SO THE DOVES

by Heidi James

  Mel laughed. ‘As if. Girls like me are hairdressers or work in a shop if we’re lucky. Or we end up pregnant, or if we’ve really fucked up, we end up on the game.’

  ‘That’s not true. You’re clever, you could do anything you want.’

  ‘Right? It’s that easy is it? Just head off to Uni.’ She took a final drag on her cigarette, right down to the filter, and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘For you maybe.’

  ‘For you too, seriously. You’ll easily get good A-Levels and there’s grants and things. You can get a loan.’

  ‘That’s the point, I ain’t doing A-Levels: my mum can’t afford to put me through another two years of school. I have to get a job. I have to earn my keep, and I want to anyway. I want some money. I’ve had enough of it round here.’

  ‘But that’s so short-sighted, you could have an amazing career.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I don’t know, anything. You could be an English teacher, or a nurse.’

  ‘Wow… That’s some enticing career path you’re sketching out for me there. Teaching little shits or cleaning up someone’s shit.’

  ‘Well, something else then. I don’t know. You’d figure that out at Uni.’

  ‘Well, mate, I don’t have the luxury of five years to figure out what I want to do.’ She’d hunched her shoulders, pulling her chin down to her chest like a bird sheltering from the rain, her hands in her pockets.

  ‘I suppose we should get back to school.’ He looked at her, to catch her gaze and smile, to apologise for whatever he’d said that’d made her sink down inside herself, but she looked past him and pushed herself off the wall.

  ‘Come on then.’

  ‘You’re going to come to class?’

  ‘Yep. I suppose I’d better if I want a “career”.’

  She stayed for the rest of that afternoon, French and History, both teachers looking up from the register in surprise when she answered to her name. She answered most of the questions the teachers threw out to the class, too.

  After she told Miss Graveney that Magna Carta meant Great Charter in Latin, he nudged her, hissing ‘See! You’re clever. No one else knew that.’ She sat next to the wall of windows, which some architect no doubt intended to allow for lots of uplifting and inspiring light; instead, the expanse of glass made the room boiling in summer and freezing in winter. The sun picked out a halo of red highlights in her dark hair.

  ‘It’s not clever, I read and remember things. That don’t make me brain of Britain. Anyway, you knew what it meant, and when it was signed I bet. Why didn’t you answer?’

  ‘I don’t want to show off, give them more ammunition,’ he whispered, hair falling into his eyes – he was growing it out.

  ‘Right.’ She gave him that long look, sucking him into her gaze, exposing him. ‘You should get a haircut, you’re beginning to look like those twats.’ She turned back to the Darrens, sprawling at the back of the class. Darren Shine looked asleep. The short Darren saw them both looking; pressing his tongue into his cheek, he inserted his left index finger into his closed right fist and began a crude semaphore of fucking, all the while staring at them both.

  ‘Wow…’ she said and shook her head. ‘Jealous, Darren?’

  ‘As if!’ He sprayed little flecks of spit as he spoke.

  She didn’t go back in for the rest of the week.

  A Long Silence

  After the cemetery I dropped mum home. It was strange, standing there in the bright sun, gazing down at my father’s grave as if waiting for something – an answer or realisation, a sensation of grief – while Mum tugged out the dandelions growing by his headstone (simple, just his name and the dates that plot his span like coordinates on a map) before she filled up the vase from the tap by the chapel and arranged the flowers in silence.

  ‘I’m just going to run a couple of errands, Mum, alright?’ I said as she climbed out of the car. My head was throbbing. This time the road was empty: no one in the street and the only other cars were standing on the neighbours’ drives.

  ‘Oh, OK then.’ She looked disappointed, and a familiar feeling crawled cold up my spine.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Shall I wait for you to have lunch?’

  ‘No, you carry on. Don’t mind me.’ There it was, kindness and my failure to be worthy of it, same as always.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Where? Tell me or I’ll worry.’

  ‘I’ve got to get a laptop, I can’t keep using yours.’ My source hadn’t called and her number was still dead, my emails bouncing back undelivered, but I still believed I’d need to work, that I’d write again. More than that, I needed to get out of the house.

  ‘That’s a good idea. Drive carefully then.’

  ‘Will do.’ I watched her as she fumbled for her key, then stepped inside without waving goodbye. I opened the glove compartment and checked that the locket was still there, tucked under the log book.

  I drove slowly, up past the estate, flicking through the stations on the radio, avoiding the news programmes until I found a classical music station. I let myself enjoy the sun and the music, just for a moment: no work, no Mother, no scandals, no lies, no guilt. No dead policeman. Not being followed.

  At the edge of town I pulled into a new retail park. Six stores spread low and vast over the concrete, built from prefabricated cement and metal blocks, as if they were designed to withstand a hurricane in Mid-West America, not the mild English climate. There used to be orchards here, acres of cherry and apple trees planted in neat rows, but now our fruit is imported from South America and Africa, where the farmers are easier to exploit.

  I parked right in front of Tech Whizzards and took less than twenty minutes to purchase a new computer, despite the salesgirl trying her best to deliver her pitch. My credit card was accepted, which of course it would be, except that I’d begun to imagine persecutions and calamities that weren’t real, or not yet real. Nothing would surprise me.

  I drove over to Melanie’s old house. I couldn’t get the image of Burrell out of my mind, or the idea that the locket being moved was a warning. I couldn’t sit around the house, waiting. Waiting for what I wasn’t sure, but I knew that at some point the police would come. I needed to get back on top, resurrect my old instinct for truth, for unravelling secrets. That was who I thought I was.

  The estate hadn’t changed that much, though there were more cars parked outside the houses and most of the houses were privately owned now. The old uniformity was gone, ushered out with Social Security, jobs for life and community, to make way for neighbourhood one-upmanship and bad taste. I parked and sat in the car across the road from her place, memories flaring then guttering out, like a match flame held at arm’s length. Images – of faces, a smile, a crate full of bottles of fizzy pop on the doorstep, the butter dish, two-pronged forks with plastic pineapples on the end – all those things that meant everything and nothing. I felt sick. A smell of stale cigarettes and vinegar hung in my memory like forgotten laundry.

  All that time had passed since she’d gone and for so long I’d tried not to think about Melanie, or at least, not to think about her being here, being a scared desperate kid. I tried not to think about what I’d done or not done. I never confronted my part in what had happened to her, because she’d disappeared and I told myself it wasn’t my fault. I was just a kid myself. It takes the lens of distance to see the elements of story in your own life, to become an outsider to your own circumstances. There I was. The coward returned, still trying to save his own skin.

  I wondered if Charlie’s pigeon loft was still standing, tucked behind the house, just visible from the back bedroom window. The house was pretty much the same, a squat two up, two down 1930s terrace, the kind that had the bathroom tacked on to
the kitchen as an afterthought. Brown pebbledash was starting to fall off in small chunks, exposing the brickwork underneath. The front door was brand new though, the white plastic shiny and clean, the brass-coloured handles and locks gleaming hot in the sunshine. The net curtains fell in pure white, evenly spaced pleats. I got out of the car and crossed the road.

  A woman opened the door, small with dark hair, too young to be Chrissie, but still I asked anyway. She squinted up at me, examining my face as if she recognised me. But she didn’t say anything other than to tell me she didn’t know Chrissie, never heard of her, and that she’d bought the house four years before from a couple named Nicholson.

  The door to the living room had been pulled closed but the stairs behind her were newly carpeted, the paintwork pristine. I smiled, thanking her and turned to leave, noticing a smell that I’ve always associated with that house and as I walked away I saw why – the curry plants Mel’s mother loved were still growing in the small flower bed by the fence. I bent and crushed one of the leaves between my fingers.

  ‘Why are you looking for her? Not the police, are you?’ the woman called after me. She was still standing on her front step, watching me, her arms folded over her pale blue t-shirt. She was wearing jeans and a pair of those ugly boots that look like someone has gutted a stuffed toy and shoved them on their feet.

  ‘We were friends,’ I said, the scent of curry leaves clotted on my fingertips.

  ‘Try next door, later, after six. They won’t be in now but they might know.’ She shut the door.

  1989

  He felt shy when she opened the door in her mottled jeans and grey t-shirt, because he’d only ever seen Mel in her school uniform before and she looked like a stranger. She gestured him into a tiny hall, which was basically a square just deep enough to allow the front door to open. She had to stand on one of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms to give him enough space to come in. ‘Go in,’ she said, nodding to the door by his left shoulder. He did as he was told and walked into the sitting room, Mel close behind.

  An enormous velvet rug printed with a brightly coloured Elvis in his prime hung on the chimney breast over the gas fire; below it, on the orange brick mantelpiece, figurines of horses with cowboys on their backs bucked and reared. A brown velvet three-piece suite was pushed back against the remaining three walls, the armchair under the window. Dangling from the back of the chair in its white leather holster was a silver gun with an ivory handle.

  ‘Is that real?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah, it fires blanks. My mum is really into Country, you know, the music, cowboys and all that. She dresses up for the barn dances: boots, hat, gun, the whole cowgirl Dolly Parton works,’ she smiled, watching his reaction.

  ‘I’ve never seen one before. Can I hold it?’

  ‘Sure.’ She handed it to him, holding the barrel in her fist.

  ‘It won’t go off will it?’

  ‘Not now, maybe later.’

  ‘I think that is… fantastic. I’m jealous.’

  Melanie tipped her head, slowed time with her long indrawn breath and then blinked him back into the room. ‘I suppose you would say that.’ She took it back and polished it on her t-shirt before sliding it back into the holster.

  Marcus looked around at the shiny horse brasses and the Royal Wedding commemorative plate hanging on the wall, the embroidered lacy cushions on the sofas, the thick pile carpet underfoot and the black ash coffee table right in the middle, topped by a clean ashtray. The room smelt of lemons, furniture polish and bleach. He hadn’t expected it to be so sparkling clean, and was surprised that there wasn’t an atom of dust anywhere, not even on the framed school photos, and there were lots of them, from primary class onwards – of Mel mostly, and a few of a little boy – on the wall above the TV in the corner.

  She moved past him, cutting off his curiosity, and opened the door at the far end. ‘Want a drink?’

  He followed her into the kitchen, the thick carpet giving way to patterned lino. Her mother was sitting at a table pushed up under the window, a rubber cap on her head. A skinny woman with bad skin and jet-black wiry hair cut short like a boy’s was yanking tufts of Melanie’s mum’s hair through small holes in the cap with the tail end of a comb.

  ‘Mum, you remember Marcus?’

  ‘Oh yeah, hello love.’ She winked at him and took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Excuse the state of me, I’m just having me streaks done.’ She blew the smoke out through her nose and pulled a towel tighter around her shoulders. ‘Don’t get bleach on me top, Dot.’

  ‘And this is my Aunty Dot.’ Mel gave the woman a quick squeeze on her arm and kissed her cheek as she moved to the fridge and grabbed two cans of Coke.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, hearing himself stiff and prissy, blushing. Dot smiled and revealed a dark gap where her top front teeth should’ve been, before ducking her head and concentrating on hooking a twist of hair and teasing it through the hole.

  ‘What youse two up to then?’

  ‘Going to listen to some music in my room.’

  ‘What you listen to ain’t music. Do you like that shouty stuff an’ all, Marcus?’

  ‘Erm, yes.’

  ‘Motown, that’s music. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Alright, but don’t wake Jamie up, I’ve only just got him down. And put your ironing away, took me hours to do your washing, I don’t want to come up there and find it on the floor. You hear me?’

  ‘I hear you,’ Melanie said, and grabbed a pile of clothes from the plastic basket on the counter.

  ‘And keep the door open, I don’t want any funny business.’

  Mel’s room was cramped, with just enough room for a single bed and a chest of drawers. What his mother would call ‘the box room’. She put the pile of clothes on the floor. Two shelves were crammed with books, most of them with the pale green spines of Penguin Classics.

  He picked up one the size of a brick, ‘Have you read this?’

  ‘No, I just look at the pictures.’ She popped the ring pull on a Coke and handed it to him. ‘Yes, I’ve read it.’ He took the can and put the Proust back on the shelf next to the slim volumes of poetry by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be patronising.’ He sat on her bed, ruffling the immaculate pink counterpane.

  ‘You’re alright. You can’t help it,’ she said and sat next to him. The mattress sagged and tilted them towards each other. ‘Cheers.’ She bumped her can against his and drank.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who actively chooses to read all these books. They’re all so serious. Are they school books?’

  ‘Do they look like school books?’ She shook her head. ‘I borrowed some from the library, others I chored from W H Smiths.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t approve of stealing.’ Stiff and prissy again, he swigged the Coke to shut himself up and almost choked on the sharp fizz as it hit his throat.

  ‘Only things you don’t need. I need these.’ She got up and pulled a CD out from a pile on top of the chest of drawers and slid it into a small portable stereo. ‘Goo, alright?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She pressed play and lowered the volume. ‘Have to keep it low or Chrissie will have a fit, she’s already pissed off with me.’

  ‘Are you in trouble? Do you want me to go?’

  ‘Nah, she’ll get over it.’

  ‘How come you have so many of the green ones?’

  ‘Are you still going on about the books?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m just curious. Have I offended you?’

  ‘Not really, you’re just a nosy bugger. I read those because they’re classics and how else will I know what’s good? Besides what Laugham and the Tory twats think we have to read, how else am I gonna know what is worthwhile or not?’

  ‘I guess. That makes perf
ect sense.’ He thought of his mother and the pile of books she kept pressing him to read and the study, filled with his father’s collection of books, faint pencil marks in his handwriting in the margins of the ones he cherished, and felt the feathery brush of guilt in his gut.

  So they sat there together, Melanie leaning back on her elbows, eyes closed, her bare feet pointing up to the ceiling that looked like a wedding cake covered in swirls and peaks of stiff white icing. She was right he was nosy, he wanted to get up and poke around her things, to open the drawers and look under the bed. Instead he read the CD covers and the titles on the spines of all the books. He’d not even heard of most of them. On the window ledge there was a small animal skull with sharp little teeth, and a field guide to the wild flowers of Britain. Above them, a flock of paper doves hanging from a wire fluttered in the draught.

  Over the music he could hear the low hum of the women’s voices downstairs. The house was so small he couldn’t imagine much privacy: even upstairs, in a separate room, there was a sense of being observed. But then on the other hand he imagined that he wouldn’t be lonely either. Wherever you might be the family would be close by. He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. Exposed but together. He turned to Mel and she was watching him back, looking closely at his face. ‘Are you looking at my spots?’ He reached up to cover his chin. ‘My mother says I should see a doctor.’

  She laughed, her head tipped so far back that he could see the metallic grey fillings in her back teeth. ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘If I’m nuts, what does that make you?’

  ‘I’m entirely sane, thank you.’ She kicked his foot with hers, and rested her head on her left shoulder. ‘Do you like my rabbit skull then?’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘The skull. I saw you looking at it.’

  ‘It’s a bit gothic, I suppose. Where did you get it from?’

  ‘I found it out near the orchards. I think it’s beautiful, a reminder that there’s more to the world than what we see. You know, under the surface.’