by Helen Slavin
They looked at me strangely, those women, as if I was a freak, a thing to be afraid of.
Except for Bar. After that first week Bar came along every week and she had a different look about her. She was waiting for something and it wasn’t coming. She had a way of raising one eyebrow. Her eyebrows were shaved and painted in pencil. The effect was to make her face look even more forgotten, as if someone had been painting it and got as far as her eyebrows before finding that they’d let a pan boil dry and being distracted.
When we had finished the session Bar was always the last to go. As Aunt Mag was seeing everyone out Bar would sit and finish a smoke. She didn’t say anything to me, she just waited. But there was nothing. No one in chocolate brown slacks and chocolate brown sweater had anything to say to her. Then she would pull on her jacket, a crumpled leather coat that made her look even thinner. She would stub out her cigarette in the ashtray and leave.
And then one week the message came. A slight lady in a chocolate brown shirtwaist dress pushed her way forwards before Bar had even got her coat off. Trace and Al weren’t there yet and Aunt Mag was in the kitchen with three other women from her bingo club. They were hopeless, they came along expecting racing tips and Nostradamus-style predictions. They wanted to know who was going to win the World Cup or the Grand National. They didn’t get it. They didn’t see that the point was the chocolate brown lady in the shirtwaist dress.
She was so anxious to get the message over with that she didn’t wait. She stepped in and spoke. Bar had her back to me at the time and to suddenly hear her mother’s voice was a big shock.
‘Barbara. Listen. I can’t stay long.’
Barbara turned to face me. Today she had forgotten to pencil in her eyebrows.
‘Stick with Kath.’
Bar stared at me. All my body was prickling now and I was willing Bar to say what she wanted before her mother headed off through the MDF door to Heaven.
‘Kath.’
‘You’ve found someone, Bar. That’s the point. Stick with her.’
And then I was on the floor and full of pins and needles. Bar didn’t take her coat off. She picked up her bag from the chair and headed out, pushing past Aunt Mag to get there.
It is no credit to my Aunt Mag that instead of seeing that I was in a bit of a state she simply picked me up off the floor, fed me a glass of brandy and let me carry on. There were three messages about Crown Derby tea sets that afternoon and they weren’t connected with anyone there. Someone was still looking for Jim and the three women from the bingo club never did get to find out who was going to win the National.
A horse died in the National that year. It was put down at the trackside and Aunt Mag sobbed even though it wasn’t Cherish the Day. Aunt Mag was not interested in the fate of the jockey, who at one point was thought to have broken his neck. The horse was. Two days later that horse, which was chocolate brown to start off with, came to see me. And that horse was worried about the jockey.
Bar is still with Kath all these years later. I see them in town and Bar always gives me a nod. That nod is worth more than a thousand Crown Derby tea sets.
After a while I began to dread Thursdays. It was hard work. I felt very tired on Friday morning and I had bad dreams on Thursday nights, as well as bad dreams on Wednesday nights in anticipation of the events of Thursday. I refused to go to Aunt Mag’s on several occasions. My Mother resented this. I was cramping her style. Impinging on her last freedom. Her fling.
Finally someone was so furious he didn’t go away. We were having our usual session. The ladies from the bingo club were there that week and a new girl from the factory, Abby. She was very quiet and didn’t like it when we shut the curtains and lit the candles. I had to admit I’d never liked that either. It made it sinister. Aunt Mag made a big thing of drawing up the ouija board, as if she was casting a spell, invoking the Devil.
It certainly felt like that when Hal arrived. He was very tall, very angry and the words he used to me were all ones that I was forbidden. I couldn’t tell Aunt Mag what was being said because it was unrepeatable. I held tight to the upturned cup we used as a pointer. I wouldn’t budge it. In the end I said I felt sick. She was furious. Her mates asked for their money back. Jim was, once again, not found.
I got home still feeling very odd with Hal poking at my shoulder, bickering at me. My Mother had had her evening with Mr Bentley and was stacking up a couple of boxes of Imperial Leather. I went to bed. Hal kept me awake all night with his anxiety and his distress.
‘I thought you fucking listened. Why aren’t you listening to me?’ and he began to shake me. I lay very still and quiet under the blankets, hoping that if I stayed rigid and quiet he would be fooled into thinking I wasn’t there. Hoped. Hoped. Imagined.
What if I stopped breathing? If I could hold on for long enough, could I work the ultimate magic and disappear? And just when I couldn’t hold on any longer, when I thought it was quiet and perhaps he was gone, he would tug at my feet. The ultimate bogeyman, hanging onto my ankles. Have you ever been so scared you couldn’t scream?
I worked very hard at ignoring him. He followed me around, swearing at me, grabbing at me. The first one ever to do that. To ever actually reach out and make contact. Pins and needles in my arm when he touched me.
I was eleven. I have tried to forget this for a long time. A quarter century, in fact. You can’t blame him really. Like Hugh’s mam warned, we were dabbling in the occult. I was too young and untrained to deal with these people and their emotional turmoils. For Hal it was like getting to the front of the queue at last only to be told he was in the wrong shop.
Hal’s unfinished business was that he had been murdered. I have never found out who it was who killed him or whether they were ever punished. Something happened eventually because he stopped visiting me. He no longer had unfinished business. If the law didn’t catch up with his killer in this life then certainly those too-tight dress shirts and the pinch-feet lace-up dress shoes would have done.
I was in school. It was the summer term of my first year at the secondary school, Sir Charles Whitworth High School. Sounds fancy on purpose so that prospective parents would be lulled into a false sense of security. Its real name should have been Strangeways. Like the prison. It was a petri dish of a school. You had to fight your way through the kids who were fungus or poison.
My first year was not going well. I was quite bright, quite quiet, I got on with what I was asked to do. I didn’t make friends easily. But I had attracted a bully.
Like a fly round dung balls, Julie made my life slightly more hellish than the Dead did. Mrs Berry had some very choice things to say about Julie and her personal hygiene which did make me feel better, at least I wasn’t the only one who thought she was a hag from Hell.
Julie had very blonde hair with a texture like steel wool. She had broad shoulders like an Olympic swimmer, which in fact she grew up to be. She divided her waking hours. For most of the time she was chugging up and down the pool in town. I imagined she cut through the water like a shark, her elbows sticking up like dorsal fins as she crawled through the water. When she was on dry land, as a little light relief from the rigours of Olympian athleticism, she tortured me.
To write it down it seems petty; poking me in the back with a pencil, dropping pencil shavings down my neck, tripping me, letting doors go in my face, name calling. The name calling was particularly pathetic, without much range. ‘Bag’, ‘Slag’, ‘Hag’, ‘Nag’, the Dr Seuss school of intimidation. But mental torture is always so much meaner. There were the whispering campaigns and the fact that if you stood too near me at breaktime you’d get punched too. No one could afford to be my friend unless they had studied martial arts.
I decided to save up and have karate lessons. I spent evenings dreaming of the day I’d be a black belt and whack Julie on her slightly fuzzy-haired chin with the side of my foot. I didn’t want to save up for a gun. No. Firearms would be cheating. I wanted the pure physical pleasure of my
own strength and skill. Contact killing.
As it turned out I didn’t have to save up for any karate lessons at all. As it turned out, Hal came to my rescue.
We were on the maths corridor. It was like a giant cardboard box, the classrooms partitioned with pre-fabricated flimsiness, small rectangular windows at the tops of the walls which let minimum light and air into the short corridor. There were stairs at one end, doors which trapped fingers. It was nightmarishly easy to be trapped into a corner by a practised bully.
I was shoved into the wall, into the corner. I could smell her breath, oniony, and the smell from her clothes was sharp with a back note of chlorine. She was laughing, a low piggish snorting under her breath, and simply shoving me. Every time someone moved past us she shoved against me as if she was being forced to do so by other people pushing past her.
‘Oops…soh-ri,’ she said, cartoon-like. ‘Oops…soh-ri,’ laughing all the time. A couple of girls passed by on their way to the stairs and once again, she shoved right into me, so hard in fact that she nearly lost her balance, and in grabbing at me to steady herself she tipped my balance. I stumbled, fell to the floor.
And then Hal saw his chance, stepped in and took over.
It felt like your arm going dead. When you wake up in the middle of the night and you’ve been sleeping on your folded arm and all the circulation is gone. You look down at the hand and the arm and it’s like it isn’t yours. You can’t move it but it is still attached to your body.
My whole body felt like that. I couldn’t move. Not my eyeballs, not anything. It was as if I’d disappeared. Hal’s voice came out of my mouth. It was a torrent of abuse aimed at the person who’d killed him, I think. This afternoon it was aimed at Julie. She just got in the way that day. Afterwards I could only remember pieces of it. He didn’t name names, either.
See what I mean? Tell me something important. Give me information.
‘Fucking bastard. You shitty piece of shit. You’re shit and you touch her. You can’t get rid of me. NO. NO. Can’t get shut of me you shitey bastard fucker.’
This is shocking enough I know, simply to read cold and black in print on this page. Imagine hearing it. A gruff, male, northern voice, deep and smoky sounding spitting forth from the mouth of an eleven-year-old girl. Let’s remember that this was 1970 something and nothing, and I was wearing a white school blouse and a Marks and Spencer regulation box-pleated skirt. I had on a V-neck grey jumper. I was wearing knee socks, for pity’s sake.
Suffice to say I was taken to the medical room and Julie never really recovered from the experience.
She never bullied me again. Now she’d seen magic. The chief reason that many people don’t believe in magic is terror. It is wild and uncontrollable. It is not a card trick.
I lay on the couch in the medical room feeling pins and needles all over and aching in every muscle I possessed. No pun intended. My Mother had been called away from work and was discussing me in the headmaster’s office. I felt strangely calm lying there. It was quiet in the medical room and there was a velux window in the sloping roof so I had a view of the sky, and a silver birch tree that grew just outside in the courtyard off the science labs. It was one of the best days I ever spent in school. Lounging on a sofa in the medical room.
I was a social pariah after that, of course. Which made life a lot easier. Thanks Hal.
Later My Mother came and took me home. She let me lie on the sofa at home and I was fed copious quantities of hot tea and given a cold flannel for my head. My Mother asked a lot of questions that day and I confessed everything. Even about Aunt Mag and the home-made ouija board. That went down like a lead balloon.
Mr Bentley found that his Thursdays were rudely interrupted. Aunt Mag’s racehorse fund was abruptly stopped and the monies in the fund were transferred into premium bonds in my name. My Mother had a big row with Aunt Mag over the ouija board and ‘meddling’ and ‘dabbling’ were words that were used quite a lot.
Aunt Mag was at once contrite and terrified. She thought I was possessed and didn’t want me in her house. My Mother was thankful; the understairs cupboard was almost full of soap by now. She had a good way to finish the relationship.
She was anxious to do this because she had recently met Mr Dauntsey who worked at the supermarket. He was Fruit Manager and managed to slip us at least three melons a week plus a variety of sub-standard spoiled-in-transit apples, pears and bananas. He looked like a wolf with odd grey-blue eyes under thickish greyish brows. But he didn’t scare me. By then nothing scared me. I was becoming fearless.
Mr Dauntsey. Wolf. I remember it now as always being a full moon but that is probably embroidery. When Mr Dauntsey was visiting he did not mind me being in the house. I was quiet and out of the way in my room whilst he and My Mother were ensconced in her ‘boudoir’. That’s what she always called it, even when we moved house and her allotted space was little more than a box room. My Mother made her living space a boudoir, richer, fuller, lush. She was a bower bird. Making it home.
I don’t know how it began. I was doing some homework. I had some music on. David Essex. I was accustomed to the slight noises that would leak out from the boudoir. The odd bump, the slide of an elbow against the wall, the rhythmic headboard drumming. (Turned my music up louder at this point. Bought headphones later. Bliss.)
The noise changed. It was a wafer-thin change, an extra bump. Another bump. A sharp word, muffled. I stood up then. My ears straining out for sound although I didn’t think to switch the music off. I moved onto the landing.
The boudoir was one room down, we had a big house then, four bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms. I moved along the landing, hearing more of the thuds. Not the regular rhythm at all. Arrhythmia. The arrhythmia of someone beating someone else. The arrhythmia of my heart. Now in my mouth.
I could hear his voice now and the sound his fists made on My Mother’s flesh. The chock sound her head made on contact with the wall.
I pushed open the door. He was naked. Like a wolf with a snake of thick dark hair down his back and thicker curlier hair down his arms. My Mother was underneath him, his hand on the back of her neck, as he held her the way someone holds a puppy they are about to drown. He looked at me with fury. I flew that night. I lifted off vertically and I moved through the air to land on that hairy, animal back.
The impact shoved him forward and he was half crushing My Mother, who was now semi-conscious and bleeding from the mouth, a loosened tooth smearing a trail of blood across the sheeting. He whirled, lashing out at me. His weight shifted from My Mother and in a daze she rolled off the bed, bumping onto the floor at the side. I thought she was dead then and I was going to kill him.
I didn’t need to. Rounding on me, catching me round the neck with his hairy arm he thwacked me to the ground. He was punching at me, my head banging on the floor, feeling the static charge from the nylon carpet. I could hear My Mother being sick. The scent of vomit now. Which is when Hal took over. My arms and legs were rigid, rubbery, and his voice spat out of my mouth. Dark, smoky, Northern.
‘Fucking bastard. You shitty piece of shit. You’re shit and you touch her. You can’t get rid of me. NO. NO. Can’t get shut of me you shitey bastard fucker.’
Mum’s Eye View: sideways on
Don’t mention him. How to see yourself as a complete failure in one easy lesson.
I didn’t save her from bloody Mag. I could have brained Mag. But I was more furious at myself. I was so busy having my good time with Jeff Bentley I didn’t see it. I didn’t bother to look, just cast the kid aside for some pleasures. Your children are a piece of you, like pinching off a bit of dough, it goes on, it makes other loaves or pie crusts but it starts with you. It got so that I couldn’t look at Jeff without thinking about Annie. So I broke that off. Punishing myself.
Don’t mention Dauntsey. There are things that you just don’t let your children see. Your worry. Yourself in bed with your lover. And of course for her to come in like that, with a dead man’
s voice and the language…How do you feel about that? You feel sick and afraid and powerless. She saved me. What if she’d not? What if that bloke hadn’t come through her like that? What if she’d slept in her bed and the next time she’d seen me I’d been giving her a message, make sure your Aunt Mag never finds out they found her in a string bag in the doorway of the chippy.
I was dangerous. I wasn’t fit to be let out. I don’t know who I was more afraid of. Me. Her.
And you puzzle it out, you know. How all this happened, how you got yourself where you are. The back of my mind was always telling me that I couldn’t give up being me, but it also kept telling me that she was always giving up being her.
She didn’t have a lot to say for herself. They had a lot to say for her. Through her. I should have found out things. Made enquiries about that Hal bloke for a start. Exorcised him somehow. But I was scared to. Scared of what we might let loose. There weren’t demons in her. But there was a demon in me, a little wily git who kept me afraid and stopped me doing what I should.
I never could ask how it felt, if she minded. I was lost on it. What could I do?
Dauntsey never got over it. He got religion shortly after. Which I don’t know if I’m pleased about.
So, anyway
We got shut of Mr Dauntsey. We didn’t shop at that supermarket any more. Shortly afterwards My Mother got a new job and we moved house. To the other side of town up near Old Park. Big. Victorian. Haunted of course, but I kept that, kept them, from My Mother.
At the time I felt safe. I thought My Mother had moved house because of Mr Dauntsey. That she was cocooning us, making us safe. Now I think back and I am sad to realise that in all reality she was probably just afraid of me. If she could have moved house without me maybe she would. The Hal incidents shook her up. If I had been her, I would have taken me to the library and tried to find out who Hal was and what had happened to him. To try and put things straight.