by Janet Davey
Jo sat down and picked up the only full cup that was left on the tray. She tried to focus on the scene before her. Airport chaos. People sitting on luggage. A little girl missing from a camp site in Cumbria. The newscaster’s voice seemed to come back louder with each new item. Jo watched but couldn’t, at the end, have said what had been happening. There was always a sequence of sorts. Hopes fade, feared dead, found dead. She couldn’t recall which stage had been reached. Once the weather forecast was over Geoff turned the volume down to a murmur. Rob leant forward in order to carry on listening. Annie drew shapes in the air with her finger.
‘Did you bring me any books?’ Dilys said.
‘No. Sorry, Gran. Not this time,’ Jo said.
‘I expect you had too much to think about,’ Dilys said.
‘The print was too small.’
Trevor acquired books in job lots from his ladies along with the rest of the rubbish. She usually picked out one or two for Dilys. The latest batch had come from a kleptomaniac who had never taken back library books. They had become non-returnable, the library in question having shut for good ten years ago. No one wanted to buy them. They had shrunk inside their covers like old people who have shrivelled, but carry on wearing their clothes of plumper days. The Sellotape holding them together was crisp with age. It was probably true that the print was too small. But she hadn’t bothered to look.
Geoff got up and looked out of the window.
‘Marion’s son’s car is still there,’ he said.
‘She’ll be glad to have company,’ Dilys said. She turned to Jo. ‘She had the burglars a week ago. Did I tell you about that?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jo said.
She moved slightly in the chair to face her grandmother and made herself pay attention. Marion was a comparative newcomer, having moved in since Jo left home. No memories attached to her. She tried to form pictures as Dilys talked, exorbitant pictures that would fill her mind. Marion asleep in her bed, a man climbing over the back fence, a strange hand opening and shutting drawers, the Krugerrand in a felt box that the burglar had turned his nose up at. She had met Marion and liked her, but that didn’t make any difference, the images failed to appear. It was like trying to light up a room by striking a dead match. When Dilys paused, Jo forgot to say anything. She looked round, hoping that something on the walls would jog her memory.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
She felt sorry.
Geoff nodded.
Dilys started up again. ‘She didn’t hear him break in because an early-morning aeroplane flew over the house,’ she said.
‘Say that again, Gran,’ Rob said.
‘They start every morning. Four a.m. You can set the clock by them,’ Dilys said.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Rob said.
‘She’d have heard the glass smash otherwise. So she said.’
‘But how did Marion know? That’s what I mean,’ Rob said.
‘The first she knew of it was when she came downstairs and felt the draught,’ Dilys said.
‘Leave it, Rob,’ Jo said.
‘She thought it might have been the boy who comes door to door selling dusters and gardening gloves who did it. Ridiculous prices he charges,’ Dilys said.
‘Why pick on him?’ Rob said.
‘He was very careful,’ Dilys said. ‘He didn’t leave a mess. She was grateful for that.’
‘I thought you said he smashed the window,’ Rob said. ‘You wouldn’t call it careful if I smashed a window. Even by mistake.’
‘Rob,’ Jo said.
‘He didn’t harm her,’ Geoff said. ‘That’s the main thing.’
‘Ella’s not nervous, being on her own at night?’ Dilys said.
‘Not as far as I know,’ Jo said. ‘She doesn’t seem to be nervous of anything.’
‘She seems young to me to be left,’ Dilys said.
Jo watched as Geoff collected up the cups and carried them out on the tray. She looked back at the television screen, mottled gold as the sky it reflected. She had only been to see Dilys and Geoff once since March. It had just been for the day. She had gone with Annie, up and down on the usual trains. Felpo had come to meet them at the station. Her grandparents had said how well she looked. Bonny, Geoff had said – and they hadn’t asked her why. They weren’t like that.
Now another evening stretched ahead. Annie to be put to bed. The table laid. Food prepared. And eaten. No one had mentioned her cheek – the fact that the plasters were off – though they had all had a good look at it.
6
THERE WERE STILL people moseying around Lois Lucas & Son. Most of the shops and tea-rooms had closed so the day-trippers who weren’t ready to drive back home wandered the streets. They were relieved to find somewhere to pass the time. Even in fine weather they liked to shop. Trevor generally picked up a bit of trade at the end of the day. He got up from his chair on the pavement and went inside to pour himself another glass of wine. A man and a woman were opening and shutting the doors of the huge mahogany wardrobe, sticking their heads right inside it. Woodworm, he supposed they were looking for. He was fairly certain it was clean, though he hadn’t looked too closely. He hoped they wouldn’t want the wardrobe. Unless they had come in a decent-sized van that was parked round the corner, they wouldn’t be able to have it. He dodged past them into the kitchen. He didn’t want them to start asking him questions. Would he deliver it to Bromley, preferably this evening, or, at the latest, first thing tomorrow morning? Would he put it in acid to strip off the varnish? Someone had asked him that once. What did they take him for – even a serial killer wouldn’t have an acid bath the size of a small swimming pool. One day he’d just have to set light to all the big pieces. They caused too much aggravation. Sometimes he found a mate with transport to help him out with deliveries, but he couldn’t depend on it. Blokes with vehicles over a certain size were a law unto themselves. If he managed to pin them down, he never knew what favour they’d ask in return. He wasn’t up for burying asylum seekers who had been accidentally suffocated.
Jo’s boyfriend had shifted a hospital bed for him. Delivered it to a couple outside Sittingbourne. He’d been obliging. He did removals – the sort that used to be called light but which as a term had gone, together with the Light Programme. Man with a Van it was now. Trevor had asked if he put No Job Too Small when he advertised. He said he didn’t bother with advertising. One thing led to another, he said.
He was a nice enough fellow, the boyfriendo. Sweet pea with Jo. They seemed devoted. People were said to go for the same partner again and again and there was something about him that reminded Trevor of Jo’s ex – a touch of the beseeching hound, though the breeds were different. He’d met the ex once or twice when he’d come to pick up the kids from the shop. She seemed to think she had branched out a bit and that was what mattered. Amazing that bed had been. He’d regretted accepting it from the widowed headmaster, but the first day he got it in the shop everyone wanted it – he could have sold it several times over. There was no point in asking why. If there was a craze in Kent for playing doctors and patients he didn’t want to know about it. Lois had had a bit of an eye for that sort of thing. She read the posh magazines when she got a chance, knew whether chinoiserie or brass was making a comeback. His point was that it was all a mystery – what people wanted.
He skulked in the kitchen until the couple had got out of the wardrobe and left the premises. Then he felt free to come out of hiding. Only a few customers were left now: a woman leafing through old comics, another holding a satin lampshade up to the light as if it were a piece of fine china while her child drummed out a tune on a typewriter. He picked up a shiny teacup and examined the rivets that kept the handle on. Ugly, like metal fillings in teeth. He used to have a chap who could do little jobs like that but his hands got too shaky to carry on working. A lot of the junk had to do with tea and old-fashioned ways of drinking it that had passed away with the original owners. Slop basins, sugar tongs,
tea strainers. They weren’t fast-moving lines, unless some new illegal use could be found for them. They had that look about them which suggested medicine and decadence. Caught in the street with sugar tongs in your pocket: instant arrest on suspicion.
Eventually the shop emptied. The woman hadn’t bought the lampshade but her boy had nicked a peacock feather. He waved it as he went out. Trevor took a couple of notes out of the tin box and locked it again without counting the money. He knew more or less what was there. A sheaf of tenners and fivers. Some loose change. A thirty-quid cheque for the lopsided airing rack. He had Francesca, the new care worker at Borrowdale, to ponder on. She was pretty enough, very pretty, in fact, in an East European sort of way. Different from the usual run. Though there was generally one presentable one per retirement home – usually a temp – who hadn’t developed the optimistic facial expressions, or the hands atrophied by germicidal soap and hot water. Francesca had seemed encouragingly depressed by the ambience of Borrowdale, managing to smile at him in a different way from the sombre smile she gave the elderly. Her face was otherwise inexpressive and that, together with the nice bloom to her skin, made him think of an egg in a grey egg box. She had eyebrows that rose and fell like the eyebrows of a sad heroine in a silent film. Past thirty, a moderate showing of low spirits was a good sign, he always thought, promising worldliness and some experience with men. Scope for cheering up in the old style.
They’d had a nice chat over coffee and biscuits in the day lounge with the retired ones splayed out on the sofas. He’d found her voice restful. The way she said Borrowdale, with the accented first syllable and the rr like a cat purring – he kept hoping she’d repeat it. She was homesick, she said. He’d sympathised with that, having never left home himself for longer than a fortnight. When he had asked her what she was doing on Saturday evening she’d told him she was on duty, but that hadn’t seemed to worry her and certainly hadn’t worried him. They hadn’t exactly made a date – but neither had she been actively discouraging. He had written her name in his diary.
He went upstairs to shave and put a comb through his hair, maybe change his shirt. He felt slightly disconnected, almost reflective. It must be the heat, he thought. He opened his bedroom door and surveyed his upstairs arrangements. No one could call them domestic. Even qualified by chaotic or squalid the word had a solidity and cleanliness which shone through. The true junk ended up here, among his socks and wet towels and the Indian take-away packaging with slicks of sauce still clinging to the inside. These were the things that even he knew could never be sold and that would have turned to mush if he had left them in the yard at the back. The stained tea cosies and odd elastic stockings, the cushion covers and net curtains. He never knew whether they were included in the boxes because the clients thought someone would make use of them, or to pad out the breakables. The truss can’t have been for that; it was a liability among the sherry glasses. They were on their way to the dump, he said, when Jo asked him what he planned to do with them. She had asked him where it was, the dump – only out of interest, she hadn’t been offering to go – and he said he didn’t have any idea, he would know it when he got there. She’d said he made it sound like heaven.
His love life was conducted off the premises. A week after his mother died, while the place was still orderly, he’d brought a woman back, but so soon after the cremation, the mood had left him. He’d tried once more a few days later with the same woman, and then with a different one a month or so after that. Nothing doing. He had given up on girlfriends for a while. Then he had met Buffie who was living on a permanent site behind the White Cliffs Country Trail. She hadn’t wanted to leave the caravan empty at night. Squatters kept a look-out for empty property, she said. It had been a relief to him that his old form came back. Buffie had sugared off to the Isle of Wight to give seaweed treatments at a beauty salon her friend had opened. But then there had been others. There were always spare women at the seaside. Of course, it wasn’t an ideal situation. He found it inconvenient not to wake up at his own place, especially in the winter when he had to turn out in the cold.
Beyond the foreground debris he could see the bed, a collapsed heap of sheeting and discoloured ribbon-edged blankets, which, because not tucked in, revealed the mattress with its ticking cover and felted buttons. It looked pretty rancid. He sniffed, in case it also ponged, and then shook his head at his own disquiet, as over a good pair of shoes that had developed a silly squeak. He focused on his essentials, plainly visible in the conventional place on top of the dressing table: brush, comb, nail scissors, electric shaver. This was the only square foot that was uncorrupted. He went across to pick up the shaver and the comb and left the room. There wasn’t much else to the building. A few uneven steps led down to the landing and up again to the low cupboard in the roof space and the bathroom that smelled of river mud when the window was shut. He went up the steps, tripping over the top one in the darkness. The bathroom was rank – the fittings scabbed over with green-streaked lime scale. Jo never went there, he noticed. If she needed a wee, she waited until she got back home. She had a fastidious streak. From time to time he felt her disapproval. No Jo this morning. Something must have cropped up. No Ella either. It hadn’t mattered. He had woken at twelve and opened up the shop himself.
He leant backwards, hollowing his lumbar, in order to look in the bathroom glass. He saw himself – not from the inside looking down, the landscape which began with glimpses of alternate sides of his nose and went all the way down to his feet and somehow translated itself into the fellow in the mirror – but as someone quite separate. He had the sun tan from the neck up and on the lower arms from lounging outside the shop – and Lois’s good head of hair. He paid attention to his clothes, choosing what he hoped was a raffish style and incorporating this and that from the house clearance to keep the cost down. But it had to be faced that his body had lost its bowling-green flatness. He had had the best part of a week to whittle away the gentle curve to his belly before he met Francesca again but he had done nothing – unless he counted his walk with Ella on Thursday evening. He had nearly forgotten that. He had gone to The Dog and was sitting in his usual spot by the corner window. She had passed by looking a bit forlorn. He had bobbed up and hailed her. She’d glared until she realised it was him. She had a sort of force field of touch-me-not and touch-paper about her which was attractive if you didn’t mind risking having your head bitten off. She’d said hullo through the open window and asked him if he had a spare cigarette. He’d offered her a drink but she had said she was going for a walk. He had asked if he could accompany her. He’d said they would have to stick to the level; he couldn’t manage an ascent after work. They’d both had a cigarette and set off. She’d been good company. He couldn’t remember what they’d talked about. But the flavour of it he retained – cheerful and friendly, mildly flirtatious. Remembering the taste of the butterscotch but forgetting it was called Something and Something – that’s how it was when your memory was going. Who gave a toss about Something and Something? They’d covered about three miles over the dunes footpaths. When he stopped for a breather she’d said they could turn back if he liked, and that made him feel like great grandad. It was the first long walk he’d had in years. Callard & Bowser. That was it. What crap he remembered.
7
‘I’M NOT GOING to The Dog,’ Ella said.
‘Suit yourself. Where do you want to go?’ Vince said.
‘Round here. Not back my way,’ Ella said.
‘That should be interesting.’ He stopped.
They had been walking slowly through the recreation ground and had reached the main road. The temperature had hardly dropped, though the sun had gone from the sky.
‘Well, there’s The World’s Your Oyster. That’s where Dad goes. Have you been there?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘I thought not. You’d have to be seriously into sociology. Then there’s The Duke of Edinburgh. Plate glass and swimming in bleach. I’ve never s
een anyone in there, ever. In fact, it could be the mortuary. And the Sandrock Hotel. That’s it.’
‘Do they check up on how old you are?’
‘Which one?’
‘The last one. The sand something.’
‘No, not as far as I know. I’ve never had any trouble.’
‘Let’s go there.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Vince said.
The sole advantage of the Sandrock Hotel, and one that didn’t matter to Ella and Vince, was the car park. It was the size of a small airfield. A concrete expanse without marked spaces. You could park in its furthest corners and be sure of privacy. You could park in the middle to the same effect, but the clients felt more comfortable tucked round the edges. Theft, vandalism and illicit dealing were a problem, but the landlady had a way of evading the crime prevention officer, who came round, at least once a month, with brochures full of pictures of exterior lighting. She knew what she was doing. Everyone was marooned on a separate Windsor chair, with low tables at knee level. (Ring marks etched into the dark veneer.) It was impossible, therefore, to lean on or across the table, make covert approaches under the table or cuddle up next to someone. The moment of needing to go to the car park was delayed by several hours and she sold a lot of drink.
It was funny in a cheerless way, but not that funny.
‘So, what happened yesterday after you left?’ asked Vince, shifting around to find the least tortured position in relation to his pint.
‘Nothing. I walked along the beach. Then I went to Lois Lucas’s,’ said Ella. ‘It wasn’t eventful. Just a night.’