Chain Reaction

by Gillian White

  Is Joy’s shopping a way of exacting revenge?

  No, that doesn’t make sense either. This way she is punishing herself!

  It is she who finds the prospect of homelessness intolerable, dreaming about mobile homes and the like. It is she who is already appalled by the thought of moving into that small flat.

  Vernon is going to have to close the shop and go home although he knows that a shop closed early is the simplest way to announce to the world that here is a business about to pack up. Any customers will just have to lump it although he has to admit that a customer on a Thursday afternoon would be an unlikely phenomenon anyway.

  Home, when he gets there, is empty. Joy, who frequently moans that she has nothing to do, has obviously found something, or somewhere to go, probably elaborating on the plans they have for the renovation of a cottage that does not exist beyond the confusion of her own sick mind.

  Wearily Vernon mounts the stairs, unemotionally, deliberately, like a policeman on the prowl. How can he play the strong protector?

  He moves across the bedroom towards Joy’s wardrobe, turns the key and slides it back. There, still with the tags, with the labels, are some of the purchases Joy must have made on Tuesday. They are pressed in tightly, amongst the racks of other clothes, rank after rank of them. ‘Never anything decent to wear, well, never anything suitable,’ she always says.

  Vernon catches his breath, swallows, and runs his finger inside his collar. Then he moves on to her chest of drawers, slowly, like an aged man. Going through his wife’s things feels so wrong and distasteful; he is no better than a pervert rifling through women’s washing on garden lines. But he has to do this. He can’t turn back now; there is no other answer. Everything is neatly folded and smells of some sort of soap she stores in the drawers to keep her beloved garments fresh. He tries to do it delicately and with a measure of respect but his eyes do not want to look. Nothing can ever be the same again, and there, as he expected, hidden away under the slightly older jumpers, blouses, underwear and nightwear, are the carrier bags full of Tuesday’s treachery, of tissue paper, of new wools and silks and cottons and lace and his own white unhappy fingers feeling.

  He can’t bear to face her jewellery box; there’s a premonition of too much pain. He feels like a man who’s expecting a shot in the back.

  And he’d wanted to fight the world for her sake.

  When Joy returns half an hour later, Vernon is downstairs in the kitchen smoking a cigarette.

  ‘What on earth?’ she starts. ‘Where did you get those from? You haven’t touched one of those for five years!’

  ‘Where were you on Tuesday, Joy?’

  ‘I am disappointed in you, Vernon. Honestly, what with your obsession with bacon and fried bread and chips with everything, what do you think the doctor would say if he knew you’d taken up smoking again? Nobody smokes these days. Everyone knows that it is disgusting.’

  ‘Where were you on Tuesday?’

  ‘I thought we’d have stew tonight. They were giving away braised beef at Dawsons so I popped some in the oven to braise at lunch-time.’

  ‘Where were you on Tuesday, Joy?’

  Her frightened eyes fix on him.

  Vernon pours it all out in a broken and passionate stream, all the arguments, stresses and mortifications he has been putting up with for months, all the hopes this new move gave him, working up to a desperate rage.

  She listens, scared, silent and staring. The old defiance sparkles for a second in her eyes, ‘Can you blame me?’ she pounces back contemptuously, attempting to claim the drama of the moment. ‘After all I’ve been through…’

  Her words are like stones that blind him. Damn her! Damn her with all her ridiculous blush and stutter, with her hundred punishing sentences already rehearsed and ready! Her eyes are hard, blaming and unloving. The shiver which he hardly noticed a few minutes ago now shakes and worries his body and his limbs. With the hurt passion of a child tortured for too long he hurls himself towards her. ‘Am I never to get free of all this?’ And he raises the only weapon at hand, the steam iron on the draining board.

  ‘I’m left on my own nine hours a day, sometimes ten, while you’re away at that nasty little shop and now you decide to come back early and have the nerve to go rooting—’

  His eyes glare. His voice rises. ‘What have you done? In God’s name, Joy, what have you done?’ His eyes look like a madman’s eyes and she is forced to recoil from them, and from his uplifted arm. His temples beat, his limbs shake, his heart plays tricks and he no longer sees, hears or feels anything around him. And then, as he hammers the iron down again and again, he feels his brain give way.

  EIGHTEEN

  Penmore House, Ribblestone Close, Preston, Lancs

  JODY IS HOME AGAIN, thank God. But it’s a mixed blessing and he can’t stay long. The Middleton family once again feel like hostages in their own house.

  He arrived under cover of darkness last night, two days after Len’s nerve-racking visit to the park to give his son the money he’d asked for. When, on that evening, he broke the news of Jody’s escape to a white-faced Babs and showed her the tabloid reaction, she acted as though she had just been given the news of a holy birth, prepared to travel 1,000 miles with only a star to guide her.

  ‘Where is he, Len? I must see him at once!’

  ‘Babs, I honestly don’t know where he is. He’s with two friends as far as I gathered and I presume he is hiding out somewhere with them. Let’s face it, dear, they’ll catch them. Jody’s case is the most notorious to come up round here for decades. He’s the lead player and the public are baying for justice, so they’re bound to pull out all the stops to put him back inside again.’

  Babs scoffed scornfully, ‘Inside—where he belongs, I suppose. Well, just let them try!’

  Len hesitated, braced himself. ‘I did wonder, for his own good, if we ought to turn him in.’

  She snarled at him then like a she-wolf protecting an injured cub. ‘Don’t you ever say that again! You know how unjustly he has been treated and all because that cretinous girl won’t tell the truth—attention-seeking, no doubt, making up all sorts of mischievous stories.’

  ‘Babs, there’s been no suggestion of that.’

  ‘No, but I’m fairly certain that’s what is going on. They wouldn’t tell us, would they? We’d be the last people to get to hear about that.’

  Len tried to take his wife’s hand but she shook him off impatiently. ‘For his own sake, pet, it would be better if he had never absconded…’

  ‘He’s out of that hell-hole, Lenny, and neither you or I are about to put him back in there again. Over my dead body!’

  Telling the girls was a stressful exercise. But they had to be told before they saw the evening papers.

  Cindy rushed upstairs in tears and Dawn just sat on the sofa sighing, rolling her eyes in disbelief, ‘Wait till everyone hears about this! Oh no, oh no, so it’s all blowing up again. No sleep for us, tears from Mum all the time, screaming headlines, abuse in the street… Why the hell did he have to do this to us?’ She rocked herself backwards and forwards hugging a cushion as if she was racked by stomach cramps. ‘Hasn’t he already done enough? I hate hint! I hate him! And you… you could have turned him in, Dad. You just don’t see, do you? Both of you are as bad. You just refuse to see…’

  And then she leapt up and followed her sister, slamming her bedroom door behind her.

  Wearily, Len shook his head. ‘They’re too young for this, Babs. You mustn’t blame them, they’ve been to hell and back.’

  ‘And hasn’t Jody? Don’t you think he’s been there, too? Sometimes I honestly have to wonder if any of you ever really did love that boy.’

  ‘Stop it, love, stop it!’ She poured out the cruellest words she could find in order to justify herself. Off we go again, thought Len, the same old arguments and tensions as before. Living on edge all the time as they tore themselves apart to discover where they’d gone wrong. Shouting, crying, blamin
g, blaming. At least, since the house was half-sold, Babs was a broken-hearted wreck but there was a sense of lightness, the chance of a new tomorrow, clearing the debris of the past. His wife would get better eventually; her pain would ease and there was hope of Jody’s acquittal. But now with all the uncertainty again, with new life pulsing through her again—well, now she’s back to the start.

  She was instantly worried that the police would pick Jody up and deliberately manhandle him out of revenge. She feared he would be cold, frightened, alone—you’d think the lad was still a baby—and end up in more trouble at the end of the day, caught breaking and entering for money. She hurled her accusations at Len. ‘You should have given him more! Only a hundred pounds? How could you be so stingy?’

  Len was torn between upsetting his wife more, and sheer common sense. ‘For his own sake I think I was probably wrong to give him anything at all.’

  ‘How can you speak like this about your own child! If it was one of the girls you wouldn’t think twice.’

  ‘Jody’s circumstances are vastly different…’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Babs, I really don’t know. Perhaps, after all, it is nobody’s fault, nobody’s but Jody’s.’

  ‘Well, now we will just have to hope and pray that Dawn and Cindy keep quiet about you two meeting. They’ll be questioned, of course?’

  ‘We will all be questioned.’

  ‘And are you going to tell the police that you saw him?’

  He had neither the courage nor the cruelty to deny her. ‘No, pet. No, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that!’

  When the morning paper came out, the news of the ‘dramatic’ escape was plastered all over the front page. The focus of their hatred was Jody; the two other lads who’d escaped with him were on remand for far lesser crimes, dangerous driving and inflicting bodily harm. They called Jody a fiend in so many words, tried and condemned by the innocent words, ‘charged with the rape of a twenty-three-year-old handicapped woman’.

  And that seemed to say it all.

  A police car was stationed outside the house. The Middleton family was questioned, but all denied having seen or heard from Jody. Their phone was bugged, their mail was opened; they felt like cornered animals. There were long silences in the house and much straying of uneasy eyes. Len stayed home from work in case there was a repeat of the attacks they had suffered after Jody’s arrest.

  The police were up to their eyes in it, dealing with the public’s fury that a man accused of such a crime could just walk out of jail when he pleased. An enquiry was demanded. In fact, Jody and his mates had escaped from the local hospital, having first inflicted wounds upon themselves and then deliberately infected them. Easily done when you think of the primitive sanitary provisions in most of the country’s jails. In the hospital lavatory they had overcome their accompanying officer and that poor man, suddenly a hero, was now in hospital suffering from severe concussion.

  ‘But Jody wouldn’t harm a fly. Is he badly hurt?’ cried Babs, overwrought.

  ‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him when I saw him,’ said Lenny.

  ‘Would you have noticed?’ she asked sarcastically.

  ‘I think I would have mentioned something if he’d been limping,’ Len suggested quietly. He wanted to say, ‘He’s my boy, too.’

  But Babs snatched the paper off him. ‘Where were their wounds? Does it say?’

  ‘I think you’ll find the press more concerned with the prison officer they attacked.’

  ‘More concerned with him than three boys who are meant to be innocent until proved guilty.’

  He tried to make his voice sound kind. ‘Well, that’s the way of the world, pet. And you know that.’

  ‘I certainly ought to by now,’ said Babs.

  It was that same night that Jody came home. Still an athletic lad in spite of prison conditions, he approached through the unlit garden, climbing onto the garage roof and from there in through the bathroom window. He secretly, sadly spent that night sleeping in his own room for fear of disturbing them, as if they could sleep anyway. It was in the morning, soon after dawn, that he crept into his parents’ bedroom and woke them up.

  Like a child having nightmares.

  At first they were too alarmed to make out what was happening. ‘It’s OK!’ With a finger to his lips Jody countered the fear on their haunted faces. ‘This is the last place they’ll think to look. They had someone watching all night out the front and I still got past them.’

  ‘Are you on your own?’ In the premature daylight Len shivered. Anxiety like a deadening bruise was a lead weight in his head. Deep within him love and fear struggled for supremacy. He stared into his son’s bright eyes and saw no shame in them, only his own, reflected there.

  ‘I’m alone, Dad. I left the others.’

  ‘You’re hurt, love,’ Babs cried, homing in on the one thing she thought she could cure. ‘The papers said you were hurt. Come here.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Mum.’

  ‘Let me see,’ she fussed.

  Jody, this boy who still needed them both, lifted his T-shirt. The jagged knife-wound there was painfully inflamed, but only superficial. His mouth twisted slightly. ‘I’ve given it a clean-up as best I could.’

  ‘Come here, come into the bathroom with me and we’ll do a proper job on it.’ Horrified by the sight of his injury, Babs was happy now she could fuss over him. Anything physical she could handle, just like when he was little.

  Lenny sat on the edge of the bed and heard the sink filling with water and the First-Aid tin being brought down from the shelf. The sound of gentle commiserations flooded into the bedroom with the shard of cold fluorescent light. ‘How on earth did you do this, Jody?’

  ‘It was easy, Mum. We had to make it seem like we’d had a fight, you know, to make it convincing.’

  ‘But it looks like a knife. It must have hurt so much! What were you doing with a knife?’

  ‘There’s more knives and drugs in there than there are on the outside.’

  ‘Oh Jody, love. You really need a doctor.’

  ‘Daren’t do that.’

  Babs has lost a stone in weight since Jody was arrested and the marks of her recent experience—shock, shame, guilt, bereavement—linger for all to see beneath her pallid skin.

  Len wanted to ask his son how long he intended to stay. Was he merely passing through or was this an open-ended visit? But he held his tongue. He dropped his head in his hands. He wished he could discuss these matters sensibly with Babs but where Jody was concerned she could no longer act in a rational manner. Nonetheless, in this intolerable situation she must be made to see the detrimental effect Jody’s presence here would have on his sisters. It was too much to ask of Dawn or Cindy, already so miserable and confused. Len, scared out of his wits to think that his son had spent one night here with nobody knowing, wanted to ask what would happen next, what was demanded of him and how he was expected to cope, as a father, with this new crisis.

  Jody couldn’t stay here in Ribblestone Close, not with the hue and cry at its peak. The police, with a heavier presence than normal would soon seek him out. Good grief, they’d see him moving about the house through the windows, it was as simple as that.

  Len wanted Jody to go before the girls woke up and saw him.

  In his dressing gown and slippers he followed his wife and son downstairs to the kitchen where the curtains were still drawn against the new day. Babs started a fry-up, Jody, his chest now expertly bandaged, tucked into cornflakes while Len put the kettle on.

  Babs kept her voice low and conspiratorial. ‘You can’t stay here, love. You know that, don’t you?’

  Thank God it was Babs who said it, not him.

  ‘I could spend the days up in the attic and come downstairs at night.’

  Babs shook her head while Jody watched her anxiously.

  ‘But I have to stay here, Mum,’ he protested.
‘Where else would I go?’

  Babs concentrated on cracking the eggs one by one into the pan. She started to push them round roughly. ‘You can’t stay here because of Dawn and Cindy. They are already too badly disturbed. If it was just your father and me, of course it would be different.’

  ‘The girls don’t need to know where I am.’

  Babs pushed aside the already browned bacon, leaving more room for the eggs. ‘Jody, don’t be silly. For your own sake you mustn’t stay here.’

  Scarcely noticing his mother’s firm answer Jody went on like the child he still was. ‘I’ve got it all worked out.’

  ‘They are likely to burst in here any moment and search this house.’

  ‘But I have to stay here. There’s nowhere else.’

  ‘We’ll make sure you’ve got all the money you need and suitable clothes in a rucksack.’

  Neither was listening to the other. There were two separate conversations going on in the room. ‘Mum, they’ll catch me the minute I step out of here. Please, please…’

  ‘And we can always arrange to meet you…’

  ‘How, Mum? How, when they’ll probably bug the phone?’

  Hot smoke from the pan formed a fragile dome around her. She dished out the eggs one by one. She spoke in a tired monotone as if she was alone in the room, as if she was talking only to herself. ‘We can’t have Dawn and Cindy drawn into this any further. We can’t risk being accused of aiding and abetting.’

  He pleaded then, for the last time, and Len felt his own heart breaking. ‘I know how hard this is for them but it’s me whose future’s been wiped out, it’s me they are telling lies about, and you know I won’t get justice, the way everyone thinks about me…’

  Babs raised her blue eyes to his identical ones. She fetched him the mayonnaise from the cupboard. ‘But you can’t stay here. You know very well you can’t.’ She lifted her shoulders as she finally sat down and pushed his breakfast towards him. Only Len knew how much this decision was hurting her. ‘It’s no good Jody, you’ll just have to go—’

  ‘But where, Mum, where?’