The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Shaking, I found myself, coat on still, stuffing my clean black clothes into a carrier bag. What else was there? I could call in and collect my handbag from the library on my way.

  On my way. Where? Never mind. There was safety in readiness. I stuffed the bag under the bed.

  The doorbell seemed to switch on an electric current in my bones. No one called here, not even Jehovah’s Witnesses. I moved to the window, to the far left so that I had an angled view of the doorway. I couldn’t see who it was, just a movement of coat. And then I saw that Iris’s old green VW was parked at the kerb.

  Out in the hallway the bike’s pedal renewed its attempts to break my shin. I stumbled towards the door and opened it. Martha was there in full Astrakhan glory. Heavy black biker boots, a long drapy dress in a deep vermillion and a startling silver pendant. She was accompanied by my handbag.

  ‘We thought you might need this.’ She offered the bag. I nodded thanks, and took it. Martha didn’t move away and I didn’t make a move to close the door.

  ‘You heard about Tierney?’ she asked, trying to look into my face, which I was stubbornly not letting her do. I managed a nod but no words.

  ‘I was there yesterday. In Darley Cut.’ Her voice was quite small now. I nodded again and she matched it with one of her own. Her lips wobbled and she didn’t dare blink.

  ‘Don’t.’ I murmured in my head, only to find it had sneaked out through my mouth. Martha looked down, looked about to turn away. Then with a sudden flurry of arms she grabbed me, hugged me to the textured front of that Astrakhan coat. I felt the softness, the warmth, the smell of her. A rich scent of rosemary and a cooling overtone of black peppermint. Something beneath that, something oniony and savoury. Her hair brushing my face, coarser and thicker than it seemed. Strong.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, matter of fact, as she pulled away. In the car, she wound down the window. Her last look over the top of the glass. Her uncertain question, ‘We will, won’t we?’

  I nodded.

  Back in the hallway the bike spun its vicious front wheel round and winded me with its curled rams-horn handlebars. I shoved at it, reached down and yanked the chain off, the oil like blood on my hands.

  Kotowaza: ‘Nakitsura ni hachi’

  Japanese Proverb: ‘A bee to a crying face’

  I stood at the staffroom window watching the police officers fingertip search the Memorial Gardens. Behind me, the kettle steamed on and on. This time, Mrs Milligan had forgotten to put the lid on. We all stood watching the search. Mrs Atkinson with her arms folded across her front, Mrs Milligan chewing at her thumbnail. Martha, elbow resting on forearm, one fist curled, her face obscured by her other palm, her fingers tapping anxiously at her nose. Eyes wide. Eyes narrowed. I found the sunlight too bright. Dust motes seemed to suffocate the air.

  The knicker-thief had ceased to be a joke. He had progressed from the slightly comic hobby of filching pants from washing lines and poorly attended service washes to become a sex offence genius overnight. The details were blurred, but the fact was he had attacked a woman in the street last evening. He had approached her from behind, brutal hands rammed up under her skirt. He had taken her knickers hot from her body, tearing them down, ripping clothes, grazing flesh, tripping and pushing and, once the victim was floored, trampling over her to get away.

  The underwear had been found in the Memorial Gardens by the Parks and Gardens man on his way to clear the beds. He had told Mr Machin that the fabric was stained with knicker-thief jism, now being analysed. In these days of DNA sampling it is as good as a calling card. Now they were looking for more, plaster-casting a footprint under the far shrubbery that backed onto the bank carpark. Through the chainlink fence and the gaps and patches of the thick hedging we could see the glimmers of fluorescent police vests as they scoured the tarmac of the carpark, and the kettle began to scorch itself with thirst.

  * * *

  May 1889. It was a Chas. Goodrich journal that had been deposited under a creased pile of drawings for a new Orangery, dated 1914. All sorts of ideas that never came to pass. As Viscount Breck was scrawling V. Good. Best yet. on a set of the drawings, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was being assassinated and setting in train a different set of plans.

  But that concealed May 1889. This journal was damp and mouldy. It had not been kept with the others and it looked battered and weatherbeaten, as if it had travelled through tempests in attempting to rejoin them. Some of the pages were stuck together and couldn’t be unstuck without tearing. I made a mental note to buy razor blades in my lunch hour and opened what pages I could. But I was thick-fingered, unable to concentrate. It seemed that every creak of every floorboard made me leap out of my skin. Was it likely that a knicker thief, newly promoted to the rank of sexual offender, would frequent the library? I knew, of course, that anything is possible.

  I found I wasn’t reading Lady Breck’s sloping handwriting. The words were swimming and curling before me but my head was going through the male faces I met in the course of a day. The man on trolley duty in the supermarket carpark. The white van that picked up the team of plasterers from the newly developed two-storey block of flats at the corner. The parcels delivery man who called in at the computer store each afternoon. I thought of the faces at Intermediate Japanese. That tall chap at the back who always yawned. The balding man in the suit who never did the homework.

  Who were these people? Mr Machin. Harvey. Mr ‘History-Teacher’ Pennington. What did I know about them?

  * * *

  ‘…without so much as a by your leave,’ Lady Breck fumed across the page.

  By the time we return the Travellers will have moved on, not to return until September. I have half a mind to stow away to the horse fairs with Vancy Kircher. All my rebellions are imagined and at the last, I know, duty will call and I shall answer.

  Several pages were stuck together.

  …journey to hell with bad weather and clattering trains. Hazard’s brougham awaited us at Kingswear. How wonderful to glimpse the sky and the sea and the castle on the little outcrop and to breathe air. I don’t care for the train, that miserable iron box. Complain, complain, complain. But, the house is magnificent. Breck quite jealous of the Japanese Garden…

  The journal pages were stuck fast. I turned over, missing maybe ten or twelve pages out.

  … not prizes to be won, nor beasts to be tamed. To overhear them after dinner fills me with shame. They are beasts. I would not have believed it even of Breck but there he sits, puffing Hazard’s cigars, every…

  Empty pages. Another five or so stuck together in a wedge. I turned it over. I was already thinking that the house in the landscape was probably Hazard’s house, the house Lady Breck was writing about with the Japanese garden. Most likely the men at dinner were those of their acquaintance, Whitside and Monty. They milled about between country houses being fed, watered and entertained. Well-dressed tramps some of them, with nowhere to go but to the hospitality of their friends.

  * * *

  …local girls. The latest is his favourite pet, a thin girl of no more than fifteen who is capable of reading. He calls her into the library and she is made to read passages from Austen until he tires. Monty is, for the moment, utterly rapt by Austen. Mary-Ann Penny reads very well, better, it must be offered, than Monty. She has expression and understanding notwithstanding that she is employed in the Laundry. As her fellow laundresses fall into their beds to dream of mangles and coppers rolling to the boil her attendance is requested at the Golden Lectern in the drawing room. Each evening she appears more tired and draggled than the last, the dark circles under her eyes deepening. Breck is taken with her and wonders where she has gleaned her small education.

  I dislike Hazard. He is a slow poison of a man.

  Now the fluorescent bulb of memory juddered into life. The names I had seen before, not just familiar from Kite House. Familiar from the Brakers Meet entertainment programmes. The social circle.

  I took the journal down to
Mrs Atkinson’s office. I needed some air. I needed to keep moving so that I didn’t think about knicker thieves and violent hands and slow poison.

  As I moved to the first step on the Tech stairwell I waited for my usual sense of uplift, of moving not just physically up the stairs but mentally upwards. Lightening. Letting go.

  Tonight it didn’t come. As I topped the stairs the corridor seemed quieter than usual. At the far end Ceramics students were donning aprons, but no one seemed to be swotting for their vocab test. The door was shut to me, a small typed notice sticky-taped to the chickenwired square of window.

  * * *

  DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES

  BEYOND OUR CONTROL

  THERE WILL BE NO SESSION

  OF INTERMEDIATE JAPANESE

  THIS EVENING

  * * *

  It didn’t occur to me to wonder why. I assumed flu or a babysitting crisis and then pondered what else I could do with my evening. Ceramics? No, that would require some skill, not just the donning of an apron. Discouraged, I continued on down the corridor, and as I reached the foot of the stairs the frosted glass door to the reception office opened. I halted at the murmured voices of the receptionist and the Tarot tutor, heard Setsuke’s name float out of the hushed cloud of gossip. I learned how the knicker thief was the circumstance over which they had no control.

  All the things I had not known about Setsuke.

  That she had come from Japan five years before to work in some faceless shiny-windowed building in the nearby city. That she had married someone she had worked with there and now love marooned her in this alien, Western place. That she had taken a career break to bring up her two small children and had been delighted to be asked to teach Japanese at the college a few evenings a week and be part of a community-wide cross-cultural initiative, an idea to get us all speaking new languages and engaging with people from other cultures. That after all of that, it was Setsuke who had engaged with the knicker thief. That besides love there was indignity, fear, humiliation.

  All these things were now common knowledge, splattered greedily all over the front page of the local paper. Which I did not buy. Which I did not read. I listened at the foot of the stairs and I walked away.

  * * *

  Back at the flat, Third Floor’s bike had fallen across the doorway and blocked the door. No amount of shoving and pushing would shift it. I buckled the wheel trampling over it and it took revenge by twisting my ankle down into its spokes. Locked out yet again, I hiked back over the bike’s carcass and headed around the back to break in again via the pergola.

  Inside I was restless, churning around like a caged zoo cat. The walls seemed to blank me at every turn. I glanced through the kitchen window and saw not a light. Not a one.

  Blinds down. Curtains drawn. No lights. The neighbourhood was on watch.

  At last, as if a magnesium flash exploded in my head, I knew there was only one thing to do. In the bedroom I rummaged the carrier bag of belongings out from under the bed and took off my clothes. The worn and baggy grey jumper, my slim and seated cord skirt. I shed them like skin. I pulled on the black skirt and deep v sweater. I zipped up the soft high-heeled leather boots. I didn’t think my cagoule would cut it so I opened the wardrobe, where my old charcoal coloured coat was slumped in the furthest corner. I dragged it up like a pelt and slung myself into it. It smelled of rain and buses and lemony wood polish. And piled deep within the fibres was that other smell, a smell of long ago and not quite far away enough. But needs must, and the devil always seems to be driving.

  It was unlikely that he would strike again given the fact that the town was on red alert. However, if cheap detective novels and amateur psychology were to be believed he might have got an unquenchable taste for the deed. Brutality and power are probably more addictive than heroin, although I haven’t done the research. Imagine the laboratory. A box of brutal thugs being asked to pummel and rape, up against a box of other thugs being injected with opiate narcotics. And no one looking at the men in the white coats brandishing the clipboards, who have more power and more brutality and more addiction than anyone else there.

  You see I was rambling. Not rational. My head was seething and boiling as I began to walk the streets.

  I had the map of town in my head; I had walked most of the streets in my two-year stay. Where had the attack on Setsuke taken place? On a side street at eveningtide. An extraordinary moment in an ordinary place. I walked to the parish church and, keeping the library to my left, I took in the townscape. There were the streets but also there was Queens Park, the quiet Victorian area surrounding it, leafy with big front gardens that secluded and excluded. It would be daring to attack there, under their noses. My own part of town, the oldest part where the rows and terraces backed up against each other, squaring off back gardens, creating little behind-the-scenes towns of sheds, back lanes and garages. Would he dare go there? Wasn’t that just trap territory, the windows all watching? And there was Darley Cut and the school…

  What the hell. There was no point second guessing, so I walked. Come and get me.

  If you asked me now I would say I was reckless. Delusional, all the thoughts in my head convinced that only I could do this, and if I did, I could save them all. Setsuke and Martha and Vanessa Milligan and Georgia Atkinson and red-headed Angharad and Ellen Freethy, all the women who ever came through the library doors, who ever pushed their trolleys round the supermarket, who gardened naked, who sat on the bus.

  I was a beacon, burning. Come and Get Me. You’ll see. I am dressed in the night for a reason.

  I am slow poison.

  * * *

  I did not find him. I walked the outer edges of town finding nothing but residential streets and rowed houses. Only parked cars for company, lining the streets and growling along the motorway in the distance.

  In wintertime everyone abandons the streets in this town. Further up the dual carriageway there is an industrial estate with a nightclub that has a record of a murder a month and the drunks and sluts draggle around the maze of units trying to find their coach or their bus or their vandalised car. But in town, there are a couple of pubs that run quiz nights and bingo and that’s it. Everything is finished by ten o’clock. There are takeaways of course, busy into the night, people reading the local paper and watching the fish tank, waiting peaceably for their midnight kung pao chicken.

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when I shut the door on the phone box. The coins flashed like comets in the moonlight and each titanium white beam of light seemed to slow time. Down and down. The tinny sparkling sound as they fell down and down and my fingers, like highly trained creatures picking out the numbers. It rang out at the other end. He would be awake, at the piano possibly, going over the Beethoven, working his way through the Bach.

  ‘Hello?’ as his voice answered I crowded myself closer to the phone and let the tears come. I was utterly silent.

  ‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said, matter of fact. It was what he had always said before, those several spooky times when I had picked up the phone to call him and found him already on the other end, waiting for his call to me to ring through. We always laughed. About a hundred years ago.

  ‘Just wondering. That was all. You know. Things.’

  A sound escaped from me, a hybrid sniff and sob and after it an echo of silence.

  ‘She’s doing very well, by the way. Keeps me up to date with it all, but she’s captaining the ship superbly. And Irene is still doing the teas. Just in case you were wondering. You know.’

  Time slowed further. We’re like the centre of an orrery, an utterly still point in the night, in the universe and everything spins around us.

  ‘I’ve abandoned Beethoven for a while. Wrestling with Freddie Chopin instead. That yellow book of preludes. For a while.’

  I’m listening to the words and I’m not in the phone box. I’m back there, my legs curled round the legs of the music stool and we’re trying to play ‘Arrival of the Queen of
Sheba’ but I can’t manage it because I keep laughing. The frantic pomp not matched by my fingers blundering and clashing. The stool wasn’t wide enough for two, he used to pull up one of the dining chairs and sit, just slightly too high.

  I hear a clomp on the end of the line then, the floorboards creaking under the carpet as he moves. And he starts to play. Sparkling and bright, a burst of stars. It isn’t Chopin. It is a message. Clear. Written down by Schubert as an Impromptu. Number 4, A flat major. Allegretto.

  All regretto. Music is powerful, reaching down the telephone wires to clasp me tight. To let me know, before my money runs out.

  Ashimoto ni ki o tsukete kudasai

  Watch your step

  The next day I knocked on Mrs Atkinson’s door and retrieved the spoiled journal. I took it down to the archive to try and separate the pages with no skill at all, just desperation. The pages tore of course, layered into each other, inseparable. Still it was possible to make out words and start to put some sense to them. The trouble was that once I started to pick out the words and the sense hovered into view I wished I had left them stuck together.