by Sue Townsend
Angela saw with dismay that the tubular chairs with the plastic seats looked dangerously fragile. She lowered herself to sit down with great circumspection, keeping her hands braced on the red Formica table in case the worst happened and the chair gave way beneath her weight: When she was securely seated, she looked around. It was a horrible place. Only the dark beams which crossed the low ceiling spoke of a former gentility. There were no tinkling teacups or saucers now. The tables were covered in packaging litter and spilt food. The red and white rubber floor tiles were coming loose. She moved an overflowing ashtray to an adjacent table. They looked up at the hand-written menu, which was scrawled on a board above the serving hatch.
Eventually Christopher said, “What will you have?”
Angela’s mouth watered for grease and carbohydrate and sugar, but she remained silent, unable to voice what she most desired.
Christopher said, “I’m having the All Day Breakfast with chips and bread and butter.” This enabled her to say, “Oh all right, I’ll have the same.” As though her choice had been dictated by the wish to be companionable, rather than the need to satisfy her own greed. Eventually, after the ordering of food and mugs of tea, there were no more distractions. They looked each other in the face and Christopher asked Angela again.
“What happened to our baby?”
She looked at him blankly at first before saying, “It died, Chris, you know that.”
Christopher said, “I don’t know that. I didn’t see it, and you wouldn’t talk about it.”
He looked out of the large window to the street outside. A young man with a shaven head was in a phone box. He was wearing a black leather jacket with a crudely painted devil’s head and horns on the back. He appeared to be shouting into the phone. A small thin child in a pushchair waited outside, wearing a cotton romper suit and a short denim jacket.
“But you knew that it couldn’t live, Chris. It was premature.” Angela pushed a track through the spilt sugar on the table with her forefinger. Christopher lowered his head to look at her face.
“Did you see the baby, Angela?”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to see.”
He wanted to believe her, but he thought that she might be lying. He prompted, “But you asked if the baby was a boy or a girl?”
“Did I?” she said, looking away from him.
“Yes, you did!” He’d raised his voice.
“Don’t shout,” she said, looking around to see if anybody was listening to them. A couple of old women met her eyes before glancing away.
Christopher lowered his voice. “The baby was a girl, you said.”
“For Christ’s sake!” she said. “Yes, they told me it was a girl.”
“Don’t call her it,” he said angrily. “Why didn’t you want to see her?”
She didn’t speak.
“Angie, have you ever thought, y’know, that the baby might have lived? Might be alive somewhere?”
Angela searched his face for signs of madness, but his expression was calm enough.
“No, I’ve never thought that,” she said. She knew that if she allowed herself to cry now she would never stop.
She took a tissue out of her handbag and wiped their table, accidentally pushing some of the spilt sugar on to the floor. The dog lapped it up immediately.
There was a long silence between them. Then Angela broke it, shouting, “I didn’t go in there to have a live baby, did I? I didn’t want a baby, did I?” She no longer cared who heard her.
“But I did want a baby,” said Christopher. “You had no right to take her away from me.”
Angela couldn’t speak. A huge swell of tears was dammed up at the back of her eyes.
She got to her feet, knocking against the table in her hurry.
“Wait,” Christopher beseeched. “Please don’t go.”
She sat down again but turned away from him, saying, “I don’t want to talk about the baby any more.”
He tried to take her hand but she shook him away.
Christopher looked out of the window. The child outside, in the pushchair, was watching the shouting man in the phone box. Its thin face showed open misery. Its blanket must have fallen on to the pavement, thought Christopher. No responsible person would bring a baby out wearing such flimsy clothes. Not without a blanket tucked around it. Not with snow on the ground.
Angela studied Christopher’s face while it was turned away from her towards the window. There was more grey than blond in his hair now, and the stubble on his cheeks was white. He looked like the ghost of the man he had once been. Only the colour of his eyes remained unchanged. They were still a peculiar shade of blue: ‘like faded cornflowers’, she’d told him once. She wondered when he had stopped caring about himself and why. He had been handsome once. Her friends and colleagues had been surprised when he had chosen her.
Christopher looked around at the other people in the café. It was a place where poor people came to eat cheap food, and smoke cigarettes, and rest for a while amongst their own kind. He understood this need. It was hard work being poor. It was almost a full-time profession. He’d been poor for a year now.
He couldn’t bring himself to sell any of his books. He’d had some of them since he’d been a boy. He’d been given them by his grandmother and she had taught him how to handle them and keep them. It was a crime in her household to crack the spine of a book or to turn down the corner of a page. Later, when he began to buy his own, it was natural for him to select only those books that were in pristine condition. He was in his middle twenties before he realised that he had become a collector.
As if making normal conversation, he asked, “Have you got any children?”
“No,” she said. “Have you?”
“No,” he said. He wanted to say, “Only the one we had,” but he bit it back.
The child in the pushchair was crying now and reaching its arms out towards the man in the phone box.
Angela was glad when the food came. She noted with satisfaction that the chips were piled high and falling off the plate, that the sausages were brown and fat, the yolk of the egg was runny, and that the strips of bacon had been fried and not grilled.
Crackle left the phone receiver hanging. He backed into Veronica’s, dragging the pushchair behind him. The baby’s head jerked as the wheels dropped over the sill of the door. It had stopped crying but was still trying to catch its breath. Crackle brought the pushchair alongside the empty table next to Christopher and Angela’s. He used one hand to steer the pushchair, signifying by this slight detachment, that, though he was in charge of a baby, he still lived in the masculine world. Crackle went to the counter and Christopher saw that there were three sixes tattooed on the back of his head. He reached out and touched the baby’s cold hand. He noticed that its fingernails were ragged and dirty.
The baby looked a hundred years old: its hair and skin looked desiccated. There were no plump folds around its wrists. It was a sharp-angled baby. When Crackle came back and sat down at the table the baby eyed him with a frozen watchfulness that reminded Christopher of his dog, after punishment. Crackle spread his fingers and twisted his rings so that the various pagan symbols: dragons, skulls, a naked woman, a devil with a three-pronged fork, a snake, were in the centre of each finger. It was something he did when he was bored, and there was nobody to talk to.
Angela ate quickly, she longed to be out of this depressing place. She didn’t belong here with these people. She was afraid of Christopher and his questions, and she was repelled by the man in the leather jacket, and his odd-looking baby.
Christopher ate slowly, turning his head to look at the baby as he chewed. He couldn’t decide if it was a boy or a girl. There were no clues. Its hair was straight and the colour of a page in an ancient book. The man took a Barclays cigarette out, then crumpled the empty packet and put it in the ashtray. He patted the pockets of his jacket, then raised himself and felt in the pockets of his jeans. He turned to Christopher.
; “Godda light?”
“Sorry,” said Christopher. “I don’t smoke.”
Angela put down her knife and fork and felt inside her bag.
“I’ve got one,” she said through a mouthful of food. She found her lighter and flicked the flame and held it out towards him. She could see that the pores of his skin were clogged with dirt. As he leaned towards her, a smell like a sour dishcloth came from him. He inhaled deeply and nodded his thanks. The baby’s hands curled open and then closed again, like a plant on the sea bed.
Christopher said, “You’ve still got it.”
Angela handed him the heavy gold lighter.
“I don’t lose things,” she said.
Christopher turned the lighter upside down and read the inscription on the base. “For ever” he read to himself. He handed it back to her.
“Still smoking?” he asked.
“Only now and again,” she said. She pushed her empty plate to one side. She wanted a cigarette now. She looked around for a machine, but didn’t see one.
He’d given the lighter to her in 1978 in a hotel room in Paris after they’d spent a frustrating day trying out their night-school French. Reading it, speaking it, and understanding the measured tones of Mrs Humphreys, their night-school teacher, had been no problem. But they had despaired of understanding the real, rapid French, as spoken by busy waiters and shop assistants. Angela lay on the narrow bed in their seventh-floor attic, room looking despondently through the guidebook that Christopher had bought at Waterloo station. He had planned to give her the lighter on her birthday the following morning, as they sat at the pavement café outside their hotel. But, on impulse, he went to his overnight bag, unzipped a compartment, felt inside and drew out a maroon leather box with ‘Colibri’ in gold letters written on the front.
When he gave it to her she sat up straight and opened the hinged box and cried out in delight when she saw the quality of the gold and felt its weight in her hand. She immediately lit a cigarette and smiled happily through the smoke, relieved for him that the lighter had worked first time, delivering an even blue flame after the slightest depression of the sleek side. It said ‘quality’ to her and she was pleased by this evidence that Christopher was perhaps, at last, letting go of his working-class background and tastes.
But, the next morning, when he asked her to marry him she refused. She loved him, but she couldn’t marry a man who pronounced ‘baths’ to rhyme with ‘maths’, and was part-owner of a two-man electrical repair business on an industrial estate plagued by vandalism. She had been brought up to marry a man who wore a suit to work, who sat behind a desk, not a workbench. She couldn’t say any of this to Christopher. She told him instead that marriage was an old–fashioned institution and that she was a modern woman. He had believed her.
Their baby had been conceived in the narrow bed to the sound of trains arriving at and departing from the Gare du Nord. Uncharacteristically she had left her dutch cap in the bathroom cabinet at home and Christopher’s French had not been understood when he went into a chemist’s shop to buy a condom, and, desperate though he was, he couldn’t bring himself to mime what it was he wanted.
“Imbecile?” she had laughed, pronouncing it the French way. “You should have just said, “Durex”.”Before they made love they agreed to use coitus interruptus as a method of birth control. Angela was adamant that she didn’t want a baby. But, when the time came for Christopher to withdraw from Angela, he had been unable to do so. She was furious with him and pushed him off her, and lay at the very edge of the bed for the rest of the night.
♦
Christopher speared a rasher of bacon on his fork and held it out to the dog under the table. The baby and Crackle watched as the dog ate.
Crackle said, “Staffie ‘hit it? My mate’s got one. It killed one of them little dogs last week. One of them foreign dogs what have got no hair.”
Angela started to hunt through her bag for her purse. She would pay the bill and go back to work. She would wait until she was behind the locked bathroom door at home before she allowed herself to cry.
The greasy woman came from behind the counter with Crackle’s food. She placed it wordlessly on the table, watched by the baby.
“It torn its throat out,” said Crackle, jiggling his crossed-over leg in excitement. “Weren’t the staffie’s fault, were it? Can’t blame the dog. Bred to it ain’t they, staffies?”
Christopher bent down and stroked the dog’s soft ears.
Crackle took a long pale chip from his plate and held it out to the baby, who looked at it, but didn’t move.
“Tek it, go on. Tek it,” said Crackle, irritably.
“His hands are too cold, I think,” said Christopher, guessing at the baby’s sex.
“It’s a girl,” corrected Crackle. He placed the chip on the baby’s lap. “Tek it or leave it,” he said.
“What’s your name?” Christopher asked the still and silent child.
“Storme,” obliged Crackle. “Storm, like bad weather, only it’s got a ‘e’ on the end.”
Angela rolled her eyes. “Storme,” she thought. She had never seen a child with a more inappropriate name.
Crackle said, “We called her after the one on the telly.” He broke off to stuff a forkful of chips into his mouth. Angela had seen the programme. Gregory watched it every Saturday without fail. Professionally athletic men and women in well-cut leotards competed with less beautiful members of the public over a series of spectacular but silly games, watched by an hysterical studio audience. Storme was a tall, muscled blonde. Gregory’s favourite. Angela usually did the ironing in the kitchen while it was on.
“I must go back now,” she said to Christopher.
“I’ll walk with you,” he said.
“No, stay and finish your tea,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. She wanted to be by herself. She calculated the gaps between the chairs and tables. She would not be able to get to the door without asking people to move. She put a £10 note on the table. Christopher looked as if he might be short of money.
“Bye then, Chris.”
He told the dog, “Stay,” and got up and went before her, making a tactful path for her bulk. He opened the door for her, and they stood together on the pavement in the shockingly cold air.
Christopher said, “I’ll come to see you again.” Angela said, “No, don’t,” and shook her head. Her hair fell in front of her face and he reached out and held the heaviness of it for a moment. He loved her again. She turned the collar of her coat up, and tucked her hair inside. “I’m late now,” she said, and turned and walked off in the direction of the agency, treading cautiously on the icy pavement.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Seven
Tamara put the phone down and wiped her eyes on a piece of crumpled toilet paper. Honest. That Crackle! she thought. How was she supposed to get down town by half-past one? She didn’t have the bus fare and she’d rung her dad for a lift, but he weren’t at home and now she was trapped in the flat. She couldn’t go out. That guy sitting in the car outside had come to serve a warrant on her. He would get her if she left now. He would trick her by using long words. She couldn’t use long words herself. They wouldn’t stay in her head. If she tried to use them they got jumbled up on her tongue and came out wrong. She only ever used the little words she’d used as a child. She would have to wait until the man in the car had gone. Crackle had gone mad on the phone. She hated it when he shouted like that and called her a cunt. And he’d took Storme out without a coat. He never noticed the weather himself. He wore the same clothes all year. Leather jacket and jeans. He even wore them in that heatwave when there was a hosepipe ban.
He’d got a visiting order to see Bilko in prison. He’d be in Veronica’s café, “Until half-past one,” he’d said.
“And I ain’t takin’ Storme in the nick,” he’d shouted. “So get your arse down ere, cunt.”
They’d arranged that morning that he’d look after Storme while sh
e went to the social to see about getting a loan for a new bed. The bed she shared with Crackle was so old the springs had come through the mattress. When the phone rang at twenty-five minutes to two, she’d dreaded answering it.
“What the fuck you doing there?” he’d said. “You should be here, cunt.”
Visiting Bilko was the highlight of Crackle’s life. He loved Bilko. At the end of each visit they clasped each other around the shoulders and said, “I love you, man.” She’d seen it, it made her sick. He loved Bilko more than he loved her. She knew this. He wrote to him every week and used a first-class stamp. She couldn’t read, but she’d looked at one of Crackle’s letters, when he was out at night doing his business. His handwriting was crap.
It wasn’t fair about the warrant. Why should she buy a telly licence? She never watched the BBC, 1 or 2. The BBC was for old people. It did her head in. She couldn’t have gone to the court on June the 18th at eleven o’clock. It was the first anniversary of her mum’s death. She had to go to the cemetery at ten o’clock, and meet her dad and put flowers on the grave. She couldn’t be in two places at once, could she? Crackle had read the letter from the court out loud to her.
“Fined five hundred pounds in your absence.” So when the second bailiffs’ letter came they’d had to move. It was a shame; she’d liked their old flat on the estate. It had central heating, not like this place, which had an icicle hanging from the bathroom window. It was disgusting how the council expected you to live. People on the estate took the piss out of the block their flat was in. ‘Scumbag Towers’ they called it. Though there was only three floors.
The flat was a right shit heap. She knew she ought to clean it up: do some washing and borrow the vacuum from her dad. Take the pots out of the slimy water in the sink, and take the rubbish downstairs. They’d have to do something about that mattress in Storme’s cot which was so wet with piss it made your eyes run. She might start on it in the morning. Trouble was, Crackle didn’t like her getting up early, and by the time they’d got dressed and ate something the day was gone. She was too tired to do anything at night. She kept Storme sitting in her pushchair most of the time, but she had to let her out some time, and then the little sod was all over the place, running about and touching things. She was a nightmare.