‘Where?’ Derek says. ‘Where did you find her?’
She can feel it. The big decision, attempting to be nothing, hiding amongst all the small decisions, hoping it will be unseen and unimportant. It’s making its way to the front of the queue, carrying everything in its pockets.
‘Beatrice, where was she?’ Eric Lamb is speaking now, but they are all listening. Everyone stares. Everyone waits for her answer.
She looks across at number eleven. The curtains are still tight to the glass, but at one of the upstairs windows she thinks she sees the edge of a figure.
‘The bandstand,’ she says. She doesn’t take her eyes from the window. ‘I found her in the bandstand.’
‘I fucking knew it.’ Thin Brian pushes out of the crowd, and marches back across the avenue, towards number eleven. He stops by Dorothy and Harold’s and lifts a piece of Yorkshire stone from the rockery.
‘That’s not the answer.’ Eric Lamb was shouting, but words are not powerful enough to pull Brian back. He is fired from a barrel of his own anger and he launches himself towards Walter Bishop’s, arms raised, temper lit.
Mrs Morton looks at the faces around her. She feels the feeding of a forbidden hunger – the stealth of approval. It’s in the quickness of the breaths and the width of the stares. She sees it in the wetness of Sheila Dakin’s lips, the tightness of Derek’s fist, the spark that moves between them all, building up its charge. She knows it’s been there all along, but now it can find its way out. Now it has an escape.
The crack of the stone on the glass seems to fill the whole avenue. The window splinters and splits. It holds for a fraction of a second, but then it falls in a sheet, smashing on to the concrete. It’s the kind of noise that makes your ears ring and your pulse march through your neck. But it’s not so much the noise, it’s the silence afterwards which is the most shocking.
‘Pervert,’ Brian screams towards the shards of glass. ‘Fucking pervert.’
The wind takes the hem of the curtains. They break free of the window frame and the material begins to beat against the brickwork, as though it’s trying to escape.
They all watch, stilled by the idea that what they had just witnessed could go unanswered.
Eric walks over to Thin Brian and stands a few feet short of him. ‘Come on, lad. Let’s leave it. There are other ways.’
Mrs Morton pulls the cardigan around her shoulders. The edges of the day are beginning to fade and the light is changing into the soft purple-blue of dusk, leaving them standing beneath a bruised sky. Derek takes the pushchair from her. As he does, he nods. It’s wrapped in a brief smile, but it is a nod all the same.
Her hands feel very empty.
Sylvia is still holding Grace, cradling the child’s head against her body. ‘How can we ever repay you?’ she says.
She holds on to the smell for as long as she can. ‘She’s a beautiful baby,’ says Mrs Morton. ‘Perhaps I’ll be able to spend some more time with her.’
Sylvia leans forward and kisses Mrs Morton on the cheek. There’s the smell. The smell of the undamaged and the unspoiled.
As she walks away, they are still gathered around number eleven – watching and waiting. She feels it again, the sense of a beginning, but this one is injured and fearful. This is a beginning she wants no part of. She walks home along empty pavements, carrying the weight of her shopping, past houses filled with the joined-up lives of other people. It’s the small decisions, the ones that slip themselves into your day unnoticed, the ones that wrap their weight in insignificance. These are the decisions that will bury you.
She thinks of the elephant, lying beneath the tomatoes and the cabbage. Grace will never remember. She will grow up and go to school, and make friends. She will find a joined-up life of her own, and one day, perhaps, she will hold a child in her arms and breathe the same smell and feel the same pull, and she will understand the need for a beginning. Grace will remember nothing.
But an elephant, an elephant never forgets.
The Drainpipe
21 August 1976
Jesus didn’t really look like Jesus, even when I squinted and sat back on my heels and tilted my head.
I wondered if He ever really had. The garages were empty shells again, and the pool of oil and the rotten tyre were silent and ignored. Even the leaves didn’t talk in the corners any more.
I put my face right up to the drainpipe. ‘Was it really you?’ I whispered.
I pulled my knees to my chest and listened.
I heard it – a few minutes after I thought it would be, but it was there: Tilly’s sandals slapping against the path, slower and softer than before. But I heard them.
She appeared a few seconds later, all smiles and carrying her sou’wester. She had taken the bobbles out of her hair, but it stayed in exactly the same position as if they were still there.
‘My mum says I can’t stay long,’ she said.
I moved across on the grass and she sat down next to me. ‘I thought you were only going to be ten minutes?’ I said.
‘I had to go back.’ She reached into her pocket. ‘I forgot to bring it with me.’
I looked at the bushbaby. ‘I can’t believe you carry a Whimsy around with you,’ I said.
‘Of course I do. You gave it to me. It’s important.’ She turned it over in her hands. ‘I thought you said they couldn’t be separated, though. I thought you said they were a pair.’
‘They are,’ I said. And I decided it really was true after all. You only really need two people to believe in the same thing, to feel as though you just might belong.
‘I was thinking,’ I sat back on the grass. ‘I don’t know if it really was Jesus after all.’
Tilly squinted and tilted her head to one side. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t actually matter, does it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well,’ Tilly stretched her legs into the sunshine, ‘it doesn’t actually matter if it was Jesus or Brian Clough, or just a stain on a garage wall. For a while, it brought us all together, didn’t it?’
‘For a while,’ I said.
‘It just shows, though,’ she said, ‘doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose it does,’ I said.
‘And, after all, Jesus is definitely in the drainpipe. He always has been.’
I sat up a bit straighter. ‘How do you mean?’
‘God is everywhere, Grace,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows that.’
And she waved her arms about, and I laughed, and waved my arms back.
*
We sat in silence. Everything was different somehow. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it felt as though the day had turned and shifted, as though something in the avenue had gone missing. It was only when I looked at the sky that I realized what it was.
‘Oh my goodness,’ I said.
We both stared up.
‘The sun has disappeared,’ said Tilly. ‘Where did it go?’
The sky was an iron-grey, blackened and angry. It grew darker as we watched, anchoring itself to the rooftops and forcing the daylight back under the ground.
‘It’s still hot, though,’ said Tilly. ‘How can it be so hot when there isn’t any sun?’
‘It’s because it’s still there.’ I pointed into nothing. ‘It hasn’t disappeared. It can’t just disappear. It’s impossible. It’s only that we can’t see it any more.’
We were both still thinking about this when I remembered the time.
‘Quick, we’ve got to go, Tilly. It’s almost here.’
‘What’s almost here?’ she said.
‘The bus. Today is the day.’
‘The day for what?’ She pulled her sou’wester down and dusted the chippings from her socks.
‘The day we’ve all been waiting for,’ I said. ‘The day Mrs Creasy comes home.’
The Avenue
21 August 1976
When we turned the corner, everyone was already gathered in the middle of the avenue.
‘It’s nearly time,’ I said and looked at my watch.
*
We didn’t notice to begin with. It was Thin Brian who saw it first.
‘Look at that cat,’ he said.
We all stared at the bottom of the avenue.
Dorothy Forbes dropped her duster. ‘Whiskey?’
‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘after all this time.’
The cat padded along the pavement, each careful paw placed on the concrete, edging its way past the fences and the walls. It looked as though it knew exactly where it was going.
It reached Mrs Forbes and jumped into her arms.
‘Whiskey,’ she said again and kissed the top of its head. ‘You didn’t disappear after all.’
‘I told you so,’ said my father. ‘I told you it would come back.’
Brian peered around his mother’s shoulder. ‘How long has it been missing, Dot?’
‘Since the night of the fire,’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘Haven’t you, my darling?’
The cat purred and rubbed, and kneaded its paws into Mrs Forbes’ cardigan.
‘Nasty taxi, scaring you off like that.’
Mrs Forbes kneaded whiskey back again.
Sheila Dakin was frowning at her. ‘What taxi was that, Dot?’
‘The one that brought Walter and his mother home.’ Mrs Forbes carried on kneading, and gave more kisses to the top of Whiskey’s head. ‘I said to Margaret, it’s no wonder he ran off. Big, scary car like that, pulling up in the avenue in the middle of the night.’
‘You knew she was in the house?’ said Mrs Dakin.
Mrs Forbes smiled. ‘I thought they both were,’ she said.
Mrs Dakin’s mouth fell open, but no words seemed to want to come out of it.
‘It’s a wonder you recognized it,’ said Brian, ‘after all this time.’
When Mrs Forbes answered, she didn’t look at Brian. She looked at Sheila Dakin instead. ‘That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? You can’t ever forget what you’ve seen,’ she said. ‘Even if your photographs have gone, you can just pull it out of your mind whenever it might be useful to you. Memories are only forgotten when someone dies. It’s a dangerous thing. Worth remembering, that is.’
And she carried on staring at Mrs Dakin, even after the words had disappeared.
I looked at Tilly and shrugged, and Tilly looked at me and shrugged back again.
*
We could hear the bus from miles away. We could hear it push around the estate, stopping and starting on corners, hissing its brakes, and coughing and spluttering in the heat. The sky seemed to become even darker, and the air even thinner, and I watched Mr Forbes take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe at his forehead.
‘She’s nearly here,’ said Mr Creasy.
Sheila Dakin lit a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke it. Instead, it just rested between her fingers, burning itself into a thread of ash, as she stared at Dorothy Forbes.
We were standing like that, all of us watching the bottom of the avenue, when he turned the corner.
Walter Bishop.
He carried an umbrella and had his coat over his arm, and instead of shuffling and staring at the pavement, he looked straight at all of us as he walked past everyone’s houses.
‘Well,’ he said, when he reached our little collection. ‘This is quite a welcoming committee, isn’t it?’
‘Mrs Creasy is coming home,’ I said.
‘So I hear.’ He put down his umbrella and his coat, and reached over to stroke the top of Whiskey’s head.
‘We’re all very excited,’ said Tilly.
‘So I see,’ he said. ‘Although for people who are very excited, none of you look especially happy about it.’ He laughed.
I had never seen Walter Bishop laugh before. He looked like a completely new person.
Walter stood for a moment and stared at the sky. When he had finished staring, he picked up his umbrella and his coat, and his eyes met everyone in turn.
There was silence – the kind of silence that only Walter Bishop was comfortable with.
After a few minutes, he turned to Mrs Forbes. ‘I’d get that cat inside if I were you,’ he said, ‘it looks like rain.’
As he spoke, there was a rumble in the distance. At first, I thought it was still the sound of the bus, but then I realized it wasn’t. It was thunder. Creeping across the horizon and cutting into the dark, slate-grey of the sky. It was quiet and indifferent at the beginning, but then it grew louder, joining in with the sound of the engine, until the whole avenue started to snarl and growl, and all the little houses seemed to shake in their gardens.
The brakes hissed and the engine spat, and the bus pulled up at the bottom of the road.
It was then that the first drops began to hit the pavement. There were just a few at first, smacking the concrete as though they had been thrown at us, but then there were more, lots more. And they raced and gathered until there was no space in between the sounds, just the unbroken, unquiet noise of rain, carrying off the heat and the dust and washing away Jesus as if he had never been there in the first place.
The bus still waited. And we stared.
And we watched Mrs Creasy’s feet appear on the platform.
‘She’s here,’ said Mr Creasy.
‘Oh Jesus Christ.’
I turned around to see who had spoken. I looked at all their faces. Mr and Mrs Forbes, and Clive from the British Legion. Thin Brian and his mother, and Sheila Dakin, who hadn’t taken her eyes from Dorothy Forbes. Eric Lamb and my parents, and Mrs Morton, who still held on to the elephant.
Walter Bishop stood underneath his umbrella and watched everyone with me.
I knew I’d heard the words, but I couldn’t decide who it was.
I turned back to wait for Mrs Creasy.
It didn’t really matter. It could have been any one of them.
We all stood in the middle of the avenue, watching. The rain dripped from our hair and from our noses, and it pushed through our clothes and soaked itself into our skin.
I looked at Tilly, and she smiled at me from under her sou’wester.
And it felt like the end of summer.
Acknowledgments
To list all the people who have cheered for Goats and Sheep would be impossible, so I would just like to say a huge thank you to the writing community as a whole for the most incredible support and encouragement, with an especially big thank you to Kerry Hudson and Tom Bromley. A huge debt of gratitude to my amazing agent Sue Armstrong, and all the team at Conville & Walsh, and to the very lovely and very talented Katie Espiner, and everyone at The Borough Press and HarperCollins. Thank you also to the staff at The George Bryan Centre in Tamworth and ECW at the Radbourne Unit in Derby, for teaching me to understand the importance of a narrative, and for caring for the goats as well as the sheep. Lastly, thank you to the patients I have had the privilege to meet. Our paths may have only crossed for a short time, but your courage, wisdom and humour will stay with m
e forever.
About the Author
Joanna Cannon graduated from Leicester Medical School and worked as a hospital doctor, before specialising in psychiatry. She lives in the Peak District with her family and her dog. The Trouble With Goats and Sheep is her first novel.
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
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Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Page 31