Fly in the Ointment

by Anne Fine

  That was the landline done and I went home. The mobile was a different matter and would take cunning. I kept watch from my window until I saw her tottering up her path, swinging her shopping, and made sure only a couple of minutes had passed before I was back round there with rather a sullen Larry snatched up from some absorbing game with Squeezy Owl.

  I showed the greatest interest in the glossy bags piled on the kitchen armchair. ‘Can I peep?’

  The nearest she could come to gratitude was an ungracious ‘I suppose so.’ I didn’t let her rudeness rattle me. I picked the first package out and shook off the pretty pink tissue. ‘Oh, that is lovely. You’ll look splendid in that.’ I kept it up, praising the slinky dress, the low-cut tops, the vulgar shining belt, until I reached the last of her choices. ‘Oh, look at this! Cut on the bias. It must hang like a dream.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Oh, go on. Show me. Put it on.’

  Smart to have picked the skirt. If I had handed her the dress, she would have baulked. Far too much effort. A skirt was different. All that she had to do was hop from one foot to the other, keeping her balance, while she peeled off her jeans. Then she pulled on the skirt and struggled for a moment with the zip.

  And that is all the time it took to slide her mobile phone out of the bag she’d left on her kitchen counter and put it in my pocket. I admired the skirt. (She did look good, I admit.) And then I turned to go as she swung open the freezer door and stared inside.

  ‘What’s Larry like with mushrooms?’

  Shopping with other people’s money is clearly hungry work. Even before she’d finished the question, she’d made up her mind.

  ‘Oh, who cares? Mushrooms is what I feel like. If Larry’s going to be a fusspot he can pick his off and trade them for my crusts.’

  Why did she always manage to make it so very easy for me to steel my heart? I kept my hand on the door.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I very nearly forgot. This bloke was hanging round outside your gate. I told him you were out. He said he really needed to see you, but not at his flat. You weren’t to ring him either. He was a bit cagey, but I had the feeling he thought there might be something fishy about his phone line.’

  Now she was staring. ‘Something fishy? You mean, like being tapped by the police?’

  I shrugged.

  I’d made her anxious, I could tell. ‘What did he look like? Did he tell you his name?’

  ‘No. But it was obvious he was in a state. And he kept saying he had something for you. Something important. But he could only keep it till tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘He just kept rattling on about needing to meet you under some bridge near Ballantyne Street car park.’

  ‘That stone bridge over the canal?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  I watched her look down at the pretty skirt. She even twitched her hips from side to side to make it swirl a little. Spending an afternoon flouncing about in a dress shop had probably reminded her of life outside. And it was Saturday night. I watched her make her mind up. ‘You can take Larry, can’t you?’

  I’d thought about this. Sometimes in life it’s best to take a back-row seat.

  ‘Sorry,’ I told her firmly. ‘Out myself tonight.’ Lowering my voice as if I didn’t want the child in the next room to hear, I added, ‘And if you want my opinion, Janie Gay, you’ll stay well away yourself. He seemed to me to be a very creepy type. To tell the truth, I was in two minds about telling you.’ I leaned towards her confidentially. ‘I even think he might have been on drugs.’

  28

  SO, WHEN YOU think about it, it was Janie Gay’s decision to slip out to try to find her precious Wilbur. ‘Here is a case in point,’ says Mrs Kuperschmidt each time the subject of that evening comes up. ‘There was a child of three left unattended in the house. That is illegal. All that you had to do was phone the police. Within an hour, that child would have been out of there. Your worries could have been over. Janie Gay would have been cautioned, and social services would have been on the case.’

  And what sort of farce would that have been? Poor old Joe Taxpayer forking out more hard-earned cash for yet another flurry of investigations and case interviews, all ending up with some soft magistrate offering a dolled-up Janie Gay ‘just one more chance’ and sending a gullible social worker round once a month to get fooled by a pack of lies. No. I was the one with the problem and that was not a plan I had much time for.

  Better to settle it now and settle it properly. So I’ll admit I did ignore the fact that Larry was left home alone while I locked up my own house and hurried along to where I had discreetly parked the car a few hours earlier, two streets away. For quite a while I must have been behind the very same bus that Janie Gay took into town, and would have overtaken it but for the fact that I had to pull off into that video-store car park to tug on the red wig.

  It smelled a little musty, which I thought odd considering I’d kept it in the box in which it came, and it had cost so much. It still looked good though, giving me confidence that, what with the tightly belted raincoat that Janie Gay had never seen me wearing, she wouldn’t recognize the person coming her way until it was too late.

  Ballantyne Street car park was closed. That didn’t bother me. I found a space on the next street and even had the presence of mind to drive to the end and back, so I’d be facing the right way when it was time to go home. I locked the car, tightened the belt on the raincoat, and set off walking briskly towards the bridge, lowering my umbrella to shield my face whenever anyone walked past.

  Saturday night. In spite of the weather there were a good few early-evening revellers. It worried me. I knew the streets could only get busier. But all of them were headed off the other way, towards the city lights, and by the time I reached the bus stop nearest the bridge, no one was about. I’d cut things very fine, I realized, because far down the street – so far away I only noticed when she stepped under a street lamp – I caught a glimpse of Janie Gay already making her way around the corner of one of the narrow interlocking streets between the road and the canal. I set off after her. It was a bit like playing Grandmother’s Footsteps. At first I thought she might suspect that she was being followed, but after a bit I realized that every time she heard a noise or saw a moving shadow, she stopped to peer about her, hoping, no doubt, that it was Wilbur. So we made crab-like progress down the street, with me continually flattening myself into the dark of doorways. I was as sure as I could be that if she suddenly swung around and saw me in the full glare of a street light, I would still seem as much a stranger to her as I had to my father during Malachy’s funeral.

  Still. Best to be careful.

  It was a whole lot easier along the towpath. The place was full of shadows. Frankly, I would have thought it safer to put a fence along and keep it locked at night. I wouldn’t say that I was frightened, exactly. And it may sound perverse, but every time I heard the scurry of some small creature my footsteps had disturbed, or strangely shaped bushes loomed at me suddenly out of the dark, I was quite glad that Janie Gay was there.

  We reached the big wide sign behind which I’d once stood watching her so reluctantly offer a drag of her cigarette to my besotted son. (‘Oh, him.’) And as she picked her way along the path from there towards the bridge, I had the feeling everything was running backwards, and if I could just get her under that arch where I’d first heard her shrieking her insults at Malachy, I might be able to stop time in its tracks – make it unravel in a different way.

  And now she’d stopped. We were so close, but she’d no wish to go in that dark place for no good reason. Restlessly she stood about, occasionally going nearer the bridge mouth to peer inside.

  She wouldn’t wait for ever. No one was coming along, so I climbed up the bank on to the roadside. I don’t think she can have heard my footsteps as I walked past above her. Only one car went by, and that was going so fast I almost fled for fear that the police would almost certainly be chasing
it. Once on the far side of the bridge I slithered down to reach the other black and gaping mouth.

  Then I called to her. ‘Hey! Janie Gay? That you?’ I made my voice sound rough. She wouldn’t for a moment think this was a man shouting through the arched space. But with the billowing echo – ‘you . . . you . . . you . . .’ – she might confuse my voice with any one of all the other druggies she must have met at Wilbur’s place and it might give her confidence she wasn’t alone on the towpath.

  Her voice was tentative. ‘Hello? Who is that?’

  I answered even while her echo rang. ‘Down here,’ I called. ‘We’re all down here . . . here . . . here . . .’

  That was enough. She moved under the bridge. I saw her only as a blacker shadow coming towards me.

  She didn’t see me at all.

  ‘Oof!’

  That’s what she said as she fell in the water – ‘Oof!’ – just like some character in a cartoon. I stepped towards the edge but barely had a moment in which to see in the slick of light thrown by some passing headlights her look of pure astonishment before her coat sucked up enough of the water to start to drag her down a second time. She opened her mouth. To call for help? Abuse me? I still think, from the way she looked at me, it might have been to ask the simple question, ‘Why?’

  And that was that. Once her mouth filled with water, the poor girl didn’t stand a chance. The struggling went on for quite a while, but was a losing battle. Even if I had wanted to pull her out, by then I couldn’t have reached her. She’d flailed her way too far from the brick side.

  I watched the oil-black water suck her down and along. By the time she’d safely vanished we had moved out from underneath the arch and were a good few paces along the path. I could have praised her timing. People were coming along the towpath towards us. Quickly I slipped behind the bushes till the little gang of them had wandered past. Then, putting up a hand to check the wig was still on properly, I hurried back to where I’d parked the car and I drove home.

  It was a bit of a restless night. For one thing I was worried about poor Larry. What would he think when he woke up to find his mother gone? I knew I mustn’t go next door too early. It would look odd. The whole street knew she was no early riser. Painful as it was, I had to wait.

  But it was the police who showed up first, with all their questions. Had I seen my neighbour from next door?

  ‘Who? Janie Gay?’

  When was the very last time that I had seen her? Please think carefully. Guesses aren’t helpful.

  Of course I knew exactly. ‘Half past six last night. I took her son home. I’d been babysitting him at my house while she went shopping.’

  That’s all it took. ‘So you do know the little boy? He’s confident with you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I spend a lot of time with Larry. And since his mother has no car, I’m usually the one who takes him off to see his dad.’

  He was a kind man, that was evident. His face lit up. ‘Oh, so the boy is still in touch with his father?’

  ‘Not just in touch. They’re very, very close. In fact—’

  So it fell out the only sensible way. Instead of whipping Larry off to strangers in a temporary foster home, they brought him round to me. Guy was a suspect for only as long as it took the seven other stable lads to pool their photos of him acting silly on his first night out. So it was only a few days before I was allowed to take Larry to Todmore. And there (after all the cuddling and a few rides on that delightful painted horse) it was the work of a moment to agree the best course of action.

  And that’s how things worked out. Perfectly. I was delighted to get back into the office – and to my house in Pickstone, where Larry settled in as easily as if he’d never had another home. I only had to go back once, for Squeezy Owl. (She’d thrown him up on the high shelf as some sort of punishment, and when I finally found him there after a good bit of searching I felt a stab of joy that I had rid the world of such a nasty piece of work as Janie Gay.) Once he had Squeezy Owl, Larry fell easily into the pattern we’d arranged for him. I woke him early so I could drop him off at the creche and still get into work before Audrey. Guy sprung him for an early lunch, then took him back to Stablelads’ House for a shared nap before the afternoon session. It was a long day for a little boy. Nonetheless, when I came by to pick him up after work, it was often quite hard to prise him off the merry-go-round, or out of the wooden ‘castle’. So by the time that social services finally came round to give us the official nod, we were all revelling in our new lives.

  Perhaps too deeply. Now, I look back and almost can’t help being amused to think that Joshua Omulolo found that slip of paper with the neatly pencilled list on it on the exact same day that Trevor Hanley asked me to marry him.

  ‘Why me?’ I’d asked. ‘I thought I was supposed to be too cool a customer for you.’

  Trevor had gone bright red, and done his usual trick of pawing the carpet like a guilty twelve-year-old. ‘Oh, well. You know.’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  He seized my hands. In his great paws, they felt like little birds. ‘Yes, you do, Lois. Please don’t muck about. We’ve wasted so much time already. Just say yes to me. You know that we’ll be happy.’

  I did, too, thanks to the recent visit from that smug charmer George. So I said yes. Now everyone was happy. Obviously I couldn’t share the thought with Trevor or his father, but I did feel as if some gloriously technicoloured play had worked its way through to the final act. Everything had fallen out perfectly and all of us were at last revelling in our just desserts.

  And then the phone call came.

  Trevor and I were in bed. ‘I won’t take that,’ he offered, but as his arm was already reaching out towards the bedside table I thought I might as well be gracious. ‘No, no. Perhaps you’d better.’

  Relieved, he put the phone up to his ear. ‘Hi, Dad.’

  I suppose I knew the call concerned me just from the way that Trevor shifted the phone from that ear to the other. One moment I could hear the chirruping of Mr Hanley’s voice, the next I couldn’t. Though Trevor didn’t seem to move away from me in bed, I felt a distance, and Trevor himself spoke only in monosyllables. ‘Yes . . . Now . . . No.’ Oh, and the care he took not to let his eyes slide round to meet mine! I knew it was bad.

  Indeed it was. A barely credible run of rotten luck when you consider that just one tiny thing falling out differently could have stopped the disaster in its tracks. If Ainsley Forsyth plc hadn’t been suspected of minor VAT fraud and had their files marked up for special attention by one of the department’s auditors. If Joshua Omulolo had only been a little busier that day and actually worked through lunch instead of idly picking up that stupid list of credits and debits that fell out of the file in front of him while he was eating his sandwich at his desk, and idly wondering what it could mean. But then again, if Mrs Omulolo had not been five months pregnant, her husband might not have been keeping his eyes peeled for prospective names. And if Janie Gay’s mother and I had had the sense to call our children by names a little less striking, then Joshua Omulolo’s attention might not have been drawn to the article in the paper that made such a big deal of the fact that Malachy Henderson’s wife Janie Gay had drowned in the very same canal as her husband, and on the anniversary of his death.

  All very striking.

  Without that sheet of paper (neatly entitled ‘J.G. – Pros and Cons’ – what was I thinking of?) I would have definitely been home and dry.

  But as it was, the game was over.

  29

  ‘FIVE MINUTES,’ THE police officer had said, and made it clear she meant it by standing stolidly in my bedroom doorway while I was gathering the few things I’d need. Seizing a moment when she turned her back to answer a shout from downstairs, I tugged down Malachy’s glass prism – hung in the window only a few weeks before to sprinkle dazzling rainbow promises of peace and happiness around the room.

  A fitting seal on things, I’d thought, to show the world
was back in place.

  When we came downstairs, Trevor was standing watching. I asked the officer, ‘Mind if I give him a hug?’

  ‘Don’t make a meal of it,’ she warned, and didn’t see me dropping the prism in his pocket. I knew he’d keep it safe. He kissed me briefly on my nose as if I were a child before they took me off. Once at the station, I did my bit to try to shift the blame. ‘All I know is that she went off to see some bloke called Wilbur.’

  Naturally they knew the name. Out of a sense of covering all bases, they put a tail on him, and snapped up more than enough evidence within a week to feel obliged to charge him. I couldn’t help but feel some satisfaction – a second bird killed with my little stone? – but in the end it proved small comfort. The way of the world is such that Wilbur’s drug-dealing was judged so petty – and dealt with so fast – that he was out again before my own trial. (I saw him sneering from the gallery, and when my sentence was announced, the man had the nerve to whistle his approval.)

  I wasn’t going to confess. Doodling a list of pros and cons for someone’s death does not make you a killer. Still, thanks to Stuart’s all too successful disappearance all those years ago, suspicion mounted. Information filtered in. (Even that bloody wig-maker woman remembered my face.) There are more cameras about than you would think on streets and in video-store car parks. The evidence stacked up about my visit to the bridge. I argued forcibly enough that people go to visit their children’s graves. Why shouldn’t I have chosen the anniversary of his death to go back to grieve at the place where I’d poured my son’s ashes? But I was on a losing wicket. Stuart was somehow dug up, and though I don’t believe his whole intention was to show my black heart and sheer implacability, he didn’t help. ‘Yes, it was Lois who threw Malachy out on the streets . . . No. That’s right. Lois never visited her mother when she was dying . . . Yes. It is true that Lois didn’t attend her funeral.’