Later, when the mince had stuck to the bottom of the pot, she knew he had gone to the pub. And by the time she had put the girls to bed and went to bed herself, she knew what his alibi would be: he’d say he’d met so-and-so who’d met so-and-so and would you believe it, they knew so-and-so? When she heard the door slam shut, she turned her back, pulled the sheets up over her ears and feigned sleep.
After banging about, opening and shutting the living room doors, parading up and down the hall and going to the toilet a couple of times, he finally figured out whose house he was in and where the bedroom was.
He skulked into their room stinking of whisky, beer and, although he hardly smoked, cigarettes. ‘You awake, Mary?’ he said in a muted voice, but loud enough for those in the bedroom upstairs to hear.
The stupidity of men never failed to flabbergast her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sleeping.’
‘I’ve got you some Black Magic,’ he said.
She heard him stumbling against the dressing table and dropping them. She risked raising her head from the pillow. Joey was swaying and peering at the floor beneath the bureau, but the Black Magic had disappeared. He scrambled to get his working gear off, standing stork-like, working out the wonder of taking off socks without falling over.
He fell into bed beside her and patted her nightie down like a novice cop on drug detail. She skelped his hands away, inching closer to her side of the bed. The calloused hand fondling her hip went slack. He was lying on his back, snorkelling between snores, as if he was running out of air. She shoved him on the shoulder, then nipped his nostrils together, but he was out cold and there was no moving him. She soaked up the warmth of the bed for a few seconds with her eyes shut before flinging her legs out into the cold, and her feet into worn-out slippers, she hurried along the hall.
She barely made the toilet bowl before she was retching. There was little to bring up; she had not been eating much lately. It always started that way. Soon her face would be like a razor blade and there would be a little soft bump on her belly, and Joey would be overjoyed because he was daft and it was proof he still had it in him. She cooled her cheek on the white curve of Shanks’ best porcelain and rubbed her stomach and thought about starving the baby out. But she knew babies were tenacious wee buggers and were quite prepared to mash her bones up to get the nutrients they needed. And all that baloney about hot baths and bottles of gin – she spat the sour taste into the pan. Her bony legs and feet were adapting to her fate and looked sickly white. Before she flushed, she thought she heard knocking coming from the girls’ room. The light from the bathroom cut across the hall and splayed against their closed door.
She was too tired to care. The front and back door were locked and the keys hidden from Ally in the tea caddy. Stepping into the hall and cocking her head to eavesdrop, she sighed in relief. The noise was coming from Daft Rab’s bedroom, situated above the girls’ room. Somehow, God knows how, he had managed to get himself a girlfriend dafter than him. The two of them were playing pass-the-parcel with their sticky bits. And anyway, she thought, it was still too early in the night for Lily to make an appearance. She usually popped up about half two to half four, her timing impeccable; just at the moment when Mary’s eyelids fluttered and she began to dream, her eyelids would pop up like a toaster and she would sit up in bed.
Mary sneaked back into bed. She had been in the bubble phase of a dream where she was driving an articulated lorry, being guided in by a man in uniform, zigzagging and reversing a trailer stacked with children’s white coffins backwards through St Stephen’s Church gates and into the closed double-doors. She waited for the crash of wood and glass, and the grinding of facing brick. It was an impossible fit. The reality was that she had never been behind the wheel of a car, never mind a heavy goods vehicle.
Ally’s presence beside the bed woke Mary. Silver moonlight breached the venetian blinds. Ally’s blonde hair was a foggy woolpack, and Mary inspected her daughter’s appearance for clues about whether she was Ally or Lily. Her eyes glittered and were unblinking as distant Mars. Mary reached out and touched her hand.
‘You’re freezing,’ whispered Mary.
‘Yes, Mum,’ replied the little girl, in a voice Mary had come to recognise.
Joey stirred next to her, but was soon snoring again. He harrumphed now when she mentioned anything about Lily. Lying in bed drunk beside her, he was useless. Sober, he was also useless.
She shook her head, a kaleidoscope of dreams and waking thoughts, her brain regaining time – tiredness left her feeling jammed on the wrong setting. Using her bum and elbows to slither out from under the blankets, she hunkered against the backboard and a creased pillow. The little girl turned and darted into the hall. Mary stared into the Stygian darkness, half wondering if she was still dreaming, hands patting for her fags and toppling the bow-legged, circular table.
She had played hide-and-seek with Lily, following her from room to room, the last couple of nights and reckoned tonight would not be any different. Plucking her housecoat from the bottom of the bed, she put it on, tucking her packet of Silk Cut into her pocket. Closing the bedroom door behind her, she turned the light on in the hall and listened to the shifting silences of the sleeping house. Branches buckling and groaning in the wind made it difficult to be sure what she had heard. She was no longer sure what she had seen and had a nagging fear she would end up in the loony bin beside John, which made her smile.
She checked Ally was not in her bed, then the hunt for Lily began. She searched every room, even kneeling and looking underneath John’s bed. Standing in the living room with her eyes closed to help her think, she tried to figure where Lily would be. Logically, she had to be inside the house; the doors were still locked, and although it was kids’ play to climb outside the window, step onto the metal ledge and jump down onto the two-by-two slabs, the lock of the window handles remained in position. Think, she told herself. But the gorge rose in the back of her throat again, and she rushed into the bathroom to hover over the toilet bowl, waiting for and willing herself to be sick. Ally watched her from the doorway, but before Mary could move the apparition was gone. She spent about fifteen minutes throwing up.
Outside she heard a childish voice singing Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez Vous, Dormez Vous. She opened the window and let the cold wind wash sweat from her body. Leaning out into the night, she peered into the darkness. Her mind buckled at the thought – Ally, in her thin nightdress, had got out and was running barefoot in the street below.
Mary found Joey’s key in the lock, the front door open, and the wind whistling through the hall.
Wind tugged her hair as she sloped along in damp house-slippers up towards the old folks’ home at the top of the street, her nightgown falling open and her nipples erect through the rayon. A few windows were lit up, giving the appearance of a ship sailing through the night. She forced her heels into the trodden-down backs of her slippers, giving her a rolling gait, then bounced down the steps and followed the path onto Shakespeare Avenue. Panting, she stopped and looked up and down the road. A shape – it was difficult to tell what or who stood underneath the arc of smoky sodium streetlights – moved behind the shop opposite, onto Overtoun Road. Council houses running parallel to the road were shadow-filled flags. Then she heard the chime of Frère Jacques again and mocking laughter.
No traffic on the roads gave the empty streets a dreamlike quality. Her head jerked right and left, searching front and side gardens, looking for a crouching body hiding behind a Volkswagen, or one of the old Fords, or the work van with a cement mixer lying in the back. In an upstairs room a dog growled and barked, the sound, amplified, wolf-like, in the settled streets, taken up by another dog. She hurried on past the golf course, the oaks, elms and birch trees of Dalmuir Park a spectral presence, swishing back and forth in the wind. She dithered, unsure whether to go left or right.
‘Mum! Mum!’ Ally’s voice squealed from the golf course below her.
Mary scraped alon
g the sides of the hedges that ran up and along Clarke Street. Fifteen-foot high blackthorn, holly married to hawthorn, formed boxed battlements she was unable to see through or over.
‘Mum! Mum!’ The voice came from further away.
Twisting low at the branching base of the hedge, rain made Mary’s eyes into slits as she peered into the murky night, picking out a distant figure framed by the reflected lights of Littleholm high flats. Thorns snagged her clothes and scratched her face, ripping her arms and legs, and she bit down on squeamish thoughts and forced her hips through the gap below the pavement and between the bowers of branches. She plopped stillborn, wet and bloodied, onto the terraced pasture and rough grass of the golf course.
Her knees were blotchy and felt shaky, but the downhill terrain and the short drop to the fairway was easier on her feet. The bright silhouette of Ally’s hair bobbed up and down in front of her as she barrelled forward. Her daughter was close to the bridge, too close to the tumbling swell and bruising rush of the burn, partially hidden from the road by the windbreak of another, higher, hedge. But she was not alone. A man stalked her, a luminal naked presence in patches of broken light and blackness. Ally rushed to meet him, shanking her nightie up around her waist, exposing her naked bum. She clung onto him, her arms round his neck and they shrieked with laughter.
Mary’s slipper worked loose and she fell, skidding along the turf and twisting her left knee. Dazed, her mind warped and bent, she scrambled up and hobbled down to the dirt and stone path that ran parallel with the first green. They had flown. She recognised the man’s hair, and the way he stood and laughed, but she forced away the thought like a wilful child spitting out a floret of broccoli. Her son was locked up in Gartnavel Hospital. She was sure when she got back home, Ally would have come out of her hiding place and would be sleeping snugly in bed. Joey would get into another one of his rages if she mentioned her misgivings, he’d call her the daftie, say she was sick in the head thinking about such things, he would have woken up and been the first to notice if something was wrong with his best baby girl. Mary cried like a wain, globs of tears and snot, not caring who saw her. Her feet hurt. Her knee hurt. She hopped rather than walked. Lately, everything always seemed to be her fault. She was no longer sure that wasn’t the case. Her mind felt like a prison camp made of primordial, shape-shifting sludge, in which she played the role of a warden, patrolling the corridors alone, late at night. She just wanted it all to end, so she could get a decent sleep.
Day 42
Janine thought sex was sex. Men slept afterwards. Those were the rules. Sheep counting was for country yokels; she counted the calories she had burned off. She stretched. If she was a cat she would have purred. Medication made the day a little fuzzy around the edges, a bit groggy, the lines of the window leaning in, eyes closing, and eyelids blinking. Her mind straightened out the angles of the window, the desk, the covers on her bed, until they started unravelling again. Sleep was a package she did not want delivered.
The night before she had involuntarily catnapped for a few minutes before falling into the dream. The room had been too stuffy. When John tilted the window open he had fiddled with the locking mechanism to keep it from banging shut. He was good with his hands, but not very mechanically minded. Mr Fix-It was super-horny afterwards. The pounding, fucking, lovemaking had left her nerve endings without any more spark and a mercurial sheen on her skin. With her head on the pillow, feeling the heat from his body, and the comforting nuzzle of his cheek on her neck, she fell asleep with her feet locked between his – she was a mermaid going under, no longer able to keep to the world of matter and consciousness.
Her da was here in the room. She tried to turn round, but she was dragged by an invisible force. Pulled through open doors into the void, into their old tenement block and up the stairs. Someone had left a wad of grey gum underneath the railing on the first floor landing; her legs looped and crabbed round the handrail. She screamed until her lungs burned, but nobody listened and nobody heard. Her legs and arms were stretched and racked until she let go.
‘Onwards and upwards,’ she heard him say. The stairwell stretched ahead and wound around marble steps, the gas lamps with spidery mantles shimmering onto the burnished cherry-wood of the banister. She hoped and prayed – to God knows who – for it to end, but each step was a stretched second, a little infinity, of waiting for something to happen – not yet, not yet, not yet. The house door was open and her da waiting for her. The smell of blood hung like a butcher’s bib. She fell to her knees gagging until watery phlegm dripped onto the stairs and the knees of her denim. He gazed down at her and folded his arms across his chest. He grinned, his face was handsome, the way it had looked before he tortured her. Tortured them. He whistled off-tune through a gap in his teeth, Frères Jacques, Frères Jacques, and the song squealed and dipped and burned her insides like mustard gas. She was aware of a coldness creeping up through her feet and a pool of darkness that was not locked inside the house with her da, but waited outside, shape-shifting, taking possession of her body, mind and soul.
‘Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.’ Her arms and legs jerked and pulled and kicked, but she discerned an implosion of listless surrender in her limbs she had never felt before, even when her da was raping her. She whirled round, tumbling and falling down the stairs onto the landing. The shadow thing had taken form and was lying on top of her, pinning her legs and suffocating her. Her da was now outside the front door, looking down at her, looking down at them. The rules had changed. He had not been let out of the house before. And he was triumphant. A cackle started in the back of his throat and crowed higher. She was punching and kicking to get away. ‘For fuck sake, John, let me go,’ but the harder she struggled, the further they sank, deeper and deeper into a fissure of the marble floor. Below them the bright eyes of her wee sister watched with her hand over her mouth.
‘Run, Lily! Run, Lily!’ shouted John.
Janine’s eyes opened as she heard the crash. John had fallen out of bed. His hair was tousled and he looked up at her in that woolly way he sometimes did, which infuriated her.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Must have fallen asleep.’
She reached across to the bedside table for her cigarettes, pulling the blankets up and over her breasts, stretching her fingertips for the lighter. He pulled back the cover, a sudden draught on her stomach, ready to slip back in beside her. ‘I’m tired.’ She lit her cigarette, blowing smoke out in front of her, and sat up straighter, patting the blanket and tucking it in under her. He stood, undecided, his body bow-shaped like an old man’s, gripping a corner of the blanket. His cock was already rising and getting hard.
‘Sorry.’ He let go of the blanket, forcing his cock downward and sideways, like he was trying to fold a piece of origami into the shape of a stork. He held his free hand as a screen whilst scrambling for his pants under the bed.
‘Careful, you might hurt yourself.’ She jested with him, using her elbows to work her way higher up the bed. He was kneeling, peering under her bed and reaching for a sock, his denims or a stray shoe. She took another drag, watching his nakedness and measured movements as he gathered his clothes into a pile. ‘I’m a bit sore now and I’ll need to go for a pee, but you want a blow job before you go?’
He had his Y-fronts on, one sock over his ankle, and was standing on one leg trying to put the other one on without falling over. He looked over at her. She could almost hear his brain ticking like a parking meter. Tick. Tick. Tick.
‘But you’re smoking,’ he said.
She nodded, blowing out a mouthful of smoke. ‘Fuck off.’ She waved him away, dismissing him. ‘Go and play with yourself in your own room.’
Her fag was almost burning her fingertips when he finished dressing. She watched his shuffling uncertainty, wondering whether to come to her for a final snog or just leave.
‘I’d this mad dream,’ he said.
She gave him no encouragement, looking at him with blank eye
s. But he continued talking.
‘And some guy with mad-starey eyes,’ he said, ‘with a gap in his teeth. I’ve seen him before.’
Janine flinched, but he failed to notice.
‘And I think Lily was there too.’ His eyes crinkled as he tried to think. He shook his head.
She yawned.
‘Sorry, I’m boring you. You’ll be tired.’ Then he made his run, darting across and pecking her on the cheek as though she was his grandma. ‘You’ll be wanting to get a good night’s sleep.’
The bedroom door shut behind him.
Day 43
Mary was first out of bed, but Joey said the porridge was lumpy, he complained about his tea being cold, said she was smoking too much and her hacking cough was keeping him awake. He made no mention of her being up all night with Ally again. He was like most men – selfish. His response was to grab for the covers and snuggle further into their bed.
The kids were at school and she decided to have a catch-up nap, but it made her more unsettled. Outside it was dark and sodden, wind swishing through the trees in the gardens below and the long, drawn-out keening of a herring gull. She experimented with burrowing under the blankets with her nightgown on and a thick pair of Joey’s woollen socks, darned at the heel with the wrong colour, yellow, wool. He was meticulous, almost military, about taking care of his feet. He would have a nannyroony if he knew she was wearing them, but she would just fold them and stick them back in the bottom drawer and he would be none the wiser. She decided to have a fag to help her settle. Her nose wrinkled in disgust at the ashtray next to the bed, but she figured it would be best to empty and clean it out later. She reached for her lighter, but it was out of paraffin and would not spark. The flint gone. She reached across, dangling her hand. There was nothing but junk in the top drawer of the bedside cabinet. Batteries that might come in handy someday; a blue Matchstick car, from when John was a boy, with three tiny plastic wheels caught in a set of rosary beads; a black-and-white wedding photo and, thank God, a packet of Swan Vestas. She rattled the box. Satisfied there were a few matches in it, her body relaxed. She lit a fag, plumped herself up on the pillows and idly lifted the photo, daring herself to look. A lungful of smoke hanging in front of her face helped veil the threat. She felt an old woman now, hair suddenly threaded with grey, shadows like horses’ hooves around her eyes, always panting and out of breath, a whinger and whiner, shapeless as a flagpole and always tired.
Lily Poole Page 15