Playing Friends

by Marilyn Duckworth

  Beryl sat, frozen into an uncomfortable position, a collapsed mannequin. 'Are you sure?' she asked me, and then to Sheree: 'I really meant it. You'd like my little house — Clarice's been there. It's near the zoo. And McDonald's. And the supermarket.'

  Sheree tossed her uncombed rusty locks and laughed gleefully. 'What did I do? All I did was pop her out . . .' Then she put a hand over her mouth, looking towards the sleeping baby. 'I'm so lucky!' She was keeping her voice down now, unusually for her, when she turned to Beryl: 'Thank you, but I'm used to where I am. You can be another nana if you like. Three nanas might be pretty good. I only had one. Could you fetch me a coffee, Claz? I need to drink a lot of fluids.'

  I swayed as I stood up. I'd had a number of shocks and now Sheree was addressing me as Claz, which is what Una called me, no one else. Maybe it was a sign of another change, Sheree's altering position in our life, as if the girl were preparing to be another grown-up, one of us, leaving her teenage years behind. Was that such a good idea after all? Oh God. Anyway how would we all fit in the apartment? But, wait a moment — Una might not be there for long.

  'Are you all right?' Beryl had followed to help me carry the coffees. 'I can help with baby. Really. If Una gets difficult.'

  Difficult. Thorny. Tricky. Beryl had no idea. I shrugged a bit too vigorously and lost a splash of coffee from one of the plastic beakers. 'Thanks. I might — we might need it. Grandma,' I added, wanting Beryl to smile again, at least.

  I wasn't in a hurry to get home and neither was I keen to spend time in the hospital cafeteria with Beryl but this was what I ended up doing. After we left Sheree it seemed easiest to give in and be led across the car park. Inside the batwing glass doors an old man was lying collapsed on the corridor floor, attended by an orderly who waved us past when I paused. Beryl had been here before and knew her way about. The cafeteria was inhabited by a handful of nurses as well as visitors and outpatients, one with tubes going into her wrist, two in wheelchairs. There was a queue.

  'Life's all about queues lately. I try to remember stuff and it's as if names and words have to queue up like everything else. There's too much of everything,' Beryl complained, aiming for a table that looked out into the courtyard; I followed with the bottles of cranberry juice. I'd drunk enough coffee.

  It only occurred to me after we'd sat down at a table smeared with the last customer's tomato juice that cranberry juice was also the colour of blood. Not a good reminder in a place like this. Sheree's blood had splashed on the doctor's white coat, but that had been joyful blood. At least there would have been no blood at Garth's flat, if Una's account was accurate. I was winding myself up to tell Beryl some of the story. She would be shocked but I found I didn't care about that: I simply had to talk to somebody.

  'It must have been an accident,' Beryl said and left her mouth hanging slightly open so that the cranberry-stained tongue was visible.

  'Must have?' I shook my head. 'I don't think so. Well of course she didn't mean him to die . . .'

  'So that's manslaughter.'

  'Not the way she tells it.'

  'She might have been drunk,' Beryl suggested.

  'I'm sure she was drunk but that doesn't help, does it? And what sort of term would you get for manslaughter in this country anyway? Do you have any idea?'

  'And Garth shot one of the zoo animals? What with? Did he go to work with a rifle under his jacket?'

  'I couldn't get anything out of her about the dead dog. I just know he wasn't working there as long as he claimed he was — she did say that. Goes like this, she said, he had keys that didn't belong to him and worked funny hours. His last day could have been any day this month, or earlier. I don't know why there's been nothing more on the news — I don't always get the paper.'

  'Didn't he shift house?' Beryl asked.

  'That's right, he did. I forgot that. Maybe that's why. He was hiding. But the cops must be cleverer than that. Mustn't they? I've never had much to do with the police. They have to find him before they come looking for Una.'

  'Let's buy a paper.'

  'Mind if I sit here?' A fat woman in a green overall had plonked herself down at our table and beamed cheerfully. There was whipped cream on her lip.

  We walked through the hospital, following the painted yellow line along angled corridors, past the row of lifts, and picked up a Dominion Post at the hospital shop. Then we had to walk further, winding around to the older lifts and the staircase that let us out onto Riddiford Street. Here we sat on cold concrete steps and read, sharing sections of the newspaper.

  'I can't see anything.'

  'Neither can I.'

  'Well, it wouldn't be in the business pages.'

  'Do you want me to come home with you? I don't mind.'

  I considered. 'I'll give her a call and see how she's going. Oh damn — I must have left my telephone card in a call box.'

  Beryl didn't have a card. There was a notice at reception. DO NOT ASK FOR CHANGE FOR THE TELEPHONE.

  'Why do they have make life so difficult just when we're getting older?' Beryl wanted to know.

  'Some people are young,' I said. 'Some people have cellphones. Don't worry — I'd better just get home.'

  'I'll come with you.'

  'Best not. She'll talk to me if there's just the two of us.'

  'Oh.' Beryl looked mildly offended. 'But you will phone me if you need anything?'

  As I passed the carpet shop and approached the apartment block I had a vision of Kevin and his wife lunching together at Wellington airport earlier in the day. They were smiling at each other, sitting at a table behind the espresso counter and fat aircraft were manoeuvring on the tarmac, while seagulls swooped and dived across an oyster sky. No, that was wrong. He was a member of staff, possibly important, and would have his own office — even underlings who might bring him lunch on a trolley, with tiny bottles of wine. It irked me that I knew so little of his working life, or his home life, come to that, while Dale wore her secret knowledge of him as casually as that fine tweed Oxford Street outfit, moving her skirted bottom possessively, confident, not even jealous of his upstairs fuck.

  Kevin would have been so much easier to confide in about all of this, about Una's predicament, which was my predicament in a smaller way. I needed a hug, desperately, a big male hug — what was so different about a male hug? I'd been learning quite well how to do without until now. Dale's timing was just awful, but I supposed it had been nice of the woman to offer a lift to the hospital. I couldn't feel grateful. Kevin would hug his smart London wife. Something more like hatred stirred me until I was rattling the keys in my coat pocket viciously as if I wanted to destroy them.

  When I opened the door I expected Una to be waiting for me. The afternoon had darkened while I walked so that the apartment was dim with looming dusk, but the living room light hadn't been switched on.

  'Una?'

  Nothing. In Una's bedroom her towelling robe had been discarded in a grubby mound behind the glass door. I looked quickly to see if the familiar red wool coat was still hanging on the stand but it was gone. I couldn't believe the police had come and taken her in as she insisted they might; it felt too sudden. Yet whatever awful thing happened at Garth's place might have taken place days ago, she'd been so vague. It occurred to me that I hadn't noticed her car on the street when I returned home last night, although it was usually parked around the corner in Ellice Street or wherever a lucky residents' parking space appeared. I should have looked out for it on my way home today. Perhaps Una had driven back to the flat and the scene of her crime as criminals are said to do. Where else would she go? I sighed and picked up my keys again; I might as well go and check if the Mazda was there.

  On the stairs I had a second thought. What about Garth's car? If it was registered in his name and the police suspected him of the zoo shooting, they would have had no trouble finding him. All they needed was to locate the number plate and knock on a few doors. That first visit to the apartment he'd definitely had a vehicle;
he'd brought his parcels of bloody meat in it and had found a park nearby. Then — horrors, was my memory slipping? — I remembered Garth's car had been sold, of course. There was some fuss about it: he couldn't afford the payments since he was losing his job, perhaps. Una had talked to me about this and I'd happily forgotten the details, just as Una had forgotten the important details I offered about my children. I was no better at listening than Una after all. Poor Una.

  On the street I lifted my eyes and saw a couple on the pavement weaving towards me, arms about each other, not drunk but unsteady with shared amusement. Kevin and Dale. They were more or less the same height and fitted very nicely together. Kevin straightened when he saw me and I imagined he loosened his grip on Dale, although they remained linked.

  'Are you all right?' Kevin asked.

  'I'm not sure. You haven't seen Una, have you?'

  'Have you lost her again? She'll be visiting mother and baby.'

  I was shaking my head, but I agreed. 'Yes, she could be. Thanks for the other day, Kevin.'

  'Yesterday,' Dale laughed. She was too damned happy.

  'Oh yes.' It already felt days ago that Sheree had been panting and groaning in Kevin's car. So much had happened since then. Birth and death, no less. I reached the corner of the road and took a few steps up the steep incline to peer through the dusk at Una's number plate, safely parked. So she hadn't driven anywhere. This seemed to suggest that the police had kidnapped her after all, for questioning at least, in a Black Maria or a panda — or whatever they drove in Wellington, New Zealand.

  Round the bend in the road Una was walking ahead of me with her shoulders down; I caught her up as she was swiping her card on the entrance lock.

  'I lost you,' I protested, panting slightly because I'd had to run the last few yards.

  'Not yet, you didn't. But you will. Why do you care? I've got some gin. It isn't Bombay Sapphire, sorry.'

  'I was worried. I thought the police might have been.

  Or you might have gone back to the flat.'

  'What? I'm not going near that place — eugh — never again! You must think I'm bonkers.'

  I followed the red wool coat up the stairs without disagreeing.

  'I had to get a drink,' Una told me, when she had slopped two generous measures of gin and slumped with an elbow on the dining table. 'I've remembered what I did, Claz. Afterwards. It's not very interesting but it reminded me I needed to get this.' She lifted up the Beefeater bottle and her wrist drooped tiredly as if she were already on her way to being drunk again.

  I joined her with the bottle of tonic. 'So? Are you going to tell me?'

  'Of course I'm going to tell you — keep your hair on. Not too much!' She snatched her glass away so that some of the tonic I was pouring spilled onto the leather tablemat. She drank. 'That's what I did. This. Drank everything I could lay my hands on, but not until I'd searched the place for some pills, and the bugger didn't have more than a couple of Imovane. I thought it might be enough with neat gin, but it wasn't because I woke up quite soon after — well, it felt soon after — and I was still there at his bloody table, with the candles gone out. It was weird.'

  Just the stereo monitor and the bright figures blinking on the clock. The room was barely furnished apart from a pile of cardboard cartons, some of them crushed ready for disposal behind the door. The floor rug was disturbed, badly rucked up where she had dragged him to the bedroom — she could see this when her eyes grew accustomed to the grimy half-light from a high window fan.

  'I didn't go back into the bedroom. Neither would you.'

  'Maybe he's not dead. Were you sure? Didn't you even check?'

  'No! I told you I didn't. But he was dead all right.'

  'So you just came home?'

  'First I cleaned up the sick. I must have been sick. I could have choked!' She gulped with laughter at this. 'On my own vomit. It happens. But no such bloody luck. And the police didn't come — I thought they might, after that zoo story on the radio.'

  'Was it on the radio?'

  'But he'd shifted flats, hadn't he? Thought that was all he had to do — silly bugger. They'll track him down — they have to. And then it'll be me. What's worse — one wild dog or one whingeing Pom? So what did Sheree have to say about it?'

  'I couldn't tell her. Not about Garth. Don't be silly.'

  'Why not? She's tough enough. She has to find out sooner or later what sort of person I am.'

  'Well —' I shrugged. 'But she was too happy. I didn't like to bring her down.'

  Una raised her eyebrows and then her glass. 'We're wetting the baby's head, are we? I nearly forgot. I'm surprised she's happy — she's going to have to pull herself together. This is where the hard stuff begins.'

  'Motherhood, you mean? Solo?'

  'She doesn't want the baby, remember?'

  'But you said . . . Have you changed your mind again?'

  'Mind? That's the trouble with me, isn't it? I'm not sure I've got one. I think I've just lost it, and good riddance. It won't be much help to me in prison.'

  'Do go easy on that stuff,' I said. 'You'll make yourself sick again.' I moved the gin bottle off the table and placed it on the kitchen bench. 'Sheree's decided she wants to keep the baby.'

  'I suppose you told her, did you?'

  'No, she'd made up her mind before Beryl and I even got there. She'd talked to someone — a social worker.'

  'But you told her what I said, about the genes?'

  'I did. Yes, I told her that.' I was glad to be able to report this without lying.

  'Good.' Una sounded pleased, as if she meant this.

  I began to tell her about the emergency allowance and how Sheree expected to come home with her baby to this apartment and have three grandmas — or one great-grandmother and two surrogate grannies. And which bedroom would the young mother sleep in — mine or Una's? — since space would be needed for a baby bassinet and it wouldn't fit in the little back room. For a moment I could pretend none of the other stuff had happened and look at the possibility of life continuing much as before, with only minor adjustments. But somewhere during this recital Una had stopped listening, or she was listening to another voice that I couldn't tune in to.

  'I'm going to the police,' Una said later, when she woke up on the sofa and saw me moving about, wiping down the table with a damp cloth. It was late. Tomorrow I was expected to go in to work at ten in the morning.

  'Don't be silly. What for?'

  'I have to make a statement. I need to be punished, don't I?'

  'You need to get a good lawyer, that's what you need.'

  'I don't deserve a lawyer, and I can't afford one.'

  'You might get legal aid — you have to — it's the law.'

  'Oh, that's right, you worked in one of those places once, didn't you? Hah. I suppose you know everything about murder, or you think you do.'

  'I don't know much at all. Or manslaughter.

  Honestly, Una, you have to talk to someone before you start admitting anything. If you were going to bring in the police the time for that would have been straight after he fell off his chair.'

  She was laughing, loosely, her lips slack with gin and I noticed she must have dribbled while she was sleeping. She laughed almost with pleasure, delighted at my reaction. 'You talk like you were there with me. How do you know so much? Clever Clarice.'

  'You told me about it,' I reminded her.

  'Oh, did I? I suppose I was telling the truth, was I?'

  'I think so,' I frowned. 'It sounded like it.'

  'Okay. Yes,' Una stopped laughing and tried to pull herself up straighter on the sofa. 'It was, actually. The truth, actually, so help me God.' She shut her eyes. 'I think I might leave the police out of it for now.'

  I made some phone calls after breakfast. I excused myself from going in to the office, claiming a migraine. Normally I would have worried that a lie like this would deserve the truth rebounding and punishing me with a blinding headache, but this time it was excusable.
So why did my temples throb with a threatening pulse? I rang Una's work as well and lied for her, while she sat within hearing distance wearing an ironic expression — it hadn't been her idea, this lie. Then I called the law firm where I'd worked, oh quite a few years ago now, and learned that my immediate boss had 'passed away a few years back'. I asked for the phone number of one of the law clerks who'd been a sort of friend once upon a time; no one seemed to remember who I was talking about, or even who I was. I replaced the phone, feeling bruised and discouraged.

  'I don't know what you think you're doing,' Una said. 'I don't need anything from you. I'm quite capable of making a confession and getting the sack without any help.'

  The phone shocked us. It sounded unusually loud as if I'd accidentally turned up the volume; we started, in perfect time. It was Sheree, calling from a hospital phone. She didn't at once ask for Una — she'd clearly expected an answerphone message instead of my voice — but Una jumped from her chair and held out a demanding hand.

  'Hi, Ditzy! I won't say I didn't think you had it in you — you had something in you anyway . . . I'm pleased. I bloody am. Would I lie? . . . I can't. Tomorrow? Isn't that a bit soon? I can't pick you up, sorry — I'm a bit tied up.' Tied up. She caught my eye and began to giggle. 'And I can't talk now. We have to go to the p— p— police station.' She was stuttering with laughter, so that I had to snatch the phone back from her.

  'Just to provide some information. Don't worry about it. I'll pick you up tomorrow if Una can't. Drink lots of water. We might be in later.'

  Una was looking sour when I turned around. 'You don't have to come with me.'

  'Don't I really?'

  She bowed her head. 'Yes, please. Please, Clarice.' The humour had sloughed off her face, leaving it creased and pasty. 'I don't even know where to go.'

  Una parked the Mazda in the library basement car-park because it was close to the police station and we sat leafing hurriedly through the newspaper before going to feed money into the meter. I was relieved to have arrived safely this far at least. Una had driven — she had insisted on driving, well it was her car — with a reckless abandon that made my stomach clench; swerving sideways to the stationer's on Victoria Street and then having to travel in a circular sweep to approach the car park on her second attempt. It was only luck that saved us from running out of petrol. My long fingers shook as I flapped the paper open.