The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

  We had heard the shudder of an engine and the thud of closing doors, and my father had gone to the window to investigate.

  ‘Inspector Hislop and that other copper,’ said my father. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Green?’ said my mother.

  ‘That’s it. Green.’

  My mother looked up. ‘Do you think they’ve found Margaret?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ My father pulled the curtain back a little more. ‘But everyone’s out there.’

  The Kays catalogue fell to the carpet as my mother got to her feet.

  *

  By the time we got outside, Detective Hislop was surrounded.

  Everyone seemed to be shouting questions at him, Mr Forbes and May Roper, Thin Brian in his plastic jacket, and Dorothy Forbes waving her arms around and becoming quite hysterical. PC Green was trying to keep everyone quiet, and Detective Hislop was holding his palms out and refusing to open his eyes until they’d all bloody shut up. Mr and Mrs Kapoor stood on their doorstep looking completely bewildered.

  ‘I need to go inside and have a word with Mr Creasy, if you would all just step out of the way,’ said Detective Hislop. He tried to walk towards number eight, but the crowd moved with him, like a lake of curiosity.

  John Creasy stood at the edge of the pavement. He was the only one not making any noise.

  ‘Anything you want to tell me, you can tell me out here,’ he said, ‘in front of everyone else.’

  His words seemed to have much more of an effect than either Detective Hislop’s or PC Green’s, and the crowd became very quiet.

  The detective looked around at all the faces. He turned to PC Green, who just shrugged his shoulders andtook a notebook from his top pocket. ‘Very well,’ he said.

  He paused for a moment, and we all paused with him, holding our breath. ‘I came here today, to tell you that your wife has reported to one of our police stations to confirm that she is, indeed, safe and well.’

  Everyone in the crowd seemed to breathe again at the same time, although it did sound as though all the breath was going in, rather than coming out.

  ‘I knew it,’ said Mr Creasy. ‘I told you all, didn’t I? I told you she was alive.’

  No one replied. All the faces were silent, but I did think I heard someone at the back say Oh my God.

  ‘Where has she been?’ John Creasy said. ‘Did she tell you why she left?’

  ‘I believe she said she’d had a lot on her mind,’ said Detective Hislop. ‘She used one of these new-fangled expressions women seem to be fond of these days. What was it again, PC Green?’

  PC Green studied his notebook. ‘She said she needed to “work things out”, sir,’ he said.

  ‘That’s it.’ Detective Hislop shook his head. ‘Work things out.’

  I definitely heard someone say Oh my God this time.

  ‘Oh, and she asked us to pass this on to you,’ said Detective Hislop.

  PC Green handed Mr Creasy an envelope.

  The detective looked at the crowd. ‘She said you’d all understand.’

  John Creasy stared at the envelope, and we all stared with him. Detective Hislop and PC Green walked back towards the police car.

  ‘Is she coming home?’ shouted Mr Creasy. ‘Didshe say?’

  ‘Oh, I do believe so, sir.’ The detective opened the back door of the panda car and heaved himself inside.

  PC Green turned the ignition, and Detective Hislop wound down the window and looked out at us all. ‘But she did say she’d like to pop into the station and have a little chat with us first,’ he said.

  *

  We watched the police car drive down the avenue and disappear around the corner. It was so quiet, you could hear the engine for ages afterwards.

  Mr Creasy still stood with the letter in his outstretched hands.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it, John?’ said Mr Forbes.

  Mr Creasy turned the envelope over. ‘It says “The Avenue” on the front,’ he said.

  ‘So it’s to all of us?’ said Sheila Dakin.

  Mr Creasy nodded. He ripped open the edge and took out a piece of paper. When he’d read it, he looked up and frowned and read it again.

  ‘Well?’ said Sheila. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ He looked at it again.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, spit it out,’ said Harold.

  John Creasy cleared his throat and began to read. ‘It says Matthew, Chapter 7, Verses 1 to 3.’

  We all waited.

  ‘Is that it?’ said Sheila Dakin.

  ‘What in hell does that mean?’ Mr Forbes threw his arms into the air. ‘Has the woman gone completely bloody crackers?’

  Mrs Forbes and Mrs Roper stared at each other. When they spoke, their words came out at exactly the same time.

  ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ they said. Like a duet.

  Number Twelve, The Avenue

  17 August 1976

  Sheila Dakin snatched open the pantry door, and started pulling tins from the shelves.

  ‘Mam? What are you doing?’

  She knew the bottle was finished, but it was worth looking again. It was always worth looking again. Sometimes she forgot where she’d put them. There was always a chance.

  Pasta shells spat on to the floor.

  ‘Mam?’ Lisa stood in the doorway, her hair in a towel.

  ‘I’m looking for something, Lisa.’

  Perhaps there was one under the sink. She could remember leaving something there a while ago. Perhaps. She pushed past Lisa and the ironing board.

  ‘Eighty-two degrees.’ Sheila pointed at the thermometer on the windowsill. ‘Eighty-two bloody degrees. How is anyone supposed to function in this bloody heat?’

  She crouched on the floor and reached into the cupboard. Tins of polish and bottles of window cleaner fell like skittles.

  ‘Mam, what the hell’s happened?’

  Sheila looked over her shoulder. ‘Margaret Creasy, that’s what’s happened. Margaret Creasy is coming back.’

  ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ said Lisa.

  ‘No, it isn’t a good thing. It isn’t a good thing at all.’ Sheila went back to the cupboard. ‘Because she’s not coming back on her own, is she?’

  ‘She isn’t?’

  ‘No, Lisa, she isn’t.’ A can of Mr Sheen span across the lino. ‘She’s coming back with all our secrets. She’s got a bagful of them. She knows everything.’

  *

  ‘That’s it. We’re all done for.’ Dorothy Forbes appeared in the doorway, her arms raised to heaven. She billowed with hysteria in the centre of a cloud of taupe.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Dot. That’s all I need.’

  Dorothy must have followed her across the avenue.

  ‘I’m telling you, Sheila. I’ve said it from the beginning. That woman’s worked it out. It’s going to be the end of all of us.’

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic, Dot.’ Sheila sat back on a Brillo pad. ‘We just need to think, we just need to get our stories straight.’

  ‘I don’t even know what my story is any more. Every time I try to think of it, I just get in a muddle.’

  Lisa pulled the towel from her hair and stared at them both. ‘You’ve both gone bloody mad,’ she said, and turned on her heels. Her footsteps thudded up the stairs and across the ceiling.

  Sheila swayed to her feet and reached for the cigarettes. When she looked back, Dorothy was collecting all the cans and packets from the floor and rearranging them in the cupboard.

  ‘Would you stop tidying up other people’s houses, Dot. It drives me crazy.’

  ‘I can’t help it.’ Dorothy reached for a bottle of bleach under the kitchen table. ‘It’s my nerves,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve got to stay calm.’ Sheila began pacing the lino with her cigarette. ‘We’ve got to put the pieces together. What did you say to Margaret? What exactly did you say to her?’

  Sheila waited. She could feel her heart, throwing its
pulse into her neck.

  Dot stared at her and blinked.

  ‘Dorothy?’

  ‘What was the question again, Sheila?’

  The pulse seemed to fill Sheila Dakin’s whole body, turning her stomach and pulling her chest, and hammering at the sides of her skull. She watched Dot folding the tea towel.

  This way, then that. Squares of material, backwards and forwards in her hands.

  ‘Would you stop folding that bloody tea towel.’

  ‘I can’t help it. It’s a habit,’ said Dorothy. ‘I don’t even know I’m doing it.’

  Sheila took a drag on her cigarette. ‘You’re not supposed to fold tea towels, anyway. Not according to Walter Bishop. They harbour germs.’

  The folding stopped and she put the tea towel on the draining board.

  Sheila stared at it. The kitchen was silent, but the clock ticked away at her thinking. She stared at the tea towel again. Folded. On the draining board.

  ‘Walter Bishop doesn’t fold tea towels,’ she said.

  Dorothy blinked.

  ‘But you do, Dot. Don’t you?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Dorothy?’ she said.

  Dorothy Forbes looked at the tea towel, and looked back at Sheila. Her eyes were very wide and very blue.

  ‘The whole avenue wanted him gone, Sheila. You all said so. It was doing everybody a favour.’

  She hadn’t got a reply. For the first time in her life, Sheila Dakin had run out of words.

  Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft

  17 August 1976

  Mrs Morton replaced the receiver.

  She thought it might have been about Tilly, but it was May Roper, standing in a phone box with a pile of two-pence pieces, dispensing news about Margaret Creasy. She had a feeling her telephone call may have been one on a long list.

  The estate had always been this way. A parade of people, joined together by tedium and curiosity, passing other people’s misery around between themselves like a parcel. It had been the same when Ernest died. It had been the same after the funeral.

  She went back to the sitting room and returned to her chair and her knitting, but even though the wool was waiting for her, wound around the needles in the middle of a stitch, she couldn’t quite settle back into it. She stood up and rearranged the cushions. She opened the window a little more, and moved the footstool further away, but it was no good. The feeling of quietness had left, and in its place was a wash of unease. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the breathless anticipation in May Roper’s voice, or the sense that, every day recently, the past seemed to be drawing up alongside the present, or perhaps it was neither of those things. Perhaps it was the feeling that there was something she had missed – something about that day which lay paused and expectant in her memory, waiting for her to discover it and remember.

  7 November 1967

  There are twenty-two cards on the mantelpiece.

  Mrs Morton counts them, although she knows the number hasn’t changed from three hours ago. They run in diagonals between the plate she brought back from Llandudno last year and their wedding photograph, joining her life together with sincere sympathy.

  There are more cards on the kitchen table, and a few on the telephone stand in the hall, but she hasn’t got the heart to open them. They just repeat themselves, over and over, an endless stream of meaningful waterfalls swimming with deep condolence. You can tell a lot about a person by the card they choose. There are the safe ones, the lilies and the butterflies, with straightforward messages in a simple text. Then there are the ones that hint at a bigger force at work, the sunsets and the rainbows, and whole ranges of mountains with interesting rock formations. And of course, the religious ones – the ones that suggest you’re suffering for a very good reason, the ones that tell you the Lord is supervising your misery, in swirling, gold letters, because when God speaks, he appears to speak only in a decorated font.

  Call upon me in the day of trouble. I will deliver thee, says one.

  Beatrice Morton isn’t sure she will ever be delivered – not from the despair and the sorrow, but from the shame.

  *

  She sits in curtained daylight, although the weak November sun is pressing through the material and cleaning away the shadows. The curtains have been drawn for two weeks, holding the house in a pause between loss and acceptance. She had drawn them as soon as the policeman left, watching him walk down the path as she pulled them to. He had been a self-conscious young man, and clearly unsure of the etiquette of informing someone their now-dead husband had acquired a female passenger somewhere between the Chiswick Flyover and Reading Services. She had wanted to make it more comfortable for him, to tell him that she had long since known about the passenger, that the last fifteen years had been spent living in her shadow, and about the enormous amount of effort it had taken to shape a life around her existence. She wanted to offer the policeman another cup of tea, and smooth down the edges of the conversation, so they could journey across the awkwardness together. But the policeman had an inventory to get through, a list he had to tick off before he was allowed to leave the untouched cup and the edge of his seat.

  Ernest doesn’t even like the New Seekers, she’d said, looking for a loophole that might bring him back from the dead.

  The policeman had fashioned a group of small coughs at the back of his throat, and explained that the female passenger had survived. More than survived, she was right at that moment sitting in the Emergency Department of the Royal Berkshire Hospital, drinking tea from a plastic beaker and explaining everything to one of his colleagues.

  I’m sorry, he’d said, although she wasn’t entirely sure if he was apologizing for her husband’s death, or apologizing because her husband’s mistress had survived.

  As she watched him leave, she knew. She knew he would talk to his wife that evening as they ate their meal, leaning back in his seat, chewing the details of her life along with each mouthful. And the next day, his wife would sit in a hairdresser’s chair and say you mustn’t tell anyone, and the hairdresser would hold a comb between her teeth and pull hair around blue plastic curlers, and wonder which anyone she was going to tell first. And how very easily everyone would know the secret she had worked so hard to keep airtight.

  *

  The warmth of the sunlight finds the windowsill and carries the smell of decomposing flowers into the room. The house has been taken over by Ernest’s death. There are flowers hiding everywhere, in vases and jam jars and earthenware jugs. Their leaves are eaten into frail skeletons, and the petals crowd on to the carpet in solemn clusters. She should really sort them out, deal with the slurry of stagnant water which fills the air with a slow, quiet decay, but she hasn’t got the energy to clean it all away and start again. It was a mess she had never asked for to begin with.

  The flowers were left on the doorstep, or delivered by a pleasant young woman in a red van. No one has been inside the house. Sheila and May did make it to the doorstep, three days after the accident, fuelled by curiosity and half a bottle of sherry, but even they disappeared when they realized that widowhood wore a beige cardigan and said very little. It certainly said nothing about dead husbands – or dead husbands’ mistresses. They wanted to know how she was getting on under the circumstances, but they were circumstances she couldn’t even discuss with herself, let alone with Sheila’s hopeful eyebrows and the rise and fall of May’s larynx, as it travelled within the folds of her throat.

  Instead, the funeral had fed them on her behalf. The funeral had provided a feast. It had spread out her foolishness for everyone to see, unrolling each thread of misery, each word of deceit, and she knows that whatever she chooses to do in the future, it will always be played out on a background of her own stupidity. She hadn’t turned around when the sobbing began. She had spent fifteen years facing the front, and she wasn’t about to look away now.

  *

  She needs to go shopping, but each journey from the house is a difficult one
. She tries to take the least crowded pavement, the quietest time of day, but she still feels like an exhibit, a curiosity. She knows that her presence on the street will switch conversations on like a string of fairy lights. As soon as she has moved beyond hearing, they will begin dissecting her misery and her ridiculousness, and dish it out between themselves in manageable bites.

  She moves from shop to shop, as quietly as she can, like prey.

  The hands of the woman in the greengrocer’s clasp around hers. ‘And how are you feeling?’ she says, tilting her head to one side, and frowning, as though Mrs Morton were a riddle that needed to be solved.

  ‘I’m feeling like a pound of tomatoes,’ says Mrs Morton, ‘and one of your best cabbages.’

  She isn’t sure how she feels. Or how she is supposed to feel. Are her feelings normal? Appropriate? She has never lost a husband before. There is a part of her that thinks she should be more upset, and she waits each morning, bracing herself for the sorrow. But it never arrives. Instead, she feels an unpleasant sensation of disruption. As though, in the journey she had planned for herself, she has been forced to take an alternative route, and she isn’t sure if the shock she feels is the result of losing Ernest, or the surprise of having to change her travel arrangements.

  She crosses the High Street, to the side with fewer shops. The stares still find her, but they seem easier to manage if she can put a road between them. On this side, there are a couple of banks and a hairdresser, and a shop selling baby clothes. The sales have started, and there are red and white banners shouting at her from every window.

  ‘Beatrice!’

  She is too busy looking at the Unbeatable Sale in the shoe shop opposite, and almost walks into Dorothy Forbes.

  ‘How are you?’ Dorothy drags the words out to fill the whole pavement.

  ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ she says.

  ‘Mustn’t you?’ Dorothy looks openly disappointed.

  ‘Doesn’t do any good, does it?’ Mrs Morton tries to smile, but she isn’t sure if smiling widows are appropriate, so it evolves into a strange grimace that smothers half of her face.