric, just the man!’

  With Harold, life was never that simple.

  ‘Rum business, eh?’ Harold dipped his head towards the bottom of the avenue.

  Eric wasn’t sure if Harold meant Jesus, Walter Bishop or Dorothy’s theatricals over the deckchair, so he gave a general smile of agreement to cover all three.

  ‘Don’t know quite what to make of it all, do we, Clive?’ said Harold.

  Clive didn’t reply, but made a noise which could have been a no, but which could equally have been the start of clearing his throat.

  ‘New family seem nice?’ said Harold.

  Eric said that they did.

  ‘Doesn’t look like this weather’s going to break?’

  Eric said that it didn’t.

  ‘Garden’s not doing too bad, considering.’

  Eric said that it wasn’t, and that, as it was nearly tea time, if Harold and Clive would excuse him, he was just—

  ‘The thing is.’ Harold’s feet took a step closer and the tone of his voice took a step lower. ‘Dorothy and that comment about photographs. What did she mean exactly?’

  Harold and Clive were looking straight into Eric’s eyes. He didn’t think it was possible to slide even a small lie in between them.

  ‘I think you’re better asking Dorothy, rather than me,’ he said. ‘It’s really none of my business.’

  Eric tried to walk away, but Harold’s gaze wouldn’t let him. Despite the curve of Harold’s spine, despite the peppered hair of an old man that pushed from Harold’s pale flesh and peered through the gap in his shirt, he was as stubborn and as sharp as a teenager.

  ‘She found the camera, didn’t she?’ said Harold.

  Eric didn’t reply. It was an answer all in itself.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Clive said, and leaned back against the wall.

  Harold put his hand up. ‘No need for panicking, Clive. We did nothing wrong.’

  Eric raised an eyebrow.

  ‘We didn’t, Eric. It was a public service. We had every right to take it.’ Harold glanced over at Clive. ‘God alone knows what he had on film.’

  ‘A blackbird on a milk bottle?’ Eric could hear his voice becoming louder, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Beatrice Morton tying her shoelaces?’

  ‘Dorothy doesn’t think we had anything to do with the fire?’ said Clive. ‘We took the camera hours before that started.’

  ‘I’m not sure what she thinks, but she’s not as daft as you make out, Harold.’

  ‘She probably thought we were rescuing it from looters,’ Harold said.

  ‘Looters?’ Eric raked his fingers through his hair. ‘You mean people who break into empty houses and steal other people’s property?’

  Clive began walking down the avenue, a firm, brisk walk. A walk that took him away from blame and accusation.

  ‘You’ve got to understand,’ Harold turned back from watching Clive, ‘we didn’t know what was on there. We had to be sure, and Bishop was on holiday. It seemed like the perfect opportunity.’

  ‘You can’t just take someone else’s belongings because it suits you, Harold.’

  ‘It would have been destroyed in the fire anyway,’ Harold said. ‘If we’d known that, we could have saved ourselves the bother, and left it where it was.’

  Eric didn’t reply.

  ‘We couldn’t take the risk, Eric.’ Suddenly, Harold looked very old and very tired. ‘If people found out,’ he said. ‘If people knew,’ Harold’s voice had faded to a whisper, ‘I couldn’t stand the shame.’

  *

  Eric closed the back door behind him and dropped the catch. He walked over to the kitchen window and snatched the curtains closed, pulling them so tight, not even a cutting of sunlight could manage to break through.

  If he had been a drinker, he would have drunk. Instead he stared at Elsie’s chair, smooth and unfilled, and tried to imagine what she would have said had she been here.

  But the chair remained silent.

  It was strange how the past often broke into the present like an intruder, dangerous and unwanted. Yet whenever the past was invited in, whenever its presence was requested, it seemed to fade into nothing, and made you wonder if it had ever really existed in the first place.

  It had all started with the past. It had all started with Walter Bishop stealing the baby, and everything that happened afterwards unravelled from that very first moment. Even now, the memory of that moment travelled around the avenue. No matter how much they all wanted to escape it, no matter how many other memories they tried to put in its way, it was still there. Creeping into the present; shading and colouring everything that happened afterwards, until the present was so disturbed by the past, no one could really decide where one ended and the other began.

  Eric sat back in his chair and bit at his nails. He hadn’t bitten his nails since he was a boy. Perhaps the past was shaded too, he thought. Perhaps it worked both ways. Everyone was so certain of what had happened, but maybe the present crawled into our memories and disturbed them as well, and perhaps the past wasn’t quite as certain as we would like it to be.

  7 November 1967

  It takes three buses to get to the hospital. None of the journeys is long enough to get comfortable, either. They are short and winding, and filled with traffic lights and roundabouts and sharp corners. Eric Lamb sits with the little case on his knee, swaying this way and that, trying not to sway into the person next to him or fall into the aisle, or get his feet in anyone’s way. By the time he arrives to the hospital, he is exhausted just from the effort
of not being a nuisance.

  Other passengers move on and off the bus, and he watches windows of people’s lives as they pass through: the couples who wind and whisper around each other; the mothers, fighting wars with prams and shopping bags; the young man with a book, whose pages lean in time with the tarmac. As they near the hospital, there are uniforms, porter grey and staff-nurse blue. Shoes designed for corridors. Ankles rubbed. Necks stretched out. The uniforms are hidden under anoraks and coats, secreted away beneath cardigans, but they break through from time to time, as though the wearer will never be free of who they are, no matter how many layers of another life they try to put on top.

  He has been to visit Elsie. He visits each afternoon and each evening, and in between visits he returns home to watch the floor and the walls, and the empty seat where Elsie always sits. Staring at the seat always makes her seem even more missing, as though he’s found the very centre of her not being there and set it free to take over the whole house.

  Tests, they said. We just need to run a few tests. We need to find out why you’re tired and pale and thin.

  ‘I’m getting old,’ she’d said, and laughed, but the doctor didn’t laugh with her. Instead he smiled very quietly and wrote in the notes, and the sound of the nib scratching on the sheets of paper had filled the whole room. The hospital had called for her a week later, and she’d packed her best nightie and a pair of slippers, and the book she was reading, as well as the little sachet of lavender that Eric could never understand the point of, because it always made him sneeze.

  ‘Because it will help me to relax,’ she’d said.

  He’d tried to fish out what she needed to relax about, but she’d shaken her head and squeezed his hand, and said it was a strange bed and different food, and sitting about all day waiting for doctors to appear.

  ‘Calm down. Don’t look so worried, Eric.’

  And so he’d tried very hard not to look worried, and the effort he had to put in to manage it made him worry even more.

  Today, he had tried not to look worried all the way down the long, grey corridor. It was always cluttered with relatives waiting for the doors to open, and he moved slowly, past obstetrics and paediatrics and orthopaedics, the heavy, swinging doors which led to theatres, and the hushed importance of the cardiology suite. It was like a path of life, stretching out in front of him, and in the distance he could see the oncology wards and the palliative care unit. At the end of the corridor were the biggest queues – knots of people, all waiting for the click of two o’clock, measuring every second.