Laughing still she shook her head. He could take her blushing how he chose.
‘Let’s stick to music,’ she said.
‘If that’s how you want it.’
She’d hurt him now. Not good enough for you, then, his look said.
‘I didn’t mean that, Jim. I like you. I admire you. I’m glad I got to know you. But, well, we’ve really been talking about this already when we were talking about the kind of music we liked. Music is fun—I agree with you about that—but it isn’t just fun for me. It’s something deeply involving, something I can give my whole self to. It can be tragic, it can be almost incomprehensible, it can even be tedious in a special kind of way, but still … I want it all, not just the fun.’
‘And what have you got? A lot of tapes and books in a basement, and a ruddy great cat, and one little kid to watch after till he’s old enough to do without you?’
‘Yes, that’s fair. I’ve got myself into a rut. All I know is this isn’t the way out of it.’
He swilled his gin round in his glass, sniffed it luxuriously and drank.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll accept that. Let’s talk about something else. Those girls at the play centre. Ever strike you, Poppy, what a nice little set-up for blackmail someone might have there?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Classy old families some of them work for. And I bet you they gab around among themselves when they’re watching the kids. You’d just have to have one of them listening extra careful, and passing it on to her bloke, maybe.’
‘Jim, they’re my friends.’
‘You think about it. Could have something to do with what happened to the chap on the table. He could’ve been trying something in that line.’
‘You’re wrong about the girls—I’m sure you are … Did you actually see him, Jim? Naked, I mean, without the sheet on him? Saw that he hadn’t been mutilated or hurt?’
‘No, it’s just what they’re saying, but I bet it’s right. Why’d they go making something like that up?’
‘And his beard? Had they shaved it off after he was dead, or had it been done before?’
‘Have to wait for the lab tests for that, but to my eye it had been done recent. Sort of a dead fish look round his mouth, didn’t you think, spite of the pink bits? Why d’you want to know?’
‘I can’t help wondering about him. I mean if he’d tried following us again, perhaps when I hadn’t got Toby with me. I think he was watching outside here one night. Perhaps I did see him, but I didn’t recognise him because he’d taken his beard off. Suppose I’d stopped and talked to him. Suppose he’d just needed help … Oh, what was he like? What kind of a life had he had, what kind of a childhood? Somebody must have loved him once. He mattered. And now he’s nothing. There won’t even be a wreath on his grave. Don’t you think that’s awful?’
‘He’s not the only one. You’re working yourself up, Poppy. Getting morbid. You better snap out of it.’
‘Oh, if you say so. How about another gin, and I’ll find you the Hallelujah Chorus.’
‘Wouldn’t say no to either.’
When he’d gone, late, with the gin bottle half empty, Poppy lay in the bath and reeled the evening through her mind, seeing it all with the illusory clarity of the half-seas-over. He had made her a friendly offer and she had said no, rejected him, clumsily, rudely. Why? Snobbery, a little. Timidity, a bit more, maybe, though there was nothing to be afraid of. He would have made the whole thing so easy, an uninvolving romp like a game of squash or a twirl with a fresh partner in a Highland reel. He’d have been good, too, she guessed—better than Alex or Derek. Pity. Perhaps, after all … But no. It wasn’t what she wanted. At least she’d been right about that. She couldn’t live Jim’s life nor he hers. He’d simply have been another piece of furniture in the rut, along with the tapes and the bridge and Elias. What she did want, though? She tended to ask herself this question most evenings, after a couple of gins, but seldom when as woozy as she felt now. The usual answer was that she wanted someone’s life to share, to grow into, to become part of, while he grew into and became part of hers, as the nerve ends grow and branch into the brain of a child. She needed, desperately at times, physical, sensual love, but it had to be love. Alex had taught her that lesson, at least. But now, as she eased her body to and fro, setting up currents of water to caress her tingling skin, she found herself released from that body and able to float away, to perch in spirit on the glass shelf beside the toothbrush rack and look down at her drowsing self. A common case. The left-over half of a smashed marriage. For twenty-six years she had let herself be moulded to one functional shape, to be baked in the slow kiln of the years till the shape was fixed, one half of a clumsy jar. Then smash, and she was left lying useless, a shard on a rubbish tip. What chance was there that somewhere else on the tip, close by, there should be lying another similar shard which, with only a bit of filling along the crack, would fit on to hers so that together they could once again hold water? It was even more of a fantasy than the furry lover. The Poppy on the glass shelf folded its arms, crossed its dangling legs and gazed sardonically down at the pink shape in the Badedas-yellow water. (She must be really dreaming now, she knew in a corner of her mind, for the dichotomy to be so clear, so embodied.) You look soft enough, she told it. Floppy, to be blunt. But you’re still baked hard. Hard, broken edges, still shaped to your lost other half. Dead. If you want a living life to share you’ve got to have a living life to offer, flexible, self-sufficient. What are you afraid of? She glided down from the shelf and into the pink, comfortable flesh. It’s a pivotal moment, said some still wakeful corner of her mind. No it isn’t, answered another. It’s just gin.
Elias woke her, swearing at one of his enemies under the window. She was dead—laid out in some kind of preserving fluid in the chill, white mortuary. No she wasn’t. She was lying in a less than tepid bath, drunker than she’d been for months, but not ashamed. Giggling she rose and towelled her rubbery flesh, did her teeth and made swayingly for the bedroom. There was something she’d got to do. Start living? Something else, first, something important. She remembered as she was reaching to turn the light out. She got up again and staggered into the kitchen where she scrawled a memo to herself and used the magnetic ladybird to fix it to the fridge door.
‘Order wreath.’
3
‘Your Toby’s in all the papers,’ said Mrs Jinja.
Poppy was late today, having slept badly in the first half of the night and then overslept, still without real rest. She’d snatched her Guardian from the rack outside and rushed in with the money ready. Mrs Jinja showed her a Daily Mail. There he was, unmistakable on the front page, with his head peering out of the Wendy House over the top of the barrel while the WPC knelt at the other end as if prostrating herself before some masculine altar. RITUAL DEATH AT LONDON PLAYGROUND shouted the headline. The caption had his name and age right. One of the girls must have told them. The Mirror and the Sun had almost the same picture. Mrs Jinja showed her the centre spread of Today, which had several—that one, and one of the hut with Inspector Firth at the door and another of Poppy herself pushing the chair, with Sergeant Osborne and a policeman (she’d never noticed him at the time) walking beside her as if she’d already been arrested for the crime. Her face looked set with shock and grief. It could have been her own son she’d left splayed on the Lego table. The caption gave her name as Polly Tasker.
‘Not that good of you, is it?’ said Mrs Jinja. ‘You look a lot younger than that, mostly.’
‘Horrible. Horrible. They all want to know about the time when that man was following us—you remember?’
‘Of course I do. Was it the same man?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. But please don’t talk to them about it.’
‘Oh, of course not. You can trust me,’ said Mrs Jinja, pursing her lips as though no gossip had ever been known
to pass between them.
Janet had found the picture in her Guardian and read the news story too.
‘I simply don’t believe it,’ she said, ‘if that’s what they’re hinting at. I suppose it might happen in some really primitive culture.’
‘You should see the gutter papers,’ said Poppy. ‘But they’ve all got it wrong, I’m glad to say.’
She explained about the freesias, and the car exhaust.
‘My friend Jim—you remember, the lollipop man at the school who helped me that time—he says they’ll find out more in the post-mortem. He used to be a policeman.’
Typically it didn’t enter Janet’s head to wonder how Poppy had come to hold such a conversation.
‘That just makes it incredible in a different way,’ she said.
‘But it’s easier to think about somehow,’ said Poppy. ‘I don’t understand why it should be, but it is.’
‘They’ll close the play centre, for several days I should think. What are you going to do?’
‘Get together in different people’s houses, I expect. I hope someone remembers to ask us.’
‘Of course they will—they’ll want to know all about it. But are you sure you’re all right, Poppy? I could take Toby if you’re not up to it.’
‘Oh, I’m all right now. I was terribly grateful to you for coming home yesterday, but I’ll be OK today. The girls can be really supportive when you need them.’
‘Well, if you’re sure. I’ve got a meeting this morning when I’ve really got to fight my corner. I could take Toby, but it gives the others an unfair advantage being nice to me about him, and me not being able to concentrate.’
‘Off you go. Don’t forget the scythe-blades on your bike wheels.’
Janet grinned. That was how she saw herself, Poppy thought, charioted, helmed, bronze-bodiced, hurtling into the reeling male legions with her red hair streaming behind her. It would be interesting to see how she got on with Nell, who lived by a more contemporary sort of myth, urban terrorist in the gender war.
Janet left and Poppy took Toby up to dress. Recently this had become a bit of a struggle, since he’d worked out in the play-group that big kids don’t wear nappies, but had for once failed to make the connections that would allow the same to be true for him. Poppy had potty-trained her own babies from day one and was convinced that Toby could have been persuaded to use a pot without fuss or trauma by exploiting his experimental bent, but Janet, characteristically, had been unable to consider the possibility that Poppy could be right about any point on which they disagreed. The upshot was that Toby would now only consent to the indignity of having nappies put on him when he’d been allowed to do the same for his favourite cuddly toys. The polar bear fitted snugly, with an odd hint of kinky sex in the result, but nappy design and natural selection had not come together for the giraffe. Poppy had Toby half-way into his overalls when the telephone rang.
‘Mrs Tasker? Sergeant Caesar here. Detective Inspector Firth would like to see you, soon as poss. Can you nip along to the station? Know where it is?’
‘I’ve got my grandson with me all day.’
‘No one you can leave him with?’
‘No, but he’ll be sleeping, almost certainly, between about half past ten and twelve. If Mr Firth could come here then …’
‘No can do. There’s statements to be taken et cetera et cetera. Want me to send a car?’
‘Don’t bother. If I’ve got to come I might as well walk. It’s not that far. I could be with you in about half an hour. Try not to keep us waiting. Once he gets restless …’
‘See you soon, then.’
She finished dressing Toby, packed his changing bag, added a few toys and books, set the answerphone and started out. It was a windy dry morning with dead plane leaves rattling along the gutters, but there was a smell of rain in the air. Toby struggled with the straps, demanding to get out and walk, so she pacified him with his mug of juice and pushed on. I’ll tell the Inspector anything he wants to know about me, she thought, but not about anyone else. Not about Big Sue, or how upset Nell seemed to be. And I won’t let on that Jim told me anything about the body. That might get him into trouble. I wish he hadn’t said that about blackmail.
Instantly her mind was back in the repetitive, useless swirl of ideas and images that had kept her awake last night, more manageable now because less distorted by the delusions of the half-awake mind, but still troubling enough, because true. She could easily call up memories of groups of girls, sitting, particularly on the bench against the wall behind the painting area, and talking among themselves, chit-chat, telly-babble, pop-dross, but here and there more titillating kinds of small talk—their own lives, of course, and their boyfriends’ vagaries, and sometimes too their employers’. No doubt they were more discreet in Poppy’s company than they were among their closer cronies, but even in the last few weeks she’d learnt that Lucinda’s teenage stepbrother had what sounded like a serious drug problem, and who Serena’s father probably was, which the nominal father seemed not to know. If you were one of the cronies, or if you were clever at eavesdropping …
Poppy couldn’t banish from her mind the image of one of them—but who? Who? Because all of them were already elsewhere in the dream picture, recognisable, innocently chatting away, while there was still this shadowy other, listening, remembering …
The police station was a baleful Victorian building in a quiet avenue south of the Uxbridge Road. A group of what must be journalists waited by the steps in macs and anoraks. Two of them photographed her as she heaved the push-chair up the steps, but none took the ice-breaking opportunity of giving her a hand. She knew the form, having had to report a stolen handbag last spring. Gone were the days when you walked right in and told your woes to a fatherly sergeant at a long mahogany counter and he fetched out a St Peter-sized ledger and wrote in it in slow copperplate. Most of the old Station Office had been sealed off. Only a short section of the counter remained, and that had to be reached through a double set of swing doors, the inner set being electrically locked so that only one caller at a time need be admitted through to the counter. Between the two sets of doors there were three metal chairs for people waiting their turn.
Poppy had hit a quiet moment and was let straight through, only to be told that Mr Firth had been delayed somewhere, and she would have to wait. Crossly she returned through the inner doors and settled down to read Toby But Martin. It was this week’s favourite book, but with new surroundings to explore he was only slightly interested and the moment a newcomer pushed through the outer doors he was lost. It was the door mechanism that did it. When opened and then let go the two leaves hurtled towards their closed position, only to slow mysteriously and sigh shut over the last few inches. They performed this magic in both directions. The phenomenon cried out for investigation.
Poppy had hated swing doors since Hugo had crushed a finger in one at the age of three. If there’d been anywhere to go she’d have taken Toby away. She turned him round, but there was the other set of doors, with the counter beyond. But Martin had no charms, nor any of the other books, nor the glove-puppet wombat. He flung the plastic post van across the lobby. In desperation she gave him her handbag, normally forbidden, and let him unzip the compartments, but of course all the best things in it were forbidden too—the lipstick with its amazing combination of removable cap, protrudable stick and smear potential, the purse with its change. In Toby’s economy what you did with change was slot it through cracks in floorboards (Janet kept a pot of foreign coins for this purpose, to the confusion of future archaeologists), but this floor was solid.
The doors swung again as a woman buttocked her way in dragging a double push-chair. She had that grey, pulpy, used look you sometimes see on young mothers trapped in the prison of child-care, with their men out all day, no help, no contact with friends, each dragging hour a desert. Why didn’t more of them come to t
he play centre? They and their children were the ones who really needed it, not the Tobys and Deborahs and Dennys. Some did, of course, but far too few.
The push-chair held a sleeping baby and a boy a little older than Toby. As soon as his straps were undone the boy rushed to the outer door, shouting with excitement, shoved it open and let it swing back. The mother was lighting a cigarette and made no move to warn or stop him. Poppy managed to catch Toby as he flung himself off her lap. He squirmed in her grasp like a fresh-caught fish.
‘No, darling, not you,’ she said.
He threshed. He yearned with his arms for the door. It was his, a piece of apparatus he first of all mankind had discovered, and now this interloper … He yelled, full throat.
‘Ah, go on, love,’ said the woman. ‘Let him have a go.’
‘My son smashed his hand in a swing door,’ snapped Poppy. ‘That was thirty years ago and it’s still not right.’
The woman shrugged. There was no hope of fixing Toby into his push-chair in this state so Poppy slung him up on her shoulder, shovelled her belongings one-handed into the changing bag and turned towards the inner door. The previous caller was still at the counter, but one of the policemen was coming round, presumably to restore order in the lobby.
‘We can’t wait here,’ said Poppy as he came through the door. ‘Tell Mr Firth I’ll be back in ten minutes. He’d better be ready.’
‘You’d much better wait …’ he began but Poppy had already turned away, dragging the push-chair with her free hand. The boy had the door conveniently open so she strode through, the mixture of angers in her expressing themselves in an extra forcefulness of movement. Unfortunately Toby responded to the insult of passing so close to his rival with a sudden heave and wallow and she almost dropped him, letting go of the push-chair and unbalancing herself at the top of the steps as she struggled to hold on. She had to take the steps at a run, and would have fallen at the bottom if a man hadn’t caught her and held her steady. It was Mr Firth.
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