by Sue Townsend
“She was told not to do it. I told her, and her dad told her, but she kept doing it, climbing out. Then she must have just—fell.”
Angela said, “On to a bare floor?”
“No, there’s a carpet,” said Ken.
Blood was thicker than water. What had their family business got to do with these strangers?
“And this fall fractured her skull and ruptured her spleen?” Christopher asked.
Tamara looked away.
“She must have landed funny,” said Ken.
He clasped his hands together. He was trembling for a drink.
The café woman shouted from the serving hatch that Christopher’s ham salad and chips were ready. But it was Angela who got up to collect it. She wanted to do things for him. She made a second journey to collect their cups of tea and then a third to collect paper napkins and cutlery and salt and pepper. She arranged everything in front of him as though she were making preparations for a simple religious ceremony. She wanted him to know that she worshipped him.
She was pleased to see that the girl and her father were preparing to leave. She resented the interruption they had caused to the short time she and Christopher had together. As Tamara and Ken got up to leave, Christopher said, “I’ll be thinking about her.”
When they were outside on the icy pavement, Ken said, “Who’s he?”
Tamara said, “Just a bloke,” and she took her father’s arm. He looked unsteady on his feet.
♦
Angela watched Christopher eating. She loved the neat way he cut his food up and forked it into his mouth. She bent down and stroked the sinuous back of the dog and it woke and pushed its muzzle into her hand. “I love your dog,” she said.
“We’ll go and see the baby when I’ve finished this,” he said, looking over at the hospital.
“I can’t go,” she said. “I’ve got to go back to work. And they won’t let you see her will they? You’re not family are you?”
“I just want to see her,” he said, stubbornly. “Come with me, Angie.”
They were careful to keep a distance between them as they crossed the road together. Nobody seeing them would have known that they were lovers. When they drew near to the entrance of the hospital Angela looked at her watch and said, “I’ll be late for work if I don’t go now.” He pleaded with her to accompany him. Helplessly she agreed. He tied the dog’s lead to the icy iron railings surrounding a small frosty garden and they went inside.
At the main reception he gave the little information he knew about Storme and after a short wait they were told that Storme was on the seventh floor, in Paediatric Intensive Care. Angela was relieved. There was no possibility of visiting anyone there. If she started back now she wouldn’t be late for work. But Christopher walked towards the lifts and pressed the button for the seventh floor.
“You can’t!” she said.
“Please, Angie, come with me,” he said.
The lift was empty, and he took her in his arms as soon as the doors shut. When they opened again he said, “Just look as if you know where you’re going.”
There was nobody at the nurses’ station at the entrance to the ward. Nobody came to answer the ringing telephone.
Christopher soon found Storme. He stood looking through the glass at her, and at the nurses who were threading a plastic tube inside her nose.
Angela looked for a moment, then turned her head away and went back to the lift to wait for him. Catherine came and stood at her side. As usual, she was immaculately groomed. Her school uniform looked brand new.
“I might be a doctor, Mum,” she said. “I’ll need three good science A levels and one in English. What do you think?” Her voice was melodious, like an angel’s.
“You can do anything; you’re the cleverest girl I know,” said Angela. Then she said, “You didn’t come to see me yesterday.”
Catherine laughed, “You were busy, Mum, with Dad.”
Angela asked her, “Are you pleased about me and Dad getting together again?”
Catherine kissed the top of her mother’s head and said, “Of course, it’s great to have two parents.”
Angela said, “You’re a wonderful, perfect daughter.”
♦
Angela and Christopher stood in the lift in silence for a while. Suddenly he took her hand and said, “You’ve got to tell me about the day you killed our baby.”
Angela hit him hard across his face with the flat of her right hand. The lift stopped on the third floor and a porter pushing an old man in a wheelchair, got in. The old man looked at Christopher and Angela and passed a hand over the grey stubble on his face.
“I need a shave,” he said apologetically.
♦
Angela didn’t wait for Christopher while he untied the dog from the railings but he soon caught up with her. He said, “Call in at my house tonight Angie. Please.” Her face was closed in. She wouldn’t look at him. He dropped back ten paces, and walked all the way behind her, only leaving her when he saw that she was safely inside Heavenly Holidays.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Eight
Crackle lay on the hard bed in the police cell and did that trick with his mind that detached him from humiliating and painful circumstances. It was a knack he had. He’d had it since he was a little kid. It had come to him on a Maundy Thursday in school assembly. They were singing ‘There is a green hill far away’ and Crackle had suddenly known what it must have been like to be Jesus. To have nails hammered through his hands and feet, and to be left to hang from the cross until he was dead. Crackle had stopped singing, the breath had left his body and he couldn’t feel his hands or his feet. He had sat down on the floor of the assembly hall, surrounded by the legs of the other children. He couldn’t find the words to explain to the headmaster what had happened to him. So he had remained sitting down and had said nothing. It was during the headmaster’s angry denunciation of him in front of the school that Satan had come to him.
Crackle distanced himself from the police cell and thought about the person he loved most in the world: Bilko. Bilko had always protected Crackle both from his enemies and from Crackle’s own foolishness since they were at junior school together. Bilko had joined the class half-way through the autumn term, long after alliances had been formed and a pecking order established.
Thirty-five white ten-year-olds, boys and girls had listened to Mrs McLuskey, the class teacher’s nervous preamble. “We’ve got a new boy joining us today. His name is James Billington. I’ll be bringing him into our classroom quite soon. Before I do that I’d like to ask you to be especially kind to him. Be tolerant. It’s not easy joining a class half-way through a term. I wonder, is there anybody who’d like to be his special friend and show him around the school?”
Mrs McLuskey scanned the room. Nobody lifted an arm. She sighed and said again, “Please be kind to him.” Then she left the room to collect the mysterious James Billington, who for some reason needed their kindness.
An excited chatter broke out as soon as she’d closed the classroom door. There was speculation about the boy. Crackle, who was one of the class clowns, mimicked Mrs McLuskey’s Glaswegian accent. “Be kind to him, be tolerant.”
Crackle was not popular. His kitchen-scissors haircut and hand-me-down shoes betrayed his extreme poverty, and only a few children laughed.
When Mrs McLuskey returned she had the boy with her. His skin was black and his hair was braided in dozens of thin plaits. The boy, James Billington, was dressed in a scaled-down version of adult clothes. He looked straight ahead, seemingly engrossed by the contour lines of a map of South America, which hung on the back wall of the classroom. Mrs McLuskey said, “This is James. Say hello to him, please.” The class droned, “Hello James.”
When Crackle put his hand up and said, “He can sit next to me, Miss,” giggles broke out and somebody shouted, “Poofter.” When the boy sat down next to him Crackle could hear that James was breathing very fast, and he knew tha
t the boy’s induction into the class had been an ordeal for him.
At playtime James Billington leaned against a wall with Crackle and watched the white children mill around in the playground. He spoke for the first time.
“What they runnin’ around for?” he said. “They ain’t goin’ no place.”
“You’re American!” said Crackle.
“No, Jamaican, but I’ve been living in New York City, with my dad.”
Crackle was impressed. He had heard of New York. It was where the Mafia lived.
“Why have you come to live here?”
“My dad sent me to live with my mum.”
Crackle looked beyond the playground to the Bevan, as the estate was called. He’d lived there all his life in one of those little cramped houses. “Why, what did you do wrong?” said Crackle.
“I din’t do nothin wrong.” James plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans. “My dad got married again.”
Crackle understood at once. He himself had been passed around like an unwanted parcel since his real mum had left home and he had somehow ended up living with his second stepfather and his stepfather’s new wife. He knew that neither of them wanted him: the whereabouts of his next move was a daily topic of conversation. Crackle wanted to live with his real mum again, but she had moved in with a man called Barry, who couldn’t stand children. There was a rumour that this Barry had a white carpet in his living room.
For a few weeks Crackle guided his new friend, now called Bilko by everybody, around the estate; warning him about which streets to avoid, and which persons might give him grief. Then one day, after a fight with a rival school, when Bilko had saved him from a good kicking, the roles were reversed and it was Crackle who looked to Bilko to guide him through the many difficulties he encountered in his life.
It was Bilko who had later warned him not to touch crack cocaine. They were both twenty-four years old, and were in the kitchen of Bilko’s luxuriously furnished council flat. It was a superior block which had a security guard on the door, and closed-circuit cameras in the well-kept public areas. Bilko was a fastidious man. He couldn’t have lived in the shit holes that Crackle lived in.
They were in the kitchen. Crackle was watching Bilko iron a pile of Ralph Lauren shirts. The steamy smell reminded Crackle of his real mother. Crack had recently arrived in the city and Bilko had seen that there was big money to be made out of supplying it. But he was doing OK with his own specialist business—selling steroids to body-builders and athletes. He’d got most of the East Midlands covered. It was illegal, what he did, but he was hardly the evil drug pusher, was he? Some of his clients had won big competitions: there were six framed photographs grouped on one wall of his living room, showing his clients, victorious and smiling with their trophies and winners’ sashes draped across their bulging chests.
He finished ironing another shirt, hung it on a hanger, buttoned it up carefully and gave it to Crackle, who took it through to the bedroom and hung it in one of the built-in wardrobes. A specialist firm had made them to Bilko’s specification. Crackle stopped briefly to look at the photographs of Bilko’s children displayed on top of a chest of drawers. They were happy-looking babies. When he went back into the kitchen Bilko was pushing the pointed end of the steam iron in between the buttons of another shirt. He could have had any number of women to do his ironing for him, but so far nobody came up to his exacting standards.
“Have you ever used crack, Bilko?” he asked.
“No, and I ain’t going to neither. I’ve seen what it does to people.”
“What does it do then?” Crackle was intrigued.
“OK, they call it ‘licking the rock’, OK? So the first time you lick the rock you get this fucking amazing high. So fucking amazing that there ain’t words in the dictionaries to describe it, innit.”
“What, like coke?” Crackle had used cocaine when he could afford it. It had made him happy to be alive for once.
“No, no. It ain’t nothing like coke. They call this stuff ‘the broken promise’ because the second time you take it you’re expecting the same amazing thing, innit? But the second time you don’t get it as good, and you ain’t never gonna get it as good, innit?” Bilko picked up the little jug and poured water into the funnel inside the iron. “Because. The first time you took it, it destroyed some of the pleasure centres in your brain, so you ain’t never gonna feel the same pleasure again. Not just with crack, but with sex and food and even fuckin’ music man. So don’t touch it eh, Crackle? Promise me, man.”
“Promise,” said Crackle. But within days, behind Bilko’s back, he had gone to a crack house on a council estate on the eastern outskirts of the city, where a motherly woman called Rita had prepared his first crack hit.
Within seconds he experienced an ecstasy of sensation. He was blissfully aware of every vein in his body: they were coursing not with blood, but with sweet, sweet honey. His eyes saw the wondrous colours in Rita’s room. He looked down at his hands and was transfixed by the beauty of his fingers. He knew everything. He was a superior being, the secrets and beauties of the universe were revealed to him. His body was an exquisite conductor of the magnificence of living.
Within twenty minutes he had shit himself. Diarrhoea spread out from the crotch of his jeans in a brown stain. Rita helped him to the bathroom and explained that it wasn’t his fault. Crack was cocaine mixed with bicarbonate of soda and the bicarbonate of soda loosened the bowels. She fetched clean underpants and jeans from a stock she kept for the purpose and he cleaned himself up and changed into the clean clothes and joined the others in Rita’s breakfast room, who were sitting in the dark, ascending to heaven or descending into hell.
Rita charged him nothing for his first time with crack. On his second visit she asked for thirty pounds. He gave it to her gladly, but the second time he took it it was just as Bilko had said it would be. It was a broken promise. Trouble was, his body kept on wanting it like it was the first time. Crackle was on a treadmill trying to catch up with that amazing sensation, but it was always in the distance, just out of reach.
When Bilko found out he wouldn’t speak to him for a month. But then he relented and even paid off a few of his crack debts. When Bilko’s other friends, the wearers of Hugo Boss suits and Timberland Shoes mocked Bilko for his philanthropy towards Crackle, Bilko shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yeah, that Crackle’s a sad bastard, but we go back a long way, innit.”
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twenty-Nine
The Man at Rest was owned and run by the licensee, Douglas Reginald Swainson. It said so above the door to the street. It was furnished and decorated entirely to Douglas’s taste. There was no Mrs Swainson behind the bar to purse her lips and disapprove of the mixture of styles. In the Man at Rest a spindly cottage suite shared space with heavy oak tables and chairs he’d bought from a closed-down library. The walls and the ceiling were nicotine brown. Holiday postcards from regulars were crammed on the shelves behind the bottles and glasses. The rose-patterned carpet was stained with years of spillage. Douglas Swainson didn’t like juke boxes or slot machines and he regarded pub food as an affectation.
Ken pushed the street door open and went into the one-roomed pub, and up to the bar. He put his foot on the tarnished brass rail and ordered a pint of mild and a whisky chaser from Douglas, who looked behind the beer pumps like a large pale ghost. Douglas disliked sunlight and kept it out of his pub. The curtains were permanently drawn. Ken nodded at the other regulars: Thin Bob, Fat Stan, Daft Arthur and Raj. Raj could get you anything: a joint of beef, a wedding suit, an engine for a car, anything, half price, no questions asked.
“What’s up?” asked Douglas, observing that Ken didn’t look himself. Ken soon had the regulars’ full attention as he recounted his recent visit to the hospital and his suspicions about Crackle. His friends swore quietly to themselves as they listened to Ken’s description of Storme’s injuries. Douglas pushed another double whisky in front of Ken.
“On the house,” he said.
“I wish that fuckin’ Crackle would walk in here right now,” said Thin Bob. “I’d love to put my fist down his throat.”
“I want to kill him,” said Ken, throwing the whisky down the back of his throat.
“Anybody who hurts a baby like that deserves to die,” said Arthur. “If one of mine was harmed…” the other men nodded their agreement. “I’d gladly do bird,” said Stan, whose grandchildren irritated him on the rare occasions he was to be found at home.
Douglas said, “Scum like that Crackle shouldn’t be allowed to breed. In fact,” he said, “if I was a dictator I’d make people pass a test before they could have a baby. They’d have to pay to get one; they’d need a licence.”
Ken was drunk, but not falling-over drunk when he left the Man at Rest and went out into the afternoon gloom. Raj caught up with him on the pavement, gripping him on the top of his arm. Ken swivelled around, ready to fight, only relaxing when he saw who it was. Raj bent his big-toothed brown face to Ken’s ear and said, “If you want that Crackle seeing to, I know somebody who’ll do it for you.”
Ken staggered to the pub wall and leaned against it. The cold air was making his head spin. “Seeing to?” he said.
“Fifty quid for a good kicking,” said Raj. “And two hundred and fifty quid to put him out, permanent.”
“Kill him, you mean?”
Raj was scandalised by the directness of Ken’s query. “Now they ain’t the words I used, Ken,” said Raj, looking away and shaking his head.
“Sorry,” said Ken, aware now that he had breached some kind of criminal etiquette.