Deep Sleep

by Frances Fyfield

  He knew immediately there was someone there, someone alien and dangerous. The freezing of his movements was temporary: a great stirring of anger displaced fear as he stepped towards Mum’s bedroom, following the sound, then stopped at the door, paralysed.

  A tableau of two figures, one obscuring the other. Tom knew his mother lying on the bed: who else would lie on that bed? No one, except, hopefully his father. But the man leaning over the bed was not his father. Daddy was big, running to flab. These bare buttocks, with trousers obscenely lowered, were small and neat, the lights from the crane colouring them pink in the curves, unearthly blue in the hollows, and the black clothes glimpsed above the skin were never his father’s clothes. A duster was on the floor and next to it was his metal hat, the one he had left in Dad’s car. A little dirty man touching his mother, a sound of heavy, grunting breathing which filled him so full of disgust he wanted to retch. With a howl of rage, Tom launched himself forward in one massive leap into the room. He picked up the metal hat and struck blindly towards the back of the frightful head: he wanted to kick, bite and scratch at the same time, did not know he was yelling, ‘You-you-you bastard, bastard, bastard …’ struggling for the memory of every dirty word he had ever heard. The hat was heavier, infinitely more solid than he remembered: the metal was smoother, the rim sharper, so that in between blows he was aware of the unfamiliarity. Then the man turned, the eyes so intense, Tom could not meet them, sparkling eyes, hateful Pip, wafting the same smells he had known from the other cold night when he had trespassed downstairs. A smell of glue, deodorised sweat, and a sweet, sweet smell which was clamped over his mouth while his muffled shouting changed to desperation and his arms clawed the skin of the man’s back. ‘Daddy, Daddy, Mummy, Mummy …’ His skin was burning, his face twisting and turning: he was on the bed, half off the bed, grasping at flesh and cotton, his heels drumming without sound.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, Dad …’ And then, no shouting.

  It was so easy.

  Pip remained, holding the duster with liquid trickling between his fingers, pressing gently. C’mon, lad, c’mon, don’t really want to hurt, don’t want to hurt anyone. Please, please. The rage, the bitter disappointment, died quickly as he watched, silent and fascinated as one small fist clenched and unclenched against the dark carpet, finally remaining open with the fingers spread. Alongside that pale hand lay the cream receiver for the telephone. True to his meticulous self, begging time before making decisions, Pip replaced the receiver on to the cradle. Immediately, the phone rang and the eyes, Kim’s eyes from the white pillow of the bed, opened wide. Pip ducked below the level of her sight, a gesture of sudden shame. The eyes widened further in puzzlement, then, slowly, closed.

  Hot bath, warm bed, hot bath, warm bed, both of these dreams. The phone plucked in one hand, two rings, then silence. Duncan came to, looking at his watch, dismayed to find he had snoozed at all, but grumpy to see he had only snoozed for so short a time. Shouldn’t have had the whisky. Not a tumblerful anyway, followed by another, without an ounce of grace to the whole proceeding. Get bottle out of pocket: open and pour straight into something which resembled a tooth mug, drink without aid of H2O in the same way another might drink the water after a run, without any sensation of taste. Half awake now, he repeated the dose. A small dribble of whisky hit his chin: the slow drip on to his shirt made him feel ashamed. Trying to shake away the dream, he dialled Kim’s number. Engaged. Duncan went into his bathroom, and saw with the acuteness of vision which was not a blessing, what a mess he was. It was salutary to see his own image in a glass so dirty. The spots on the glass horrified him more than the reflection; the surface was covered with what might have been smashed insect, white drops for toothpaste, grey bits for shaving foam, little speckles of something which may have been blood, the whole effect like a fly-blown windscreen. He had put out his hand, felt the surface of the mirror, felt through his fingertips how it was encrusted. No wonder, then, she did not want him, clean Kim.

  Back in the living-room, suddenly aware of the musty smell, he dialled her number again. Remembered what he had dreamt; that hideous vision of his wife in the arms of another man. Forgot his coat, forgot being over the limit and fitter to walk than drive. Remembered the dream and the sound of the dialling tone. Ran.

  Into the car with the still bent fender and the engine which roared. Not a single logical thought in his head, the man who was used by others to smash down doors, motivated by a delayed reaction to being stopped, a bad dream and a nascent rebellion. Someone had been lying to him, Bailey, Kimberley, something about that silly hat and a succession of days and nights like the party where he had existed only to be fooled and humiliated. Forbidden the touch of any woman. A certain cunning as well as the memory of bombs and officialdom made him slow down. At midnight, the tall buildings of the commercial city were empty, deep glass façades blank to everything but lamps and headlights, no sign of midnight oil, nothing stirring but hidden security guards drowsing behind doors, and in the distance, one, two, three cranes, lit for Christmas, bowing at the moon. Beyond the confines of the city, where the ambience of prosperity ended, he saw the first yellow tape across the road. Drove through, snapping the tape, heard a voice yell and saw a fist raised, drove further. Got out and ran again.

  Only when he ran this time, blindly in the direction of the Parade and feeling his pockets as he went, did he see in his mind’s eye the bedside table where all useful but never used items lingered for months. He stopped, cursed, ran on. He had forgotten to bring the vital key to Kim’s flat.

  There was a strange law of diminishing returns in talking to people this late at night. Like a priest giving a winter sermon in the church Helen remembered as a child, heated with a stove in the centre so that the congregation was ever thickest in the middle, his voice and message no competition for warmth; everyone wanting to be home, but quite content to postpone movement, complainers subdued into silence long since. There was that dormitory air, like a hospital ward. Helen was aware she had assisted just a little in the pacification process, and felt that for what it was, a dull task, helpful rather than vital. Like most of her daily tasks. She, too, wanted to go home. Not because her store of philanthropy was wearing thin, but because she was redundant. She turned to find Bailey. An old woman called Mrs Beale, who was telling her all about previous occupants of Herringbone Parade and its environs, was enough to distract her attention. Somehow gossip was better if you did not know any of the protagonists and there was no guilt in the listening.

  ‘There was the Carlton sisters of course. Lived next door to me. He died in the war, and the three of ’em joined up under one roof. Big mistake if you ask me. All them women and one little lad. Didn’t seem to do him no harm, though. A good boy that, very good. Still is. Got the chemist’s shop now, after his ma died …’

  ‘The chemist’s shop in the Parade? Must have been a clever boy, then. Where else did he work?’

  ‘Yes. Clever boy. His ma said she wasn’t going to have him a wastrel, brought him up nice, she did. He went to the Polytechnic, then he worked in a big chemist’s at Limehouse for years. Funny, he married so late. Must be forty-five, still looks a lad. She put paid to the girlfriends, though, his mother, she was like that. And he couldn’t go far: she’d have him back, what with her being so poorly and everything. Mind, there was some said she was never as ill as all that. And then when she’s gone, he goes and marries, just like that. Another one the same. Bossy, that Margaret, and always at the doctor’s. Sort of woman drives a man to it, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Drives them to what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Things. Funny man, Pip Carlton. I could have told them coppers a thing or two lately, only they didn’t ask. Like how he’s always fiddling in his back room. Doesn’t need to do that. And what does he do with all that stuff he gets back?’

  ‘Sorry, what stuff?’

  ‘Stuff we return. People my age who look after other people. Mr Ahmed, they’re nice these dark
ies really, they look after their own. Anything you’ve got left, always bring it back, Pip says. Specially the worst stuff. He must have enough in there to poison the whole district.’ She laughed, looked round at her sleeping neighbours, her eyes narrowing. Tiredness and spite. ‘Mind some of them would be better off …’

  Helen crossed the arms of old Mrs Beale, so that she sat like a pyramid, feet firmly planted, a blanket on her knees, the edifice narrowing to a small and pointed head bedecked with regulation grey curls. The product of Sylvie’s in the Parade, perhaps, half price to pensioners on Thursdays only. A fund of knowledge, Sylvie’s, specially on Thursdays; the kind of knowledge which only the faintly malicious or the idle found time to accumulate. Helen was angry now. The curiosity, her conviction about the Carlton case was no longer dimmed by Hazel’s defeatism, the criticisms of the day, the accusations of interference, restlessness, of being so bent on achievement she missed some vital point. Were common sense and energy really in such short supply she could afford to stay still and would it really have been absurd for someone in the local police to sit in the local hairdresser for a while? Women would make so much better detectives for local crime. Better chemists, better neighbours, better at just about everything. On such chauvinistic, irritated thoughts, she looked again for Bailey. Gone without word or whisper.

  On second thoughts, she added to herself, men are better at subterfuge and avoiding embarrassment. Also regard themselves as better at the rough stuff. Little women don’t interfere. She shut her eyes and tried to imagine Herringbone Parade in darkness. A comprehensive street, a good street, a tribute to life where everyone watched everyone else without watching for them, as secretive as any neighbourhood with the city on the doorstep. She had known the modern sham of real villages, liked that less. Crime, like blindness, was not a matter of diet or environment. Go on, then, Bailey, like a dog off a leash, Go on. Be a policeman, but I wish you could have let me go with you.

  Bailey thought of nothing when he turned his back on the community hall, except a vague thought as he got in a car about how little community halls had to do with communities. They replaced churches, he supposed, and had little to do with those either. His mother, older than Mrs Beale to whom he had spoken at such length long before Helen arrived, had no truck with churches. She had pre-empted social workers in the East End, a woman of such conspicuous virtue she had driven her neighbours mad with kindness and earned their pity for having a husband who was always in the pub.

  Mothers. Bailey could recall the power of mother, especially an East End mother. Mother and smother worked the same, post-war women with more than half their men lost to some sodding battle they did not understand, left with their infants, legitimate or otherwise. Mrs Carlton and her two sisters. He wondered about Pip Carlton, the caring chemist, such a lad, such a jolly lad, Mrs Beale had said, you should have seen him. Always the scientist, playing with stink bombs even as a boy, always collecting old muck and going on about history and being a doctor. Nothing alters, you know. People are like time. They are time. But he never got to be a doctor. Something happened, Mum was ill. He could have got a grant. Tell me, Mr Policeman Bailey, what did he do with all those drugs he kept?

  I don’t know, Bailey had said with his best humility, thinking as he drove how odd it was he was only let near the scene of this bomb because of reports of some lone lunatic racing the streets. A man who had missed a bus: such things drove people mad in central London, but this one had left a car and, what’s more, he had known who it was. You will let me in there, he had wanted to say, to look for this lone man, whom I think I know, although I will not say so, but you would not allow me to when I wanted to check if everyone was out. Strange priorities, better say nothing. If only I could act on instinct and be furious at the imposition of other people’s rules, other people’s orders which I have been taught to respect even when they are ludicrous. I might have an ounce of Helen’s anxiety, her fury with the formalities of law which get in the way of what is perfectly obvious. Something I seem to have lost, and I lecture her so she might lose it too. She knew she had a murderer: I did not. She knew what Mrs Beale knew; something odd about that boy. I have been in these streets for forty years, and I did not. If I have the instinct, I no longer trust it.

  He had known when he held Daniel Maley in his arms that the man was not only dying, but dying murdered. It had awoken interest, but he had not moved mountains to pursue his belief.

  Bailey was glad he wasn’t a woman. No man in his right mind would ever wish to be a woman apart from a moment like this when he would have liked their instincts, their sheer, bloody-minded scent for blood.

  But he was trusting to instinct now, looking for whoever it was who had abandoned his car and run through the lines. Maverick Duncan, inevitably going in the same direction as he was going himself which somehow lessened the need for speed. Say what one would about Duncan, he was good at beating down doors. And whatever else was inevitable about Duncan, if he got there first, he would not understand.

  For the first time in a long time, Duncan was afraid. If he had been pursued in the last two hundred yards since he lost the car, he was not aware of it, nor did he care, but he cared about the silence which was terrifying. Streets were never silent like this; the dreadful stillness of desertion which allowed him to hear his own thumping breath. At the far end of the Parade he almost stopped, thought the hissing sound which filled his ears was a sound from inside his own head, his heart on the verge of explosion. Which end … where? He became confused: there was nothing, no one. He wanted no interference, but when Bailey’s car caught him in the lights and he heard that despised voice of authority, cool where he was hot, the savagery of his expression softened. The phone, he began to say, the bloody phone …

  ‘Yes, I know. Looks like someone at home.’

  ‘You knew? Why didn’t you do something, you cunt?’

  He sprinted up the steps to Kim’s door, rattled the handle, grunting with frustration. Glanced grimly at Bailey, their faces weird in the light, their voices raised against the hissing steam in the cavern beyond.

  ‘Do you have a key?’ Bailey shouted. Duncan patted his pockets, shook his head, sizing the door with his eyes. There was a plant, dead, by the side: Bailey picked up the pot and smashed the glass in the door neatly, put his hand inside for the latch, as couth as a burglar. A fragment of glass grazed the back of his hand, the brief pain a reminder. Duncan charged indoors, shouting, Kim, Kim, Kim. Bailey followed delicately.

  Kimberley Perry lay in the bed, sleeping. Both men stood at the door of the room, looking at her half in awe, half exasperation. She lay curled, demurely covered, her breathing noisy, her head to one side and her hands beneath the pillow like a depiction of innocence. ‘Kim, wake up,’ Duncan shouted. Relief was turning to anger, concern curdling in the face of such peace. ‘I’ll bloody wake her … What the hell does she think she’s doing?’

  ‘No. Wait.’ Something in the way she lay arrested Bailey: something in the smell of the room with the windows firmly closed. Something he had read or heard somewhere of how Margaret Carlton had been found without being photographed, with her head on one side, body curled like a foetus. Surely women did not copy each other in sleep as in other things: the peace was deceptive. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘don’t touch.’

  ‘Wake up, Kim,’ Duncan shouted, obedient all the same. Bailey turned on the bedside light, saw the phone in the cradle, out of arm’s reach from the bed; noticed a faint red mark on her forehead. The sickly smell, sweet and cloying, was denser nearer the floor and pillow.

  ‘She’s just asleep!’ Duncan was fuming, relief still finding outlet in anger. ‘She’s bloody irresponsible, that’s what she is. What’s she done with Tom? And where’s that fucking chemist who’s supposed to be so good to them all the time? Kim, Kim …’ He shook her shoulder, pulled down the cover, shielding his wife from Bailey’s gaze.

  ‘Get her up gently, Duncan,’ Bailey said quietly. He was thinking fast.
Such a deep sleep and unquiet breathing: she could not naturally have slept so long. They could not get a doctor in here with men steaming explosive from a bomb within a hundred yards: they must treat as they found. Rely on instinct. Phone Helen, get the number of that old doctor, ask what you should do with chloroform overdose. Quick quick. Slowly, slowly, Kimberley Perry responded to the shakings, surfaced into the light of the room, the sixty-watt bulb beneath the cheap shade, the colours from the window. Her eyes focused reluctantly, the pupils tiny: her mouth rounded to release a scream and she was suddenly, violently sick.

  ‘Christ. Jesus H. Christ. Where’s Tom, where’s Tom?’ The first words, noises rather, the sense slurred.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Duncan murmured, arms round her shoulders, immune to the coloured mess now on the pillow, the greenish skin, the wild eyes. ‘He’s safe somewhere, don’t worry.’

  ‘No,’ she was mumbling. ‘He was here. I saw. Asleep, on the floor. God, I feel sick.’

  ‘You’ve been dreaming, sweetheart. Only dreaming. What the hell did you take?’ Duncan’s voice became harsh. ‘You fucking whore.’ On one of her rounded thighs, carelessly revealed as she struggled upright, he could see a fantail of fingerprints. ‘What you been taking, you silly cow, and while you were at it, who took you?’