It Takes One to Know One

by Isla Dewar

  She sat clutching the steering wheel in the perfect ten-to-two position, head up. ‘If that’s what it takes.’

  ‘Home,’ he said. ‘A bath, food and bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.’

  ‘I’m not moving. I’m staying here to see if someone comes to that flat above the shop.’

  They sat. Charlie worried they’d be here all night. It would be uncomfortable and cold. He thought of his bed. His favourite place, if he was honest. Sleeping was his second-favourite thing to do after eating. His heart sank at the prospect of missing out on both.

  Martha stared across at the flat above the shop, shoulders tense, white-knuckling the steering wheel, willing a light to go on. Nothing happened. After twenty minutes she sighed, switched on the engine and admitted they might as well go home. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow at dawn.’

  She put her foot down and hurtled along London Road. Charlie gripped his seat. ‘I think you’re going too fast.’

  ‘Evie might be at the house. Jamie might have brought her back. She could be sitting on the doorstep waiting for me.’

  But she wasn’t. Martha walked to the front door, stuck her key in the lock while Charlie hung back by the gate. ‘I’ll be getting home, then.’

  ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me. I can’t be alone in the house. I’ll just walk from room to room thinking about Evie. She might be terrified.’

  ‘Would Jamie scare her?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘You’ll have told her about him. So he’s not a complete stranger.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’ll be talking to her. And he’ll be getting her stories about her life. That’s what will be happening.’

  He followed her in through the door, up the stairs into the kitchen and stood looking slightly vacant as she put on the kettle. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want a cup of tea. He wanted food. ‘I think you should eat something.’

  ‘I don’t feel like eating. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’ll feel better.’

  ‘I don’t want to feel better.’

  ‘Have a bath. It’ll help you to relax.’

  ‘I don’t want to relax. I’m on duty waiting for Evie to come home. I need to be ready for whatever happens. I won’t relax. I refuse to relax.’ She stood rigid, determined not to relax. There were tears in her eyes.

  Charlie didn’t know what to do. He considered himself one of life’s onlookers. He frowned. This was a moment to be masterful. Only he didn’t know how. He was standing with his helpless hands dangling by his sides and his mouth slightly open. He thought he must look like a scolded schoolboy.

  The kettle boiled. Martha didn’t notice and stood staring at him, fighting tears as clouds of steam billowed behind her. For a second or two Charlie was mesmerised before coming to his senses and moving round her to switch off the kettle. He took her by the shoulders and guided her to a chair and sat her down. She didn’t object. Encouraged by this, he made a pot of tea and poured her a cup.

  After that he raked in the fridge, took out eggs and cheese. He’d make an omelette. Quick, easy and nutritious, that would do the trick.

  She looked uninterested as he set the table. Then, seemingly without taking in what was being put in front of her, vacantly surveyed the omelette before taking up her fork and starting to eat. He slid a second omelette from the pan onto a plate and took a place opposite her at the table. He vigorously sliced bread and heaped some sliced tomatoes onto both plates. This was better, food. After eating they could consider the Evie problem sensibly.

  Martha stopped her fork on its journey from her plate to her mouth. ‘You’re kind.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘You have leftover people staying in your house. Brenda was there when I went to get your car keys.’

  ‘She is convinced she’s doing me a favour by staying with me. She says I sleep better knowing she’s safe. But I can’t complain, she has more than doubled the value of my house and she cooks a mean curry. What more could you ask of a tenant?’

  ‘You’re kind,’ said Martha a second time.

  He made a harrumphing sound. He gathered the plates, took them to the sink and told her he’d wash up before going home.

  ‘Don’t go. I don’t want to be alone. I’ll start to think and my imagination will take over.’

  ‘An on and off switch for the brain would be good.’

  ‘Right now I’d like one of those. I could go dull and stare ahead with nothing on my mind.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Charlie, ‘if you switched off your brain, you wouldn’t be thinking and so wouldn’t know to switch it on again. You’d just sort of sleep all the time.’

  ‘Sounds good to me. Talking of sleep, I think I’ll try and get some. We’ve got an early start tomorrow.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You started the we thing. I want you to come along. I need you to come along.’

  ‘OK.’

  Charlie wondered if she wanted him to stay all night. In that case, where was he to sleep? He briefly fantasised about sharing her bed – the warmth of it, the feel of her skin, the softness of her breathing.

  She rose from the table and left the room. Charlie took up a dishtowel and dried a plate. The problem with falling for somebody was doing something about it. You had to let the loved one know and risk pain and rejection.

  Martha appeared in the kitchen doorway carrying a bundle of bedding. ‘I hope you don’t mind the sofa.’

  He said he didn’t. He carefully folded and hung up the dishtowel and followed Martha to the living room. He watched as she made up the sofa, smoothing the sheets, tucking in the blankets.

  ‘This is good of you. I need someone here. If anything happens, it’ll be good to have backup.’ She sat on the made-up sofa. ‘Do you suppose Evie’s all right?’

  ‘Yes. She’s with her dad.’

  ‘How do you know he’ll be OK with her?’

  ‘You chose him. You married him. I’m thinking he’ll be OK. He wasn’t violent, was he?’

  ‘No. He was quiet.’

  ‘There you go,’ said Charlie. ‘Evie will be fine.’ He hoped this was true.

  ‘She hasn’t got a toothbrush. She needs to clean her teeth.’

  ‘She’ll be fine.’

  ‘She has a bath every night before bed.’

  ‘It won’t hurt to miss it just once.’

  ‘She doesn’t like tomatoes.’

  ‘So, she won’t eat them. Tomatoes aren’t ever the meal, only a bit of the meal.’

  ‘I suppose.’ She got up. Nodded, reassuring herself on the matter of her daughter and tomatoes. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Staying with me. Comforting me.’ She leaned over, kissed his cheek and bade him goodnight.

  Alone, Charlie tested the sofa. It seemed large enough and soft enough for a reasonable night’s sleep. He went into the hall, found the bathroom. He peed, washed his face and rubbed some toothpaste onto his teeth with his finger. Back in the living room he took off his clothes, folded them and laid them on an armchair before, still in his underpants, he slipped under the covers on the sofa. He sighed, stared up at the ceiling. He touched his cheek. He could still feel the kiss. He wished he’d kissed her back instead of standing stock still and looking sheepish. Damn. He doubted he’d sleep tonight.

  It was a surprise, then, when he woke from a deep sleep at four in the morning. He’d been disturbed by something moving nearby. Martha was sitting at the end of the sofa staring at him. She was wearing a pair of men’s striped pyjamas and thick green woolly socks and had her legs curled under her. ‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘No. I was watching you sleep. You’re very good at it. You looked peaceful.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. Was that a compliment? Being told you were a good sleeper? Rather than, say, a good footballer, athlete or, something he would have liked, a good lover. That wo
uld be excellent.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your being abducted when you were little. I didn’t take it in earlier. I was crazed with worry about Evie. What was it like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was a baby. I didn’t find out about it for over twenty years.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother look for you? Wasn’t she frantic?’

  ‘No. I think it suited her fine.’

  ‘Didn’t she love you?’

  ‘In her way, perhaps. I think not, though. She was very young when she had me. I got the impression she thought it for the best. I only spoke to her once, on the phone. I never met her.’

  Martha pulled back the bedclothes at the opposite end of the sofa. She shoved Charlie’s feet aside and climbed in. ‘Can’t sleep,’ she said, ‘too worried about Evie. Tell me your story.’

  26

  Hating the Pink

  He was Norman McKenzie. He’d found himself. The solution had sneaked into his brain when he wasn’t using it for anything much. He was sure this was how it worked. Solutions to problems crept in when you weren’t using it. He’d been in his new house, lying on a mattress on the floor, looking through the grubby window at a scrap of blue sky, wondering what life would have been like if he’d been born in New Orleans when it came to him.

  ‘Mairi,’ he said, ‘Ella told me my mother was Mairi.’

  There couldn’t have been many women with that name giving birth in Glasgow on that day. It was a clue. Something to hang on to. Something that might lead to finding a family.

  The next day he went back to Register House to check and there she was. Mairi McKenzie who’d given birth to Norman. Father unknown. But there was an address in Glasgow’s Byres Road. He made a note of it and went home to lie on his mattress once more and think about this. Being Norman and not Charlie was hard to take. It was as if he was a whole different person. He’d grown up being someone he wasn’t meant to be.

  Norman would be practical. He would have fixed the creaking floorboards and anxiety-inducing plumbing in the house. It was likely that he would have worked hard at school and would now be a doctor or lawyer. Charlie was a dreamer. He was prone to melancholy. Life with its wonky floorboards, worrying plumbing and any other disturbing thing was to be fretted over briefly before being cast aside to deal with later. He decided he was a lot better at being Charlie than he was at being Norman. In fact, Norman rather scared him. He didn’t think he was up to being Norman.

  The emotional turmoil laid Charlie low. It was three weeks before he finally went to Glasgow to investigate his past. He had to know his history.

  Byres Road was busy. A street of small shops, cafés and tenements. But it was moving with the times. It was getting arty. There was a lot of corduroy around. Charlie liked it. He found the building, went inside and breathed deeply. It smelled of disinfectant with an undertow of lentil soup. It unnerved him. His stomach was already in a turmoil of nervous apprehension.

  He climbed to the top floor examining the nameplates on all the doors on the way up. There wasn’t a McKenzie. On his way back down he met a woman coming up. He asked if she knew of anybody called McKenzie living here. She shook her head, told him she didn’t think so but he should ask at the Thompsons on the ground floor. They had lived in the building for ever.

  Mrs Thompson answered the door. There was a lot of her. She filled the doorway and considered him with mild interest. He smiled a nervous smile and told her he was Charlie. ‘Charlie Parker,’ he said. He hadn’t wanted to mention his real name so picked one close to it and beloved. ‘I’m looking for my aunt.’

  Mrs Thompson raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘Mairi McKenzie. I think she lived here some time ago.’

  Mrs Thompson continued to look mildly interested.

  ‘My mother is ill. She wanted to get in touch with her sister, Mairi.’

  Mrs Thompson nodded and invited him in. She led him down a short hall into a small cluttered living room. ‘This is Mr Parker,’ she said to a small man seated on a large maroon chair. ‘He’s asking about Mairi McKenzie.’

  Mr Thomson said, ‘Well, that’s going back a year or two.’ He looked at his wife and added, ‘Mairi. God, she was a beauty.’

  Walking into the room was like walking into a wall of heat. It was airless in here. Mr Thompson gestured to the sofa and told Charlie to sit down. He lowered himself onto the seat and looked round. There was so much stuff in here there was hardly any room for people. There was a large collection of teapots displayed in the cabinet by the door, a writing bureau was wedged behind the sofa, a long coffee table was placed in front of it, and a small fire glowed in the grate. Mr Thompson had one foot placed on a stool by his chair. He looked to Charlie to be steeling himself for a long chat. Mrs Thompson leaned forward and said, ‘Cup of tea.’ Plainly this wasn’t the offer of a refreshment but an announcement of what was about to happen next. She disappeared into the kitchen, keeping the door open so she could hear the conversation.

  ‘She was a looker, your aunt,’ said Mr Thompson. ‘Never saw a woman as beautiful as she was. Film-star looks. If she stood in front of you, you couldn’t believe what you were seeing. You couldn’t believe that a creature like that was out and about walking down the street like an ordinary person.’

  Charlie smiled. ‘Beauty takes you like that.’

  Mr Thompson agreed. ‘And she was young. Eighteen. Nineteen. And expecting.’

  ‘Four months gone,’ Mrs Thomson shouted from the kitchen.

  ‘Her man came three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He paid her rent. Never took her nowhere. He couldn’t. Too well known about town to be seen with his bit on the side. Someone would have told his wife.’

  Mrs Thompson bustled into the room carrying a large tray. ‘Arrived at seven, went away half past ten. Never varied.’ She put the tray on the coffee table. Set out three cups and saucers and poured tea from a huge brown teapot.

  ‘Do you know the man’s name?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Ian Bain,’ said Mrs Thompson, handing him a cup. ‘Mr Three-Times-a-Week. Him and his hat.’

  ‘He wore a hat?’ said Charlie.

  ‘One of them gangster ones you see in the films. He fancied himself.’

  ‘He stopped coming just before the baby was born.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Steps outside,’ said Mr Thompson. ‘We hear it all. We know who’s coming and going. We get to know the sound of feet.’

  ‘He left Mairi to fend for herself. Put ten pounds in an envelope that he left on the table and walked away from her. Said he had a wife and two young daughters to care for. He didn’t want to hurt them,’ said Mrs Thompson. ‘Ella told us that.’

  ‘Ella?’ said Charlie, though he knew who Ella was.

  ‘Lived across the landing,’ Mr Thompson said. ‘It was the baby interested her. She always wanted one of her own but that wasn’t going to happen. Her young man was killed in the war. The first war. Charlie Gavin he was. She never got over him.’

  Charlie looked at his feet, said, ‘Ah,’ and prayed he wasn’t turning red.

  Mrs Thompson took over the story. ‘She’d drop by for a cup of tea now and then. She’d had a hard life. Brought up in an orphanage. Half starved. She remembered being beaten for wetting the bed. Had to wash the sheets at three in the morning in cold water. She grew up afraid to fall asleep.’

  ‘Afraid of everything,’ said Mr Thompson. ‘She was a wall walker.’

  Charlie said, ‘Huh?’

  ‘She didn’t like being outside on her own. She was scared of doing something wrong. She walked close to walls so as nobody would notice her. She wore grey clothes.’

  Charlie knew this to be true.

  ‘Soon as that baby was born Ella took to him. She prepared his bottles, changed his nappies, took him out in his pram. Mairi took a job at the grocer’s across the way. Ella doted on the boy. She took in sewing, didn’t go out to work. She worked when
the baby slept. Mairi was too beautiful to work in a grocer’s.’

  Mr Thompson took over once more. ‘Men stared at her. It just didn’t seem right buying cheese or potatoes from someone who looked like that. Women didn’t like her. She never took to being a mother. She started being young again. Out at nights dancing and going to see films. It worried Ella. She thought Mairi would meet somebody to marry and move away with the baby.’

  Mrs Thompson handed Charlie a slice of fruitcake on a small plate. It was stale but he didn’t mind. It was more than warm here. There was an aroma of soup cooking and the tea was good. The story was thrilling.

  ‘It had to happen,’ said Mrs Thompson. ‘Mairi got home later and later till one night she didn’t come back at all. What a night that was. Ella in a state going up and down the stairs, up and down every ten fifteen minutes looking out for her. Then later on it was leaning out the window staring down the road. But Mairi didn’t come.’

  Mr Thompson took over. ‘Ella was out of her mind with worry. She came to our door and asked if we’d seen Mairi. She said if Mairi didn’t come back the police would take the baby away. I think she’d decided then she’d take the boy. Save him from the children’s home. And that’s what she did. Took the boy and disappeared. Of course Mairi came home. Stayed for a couple of days then went off.’

  Charlie said, ‘That’s quite a story.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Thompson. ‘Ella abducted the baby and Mairi said nothing about it. Wasn’t in the papers. No police came to enquire. Nothing.’

  Charlie asked if she knew what happened to Mairi. Mr Thompson shook his head. ‘There was gossip. Of course there was gossip. She took up with her man again. Didn’t marry him. His wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. Mairi and her man formed a company Bain and McKenzie. They did loans. Never heard anything about Ella.’

  ‘I saw her go,’ said Mrs Thomson. ‘I’d been to the butcher’s to get a pie. So it was a Friday when she took the little one. Butcher did good pies on a Friday. I was just down the street and there was Ella ahead of me striding out. She had the babe in one arm and was carrying a big suitcase. There she went. Walking down the middle of the pavement and not up by the wall. Big steps. She did a brave thing.’