Things in tins and things in packets. Lots of them. It’s a Seventies convenience retail dream. Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies. Baked beans: plain, curried, BBQ, pork sausage, all-day-breakfast. Green Giant niblets. Soupernoodles. Sandwich Spread. Shipphams paste. Tinned carrots. Marrowfat peas. Angel Delight. She half expects to see a selection of dust-covered sachets of Rise'n'Shine and Vesta just-add-water freeze-dried chicken curry, but instead the chiller cabinet bows to twenty-first-century ill-health with stacks of agent orange Sunny D and cook-chill lasagne. Cottage cheese with pineapple. Ski yoghurt. Mattesons smoked pork sausage. Try saying that without saying mmm...
There's a lady sitting on a bar stool behind the toughened glass of the post office counter. It's more there in order to show where the counter is than as an actual security measure. If anyone wanted to rob the place, all they’d have to do would be to step through the open door to her cage. Bridget looks up from the lackadaisical display of lettuces and onions and catches her eye. Smiles.
“If there’s anything you can’t find,” says the lady, “just ask.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I think I’m fine at the moment.”
“Well,” says the lady, “you know we’re here”. Goes back to leafing through her big book of picture stamps.
Bridget lines the bottom of a wire basket with a copy of the Mirror, starts loading up. She won’t bother with Wadebridge Tesco until Monday. Figures there won’t be so many crowds. Beans. Bacon. Eggs. Spaghetti. She almost does with spaghetti hoops until she notices that there are three pots of pesto on the top shelf, in among the cook-in-sauces. Pesto: the Marie Rose sauce of the Nineties. Even Meneglos would have caught up.
She needs to hurry up. Yasmin has moved on to the rack of chocolate at the front of the till. In the chiller, three types of pasty. Gosh, she thinks, I really am in Cornwall: I can’t think of a time when I last saw a pasty that wasn't made by Ginsters. She decides to try each of them for supper tonight, with the beans: drops them into the basket. And then she thinks: sod it. Let’s have some clotted cream. Life can't be all subsistence rations. Scoots back to pick up flour and jam and cream of tartar. This afternoon Yasmin will be introduced to the delights of scones. Now that she doesn’t have to worry that the oven will make the meter run out quicker. Frozen peas. Fish fingers. Oven chips. A big loaf of Hovis. She has more than enough for the weekend, now.
The lady at the till takes her basket and begins, very slowly, to ring the items up and stack them, one by one, in a blue-and-white-striped plastic bag. “Staying locally, are you?”
It’s a local shop, for local people…
“Yes,” says Yasmin.
“Yes – well, no,” says Bridget. Sees her London accent noted, sees the information disappoint. “We’ve just moved in, actually. Up the road.”
The woman perks up. “Really? I hadn’t heard anything had been sold…”
“No, I’m caretaking. Up at Rospetroc. Rospetroc house.”
She shifts on her stool. “Oh, right.”
She rings up the bread, the peas. Giving herself some thinking time, observes Bridget.
“And how you settling in, then?”
“Fine,” she answers. “Well – we only got here last night. Didn’t find the boiler ’til this morning, though.”
“Bet you were freezing, big old place like that.”
Bridget laughs.
The woman leans round her. “Ivy! Come out here! We’ve got the new housekeeper at Rospetroc come in!”
Ivy closes her book, comes out to greet her.
“Hello!” she says. It's a quizzical hello, as though Bridget were an old friend who’d suddenly turned up somewhere unexpected. “How you getting on, then? Ivy Walker.”
“Hello.” She shakes her hand, surprised by the friendliness. She used the same corner shop in Streatham for seven years and the owners had only graduated up to a faint nod of recognition by the time she left. “Bridget. Bridget Fl– Sweeny.”
She kicks herself inwardly. I'm going to have to get a lot better at this if it’s going to work.
The woman behind the till reaches out and shakes her hand as well. “Chris Kirkland. Welcome to Meneglos.”
“Thanks.”
Ivy bends at the waist, brings her face down to a level with Yasmin’s. “And who’s this?”
“Yasmin,” says Yasmin, taking a rapid step back. She’s not used to strange adults coming so far into her space. Bridget’s not thought about it before, but people in London are scrupulous about keeping their distance from children for fear of being strung up.
“Hello, Yasmin,” she says. Reaches up to the counter and gets down the giant sweet-jar of lollipops. Unscrews the lid and offers them. “Would you like one of these?”
Yas’s eyes are out on stalks. Then: “no, thank-you,” she says.
Ivy looks taken aback.
“Mum says I’m not to take sweets from strangers,” says Yas.
Chris laughs. “Too right,” she says. “And you've got your manners, too, I see.”
“It’s all right,” Bridget assures her. “They aren’t strangers any more. You can have one.”
The jar is lowered within her reach again. Yasmin takes her time about her choice. Considers each sweet in turn before finally reaching in and plucking out a blue one.
“Thank you,” she says, unprompted.
Oh, bless you, my little darling. You don’t know how grateful I am for this first impression. It’ll be all round the village about us in no time; thank you so much for choosing this moment to not have a screaming tantrum.
“So are you at school, then, my love?” asks Chris. Yasmin, mouth clamped round her lollipop, nods, deep and long.
“She just started in September.”
“Sending her to the village school, are you?”
“Well, I was hoping… what do you think the chances are?”
“Oh, I daresay. It's not exactly Eton. You don’t have to put them down before birth here.”
“Put ’em down,” says Ivy. “I always liked that phrase. Always gives me an image of the upper classes drowning their young in a bucket, like kittens.”
Please don’t let Yasmin have heard that. We’ve quite enough trouble with kittens as it is.
To her relief, Yasmin has found a pile of Barbie magazines, has lost interest in the grownups.
“Just pop in Monday morning,” says Chris. “They break up Wednesday, so you’re in luck. If there’s no-one in the office, go and knock on the headmistress’s door: it’s the house by the school gates. Blue door. You can’t miss it. Mrs Varco, that’s her name.”
“Will she get in, this late in the year?”
“It’s the law,” says Ivy, simply. “You’re in the catchment area. They’ll just squash another chair round a table and away you go.”
“Thing is, there isn't a choice down here,” says Chris. “Not like in London. No worries about avoiding the sink schools. Here it’s whatever there is or there’s private. Lucky for you, Meneglos is a good one.”
“Well, they don’t come out swearing like pirates, anyway. Not like over at Wadebridge.”
The pair of them fall quiet in contemplation of the urban degeneration of the local market town. Tut and roll their eyes.
“So what sort of state is the old house in, then?” asks Ivy Walker. “I heard Frances Tyler left in something of a hurry.”
The two women exchange a barely perceptible mutual eye-flicker. Bridget only just registers it before it’s gone.
“Not great,” she says. “She obviously left halfway through pretty much everything.”
“That’ll be a lot of work for you, then.”
“Mmm. Well, it's what I'm paid for.”
“True enough,” says Ivy. “He was down here trying to get someone to come up and do it before you arrived. Didn’t have much luck, I expect.”
“I’m surprised,” she fishes, “that no-one round here wanted the job.”
The flicker again.
> “Oh, I wouldn’t be, dear,” says Chris, slightly hurriedly. “It’s not much of a salary, if you think about it. It’s okay as a live-in wage, with all your bills covered, but everyone around here’s got somewhere to live anyway, or they wouldn’t be here, would they?”
“Yes,” says Ivy. “And besides, that isolation thing’s more of a city-folk fantasy than it is for people like us. Most country people would rather live in a village. A bit of life. Someone around. You know.”
“You’re very cut off up there,” says Chris. “you need to watch it. You can get cut off if it snows, with that hill to get up. And the power’s not exactly reliable up there. You must make sure you’ve got plenty of candles and stuff because you can lose it altogether for a couple of days, sometimes.”
“Oh, I don't mind,” she says. “After London it feels like a luxury.”
“I daresay it does,” says Ivy. “You couldn’t pay me to live up there, personally.”
Chris laughs. “Well, someone is paying her, Ivy. I don’t suppose she’d be there if they wasn’t.”
Chapter Sixteen
The car alarm goes off and she knows he’s back. It’s taken months for her to realise that there’s a correlation between the alarm going off and Kieran’s visitations, but of course there is. That bloody idiot in the ground floor flat must leave the door open when he goes down to switch it off, and then Kieran must use the opportunity to sneak in and hide in the shadows in the hall.
Shit, she thinks. I knew it would come down to me in the end. I told her I didn’t mind, but I do. He’s going to be really, really angry and I’m going to have to deal with it.
The guy downstairs always takes five minutes to come down and sort his alarm out. Carol has a faint suspicion that it might be deliberate, that he wants his neighbours to know exactly who owns the Audi parked in the street, but it’s more likely, she supposes, that he sleeps in the nude and he’s lazy. She’s seen him a couple of times, trying to turn the alarm off with the remote control in his key fob, though doing so has only ever unlocked and locked the doors in the hundred or so times he’s woken up the street with his show-off security. She needs to flush Kieran out before he jogs down the steps, Calvin Kleins and black satin robe covering his fake-tan gym skin, and leaves the door hanging open while he does it. It’s hard to credit that he wouldn’t have noticed his former neighbour lurking when he came in, but he never has. Can’t see beyond his own self-interest, that one.
She goes to the window, throws back the curtains.
Someone ducks down into the dark spot formed by the wheelie bins and the hedge. So that’s how he does it. Of course.
She slides the window up. Leans out.
“Kieran?” she shouts.
No voice in response, but she feels a freezing in the dark place behind the bin. He is there: I know he is. And he’s heard me, but somehow he thinks that if he stays still enough I won’t know he’s there.
“Kieran?” she shouts again. “I know you’re down there.”
Still no reply.
“Get the fuck away from here, Kieran,” shouts Carol. “She’s not here.”
Now there’s a definite stir behind the bins. He heard that all right.
The front door opens and her downstairs neighbour appears on the step. Looks up at the sound of her voice and sees her leaning out of the window. Folds his arms, stares up. Carol struggles to remember his name. He has never, after all, introduced himself to her or to any of his neighbours. All she has to go by is the sheaves of junk mail – credit card offers, loan offers, brochures for expensive holidays – that pile up on the front doormat.
“Nick,” she says, “shut the door behind you.”
He looks a bit surprised that she has called him by name. Goggles at her like a blowfish, starts down the steps.
“Seriously,” says Carol, “close the door. You may not realise, but there’s someone in behind the wheelie bins.”
He jumps. He actually left his skin for a second there, she thinks. If there’s one thing a yuppie is more scared of than car thieves, it’s muggers.
“Shit,” says Carol. “Come out from there, will you?”
Kieran stands up, steps out.
Nick bolts up the steps. Stands half-in and half-out of the door, wrapped around it like a small child in desperate need of the lavatory. They both look at Kieran. Carol suppresses an urge to laugh. He looks absurd tonight. He’s always suffered from man-of-action fantasies – action that never got further than a spell in the TA – and tonight he has dressed for it. He is wearing black. Black jumper, black jeans, black shoes and – she almost shouts with laughter when she sees this – a black beanie hat covering his black hair. My God, she thinks: all he need now is a few stripes of mud on his cheeks and he’d do as an extra in a Ross Kemp show.
“Fuck off, Kieran,” she says.
Kieran walks forward, stands on the path, arms crossed defensively across his body. “Don’t tell me to fuck off,” he says.
“Fuck off,” she repeats.
“I just want to see my little girl,” says Kieran.
“Not at one o’clock in the morning you don’t,” says Carol.
The car alarm is still shrieking. Nick appears to be at a loss as to what to do. He glances at the car, glances at Carol, glances at Kieran standing between him and the street, stays rooted to the spot.
“You don’t know anything about it,” says Kieran.
“Yes I do,” says Carol, “believe me, I do. You’ve got a restraining order out on you, Kieran, and you just won’t pay attention to it, will you? You’ve only got yourself to blame.”
“I just,” repeats Kieran, “want to see my fucking kid.”
“Well you can’t,” she says. “She doesn't want to see you. And anyway, she’s not here. Neither of them are.”
She knows that she’s being harsh, but she is so angry – with him, with the situation, with his pigheaded thuggery, the way he thinks his wife and child are his belongings to do with as he will, with the fact that she’s been left to break the news because Bridget is too afraid of his reaction to do it herself – and she can’t help it: she feels like he’s getting everything he deserves. Everything. No, not even half of everything.
“They’ve gone away,” she finishes, spitefully. “Gone to get away from you.”
For a moment, the only sound is the shriek of the alarm. Then: “What do you mean?” he asks, and his voice has suddenly dropped. No longer the wheedling, no longer the mistreated Daddy. Both she and Nick hear the edge of threat in his voice.
“Gone away,” she repeats. “Moved away. Moved out. Handed the keys back and buggered off.”
“What do you mean?”
“You heard me,” she shouts. “Now piss off and leave us all in peace.”
I’m not handling this well, she thinks. It’s one in the morning and I’m knackered, and I’m probably making things worse. But fuck it. Since when did Kieran deserve the softly-softly approach?
A window goes up next door. A voice, heavy with sleep, bellows: “shut the fuck up, all of you! Do you know what time it is? There are people trying to sleep here!”
“Sorry,” Carol shouts back, “this won’t take long.”
“What do you mean, won’t take long?” Another voice, a woman's, emboldened by her neighbour’s intervention, drifts down from the attic window two doors up.
“What do you mean, won’t take long?” asks Kieran.
“Shut up! All of you! Go to sleep!” bellows the first voice.
“And turn that faahking car alarm off!”
“And you can fuck off and all,” shouts Kieran. Starts toward the door.
Nick, seeing him approach, darts back inside the hall, slams it shut in his face. Carol, now that there’s a barrier between herself and the street, goes to her own front door, comes out onto the stairs. Nick’s physical presences emboldens her. He may be a useless bugger, but now he’s here there’s no way he can wriggle out of being involved.
; The banging starts. Kieran hammering on the front door. Nick leans against it, eyes bulging, sweat on his Youth Serumed forehead. He looks more scared than I feel, thinks Carol.
“Call the police,” he stutters. “For God’s sake, call the police. He’s trying to get in!”
Great, she thinks. There were a few times when we would have been grateful if you’d done that yourself. Nonetheless, she sets off down the stairs as the hammering goes up a notch, the sound of kicking adding to it. Kieran’s rage is mounting. She steps past Nick, puts a finger on the intercom button. Should’ve got those mortise locks, she thinks. Should have got that burglar chain.
“Go away, Kieran,” she says again. “They’re not here anymore. They’ve gone away. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”
A renewed bombardment shakes the door. Kieran’s voice, all control gone, now, howls like a wolf through the wood. “Let me in! Let me in! I wanna see my kid! Let me in, you bitch!”
The hall light timer switch goes off. Even in the dark, she sees the whites of Nick’s eyes. He’s going to have handled this totally differently by tomorrow morning, she thinks. By the time he’s in the office, he’ll have seen Kieran off single-handed.
“Let me in!” bellows Kieran. “Let me fucking in!”
And further away, off on Streatham High Road, the sound of an approaching siren.
Chapter Seventeen
She’s locked back in the old dream. The reliving. Night after night, over and over, like a video image stuck on loop: his teeth bared, the fist drawn back, the crunch of contact, the red. Over and over. His vulpine face looming at her out of the dark, rushing at her, pouncing…
She thinks she might have screamed. Something has woken her. And then she remembers.
He was here, she thinks. He was here. I heard him hammering on the door, shouting to be let in. But now there’s nothing but the wind. And the sweat on the bed-sheets. And the darkness. Velvet, enveloping darkness. The sort of darkness she imagines the blind see. She can make out nothing in her bedroom: no streetlight filters round the curtains, no red alarm clock LED creates its own tiny oasis of normality. No sounds: just the sobbing of the gale and the sound of her own breathing.
Hold My Hand Page 9