by Sue Townsend
“The doctor went out as soon as she was born. He’d missed a meal break he said, but I knew he despised me and couldn’t wait to get away. He’d warned me that the labour would be painful, but I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t brave, you see. I’ll never forget that pain. I wish I could tell you how bad it was. Imagine somebody continuously tearing your body in half…I screamed for four hours solid. I had no voice when you came, remember?”
“I remember.”
“So they left me with this nurse.”
“What was her name, Angie?”
“Susan. So Susan was in charge of disposing…the thing is Chris, she couldn’t do it. She should have put the baby in a container and put the container into a bag. But she couldn’t do it, not while there was a pulse.”
Christopher tore two buttons off his overcoat and gave the snowman eyes.
“She lived for nineteen minutes. Susan and I watched her chest jerk up and down. Susan said that only one of her lungs was working, and then that stopped working.”
Angela lit another cigarette, then pressed the pink lighter into the snowman’s face, making a forbidding slit of a mouth.
“She asked me not to tell anybody and I didn’t.”
“Not even me,” he said.
“Especially not you.”
“Did you hold her, Angie?”
“Yes, I did. I held her. You can’t imagine how tiny her hands were.”
“You told me some terrible lies, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. I never thought I’d tell you the truth. I can’t believe you know the truth now.”
She looked up at the black sky, expecting to see that the stars had gone. The world had entirely changed for her now that Christopher knew the truth about their baby.
She felt light enough to float. They both looked at the snowman.
“We ought to give it a nose,” he said.
She went back into the house and opened the refrigerator door and took a carrot out of the vegetable crisper box. Then she went into the cloakroom in the hall and selected a red scarf and a blue and white striped bobble hat. She took these into the garden and gave them to Christopher and he finished dressing the snowman. When he stepped back to admire it, Angela looked at her watch and said, “He’ll be home in three-quarters of an hour. You said you’d go.”
But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. He fiddled with the snowman’s scarf and said, “We’ll have to find out where she is, Angie.”
“It’s seventeen years.” She sat down on the bench and bowed her head, her hair swung slowly forward, completely obscuring her face.
“Somebody will know where she is,” he said. “Finding her will give me something to do.”
He knew that this was the right time to tell Angela about the other one, the one he’d found in the ditch, but he knew that if he did tell her she’d be frightened of him. She would think he was mad and that would mean that they would never be together as man and wife.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirty-One
Gregory was disappointed to find that the wine appreciation class had been cancelled. There was a note on the door to the classroom they used which said, ‘Cancelled due to the weather’. He had been looking forward to tonight. The tutor had promised to show them a video called ‘Great Cellars of the World’.
Gregory was thinking about converting his own cellar at home into a wine store. The central heating boiler would have to be moved, and a few pipes diverted, but he felt it would be worth it for the pleasure of strolling along the racks before dinner each night, selecting something that went with the food. As he walked along the sixth form college corridors towards the exit, he wondered how many years it took before thick dust settled on a bottle. The tutor wore a brown overall in his own cellar, he’d informed the class. In his mind’s eye Gregory saw himself climbing his own cellar steps whilst wiping the bottle clean.
As he left the warmth of the building and crossed the carpark towards his car, he tried to estimate how much racking he would need. He’d do all the work himself, he thought. No sense in paying a carpenter for such a simple job.
He stopped off at an off-licence on the way home, and spent ten minutes selecting a wine that would go with ham salad and pineapple upside-down cake. After careful deliberation he chose a £4.99 Riesling which he felt would not swamp the flavours of the food.
Gregory let himself in and immediately noticed that the safety chain was broken. His first instinct was to shout Angela’s name, but then he saw a dog, a bull terrier, come out of the kitchen and stand growling at the end of the hall. Gregory had never been that keen on dogs, but he was terrified of bull terriers. Weren’t they the ones that savaged kiddies? He backed off and felt behind him for the handle of the front door. In seconds he was outside on the porch again.
Terrible images filled his mind. A burglar, a rapist. Angela tied up and defiled.
He listened intently but could hear nothing but the traffic passing at the top of the road. He unlocked the garage door and without switching on the light walked through it past the junk stored inside and into the garden.
He couldn’t see at first, such was the glare of the lights on the snow. Then he made out three figures. One was Angela, one was a tall man, and one was a child in a white coat, red scarf and Gregory’s own blue and white football hat. Because Angela and the tall man were embracing, it took Gregory some time before he realised that the small person in the white coat was a snowman.
As he watched the tall man pressing his mouth against Angela’s mouth he felt as though a giant were treading on his chest. When the man undid her coat and stroked her breasts, Gregory retreated back inside the garage. It wasn’t seemly to watch.
He leaned against his wooden workbench and tried to calm himself. He was surprised to find that his whole body was trembling with desire for his wife. He let himself out of the garage, and got into his car and drove to a petrol station, where he picked up a sack of logs from the forecourt. He then drove back home and saw the tall man and the dog crossing the road near his house. He drove around the block several times to give Angela time in which to compose herself, then he revved the engine noisily and parked outside their house.
He wondered how she would explain the snowman to him. He decided not to confront her with what he’d seen. The thought of listening to her lies thrilled him almost as much as the sight of another man desiring his wife’s body. It was an affirmation that Gregory owned a prize.
Gregory smiled when he saw the clumsy repair that had been made to the security chain on the door. He went into the kitchen with the logs and the wine and found Angela stirring custard in a pan on the stove.
“You’re just in time,” she said. The lights were out in the garden, but he could see the shape of the snowman through the reflection on the kitchen window.
She’d set the table for one. A plate of ham salad was ready for him.
“How was the class?” she said.
“Very good. We had a video, ‘Great Cellars of the World’.”
He watched her face carefully as she poured the custard into a glass jug. Her lipstick was freshly applied. He wanted her badly. He took the sack of logs into the living room and lit a fire, using kindling already in the hearth, then cajoled it into life by blowing on the flames. He crouched in front of it until Angela called him through to the kitchen. She had opened the wine and had already drunk half a glass. He knew that she would drink heavily tonight, and he was glad. There were some things he wanted to tell her about himself and he didn’t want her to be entirely sober when he did so. Before he sat down to eat, he filled her glass to the very top, then he ate in silence and watched his wife as she first inverted the Pyrex dish on to a dinner plate, then lifted it, like a conjuror, to reveal a perfect pineapple upside-down cake.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirty-Two
Angela couldn’t get out of bed. She’d drunk most of the wine and a quarter of a bottle of vodka the night before. She burrowed
her head in the pillow and made small whimpering noises. She could hear Gregory downstairs making tea. She could tell from the smell of the aftershave in the room that he had already showered, shaved and dressed. She turned her head slowly and squinted at the alarm clock on the bedside table; it was ten minutes past eight. She was going to be late for work again. She dreaded going into the agency and seeing the reproachful faces of the other workers.
Gregory came into the bedroom carrying two mugs of tea. He put one on the bedside table next to her, using the Stephen King novel he was reading as a coaster. She turned over and sat up in bed, then pulled the duvet up to cover her breasts when she realised that she was naked.
“There’s a snowman in the garden,” said Gregory.
Her brain wasn’t engaged yet. She couldn’t remember what she had planned to tell him. Her wits were not yet sufficiently exercised by deception. To give herself time she picked up the mug and sipped the scalding tea.
“I built the snowman as a surprise, for you,” she said. Her tongue was burning from the tea. She interpreted this as a suitable punishment for a liar. Gregory handed the pink disposable lighter to her and said, “Thank you, I’ve given him a more cheerful mouth, I stuck a piece of orange peel in.”
She badly needed a cigarette, but there was a rule that she wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom.
“Can I, Gregory, just this once?” she said, reaching for a packet of cigarettes in her bedside drawer.
“Slut,” he said, but he was half-smiling. So she lit a cigarette and leaned her head against the pink, padded headboard.
“I might take the morning off,” she said. “I feel terrible.”
“That’s my fault,” he said. “I wore you out last night, didn’t I, slut? Didn’t I, you fat, dirty whore?”
“Gregory!” she protested. She had never heard him use such language before, to her or to anyone else. He dragged the duvet off the bed, and threw it on to the floor. He kicked his shoes off and unbuckled the belt in the waistband of his trousers, and continued to call her ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and even ‘harlot’. He removed his trousers and tartan boxer shorts and she saw that his penis was hard. There was nowhere to stub the cigarette out. She tried to roll off the bed, but he pushed her down and said, “Smoke it, whore! Smoke it!”
Then he sprawled her legs apart, and pushed his erection inside her. It was painful and she cried out. Then he told her the things he had intended to tell her the night before. He was pleased now that she had fallen asleep in front of the fire. It would be far worse to hear such things in the marital bed in a cold north light.
“I’m going to tell you now, slut. I’m going to tell you about me and my women. I had my first affair two days after we came back from honeymoon. Marcia, remember Marcia. God she was gorgeous. Gorgeous. Her arse, Jesus!” Underneath him Angela tried to remember Marcia, but could only think of a snaggle-toothed woman who had once worked in the optician’s next to Lowood’s Linens.
“Then there was Mrs Daventry. You know Mrs Dav-entry, I had her at the back of the shop on top of a bale of towels, just after I’d closed up. She was tight and wet and I made her come three times.”
Angela did know Mrs Daventry. She was the linen buyer for a local chain of hotels, one of Gregory’s best customers, but she was surely out of Gregory’s league…
“And so many whores, every shape, colour, age, two whores a week. Pay them to dress up. Schoolgirls, nurses, French maids, women queue up for me. Rub against me in the shop…”
He was breathing heavily now and she knew that he would come soon.
“Tell me Angie,” he moaned, “tell me about the men you’ve had, you whore, you slut.”
He had a picture in his mind of the tall man stroking Angela’s breasts. He moved the picture on a frame and the man was sucking Angela’s nipples, then Gregory lost everything. As he ejaculated, he shouted, “Tell me!”
But Angela told him nothing.
As they dressed and washed, neither of them mentioned Marcia or Mrs Daventry, or the whores. Gregory put on his best overcoat and a Russian-style hat made of astrakhan. He went out and backed Angela’s car out of ‘the drive and parked it in the road. This gave him an excuse to study the interior of the car, but he found nothing to tell him the identity of the tall man with the dog. Before he came back into the house he dropped Angela’s car keys down a drain. He wanted to make her suffer. She accepted his offer of a lift, and pretended to believe him when he claimed to have dropped the keys accidentally. They talked about their forthcoming holiday in Barbados during the journey into town, and kissed goodbye before Angela got out of the car.
When she got to work, there was a yellow post-it note, stuck to the computer screen on her desk. On it was written, ‘Same place, usual time’.
The agency was busy all morning, the phone rang constantly with enquiries about late Christmas bookings, and people queued at the counters, desperate to get away from dreary England. The temperature had risen slightly in the night, and a thaw was under way; but the air was heavy with moisture and the ground was covered in dirty slush. Angela thought about Christopher constantly. She had told him the truth about the baby and he still wanted to see her. She vowed to make herself more beautiful for him.
All the time she was talking to customers she was thinking about leg waxing, pedicures and dyeing the grey in her hair. She kept making small mistakes and was constantly apologising.
Eventually she could bear the confinement no longer and announced to the girls that she was going out for an hour. She gave them no explanation, but as soon as she’d shut the door Claire said to Lisa, “She’s got a fancy man.”
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirty-Three
Angela took her clothes off and hung them on a peg in the changing cubicle. When she was naked she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. The harsh fluorescent lighting overhead was merciless. It showed every discoloration of skin, every pucker of dimpled flesh.
“How can he love me?” she thought.
Then she thought, “How can they love me?”
She turned her back on her own reflection and reached for the red satin outsized underwear she’d chosen with the help of an assistant. She disentangled the bra, the French knickers and the camisole from their fiddly little hangers. She was pleasantly surprised to find that they fitted perfectly. Still with her back turned to the mirror she took a red lipstick out of her bag and drew a cupid’s bow on her lips. Then she brushed her hair, and only then, when she was looking her best, did she allow herself to turn around and look at her reflection. “Yes,” she said to herself.
She couldn’t bear to re-dress in the sensible cotton underwear she’d been wearing when she entered the shop. She called the shop assistant guarding the entrance to the changing rooms, and gave her the satin things and cash which she’d drawn without Gregory’s permission from their joint account earlier. While she waited for the girl to return she tried to look at her naked reflection with more kindly eyes. Centuries earlier her voluptuousness would have been highly desirable she reasoned: paintings of women like her were admired in art galleries all over the world. The girl came back with her things and her receipt. As she re-dressed in her new underwear she thought about Christopher. When she met him in the café at lunchtime today she would tell him what she was wearing under her dowdy blue uniform.
Red used to be his favourite colour.
On the way back to work she was conscious of the satin gliding next to her skin. She looked into the faces of the middle-aged men and women she passed on the pavement and wondered if they had somebody to love them. She wished fervently that somebody would love Gregory one day, and that he would reciprocate this person’s love. She dawdled past shop windows. Everything she saw she related to Christopher. She mentally refurnished his house from the Habitat window. She fantasised about buying a pair of brogues for him in Lilley and Skinner. In her imagination she fastened a Rolex watch costing £3,000 around his wrist. She understood why peop
le in American musical films danced down Fifth Avenue singing about their love.
There was a sullen atmosphere in the agency when she got back. She’d been out longer than she’d said, and the girls behind the counter looked beleaguered as they faced the long queues in front of them. She tried to appease them by insisting that they each take a longer tea break than usual, but when Angela left for her lunch hour, the cold atmosphere between them all remained.
Her route from the travel agency to Veronica’s Cafe led her past Woolworths. She walked automatically through the doors and approached the Pick ‘N’ Mix before remembering that she was wearing red satin underwear and would probably be having sexual intercourse with one man in the evening and perhaps another man at night. The thought made her sick with excitement and fear, and she turned her back on the cornucopian sweet counters and left the shop.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirty-Four
Ken was checking the weather from his bedroom window when he saw Crackle walking down the path towards the front door. Tamara was at the back of the house in the kitchen. Ken shouted, “Tamara, don’t answer the door.”
“Who is it?” she said.
“Him.”
“Oh.”
She didn’t know how to explain to Crackle why she’d chosen the baby instead of him, so she ran upstairs and shut herself in the back bedroom, the one she had slept in as a child. Some of her toys were still there, lined up on the shelf. She sat on her narrow bed, closed her eyes, and listened to the doorbell ringing and ringing. Brandy barked frantically.
When the banging on the front door started, she took Jennifer, the doll whose eyelashes she’d once trimmed with nail scissors, down from the shelf and rocked her in her arms. Now that Tamara was grown up Jennifer felt cold and stiff and unfamiliar. She put her back on the shelf, next to Barbie in the wedding dress and Paddington Bear.