by Sue Townsend
When Gregory opened the front door, he found his wife on her hands and knees on the doorstep, crouched over the contents of her handbag.
Angela smelt wood-smoke in the hall-way and knew that she was in for at least an hour and a half of sexual activity in front of the log fire in the living room. When she had gathered her things together and thrown them into her handbag, he extended his hand and pulled her to her feet. They went into the kitchen and unpacked the plastic grocery bags in silence. When everything was in its proper place, Gregory said, “Shall we go and sit by the fire?” It was what he always said.
She went into the living room with him and sat down on the brown leather sofa. He put his arm around her neck and pulled her towards him. He pecked at her with his thin lips. His moustache felt like a small animal grazing on her mouth. He got up and crossed to the switch by the door and dimmed the wall lights. Then he went back to her and kissed her more ardently. He then pulled her down on to the towel which he had laid over the Chinese patterned hearth rug in front of the fire. He removed her outsize clothes and folded them carefully and laid them in a mounting heap on the carpet.
Angela closed her eyes and thought about the delicious sex she had once enjoyed with Christopher Moore in the sagging bed they had shared when they were young. They had devoted whole weekends to making each other happy. She could still smell the pungency of the sheets as she rammed them into the mouth of the industrial washing machine at the launderette on Monday evenings. Sometimes she had felt dizzy with remembered desire and had been obliged to leave the humidity and the swirling drums of clothes and go out into the night to cool off.
Gregory placed his jacket, trousers and tie on the wooden multi-purpose hanger he always used. Then hung it on the hook behind the door that he’d fixed there for the purpose. He removed his thermal vest, underpants and socks and placed them behind a cushion on the sofa. He went to the switch on the wall and turned the lights off. Then he bent over the fireplace and thrust a long copper poker with a jester’s head in between the smouldering logs. He needed flames: flickering firelight. Once, when drunk, he’d tried to explain why, but had only got as far as telling her about a camping trip with the scouts, before becoming incoherent.
“I’ll fetch a firelighter,” he said, and slipped his bare feet into his brown felt slippers. Angela arranged herself as best she could into a fetching arrangement: one leg slung over the other, toes pointed. One hand supporting her stretch-marked breasts. Head thrown back so as to tauten her chins. He knelt down, she heard his knees crack, he leaned over her awkwardly and kissed her newly revealed neck. “Wait for me,” he said, and crossed the lounge, hiding his genitals with one hand. After he’d closed the door, Angela let everything go and her body settled itself comfortably in the darkness.
When he returned a few moments later he was holding a single white firelighter ahead of him, like a baton. He looks like somebody about to run a relay race, thought Angela. And, as he crouched over the fire, breaking pieces of petroleum-soaked stick over the logs, he could indeed have been settling himself into the starting blocks waiting for the sound of the starting pistol. Once the fire was blazing he excused himself again, and went to the cloakroom where Angela listened to him washing his hands and brushing his nails.
Gregory had nothing to do with Angela’s orgasm, twenty minutes later. It was entirely Christopher Moore’s doing. It was the first time she had ever been unfaithful to Gregory, and she was surprised to find that she didn’t feel at all guilty. She lay on her back and watched the colours in the fire and was just wondering how long it would be before Gregory reached his own climax, when an exploding spark from the fire fell on to Gregory’s hairy back, and he leapt off her and yelped in pain, and flailed at his back with his right hand. His penis quickly lost height and size, until it resembled a one-eyed creature hiding in a cave. “Should have put the fire-guard up,” he grumbled as he gathered his clothes together. Then, “Aren’t you getting up?”
“Not yet,” she said. “It’s lovely, just lying here.” He stood looking down at the full expanse of her. His hand was covering his genitals again. She didn’t arrange her body in the customary way. She was fully conscious, but her body lay flat and totally relaxed, as though she had been anaesthetised for an imminent surgical operation.
When Gregory had pulled on his Y-fronts and left the room to make some tea, Catherine came and lay down beside her mother. She had to write an essay in German about Cologne cathedral and she was worried. Angela listened to her and told Catherine that if she got stuck she must bring the essay and they would work on it together. She kissed her daughter’s beautiful face and squeezed her hand and said, “You’re my perfect, perfect dream girl.”
The door opened and Gregory came in carrying a tray on which were two glasses of Tia Maria and a Chinese rice bowl containing Marks and Spencer’s prawn crackers.
“Ich liebe dich, Mum,” said Catherine, and was gone.
♦
Lionel locked his bike in the shed at the bottom of his small garden. He’d forgotten his gloves and his hands were numb with cold and where he had gripped the handlebars. As he struggled to turn the key in the padlock, he looked down the garden to the terraced house where he could see his wife sitting behind the window in their living room, watching the nine o’clock news on the television. A picture of Nelson Mandela was showing on the screen and Lionel wondered if he was dead. He tapped on the window before opening the side door to the kitchen and his wife turned round and blew him a kiss through the glass. It was their evening ritual. As he passed through the kitchen, he saw his dinner on a film-wrapped plate, waiting by the microwave. As he ate it he would tell his wife, who was always eager for news, about his day in the booth of the multi-storey carpark. As he took his coat off, he decided that tonight’s anecdote would be about the fat woman who talked to herself about her daughter.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirteen
It was in bed on a Sunday morning in June that Christopher first felt the baby moving inside Angela. He was lying half awake with one hand on her belly. At first he felt no more than a fluttering, as though a fledgling were practising bird-flight from the safety of the nest. Then there was a movement, a slight shifting of position. Christopher was fully awake now and he tried to wake Angela, but she turned her belly away from him. He got out of bed and came around to Angela’s side. He peeled back the sheets and blankets and watched her belly. He loved the swelling of it, the recent definition of her womb. He held her belly with both hands and felt the child kick at the point where his thumbs were connected. He looked at the clock and noted the time: 8.13 AM He would remember that, he thought. Angela half woke and felt for the bed coverings, and Christopher pulled them over her and tucked them around her neck. He then went back to his side of the bed and lay down and wondered what it must be like to have a living thing inside you.
He called the child Catherine in his mind. He said it out loud. “Catherine,” then he said, again out loud, “Catherine Moore.” He wanted her to have his surname. Angela stirred.
“What?” She opened her eyes.
“How about Catherine?” he said.
“Catherine?” She didn’t understand, she didn’t know a Catherine.
“For our baby. Catherine. I felt her move, Angie.”
She turned over and buried her head in the pillow. He shouldn’t have named it, or felt it. It had been stirring inside her now for over a week. She hadn’t told him because these new stirrings were disgusting to her. She felt as though she was being consumed by an alien force. One that was swallowing her up and making her invisible.
“How about William, if it’s a boy?”
It was all he talked about lately. The baby.
She felt his hand sliding under her, then his left hand move over her back to link up with the right, and girdle her belly. She knew he was waiting for the baby to move again. He was as still as an angler waiting for a fish to bite. She got out of bed abruptly, breaking the
circle of his arms, and went into the bathroom and stood under the shower. She washed her hair and shoulders and arms. She could not bring herself to touch her taut belly, or her blue-veined breasts, which had swollen so much that she no longer recognised them as her own. Under the noise of the rushing warm water she spoke to the baby. “I don’t want you, I don’t want you, I don’t want to be your mother.” Then she thumped the place on her belly where she had last felt movement. She thumped again and again until her fists ached and she was sure that the baby must be battered inside her. When she was towelling herself dry she avoided her belly and breasts, and let them dry naturally in the fresh warm air. She took her dressing gown off the hook on the bathroom door and put it on, and went downstairs to make the coffee.
While she waited for the percolator she listened to the floorboards creaking as Christopher moved around upstairs. She pictured his big sad face as he shaved and how very much sadder it would be when she told him that she no longer had his baby inside her. She laid four strips of raw bacon inside the grill pan, and put it under the grill. She watched the fat pour out and then frizzle and contract and harden, until each piece of bacon had changed its shape and texture and colour, and become something else.
When Christopher came into the kitchen, he was fully dressed; his hair was wet from the shower. He knew from the way Angela kept her back to him that something was wrong. The pregnancy book he had read had warned him that it was a time of ‘hormonal changes’ for Angela and he was to expect some ‘mood swings’. The book asked him to be patient and loving. He went to the stove where she was spooning hot fat over uncooked egg yolks and put his arms around her belly. He was astonished when she spun around and pushed him away. He had never seen an expression of hatred on her face before. It made her ugly and it frightened him into silence.
He set the breakfast table carefully, with the blue and white striped crockery and the sleek cutlery they had bought for the new house in the Habitat shop that had recently opened in their town. He took a loaf out of the pine bread box and cut some slices of bread with the new Sabatier bread knife on the new ash bread board. The kitchen was full of sunlight, and he felt like a man in the Habitat catalogue until he noticed that the keen blade of the knife had sliced into the top of his thumb on his left hand and that crimson blood was bubbling out and dripping on to the last slice of bread in the small stack he’d cut.
He took his injury to show Angela, then to the sink where he watched his diluted blood sliding down the plughole. When she’d seen the blood flowing Angela had said, “Lucky you.” Christopher was surprised. But of course, she must have meant to say, “Unlucky you.” It was a slip of the tongue. He blamed the hormones. She would be perfectly all right when the baby was born. He wished Habitat was open on Sundays. It was time they sorted the spare room out and made a place for the baby, for Catherine or William. But preferably Catherine.
A week later she told him that she was going on a training course to learn about the computers that were going to revolutionise the travel industry. He believed her. But he said, “Is it worth it for you, Angie? I mean, you’ll be leaving your work soon, won’t you, when the baby’s here?”
Three days later he had helped her to pack a small overnight bag. She had removed two hundred pounds from her building society account and caught a train to Leamington Spa.
A mini-bus had picked her and six other women up from the station. They had not spoken to each other on the journey to the Elms. There was nothing to be said.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Fourteen
Storme woke up crying three times in the night. Twice she had woken Crackle. At four o’clock in the morning Tamara dragged herself out of bed again. She stood at the side of the cot, shivering, and trying to quieten her little daughter before she woke him up for the third time.
“Don’t wake your dad, there’s a good girl,” she implored in a whisper. But Storme struggled up through the stinking blankets and held her arms up imploringly. Tamara saw the tears on her face by the moonlight filtering through the dirty net curtain at the window. She pushed the little girl down and arranged the blankets on top of her as best she could in the dark. Storme cried out again, a cry so terrible and so piercing that Crackle woke and sat up in bed, an angry shape in the dark.
“What the fuck?”
“S’alright. Go back to sleep,” said Tamara to him. She put her hand over Storme’s small mouth to try and stop the screams coming from her throat. But when she took her hand away the sound of Storme’s misery filled the room and caused Crackle to leap out of bed and run to the cot and grab Storme by the front of her damp pyjamas. He held her level to his face and shook her, using her body as punctuation for his words.
“Shut, the, fuck, up. Shut it!”
Tamara was so afraid of his anger, she thought that her heart would burst through her chest.
“Perhaps she’s poorly. I’ll take her in the living room,” she said, trying to wrestle the baby away from him. The screaming was more than she could bear.
“There’s nowt wrong with her, she’s just playing up,” he said, and he threw the little child on to the bed face down and punched her in the small of her back.
She cried even louder. He picked her up by her shoulders and shook her violently, trying to stop the noise that she was making. Her head cracked against the wall above the bed and she stopped crying.
“See,” said Crackle, handing Tamara the damp whimpering body, “she’s gotta learn.”
Tamara laid her daughter on the cot mattress and covered her tenderly with the blankets. She was glad that it was dark and that she was unable to see the baby’s face.
When she got into bed Crackle turned his back on her, but she could feel him breathing heavily from his exertions.
A feeling of dread kept her awake for a very long time, but eventually sleep overtook her and she half woke at dawn to find Crackle holding her belly, just as he had done when the baby had been inside her. It had been a good time. Crackle had insisted that she should attend every pre-natal appointment and had gone along with her. He kept the appointment card inside his wallet. He had punished her if she forgot to take her iron tablets. His face had been wet with tears when he had seen Storme lying on Tamara’s belly, still attached to the milky cord. He had rung Bilko to tell him the glad news.
“I’m telling you Bilko, it’s a fuckin’ miracle,” he had said into the pay phone at the end of the gleaming corridor.
Tamara had stayed in the maternity hospital for three days. She was the only woman in the ward not to have a bouquet of flowers from her partner on her bedside locker. Crackle didn’t believe in flowers. She pretended not to mind, but on the third night she pressed her face into the hospital pillowslip marked NHS in huge block letters, and cried. In the morning the pillow was stained with the black eye-liner and the make-up that Crackle thought was part of her face: he had never, to her knowledge, seen her without it.
Bilko drove the family back to their flat with great care; like a man with a fragile and precious cargo. Crackle sat in the front passenger seat jigging about excitedly, turning back occasionally to look at Storme, who lay asleep in Tamara’s arms. Bilko’s huge black face filled the driving mirror. He was a father himself. He knew that once the initial excitement of fatherhood was over Crackle would be looking for something else to fill his long workless days and nights. It was Crackle who had carried Storme over the splintered threshold of the flat. After the antiseptic sterility of the hospital, the smell in the flat made Tamara gag, but within a few hours she had accepted it again as being normal.
♦
The morning after that terrible night Tamara stood over the cot, looking down at Storme. She looked different, thought Tamara. She was floppy and her eyes looked strange; as if they’d been replaced in the night by those of an alien baby. She carried Storme into the living room and switched on the fan heater. She couldn’t wake her up, not properly.
She sat down on the decrepit sofa that the
previous tenants had discarded. She rocked Storme in her arms until the room had warmed up, and then she took the baby’s clothes off. She was shocked when she saw the bruise on her back. It was the same colour as the spring cabbage her mother used to cook in the happy days. Tamara knew that nobody in authority must see the bruise, or the sores on the baby’s bottom that bled when she took off the sodden disposable nappy. She had a feeling that everything had gone too far, and that nothing would be the same ever again.
She wished that her mother was still alive. She would have known what to do. Tamara closed her eyes and remembered Snow White and a flock of bluebirds cleaning up the seven dwarfs’ cottage in the woods. They would come to her council flat and do the same for her. They, would put all the rubbish that had piled up under the sink into black plastic bags. Then they’d collect the used dirty pots that covered most surfaces in the flat and Snow White would soak them in hot water in the sink. Then the bluebirds would pick up the dirty clothes from the floors with their beaks and place them in bags, ready to be washed. Snow White would empty the ashtrays and scour the bathroom and toilet with Ajax, and sweep the accumulated debris from the floors. She’d clean the windows and ask the bluebirds to take down the ragged curtains and fly away with them. Then she’d sing that song and go round with a duster and Mr Sheen. Tamara opened her eyes and was almost surprised to find that Snow White and the bluebirds had not visited her, and that things were exactly the same.