by Sue Townsend
Crackle said, “Fuck it, I’m going over the road.”
Tamara followed behind as Crackle plunged angrily into the labyrinth of corridors, looking for an exit. She knew the way out, but she dared not tell him, fearing the explosion of rage that she knew was coming. Mr Parker-Wright had spoken to him with the utmost courtesy, but had managed at the same time to convey the message that he thought Crackle was a total moron.
Tamara knew that Crackle was clever, he could read and write, and he knew a lot of things about the world. Rivers and South Africa, and music and Dennis Wheatley, the man who wrote the books Crackle kept by the bed. When they eventually got outside Crackle threw her a cigarette, which she failed to catch. It dropped on to the snow and he called her a ‘stupid cunt’ and hit her on the side of her head. But the blow didn’t hurt her much and it wasn’t on her face, so there wouldn’t be a bruise. She dried her tears when they got to Veronica’s Cafe.
“I love you so much,” she said to him, just before he pushed open the door.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-One
Mr Parker-Wright was rather pleased that it was his turn to choose the music. He didn’t fancy operating on the poor little tot to anything jolly. He chose Bach: the suites for unaccompanied cello. The acoustics were superb in the operating theatre. It was all those hard surfaces. He’d had a good sound system installed at his own expense. It made the work, much of it routine, tolerable. The bureaucrats who now ran the hospital didn’t like it. He’d had a memo saying it was ‘setting a precedent’. He’d laughed and pinned it next to his year planner where a formidable number of working days were marked with red stars.
He knew that he was revered and even loved by both his staff and his patients. One complete wall of his office was covered in thank-you notes and children’s drawings. It was well known that he had a sweet tooth. A drawer in the office filing cabinet was full of boxes of liquorice allsorts, his particular favourites.
As the sonorous notes of the cello reverberated around the theatre, he took a scalpel and opened up Storme’s abdomen. “Spleen’s ruptured,” he said to his team. “I’ll take that nasty old thing out for you, my darling,” he said to Storme. “You won’t miss it.”
As he worked he hummed along with the cello. He knew every note. When the tape stopped there was silence, apart from the sound of the machines that were keeping Storme alive. There was none of the repartee that usually enlivened Mr Parker-Wright’s operating sessions. He opened her skull and saw that there was fresh bleeding and clots on her brain. “See,” he said savagely to Storme. “That’s what you do when you fall out of your cot.” Then he controlled himself and said quietly, “They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.”
His surgical registrar said, smilingly, “And I’d always thought you were so liberal and humane, Jack.”
Mr Parker-Wright smiled back and said, “Oh, but I am, I am, except on the question of eugenics. I’m with Hitler on that one.”
Afterwards, when Storme had been taken to the recovery room, and Mr Parker-Wright had gone to phone his wife, opinion was divided between those of his team who believed the eugenics remark and those who thought he’d been making one of his infamous black jokes.
♦
Tamara wanted to return to the hospital as soon as she’d finished her coffee, but Crackle didn’t see the point of hanging around in there.
“There’s nothing we can do, is there?” he said.
“No, I know, but I just want to be there, Crack,” she said. She scraped flakes of black varnish from her fingernails using the long thumbnail of her right hand. Crackle watched her irritably. She looked a right dog tonight, he thought. Her spots were showing through that white shit she put on her face. And she’d got too thin; she was a bag of bones, apart from her belly.
From where he was sitting in the café he could see the prison where Bilko, his best friend in all the world was. And if he turned his head, he could see the hospital where his little daughter was having an operation. His eyes filled with tears. Nothing ever went right for him, not for long.
“Shall I phone my dad and tell him?” Tamara had already got a twenty-pence piece in her hand.
“No.”
“I ought to tell him. He worships her.”
“He’ll be pissed by now. I don’t want him at the hospital pissed.”
Tamara put the twenty-pence piece back in her pocket.
Crackle stared down into his coffee cup and mentally catalogued his problems.
He owed £750 to Neville’s Motors for a car which he’d crashed after three days because the brakes failed him on a tight bend. Then there was the poll tax and the council tax. Fuck knows how much that was. Then there was Kerry—a girl in Nottingham who reckoned he was the father of the kid she was expecting. But it couldn’t be him because he’d only shagged her twice! He’d heard his brother was looking for him and threatening to kick his head in over the money he’d borrowed. Then he was up in court on December 22nd for driving whilst disqualified, no tax, no insurance, which everybody did. So why was he the only one stopped by the police? He didn’t even have the poxy car no more. There were other things: he’d missed two appointments with his probation officer and the social were on his back. They’d found out he was living with Tamara. He’d stopped opening their letters. They were in a pile on top of the telly with other important documents like Storme’s birth certificate and the lottery tickets. Then there was the crack.
He was sick of his life.
Crackle wondered what Bilko was doing right now. Was he in his cell or was he having a laugh with some of his mates on the wing? Crackle was almost aggrieved that he’d never been sent to prison. It was humiliating to be given a community service order. Digging the garden at a hostel for loonies wasn’t a proper punishment. He wanted a man’s punishment. He’d done some bad things in his time. For two weeks he’d done the water scam, telling old people that he’d got to turn the water off in their bathroom, and nicking stuff out their bedrooms. They always kept their valuable stuff and their money in their bedside drawers. The stupid fuckers deserved to have it took off ‘em.
He’d only done it for two weeks because on the Friday of the second week he’d been caught by an old woman. He’d told her to turn both the taps on in the kitchen and wait until he called her to turn them off, but she’d grassed him up and called the police. He’d heard her shouting down the phone; she was deaf. She’d told him on the doorstep he’d have to speak up. He hadn’t meant to knock into her in the hallway; she got in the way. It made him feel bad when he saw her picture in the paper. Her name was Mrs Iris Knott and she was eighty-five. Crackle couldn’t work out how her face had got in such a mess; she must have fell on something. He would never hit an old lady. He wasn’t an animal like it said in the paper. Further down the page, after Crackle’s description, Mrs Knott had appealed to the thief for the return of her engagement ring. She’d worn it for sixty-seven years and had only taken it off because she had lost weight, and she was afraid that it would slip off her finger. Crackle had seriously thought about giving the ring back to her, but how would he get it to her? He couldn’t remember the number of the road she lived on, and anyway it was worth nothing, he’d only got fifteen quid for it. She shouldn’t have put it in the bedside-table drawer. Old people should be warned. The government should do it, thought Crackle.
Tamara scraped her chair back and stood up. “Two hours is gone,” she said.
“Sit down,” said Crackle.
“Please, Crack,” said Tamara. But she sat down. She knew Crackle liked to make the first move in anything. He warned her about it when they first got together. The first move and the last word.
While she waited for him she looked out of the window at the hospital. She could just about see it through the falling snow.
♦
Waiting for them in the corridor at the hospital, next to the room where Storme lay in a tangle of tubes and wires, was a social worker, Kevin McDuff, and a
policewoman, PC Billings. Mr Parker-Wright brought everybody into his office and informed Crackle and Tamara that it was his clinical opinion that Storme’s injuries were non-accidental.
“Are you sayin’ we done it?”
Crackle was outraged.
“I’m saying somebody did it. Somebody bigger and stronger than a fourteen-month-old child. There are two old fractures. Do you want to see the X-rays?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he pulled an X-ray from a buff-coloured folder and slapped it up against a brightly lit box on the wall.
“She would have sustained this one,” he pointed to one of Storme’s X-rayed ribs, “when she was about four months old, and this one,” he indicated the bone in her upper arm, “about three months later. She would have been in considerable pain. She must have cried…” He looked from Crackle to Tamara and waited.
“She did used to cry a lot,” said Tamara. “I used to give her Calpol.”
“The mother’s friend,” said Mr Parker-Wright ironically. Kevin McDuff nodded in recognition. “Calpol is a liquid sedative,” he explained to PC Billings, whom he assumed, from the set of her jaw, to be childless. “We quite often find our mothers slipping it to their little ones, in here.”
But she said, “I know all about Calpol. I used it myself when mine were teething.”
Crackle said, “So, what’s happening then?”
Mr Parker-Wright said, “As Storme’s consultant I am formally advising Mr McDuff here and PC Billings that you and your partner are not to be allowed any kind of access to Storme whilst she is in my care in this hospital.”
Crackle shouted, “You can’t do that!”
Mr Parker-Wright continued, “She is a very poorly little girl and right now, she is actually fighting for her life.”
“I love the ground that kid walks on,” said Crackle. He had tears in his eyes again. Now the bastards were preventing him from seeing his kid.
Tamara said, “I’ve never hit her hard, just a little smack when she’s been naughty; playing with the electric…” Her voice trailed away into teary incomprehensibility.
PC Billings said, “Who did it to her, Tamara? If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
Tamara put her head down on Mr Parker-Wright’s desk and closed her eyes and covered her ears. The bad thing that she always knew would come one day had arrived.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Two
When Angela got home Gregory was there, waiting for her. “What’s all this about a family crisis?” he asked her.
Angela had prepared a story on the way home. “I couldn’t stand it at work today,” she said. “I’m under stress, Gregory.” Stress was a word that Gregory responded to. He claimed to suffer from it himself whenever he did his VAT returns. Only recently he had bought an anti-stress tape, a recording of a family of whales calling to each other, which he played in the car as an antidote to road-rage.
“So where have you been all day?” he said, as he filled the kettle.
“Just walking about,” she lied, taking off her coat and hanging it on the back of the pantry door.
“Are you going in tomorrow?” he said.
“Oh yes,” she said, eager to finish this conversation. “I feel so much better now. Will pasta be all right for dinner?”
Gregory watched her carefully as she chopped and peeled and stirred. There was something different about her, but he couldn’t quite define it. It was something to do with how she held her body. It was almost as if she’d forgotten that she was fat. She set the table carefully and opened a bottle of his favourite Valpolicella. There was warm bread and a green salad with an olive-oil dressing, and a rich sauce, and the pasta was soft, just how he liked it. And to follow there was Neapolitan ice cream with a crunchy triangular wafer which she knew he loved.
As she watched him eat, she thought there was something different about his face. He looked peculiar, unfinished. He lifted his linen napkin to his lips and dabbed it. When he put it back on to his lap, she realised.
“You’ve shaved your moustache off!” she said.
Gregory used a corner of the tablecloth to polish the convex back of the stainless-steel spaghetti server. When it was shining to his satisfaction, he gazed at his distorted reflection. He was pleased with what he saw.
“I’m doing something about my hair tomorrow,” he said. “I’m going to be a new man,” he said with no discernible sign of humour. At least none that Angela could see.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Three
Storme would never remember it except as a feeling. Very bright light would remind her of something of the agony. She couldn’t cry out and expel any of the pain because there was something in her throat. She wanted to pull it out, but she couldn’t move her arms. A woman’s voice called her name. Storme opened her eyes and the light was like the sun. The voice murmured to her and she felt herself being touched and wanted to cry out again and pull away. Pictures came inside her head. She saw granddad’s dog, Brandy, the door to the living room where the paint had bubbled, the pavement outside a shop, her mother’s face and the red boots, and her father’s face, and the window near her cot at home, and the bright colours of the television screen she sat in front of for most of the day and night. She heard echoing metal noises and softer shushing sounds. Helped by the maximum amount of pain-killers allowed to a child of her age and weight, she sank into a deeper unconsciousness. Imperceptibly her body started to recover from the iniquitous acts that had been done to it and began to heal.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Four
The next morning Angela left the house an hour earlier than usual, telling Gregory that, because of her absence yesterday, she would need to catch up. It isn’t money that makes the world go round, it’s lies, she thought, as she backed her car out of the driveway. She drove straight to Christopher’s house. He was there waiting for her, on the doorstep, with the dog. He had changed the sheets and placed a lamp which cast a pink glow next to the bed.
This time when they made love, their old words came back to them. They had never written these words down because until the big break they had never been apart. And anyway, they were words to be sighed and breathed in an incoherent expression of love and desire. When they were still again, they stared into each other’s eyes and smiled, then laughed out loud at the joy of being together again.
“If I could give you anything, anything in the world, what would it be Angie?” he said.
“Another hour in this bed,” she said, glancing at her watch, which said 8.30 AM
“No, what would it be?” said Christopher, insistently.
“It would be a baby,” she lied.
“Is that possible, Angela?” he said. She bent down to kiss his mouth. It tasted of her own salty juices.
“No, it’s not possible, Chris. I’ve been sterilised,” she said. She lifted a roll of fat and showed him a two-inch scar just above her pubic hair.
“When did that happen?” His voice was flat with disappointment.
“It didn’t just happen,” she said. “That makes me sound as though it was something that was done to me against my will. I phoned the Elms. I booked in. I paid the money. I willingly had the operation. I came out of there three days later, sterile. It was what I wanted.” She got out of bed and reached for her underwear.
“Please don’t look at me,” she said. He turned his head away and looked at the wall opposite the window. He listened to her breathy exertions as she dressed; he heard the snap of elastic and the rustle of nylon on nylon.
“How soon after were you sterilised?” he said.
“Do you mean how soon after I left you?”
“Yes.”
“I went straight there, from the house.”
He sat up in bed. “You arranged it while we were still living together?”
“Yes. And don’t say you weren’t told, Chris, because I told you over and over again that I would never have another baby.” She was fu
lly dressed now, in the uniform that didn’t suit her. “But you didn’t listen to me because you wanted one.”
“I thought you were saying it because of what happened to you. I thought, as time went on…”
“As time went on,” she shouted, “you developed an obsession about having another baby. It was all you talked about.”
He got out of bed, naked and furious.
“Is it unnatural to want a baby?”
“Yes, it is, it is, if your partner doesn’t want one. If your partner feels that all she is, is a potential carrier for your baby.”
“You were jealous,” he said. “Of a baby that wasn’t even born.”
“Yes, I was,” she shouted. “It was my love rival. It was as if you were planning to fall in love with another woman and bring her to live in our house, and share our bed.” Tears came into her eyes. “I mustn’t cry,” she said. “I look terrible when I cry. My eyes are swollen for days.”
He put his hands on her shoulders while she wiped her eyes and blew her nose on a tissue she took from her handbag.
“There are different kinds of love, Angie,” he said.
“So you tell me,” she said. “But it’s too late now, isn’t it?”
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Five
When they eventually left the hospital Tamara was crying. She’d tried to stop. She knew it got on Crackle’s nerves. She could see by the way his cheekbones moved that he was upset himself, but his eyes were dry. She’d tried to take his hand, but he’d slapped her off. His silence terrified her. They went into a telephone box and she rang for a taxi, but snow had started falling again, and the man on the end of the phone said that they would have to wait forty minutes. When she’d told Crackle he had said, “Fuck that,” stomped out of the telephone box and headed towards the city centre. She hadn’t dared to follow him, but had watched his hunched figure until he’d turned the corner at the top of the street.