by Fiona Shaw
Robert put his hand flat on the table, fingers out, and slowly slid it towards Charlie’s plate till his fingertips nearly touched the rim. This was an old game. Two pieces of toast were still stacked, and Charlie was eating a third. Smoothly, like a snake in a nest, Robert caught a piece beneath his fingers and dragged it away across the table towards him. This was Charlie’s cue to yell out, to stop him if he could, and sometimes Charlie won and sometimes Robert would slip the food in his mouth at the last minute, laughing at Charlie’s rage.
Today he didn’t mind about eating it or not, he just wanted to remind the boy that here they were, father and son again. But Charlie didn’t yell out or grab, he only watched, and his eyes dropped to his plate again. So Robert put the toast back, though the smell of the melted butter had his taste buds going, and he got up and went to the window. He was jittery. Could do with a cigarette.
Remember what she said, he told himself. The boy’s done nothing wrong.
‘We’ll have fun,’ he said again to Charlie.
He listened out. He’d hear her before he could see her, that clip-clip her heels made.
He lit up. He hadn’t been able to sit still, ever since Pam had told him. He shook his head. You couldn’t undo what was done, but if he’d known then. Christ, if he’d known then, he’d have taken a torch to that doctor. He looked back to the table. Charlie was still eating, on to the last piece. He was quite a good-looking lad, skinny but decent proportions. Could be strong when he was bigger. Not badly co-ordinated either. Handy with a ball if he’d put his mind to it. Robert was determined, now he had him here and away from his mother, that Charlie would put his mind to it and less of his fancy notions.
The silence in the room was beginning to beat in his ears. He stared through the window, willed her to be back soon.
‘She’ll get the dinner on when she’s in,’ he said aloud, to break the pressure, ‘so that’ll do yer till then.’
That day going to the doctor’s, he hadn’t wanted to take Charlie in the first place. The boy only had a few bruises. It was Lydia had badgered him into it, what with him off for the day he couldn’t remember why.
Robert knew Charlie had been in a fight. You didn’t get bruises like that by colliding with some slippery steps, or whatever nonsense it was the boy had said. He’d been pleased, though he hadn’t said so to Lydia, because it meant the lad was showing some spirit at last. But she’d gone on at him till he’d given in, so he’d taken Charlie to the doctor’s surgery and the doctor was that bloody woman.
He should have seen it. He should have spotted what was going on. All that stuff about bees. She knew what she was up to from the start. She was too bloody nice. Wouldn’t get a man behaving like that. Gave him the creeps. He should have got up and gone that day, taken Charlie with him. He should have punched her in the face, woman and all.
Charlie had finished the toast and was watching his father, pale-faced and blinking.
‘Well?’ Robert said. ‘Long time no see. Tell me what you’ve been up to. How’s that pretty teacher been getting on, then?’
But he didn’t hear the reply because he was thinking now. Once Irene was in and could watch the boy, he must be on with the next bit of the plan.
They’d talked it through, Pam and him, guessing at what Lydia would do, where she’d go when Charlie didn’t come home, and what they needed to say to keep her off.
‘Better if she hears it from me,’ Pam said. ‘I’ll keep my cool, make sure she understands right.’
So he needed to be over to Pam’s and tell her he’d done it. Because, whatever he’d said to Charlie, he hadn’t written Lydia any kind of letter, and when she couldn’t find the boy anywhere else, that was where she’d end up. Then she’d get it from Pam, good as if he’d told her, perverted bitch. If she was worried meantime, it was less than she deserved.
Charlie listened to his breath, the tiny whistle as he breathed in, felt the pull through his nose and down his throat. His hands were heavy on his lap, so heavy now that he couldn’t imagine lifting them, and they were fused with his legs. He couldn’t feel where his legs ended and his hands began, or the other way around. On the other side of the room, his father looked out of the window and smoked cigarettes and muttered. His father had asked him about a teacher, but he hadn’t listened to the answer, so Charlie stopped speaking mid-sentence and since then he’d sat like this, perfectly still.
When the woman came in, Charlie watched his father kiss her full on the mouth and put his hand on her bottom. She had on high heels like his mother wore to go out on a Friday and a clingy dress that meant you could see the shape of her very well. Her bosom looked like two cones, but Charlie had it on authority from Bobby that that wasn’t natural; it was the brassière that made them like that.
Charlie saw at once why his father put his hand on her bottom, what with the bosom and heels and the very red lipstick, and other things about her that Charlie recognized. He didn’t know how he recognized them, but he did. He felt them in his bones, though if anybody had asked him, he couldn’t have described what they were. Charlie saw that she had more of these things he couldn’t name than his mother did, and he hated his father for choosing her instead.
‘Irene, listen,’ he heard his father say, pulling her to the window. She turned and smiled towards Charlie at the same time as his father took her by the arm, and Charlie stared down again, at the plate with its crumbs. Their voices murmured for a minute or two, and then they stopped and the woman walked over to Charlie and kneeled by his chair.
‘Pleased to meet you. My name’s Irene.’ She paused, but Charlie didn’t say anything, and then she went on. ‘Robert’s got to go out for a bit, and I’m going to cook tea. Sausages. You’ll like sausages, won’t you?’
Charlie looked over at his father. He was putting on his coat, finding his hat, and as hard as Charlie looked at him, he couldn’t get his father to look his way. Only at the last, before he went out, did Robert turn to his son.
‘It’s all for you, this,’ he said. ‘So you do as she says.’
‘He’ll be good as gold,’ the woman said, and Charlie could tell that any minute now she’d pat him on the head. ‘We’ll have a nice time, getting to know each other.’
Then with a last scowl at his son, Robert was gone. Charlie sat on the chair and, quiet in his head, he hummed his tune again and tried not to wonder.
35
Neither of them spoke in the car. Jean drove slowly and hesitantly, not because the road was icy, though it was, or the car in some way failing. But because the future had become fearful and it was hard, driving into it. The streets were empty and glistened in the headlamps with a million pricks of ice where the day’s melt had frozen again under the stars. Beside her, Lydia sat very still.
Jean stopped the car a street away, as they had decided, and with a last look to her, Lydia got out.
She walked the length of the street as though she had never walked it before, past the waste ground and past all the houses with their eyes curtained against the cold. For a minute she stood in front of Pam’s door, then she lifted the knocker.
Pam didn’t say a word. She only stood, arms folded over her flowered bosom, looking down on Lydia from her step above.
‘I’m looking for Charlie,’ Lydia said in a quiet voice.
‘You would be.’
‘When he wasn’t home from school,’ Lydia said. She waited. ‘Bobby told me –’ she said, but Pam interrupted.
‘Bobby?’ her voice sharp as acid.
Lydia went on. ‘He said Robert had come to the school gates and taken Charlie with him?’ her voice rising to an appeal, despite herself.
‘Well, since you know it from Bobby, I don’t see why you’re here asking.’ Pam turned away, back towards the inside. ‘Excuse me, Lydia,’ she said, spitting the name as if it tasted bitter. ‘I’ve got better things to be doing than –’
‘Where is he, Pam?’ Lydia’s voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through t
he street air, and it made Pam glance back. ‘Where is he?’ Lydia said again, before Pam could shut the door on her. ‘Where is he?’ and her voice was getting louder now.
‘Stop it!’ Pam said. ‘For God’s sake. The whole street.’ With another glance out, she gestured her in, pressing flat to the wall as Lydia passed, as if fearful of catching something.
Lydia stood at the end of the hall, neither staying nor leaving. Above her, the stairs rose. On her left, the door was open, but she didn’t go in.
‘He’s not here,’ Pam said.
The smell of dinner was thick and Lydia’s gorge rose. She pictured what she’d left. They’d put the tree up in the living room and Sarah was there with the girls, making paper chains and cutting out stars. Leaving, she’d walked outside through square pools of light that fell from the windows. The house was like a beacon.
‘Don’t turn any of them off before we’re back,’ she’d said. ‘I want it lit up like Blackpool pier.’
The two women faced each other off in the narrow hall.
‘Where’s Robert and where’s my son?’ Lydia said.
‘He’s holding on to Charlie now. I knew it years ago. You don’t deserve to be a mother.’
The words cut a thin line through Lydia, a wound made but not yet properly felt.
‘No.’
‘Yes. His girlfriend, and she’ll be his wife soon enough, she’s getting him his tea tonight.’
Lydia shook her head. ‘His supper’s ready and he’s been out long enough. I want him home now.’
‘She’s a nice girl,’ Pam said, as though Lydia hadn’t spoken. ‘A secretary. I expect they’re getting on like a house on fire.’
‘His supper’s ready at home,’ Lydia said. ‘I need to get him before it’s spoilt.’
‘Supper is it now?’ Pam said. ‘Too good for tea, are we? You always did have your airs.’
Turning her head away in frustration, Lydia looked down at the tiled floor, its simple geometry a moment’s relief. She looked up at Pam.
‘But Robert doesn’t even like him,’ she said. ‘He left, he walked out. On Charlie, too.’
Pam leaned in at Lydia, her mouth distorted. ‘Now we know why, don’t we?’ she said, her eyes chasing up and down.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Lydia said. ‘And I need Charlie back. I need him home.’
‘It was him that told us. Him that let on what you get up to with that doctor. We should have guessed, her inviting you in to her home, giving you your cosy job.’
‘Charlie?’
‘It’s disgusting.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘So Robert’s taken him now and don’t you dare go near him.’
‘Tell me where he lives. I need to know where Charlie is.’
‘He’ll get lawyers if you go near. Stand up in court for all the world to hear. Then you’ll never clap eyes on Charlie again.’
Lydia didn’t know what to do with her hands, so they held each other in front of her. Or her voice, so it stayed inside her mouth, a small sound coming out that didn’t sound like her. Didn’t know what to do with her eyes, which kept on looking at things. Through the doorway the table laid for two people, knives and forks and cups and saucers, Pam’s work pinafore hanging on a chair. The basket with knitting, needles spiking up like a V for victory.
But the objects didn’t make sense. She saw the clock on the mantelpiece and the mirror above, and in the mirror there was a face looking back, bleached under the yellowed light, a face that was staring at something she couldn’t begin to fit in with tables and chairs and tea laid out.
‘Pam, please,’ Lydia said, but Pam set her lips hard and she pinched her eyes till they were pebbles in her face. Then something broke inside Lydia and such an ache rose in her chest, such a heat beneath her skin that she cried out in fury, in grief. She cried out of a pain that was new and raw, the edges still torn and ragged, and yet such a near familiar, as if it had been there all the time, just not felt till now.
‘I need my son. Tell me where he is. I’m his mother.’ And in the mirror she saw the bleached face crack.
Pam waited till Lydia turned to her. Then shook her head, slowly and carefully, and pointed back to the front door.
‘Our tea’s ready,’ she said. ‘Go back to your doctor. You’re lucky it’s not worse for you. But I shouldn’t try anything. There’s enough of us know about you now. We’d only have to call in the authorities and it would be horrid, that, for Charlie. Who knows what would happen to you.’
Lydia walked fast away from the house, everything in her held tight because she would not, must not cry. Not here, not in this street, not before other people’s doors and windows. Jean was waiting for her a street away. She must get there, to the car. She was nearly to the top of the street when she heard the footsteps, running, coming nearer.
‘Charlie!’ She shouted his name as she turned, even as she heard, even as she knew already that it was not him.
But the figure that came to her and took her hand and held it was Annie, muffled up in a big coat and a scarf and a hat.
‘I couldn’t come downstairs,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t see you there. But I heard. I heard what she said.’
‘Do you know where he is?’ Lydia said, but Annie shook her head.
‘They don’t trust me. They’ve told Irene – that’s Robert’s, you know – they’ve told her not to tell either.’
‘She’ll punish you, Annie. If she finds out you’ve come after me.’
‘I don’t care. There’s more to worry about in the world than my mother.’ Annie stepped back as if she’d said too much. ‘I’ll come and tell you, soon as I find anything out,’ she said, and they stayed standing like that at the top of the street, till the sound of other voices coming towards them broke in.
‘You’d better go back,’ Lydia said, putting her hand on Annie’s darkened cheek, and they held each other tight. Something broke through the thick of Lydia’s mind and she remembered about Annie and what Dot had said. She wondered what Pam knew of her own daughter right now and would have asked her then, before grief pushed the thought away. But, as if guessing at it, Annie slipped from her arms and was gone into the night.
‘Careful, love,’ Lydia whispered after her, before turning back into her own, hard darkness.
36
The woman called Irene was still kneeling by Charlie’s chair when his dad closed the door. After she got up, she had to brush off bits from the floor where they had stuck into her knees.
‘Nice tune,’ she said.
He didn’t want to speak to her, so he went on humming, and she started cooking his tea in the kitchen.
His mum would be making his tea now. She would be asking him to do things, not letting him sit here and hum. He wondered if she was worried, or if she knew where he was. He wondered if she was missing him. He hummed harder.
‘Charlie?’ Irene said his name like a question. She was standing in the doorway, but he didn’t turn his head, or stop humming. ‘Do you like ketchup?’
Why did his dad have to go out? He’d come to get him at the school railings. He’d brought him here.
Irene gave him her handkerchief. She put it down on the table and she didn’t ask him anything.
Charlie ate the sausages, the mashed potato and peas. Irene sat nearly opposite him and read a book. It was called Appointment with Romance.
She took his plate when he had finished and brought in a bowl of yellow jelly. Pineapple. It had a cherry on top and she made a noise as she put it down like dah-dum. Then she went and lit the fire, kicked off her shoes and sat with her back against the settee. Charlie sat on at the table with the jelly before him and he hummed again in his head.
He liked jelly. He liked red best, but he liked yellow too. His mother had a mould like a rabbit and, when he was little, his dad would cut the nose off and laugh.
‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Irene said. She was watching him.
She shrugged. ‘Weren’t any rabbits about this morning.’
He could see her out the corner of his eye. She sat doing nothing. She wasn’t like his mother.
She’d left her book on the table. He looked at the picture on the cover. A woman with blond hair stood outside a big house. She had her hands behind her head. She looked a bit surprised. Behind her was a man in a dark suit with ripply hair. He was smoking a pipe and he didn’t look surprised at all.
Charlie could smell the jelly. It smelled the same as the pineapple cubes from the sweet shop that left your tongue rough. He lifted the cherry off and ate it slowly. The sweetness made his mouth water. He didn’t think about his mother, or the Christmas tree with its real candles. He didn’t think at all.
‘You must be getting freezing over there.’ Her voice surprised him; he didn’t know where he had been. ‘You could come here, nearer the fire,’ she said.
He sat at one corner of the settee. The fire had settled in and he wondered that she wasn’t too hot. Her feet at least. She had her legs stretched out in front.
‘When will my dad be back?’
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Do you see these?’
He could see the coloured varnish on her stockinged toes.
‘Wages of sin,’ she said.
‘My mum does that too. But only in the summer,’ he said, like an accusation.
‘No. These,’ she said, pointing, and then he saw that she had lumps on each of her feet, like big knuckles grown on below her big toe. He looked at her face for an answer.
‘It’s the pointy toes,’ she said. ‘My shoes.’
‘Does it hurt?’
She nodded.
‘Why don’t you wear different shoes?’
She shook her head.
‘I wouldn’t have the job without the shoes. You’ll understand when you’re older.’
But he understood already. The lumps on her feet and her pointy bosom. He bet his dad didn’t mind about her feet.