Crying Out Loud

by Cath Staincliffe

  I felt my own anger rising. ‘I just did.’ I was truculent, even more determined to see the idea through now Ray was so riled. Why did he always have to be so po-faced about things? With our lives in such a state of flux, I didn’t even know if he’d be here with me in a month’s time. ‘We need a tenant, she needs a room. It’s a good place for a baby—’

  ‘We have got enough going on without all this.’ He gesticulated wildly at Leanne and Lola. ‘You playing bloody social worker.’

  ‘Stop overreacting!’ I yelled.

  ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,’ he threw back his head, ‘and she is not moving in without my agreement.’ He walked out.

  Leanne exhaled noisily. ‘That’s a no, then?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t give up that easily,’ I told her. ‘There are house rules, though.’

  ‘Like agreeing who moves in?’

  I started to smile, stopped as my face ached. ‘No smoking for a start.’

  ‘I never smoke in the house, it’s bad for Lola. I’ll just nip out now, though.’ She fished rolling tobacco and papers from her pocket.

  When she came back in, I took her up to the attic and gave her the tour. It’s a nice flat, sloping ceilings, a view of the garden from the main room, a smaller room furnished as a bedroom across the landing, shower and WC between. Basic furnishings. Leanne settled Lola on the rug while we looked round.

  ‘You’d have to share the kitchen, downstairs,’ I explained.

  She was looking out of the dormer window; she’d gone very quiet.

  ‘No wild parties,’ I said, ‘no trouble, you’d have to keep it nice. You could redecorate if you want.’

  She turned her head to mine, her arms crossed in front of her. ‘Why would you do that? Let me stay?’ Her face was serious, almost angry-looking.

  ‘We need a lodger.’

  ‘But me, bit of a risk, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe I like the odd risk.’

  She blinked and looked away, her jaw flexed; she was moved and I felt my own throat ache in response.

  ‘You know what I did,’ she said softly. It was a question as much as anything. Did it matter, would I report her, did it define her?

  ‘Yes. And I know why.’ I thought back to that night in the park, dark, drizzling. Looking for a lost boy before his captors found him. Men in the dark, fists and guns. Fear coursing through me. Bones running soft. The gunshot to my shoulder throwing me back against stone. Leanne, hiding in the gloom, firing at the man, killing him. Blood everywhere. ‘We can’t change the past.’ In the quiet I could hear the clatter of a train in the distance. ‘You’re making a go of things, now.’

  ‘Yeah. But yer man isn’t too happy.’

  ‘I’m not sure he is my man,’ I said frankly.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Maybe later,’ I put her off.

  ‘Yer better off without him,’ she said vehemently.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  She looked incredulous. Nodded. ‘Your face?’

  I touched my jaw where a bruise had blossomed courtesy of Nick Dryden. ‘No,’ I smiled, grasping her meaning, ‘it’s nothing like that. That’s not him.’ And Ray hadn’t even noticed, hadn’t mentioned it. My shoulder was throbbing too and so were my shins, where Dryden had kicked at me so viciously. ‘You think I’d stay with someone who was beating me up?’

  ‘Plenty do. It’s not just to wind him up, is it? To spite him? ’Cos if it is—’

  ‘No,’ I broke in. Though a teensy bit of me had enjoyed provoking that reaction. ‘Maybe you deserve a break. I was on my own with Maddie, at first. It was hard. Too hard. Finding this place, sharing with Ray, it got a lot easier. He’s got a little boy.’ Two, I thought to myself. ‘And Lola, well, she’s lovely.’

  Leanne grinned. ‘She been sleeping?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ I muttered, Leanne-style. The prospect of an unbroken night swam into view. Oh, bliss. ‘She’s got a tooth,’ I suddenly remembered.

  ‘No way! Let’s see.’ She picked her up, started praising her.

  ‘What do you think, then?’ I asked her. ‘A month’s trial?’ I glanced at my watch; I needed to collect Maddie and Tom.

  ‘What about him?’ she asked me.

  ‘I’ll deal with him.’ I sounded more confident than I felt.

  ‘Cool. I’ll have to let the council know, could be months before they sort my benefits out.’

  ‘That’s OK. Good. And I meant it about the rules – any trouble, anything dodgy, and it’s off, no second chance.’

  She opened her mouth and I expected protest, injured pride, but she took stock and instead just nodded. ‘’Course.’

  ‘I’ve got to get the kids from school. Make yourself at home. If you want a shower, there are towels in the cupboard in the bathroom downstairs. There’s sheets and bedding there, too, if you want to make up the bed.’

  She nodded, did that funny little blink again. ‘Ta.’

  As I reached the first-floor landing, Ray was there, arms folded, stern from head to toe, his eyes hot with fever and frustration. ‘We have to talk about it; you can’t just let her move in.’

  My throat hurt. ‘We need to talk about a lot of things, Ray: us, this, Laura, Oscar.’ I pulled on my jacket, aware that this time I was the one postponing time to discuss things. ‘We can talk this evening, or tomorrow,’ I suggested.

  ‘So she stays tonight?’ he huffed. ‘She’s not going to want to move once she’s got her feet under the table.’

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I objected.

  ‘Do you? Know her well?’

  I thought of my past with Leanne. The dreadful things she’d been through, the terrible things she’d done, things that I would not tell Ray – not now, maybe never.

  ‘I know her enough to give her a chance. And there is no way on earth I would offer her the flat if I thought it couldn’t work out. I’d never risk what we’ve got here.’ I hoped he’d soften then, acknowledge that what we had something, something important, permanent. But he gave me nothing. ‘I’d better go.’

  He stood there, a sadness in his eyes now, as though we’d lost something. Maybe we had. Maybe we couldn’t hold on to that first flush of passion with so many upheavals coming our way. I felt sad, too, more so as I realized I didn’t have the courage to approach him. If I laid a hand on his shoulder or touched his cheek with my palm would he shy away, slap me down? I didn’t have the heart to find out.

  SEVENTEEN

  We didn’t talk that evening. Ray kept to his room and didn’t even join us for tea. Leanne was introduced to Maddie and Tom and made quite an impression, teaching them some complicated hand-jive greeting and some street slang (inoffensive as far as I could tell). I spent half an hour picking bits of glass out of the back of the car. Leanne could not believe we hadn’t got a working telly. She stared at me, aghast.

  ‘I thought people your age were multi-platform,’ I said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘MP3, Internet, downloading movies to your phone.’

  ‘Yeah, but you still need a telly,’ she said.

  ‘We are going to replace it, just not had chance,’ I explained.

  She sighed.

  ‘Sheila had one in the flat. There’s an aerial socket up there. In fact, that would make sense, to get you one of your own.’

  ‘Cool.’

  It wasn’t a completely altruistic move; I didn’t want to be fighting Leanne over which programme to watch. I imagined our tastes would differ somewhat. And having a lodger seemed to work best when we had a degree of autonomy.

  ‘Won’t be anything fancy, mind. No plasma or 3D.’

  ‘I made a list,’ she said, ‘stuff for the flat. Some of it they might give me a grant for.’ She handed me the piece of paper. In the same neat capitals that had been on the note she’d printed out: CURTAINS, CHANGING MAT, COT, LAMP.

  ‘What colour curtains?’ I said.

  ‘
Something shiny would look good against that colour blue. Maybe a gold, or dark blue with some sparkle in it.’

  ‘Ever made any?’ I asked her.

  ‘You having us on?’ Her eyes sparkled with merriment.

  ‘I’ve a sewing machine – you can get fabric at the market, or there’s a good place in town I know. It’s not hard. I’ll show you.’

  ‘OK. Give us summat to do while we’re waiting for the telly,’ she grumbled.

  I smiled.

  I’d gone into my usual practical mode after Dryden’s attack: sleeves up, head down, all systems functioning. Keep calm and carry on. Driven, I’d managed to get the car repaired, do my chores and continue investigating for Libby Hill. On top of all that I’d handled Leanne’s Lazarus act and found myself in a stand-off with Ray.

  But just as the bruises all over my body were coming into full bloom, the colour of butter yellow, mottled with blue, reminding me of pansies, so the emotional and psychological impact of the assault was bubbling to the surface. And as soon as I stopped racing about, filling my time keeping busy busy busy, I could feel my composure splitting and fraying, tearing apart.

  The nervy unease in my stomach as I showered and got ready for bed was the start of it. And a cup of warm milk and honey did nothing to lay it to rest.

  Now Leanne was here and Lola would be sleeping – or not – upstairs in the flat with her, I should have been able to immerse myself in a deep and healing sleep. I started out OK. My eyes grainy and tired, the bed blissfully comfy once I’d found a way to lie without putting pressure on my sore bits. No need to listen for the sound of a baby breathing or panic if it was too quiet.

  I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind: banishing Charlie Carter and Damien Beswick, Ray and Laura and their baby Oscar. I struggled to fill the space with fantasies. Holiday dreams, perhaps. When that failed and scenarios started playing out where Ray and Tom and Digger moved away, leaving Maddie and I weeping on the threshold, I resorted to doing multiplication: working out how much rent to charge Leanne and what that would be per month, per year. The dullness of that succeeded, enabling me to sleep but then the dream came.

  I was in the garden, by the pond. It was summer, high summer and uncommonly warm. I was on the sun lounger and Lola was in my lap. She was happy, gurgling. A shadow fell across us. I looked up, dazzled by the sun and saw the silhouette of a man. Dread shot through me. Nick Dryden was there. He was shouting and as he did he tore at his shirt, pulling it apart. The scar on his stomach, ridged and ropey, began to open, peeling apart like a zip, and blood poured out. Dark red and sticky, glistening in the sun. I was screaming, trying to get up from the lounger but my legs had no power in them: my bones had turned to water.

  Then I was standing in the house and he was breaking all the windows, the sheets of glass crazing then collapsing like a crash of ice cubes. Over and over. Leanne came in through one of the broken windows; she had a gun in her hand.

  ‘Get out!’ I screamed to her, ‘He’s here.’

  She didn’t move. She was staring at me, her face urgent, deadly serious. She just said, ‘Where’s the baby?’

  I had lost the baby. I couldn’t find the baby. I started hunting under the cushions, behind the settee. The television was on the floor. There was blood on the carpet. There was something under the television. I saw a small hand, tiny fingernails, like translucent shells. I began to cry. I had killed the baby.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I turned, gulping. Leanne had gone. But Valerie Mayhew was there, with her straight, silvery hair, bright eyes, her smartly tailored suit.

  She held the gun now. ‘That’s your baby,’ she said. ‘You have to go to the police.’ She was shaking her head, severely disappointed in me.

  It was Maddie. I’d killed Maddie. My eyes filled with tears as the enormity of what I’d done, that dreadful, dreadful mistake tumbled through me. I’d destroyed everything: my lovely precious girl dead, Ray gone and Tom, too. Maddie was dead.

  I reared awake, slick with sweat, my heart aching, bile in my throat. It took me a few moments to really believe that it had only been a dream. I felt so sullied by it, so tainted, that I needed proof, to reorientate myself in the here and now. To banish the monsters.

  The children were there: safe, asleep. The night light glowing, the toys and posters and bedding familiar. I watched them for a while. If I could have wept, it might have helped; I craved release but I couldn’t let go. The fear and the tension clotted in my chest, gripping my throat. As if I had swallowed a rock.

  Downstairs I found the arnica that we give the kids for upsets and minor injuries. Something I should have taken straight after I’d been hurt. I swallowed a pill. Digger, sleeping under the kitchen table, opened one eye, then decided it wasn’t worth his while to do more than that and closed it again. His tail twitched. Dreaming already. Swap you, I thought. Rabbits and tree trunks for dead babies and guns.

  I’m not completely lacking in self-awareness, just a bit slow getting there at times. A few bouts of counselling in the wake of other traumas meant I recognized what my body or my psyche was telling me to do: to slow down, to care for myself and take some space to recuperate. But what about work, was my knee-jerk reaction. It’ll keep, I reminded myself. Take a day, one day. Nothing is going to change significantly in twenty four hours. Then reassess. See if you are ready to go back. The case won’t disappear, no one is expecting to see you tomorrow and you’ll be better able to work if you’re not spending half your energy pretending to be fine instead of licking your wounds and going easy on yourself.

  Ray was taking the kids to school. I hugged Maddie before they left. ‘We’ve missed some bedtime reading recently, haven’t we? I’ll do double tonight.’

  ‘Triple,’ she said.

  ‘Deal. You were snoring, you know,’ I teased her.

  ‘Was I?’ Her eyes beamed.

  ‘Like this.’ I made outrageous snoring sounds.

  ‘I was not,’ she yelled, laughing.

  ‘No, OK, you’re right,’ I said, ‘that was Tom.’

  ‘Huh! No way!’ Tom objected.

  ‘Does Ray snore?’ Maddie said to me. Pointedly. The kids now knew we sometimes shared a bed. They must have absorbed the chilling of relations. The lack of affectionate gestures or kind words, the absence of a little light flirting or gentle sparring between us. They are like little Geiger counters, really.

  ‘Snores like a pig,’ I told her.

  He didn’t even grace me with a look.

  ‘We could go shopping,’ I suggested to Leanne. ‘Get a couple of the things for your room.’

  ‘It’s really definite, then?’ she asked. ‘Have you talked to him?’

  ‘It’s definite,’ I said, choosing not to answer the second question.

  ‘Cool. I haven’t got any money, though. I’ll have to go to Jobcentre Plus, register here, then get on to the housing benefit.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Let’s do the fun stuff first,’ I said. ‘We can get a TV, too.’

  ‘Maddie said they couldn’t have a telly because they had broken it.’ Leanne studied me.

  ‘Yeah, well.’ My agreement with Ray went straight out of the window. I seemed to be making a habit of disregarding his views: moving Leanne in, reinstating the TV. But it didn’t seem unfair to me, not in the scale of things, not half so bad as his refusal to include me in his personal life. I wanted us to be sitting up till the early hours, chewing it all over. I wanted to be supporting him, listening as he worked through his confusion. Not cut off like someone who didn’t matter, who didn’t have a special, intimate place in his life.

  We measured the windows in the flat and I explained to Leanne that we’d need different amounts of fabric depending on whether she wanted to pleated curtains on a rail like the existing ones or ones with a pole and rings across the top.

  ‘I like these,’ she said, and then looked troubled. ‘Will that be more money?’

  ‘Yes, but it won’t break the bank.’ Though the new tell
y might, I thought to myself.

  Her reaction to Abakhan’s material shop, a treasure trove of fabric piled in great bins and stacked in piles, much of it for sale by the pound weight, was all I had hoped for. I’d no idea if Leanne had any capacity for sewing, it didn’t matter, really, but she loved rummaging around and kept getting distracted.

  ‘I can make Lola a tiger outfit,’ she hooted, holding up some stripy fun fur.

  She had even more fun looking upstairs at all the trimmings, ‘Check the feather boa! Maybe you need one of those for the old man.’

  ‘He’s not my old man,’ I said. It just didn’t sound right; like we were some old married couple.

  ‘The old man,’ she said, stressing the ‘the’. ‘He’s old, and he is a man, or am I missing something?’ She cocked her head on one side, scrutinized me. ‘So what’s the story?’

  I hesitated. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘You saying I’m thick?’ she challenged me. Oh, boy! The touchiness of teenagers.

  ‘No,’ I blew out, constructed an opening. ‘His ex, Laura . . .’

  ‘He was married?’ she said.

  ‘Girlfriend. She’s had a baby. He’s only just found out. It’s thrown him.’

  ‘So he’s got a downer on you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She curled her lip. ‘That’s what it looks like from where I’m standing. He’s nicer to the dog.’

  I sighed. ‘I want him to let me help, to talk about it. He’s not very good at that. In fact, he’s totally rubbish.’ I moved aside to let someone past us. ‘We thought Lola was Laura’s baby at one point, that she had dumped her on us for Ray to look after.’

  ‘I didn’t dump her!’ Leanne was all offence.

  ‘Left her, then,’ I said steadily.

  She grimaced. ‘You thought he might be the dad? Ewww! That is totally gross!’

  ‘He can’t be as bad as her real dad given everything you’ve told us.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ she conceded easily enough. Her eyes roamed over the rolls of cloth and she twirled a strand of hair around her fingers. ‘There,’ she nodded, ‘I like that gold one there.’

  Material measured and bagged, I drove us to Ikea.