Tattletale

by Sarah J. Naughton

  Baldy stands up. ‘I’d like to call my next witness.’

  The door opens behind me and footsteps shuffle up the aisle. I’m expecting a geriatric. Some old cow whose car I scratched or whose letterbox I shat through, but it’s a skinny guy of about fifty or sixty who takes ages to clamber up to the stand. When he turns around people grimace. He looks like he’s got terminal cancer.

  I have no idea who he is, but a smell that fills the court makes me gag. I swivel in my seat and give Kathy a look. Seriously? But her eyes stay fixed on the cancer guy.

  ‘Felix Goddard, you were a childhood friend of the accused.’

  There’s a high-pitched gasp behind me, as if someone recognises the name, but for a moment it doesn’t register with me. Then it’s like being hit by a train.

  Felix?

  Felix?

  A prosecution witness?

  ‘Yes.’ His voice rasps, like it hurts to talk. I guess his vocal chords have been shredded by crack.

  ‘We were mates since, like, four or five, right up to … I don’t think I’m allowed to say, am I?’

  ‘Correct. Please stick to answering the questions I ask you.’

  Kathy shifts in her seat. Her jaw’s tight. She looks like she’s about to jump up and shout ‘objection!’, but she stays put.

  ‘How old were you when the friendship ended?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘That’s very specific. Clearly you remember the incidents surrounding the break-up very well.’

  ‘Objection! Counsel is encouraging the jury to make negative inferences towards my client.’

  ‘Sustained. Change your line of questioning.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Kathy breathes as she sits down. ‘They’re not allowed to bring up the other rape trial because you were acquitted.’

  ‘Tell me about the nature of your friendship up to that point, please, Mr Goddard.’

  I lean back in my seat, staring at him as he lists all the shit we got up to as kids. It sounds bad when you put it the way he’s putting it. He’s making out that guy’s heart attack was solely caused by us playing our music on his front wall and dropping rubbish onto his lawn. He mentions the caution we got for squeezing the au pair’s tits at the bus stop and I whisper to Kathy to see if he’s allowed to bring it up. She nods tightly. The fat girl on the jury has stopped looking over at me, and the stocky tattooed bloke’s just staring at the ceiling, as if there’s something nasty playing on the telly and he doesn’t want to watch.

  ‘From what you describe am I to understand that the pair of you had little respect for women, seeing them only as objects for sex?’

  Felix nods.

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you ever feel remorse for these acts, Mr Goddard?’

  Felix looks down. ‘Yeah. Later on. After we did some … worse stuff.’

  Kathy huffs and taps her pen on the table.

  ‘I felt really bad. I wanted to blot it out and drink seemed to help that, and then drugs did too, and now,’ his voice cracks, ‘look at me.’ He holds his arms out like a broken Jesus on the cross.

  ‘Your witness.’

  Kathy stands up. ‘Perhaps we could spare the self-pity, Mr Goddard, and stick to the facts.’

  Over the next half an hour or so she tries to make out that it was all Felix’s fault, leading me astray, using the fact that he became a junkie while I straightened out. But even I can see it’s not enough.

  It’s coming up to lunchtime when Kathy wraps up.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Goddard, no more questions.’

  But he doesn’t go anywhere. My eyes burn into him, willing him to feel the hatred I’m firing in his direction, the fucking Judas. His hollow eyes are scanning the court. Then his body gives a jolt.

  ‘Jody,’ he says, his voice cracking.

  I turn around, following his gaze. And whatever bullet just passed through Felix now passes through me, making my heart judder to a halt.

  Jody Currie is sitting in the back row of the court.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jody. So very, very sorry.’

  ‘Strike that from the record,’ the judge snaps. ‘Leave the stand now, Mr Goddard.’

  He walks past me but my vision has fuzzed over like someone’s just tackled me too hard.

  Finally I get it.

  The lying slag with the dead brother. The brother who didn’t kill himself, like the papers all said. Who lived next door to Jody. She and Jody, somehow … To get back at me …

  I need to tell Kathy.

  But how can I? Actually, I’m not a rapist, only a murderer.

  I’m trapped.

  42. Mags

  Jody, Mira and I waited for the verdict in the rose garden. The plants were still just dry-looking stalks, but at the end of each twig was a tiny, tight bud, as hard as wood but already snaked with the tiny fault lines from which the blooms would detonate. By June the place would be glorious.

  Mira called home while Jody and I shared a packet of crisps, too nervous for anything more substantial, though I kept insisting it would all be fine.

  The finger-whistle made us all jump.

  Rauf stood on the steps of the court, his white grin glittering in the sunshine. He gave me a thumbs up. The jury was back already, which could only mean one thing.

  As we approached the gate my eye was caught by a brass plaque on the wall. The garden was a memorial for twenty-nine people killed by a direct hit from a German V-2 bomb in 1944. Beside the list of names an angel hung his head in sorrow. I thought of another angel, drifting down through jewelled light, never landing.

  Nine years.

  It was never going to seem enough. Not for murder, or for rape. But it will well and truly screw his life chances when he gets out. The three of us stood up as he was taken down, for the three lives he had torn apart: Jody’s, Abe’s and Loran’s.

  We cremated Abe on a spring morning before Mira went back home.

  It’ll be time for me to go back soon, too. Daniel’s there already. Not exactly waiting for me – just waiting-and-seeing.

  But before I go there’s one more thing I need to do.

  Something I should have done years ago, when I’d finally found the life I wanted to lead. I should have shuffled off my bitterness about my past back then, not let it become the baggage I always criticised other women for displaying with such martyred zeal.

  Because however misguided they were, our parents thought they were doing what was best for us. And though I may dismiss it as a childish nursery tale, they considered their faith as a truth to live by.

  So, this last loose end, I must tie up.

  I must go home to tell my parents that their son is dead.

  Father Archibald is long gone, but the church secretary promises me that Father Chinelo will call me back. When he does he tells me, in a booming Nigerian voice, that both my parents are alive and well and still worshipping at the same church.

  ‘I didn’t know they had a daughter,’ he says, but I just thank him and say goodbye. I wonder how my father feels about an African priest leading him in worship.

  On the long train journey from King’s Cross I have plenty of time to think. I believe that after the initial shock and grief they will be satisfied with the manner of Abe’s death. He died a hero. Protecting the weak.

  I will tell them that the man who killed him is in prison and will be there for many years.

  I will tell them Abe was loved, and if they ask the name of his partner, I will give them Jody’s name.

  I will not tell them he was homosexual. They’re too old to overcome their prejudices now. Let them imagine the grandchildren they might have had (and perhaps will have one day, after all).

  I will tell them that he kept the ring, and let them believe, in the end, that Abe found his way to Jesus, and that given a little more time, he would have found his way home. As I have done.

  In the end they will consider it a good way to go.

  A
t Edinburgh I change onto the local train and chunter through endless purple valleys threaded with silver streams and waterfalls, and the odd loch that crisply reflects the landscape around it – a looking glass that Abe has stepped through.

  The names of the stations are so familiar: Crianlarich, Tydrum, Loch Awe, Bridge of Orchy.

  To get to Eilean Donan I will have to travel further north. I wonder how many will have gone before me when I stand on the parapet and scatter Abe’s ashes into Loch Alsh. I wonder how long it will take them to get to the sea.

  The train slows, passing my old school, and the bridge that Maisie Ross jumped off for a laugh, into the burn that swept her away, never to be seen again. We pass the road that leads up to the old people’s home where my nana died, and the pub where the wake was held, and where my father wouldn’t let us join in the ceilidh dancing.

  I start to feel sick as we pull into the station and my arms are so weak a man has to help me get my case down. Clutching it before me like a shield, I step off the train into the station I left fourteen years ago, vowing never to return.

  The station concourse is bitterly cold, and every time the entrance doors slide open, there’s a blast of icy wind. But it brings no litter, just a few fallen leaves.

  I walk out of the station and emerge onto a roundabout. Even here, on the busy main road that runs up to Inverness, the air is different. Clean and mineral-tasting, like fresh water. To my right the loch sparkles. Whatever the weather, the surface of the water is always black. It has kept its secrets for ten thousand years.

  This is my father’s country. My mother was a second-generation Irish immigrant, but this land moulded him. And me, perhaps. We were two stones clashing together. No wonder there were sparks.

  Do they regret the way they treated us, or are they still deluding themselves that they did the right thing and it was we who were in the wrong? The lie would have been easier to bear, but if nothing else, my father was a brave man. He brought seven half-dead climbers off that mountain, in weather that would have given the hardiest Sherpa pause. Of anyone, he might have had the balls to face up to his mistakes.

  Ach! – I punch the button for the pedestrian crossing – what does it matter any more. Their child is dead. That’s punishment enough.

  I cross the road and enter my hometown.

  The shops have changed: local independents have been replaced by the franchises you see in every other British town. The greasy spoon where I gossiped with the Proddy girls when my father thought I was at netball has become a Starbucks.

  I walk past the war memorial, the rumble of my case wincingly loud in the silence. Away from the main road the street is empty of traffic, and the few pedestrians hurry on their way, their heads bent against the wind.

  It was always so windy at St Jerome’s. Was it Abe trying to tell me something? Go home, Mags.

  I’m glad to be wearing his parka. The sweet smell of him still lingers in the fur. It’s a smell I remember from long evenings of Bible reading on the sofa at home. I would slip a paperback into mine, but Abe never did. I used to sneer at him for his apparent devotion, but his eyes, though they gazed dutifully at the text, were always distant, as if fixed on some other reality. I wonder what you were thinking about then, Abe. Or who. Was it Dougie Kennedy, the cheesy football champ who most of the girls fancied? Or did you have my taste in boys – Pete Goldring, for instance, the dark, clever one who was never afraid to pass sardonic comment on the behaviour of the class morons, and got his face bashed in a few times for it?

  How strange that I can picture them all so clearly.

  The once grand Royal Highland has become a budget-chain hotel. It was the best I could find, and at least there’s a bar. The place has that thick-carpeted hush of all provincial hotels, and the air smells of over-stewed vegetables. KFC for dinner, then.

  A boy I went to school with is on reception. He doesn’t recognise me and I give a different surname so as not to have to make conversation. Currie. It’s the first name that pops into my head.

  He gives me my room fob and I go up. The room is huge and bare, with a white-sheeted bed and a cheap-looking armchair. For company I turn on the TV as I run a bath.

  Afterwards I feel different. I have been baptised in the waters of home, and it has washed something away. My confidence? My self-esteem? My sense of security?

  No, I’m just afraid.

  To steel my nerves I order up a gin and tonic and sip it by the window. If I’d raised my head as a child I would have seen that this place is breathtakingly beautiful. No wonder they get religion up here and never lose it. The place looks like it has been moulded by the hand of God.

  I’d like a second drink, but I don’t want to arrive at dusk so, slipping Jody’s silver charm into my pocket, I head out.

  The wind has died down and the loch is as still as glass as I walk down the steps.

  I could make the short trip up the hill with my eyes closed. The road snakes up past the funeral director, the hairdresser, and the house with all the china dolls on the windowsill – all unchanged.

  I take a deep breath and turn the corner.

  There is the playground where he broke my arm. The sandpit replaced by a wooden castle surrounded by a blue rubber moat.

  And there is my house. White walls, green door, slate roof, roses snaking up next-door’s garage wall.

  There is my bedroom, the rainbow sticker still in the window, its colours faded, almost transparent.

  There is my father, digging in the rose bed. My fingers close around the guardian angel in my pocket.

  The soles of my trainers are silent on the pavement as I walk the last few yards to the garden gate.

  He was a big man, the muscles gone to seed when he stopped the mountain rescue, but always there; now he’s leaner, and the coarse grey hair has thinned and become wispy. I never saw my father in jeans before. Jeans, a plain sweatshirt, and grey slip-ons that are caked in mud. His moustache is gone, revealing full lips like his son’s. The ice-blue eyes are framed in square bifocals.

  Oh, Daddy.

  When he sees me he straightens up and frowns for a second, as if trying to remember. Then the trowel goes limp in his hand and the soil tumbles like confetti onto the multi-coloured petals below.

  The high road is busy.

  It’s a mild evening, the Indian summer seems to be going on forever, and people on their way home from work pause to browse the vegetables outside the Lebanese supermarket, or take a tiny paper cup from an aproned young man standing in the doorway of the new coffee bar. His silver tray reflects a pink and yellow sky.

  The Cosmo waiters are laying out the tables for the evening rush. It got into some London restaurant guide and now the locals can’t get a table for love nor money, or so she has heard.

  She waves at the woman in the pharmacy who gestures a cup tipping at her mouth: coffee? She holds her hand to her ear, finger and thumb extended: I’ll call you. After shaky beginnings the two women have become friends. The pharmacist’s mother has dementia and sometimes she needs a shoulder to cry on.

  She crosses at the lights and turns into Gordon Terrace.

  An explosion of colour halfway down marks out the house of the new family from Syria. They held a street party to celebrate their arrival and have since been filling their little front garden with flowers that would never grow under the harsh Arabian sun. There are roses and hydrangeas, a Californian lilac, hanging baskets of fuchsias, window boxes of lavender, and some pointed red and yellow blossoms that look like flames.

  For a moment he flashes into her mind. The man she thought she loved. The man who saved her life. In all the lies and confusion she thought she had lost any notion of what was real and what wasn’t from that crazy time, but the memory has come back so clear and so strong that she knows it must really have happened. Her grill pan caught fire and he rushed over and put it out with a wet tea towel. That was all.

  She understands now why it affected her so powerfully. It mad
e her feel cared for. And it felt good. She wanted more of it, but she was knocking at the wrong door. It took her too long to realise. She is sorry now, but her friend Mags says not to have any regrets, because he saved her life. And that was an act of love even if love wasn’t in his heart.

  Mags insists on telling her she is loved. Once, when she’d been drinking in a bar with Daniel, she told her, ‘I love you.’ The thought makes Jody smile.

  Then Daniel took the phone and said he loved her too and when was she coming to visit them in Vegas. She promised she would, in the summer, if she had enough money.

  They said forget the money, they would pay, but it’s important to her to pay her own way. It helps with her self-esteem. Marian says that by next year she will be ready for a management role and there’s a charity shop two miles away with a vacancy coming up because the manager’s retiring. She’s not afraid of the journey. The youths who used to hang around Gordon Terrace have moved on because the police patrol it now, and the face she feared to see on every bus that passed her will be very changed by the time the prison sentence is over.

  At the end of Gordon Terrace she steps onto the path that runs up to St Jerome’s. The new girl from Flat Three and her toddler are working on the community vegetable garden with Dale and Sara. Tessy the terrier skitters about, snapping at the white butterflies that have been disturbed by the presence of the gardeners. It’s time to harvest the beans and she has promised to help, so she tells them she will just go and change out of her work clothes.

  As she passes the ground-floor window she murmurs hello to Mrs Lyons. She’s in a home now and doesn’t recognise Jody, but sometimes she visits and sits on the sofa watching the Carry On films that still make the old lady laugh uproariously.