'Don't.'
That hadn't worked the way she'd hoped it would. As his gaze sought her face he held out a hand. She could almost have thought he was pleading mutely to be led from the room until she realised he must want his key back. When she planted it in his hand his fingers twitched as if they were eager to close around more than the key. The room was threatening to feel as small and dark as the inside of her skull. 'Aren't you going to offer me a drink?' she said.
His face grew yet more mottled. 'I'd have to go out.'
'You've nothing to drink in the house?'
'Not the kind you're after. Are you feeling bad?'
'No,' she said and more truthfully 'I'm feeling thirsty. We're talking tea here, Hugh.'
'I've got that. I'm some use.'
'I'm sure nobody would say you weren't.' When his eyes remained guarded, little better than blank, Charlotte said 'I expect it's in the kitchen, is it?'
'It will be.'
Even this didn't move him until she made with some impatience for the stairs. As she reached the landing she felt his breath on her neck. At least it was Hugh, not some imaginary pursuer, but she said 'No need to get so close.'
'Sorry,' he gasped, which tousled her hair.
'I'll follow you down. I'm just going to the private room.'
She didn't glance back as she shut the door. The overcast sky blackened the window, which was already on the way to opaque with a rash of glass pimples. A greyish shower curtain sagging from immovable plastic hooks helped confine her in the token space between the bath and the opposite wall, where its reflection in the mirror failed to add even a pretence of spaciousness. The trickle of the cistern behind her might have been mocking her own activity, but she hadn't finished when she realised she had yet to hear Hugh go downstairs. Was he listening like a sly jailer outside the door? The room seemed shrunken by darkness, and the light cord was out of reach. She rose to her feet as soon as she could, because she felt watched too. What was twitching the shower curtain aside to peer around it? Her own hasty movement had stirred it, and the shrivelled clawlike hand consisted of wrinkles in the plastic. It was enough to put her in a fury at her rampant imagination, and when she stalked out of the room the sight of her cousin loitering in his bedroom doorway made her angrier still. 'What do you think you're doing now?' she demanded.
His face was reddening again, a process that her question accelerated. 'Waiting for you,' he mumbled.
'Don't you think I can find my way around your little house? I wouldn't mind if it was twice the size.'
She oughtn't to seem to be denigrating where he'd chosen to live, but he had to be the reason why she was on edge. She felt worse than guilty for wishing Ellen would arrive so that she wasn't alone with him. 'Come on, let's make that tea,' she said.
The instant she planted a foot on the top stair he came after her. 'Not so close,' she had to warn him again, and kept hold of the banister. Gaining the hall would have been a relief if it had been wider. She was heading for the at least slightly roomier kitchen before she noticed he had frozen three steps up. 'What's –' she cried as she turned to see what in the front room was appalling him. He was gazing across it and through the window, and in a moment she saw the figure outside the house.
TWENTY
As Ellen plodded into the station concourse a voice as large as the building finished an announcement, and she heard a tuneless humming behind her, which rose as if she'd aggravated its impatience. Nevertheless it was being emitted by an invalid tricycle, not its rider, who called 'Can you mind out, love? I can't see round you.'
She might have fled without looking at him, to a different exit and home – she'd already had children turning to stare at her once they'd sat ahead of her on the bus across Southport – but she mustn't care about anything more than Rory. As she moved aside the tricycle droned past her, laden with a pensioner whose pink scalp peeked through his grey hair and who bulged on both sides of the seat, not least his tweedy buttocks. At once he halted, blocking her progress. 'I still can't make it out,' he complained. 'When's the next train to Manchester?'
'In just a few minutes, and I'd like to be on it if you don't mind.'
'Can't stop you if there's room.'
She felt as though he were putting into words the image that had haunted her for days and equally sleepless nights, and so her retort was more of a plea. 'What do you mean?'
'The same as I say, love. It's an old-fashioned habit of mine.'
As the tricycle cruised forwards its humming grew more laboured. Perhaps Ellen should have saved her breath as she did her best to overtake, but a remnant of her old profession made her say 'You ought to have that serviced. It's under too much strain.'
His large already purplish face shook as he poked it up at her. 'What's it to you?'
'I'm only advising you. I used to care for people like you.'
'Given up now, have you?' he said and slitted his overflowing eyes as if to keep a thought in. 'Hold on a tick. Weren't you in the paper?'
She only had to run for the train, if her legs were up to running. She was stumbling away when he said 'It was you plain enough. No wonder you didn't want to show your face.'
The tricycle hummed alongside her, sounding unbearably smug, and she turned on him in the hope that some of the scattered commuters might come to her defence. 'Why shouldn't I?'
'Good God, woman, don't grimace at me. You're ugly enough.'
It must be a standard insult of his, Ellen tried to believe – perhaps one he'd levelled at any wife or wives he had – but it didn't tell her anything she didn't already know. Nobody was going to intervene on her behalf, since they could see the truth of his remark, if they could bear to look. Indeed, she had a sense that one of the spectators was delighting in her experience. Their glee seemed to pace her as she trudged ahead of the old man, her eyes so swollen that they felt like insomnia rendered solid, her lips too engorged to utter another word.
The first carriage on the train had a space for wheelchairs and the like at its near end. Ellen dumped her wheeled case in the luggage alcove of the only other carriage and plumped herself onto the closest pair of unoccupied seats. She was wearing her most voluminous clothes, but she couldn't tell whether they were clinging to her because they were no longer large enough or with her inelegant sweat. As the train filled up, more than one person thought better of sitting next to her. She was beginning to dread that someone might have to – that she would be trapped with their reaction or their attempts to conceal it all the way to Manchester – when the train jerked forwards.
She felt the vibration travel upwards from her feet, a quivering that passed through every inch of flesh. As she moved uneasily the seat seemed to yield too much, unless she did. She lifted a ponderous arm to open the meagre slat of the window, which brought her upper regions a humid breeze, although it also intensified the earthy stench that had become her companion, no doubt a symptom of her state. She was so enclosed in bloated flesh that she couldn't judge how hot she was. Whenever a shadow moulded itself to her she could have taken it for moisture welling up from her body. She tried gazing out of the window, but the headlong countryside occasionally halted by stations was eager to parade the sight of her face bulging like a fungus under bridges or being dragged like a fallen moon – an object as rotund and blotchy and porous – over fields and townscapes. Sometimes the spectacle compelled her to touch her face, but she was unable to determine how swollen if not rotten it might be – no less than her groping fingers. If she rested her hands in her lap she couldn't avoid noticing how much they resembled stranded sea creatures, bloated and pallid and ready to grow more discoloured. In the end she had to settle for staring at the back of the next seat, although it made her feel caged, like an exhibit but one so unsightly that spectators couldn't bear to look. She would be with her family soon, and surely they could stand whatever she'd become or at least show her a modicum of sympathy. The prospect went some way towards sustaining her as far as Manchester, and t
he thought of Rory did. In one sense he must be in worse shape than her.
The train wobbled to a halt at Manchester, and then she did. She kept her seat while the carriage emptied, not least because nearly everyone who passed her stared at her, unless they glanced at her and quickly looked away. She remained seated even once she was alone in the carriage; she didn't want another confrontation with the tricycling pensioner. Or was she alone? Perhaps if she peered into the dark under the seats she would find she wasn't quite. She would do nothing of the sort; she might be missing the next train to Huddersfield. She stumped along the aisle to grab her luggage and lower herself from the train.
The tricyclist was blocking the way off the platform while he lectured the ticket collector about facilities for invalids. Neither man immediately acknowledged Ellen. 'Excuse me,' she said to the collector, 'could you ask –'
'Just because I'm in a chair doesn't mean I can't talk.'
'I'm aware of that. So could –'
'See, there's people like her that don't think us cripples ought to be heard. We're just in their way, that's what they think.'
Ellen was growing hotter with frustration, which made her feel heavier still. 'Well, if you don't mind my saying so –'
'I do mind. We're not meant to have feelings, you see,' the old man informed the collector. 'At least there's some that still care about us. She got fired from her job for mistreating the likes of me.'
She might have tried to refute this if the collector hadn't said 'Do you two know each other?'
'I know all I want to know about her, thanks very much.'
'You don't know anything about me.' Despite feeling like a child in an outsize body, Ellen couldn't resist adding 'And I'd rather not know anything about you.'
'See, she admits it. That's how much she cares about cripples, and they were supposed to be her job.'
Ellen had a sense of helplessly performing a script for someone else's amusement or worse. 'I always cared for my patients, however disabled they were.'
'You can see how much, can't you? She won't even face me. Maybe she thinks I'm nothing to look at, but –'
'I don't care how you look,' Ellen said and stared at him. 'It isn't how people are on the outside, it's inside that counts.'
'And you're as bad one way as you are the other. Don't go putting on your nasty face again. I told you, there's no need to make yourself worse.' As Ellen's cumbersome lips shifted he said 'Just dry up, you ugly woman.'
She thought the collector was coming to her defence until he said 'Can you both go through now, please? There's another train in.'
She must have deserved everything, then, since he apparently thought so. As the tricycle moved off with a satisfied hum she brandished her ticket at the collector, though her distended fingers came close to dropping it on the ledge of the booth and letting it lie. She dragged her case and herself across the concourse to the departures monitor and saw that the next train to Huddersfield left in ten minutes. Having shown her ticket to another official, who looked unimpressed by it or her, she blundered into the nearest carriage on the train.
Despite its size, the train was nowhere near full by the time it left the station. Ellen couldn't blame the handful of commuters for wanting to avoid her, especially once she saw her blurred face slithering sluglike across the inside of a bridge. It was as dim as some bedroom item rendered monstrous by a nightmare that refused to dissipate. She closed her bloated eyes and clasped her hands tight in her lap against the temptation to finger her face. They felt like clammy lumps of tripe resting on more of the same, and in general refusing to see only aggravated her sense of herself as just a hulk of loathsome meat. Now and then sunlight flooded over her, unless it was some exudation of her own, which reminded her of the old man's advice. She wished she could indeed dry up and wither too. Writers might be meant to use their own experiences, but she was afraid she'd passed the limit. Her imagination felt crushed by her body, reduced to a sense of the misshapen mass of flesh.
At last the train wavered to a stop in Huddersfield. Once she heard she was alone, unless someone was silently watching her, she opened her eyes and heaved her deformed bulk towards the platform. Perhaps the ticket collector had seen her coming, because he took her ticket without looking at her. She trudged out to a taxi rank, where she felt her midriff swell like an inflated tyre as she bent to the window of the first vehicle. She was sure the driver barely managed not to shrink away, but she wasn't going to subject him to her presence in the car. As soon as she'd obtained directions to Empire Street she stepped back.
The beginning of the route was steeply uphill. The dark sky looked laden with moisture, if no more so than Ellen felt. A bridge over the ring road seemed to coat her with noise and grimy fumes before the route led between a factory and a wall overhung by trees. When she plodded into the shade of the foliage it seemed to leave her moister. Most of the few people she encountered were on the opposite side of the road, and all were by the time she came abreast of them. Were they glancing hastily away from her or from somebody behind her? Surely she was bad enough. If there appeared to be a scrawny shadow on the pavement when she turned her burden of a head, it must be an elongated stain. The clumps of outstretched spindly objects at the ends of two thin twisted branches of the main discolouration couldn't drag her back or down or chase her off.
Beyond the factory a side street led past a copse to Hugh's house. An unpainted gate slouched in the entrance to his garden, more like a scrap of wilderness. However shabby the building was, it looked like a haven to her. Whatever had befallen her, surely Hugh and Charlotte would understand. She was suddenly so desperate to see her family that she grew afraid of being prevented somehow as she and her thunderous luggage made for the house. She had almost reached the gate when she saw Hugh.
He was on the stairs, framed by the window and the doorway of the front room, and seemed paralysed with shock. There was no question that she was the cause of his distress. In a moment Charlotte peered across the room at her and cried out, unless she was too appalled to make a sound. Ellen couldn't run, but she and her case lumbered away as fast as they could. The front door must have opened, because this time she heard Charlotte, whose question only spurred her onwards. 'Oh, Ellen, what have you done to yourself?'
TWENTY-ONE
That couldn't be Ellen, Hugh tried to believe. It mustn't be. Perhaps his thoughts were visible, because she retreated, dragging her wheeled suitcase or using it as support. As soon as she disappeared from the double frame of the doorway and the window he had no idea which way she'd gone. The banister gave a pained creak before he realised how hard he was clutching it. As he managed to relax his grip in case the rail came loose from the uprights, Charlotte ran to open the front door. 'Oh, Ellen,' Hugh heard her cry, 'what have you done to yourself?'
They could have been his words, and he shouldn't let her speak for him. He was too prone to behave as if Rory and their cousins were more capable of just about anything than he was. If he couldn't help Ellen, he was no use whatsoever. He swung towards the sound of Charlotte's footsteps dulled by moss. The hall was straight ahead, and so was the path. He was able to keep Charlotte in sight all the way to joining her outside the gate.
Ellen was heading doggedly towards a clump of trees as if she planned to take cover among them. 'Ellen, don't,' Charlotte called and ran after her. 'Ellen.'
'Where are you going, Ellen? Come in the house.'
The ominous rumble of her luggage faltered to a halt, and then she did. She didn't turn, and even in the silence her voice was barely audible. 'Don't you want your neighbours to see me, Hugh?'
'I always would.' He only mouthed this, from embarrassment more than doubled by Charlotte's presence. Aloud he said 'We don't want them seeing us arguing, do we?'
'There's nothing to argue about. I saw you both.'
'What did you see?' Hugh felt so guilty that he imagined it might help to protest 'We weren't doing anything.'
'Oh, Hugh, don't sta
rt any of that now. I saw what you both think of me.'
'It was a shock, that's all,' Charlotte was determined to assure her. 'Come on, let's go inside so we can talk properly.'
'About what? It won't do any good.'
'I'm certain it will, aren't you, Hugh? And more to the point, Ellen will.'
She was facing Ellen by now, and he had to. As he moved to stand in front of Ellen he saw her lips shift as if they were trying to recall how they used to feel. 'Tell me how,' she said without inviting.
'By going to see Rory,' Charlotte said. 'We're all here for him, remember.'
'I don't think he'd like to find this at the end of his bed.'
'I'm sure he'll appreciate it when we've come all this way to see him. You aren't planning to waste the journey, Ellen. What sense would that make? Suppose we had to tell him?'
Ellen pressed her lips together, squeezing them paler still. Hugh was afraid that she meant to leave without further discussion, and dismay made him clumsier than ever. 'Maybe he won't know,' he no sooner thought than said.
Ellen forced her lips apart with her tongue before it appeared to flinch from them. 'You mean he'll be safe from having to look at me.'
'No, I mean maybe he's waiting for us all to bring him back to himself. Maybe we're the only ones that can.'
It was Hugh's latest if not last attempt to wield his imagination. Though he thought it sounded more desperate than persuasive, it delayed Ellen long enough for Charlotte to say 'Hugh could be right. We won't be able to live with ourselves if we don't find out, will we?'
'Don't go off without us. We need you.'
The towing handle of her case had sunk into its sockets, but Ellen pulled it up. Hugh thought his blundering had driven her away until she trundled the luggage around in a reluctant arc and to some extent followed it. 'Take me in if you want to,' she only just audibly said.
Thieving Fear Page 18