Elsie’s ward was three quarters of the way along. Ward 11, Female Surgical, it said over the blue doors.
‘Not everyone on a surgical ward ends up having surgery.’ The nurse who admitted Elsie saw their faces. ‘There’s no need to be anxious.’
There was every need to be anxious, but Eric was becoming more practised at sweeping it from his face.
*
Today, Elsie had looked very small. The hospital and the ward and the bed seemed to swallow her up, and she gripped the sheets as though she were afraid she might disappear altogether into the stiff white pillows. They had talked about the book she was reading and how the garden was doing, and when the weather might change – very small, ordinary conversations, conversations that they might have had without a second thought over the breakfast table, but over a hospital bed, they seemed like forgery. The doctors had already been on their ward round, she said, a whole collection of them in white coats. They look like bakers, she said. Perhaps they might offer her a tin loaf and half a dozen teacakes, and she’d laughed. No, she hadn’t asked about the test results. They were busy. She didn’t want to bother them. She would ask tomorrow. Eric had stared into his hands. Has he been eating properly, she asked? Not just tomato soup? And they swam back into shallow waters and counterfeit words.
He sways this way and that on the journey home, trying to sieve reassurance from his thoughts. Through the windows, watercolour streets pass by, nothing sharp enough to focus on, nothing clear enough for distraction. Around him, the seats empty and fill, but he simply sees the outlines, shapes moving at the edges of his worrying, all their detail eaten away. It’s only when the bus turns into the estate, when his eyes find a pattern in the rooftops, and the brakes hiss and spit out a familiar song, that he is pulled away from Elsie and how the skin draws on her bones, and how the wedding ring turns on her finger.
He walks slowly, marking out time on the pavement. Four hours, and he will make the trip back, four hours of staring and thinking and trying to find the map to chart this journey of his life. He doesn’t see Sylvia at first. She seems to appear in front of him, spinning from nowhere, white with anxiety, a tremor around her lips, even though no words appear. He hasn’t seen that kind of fear for twenty-five years. Not since the telegrams. We deeply regret to inform you.
Eric puts the little suitcase down on the pavement and places his hands on her shoulders. The fear has carved into her, and she barely moves. Very slowly, he asks her what’s wrong, and he repeats it over and over, until she finds his eyes. She whispers in the beginning, so quietly he can barely hear, and he needs to lean towards her to listen. Then the words become louder, more desperate. She shouts them across the avenue, again and again, until Eric wonders if there was anyone left in the world who couldn’t help but take notice.
‘Grace has disappeared,’ and then she covers her ears with her hands, as if she can’t bear to hear the words said out loud.
Number Four, The Avenue
7 August 1976
The next day, Tilly didn’t appear at the drainpipe.
She would usually be there by ten, but even as Mr Creasy waited for the five to eleven bus, and even as he walked back up the avenue with his hands deep in his pockets, she still hadn’t appeared. There was only Mrs Forbes, shouting out clues from her crossword, and Sheila Dakin, sunbathing and pretending not to hear.
I decided to go home. Jesus wasn’t as much fun without Tilly.
*
My mother sat in the kitchen, sewing buttons on my father’s shirts. She looked at me as I walked in.
‘Has anyone called?’ I said.
She shook her head and went back to the shirts.
My mother had been very quiet since Andy Kilner took the photographs. When Tilly left without saying goodbye, I thought my mother might have given me one of her dentist’s smiles, or told me Tilly was just being ridiculous, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had just looked at me wordlessly from time to time, and then gone back to whatever it was she was doing. I would normally have given up. I would normally have gone round to Mrs Morton’s, but Mrs Morton said she would be especially busy that day and she wouldn’t have time to sit with me or make any Angel Delight. She said I should stay at home instead, and have a really good think about things.
I went up to my room and tried to choose what I should be doing to look very busy and unconcerned when Tilly finally did decide to turn up, only I couldn’t really find anything to do. Instead, I listened for her sandals, but all I could hear was a burned, measureless silence. It was too hot even for the birds to sing.
It was three o’clock when our telephone rang. I was sitting on my bed, rearranging all the Whimsies and then arranging them back to exactly how they were before. Our telephone didn’t ring very often, so whenever it did, I always felt obliged to go on to the landing and involve myself in listening.
‘If that’s Tilly, tell her I’m very busy,’ I shouted over the banister and sat down.
I stood up again. ‘Well, not so busy that I can’t speak to her. Just really quite busy,’ I said.
I heard my mother waiting for the pips.
I tried to listen to what she was saying, but as soon as the conversation started, she turned her face to the wall and spoke too quietly for me to hear. When she finished talking, my mother put the receiver down very slowly and went into the sitting room, where my father was doing his paperwork, and she shut the door behind her.
I felt as though I had been sitting on the landing for a very long time. My back ached, and my legs started to tingle, but I couldn’t stop watching the door of the sitting room and wishing it would open.
It was only when it did open that I realized I actually didn’t want it to open after all.
My mother shouted up, ‘Grace, come downstairs for a minute. We need to talk to you.’
I didn’t answer.
After a moment, her face appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
‘I’m really quite busy, you know.’ My words only came out as a whisper.
‘It’s important,’ she said. She gave me one of her smiles.
When I stood up, my legs felt so watery, I wasn’t even sure they could take me all the way to the hall.
*
I sat on the chair next to the fireplace.
My parents sat opposite, on the settee, and my father put his arm around my mother. They looked pale and strange, as though they might break at any moment.
‘We need to talk to you,’ said my father.
I tried to stand up. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m supposed to be going to Mrs Morton’s, so you’re going to have to speak to me later. Or perhaps tomorrow.’
My father leaned forward and made me sit down again. ‘Grace, I need you to listen,’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to tell you.’
My mother began to cry.
And when I looked down at my hands, I saw they had started to shake.
7 November 1967
Sylvia Bennett’s shouts force people out from their houses.
Sheila Dakin appears first. She’s wiping her hands on a tea towel, frowning, angry. She’s asking what all the shouting is about. Her slippers thump along the garden path.
‘It’s Grace.’ Eric still holds Sylvia’s shoulders. He’s worried that if he lets go, she will slip through his hands. ‘She says Grace has disappeared.’
Sheila rushes through the gate and across the street. The tea towel falls to the pavement.
‘Disappeared?’
Sylvia’s hands tighten against her head.
‘People don’t just disappear.’ Sheila edges Eric away and takes Sylvia’s wrists, pulling her hands away from her ears. ‘Listen to me,’ she says.
Eric lets Sheila take over. He has never been very good with upset. He’s always the one putting the kettle on and making phone calls, and giving directions. It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he can’t help himself getting upset as well, which only seems to grow everyone else’s upset e
ven more.
Sylvia begins to moan and stumble, as though all the fear has exhausted her.
‘Listen to me,’ Sheila says again, and Sylvia becomes quiet and looks up at her like a child.
Sheila asks a run of questions, each one tipping into the next. She pauses for Sylvia to speak, but it only delays her a beat, before the next one arrives. When Sylvia replies, the answers are fragments, swaying words that lurch and stagger, fear stealing away the shape of the sentences.
Grace was in the kitchen, she said, in her pushchair. They were going out. Sylvia went upstairs to change her shoes, and when she came back, Grace and the pushchair had gone.
‘How long were you upstairs?’ Sheila says. Sylvia is looking at the pavement, and Sheila moves her head to find Sylvia’s gaze. ‘How long?’
‘Not long,’ she says. ‘Not that long.’
Eric puts his hand back on Sylvia’s shoulder. ‘Yes, but how long, love? It could be important.’
Sylvia’s fingers rake through her hair. It seems to pull her eyes even wider, even whiter. ‘I sat on the bed. I think I might have fallen asleep,’ she says. ‘Not for long. Just for a minute. I don’t know.’
Eric looks at Sheila. Their eyes partner for just a brief moment, but Sylvia sees it.
‘It’s not my fault!’ She is shouting again now. ‘No one understands what it’s like. No one.’
More people have come into the street. May Roper stands at the edge of her garden, listening, her eyes saucered with curiosity. She is eating, and her chewing slows with each sentence, as though she needs her entire face to be still in order to concentrate properly. Brian appears at her left shoulder, but she holds out a hand to prevent him from disturbing the view.
‘Have you checked all over the house?’ Sheila is saying. ‘Every room?’
Sylvia nods. She is crying now, purging herself with deep, torturous sobs that echo through her entire body.
Sheila looks around and sees May. ‘Check the house again,’ she says, ‘just to be sure.’
May’s hand presses to her chest. ‘Me?’ she mouths.
‘Just do it, May. Hurry up.’
May scuttles across the road, like an over-ripe insect, and Sheila turns back to Sylvia. There is a crowd now. Harold and Dorothy Forbes, John Creasy, Thin Brian. They make a circle around Sylvia, holding in the hysteria, containing it within a space, as though it were a wild animal that needed to be trapped.
‘Tell us what happened this morning,’ Sheila says. ‘Everything. Did you see anyone? Speak to anyone unusual?’
Eric listens as Sylvia runs through her day. It’s a very ordinary day. It’s strange how the worst day of your life often starts just like any other. You might even complain very quietly to yourself about its ordinariness. You might wish for something more interesting to happen, something to break the back of your routine, and just when you think you can’t bear the monotony any longer, something comes along that shatters your life to such a degree, you wish with every cell in your body that your day hadn’t become so unordinary.
‘We walked to the corner shop, this morning,’ Sylvia is holding her head in her hands, as though the weight of thinking is too much to bear, ‘for milk.’
‘Was there anyone in the shop? Anyone you didn’t recognize?’ Sheila says. ‘Did anyone follow you?’
‘We didn’t see anyone. No one except the postman. We walked out of the shop, down Lime Crescent and through the alleyway. It was warm. I was telling Grace she didn’t really need her cardigan.’ Sylvia stops speaking and looks up at Sheila.
‘What? What have you remembered?’
‘We saw someone else,’ Sylvia says. ‘Someone stopped to speak to us on the way home.’
‘Who was it?’ Eric says. ‘Anyone you know?’
Sylvia looks at each of the faces surrounding her before she speaks. The words are tissue-paper quiet, almost nothing more than a breath. ‘It was Walter Bishop,’ she says.
‘We spoke to Walter Bishop.’
They all look across at number eleven, each of them holding the house in their gaze for a brief moment before they turn back to Sylvia.
‘What did he say to you?’ Sheila says.
‘He said—’ The sobbing has started again, and Sylvia has to fit her words around jagged breaths. ‘—he said how beautiful Grace was. He said how much he loved children.’
Brian turns back to number eleven. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘there’s your answer.’
*
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions.’ Eric feels he should make the effort to calm things down. There are more people now, people who don’t live on the avenue, but have floated towards a crisis like driftwood. John Creasy is organizing them into groups to search the estate. The police have been called. Someone has gone to the phone box to ring Derek.
‘There’s only one conclusion you can jump to.’ Brian stares over at Walter’s house. ‘We should go over there. Confront him.’
‘You can’t just march over there and accuse him of taking a child.’ Sheila is speaking now. She keeps her back to Sylvia, trying to shield her from the conversation.
‘The police will be here soon,’ Eric says, ‘let them deal with it.’
Brian punches his hands into his pockets. ‘He sits in that park all day, you know. Up in the bandstand. Staring at children. He’s a bloody pervert.’
‘Brian’s right, he does. I’ve seen him.’ Dorothy Forbes has picked up Sheila’s tea towel, and she is folding it and unfolding it as she speaks. ‘He’s always in that bandstand. He just sits there and watches all the kiddies.’
There is a slip of unquiet. Eric can feel it. It snakes around the group, lifting voices and brightening eyes. He tries to tell them to calm down, to think about it, but Harold is drumming through the crowd, grabbing the restlessness and sharing it out.
‘Well, I’m going over there,’ he says. ‘Everyone else is out here, trying to help. Where’s Bishop? Where is he?’
Harold starts walking towards number eleven. Brian is right on his heels. Eric shouts to stop them, but he knows it’s pointless. The crowd are trailing across the avenue, moving with the story, not wanting to miss a chapter. Eric follows them. It’s all he can do.
Walter Bishop’s house has the kind of front door that looks as though no one has opened it in the last ten years. A skin of paint peels around the frame, and dust has turned the black into a quiet, deadened grey.
Harold bangs on the wood with the heel of his hand.
Nothing.
He bangs again. Shouts. Tries to rattle the handle of the letterbox, but the rust has eaten its way into the hinges.
He shouts again.
Through the window in the door, behind the bubbled glass, Eric can see a shadow of movement, a brief change in the light. A chain shakes and slides, and the door opens a few inches. Just enough to catch the pale, stubbled skin, the reflection of a pair of spectacles.
‘Yes?’ Walter Bishop’s voice is soft and unclear. There is a faint lisp, which stretches the word into a whisper.
‘There’s a child missing. Grace Bennett.’ Harold’s words are like needles by comparison. ‘Did you know?’
Walter shakes his head. Eric can see the edge of the man’s clothes. They are grey too. He looks washed through and faded, as though he has given up trying to make any sort of imprint on the world.
‘You spoke to her mother this morning,’ Harold says, ‘in the alley next to Lime Crescent.’
‘I did?’
‘You did. You told her how much you liked children.’ Harold’s temper is roped in, but it pushes against every syllable.
Walter shifts behind the chain, and Eric sees the gap narrow just a fraction.
‘I was making conversation,’ he says, ‘being friendly.’
‘Friendly?’
‘It’s what people do, isn’t it?’ There is a glaze of sweat on Walter’s forehead. ‘They pass the time of day, they admire someone’s child.’
‘Not if that child go
es missing a few hours later.’
Eric can feel the weight of people behind him. He can feel them tighten and wind. There are a few voices at the back, low and rumbling for now, but Eric knows it would only take one of those voices to strengthen and speak up for the entire group to unravel.
‘Have you any idea where Grace might be?’ Harold is saying. His voice is slow and deliberate.
‘I really couldn’t say.’
Walter tries to shut the door, but Harold’s foot is too quick.
‘The thing is, everyone is out here searching for her. Will you be joining us?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’ A faint tremor floods Walter’s voice. ‘I have no idea where she is.’
‘Perhaps, then, you wouldn’t mind if we take a look around the house?’
With Harold’s foot blocking the door, Eric can see Walter’s face slightly better. His skin is a little too milky, his hair is a little too long. Discomfort gathers in beads around the edge of his glasses, and Eric looks for a splinter of concern behind the lenses. He finds nothing. Only an unease, a layer of self-preservation.
‘This is private property,’ Walter says. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
‘We’re not leaving until we find Grace. So you’d better open this door and let us get on with it.’
Eric can hear boots scuff and drag on the path. The voices are building, feeding from each other. He feels an elbow dig in his back, pushing him forward.
‘I must insist.’ Walter’s breathing is shallow, rapid. ‘I must insist that you go.’
Thin Brian is at Eric’s shoulder. There is a young man’s rage there, Eric can feel it, the kind of rage that smoulders and spits, and looks around for a place to land. He remembers being the owner of that kind of rage, before time sandpapered it down into something he could hold on to.
The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Page 27