Facing the Tank

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Well, yes. You can’t like people simply because they’re not white and you feel sorry for other white people giving them a hard time.’

  ‘Quite. I hate lots of white people too.’

  ‘Some of my worst enemies are white.’

  ‘You’re laughing at me!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Toad,’ she said, almost laughing only she was too tired. ‘You’re glad they’ve gone, too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Especially Tobit.’

  ‘No? Why do you say that?’

  ‘You’re jealous of him and me, that’s why.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘You’re like a spoilt little boy,’ she said and started to tickle him.

  ‘No! Ow! Please, Lydia. No!’ he begged.

  She snatched his glass out of his hand, placing it beside hers on the coffee table, and attacked him with both hands, interspersing the tickles with the occasional sincere pinch.

  47

  ‘I thought we were driving somewhere nice for tea,’ said Dawn as Fergus turned off the High Street and headed for the Roman Bridge and Friary Hill.

  ‘We are,’ he said, ‘but Marge Delaney-Siedentrop’s friend Polly McCreery was in the Garden of Remembrance this morning and she said the roses didn’t look well.’

  ‘I thought you were looking a bit perkier,’ Dawn said. ‘Any news from Brooklea?’

  ‘Yes. I rang them last night. She’s being a devil, of course. It didn’t take long.’

  ‘What’s she doing? Apart from the obvious.’

  ‘They weren’t being very specific, but the nurse I spoke with sounded as if she was having great difficulty being civil.’

  ‘When are you allowed to make your first visit, then?’

  ‘I agreed to go tomorrow. They were going to make me wait longer, but I think they’ve decided that seeing me might calm her down a bit.’

  ‘Fat chance of that.’

  He parked the car and together they walked into the gardens. The crematorium was tucked off to one side of the car park. It tried to look like a chapel in the Welsh tradition, but the horribly visible red-brick chimney emerging from the shrubbery at its rear and the queues of hearses and families on the busier days, accentuated its industrial purpose. When he and Dawn had come, with a modest gathering, to see what was left of Roger consigned to its flames, they had had to wait while one family filed out and another filed in. They had seen the sudden column of off-white smoke as the first family’s beloved was consumed.

  They had barely turned right from a little avenue of cypresses and passed a Friary Hill type who was leaving with a bunch of blue, suspiciously well-fed flowers tucked hastily under one arm, when Dawn asked, with quiet excitement,

  ‘Do you see what I see?’ She pointed along the leafy alley in which they were walking to where Roger’s roses had been planted. For the first time in their acquaintance, Fergus ran. Caught up in the spirit of the moment and remembering that there was her bottle of champagne chilling nicely in his fridge for when they got back, Dawn ran after him.

  Someone had pulled up the hideous pink roses, roots and all. A handful of leaves had fallen into the neat holes that remained. Dawn caught up with him and stood at his side, staring. He took her hand and squeezed it; another first.

  ‘Oh Harpy, I’m so glad!’ he said. ‘Is that wrong of me?’

  ‘Don’t be a wally,’ she said, squeezing his hand back then letting it go because the difference in their heights made the posture a difficult one to maintain. ‘Who do you think did it?’

  ‘Someone very, very kind, with absolutely no taste,’ he said then caught her eye and grinned. ‘Harpy, you didn’t …?’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I flatter myself that some of your taste has rubbed off.’ He laughed, turning to go and patting her on the back as she turned to walk beside him. ‘The nursery’s open on Sundays,’ she said. ‘You could go after breakfast and have something new in here by lunchtime.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Something snow white and very old-fashioned with thorns all over.’

  ‘Be a devil and have some pink.’

  ‘More pink?’

  ‘Tasteful ones like that Thomas Hardy you’ve got at home.’

  ‘Mme Hardy. But she’s white. You’re thinking of Zephirine Drouhin.’

  ‘Whatever. Pink’s more romantic.’

  He laughed at her so she winded him with a flap of her hand.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But it’s got to be white. Frau Karl Druschki perhaps or Alba Maxima.’

  ‘Alba who?’

  ‘Great white. Like the shark.’

  48

  Considering his infernal hangover, Emma Dyce-Hamilton had cheered Evan up slightly. The surprise of finding a pretty, young woman where he had expected a sadder, stuffier one buoyed him up. He had flirted a little and proved to himself that he was not going to lose control every time anyone asked him about work. The gaffe about her cousin’s love life was rather awkward, but if he told Jeremy at once he was sure that oil could be poured on troubled maidenly waters and no harm done. The gardens he passed had an anthracite brightness after their recent soaking and he felt slightly drunk. The air was suddenly rent with a tooting horn and the young couple he had seen in Dimity Street the other night, rounded a nearby corner in their open-topped Alfa Romeo. In daylight he was almost as decorative as she. He was dressed for a wedding, his black girlfriend for a cabaret. She was throwing back her head and laughing as if she were high on something.

  ‘Yeah,’ she whooped. ‘Fast fast fast!’

  Evan stood to watch them disappear honking around another corner, caught himself smiling from ear to ear, then remembered his head and stopped.

  As soon as he got in, he telephoned the agency and told Jeremy all. He started merely by telling him of lunch with Emma but the sane, non-Barrower sympathy on the other end of the line was such that the horror story of the manuscript came spilling out.

  ‘Well the first thing you can do,’ said Jeremy, when he had finished oh-my-Godding, ‘is to sketch down a synopsis of how it would have been.’

  ‘Why bother?’

  ‘It looks as though we’ve got Queenie Dawson at the Beeb interested in buying Visions of Hell for a big documentary or even a little series. If we can show her there’s going to be another, that would clinch it. Who knows, if you really couldn’t face re-writing it all in book form, you could always cobble up a TV script out of what you can remember and the notes that are left.’

  ‘There aren’t any notes.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘God, Evan, you know you could do it standing on your head.’

  ‘I can’t stand on my head. Never could.’

  ‘See? You’re cheering up already. Now are you coming back to London?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Or would you rather run away?’

  ‘Run away.’

  ‘Take the cottage, then.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Ours. Well, it’s James’s really but what’s his is mine et cetera. Do you know Pembrokeshire?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s very Tristan like north Cornwall, only without the beaches and brats.’

  ‘Fantastic. But don’t you ever go there?’

  ‘My dear boy, we’ve been every summer since we met and poor J’s been there every summer since he was about eleven so we’ve more than had enough. We can’t be bothered to let it as it’s full of “family” stuff that we’d have to lock up and so on. Keys are with … Have you got a pencil?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Evan, snatching one.

  ‘Keys are with Mrs Rees in the post office. Her daughter can drive you up there and show you how to turn on the water and gas and so on. Now I’d better tell you about trains and things. You’ll have to change at Haverfordwest which is always dreary but it’s better than Welwyn Garden City. So take a book. Now …’

  Evan rang up the station next, to fin
d out about train times. He could catch a Cardiff train in just under an hour. Packing would not take long, he thought sourly. He rang for a taxi to pick him up in thirty minutes. He tore off the page of Jeremy’s directions then performed a quick sum to work out his board and lodging. In the kitchenette he wrote out a cheque to Mrs Merluza, adding a fiver for telephone calls and cooking brandy. Then he hurried around picking up his things. He was just slinging Towards a New Mythology on top of his quickly filled case when he caught sight of a hand just outside the French windows. It was not a normal hand, being caked with mud and having nails as long and thick as dog’s claws. Still clutching the soap he had been about to wrap in a plastic bag, he hurried to open the window.

  He found what must once have been a child, lying on its front with one arm thrown forward. It had a great mass of red hair matted up with twigs and leaves. The skin was so grimy that it took a few seconds to see that the child was naked. He slipped the soap into a jacket pocket, crouched and lifted the body a little by its shoulders. It had one of the bowls of poisoned nuts in its grasp. Half had been eaten but it – actually, now that he looked, it was a she – she was not quite dead. She let out a quiet moan as he tried to turn her over. He set her gently down again then raced for the telephone and began to dial nine nine nine. Then a devil in him slammed back the receiver.

  What could he tell them? That there was an animal that might once have been a kid in his landlady’s back garden and that he had just poisoned it? Not plausible, certainly, but true. His better nature was just reaching out for the phone again when he thought of the appalling backlash of publicity he might be bringing on to Madeleine. Then the doorbell rang. Evan opened the door a crack like an interrupted murderer, found it was the taxi driver and asked him to wait. Shutting the door he heard a clatter from the garden. He ran back through the granny flat to the French windows and came to a panting halt. She had gone. There was nothing but the poison bowl – now empty, and a little to one side – and a scooped-out trail where she had dragged herself through a flower bed. He checked everywhere, even looking over the fences on each side and checking the little alley at the end of the garden. Nothing. Petra Dixon had explained that the hill was full of tunnels and holes. He was startled by the doorbell, glanced at his watch and saw that he would have to rush for his train. Diary, suitcase and last banana were snatched and soon he was in the taxi.

  As they drove down the street towards the Close, he saw someone jumping up and down waving her arms. It was Madeleine. He tried to open the dividing window to ask the driver to stop but it was stiff and by the time he had, they had left her far behind. As the taxi sailed him past the Cathedral for the last time and began the descent down the hill to the station he remembered a girl in a pink dressing gown with a blue swallow on the pocket. Deeply disturbed he toyed once more with the idea of calling the police but the train was already waiting at the platform and it was all he could do to buy a ticket in time. He would come forward if there were anything in the papers.

  49

  Claire Telcott confronted Lilias in the middle of the day room.

  ‘I think we had better go to our room and have a little lie-down, Mrs Gibson, don’t you?’ Her tone was icy and It’s a Wonderful Life went unwatched for a minute as twelve pairs of rheumy eyes watched her frogmarch the new resident out of the room and up the stairs.

  ‘I hate you,’ Lilias said as they climbed in the sub-tropical heat.

  ‘Now there’s no need to talk like that,’ said Claire Telcott.

  ‘I hate you and I hate you and I hate you. You are a deeply evil person.’

  ‘You’re not so likeable yourself, dear,’ the Matron hissed.

  ‘I heard that,’ quavered Lilias.

  She had heard a lot of things since Fergus abandoned her. Lying in bed she had heard this evil Telcott woman plotting to poison them all. She had tried to warn her fellow prisoners.

  ‘There aren’t any minerals in this spa,’ she told them, ‘only cyanide and they’re putting it in in tiny quantities so that the coroner won’t know there’s been foul play. We absorb it through our skin like plants.’

  Nobody had paid her the least attention, however. She suspected that their passivity was the result of a longer exposure to the ‘treatment’ than she had yet suffered.

  There had been a quieter moment this afternoon, after they had drunk their vile, milky tea, so she had slipped off to pursue her private investigation. All her life, it seemed to Lilias, she had been deceived on a crucial matter. It was all her mother’s fault. Her mother had been a tight-lipped, dark-humoured woman who used to put salt on slugs to watch them fry in the sun. For a practical joke she had taken Lilias from her potty and trained her to sit on the lavatory facing the door. All her life Lilias had harboured a sneaking suspicion that this was somehow wrong. She could see it in the eyes of prim women as they dabbed on fresh lipstick in the ladies’ room at the Theatre Royal, and in the way people peered at her from the side of their faces as she emerged. They all faced the tank and she alone faced the door. For years she had kept her dark secret, snatching glances at bathroom catalogues in a vain search for the truth. Of course she could ask no one outright, although just lately she had been taking advantage of her seniority to be a little bolder. She had long given up any attempt at conforming and facing the tank herself; the firm instructions of one’s childhood are far too hard to unlearn. She was left to face the door knowing in her heart that, used as they were to it, the other way round was perfectly comfortable for everyone else. Fergus had been potty trained by her interfering mother-in-law so even he was in on the conspiracy. The sole respite she had found had been after her husband’s death when the spirit had moved her to leave her son with his grandmother and follow Saint Paul on a mission to the unconverted; the African bush offered a refreshing lack of organized sanitation.

  ‘I don’t care if you did hear it, frankly, Mrs Gibson,’ Claire Telcott continued. ‘I make no secret of the fact that you’ve been very difficult. I’m sure an impartial observer would agree with me.’ She changed her tone, fancying that she saw a softening in the lie of Lilias’ mouth. ‘We so want you to be happy here. All it takes is a teensy bit of cooperation.’

  They had finally reached the landing. Lilias was panting from the effort of the climb and her irritation at this insufferable woman’s tone, and was beginning to agree that what she really needed was a little ‘lie-down’. Then she saw the chance of a lifetime. Someone had just slipped into the landing lavatory and not closed the door behind them. If she rushed she would see. Quick as she could – she always kept a little speed in reserve so as to take her warders by surprise – she broke free of the matron’s guiding grasp and staggered over to the lavatory door. Claire Telcott’s cries confused her, however, and she found herself pulling the door to behind her and locking it.

  ‘Mrs Gibson! Mrs Gibson!’ the Matron called.

  Lilias made no reply, enchanted by what she had found. There was a tall young man with a quantity of blond hair, and he was facing the tank. He was also fully dressed and had both hands firmly clutched around the pipe that led down the wall from the tank to basin. He did not seem at all perturbed to find her in there with him, but turned half round, smiled and beckoned her with his head. Eager for a full vindication of her cherished beliefs, she came forward and sat down behind him riding pillion as it were.

  ‘Mrs Gibson? I insist you come out at once. It’s no use waiting for me to go away. I’ve got a key so I can come in and get you out if you won’t come quietly. I’ll count to three. One.’ The little room filled with a warm breeze and a delicious smell like new-baked bread and honey. ‘Two.’

  ‘Hold tight!’ the man seemed to shout over the sound of rushing waters.

  ‘We’re off!’ whooped Lilias and the wall before them started to melt in the brilliant sun.

  ‘Three! Right. Ready or not, I’m coming in.’

  There was a loud rattling as Claire Telcott thrust her key in from the other side
and unlocked the door, but Lilias was beyond hearing.

  50

  It was already dark when Dawn walked back to Bross Gardens. She had broken her iron principle of never becoming drunk. She and Fergus had polished off her bottle of champagne in no time, listening to one after the other of his eclectic collection of old singles. Then he had disappeared to the kitchen and returned with a rack of toast, butter, smoked salmon, lemon juice, pepper mill and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot that he had been keeping in the fridge. They had wolfed the salmon and toast but it was not enough blotting paper for such a quantity of wine and, after a slightly fervent goodbye hug, she found herself home in record time. She wondered if perhaps she had been running or skipping unconsciously and hoped that someone she knew had seen her and been alarmed. Suppressing an impulse to jangle Mrs Parry’s doorbell then hide, she let herself in and walked through the dark to the kitchen.

  Hoping to ward off the acid stomach she feared she might be getting, she splashed some milk into a saucepan to make cocoa. She was looking for a teaspoon with which to prise open the tin when she heard scratching and saw a tiny, long-nailed hand at the bottom window of the garden door.

  ‘Sasha!’

  She almost shouted her daughter’s name. It was hard to open the door properly as the body was so close. Whining with frustration, Dawn raced back through the cottage, out of the front door and round to the back by the side passage. Sasha – she knew it was her – was lying on her river-soaked side, clutching at her stomach. Dawn hesitated, then, seeing the child was not going to flee, stepped out of the shadow and dropped beside her.

  ‘My baby,’ she whispered. As she reached out and ran a hand across the muddy forehead a wild trembling went through her daughter’s body and the light from the kitchen picked out the whites of the eyes as they twisted to look up at her. ‘Christ,’ said Dawn, ‘it’s you,’ and sitting with her back against the door, gently drew Sasha over so that her shoulders were resting on her lap. The shuddering continued and the smell of river weed was joined with a pungent animal scent, a smell of pain, of death. Dawn could feel the sweat breaking out on the crusted skin in her embrace. Pulling her sleeve over her hand, she wiped some weed off Sasha’s wet face. Sasha gave a wild jerk and clutched at her stomach again. ‘Ssh,’ Dawn soothed. ‘Ssh, baby. Ssh.’ With a soft, pained growl, the child twisted her head and bit hard on her mother’s forearm. Dawn winced at the needle-sharp teeth but left her arm in their grip, continuing to stroke with her free hand. ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘Ssh.’ There was another strong smell and she felt Sasha’s urine soak her dress. ‘Poor baby,’ she said. ‘Sashasashasasha.’ She rocked the clenching child. There was a last spasm and the biting stopped. After the growling and the hard, agonized pants, the final outlet of breath was quite, quite human.