Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “And the baby was screaming and screaming. I looked into her pram and her face was bright red and her eyes were shut and her little mouth was wide open. She was yelling and waving her fists, kicking her legs. I put my hand on her to try to comfort her and maybe if she had quieted, I’d have been able to think, but she … she hated me! She screamed even louder, even higher, and she went rigid! She arched her back right off the pram, like she was trying to buck my hand off her. I was … it sounds stupid, but I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “So you phoned 999,” said Eddy. “Didn’t you?”

  “Of course you did,” Lowell said.

  “Yeah but … Okay, I’m just going to tell you and if you want me to go, I’ll go.”

  “I can’t imagine anything you could say that would make me want you to go,” said Lowell.

  Eddy snorted. “Get a room.”

  “I dialled 999,” said Jude. “But I used Raminder’s phone. Because I’d already decided I needed to get out of there. And I knew if I used my phone, they’d know. She had hers in her hand when she fell and it was still in her hand. I took it from her. Her hand was warm, but limp. She wasn’t gripping it. I took it and I dialled and they say … ‘which service?’ and you’re supposed to say ambulance or police or fire, I think. But this woman said ‘which service?’ and I said … I said … I said … ”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and remembered. The absolute stillness of Raminder on the floor, with her feet up on the second step and her hair covering her face and spilling out in a pool around her head. And the sound of the baby, screaming as if someone was torturing her, and the feel of Raminder’s phone in her hand, the smell of Raminder’s perfume—something light and sweet—clinging to it, and then her own voice saying it.

  He pushed me.

  “And then I wiped the phone and put it back in her hand and I stood up and went out, and I left the door open and I walked away. I could hear the baby until I turned the corner onto the main road. But I kept walking and I walked all the way to the tube and took the tube to the station, and when I got to the station I got a train and I came here. So that’s what I did. I left a baby alone in a house with one passed out and one dead. She tripped and yet I said, ‘he pushed me,’ and Max wouldn’t remember what happened because he never does. I used her phone and I said, ‘he pushed me.’”

  “Well, my dear,” said Lowell, “from what you’ve told us, I’d say he did.”

  “Don’t be kind to me,” said Jude. “I’ll start crying and I’ll never stop.”

  “Can I say something?” said Eddy. “It might count as kind, but it’s true, and I think you should know.”

  Jude nodded.

  “She wasn’t dead.”

  Jude felt a wave of something she couldn’t name spread through her body, starting at her stomach, flooding in both directions, leaving her ringing from head to toe.

  “Are you going to faint?” said Lowell, half standing.

  “She was knocked out,” Eddy said. “But she’s fine now. And the baby’s fine too.”

  “But—” Jude began. “But I saw the headlines. They said ‘tragic’ and there were so many hits and you told me everyone’s looking for me.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s true too,” said Eddy. “They knew you were there. One of the downstairs neighbours saw you leave the house. Jesus, Jude. If you’d Googled it like any normal person . . .”

  “One of the … I didn’t even know those neighbours. Never so much as glimpsed them from one year’s end to the next. Never heard a peep out of any of them.”

  “Yeah, well, they knew you,” Eddy said. “This one did anyway. You know the sort—‘didn’t think much to the Muslim moving in.’ That’s a quote he gave to the Sun.”

  “She’s a Sikh,” said Jude.

  “Well, anyway, he was looking out and saw you running away and heard the baby crying. So he called the cops and said there was a suspicious person—wait for it—who had come to live in the street and she’d just chased away the resident of the house and she was neglecting her child!”

  “Wow,” said Jude.

  “Yeah, so you’re wanted, but as a witness, Jude. Not as a suspect. Just to corroborate, you know.”

  “Corroborate what?” said Jude. “I thought you said they were all okay.”

  “No,” said Eddy. “I said she’s okay and the baby’s okay. He’s dead, though.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Jude drank another whole glass of wine, sipping steadily at it until it was gone.

  “How did he die?” she said, although she was sure she knew.

  “Aspirated emesis,’” Eddy replied. “Whatever that means.”

  Jude blinked at her, the blinks as steady as the sips had been, and then shook herself. “Look, never mind this right now,” she said. “Obviously, I’ll get in touch. I’ll phone Raminder or something, but forget it for now. We’ve got more important things to think about. Lowell, what are you going to do? If it weren’t for the fire, I’d say let sleep—”

  “Eh, excuse me?” said Eddy, waving a hand in Jude’s face. “I think you’re forgetting something, aren’t you? Never mind your dead ex-husband and never mind his dead dad and five old people who’d be well dead now anyway. I’ve just found out I don’t know when I was born, remember? I’ve just found out that for nineteen years I’ve basically not known who I am.”

  “You were born in April,” Jude said. “Aries with a diamond birthstone, not Cancer with a pearl. In other words, you were three months early and you were conceived on October the third. OJ day.”

  “Don’t mind me,” said Lowell. “I’ll just sit here quietly while you discuss my child’s conception.” He had never sounded more like Eddy.

  “But why did she keep quiet about Dad right till the end?” said Eddy.

  “You might never know,” Jude said. “You might have to just—”

  “Eighteen,” Lowell said suddenly.

  “Eighteen what?” said Eddy.

  “My dear child, I know you think you’re finished with school, but I’m going to put my foot down. You are not a stupid girl, but you are pitifully uneducated.”

  “None taken,” said Eddy. “Jeez.”

  “You are not nineteen,” Lowell said. “You are only eighteen. If you were conceived, as you two so baldly stated, on the third of October 1995 and born in either the April or June of 1996, then you are only eighteen.”

  “But I’m not!” said Eddy. “I had my eighteenth when Mum was still well. We had a party. I got legally hammered. And then for my nineteenth we had a picnic in her hospital room. I’m nineteen.”

  “You can’t be,” Lowell said. “Miranda must have lost track somewhere along the line. Sometime in her travelling years.”

  “Oh,” said Eddy, in a sort of small cry. She looked down at the swell of her belly, put both hands on it at its widest point, and burst into tears.

  “What?” said Jude. “What is it?”

  “Is it starting?” said Lowell, shooting to his feet.

  “I was seventeen,” said Eddy, through sobs. “I was too young!”

  “People are different at different ages,” said Jude, taking one of Eddy’s hands and patting it.

  “No,” said Eddy. “I was too young for it to be legal.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jude said. She was still clutching Eddy’s hand but she had stopped patting.

  “I told you!” Eddy said. “I—” She broke off and let out a piercing yell, scrambling out of her seat, pointing at the blackness outside the kitchen window.

  Before Lowell or Jude could do more than whip their heads round, the back door burst open and heavy feet, running fast, pounded along the corridor. Lowell leapt up, grabbed Jude and Eddy, and drew them into his arms, backing towards the dresser.

  “Never mind me!” Jude said. “Get her away!�
��

  Two men appeared round the corner of the kitchen doorway as Lowell and Eddy made a run for the front of the house. They were dressed in black leather jackets and black jeans and wore heavy boots with rounded toes and long rows of lacing. The sort of boots that might have steel toecaps in them. Jude reached behind her and groped on the dresser top. Her hand found the vase full of dead forsythia and she flung it wildly at them.

  One of them, the larger one, screamed and threw himself in front of the other, shielding them both. The vase broke harmlessly against the stiff leather of his jacket and fell, shattering as it hit the floor.

  “Who the feck are you? Fecking psycho!” he said in an Irish accent thick enough to block a chimney.

  Jude’s mind raced wildly around Raminder contracting Irish hit men or Lowell’s father, unbeknownst to himself, killing some member of an IRA gang, undercover in Galloway during the Troubles. Then she came back down to somewhere more like reality, some connection much more likely.

  “Which one of you two thugs is Dave Preston?” she said. “And what do you want with her? You’ve no legal rights to anything, you know.”

  “Look at the state of his jacket!” said the little one. He was pale with very black stubble to match the very black eyelashes ringing his ice-blue eyes. Jude took them in because they were so wide, staring at her in disbelief.

  “And who’s Dave Preston?” asked the large one. “Has she got a lawyer? Because we can get a lawyer.”

  “And as for no legal rights,” said the little dark one, “we’ve got a signed agreement. And before you start lying, we saw her, sitting here bold as brass, the wee shite that she is.”

  “Who are you?” said Jude.

  “Oh, aye, I’m sure she’s kept us quiet,” said the large one. “I’m Terry Ennis and this Liam Doyle and we are the fathers of the unborn baby that wee menace has kidnapped, aren’t we?”

  Jude tried to speak but felt her breath leave her as though she’d been punched. She took a beat and tried again. “Liam and Terry?” she said.

  A muffled voice came from just behind the pantry door. “I didn’t keep you quiet. I told them all about you.” Eddy opened the door and came sidling in, Lowell behind her with a protective hand on her shoulder. “Eventually.”

  “It’s true?” said Jude. “I mean, it’s real? I thought … Eddy, I thought you made up ‘Liam and Terry’ for something to tell your dad for why you were going to go away and come back without a baby.”

  “What did you think I was going to do with it?” Eddy said.

  “Sell it to the highest bidder!” said Liam on a rising note. “We don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl because we wanted the surprise. So our child would be out there in Phoenix or Kiev or somewhere and we wouldn’t even know if we were looking for a son or a daughter.”

  “I didn’t think you were going to do anything with it,” Jude said. “I didn’t think it was real. I thought you’d bought a foam belly off the Internet to get sympathy when you turned up here.”

  Eddy stared at her. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you locked yourself in the bathroom and freaked out when Lowell disturbed you, for one thing,” Jude said.

  “I was doing my roots!” said Eddy. “I freaked out because he gave me a fright and I got the stuff in my eyes! And anyway, I showed you!”

  “Not the edges,” said Jude. “I thought it was fake.”

  Eddy walked over to where Jude stood and took her hand. She placed it high on the mound of her stomach. “That’s real enough, isn’t it?” she said. “Poor wee mite, it’s all upset.”

  Jude had heard it called kicking and heard it described as fluttering, but inside Eddy was a commotion more like a tiny person moving furniture. She felt bumps and jabs and almost took her hand away at the oddness of it.

  Eddy turned to the men. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My mum died.”

  “Oh,” said Liam. “I’m sorry.”

  “And she told me, on her deathbed, that this was my dad I’d never met,” Eddy jerked her head up to indicate Lowell, who had walked with her and was still standing behind her, gripping her shoulders. “So I just kind of took off. I wasn’t really thinking. I was coming back, honest.”

  “Let’s all sit down, shall we?” Lowell said. “Gentlemen? Would you care for a glass of wine or perhaps a cup of tea?”

  “Tea would be grand,” said Terry, crunching his way towards the table through broken glass. Lowell frowned at it but said nothing.

  “So you found out where I was and got the next boat?” Eddy said.

  “Flight,” said Liam. “Eddy, we’re really sorry about your mum and we’re really glad about your dad.” He smiled at Lowell. “But you’ve got to understand our position. You just disappeared.”

  “I signed a contract!” Eddy said.

  “Ach, it’s hardly worth the paper it’s written on,” said Terry. “I mean, it records intent, but the law’s a bitch. If you had changed your mind … ”

  “As it happens,” Lowell said. “The contract is void. And even if it weren’t, I would be taking personal responsibility for refunding whatever payment you made to my daughter in order to render it void.”

  Liam’s ice-blue eyes filled with tears and his nose began to turn pink. Terry put his chin in the air and gave a mirthless laugh. “Got it,” he said.

  “Lowell,” said Jude.

  “Dad, what the fuck are you doing?” Eddy said. “I’m too young for a baby! And it’s not fair on them.”

  Lowell blinked and frowned, then smacked his hand down on the tabletop. “Good Lord above, what do you take me for?” he demanded. “Good heavens, I didn’t mean to snatch the child from its parents. Dear me, dear me, dear me. Not at all. I simply don’t approve of a monetary element being part of family life. And since Eddy was too young to sign the contract, which is therefore null and void anyway, I don’t see why there should be grubby commerce associated with my grandchild. It will be my grandchild, chaps, whether you like it or not. I don’t have enough family to let any members of it slip through my fingers. I shall repay whatever you gave Eddy and I shall expect visits. ”

  “She wasn’t too young,” Terry said. “She was eighteen.”

  “She was seventeen,” said Lowell. “She’s eighteen now.”

  “I really don’t think that’s right,” Eddy said. “I would know.” She glanced at Liam and Terry, who were nursing the steaming mugs Jude had just handed to them. “We’re having a bit of a … I don’t even know what you’d call it.”

  “I’ve thought of something,” Jude said. “When was OJ arrested? Because we’ve all been placing a lot of weight on OJ night—the third of October, 1995—but there were two OJ nights, weren’t there? The verdict and the big chase. I mean, look how mixed up Mrs. Hewston was, thinking you were in America, Lowell, when you were in Plymouth and thinking … ” When she thought about it for more than a second, though, she could make no sense at all of what Mrs. Hewston said about the last time she’d seen Miranda, busy in the asparagus bed.

  “OJ Simpson?” said Liam. “Why are we talking about OJ Simp-son?”

  “The last time I saw Eddy’s mother was the night the verdict was given,” Lowell said. “It was the first and last … ahem.”

  “And she planted an asparagus bed and disappeared for ever,” said Jude.

  “Ha!” said Eddy, looking at her phone. She put her hand on her belly. “Sorry, little darling,” she said. “You’ve proper upset it, you know,” she told Liam and Terry with a sideways look. “It never usually goes apeshit when I talk.”

  “Ha, what?” Jude said.

  “The chase through Los Angeles,” Eddy read from her screen, “was on June the seventeenth. There you go. June the seventeenth, 1994, I was conceived. OJ night number one.”

  “Then you’d be twenty-one,” said Lowell. “And I didn�
��t even meet Miranda until June the twenty-first that year.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?” said Jude. “Were you at least on a trip, or coming home then? Because Mrs. Hewston thinks you were mixed up in trouble. Were you in California in the early summer of 1994?”

  “I’m not twenty-one,” said Eddy. “No way I’ve missed my twenty-first birthday.”

  “And what about the asparagus bed?” said Liam. “Is that an expression for something filthy we’ve never heard? I thought I knew them all.”

  “Wrong time of year for asparagus,” said Lowell. “And I’ve never been to California. I’ve been to Texas. In fact—”

  “I’ll go to California with you,” said Eddy. “Once I’ve got my figure back.”

  “And yes, I’m sure,” Lowell said to Jude. “Miranda and Inez and Tommy and Gary came for the Solstice. I’m hardly likely to forget. They stayed all summer and then they left one by one, the last—your mother, Eddy—in the spring of ’95. I came home in late April and they’d gone, leaving most of their things and a beautiful asparagus bed behind them. It’s not a euphemism,” he added, turning to Liam. “I have a splendid garden, even if I say so myself. I’ll show you round in the morning. I mean, dear me, I’m assuming you’re staying. You’re practically family after all, and it’s getting late.”

  “Home from where?” said Jude.

  “Dallas,” Lowell told her. “A book fair. I remember flying home, happier than I had ever felt in my life. I was oblivious to what was going on around me, completely wrapped up in what was waiting for me back here at Jamaica. And then I arrived and what was waiting for me was nothing. An empty house, no explanation. Silly old fool, to think someone so young would be interested in me. I should have known better. I should certainly know better now.” He didn’t look at Jude as he spoke. He was rigid with the effort of not looking.