by Sue Townsend
Earlier on in the café she’d given him all the money she had. She waited, shivering, inside the box until the taxi came over an hour later. She gave the driver an address which wasn’t hers, but which was round the corner from where she lived. As they drew near to the false destination, she stealthily opened the door of the car and leapt out, before it had come to a complete standstill. As she darted across the road and ran up an alley between two rows of houses, she heard the driver’s shout of rage as he watched his fare disappear into the night.
She opened the back garden gate of a house and crouched down in the darkness by the shed wall. She listened to the sound of the taxi as it drove around the block, then hearing the engine accelerate and die away, she crept out of the garden and walked the long way round to the flat. The phone started ringing as she turned the key to the front door. She ran into the living room and snatched it up, expecting it to be somebody from the hospital telling her that Storme was dead. But it was Crackle asking her to find her benefit book, and get a taxi and take it to Rita’s crack house where he’d been refused credit. She could hear music in the background and raucous laughter.
“I can’t, I feel poorly,” she said, and it was true. She felt as though her body was full of poison. All she wanted to do was to lie down and rest. He was incredulous. He screamed at her, causing his voice to rise in pitch like that of a woman.
“Bring it now. I need it! Bring it now!”
“I’ve got to stay here, in case the hospital ring,” she pleaded.
“I’ll kill you,” he screamed. “I’ll fucking mark your face.”
She put the phone down on him, then fetched the red coat, pulled it around her and lay down on the sofa. She dare not go to bed, and it was true that she couldn’t bear to leave the phone. Eventually sleep overcame her.
♦
She heard him stumble in. It was still dark. She braced herself for a beating, hiding her face with her hands and pulling her legs up so that her knees were pressed against her breasts. But he passed down the hallway and went into the bedroom. She heard him undressing and getting into bed. She waited, alive to every sound, until she heard the snores that told her that he was asleep. Only then did she uncoil her body and allow herself to drift off again into a troubled dream world.
In the morning Tamara got up from the sofa and went to the phone to find that it had now been disconnected, as British Telecom had threatened. Pausing only to grab her make-up bag from the bathroom, she left the flat before Crackle woke up and started on her.
She hurried as fast as she could through the snow, slithering in the only dry footwear she’d got, the black cowboy boots with the worn-down heels. Her dad lived less than a mile away on the same estate, but the snow turned the journey into an exhausting epic. Tamara felt like a fugitive, she half-expected Crackle’s face to appear in the sky, and his voice to order her back.
Tamara’s father, Ken, checked to see who it was at his front door at 8.30 AM in the morning by peering down from the bedroom window upstairs. It was many years since he’d been able to open the door without hesitation. There was always some bugger at the door asking for money. He’d tried to keep out of debt, but as soon as he got clear something else happened to knock him back—like finding the money for Cath’s headstone.
He didn’t look pleased to see Tamara. She always brought trouble with her. If it was money she wanted, he’d give her a fiver and no more.
Ken said, “What’s up now?” They were a family who didn’t bother with greetings or goodbyes.
“Storme’s in the hospital.” Tamara dreaded the inevitable next question.
“What’s up with her?”
Brandy, the fat Labrador, sniffed at Tamara’s crotch. She pushed him away.
“She fell out of her cot. She’s got a fractured skull and they’ve took her spleen out.”
Ken fumbled in the pocket of his burgundy towelling dressing gown for his cigarettes and lighter, and went into the kitchen and picked up the mug of tea he’d been drinking when Tamara had knocked at the door. The Daily Mirror was propped against the sugar bowl, it was open at a picture spread of the Spice Girls. The kitchen was as clean and neat as it had always been when her mother had been alive. He sat down heavily on a mock pine chair and raked back his thinning brown hair with his fingers. Tamara looked at him and wondered when it was he had got so old.
“Our phone’s been cut off. Can I ring and ask how she is?”
Ken gestured wearily towards the wall phone in the kitchen. It was one bleddy thing after another, he thought. When would it end? His body felt heavy and he was reluctant to get off the chair and go upstairs and get dressed.
“Poor little bugger,” he said. “I’ll get myself sorted and we’ll go and see her.”
Tamara was speaking to directory enquiries, asking for the number of the hospital. “Tamara!” shouted Ken. “Don’t phone bleddy enquiries at over a quid a shot. It’s up there, on the wall!”
A year ago when Cath was alive, he had neatly written out a list of the telephone numbers they used the most and pinned it to the cork noticeboard next to the telephone. Since then the words ‘Cath’s work’ had had three lines drawn through them. He had used the edge of a cigarette packet as a ruler to ensure that the lines were absolutely straight. Cath should be here, he thought. She was needed. She always knew what to do. Why hadn’t God taken that pile of shit, Crackle, instead? Ken had banned Crackle from the house since that hot day when he had taken his t-shirt off in the back garden and Ken had seen that the scumbag had paid good money to have ‘Satan’ tattooed in inch-high letters across his shoulders.
Ken and Cath were Christians and had braved the derision of their family and friends and fellow council tenants and had gone to morning service on Sundays at the concrete Anglican church that looked like a fire station. The congregation struggled to reach double figures. Ken had stopped going to church, after Cath’s funeral. He hadn’t wanted to be told by the deaconess who conducted the service that Cath had been born and had died in sin. If it was true, then what was the point of living? He prayed on his own now. After he’d turned the television off at night.
Tamara put the phone down and said, “They say she’s still very poorly.”
They had to push the Volkswagen Golf to get it started. A man sweeping snow from his path came to help them. Love thy neighbour, thought Ken. He was glad he had resisted having a tot of whisky in his tea. God must have known he’d need to drive the car and have a clear head.
When they’d parked the car and were walking across the gritted hospital carpark, Ken pressed Tamara for more details about the accident. He knew from the familiar way that her index finger flew to her mouth that she was lying to him.
When he spoke to Mr Parker-Wright an hour later, he knew for certain who had harmed his little granddaughter.
He felt as if his head would explode with anger. He was not a violent man, but there and then he vowed to kill Crackle. He would do it himself. You couldn’t trust God to mete out the proper punishment to Satan’s disciples. Not nowadays. God had gone soft on crime.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Six
Crackle woke up and found himself alone in the cold bedroom. No Tamara next to him and no Storme in her cot. Then he remembered.
He felt like crying but he didn’t know how to get the tears out any more. They were locked inside him: these tear-shaped pieces of rock. His whole body was full of them; sometimes he wondered how he managed to walk around carrying such a heavy weight. If he was cut open, like Storme was last night, they wouldn’t find no blood in his veins, just these little shining tear-shaped rocks.
After lighting a cigarette, he got out of bed and wrapped himself in a blanket. He shouted, “Tamara,” but she didn’t shout back. Something must have happened. She never went out or did anything without telling him first. He went to the window and drew the curtain aside. The estate was strangely becalmed by the snow. As he watched, a car drove slowly along the
slip road and parked in front of the flats. PC Billings and Kevin McDuff got out and looked up at the flats. Had Tamara blabbed to the police and done a runner? Crackle let go of the curtain and bent over the pile of black clothes he’d thrown on to the floor beside the bed the night before. They were cold to the touch and he shivered as he put them on.
When he’d been a little boy he’d dressed in front of the gas fire in the living room on winter mornings. His real mother had made him eat a bowl of porridge before he’d gone to school. He remembered her running after him once because he’d forgotten his gloves. He’d been ashamed because he’d been with Bilko, who didn’t believe in gloves.
He was fastening the death’s head buckle on his belt when the knock came on the door. As he went to answer it he practised what he would say if they accused him of hurting Storme.
He opened the door and they stepped back slightly as the smell from the flat rushed out on to the stone cold landing.
“I need to do a home report,” said Kevin.
Crackle opened the door and ushered them inside. PC Billings covered her nose and mouth with a gloved hand. The air in the flat felt thick, as though it were saturated with bodily secretions.
“I tried ringing,” said Kevin. “Did you know your phone’s been cut off?”
“Bastards,” said Crackle. It was Tamara’s fault. She was always ringing them 0891 numbers to find out what her stars had lined up for her. She was a Libra.
Kevin knew the layout of the flats and he led the way into the bedroom. All three of them looked down into the cot. The smell of urine was already overpowering, but became worse when PC Billings pulled aside the damp blankets to reveal the soaked mattress, which was stained with faeces and dried-on blood.
“And this is where she slept?” asked PC Billings.
“Yeah, but she kept climbing out of it,” said Crackle.
“I’m not surprised,” said the PC. “It’s not exactly Mothercare in there, is it?”
She circumnavigated the chaotic piles of things on the floor and walked out of the bedroom and looked at the other rooms. The hopeless squalor of the place disorientated her. She didn’t know where to begin to describe it in her notebook. And it was so cold. Her breath fanned out in front of her. She sorted through the documents on top of the television and, amongst the unopened DSS letters and lottery tickets and British Telecom threats, she found Storme’s birth certificate, a prison visiting order, and what seemed to be a poem written in crabbed handwriting on the back of a large white envelope. Before she could read the poem Crackle came into the room with Kevin and she put the envelope back on the pile. Crackle said, “Do you know how she is this morning?”
Kevin said, “I rang the hospital before I came out. She’s comfortable.”
“Comfortable,” repeated Crackle. “That’s good.”
“Comfortable means nothing,” said PC Billings. “They said it about a bloke I knew with sixty-degree burns and a broken pelvis. Poor sod only lived three days.”
She wouldn’t give Crackle any comfort. If she couldn’t get him for physically abusing his kid, she’d get him for neglect, and if she had to drag that disgusting mattress into court as evidence, she would.
Meanwhile, she would take Crackle back to the police station with her before he could start clearing the place up. She wanted the police photographer to capture its insane chaos.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Seven
Angela thought that Veronica’s Cafe would be a safe place for her to meet Christopher at lunchtime. Gregory never went near the east end of the city. She arrived there first and was glad because it gave her time to do her hair and make-up in the squalid lavatory next to the kitchen. Christopher was there, sitting at a table furthest from the window, when she came out. The dog was already asleep at his feet. He looked up and saw her and raised his arm as though she was not five steps away, but was instead approaching him from the end of a long road. They had to touch each other. He helped her to take her coat off but, instead of hanging it up on a peg on the wall near by, he laid it across the table and they held hands beneath it for a while before Angela removed it and hung it over the back of her chair. She looked around. The café didn’t look so bad today. Nothing had changed physically: but Angela saw it now with the eyes of a duplicitous woman. The grimy surfaces and the bad food spoke to her now of human fallibility.
Christopher gazed at her lovely face, and pushed back a strand of hair that had attached itself to the corner of her mouth. It was another excuse to touch her. He wanted her again. He wanted her back in his bed. He told her this.
“I want you as well,” she said. She remembered his morning face as his semen pumped inside her. He had opened his eyes and told her to open hers, and they had held their gaze until he was empty, and she was full of him.
She was wearing a pink silk scarf at her neck. He touched it and said, “I didn’t notice that scarf this morning. It’s lovely.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I bought it on the way here. It’s a Hermes copy.”
“I’ll buy you a real Hermes scarf one day,” he said. “We’ll go to Paris, on the Eurostar.”
He asked what she wanted to eat, but she shook her head and said, “I can’t eat, Chris; I’ve had nothing since yesterday morning.”
It was true. She felt bloated with love. There was no room for food.
She watched him when he went to the counter to order his own food. Whilst he waited for the café woman with the lank hair to remove a wire basket full of pale chips from the deep-fat frier, he turned to look at Angela and smiled and mimed drinking a cup of tea. She nodded and he turned around and gave the woman his order. As he started back to the table he saw Tamara, Storme’s mother, come into the café with her arm around a man of his own age. The man was dabbing at his eyes with a tissue. He heard Tamara’s loud whisper, “Don’t, Dad,” and the man’s reply, “I can’t help it, sorry.”
Tamara steered her father to the table next to Angela and Christopher, and seated him gently. He turned his back away from them and blew his nose loudly. It wasn’t until Christopher said hello to her that Tamara recognised him as the man who’d bought Storme the red boots and the snowsuit. He was sitting with a fat woman with black shiny hair and red lipstick. Tamara said hello back to him and turned to her dad, who was folding the tissue into a neat square before putting it into one of his trouser pockets. She was glad her dad had stopped crying. It was a terrible thing to see and hear. It made her feel as if blackness was going to cover the earth.
“Shall I get you a cup of tea?”
Ken didn’t trust himself to speak. He’d need a couple of minutes. He shook his head. What he wanted, needed, was the compassionate bite of alcohol at the back of his throat. He’d have a pint of mild first, and follow it with a treble Johnnie Walker. He needed to forget what he had seen at the hospital, and the shame he had felt when his daughter had been ordered away from Storme’s bedside by Mr Parker-Wright.
“Will you come to the police station with me, Dad?”
Ken nodded. He’d have to try and walk that dividing line between drunkenness and apparent sobriety. It was going to be difficult: Tamara’s appointment with PC Billings was at four o’clock which left him three hours’ drinking time. He could throw a lot down his neck in three hours. He’d have to take it steady: pace himself. He lit two cigarettes and passed one to Tamara.
“You’d better go home and do yourself up,” he said. “You look bleddy awful.”
He was ashamed to be sitting with her, looking like she did.
“I can’t go home,” said Tamara. “And anyway I’ve got nothing else to put on.” Cath had kept her looking like a little princess. They called her their pink princess, because it was the only colour she would wear. Now she only wore black.
There were photograph albums in the unit in his living room that showed they’d brought her up properly. There was page after page of Tamara looking clean and healthy and happy, smiling delighted
ly into the camera. Her pink dresses always ironed, her long blonde hair plaited or bunched, or flowing over her shoulders. Her white socks turned at the ankle. He couldn’t reconcile that pretty little girl with the pasty-faced young woman who sat opposite him now. He would never understand why she’d dyed her beautiful hair black and shaved most of it off. He watched her picking at the loose threads in her black sweater, then he took his wallet out and pulled two twenty-pound notes from the compartment inside. He passed them to Tamara and said, “Here, go and buy something. I’m not going to the police station with you looking like that.”
From inside another plastic compartment of the wallet Cath’s photograph stared up at him. A first-class stamp obscured part of her face. Ken pushed the stamp aside and looked at Cath. She’d not been a pretty woman, but she’d been a lovely wife. There was no point in looking for a replacement. It was just a matter of getting through the rest of his days without her.
Christopher had seen Ken pass the money to Tamara and was pleased. He would have been a generous father himself, he thought; a soft touch.
“How’s your little girl?” he asked Tamara. He couldn’t bring himself to say Storme’s ridiculous name. She didn’t answer, but instead looked at her father as though asking for permission before replying. Christopher noticed her discomfiture and said, awkwardly, “Does she still like her red boots?”
Tamara said, “She’s in the hospital,” and indicated the building over the road where the lighted windows of the wards could be seen vividly through the dark light caused by the cambered snow clouds above. “She fell out of her cot.”
Angela saw the shock on Christopher’s face and turned around to take a proper look at this girl who was apparently a mother, but had the voice of a child. When Tamara eventually disclosed the extent of Storme’s injuries Christopher half rose to his feet. His body needed to move. Angela put a restraining hand on his arm and he sat down at once. He remembered Storme walking proudly in her new boots. Angela was bewildered by this girl’s passionless account of the accident to her baby.