by Francis King
‘It’s not only that we might not exist,’ Lois said to Brian. ‘Poor little Suzie might never have existed.’
He stared at her with a desperate intensity. At work, he too had sensed that people once so matey now avoided his company, if they possibly could do so. ‘Hello, Brian. How are things? Everything okay?’ Then they hurried on, without waiting for the answer. How could everything be okay? His whole large, firm body would throb with rage against them for the idiocy of it.
‘But she did exist,’ he now said. ‘We must never forget that.’
‘Of course I never forget it! And never will! Sometimes – it’s so odd – I feel that she still exists. Something rouses me in the middle of the night – just as she would sometimes rouse me when she’d had a nightmare. Of course I can’t see her – never. But I think – I really think for a moment – yes, she’s with us.’
‘Why don’t you wake me?’
She did not answer. Then at last she mumbled: ‘ Well, you need your sleep.’
He went across to the chair where she was seated, knelt before her, and took both her hands in his. He looked up imploringly at her with his wide-spaced, pale-blue eyes.
She jerked her head aside. ‘Why does that bloody enquiry take so long? Why don’t they do something?’
‘These things always take time.’ But he too constantly simmered with an inner fury at the delays. ‘Those two wretches have both been suspended. They have to wait, we have to wait.’
Later that night, when he was snoring beside her, she awoke and peered, half in hope and half in apprehension, around the room. But no, on this occasion – unlike those many occasions before it – she received no sense of Suzie’s presence. She did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
Slowly, as quietly as possible so as not to rouse him, she clambered out of the high bed and crossed over to the door. Its handle felt cold on her palm. The boards creaked under her bare feet as, one hand to the wall, she made her way down the corridor. She often came into this room when Brian was at work and she was alone. If he knew that she had done so or was about to do so, he would chide her with a mixture of shared sorrow, love and exasperation – ‘It’s no good, love. Useless. It only makes things worse.’
‘I suppose you think we ought to forget her? Oh, I so much want her back! It’s all I want!’
He made no answer. No answer was possible.
She went into the narrow room, lit by the huge disk of an autumn moon far out above the fields belonging to neighbours whom they would once often meet at the pub or in each other’s homes but whom they now rarely saw. She sat down on the bed. She pressed her hands together between her knees and bit on her lower lip. ‘Come! Come! Oh, come back to us, Suzie!’ Her whole being said it, a silent entreaty. Briefly a shadow seemed to flicker between her body, tense with supplication, and the extravagant moonlight. She almost thought that she heard a laugh, high, bell-like. Frantically, she turned her head from side to side. Then the moment had passed. She was alone, with the motionless, mute dolls and animals still ranged on the shelf that ran along the length of the bed. She felt suffocated by the silence and her solitariness. She gasped for breath. It was as if she herself were drowning in that river, her saturated clothes pulling her down, down, down, however frantically she struggled.
‘I think they’ve forgotten us. They not only don’t notice us, they’ve forgotten us.’
‘These things all take time,’ he said wearily. That’s how the system works.’
‘Fuck the system! At first the police were all soft voices and concern. Now we never hear a word from them. Was it – was it all pretending? And it’s the same with Mr Bodley. For a few days – until the funeral was over … D’you remember how he said on television that this was a tragedy that no one connected with the school would ever forget? Well, he’s forgotten bloody quick, and so have the rest of them.’
‘People have to get on with their lives. He has a school to run. The police have crimes to solve.’ He sighed. ‘It’s understandable.’ But secretly, against all reason, he shared her indignation and rage. He too wanted to shout out: ‘Pay attention to us! Don’t forget us! Notice us! For God’s sake notice us!’
Without telling him, Lois decided to return to the river. She could not drive there because, now that she no longer had the school run to make, Brian took the car to get to the office instead of travelling there by the bus. As she walked the two miles or so to the station, a car passed her and she saw that it was Dotty Lawson’s cumbrous, ancient, dusty Volvo. There were three children in it, two of them Dotty’s own tall, serene daughters and one a diminutive, fidgety boy belonging to some newcomers to the village. Once Suzie would also have been in the car, since Dotty and Lois had taken it in turns to do the school run. Now that boy had supplanted her. From time to time, unbidden and at once repudiated in horror, the thought would insinuate itself into her consciousness: Why couldn’t that pathetic shrimp of a creature have drowned on that school excursion, instead of little Suzie? Everyone was always saying that it was a scandal how, grubby and dishevelled, he was all too clearly neglected by parents with high-powered jobs in television.
Lois wondered briefly if Dotty would stop to offer a lift or at least blow her horn or wave in greeting. But she drove implacably on, without even a momentary slackening of speed. She must have seen me. She must have. Dotty’s two daughters, like so many of the other pupils, had come with their parents to the funeral. The younger of the two, along with some other of the girls, had sobbed noisily, her hand cupped over her mouth and nose as though she feared that she was about to vomit out her grief. That had been less than three months ago. It might have been years.
Well, at least the woman slumped opposite on the sparsely occupied train, noticed her. ‘What a lovely day!’ she remarked, smiling as a podgy hand tucked the errant front of her broderie anglaise blouse back inside the loosely woven tweed skirt that bulged over her protruding stomach. Was she pregnant, Lois wondered. Lois often thought of pregnancy for herself, as people think of suicide, with a mixture of dread and the feeling that it might put an end to an intolerable situation. Did she really want to have another child, as Brian so often urged? No, no! Such an attempt to replace the irreplaceable would be a betrayal of Suzie. Why couldn’t he understand that? ‘Yes, it is lovely,’ she agreed with the woman, polite from habit.
The woman continued to make desultory conversation. She offered Lois her Daily Mail – she’d finished with it, she said. She even offered a sandwich. Then, discouraged by the two curt refusals and bare acknowledgement of this or that friendly remark, she gave up and stared out of the window instead.
The path down to the riverside was treacherous with a mulch of sodden leaves. At one point, as the recently fallen rain dripped off the bare branches of the trees on to the back of her lowered head, she slithered on a piece of abandoned cling-film and saved herself only by clutching at a tree-trunk. The tree-trunk left a greenish-grey stain on her palm. No one was about, either on the path or, when she finally reached it, on the curve of the riverbank, its grass glistening with what to her seemed a repellently metallic sheen. When she and Brian had last come here, there had been a number of anoraked anglers perched on canvas stools, isolated from each other and seemingly totally unaware of the woman who was sobbing violently, her face pressed into her companion’s chest, while his arms encircled her.
She ventured towards the rickety jetty. The police thought that Suzie must have walked out along it, bent over to peer at something – perhaps that fish briefly glimpsed over there, Lois now thought, perhaps that Fanta bottle – and then slipped or lost her balance. Might someone have pushed her? It was Brian who had voiced that suspicion. The police thought not. There was no sign of assault, a willowy policeman had said. No sign of assault of any kind, the stout policewoman with him had confirmed. She had made a point of adding the last three words, even emphasising them, having intuited that Lois had speculated, in ever spiralling anguish, that before the d
rowning her beloved only child had been sexually assaulted.
Once again Lois asked herself: Oh, why, why had Suzie wandered off so far from the others? Had they been bullying her? Had those two wretched teachers, lovers she suspected, the woman with those huge, woebegone, dark-rimmed eyes, the man with those finicky gestures and those sudden pursings of his lips, said something to upset her? She had always been not merely an independent, but also an extremely secretive child. Now she had taken her last secret to the grave.
She stared out across the oily, almost motionless expanse of water. I could kill those two, she thought. Yes, lovers. Too much taken up with each other to notice what the children were doing. Criminals. Monsters. The sudden intensity of her hatred almost choked her. Desperately she looked around her for another human presence. She saw the black smudge of a crow high up in a dripping tree. Far off a dog was barking, but it was out of sight. The fish that she had seen before, or another fish like it, wriggled up briefly, a glinting silver dagger, then was lost in the murk of the water round the jetty.
In the train she stared out of the window as the light faded over the countryside unravelling beside her. Now there was no passenger opposite to attempt to lure her into banal conversation. At first she was glad of that, then she began to wish that there was someone, anyone.
Suddenly she thought of Suzie and the squirrel. For some unfathomable reason that spring the garden had pullulated with squirrels, as it had never done before. Most of them, whisking about the lawn or from branch to branch of the chestnut trees beyond it, would cautiously sidle towards the girl as she no less cautiously edged towards them, gazing intently at them while holding out some unshelled peanuts on a palm. Stooping now, the palm still outstretched, she would furiously will one of them to approach near enough to take one of the offerings. But only the smallest ever did so. That it was the same one on each occasion, she knew because down one of its sides it had a long, purple scar, an indentation in its otherwise luxuriant fur. Lois said that it must have been attacked by a dog, a cat or even a fox and then somehow escaped. This squirrel became for Suzie ‘ my squirrel’. Having assumed from the first that it was male, she had soon come to refer to it and even address it as ‘Mr Squirrel’. Delicately, nose twitching, it would lower its head to her outstretched palm, open its mouth to show its small, murderously incisive teeth, and then would remove its prize and skip away with it. After that, she would scatter the rest of the peanuts for the others.
Then one day, for no apparent reason, instead of taking the nut in its jaws, it bit deep into the cushion of flesh below her thumb, and hung on there, its plump body twisting from side to side as though in a demonic frenzy, before racing off to the nearest tree and shooting up it. For a few seconds Suzie had suffered the attack in silence. Then she had let out a single piercing scream, which had brought Lois racing out from the kitchen to see what had happened. A series of gulping wails followed the scream.
The doctor had insisted on a tetanus injection, since the wound was deep. On the way home from his surgery, Suzie kept putting the lacerated hand over her mouth as though to suck at the wound under its dressing. ‘Why did he do that? I don’t understand. I’ve always loved him. I was feeding him. What happened?’
It was a mystery that defied explanation.
Repeatedly Suzie would revert to the subject. ‘I was doing nothing to harm him. Nothing to hurt him. Why, mummy, why?’
She was a child who had never done anything in her life to hurt anybody. Her nature, as everyone remarked, was sweet, placid, caring. In no way had she deserved that bite so deep that it needed stitching. In no way had she deserved that terrible accident, alone and unnoticed, on the rotting jetty.
They approached each other, Dotty on one side of the street and Lois on the other. Now she’ll pretend not to notice me, Lois thought. She’ll turn her head to look up at those roses clambering over that wall, or she’ll scuttle down that alley to the library. But to her amazement Dotty waved the newspaper that she was carrying and shouted ‘Lois! Lois! I was corning over to see you.’
Lois halted and waited.
Dotty raced across the road, causing an oncoming van to hoot, brake violently and swerve. ‘Have you seen this?’ Now she was brandishing the paper.
‘No. What is it?’
The paper was the free local one, pushed through the letter-box by an elderly woman piloting her load in what looked like a laundry basket on a rickety trolley. Lois and Brian always at once consigned the rag, unread, to the dustbin.
‘It’s about the plan for the school celebrations.’
‘Celebrations? What celebrations?’
‘The hundredth anniversary. You know. It’s just coming up.’
‘Celebrations?’ At first Lois was merely stunned. ‘But how can they be celebrating …’
‘That’s what I thought, How can they celebrate anything after the tragedy of poor little Suzie’s …? I mean we’ve not even had the result of the enquiry. Those two are still suspended. As soon as I saw the item, I hurried over to show it to you.’ Dotty was someone who enjoyed being indignant. She was constantly working herself up over grass verges left uncut, cars illegally parked, teenagers fooling about, noise, litter, vandalism.
‘It’s disgusting! How could they, how could they?’ Lois was no longer merely stunned. All at once she was shaking with fury.
Dotty was delighted with this reaction. ‘What can we do about it?’
‘I’ll speak to Brian.’
‘We must do something. They say here’ – she shook the paper – ‘that Princess Anne is going to come. Can you imagine?’
But Dotty’s indignation had a way of flaring up briefly and then guttering out. It did so on this occasion. ‘ Getting worked up is like an orgasm for her,’ Brian remarked bitterly. ‘Lots of frantic threshing about for a short time. Then it’s all over and she drifts off.’ Dotty said that she’d spoken to, oh, lots and lots of people. They’d all agreed that it was a disgrace, an absolute disgrace. But would they do anything about it? No, of course not. Typical! It was the same over those new school uniforms. Everyone loathed them but no one, not a single bloody parent – except, of course, herself – had had the guts to put a head above the parapet. ‘I’m sorry, darlings, I’m truly sorry. My heart bleeds for you. Sometimes I can’t sleep for brooding on what you two are going through.’
As the day of the commemorations approached, the usually lethargic little community was galvanised. Lois and Brian tried to ignore what news filtered through to them of the sports events, the concert and the pageant tracing the history of the school. When they received an invitation to attend, Lois at once tore it into shreds. Would the two suspended teachers be allowed to be present? ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Brian replied bitterly. ‘Perhaps that bitch has directed the play,’ Lois said. ‘She’s always been the one in charge of drama.’ They experienced a brief moment of satisfaction when they heard that Princess Anne would not, after all, be able to attend. But soon after it was proclaimed that Princess Michael of Kent would do so.
Suddenly, on the day before the celebrations, Brian had his idea. Having come home early from his office, he at once set to work on the materials that he had brought back with him in the car. Lois stood over him, watching, arms folded. From time to time she nodded or said ‘ Yes. That’s right. Yes, yes.’ He would then look up and smile at her conspiratorially. It was the first time that they had felt happy since Suzie’s death.
With a felt-tipped pen, tongue caught between his large, white teeth, he began to inscribe in huge capital letters:
LESS THAN ELEVEN WEEKS AGO, OWING TO INEXCUSABLE NEGLIGENCE OF TWO MEMBERS OF THE STAFF OF THIS SCHOOL, A LITTLE GIRL LOST HER LIFE. AS HER PARENTS WE PROTEST. IS THIS THE TIME TO HAVE A CELEBRATION?
He turned his head up towards Lois. ‘All right?’
She nodded.
‘Sure? You don’t think we should add anything?’
She shook her head. ‘Best short. And sharp.’
A number of other people, mostly women and many of those with small children in pushchairs, were already waiting to see the Princess. Brian, with Lois on his heels, ruthlessly used his placard to, in effect, beat a way to the front. Caught in his slipstream, one diminutive boy almost toppled over and began to wail. ‘Would you mind?’ a woman whom Brian had inadvertently jostled and then banged, protested angrily.
Brian hoisted the placard high over his head. But curiously, infuriatingly, no one seemed to want to look at it, let alone read it. In the crowd were people whom he and Lois immediately recognised – that nice, fat girl who was always so helpful at the Sainsbury’s cake counter, the postman whose asthma attacks made his deliveries so erratic, the mother of that little French girl whom Suzie had invited to her last birthday party – but, by now predictably, not one gave any indication of recognising them in return.
Eventually Lois swivelled round to face the Sainsbury’s girl, who was standing just behind her. ‘Hello!’ she said. She forced a smile, which unfortunately raised the left side of her mouth in what might have been mistaken for a snarl.