Of course I knew or feared I did. I wish I’d chosen another game to play with Paula and her family. Before long Gerald pretends one of his throws hasn’t landed on a snake. “Fair play, now,” I exhort, earning a scowl from Gerald and a look from his father that manages to be both disapproving and blank. Perhaps Geraldine misinterprets my comment, because soon she cheats too. “If we aren’t going to play properly,” I say without regarding anyone, “there’s no point to the game.” Not addressing somebody specific gives me a sense of including more people than are seated at the table, and no amount of glancing at the mirror can rid me of the impression. I’ve never been so glad to lose a game. “Will you excuse me?” I blurt as my chair stumbles backwards. “I’ve had quite a day. Time for bed.”
My struggles to sleep only hold me awake. When at last the twins are coaxed up to their room and the adults retreat to theirs, I’m still attempting to fend off the memory of my final visit to my aunt’s house. She was ill in bed, so shortly after the game of Snakes and Ladders that I felt responsible. She sent my mother out for cakes, though the remains of several were going stale in a box by her bed. There were crumbs on the coverlet and around her mouth, which looked swollen almost bloodlessly pale. I thought there was too much of her to be able to move until she dug her fingers into the bed and, having quivered into a sitting position that dislodged a musty shawl from her distended shoulders, reached for me. I took her hand as a preamble to begging forgiveness, but her cold spongy grasp felt as if it was on the way to becoming a substance other than flesh, which overwhelmed me with such panic that I couldn’t speak. Perhaps she was aware of dying of her overloaded heart, since she fixed me with eyes that were practically buried in her face. “I’ll be watching,” she said and expelled a breath that sounded close to a word. It was almost too loose to include consonants—it seemed as soft as her hand—but it could have been “Peep.” I was terrified that it might also be her last breath, since it had intensified her grip on me. Eventually she drew another rattling breath but gave no sign of relaxing her clutch. Her eyes held me as a time even longer than a nightmare seemed to ooze by before I heard my mother letting herself into the house, when I was able to snatch my hand free and dash for the stairs. In less than a week my aunt was dead.
If I didn’t see her again, being afraid to was almost as bad. Now that she was gone I thought she could be anywhere and capable of reading all my thoughts, especially the ones I was ashamed to have. I believed that thinking of her might bring her, perhaps in yet worse a form. I’d gathered that the dead lost weight, but I wasn’t anxious to imagine how. Wouldn’t it let her move faster? All these fears kept me company at night into my adolescence, when for a while I was even more nervous of seeing her face over the end of my bed. That never happened, but when at last I fall uneasily asleep I wake to see a shock of red hair duck below the footboard.
I’m almost quick enough to disguise my shriek as mirth once I realise that the glimpse included two small heads. “Good God,” Bertie shouts from downstairs, “who was that?”
“Only me,” I call. “Just a dream.”
The twins can’t hide their giggles. “No, it was us,” cries Geraldine.
At least I’ve headed them off from greeting me with Beryl’s word. Their father and to a lesser extent Paula give me such probing looks over breakfast that I feel bound to regain some credibility as an adult by enquiring “How was your search for investments?”
“Unfinished business,” Bertie says.
“We were too busy wondering where you could have got to,” Paula says.
“I hope I’m allowed to redeem myself. Where would you two like to go today?”
“Shopping,” Geraldine says at once.
“Yes, shopping,” Gerald agrees louder.
“Make sure you keep your phones switched on,” their father says and frowns at me. “Do you still not own one?”
“There aren’t that many people for me to call.”
Paula offers to lend me hers, but the handful of unfamiliar technology would just be another cause for concern. At least we don’t need to pass my aunt’s house—we can take a bus. The twins insist on sitting upstairs to watch the parade of small shops interrupted by derelict properties. Wreaths on a lamppost enshrine a teenage car thief before we cross a bridge into the docks. I won’t let the flowers remind me of my aunt, whose house is the best part of a mile away. The heads I see ducking behind the reflection in the window of the back seats belong to children. However little good they’re up to, I ignore them, and they remain entirely hidden as we make for the stairs at our stop.
The pedestrian precinct appears to lead to a cathedral on the far side of the foreshortened river. The street enclosed by shops is crowded, largely with young girls pushing their siblings in buggies, if the toddlers aren’t their offspring. The twins bypass discount stores on the way to a shopping mall, where the tiled floor slopes up to a food court flanked by clothes shops. Twin marts called Boyz and Girlz face each other across tables occupied by pensioners eking out cups of tea and families demolishing the contents of polystyrene cartons. “I’ll be in there,” Geraldine declares and runs across to Girlz.
“Wait and we’ll come—” I might as well not have commenced, since as I turn to Gerald he dodges into Boyz. “Stay in the shops. Call me when you need me,” I shout so loud that a little girl at a table renders her mouth clownish with a misaimed cream cake. Geraldine doesn’t falter, and I’m not sure if she heard. As she vanishes into the shop beyond the diners I hurry after her brother.
Boyz is full of parents indulging or haranguing their children. When I can’t immediately locate Gerald in the noisy aisles I feel convicted of negligence. He’s at the rear of the shop, removing fat shoes from boxy alcoves on the wall. “Don’t go out whatever you do. I’m just going to see your sister doesn’t either,” I tell him.
I can’t see her in the other shop. I’m sidling between the tables when I grasp that I could have had Gerald phone for me to speak to her. It’s just as far to go back now, and so I find my way through an untidy maze of abandoned chairs to Girlz. Any number of those, correctly spelled, are jangling racks of hangers and my nerves while selecting clothes to dispute with their parents, but none of them is Geraldine. I flurry up and down the aisles, back and forth to another catacomb of footwear, but she’s nowhere to be seen.
“Geraldine,” I plead in the faded voice my exertions have left me. Perhaps it’s best that I can’t raise it, since she must be in another shop. I didn’t actually see her entering this one. As I dash outside I’m seized by a panic that tastes like all the food in the court turned stale. I need to borrow Gerald’s mobile, but the thought makes me wonder if the twins could be using their phones to play a game at my expense—to coordinate how they’ll keep hiding from me. I stare about in a desperate attempt to locate Geraldine, and catch sight of the top of her head in the clothes store next to Girlz.
“Just you stay there,” I pant as I flounder through the entrance. It’s clear that she’s playing a trick, because it’s a shop for adults; indeed, all the dresses that flap on racks in the breeze of my haste seem designed for the older woman. She’s crouching behind a waist-high cabinet close to the wall. The cabinet quivers a little at my approach, and she stirs as if she’s preparing to bolt for some other cover. “That’s enough, Geraldine,” I say and make, I hope, not too ungentle a grab. My foot catches on an edge of carpet, however, and I sprawl across the cabinet. Before I can regain any balance my fingers lodge in the dusty reddish hair.
Is it a wig on a dummy head? It comes away in my hand, but it isn’t all that does. I manage not to distinguish any features of the tattered whitish item that dangles from it, clinging to my fingers until I hurl the tangled mass at the wall. I’m struggling to back away when the head jerks up to confront me with its eyes and the holes into which they’ve sunk. I shut mine as I thrust myself away from the cabinet, emitting a noise I would never have expected to make other than in the worst dream.
>
I’m quiet by the time the rescuers arrive to collect their children and me. It turns out that Geraldine was in a fitting room in Girlz. The twins forgot most of their differences so as to take charge, leading me out to a table where there seems to be an insistent smell of stale sponge cake. Nobody appears to have noticed anything wrong in the clothes shop except me. I’m given the front passenger seat in Bertie’s car, which makes me feel like an overgrown child or put in a place of shame. The twins used their phones to communicate about me, having heard my cries, and to summon their parents. I gather that I’m especially to blame for refusing the loan of a mobile that would have prevented my losing the children and succumbing to panic.
I do my best to go along with this version of events. I apologise all the way home for being insufficiently advanced and hope the driver will decide this is enough. I help Paula make a salad, and eat up every slice of cold meat at dinner while I struggle to avoid thinking of another food. I let the children raid the cupboard under the stairs for games, although these keep us in the dining-room. Sitting with my back to the mirror doesn’t convince me we’re alone, and perhaps my efforts to behave normally are too evident. I’ve dropped the dice several times to check that nobody is lurking under the table when Paula suggests an early night for all.
As I lie in bed, striving to fend off thoughts that feel capable of bringing their subject to me in the dark, I hear fragments of an argument. The twins are asleep or at any rate quiet. I’m wondering whether to intervene as diplomatically as possible when Paula’s husband says “It’s one thing your father being such an old woman—”
“I’ve told you not to call him that.”
“—but today breaks the deal. I won’t have him acting like that with my children.”
There’s more, not least about how they aren’t just his, but the disagreements grow more muted, and I’m still hearing what he called me. It makes me feel alone, not only in the bed that’s twice the size I need but also in the room. Somehow I sleep, and look for the twins at the foot of the bed when I waken, but perhaps they’ve been advised to stay away. They’re so subdued at breakfast that I’m not entirely surprised when Paula says “Dad, we’re truly sorry but we have to go home. I’ll come and see you again soon, I promise.”
I refrain from asking Bertie whether he’ll be returning in search of investments. Once all the suitcases have been wedged into the boot of the Jaguar I give the twins all the kisses they can stand, along with twenty pounds each that feels like buying affection, and deliver a token handshake to Paula’s husband before competing with her for the longest hug. As I wave the car downhill while the children’s faces dwindle in the rear window, I could imagine that the windmills on the bay are mimicking my gesture. I turn back to the house and am halted by the view into the dining-room.
The family didn’t clear away their last game. It’s Snakes and Ladders, and I could imagine they left it for me to play with a companion. I slam the front door and hurry into the room. I’m not anxious to share the house with the reminder that the game brings. I stoop so fast to pick up the box from the floor that an ache tweaks my spine. As I straighten, it’s almost enough to distract me from the sight of my head bobbing up in the mirror.
But it isn’t in the mirror, nor is it my head. It’s on the far side of the table, though it has left even more of its face elsewhere. It still has eyes, glinting deep in their holes. Perhaps it is indeed here for a game, and if I join in it may eventually tire of playing. I can think of no other way to deal with it. I drop the box and crouch painfully, and once my playmate imitates me I poke my head above the table as it does. “Peep,” I cry, though I’m terrified to hear an answer. “Peep.”
Getting It Wrong
Edgeworth was listening to a reminiscence of the bus ride in Hitchcock’s Lucky Jim when the phone rang. He switched off the deluxe anniversary special collector’s edition of Family Plot and raised the back of his armchair to vertical. As he grabbed the receiver he saw the time on his watch jerk even closer to midnight. “Hello?” he said and in less than a second “Hello?”
“Is this Mr Edgeworth?”
He didn’t recognise the woman’s voice, not that he knew any women he could imagine ringing him. “That’s who you’ve got,” he said.
“Mr Eric Edgeworth?”
“You’re not wrong yet.”
“Have you a few minutes, Mr Edgeworth?”
“I don’t want anybody fixing my computer. I haven’t had an accident at work or anywhere else either. I’m not buying anything and I’m not going to tell you where I shop or what I shop for. My politics are my affair and so’s the rest of what I think right now. I’ve never won a competition, so don’t bother saying I have. I don’t go on holiday abroad, so you needn’t try to sell me anything over there. I don’t go away here either, not that it’s any of your business. Anything else you want to know?”
“That isn’t why we’re calling, Mr Edgeworth.” In the same brisk efficient tone she said “Will you be a friend of Mary Barton?”
At first Edgeworth couldn’t place the name, and then it brought him an image from work—a woman heaping cardboard tubs of popcorn while she kept up a smile no doubt designed to look bright but more symptomatic of bravery. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, although the call had engaged his interest now: it might be the police. “Is she in trouble?”
“She’s in inquisition.” This might well have meant yes until the woman added “She’d like you to be her expert friend.”
“Never heard of it.” Having deduced that they were talking about a quiz show, Edgeworth said “Why me?”
“She says she’s never met anyone who knows so much about films.”
“I don’t suppose she has at that.” All the same, he was growing suspicious. Could this be a joke played by some of his workmates? “When’s she going to want me?” Edgeworth said.
“Immediately if you’re agreeable.”
“Pretty late for a quiz, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a show for children, Mr Edgeworth.”
“Aren’t I supposed to be asked first?”
“We’re doing that now.”
If all this was indeed a joke, he’d turn it on them. “Fair enough, put her on,” he said as he stood up, retrieving his dinner container and its equally plastic fork from beside the chair.
“Please stay on the line.”
As Edgeworth used his elbow to switch on the light in the boxy kitchen off the main room of the apartment, a man spoke in his ear. “Eric? Good to have you on. Terry Rice of Inquisition here.”
He sounded smug and amused, and Edgeworth had no doubt he was a fake. The kitchen bin released a stagnant tang of last night’s Chinese takeaway while Edgeworth shoved the new container down hard enough to splinter it and snap the fork in half. “Mary’s hoping you’ll give her an edge,” the man said. “Do you know the rules?”
“Remind me.”
“There’s only one you should bother about. You’re allowed to get three answers wrong.”
“If we’re talking about films I’m not bothered at all.”
“You don’t need any more from me, then. Mary, talk to your friend.”
“Eric? I’m sorry to trouble you like this so late. I couldn’t think of anybody else.”
That was a laugh when she’d hardly ever spoken to him. It was the first time she’d even used his name, at least to him. From her tone he could tell she was wearing her plucky smile. “What channel are you on?” he said.
He was hoping to throw her, but she barely hesitated. “Night Owl.”
The hoaxers must have thought this up in advance. Edgeworth would have asked how he could watch the channel, but he didn’t want to end the game too soon. He’d begun to enjoy pretending to be fooled, and so he said “What have you brought me on for?”
“Because I don’t know what a film is.”
He thought this was true of just about all his workmates—a good film, at any rate. He’d imagined a job
in a cinema would mean working with people who loved films as much as he did. Had she tried to put a tremble in her voice just now? She’d got that wrong; contestants on quiz shows weren’t supposed to sound like that. “Give me a go, then,” he said.
“What’s the film where James Dean has a milkshake?”
Edgeworth waited, but that was all. She ought to be telling him how little time he had, and shouldn’t there be some kind of urgent music? “East of Eden,” he said.
“That’s a twist,” said whoever was calling himself Terry Rice.
“Mr Rice is saying you’re not right, Eric.”
It was a funny way of saying so, even by the standards of a prank. Perhaps that was why she sounded nervous. “Then it’ll be Rebel without a Cause,” Edgeworth said with a grin but no mirth.
“That’s another.”
“Mr Rice says that’s not right either.”
She sounded close to desperation. However far they took the pretence, Edgeworth could go further. “It’s Giant for sure, then,” he said. “They’re the only films he starred in.”
“That’s one more.”
Did Edgeworth hear a faint suppressed shriek? Perhaps one of Mary Barton’s accomplices had poked her to prompt her to speak. “That can’t be right, Eric,” she said high enough to irritate his ear.
“Give up,” the supposed quizmaster said or asked, though Edgeworth wasn’t sure who was being addressed. “Eric can’t have heard of Has Anyone Seen My Gal?”
“Of course I have. I’ve seen it. James Dean has a milkshake at the soda fountain.” In case this failed to restore his own reputation Edgeworth added “I knew it was the answer.”
Holes for Faces Page 4