by Lisa Blower
The rest of him was black. Coat, shoes, trousers, whatever was under the coat, probably black. It’s why Frances had thought the whole of him black, including his face. He was holding a black shoe.
You’re not supposed to be here.
Lager, stale lager, tobacco, threads of it about his lips, and that smell: the smell her mother used to dread that he’d try to disguise with aftershave sprayed all over his coat.
What are you doing out here? It’s late.
Roller-skating.
One skate on. One skate off.
You shouldn’t be out here. Not now. Something’s happened and it wasn’t me.
It had not been a man’s voice but a voice pretending to be one.
And that’s when their hands had somehow met. Except Frances was still holding onto her roller-skates—there’d been dog shit all over the wheels—and now he was holding onto her arm? Or her elbow? Her hair? He had grabbed her hair with long fingers. Piano-playing fingers. Nails that needed cutting for a man.
She’s in my den. They put her in my den!
No. No.
I want to show you. I haven’t done it. She was already here. Let me show you!
As there’s always the possibility that Frances wasn’t there at all.
It’s my den and she’s in it. We need to get her out. They’ll think it’s me.
Frances had screamed.
Come with me. Come and see!
She started to scream. She clamped both hands over her mouth.
Come with me!
What?
‘Come with me.’
‘I’m sorry … What did you say?’
‘Come with me so I can show you my den. Come on. I want to show you what I’ve done in it,’ and Reuben was tugging at her shirt.
Frances stumbled out of the room as if suddenly drunk and needing to throw up. Except Clover. Where was Clover?
‘Reuben, where’s Clover? Is she with you?’
‘Nope.’
‘She was here, Reuben. Where the hell did she go?’
‘You said you would come and see my den.’
‘What have you done with my little girl?’ Frances stopped breathing. ‘Clover. Where are you? Shout to Mummy. Clover!’
She pushed open a door and yelled her name. Pushed open a second and flicked on lights though they were not needed and shed on nothing, Reuben, all the time behind her, and telling her it was only a den. Just a den. There was no one in it. Pushed open a third.
‘Clover. Thank God.’
Frances sank to the floor in a different room.
Later, when Frances thinks of this room, she will not remember the headlines and the stories and the notes; extensive notes made like a detective and chronologically arranged. She will not allow her mind to recall the photographs or the missing posters or the ones that replaced them asking for witnesses. She will only remember the one in the centre that was hard to avoid: of two girls half-smiling, five years between them yet their cheeks pushed together as if they’d been born hours apart. She will only remember the list of suspects, many of whom Frances had been to school with. Sarah Lalley. Hannah Middleton. Madeline Bishop. Her own name was at the top of the list and when she’d looked at it she’d smelt lager and aftershave and dog shit really strong. Eyes: she is sure that when she hit him with her roller-skate he got dog shit in his eyes because he didn’t run after her though she’d kept on running. No coat. Barefoot. Running up and down Featherbed Lane. Where was everyone? Why didn’t they answer their doors? Maggie, in the ground-floor flat opposite finally opening her window to her: ‘I’ve called the police, Frances. Someone has to do something for him.’ But where did he go, Maggie? Which way did he go?
By the time Frances had arrived home the tin house was in darkness and the phone was ringing. She’d picked it up because there was no one in the house to answer it.
She’s dead, isn’t she? They’ll find her tonight and she’ll be dead. Was it you? Did you do it with your skates? I bet you did and I’ll tell.
The planting of a thought that became a memory of being accused—Frances had been the last person Breda had called—and she’d put down the phone and raced back to the heath because she should’ve brought her big brother home.
6.
Frances was coming down the stairs with her daughter in her arms when Breda returned, some two hours later, and long after Frances had found Reuben, in his den, and seen all of the rooms in the house on Featherbed Lane. Breda looked up at Frances on the stairs.
‘What are you looking for, Frances? Something to remember?’
‘Your son was hungry,’ Frances snapped. ‘You’ve been gone almost two hours.’
‘He knows where to get refreshment when he’s hungry.’
‘That’s a vending machine, Breda. Who has a fucking vending machine to feed their kid?’
And that’s when Frances sees there’s something different about her. She can’t quite put her finger on what, but she definitely looks different from when she went out.
Except Breda is mad, and that she is this mad alarms Frances. ‘Why?’ she keeps on shouting. ‘Why won’t you remember?’
‘Because I don’t,’ Frances tells her again, and she covers her face with her hands and stops herself from remembering anything.
‘Come on Frances,’ Breda says. ‘You’re not remembering on purpose.’
Frances thinks this is a childish thing to say. ‘If I knew anything I’d have gone to the police,’ she says.
But Breda cannot hold back. ‘You were found on the heath, Frances,’ she shouts. ‘It was happening right in front of you.’
‘I still don’t know what it is you think I won’t remember.’
‘But you do remember. You’re remembering it all the time, Fran.’
Now Breda offers Frances wine. It’s red and it’s cheap and it’ll taste of sawdust, but her stomach is already turned and she needs to go home. She asks for their coats then scoops up her daughter Clover from the floorboards where she’s been poking between the grooves with a wooden school ruler. She takes a moment to breathe in her daughter’s hair, to dust off the malted milk biscuit crumbs from her mouth, to remind herself how lucky she is. She is calm now, clear, and she asks again, ‘Our coats, Breda.’ She would like to go home.
‘You weren’t the only one,’ Breda tells her again. ‘I was ringing people all the time, every night, saying the same thing. I’d lost my best friend. And she was, Fran. She was the love of my life. Someone knew something. You were just unlucky, I suppose.’
Frances looks down at the floorboards and hears the rolling thrum of her roller-skates as she goes up and down the hallway. She hears her parents arguing one last time in the kitchen. The thud of her father’s shoes as he storms out, never to come home again. She thinks briefly of the two-up two-down that lasted not a minute before her mother had shacked up with Derek; before the hospital called and her mother was forced to sit Derek down and tell him: ‘I have a son. And he’s not been very well.’
Not very well: Jane had had to explain. She went back a little: the teachers had called him agitated. She called him just busy. A doctor prescribed pills. She’d thrown them away. He turned thirteen. Restless. Bored. Neighbours got burgled. Friends got darker. He liked a girl who didn’t like him. Liked another who broke his heart. He was seventeen when their father left, Jane had explained. And he was taking whatever he could get his hands on. So, I did what I had to do.
Frances turns to Breda. ‘How did you know about the skates?’
‘What?’
‘When you called me on that night. You said, did you do it with your skates?’
Breda flushed. ‘I don’t remember saying that.’
‘You did. You said, did you do it with your skates?’
‘You were there, Frances. Not me. And you do remember.’
Frances took in a deep breath of the house. ‘This house will tell you nothing about me,’ she told Breda slowly. ‘And she was already dead. Dead, they said, ever so long b
efore he found her.’
Breda grabbed at Frances’s arm. ‘He?’
Frances looked down at Breda’s hand on her arm. Long fingers, splayed fingers, piano-playing fingers. Except she bit her nails now. But not all of them.
‘He died, Breda. My brother died. That’s why I’m back here. So now it’s just me who knows who was really there.’
Breda released her grip. ‘Timothy?’ Her face glowed. ‘He’s gone?’
Frances nuzzled into Clover’s neck. ‘He was in no position to take anyone’s life when he could barely live his own,’ she told Breda sadly. ‘I didn’t see that then, but you did. And my brother has saved your life,’ and she and her daughter left their coats behind.
7.
January. Eight months later. Frances finds out via text message that Breda has had a baby boy. Everything is perfect anyway. She hopes Frances will bring Clover for a play date. Reuben would like that. So would she. We still need to reminisce, is what she texts. I’m thinking of organising a school reunion.
Frances will remember their last visit, how she’d thought Reuben looked nothing like his mother, that she’d not seen a photograph of Breda’s husband to know if he took after him. She will also wonder how many others Breda had tracked down from school and lured into her house to see her room. Names on a list. Suspects in a crime: there was still no news about the dead girl and would not be for years to come. Not until Breda remembered herself. Because if the brain can forget how to breathe, it cannot be culpable for all it might’ve done. Until then, she would remain the girl found, disturbed by badgers, a shoe on the lane, a naked arm bent awkwardly across her face as if she’d just fainted, right there on the heath aside Featherbed Lane.
I haven’t done it, Fran. She was already here.
When Frances thinks of him it’s always with their father’s shamed face. And then she sees him for who he really is, a boy who could not be, and wishes, with all her heart, she had just taken him home.
Frances will read Breda’s text and delete it. Then she’ll throw the phone out of the car window. She will watch, in the rear view mirror looking back along the road she has travelled, how it smashes into a thousand black plastic pieces, like ants in a line and trying to survive. And it will jog her memory: Breda had come back into the house wearing a completely different set of black clothes.
Smear Campaign
I KNOW I SOUND like an old chuff but that van of his was getting on my wick. It was blocking my daylight. I was having to put my desk lamp on by two o’clock and you can’t be blaming the ozone for that. Dark blue navy transit it is with blacked-out windows and even the registration plate looks swindling. I was just thinking about calling the police when his mother finally came round to tell me what she’d done.
She’s gone an old-fashioned bread pudding of a woman has Petal, and she’s all trussed up in a mustard frock with a bunch of yellowing tulips clashing at her breasts. I hadn’t seen her in a while and she’d had that pearly perm done again that washes her out. I’ve told her before about hairdressing on a shoestring.
‘And I’ve told you about minding your own,’ she snaps as I let her in, and she’s whiffing already—nose in the air and eyes on the prowl—but there’s no point either of us being peevish. All water under the bridge now, getting on for over thirty years. ‘I won’t beat about the bush, Arnold,’ she says, taking off her gloves. ‘But I’ve given our Joseph the house. He says he’s ready to come home,’ and then she adds, albeit under her breath, that his marriage has broken down.
I raise my eyebrows. I didn’t know he was married.
‘There’s a lot I wish I didn’t know about you either, Arnold Bunter,’ she says. ‘It still makes my stomach curdle to think about it.’
I roll my eyes at her. I knew she’d been in next door cleaning its hind legs off with disinfectant and anticipation for the best part of a fortnight, and though I had my suspicions I didn’t get my hopes up.
‘It’s as we said, Petal,’ I told her. ‘But I’m still surprised he’s coming home.’ And I was. Very.
‘Well, you leave him be till he’s ready,’ she goes. ‘Remember I know you.’
‘And I know you,’ I said back, but we shook hands in the end and said thank you. Hearts are captured all over the place and never given back as they were.
‘Oh and Wilf’s wife’s dead,’ she said as if telling me she’d just scrubbed the loo. ‘Thought it best you hear it from me,’ and then she was off. Goes the other way these days, up the hill towards the old folks’ new builds and looking down on everyone else, just as she wanted it. But we’ve promised each other clean graves so you could say we’ve moved on.
Still, after she’d gone I had myself a little cry. Not much, but enough to soak half a hankie.
Our Joe moved in next door quicker than I expected. Great big van turned up, three lads to help, two double beds. I’d got the front bedroom net hitched up with a couple of paperclips and had brought my big teapot down from the top of the dresser and given it a scalding—it gives four good mugs at a push does that pot—and I thought they might help me out with the last of the Christmas cake. I was spick and span otherwise, cock-a-hoop to be honest, had been ever so flamboyant with the emersion, I was taking a bath every day I was that excited, but that’s me. Can’t suck on a toffee log either. Guzzle down a whisky before the whole round’s been poured.
I had it all set out on the tea tray for them by midday, four mugs of tea, four wedges of cake. They’d been working hard heaving in all that stuff. Two of the lads had taken their tops off. Bulky arms they’d got. Muscles on muscles. The type to squeeze you to death and make you feel safe as ruddy houses.
I made it down the hallway with the tea tray then bottled it. Can’t so much as knock the skin off a rice pudding these days, it’s been that long since I left the house. Still, you can’t rush these things and it’s a lot to ask of the lad so soon.
I thought me and our Joe would only see each other again in death. Dramatic, I know. But that’s me. A bit of a crisis keeps you alive.
I left our Joe a Post-it on his wheelie bin as we trundled into March. By then, I knew where he’d hung every picture, where every appliance had been plugged in, smelt what he was having for his tea, but couldn’t quite make out which bedroom he’d chosen to make his own.
‘I warned you,’ Petal shouts down the phone at me. ‘What do you think you’re playing at with them notes? Have you forgotten what’s round your ankles and why it’s there?’ But her bark’s worse than her bite.
I said, ‘It’s daft this, him being next door, me rattling about in here with nothing doing. It’s been almost two months, Petal, and not a dickie bird.’
‘Well, you’re still dead to him,’ she says spitefully.
I spot an eyelash on my teaspoon and change the subject. ‘And what’s that bloody van all about anyway?’ I says. ‘It’s been almost two months.’
‘It’s his house now, Arnold,’ she says. ‘And it’s as we all agreed. So if he wants to park a van he can park a bloody van.’
‘Now look here Petal … ’ because I was on the last of my patience to be frank.
But that was a red rag to a bull if there ever was one, because she goes, ‘No. You look here. It’s because of your bloody looking we’re all having to live like this. What about folk looking at me, Arnold? What about folk looking at him?’
I said, ‘No one’s looking at anyone other than themselves these days Petal. I’ve told you before, if you can’t look inside … ’ but she’d slammed down the phone by then. Not that stuff like that smarts any more. Between you and me, it just bounces off the sides.
A couple of weeks pass and I’m just letting my dinner go down when Petal comes to see me wearing her sensible brown shoes. I said, ‘I told you that bunion wouldn’t thank you for those peep-toe heels.’
She says, ‘You’re hardly one to be lecturing me about bloody peeping.’
But that’s the trouble with old wounds on old skin. The littl
e blighters just won’t heal.
She said, ‘I want a word. Are you busy?’
I was having a slice of Madeira cake so thick with butter you could see my teeth marks. I didn’t tell her that I’d been putting that Madeira cake out for over a week now, just in case our Joe popped in, dusting it with a drop of milk now and then to make it look like I’d just had it fresh out of the oven. I had my tricks as Petal had hers, but I could see she’d come to tittle-tattle so I put my hand on her shoulder and smiled. She pushed it off roughly and wiped herself down with her handkerchief.
‘Oi,’ I says, all offended. ‘I’ll have none of that when you’re in my house. Clean as a pin, me. First time I’ve sat down all day, yet I haven’t so much as heard a Hoover going next door. Makes you wonder what he’s doing all day.’
‘Working men, Arnold,’ she starts up, ‘go out to work all day,’ and I can see she’s trying to start something but I won’t be reeled in.
‘Well he’s gone nowhere in that van,’ I says, pointing at my calendar. ‘It’s been there sixty-five days now. That’s surely a traffic conviction.’
‘He’s kitting it out, numbskull,’ she snides. ‘He’s waiting for equipment.’
‘What sort of equipment?’
And I can see she’s itching to tell. She leans forward and beckons me in. ‘It’s best it comes from me,’ she whispers. ‘He’s window cleaning.’
I can hardly get my breath.
‘I know,’ she says clocking my face. ‘It winded me a bit an’ all.’
Petal makes me sit down and pours me more tea. She spits in milk, adds sugar, two lumps, then asks if I’ve any brandy. I says, ‘Should I just put a bucket on my head and give it a kick or what?’
She looks surprised. ‘Buckets?’ she says. ‘Buckets!’ as if I haven’t heard. ‘There’s no buckets, Arnold. It’s amazing. Totally sterile glass they call it. Spotless window cleaning and not a smear left behind. He showed me last week how it worked on the bungalow. Then he went round Margery’s and asked if he could show her what it could do for her conservatory. I said, “What do you think, Margery? Isn’t it amazing?” And our Joe says to Margery, “You’ll have to let me give your Gerald a price for his office block.” And when he sees her face he starts laughing. “See this pole, Margery?” he goes. “It’s got no limits. Glass ceilings this, reach up and clean God’s arse,”’ and she finally took a breath. ‘But you’ll never guess what the best bit is?’