The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

‘Yes, but in the circumstances,’ says Dorothy. The end of the sentence floats for a while before it dissolves. Everyone talks about the circumstances, but no one really wants to say exactly what they are.

  Mrs Morton makes ‘if you’ll excuse me’ sounds, and tries to edge around the large, tartan flap on Dorothy’s shopping trolley.

  ‘It was a beautiful funeral,’ Dorothy shifts very slightly to her left, ‘for the most part.’

  There is a smear of tangerine lipstick on Dorothy’s front teeth. Her mouth is moving around the words too quickly, leaving a blur of orange.

  ‘Dreadful business between Psalm 23 and the organ starting up, mind you.’

  She is trapped – trapped between the wheels of the cart and a shop doorway, and Dorothy Forbes’ tangerined sympathy.

  Shocking. Alarming. Embarrassing, Dorothy says.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

  Did you know her?

  ‘I just need to.’

  Harold says she isn’t local.

  ‘I should really.’

  She must have been very close to Ernest? To get so upset?

  ‘There’s something I need,’ she says, ‘from here.’ And she slips through the doorway, closing the questions on the other side, watching through the glass, as defeat spreads across Dorothy’s face in small bites of disappointment.

  It’s the baby shop.

  She has never been in here before. It smells of wool and towelling – a clean, undamaged, unspoiled smell that only children seem able to produce. The girl behind the counter looks up and smiles. She’s very young, surely too young to have a baby, but Mrs Morton knows she has lost the ability to judge someone’s age. Her barometer has become broken with time, calibrated only by the stubborn perception she keeps of herself. The girl goes back to her folding. She doesn’t look at Mrs Morton with interested eyes. There is no appraisal, no opinion. Perhaps she’s far away. Or perhaps the whispering has yet to push itself through the nappies and the swaddling.

  Her gaze wanders over the shelves. Each one is filled with comfort. Everything is intended to soothe or blanket or cradle. Even the colours are restful: Alice blue and powder pink, and soft, watery apricot. Here there is a pocket of relief from the noise of other people, a feeling that all things will eventually pass; a sense of calm folded into the shawls and the quilting, and hidden between the pleats of silent crochet.

  ‘You have a beautiful shop,’ she says. It’s the first time she has spoken about a subject other than death for the past two weeks.

  The girl looks up and smiles again.

  ‘It’s so peaceful,’ says Mrs Morton. ‘Calming.’

  The girl keeps folding. She is putting blankets into polythene bags, and the wrapping makes a soft crackle as she works. ‘Sure, babies can be the most calming people on this earth, as long as they’re not crying.’

  The sentence is pinned and tucked with an Irish accent.

  ‘You’re not from round here?’

  The girl smiles into the folds. It was a practised smile. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m an outsider.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say outsider.’

  The girl looks up. There is a dance of mischief in her eyes. ‘Oh, I would. This town is always a little flustered by anything outside the ordinary. It doesn’t cope well with a varied diet.’

  ‘Well, that’s true enough.’ Mrs Morton wanders into the next aisle. It’s filled with balls of wool, towered into pyramids, and rows of knitting patterns. Knitting patterns for every conceivable item of clothing a baby could ever have a need for.

  ‘That’s why I like being around children,’ the girl says. ‘They just see you. They don’t see all the things you carry in your pockets.’

  Mrs Morton doesn’t know many children. There’s Lisa Dakin, of course, but she’s at school all day now, being fashioned into a small-scale version of Sheila. Grace Bennett must be nearly one. She often sees Grace and her mother on the estate, and they stop and pass the time of day, but Sylvia always looks exhausted, as if she’s just woken from a nap. Mrs Morton stares at the pictures on the knitting patterns. A choir of babies look back at her. Heads round and smooth like eggs, and deep, clear irises filled with nothing but simplicity. This is what she needs. Eyes with no verdict. A person who doesn’t see the pockets. Perhaps if she could spend just a little time with someone who didn’t look at her and see only a foolish old woman, perhaps then she might start to remember who she used to be.

  ‘Were you looking for something in particular?’ the girl is asking. ‘A gift, perhaps?’

  Mrs Morton looks back at the photographs. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s it. A gift.’

  ‘Boy or girl? How old?’

  ‘A girl. She’s nearly one.’ She walks to the counter, past shelves of quiet reprieve. ‘Her name is Grace.’

  *

  She leaves with a soft toy – an elephant. He has large, cream ears lined with velvet and very solemn, stitched eyes. She tucks him into her bag, underneath the cabbage and the pound of tomatoes, for fear of anyone spotting him and assuming that she has finally gone completely and irretrievably mad.

  The bell above the door chimes as she leaves.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Morton. Take care of yourself,’ says the girl behind the counter.

  She frowns and starts to reply, but the girl is already back to her folding.

  *

  The estate sleeps in a lunch-time quiet. She meets no one. The solitude is a blessing, and it allows her to look ahead, in place of watching the constant setting of her feet on a pavement. She stares at the trees, brushed with November paint, gripping the last of their leaves like children’s hands. These are the last few days before winter gathers her skirts and wraps the evenings in darkness; the last looks at chalked clouds and apple-green lawns, until the frost rushes in and hurries them away.

  The avenue is silent, the windows blank and impassive. People are working or eating, or travelling elsewhere through their day. Mrs Morton moves past the houses undisturbed. She walks past Sheila Dakin’s, Lisa’s toys scattered on the grass like wounded infantry, the breeze clicking at the latch of an indecisive gate. Across the road, Dorothy and Harold’s driveway sits tidied and soundless, its chippings almost certainly surrendered to a sweeping brush, before it has even begun to break light.

  She stops, just outside Grace’s house, and ties her shoelace. As she does, she glances up at the rest of the avenue. She wonders if she is being observed, if somewhere behind the shadowy glass a person is watching, but when she turns, each house holds its contents with a poker face, giving nothing away.

  Grace’s house stands a touch further back from Dorothy’s. It has a swish of neat lawn, and carefully managed flower beds, but next to the Forbeses’, any garden would look a little inconvenienced. Mrs Morton walks through the space where Derek would ordinarily leave his car, past the bubbled glass of the pantry and the hall, and the row of plants on the kitchen windowsill, to the back door, its paint blistered and torn from the previous summer.

  The door is slightly ajar. When she knocks, it creeps open a touch more, and she can see the wheels of a pushchair and Grace’s stout little legs kicking from its seat.

  She shouts hello.

  She pushes the door further.

  She shouts hello again.

  She walks inside.

  The kitchen has captured the early afternoon sun, and it smells of warmth and eaten meals. There is a slow, steady drip of water from one of the taps, beating time into the sink, and crumbs of music drift from a radio sitting on the window ledge.

  Grace is alone.

  When she sees Mrs Morton, she laughs and throws her fists at the air, and kicks her stout little legs even more. You can’t help but laugh back. There is an inevitability about it. Grace seems to realize she is entertaining, and laughs again, crinkling her face and flapping her arms, until the whole pushchair shakes with amusement. Mrs Morton feels her spine unfold and her shoulders untighten, and a flood of relief so deep and so mighty, it steals
the breath from inside of her lungs.

  She reaches over to the sink and tightens the tap.

  When she looks back, Grace is leaning in her seat, trying to shuffle herself towards the open door.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ says Mrs Morton. ‘Do you want to look at the garden?’

  She opens the door a little further, and pushes Grace forward, into a pocket of frail November sunlight which has stretched itself over the kitchen floor. Grace would be fine there, just for a moment.

  She walks into the carpeted silence of the hall, and there is a rustle of fear at an uninvited journey into someone else’s life. The front room and the sitting room are both ticking-clock empty, and she stands at the bottom of the stairs, straining her neck towards the landing. She chances another hello.

  Still nothing.

  When she returns to the kitchen, Grace wriggles in her seat and throws pudding-fists at the open door. She tries to explain what she wants in burbles and bubbles and a number of looks filled with varying degrees of concentration.

  ‘Shall we wait for Mummy in the garden?’ says Mrs Morton.

  She moves Grace on to the patio, beneath the branches of a cherry blossom tree, although its petals have long since been taken by a summer breeze. A quarrel of sparrows skitters and tips between the branches, and they watch – Grace and Mrs Morton – as the birds chatter and bargain and try to find their title.

  ‘Can you see, Grace?’ says Mrs Morton, but Grace is leaning towards the path at the side of the house, and stretching her fingers towards Mrs Forbes’ cat.

  ‘Whiskey?’ she says. ‘Do you want to look at Whiskey?’

  And so they follow the cat, along the path, down the side of the house – and past the row of plant pots in the kitchen window and the bubbled glass of the hall and the pantry, and through the space where Grace’s father would ordinarily park his car.

  ‘Just to the end of the drive,’ says Mrs Morton. ‘We’ll go to the end of the drive, and then we’ll come back and wait for your mummy.’

  The cat inches against the brickwork and the sparrows squabble in the branches of the cherry tree. The wheels of the pushchair rattle and shudder on the concrete.

  They wait at the end of the drive, looking out on to an empty avenue. Through the little plastic window of the pushchair, Mrs Morton can see Grace turning and leaning and addressing everything she sees with equal importance: the yellow beak of a blackbird, the papery whisper of fallen leaves, the silver curve of the dustbin lid. They are all treated with the same degree of gravity.

  She looks back at the house. It waits for them with a quiet patience.

  In a few minutes, it will still be there, unchanged.

  ‘We’ll just go as far as the postbox,’ says Mrs Morton.

  But the postbox becomes the end of the road, and the end of the road becomes the fire station, and the fire station becomes the gates of the park. The handles of the pushchair feel like a float, keeping her above the misery and the shame, and she allows herself, just for these moments, to imagine how life might have been, if it had permitted Mrs Morton a float of her own. She doesn’t think of the walking. She doesn’t notice the trees or the pavements, or the lamp posts. They all sit in the margins of her mind as she moves through the estate, skirting the borders of other people’s lives, the fences and the walls and the precisely cut hedgerows. Instead of walking, her travelling is made up of a sequence of thoughts. A ball of feelings, as tight as a marble, which appear to move her from one place and on to the next.

  When she looks back, the journeys she takes do not seem like journeys at all. They seem like a series of small decisions, one placed thoughtlessly upon the next. It’s only when she stops and turns, and realizes she has reached a destination, that the importance of the decisions become clear. They stack behind her, the perhapses and the another-times, and the one-day-soons, and they hold her in a place she never meant to be held. The choices she has made are now a part of her. They have stitched themselves into the person she has become, and when she stops to see who that is, she finds that the cloth from which she is cut has begun to suffocate her.

  *

  When they reach the park, Mrs Morton decides they should sit in the bandstand, away from the tail of autumn, the single ice-cream seller, and the apron of leaves on the surface of a forgotten paddling pool. There are benches nearby, but they are all empty, except for a seat at the very end of the path, where an old man dozes into the pages of a newspaper and his Yorkshire Terrier listens in defeat to the sound of his master’s snoring. As they walk towards the bandstand, Mrs Morton wonders if Walter Bishop might be in his usual place – if he would be sitting in a neat square, eating sandwiches from the plastic box on his knee, and stealing helpings of other people’s lives as they passed by in front of him. But the bandstand was empty save for a pigeon scratching out the passage of time between last night’s chip wrapper and today’s morning headlines.

  Mrs Morton turns Grace’s pushchair towards the seat, and the child looks at her with wet, blue eyes. ‘We’ll go home soon,’ she says. ‘We’ll get back and see what’s happened to your mummy.’

  Grace smiles. It fills her whole face.

  ‘We’ll sit for a moment first, though. Just until we get our breath back.’

  She watches as Grace copies her expressions, like a mirror, her mouth trying to find its way around the words, her eyes making cartoon saucers. She plays to her audience, and when Mrs Morton laughs, Grace squeals and wiggles with achievement. As she does, there is the sense of a greater power, the spark of a beginning. It’s a beginning she hasn’t found in the rainbows and the sunsets and the rock formations, or gathered in the petals on the sitting-room carpet. It is a beginning not to be heard in shallow words, or seen in the stares which travel from the other side of a road. She wasn’t even sure there was a beginning, until now, and having found it, she can’t imagine how she hadn’t seen it in the first place.

  ‘Perhaps your mummy might like my help from time to time? Perhaps you and I can be friends?’

  The pigeon flaps and blusters its way past the railings of the bandstand, and the commotion makes Grace turn in alarm.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Mrs Morton leans forward and links Grace’s fingers around her own. ‘As long as you are with me, nothing bad will ever happen to you, because I will guard you like a little tin soldier.’

  *

  They sit and watch the last light of an afternoon stretch over the park, picking out the grey of the flower beds, where the strict council loops of reds and blues and whites once grew. It follows the criss and cross of the paths and the lines of empty benches, all the way to the fishpond, where it trips and flickers on the surface of the water and dissolves into nothing. It is only when the light becomes richer, when the deep orange of afternoon fills the park, that Mrs Morton thinks they should really be on their way. She remembers the elephant.

  ‘When we get home,’ she says, ‘I have a little present for you. But first I need to check if it’s all right. It’s good manners to ask your mummy first.’

  She wheels Grace down to the pond, to the shaky, wooden footbridge and the dark columns of reeds, but the sun is trimming the rooftops and starting to unbutton the day. She stops and looks up, and turns the wheels back towards the pavement.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says, ‘perhaps we should take the shorter route home.’

  They meet no one. Even if they had, Mrs Morton wouldn’t have noticed. She is too busy talking to Grace about what they might do, and where they might visit on their next day out. The zoo, perhaps. Although she does think that zoos are rather cruel, so maybe they could go to the river gardens or take a picnic to the woods at the edge of the town. When Grace is a little older, they could even catch a bus and travel to the seaside for the afternoon. Has Grace ever been to the seaside? It would be an adventure for them both. When Grace starts school, they would be more limited of course, but there are always weekends and long summer holidays. There will always be something to d
o, somewhere to go, something to get up for.

  Mrs Morton is still talking when she turns the corner of the avenue. She is explaining to Grace that one of her cousins has a friend with a caravan in Cromer. The site stands right by the coastal path. You can watch the seagulls plunge and soar, carried in ribbons of salty air, and all the little caravans look like scattered paper, littered along the grass at the top of the cliffs. She doesn’t see people gathered in the street, or the eggshell-pale of Grace’s mother, or Grace’s father sitting on the edge of the pavement with his hands plated to his skull. She only looks up when she hears the cry of Eric Lamb’s voice.

  You’ve found her, you’ve found her! he says.

  And then she sees the crowd, and the anger which digs into their faces. She sees Derek’s car spanning the kerb, its door stretched open; Harold Forbes and Sheila Dakin, standing on the path and staring up at number eleven, the curtains drawn in all the windows, as though the house were shutting its eyes against the shouting; John Creasy rushing across the road towards her; Dorothy Forbes folding and unfolding a tea towel, her face stitched with worry. Everything is in chaos. The avenue looks as if someone has shaken all the contents and tipped them back out on to the street.

  The dark, angry faces all surge forward and Grace begins to cry. As she does, Sylvia stumbles free of the crowd, the relief pulling at her legs until she can barely walk. She drops in front of the pushchair and folds herself into the child, whispering into her ear. The only tears belong to Grace. Sylvia looks like someone who has had all the crying wrung out of her.

  ‘Where was she?’ Derek is standing in front of Mrs Morton, his hands laced on the top of his head. She looks for a mention of mistrust in his eyes, but they are so crowded with relief, she struggles to see.

  She stares at the other faces. Her fingers make fists around the handles of the pushchair. ‘I found her,’ she says.

  Sylvia lifts Grace from her seat and the child locks into her mother, like pieces of puzzle. The pushchair feels too light now, weightless almost. As if it might drift away and disappear, and take Mrs Morton with it.