by Helen Slavin
‘Your dad, Jim, says, if he hasn’t asked you to marry him by now, he’s never bloody going to.’
There was a ripple of reaction. Not from her. She stood as if frozen in time, half turned. Utterly motionless. The ripple ran through the crowd. The next Jim came forward. He was looking over the audience anxiously, checking for his loved one. His messagee.
‘Can’t spot her. Can’t see her, Annie…’
‘Never mind, just give me the message.’
‘Buckets and spades. She’ll know.’
So I called out the message and up in the circle two teenage girls started to squeal with reaction and delight before making their way along the row and hurrying up the back stairs. Still squealing.
And that is how it ran. I spoke directly to people. I used names, pet names, picked them out like suspects in an identity parade. Those who thought they would give nothing away in case they were spotted and used didn’t have to give anything away. I told them what the message was, and I moved on. No audience manipulation. No reading body language. I got on with the job in hand.
The Whisky Chasers Cousin Jim had been so fond of turned out to be a group of his mates, all equally fond of Scotch. Or Irish. Quality and Quantity had been their motto. They came to the front all dressed in black suits but each wearing a colourful tie. There was a toast, and a glass of whisky was set alight on the edge of the platform. It burned with a blue and pink flame.
A couple of audience members got up to leave then, shuffling their way sideways along the seating, people who hadn’t got their message. People leaving empty handed, heavy hearted. If you were expecting poetry or wisdom you’d be disappointed. There was no Crown Derby china on Jim Night, either. Small messages of love and goodbye, the things left unsaid. The unfinished business from over forty different Jims. Reassurance and letting go. Everyday. Ordinary.
Some of the Jims also went away empty handed. Jims whose loved ones had not shown up, who were probably dead, the Jims had been hanging around so long. At the end of the evening Lara printed the messages I had relayed, the ones that hadn’t found a listener.
It was Lara who commented it was like a lonely hearts. Missing Jim seeks widow Laura with news of shed keys. Not that there had been any shed keys this evening. Apart from Jim Match finally settling his ledgers with his wife and accountant, all the treasure map/hidden Vermeer/Crown Derby coffee pot messages had been at a minimum.
But Lara’s comment made me think and I decided to print the messages in the small ads of the local newspapers, maybe in a couple of the nationals too. Just a small ad, to whom it may concern. In the mystery and puzzle of answers there would be enlightenment for someone. In buckets and spades.
Jim Night had been quiet but successful. I felt rested somehow, like ticking off an item on a list. I had been, at last, a translator. Customer service representative. I had got the job done. I thought that this night I would sleep really well for the first time in an age. I was relaxed and certain. Atalanta dropped me off at the LookOut basement. I waved as I got the keys out and opened the door.
The woman came right through me with a shudder then, and was gone. I waited. Not sure it was her. Not wanting it to be her. Someone I had never met, and yet so familiar. Moments later she was back, stepping through me again. This time I was certain. This time I stepped with her. Heading out into the darkness.
I stepped out into the basement yard, shut the door behind me and started walking.
Dig Deep with Arthur: eye for an eye
He had one eye bandaged and a bald patch just above it. The eye was safe but the bald patch would most likely never regrow. The burn extended down his left side and he had some nerve damage in his left hand that they weren’t certain would come right. There was a physiotherapist, Angie, who was very keen and enthusiastic and got his hopes up.
Well. No. Actually, she got her hopes up and projected them onto Evan. Evan had given up all hope by the looks of him. He’d been unconscious for three days. Clearly while he’d been away something had had a word with him. He lay in bed looking out of the window with his right eye, not doing anything much except heal.
I sat with him for over an hour one afternoon. Bridget had been in earlier with a vast bunch of flowers. Evan lay with his all-seeing eye turned away from them. Andy had trawled into town for a box of chocolates, setting down a huge pick-and-mix selection of luxury chocolates from Thorntons. He’d stayed an hour and eaten most of them, leaving Evan a gold box with crumples of gold foil and torn paper ribbons. Now, as I sat by the window so Evan would have to see me I could smell the leftover chocolates, bitter and sweet and sickly.
I was quite happy to sit there although I wasn’t allowed a smoke. I had a passing thought about my one-eyed status, but I guessed that me sitting there with my eye patch might make Evan sit up and realise he’d been lucky. His patch would come off and his eye would blink into the sunshine.
I had been allowed cards and I dealt out a hand of klondike. Evan’s eye watched the cards. Black on red. Red on black. Shuffle, deal. The riffle and clack of the cards was soothing. Well, was to me. The visiting hours had a few moments to go. I had been told to pack up the cards by the bossy ward sister when suddenly he came out with it.
‘My name is Evan Bees.’
His one eye swivelled round to look at me. I nodded, pocketed my cards.
He began. He didn’t say, ‘Once upon a time’, but that’s how it turned out.
He told me the Gothic romance of picking over ancient bones with Annie Colville. He spoke of the whiteness of her coat, the sonorous bell sounds the sink made as she washed up the petrie dishes and beakers. How love had set a snare for him in Annie’s face.
Then a nurse in a uniform two sizes too small came in, all set to change Evan’s bandages, and I was cast out.
As I left, his one eye watched me.
Next afternoon I volunteered for hospital visiting again. No one argued. Andy asked when Evan, or Mark as he knew him, was due out and I pleaded genuine ignorance.
This time Evan was sitting up, legs over the side of the bed, T-shirt and track pants on. He was edgy, picking at a plate of sandwiches. As I stood in the doorway he didn’t see me, turned his bandaged eye. Then he turned to pick up his juice drink and spilled it, startled by my presence. Don’t misunderstand. He wasn’t freaked out by me. He was nervous of what he might reveal. He had a lot of beans to spill.
I handed him some paper towels to mop up the juice. I took them from him when they were used up and binned them. As I looked into the bin I began my own story. A story set in a small backyard in a row of Victorian terraced houses. A yard where my gran grew tomatoes and nasturtiums in chimney pots so that the odd L-shaped space looked like an earthbound roofscape.
Chimney pots, a weather vane that fell off St Thomas’ church, old drainpipes standing on end and filled to their swan-neck hoppers with sweet peas and lupins. Tall dark blue delphiniums, as thickly blue as a storm in the sky, spired from the top. Cosmos and bronze fennel spluttered like smoke from crown-topped stacks, mottled and speckled. Ivies of every shape and shade of green poured from the vents and slats of the pots. Scrambled. Clambered. Tangling up with the black-eyed susans and the canary creeper. Empress of India. Alaska mixed. Ipomoea heavenly blue. Some days I thought they looked like castle turrets with their crenellations and cut outs and ledges.
I remember it well. Technicolor. My last view with binocular vision. Do I dream with two eyes? Yes. That’s what dreams are for. Take you back. Let you visit.
And there were hens. Three hens and a cockerel in a little run near the coal shed. Not that we had coal by then. Gran kept junk in there mostly, and some of the chicken feed. It was my job to clean out the chickens. I didn’t mind it. I got to find the eggs. I kept those hens in a royal manner. Fresh straw. Clean water. I hypnotised them occasionally, drawing a line in the dirt before them.
Tuesday. Never much liked Tuesdays. I was in the coop with my shovel and bucket and the big black rubber gauntl
ets that my gran gave me to wear. I’d got the hens out into the run, pecking out the corn I’d strewn around. Out of my way. The cockerel had been sitting on the pitched roof.
Then he wasn’t. He was ambushing me in the confines of the coop. He is my last memory with my two eyes. A blur of greenish black and gold, the gnarled skin of his feet, the spur at the back of his leg, the claws, yellow, bluish. Feathers and hen shit and blood on the straw.
I banged my head on the rafters of their ceiling trying to get away. He lacerated my arms as I swiped at him, the shovel lost, let go. He was on his territory and he had all the advantages.
Pain. Torch-hot burning and then dizziness and sick rising and stars prickling black in a white-out sky.
It seems like a laugh now. Something so ridiculous it should be videotaped for a TV show. Kid loses an eye to a crazed cockerel. Crazed with sexual jealousy? Who knows. It might be hilarious. A blur of feathers. The comical way I flapped about, crushed in by the coop so I couldn’t defend myself. Cooped up as they say.
They patched my face. My arms. There are only slight traces now of the scars that were much angrier when I was a lad. Scars are always angry. They shouldn’t be there. Just traces now, his footprints. After I woke up in the hospital I wondered where my eye was. If perhaps Gran had shovelled it away with the straw and muck. If it rolled like a marble at her feet. If it looked like a miniature football with the air let out.
I had a glass eye for a time. Exactly like a marble. So exactly like that I lost it in a game with Andrew Latham. It was highly prized. Everyone wanted to play him for it. He never lost it. And then marble season was over and it was elastics and my eye stayed at home in Andrew Latham’s marble bag.
Not much of a view.
I got the eyepatch then. I liked it. I felt at home. Unusual. Different. Settled. There was no point wailing about it. It was done and I had to move on. I ran away from it, put the whole incident behind me. Then I realised that it was not behind me. It was with me all the time. Evidenced by the blank spot under the patch. So that’s where it lived. I accommodated it. Concentrated on mastering the art of monocular vision, testing myself, pushing my boundaries. My boundaries expanded.
Gran cleared out the coop and the chicken feed. Bought me a dog who got run over.
After she broke their necks we ate the chickens. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. With some salad cream and a head of lettuce.
‘Revenge,’ said Evan Bees. He took in a gasp that might have been choking but was in fact, laughing.
Evan Bees started to laugh. And laugh. And sob.
I waited. Wanting more.
Phone box
IT WAS dark now. Following in Fran Dart’s footsteps I had gone beyond the retail park into the maze of the industrial estate. The darkness was blared into at odd points by stark security lights. Great squares of whiteness illuminating yards full of bricks or aggregate, miles of fencing and paving stacked high, sleeping machinery, JCBs with their arms lifted, buckets up as if stretching into a dream. Blank windows. One light left on by mistake in an office. Chain link fences locked with silver padlocks.
One street led into another and back into another and along and round, curving about the whole estate. All roads leading to the Buckingham double glazing and conservatory showroom.
We turned into Haymarket Way, off the Strand, beyond Fenchurch Street, parallel to Regent Street which led into Oxford Street. The double glazing showroom sitting at the head of the Mall. Some council Bright Spark having fun with his Monopoly board of an industrial centre. Haymarket Way, because it ran off into the fields of the neighbouring farm. Not that it was a farm now. It had been sold off. It was a gravel quarry on one side and a landfill site at the other.
Darkness blotted in as I walked. The rain came on, first great drops slapping into my face, onto my head and as I neared the spiked steel gates of the landfill site it pattered faster and faster like tears. Like sobbing.
Until I saw them. Fran Dart taking up her place amongst four others. Four others, beyond the gate, beckoning Fran back. And then waiting for me as Pauline had waited for her.
They stood for a long moment and looked at me, it was as if they were sorry for me, saying nothing. Giving no clue. Only Fran touched a hand to her neck and I noticed the knotted leather thong, almost like a necklace. But not quite. Too binding. Too biting. They all wore the same.
Then, as if the time was up, they moved back to take up their places, knowing they would not have to wait much longer. Hugging farewell to each other as they moved away. And the world was darkness and water.
Later I remembered being in the phone box, the metallic echo of my voice, the tiny tinny telephone whisper of the police switchboard operator, the smell of urine. Outside the rain battered and still cars were passing, headlights full on sweeping over me like searchlights. I was aware of the disconnection between my sodden clothes and the surface of me, my skin. I was bone cold. I was stone calm.
Walking back, keeping to the grass verges, I was aware of every stitch in my shoes, the muddied earth beneath the wet spikes of grass, the brush of stinging nettles, the earthy waft of dampness from the soaked ground, the ditch. The rattle and shudder of every leaf in the hedgerow. The rhythms of my footsteps. My heart. My breath.
I don’t remember town or arriving home. When I awoke I was on the floor still in my drenched clothes. When I looked for my keys they were in the door.
I stayed in. Filling in my ads, checking over Fran Dart’s shoebox of belongings looking for a way in. A way out.
I had not seen any newspapers. I didn’t take them, didn’t want all their true-life trouble and tragedy for fifty pence. I thought of one of the other women, her husband and her children. The thing that I had done. I had taken away their hope and replaced it with grief. I couldn’t seem to reconcile this with the agony of waiting.
I thought that as I had waited for Evan so they had waited for her. I thought of the children, to the youngest of whom she would be like someone in a fairytale. A mythical beast like Cinderella or Snow White.
Some back-drawer bit of my brain told me that it was better. It was good. It was moving on, that she and her four companions at the landfill site would be gone now. They’d get to wrestle the angels behind the MDF door. Harp lessons or whatever made you happy. Finished. Done. Have a sit down.
Pauline Dart was waiting for me at the basement when I returned from buying milk. She looked pale and her hair seemed very dark, very shiny and clean. I stood, my heartbeat choking me, waiting for Pauline to turn her head. I could have turned and run, but I didn’t. Pauline turned. She looked at me for a long moment and I understood that she would hate me. I understood that she would want her message. What did Fran say? When Fran had said nothing. I had nothing to give her.
I did not understand when she stepped towards me and enfolded me. Her arms wrapping around me, her hair next to my face, smelling of almonds, soft. The strength of her embrace and her voice saying gently, ‘Thank you.’
I did not understand why I was crying. Why I sobbed and Pauline soothed me, when it was not my sister they had found in the landfill site.
I couldn’t rest in peace. Instead I took out all the items from the shoebox and looked them all over. Searching. What I found, ultimately, what I hadn’t admitted I was searching for, were the photocopies of Evan Bees and his cut-out catalogue disguises. He looked out at me, speckled and a bit grainy and I wondered if, at last, I was going to get his message.
December the fifth stood like a wall at the edge of my vision now. I felt as if the race was on. I was going to get there and there’d be the snap of a starting pistol. Would all the chocolate brown crowds be there to cheer me onwards? Evan would be declared dead, which wasn’t quite the same as actually being dead. The angels would not get their way. I wondered if they would all be sitting, as I had, eating celestial Bourbon biscuits and waiting for Evan to show his face. I know, he won’t ever turn up. Not here. Not there.
The rumours began t
hat the phone box caller on the Goatmill Lake murder and the phone box caller in the Landfill Killer business were the same person. There was an interview on the local radio station with the journalist who wrote the book about the Goatmill case. They were trying to work out how the person is connected, when the murders clearly aren’t. DI Knight was interviewed on the radio, most of which had to be bleeped out.
It was the magical mystery of the month, ‘Who was the masked avenger?’ sort of thing and it was front page because everyone else was behaving. Councillors were concealing their corruption and vices for the moment. No one was riding bareback on wheelie bins on the council estate. I felt guilty even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was relieved when a cow was run over on the dual carriageway.
Tuesday. I had been in the throes of sorting out the newsletter I had started. Instead of maxing out the classifieds in the local paper, I had brokered a deal with the manager at our local branch of Printshop Special by the station to print up my own small ads in a handy sheet, called, you guessed it, The LookOut. He was very helpful, offering his brother’s services as a website designer if I fancied going ‘webwide’ and casting a critical eye over ideas for the banner. I avoided the obvious eyes looking through the double ‘O’. Instead I opted for a seafaring chap looking through a telescope.
It was a cheap run of 1,000 copies every Tuesday. I collected them at closing time and distributed them on Wednesday morning. Except at the library. They’re closed on Wednesday so I took them straight from Printshop Special and Lara let me into the library to drop them off there. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Liar that I am. It is to stave off having to tell you that the most important thing that Tuesday morning was Terry Adam.
I did not see his change of clothes at first. What panicked me was that he was inside, going through my belongings, sniffing the mould in a tea mug, picking over my clothes from the back of the chair. Sniffing the underarms like a dog taking scent. I halted in the doorway, feeling like a trespasser in what passed for my home. Then I saw there was something different about his uniform.