Mud Pie

by Emma Lee Bole

  Chapter Three

  Piccadilly

  When was it I began to die? I think I felt myself slowly sinking into the sombre underworld all the way through the trial. I slipped deeper and deeper into fear and guilt and grief, the shadows rising all around me. The shouts outside the court. The pellets of spit on my best jacket. The daubings on my door. The icy malice that turned the courtroom chill to permafrost: I was always cold in there.

  But I didn’t expect it to last. I thought, back then, naively, that everything would soon get back to normal, that I was immune from reprisal – a prim little girl protected by her shiny halo. I thought that nothing really bad could happen to me just for doing the right thing.

  Daft of me. I should have known better. I did know better. My chaotic childhood had already taught me that bad things happen all the time, especially to the innocent. Babies fell off balconies. Toddlers got their faces bitten off by pit bulls. Kids got belted by jealous stepfathers and fed class A drugs by spaced-out mothers. They were visited by endless tormenting plagues of lice and fleas and scabies, and jeering gangs in the playground.

  A couple of years later they got pressed into the real gangs. They tooled up and practised mugging skills on everyone smaller, any remaining softness turned to tough, unyielding scar tissue.

  I knew all that because I’d been through some of it myself. I knew what those gangs were like. So that encounter in Piccadilly the week after the verdict shouldn’t have come as a shock at all.

  In one way I was lucky. Our paths crossed by chance, not design, so that when our eyes met across the platform of the Piccadilly tram-stop they looked as taken aback as I was.

  I only knew one of the three men, the one with the narrow hungry rat-face: Peel his name was – a mate of my brother Karl’s whom I’d not spoken to for years and who had lately spoken just four words to me. The whisper in the courtroom lobby, very quiet and distinct. We’ll get you, Herron. It echoed round my head for days.

  And there he was. Like looking in a mirror, our mouths both hanging open. I just stared at him and he at me, and it wasn’t until he opened his mouth wider to shout that I came to my senses and ran.

  But I ran the wrong way. I should have tried to cut across to Market Street, where the crush of lunchtime crowds would have made it hard for them to follow me. From there I could have dived into the warren of the Arndale Centre and its many bolt-holes.

  Instead, since I had no certainty of out-running them, and since the tram was there waiting, I leapt on to it just before the doors hissed closed. Peel and the two others were stranded, as with a doleful hoot it pulled away.

  Unfortunately a tram is not a great getaway vehicle. We glided sedately round the end of Piccadilly in agonising slow motion while my pursuers jogged after us. They didn’t even have to run. By the time the tram sighed to a stop three hundred yards away, they were ready and waiting.

  I couldn’t get off. I had to watch them get on and pretend I wasn’t watching, that I was just one of the tired shoppers or a distracted office worker. I gazed out of the window with my heart leaping around in my chest like a fish on a line. The three of them stood and swayed by the doors while the tram dragged itself down ponderously to St Peter’s Square where it stopped again, exhausted, and everyone wanted to get out.

  So I had to get out too. As I stepped onto the platform they grabbed my sleeves and I felt something sharp jab through my coat into my back. Peel strutted round in front of me, very close, showing me his teeth and his knife. It was a crappy plastic pound-shop craft knife with snap-off blades, a throwaway bit of terror that you could stamp to bits or even melt with a lighter to destroy the evidence.

  I think I said “Oh no” and put my hands up to shield my face. Then I screamed.

  I’d never screamed before in my life; it wasn’t easy, and it came out startlingly loud.

  No good Samaritans leapt in to rescue me. A few heads turned, but that was all. We were just a bunch of scallies having an argument; nobody was going to interfere.

  “Shut up,” snarled Peel. As the knife came for my face I grabbed it. I felt it slice my fingers, but I was past caring. I held on to it while I kicked Peel and then tried to head-butt him, unsuccessfully but enough to make him stumble backwards. At that I let go, and as I felt a slash across my back, I wriggled wildly and twisted my arms right out of my coat sleeves. The two of them were left grasping the empty coat with wadding erupting from it like whipped cream.

  One of them grabbed me by the hair, but I yanked free. Then I turned and launched myself down off the platform, right in front of the departing tram.

  This time it was just as well it moved so slowly. It missed me by half a yard, hooting reproaches. I glimpsed the driver furiously gesticulating as I leapt out of the way, and then the tram was between me and them. I had several precious seconds to race across the square to the grand pillars of the Central Library, where I barged through clusters of students to the smooth glass doors and plunged inside.

  I ran up the stairs – all glass, curse them – and bolted into the reading room. Heads looked up from laptops in disapproval as I clattered through the silence and out the other side. There was a shout behind me as I raced round the music library to the sound of keyboards and arrived back at the lift.

  Its door was just closing. I threw myself in. More glass, dammit, it was like a goldfish tank, and they were waiting in the lobby: but the lift glided past them, down to the basement and the City Library with its unrarified shelves of thrillers. Hyperventilating and clutching my bleeding hand under my arm, I darted past the bookshelves.

  I knew the library, but I guessed they didn’t. More stairs – not glass, thank God – brought me up into the Town Hall. Hand clutched in my armpit, I walked briskly down a ornate, curved corridor half-full of sadly waiting claimants and emerged outside at the back.

  There I hid behind a convenient stone pillar, sweating and shivering and pressing my hand with my handkerchief, wondering what the hell to do next. Until now I’d been running on pure instinct. But now I remembered where I was – a mere step away from Bootle Street, and the Manchester Police Headquarters.

  So I took a few deep breaths and stuck my head round the pillar, only to spot Peel lurking at the back of the Library, waiting for me to pop out of a hole.

  I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go. At last he looked down to check his mobile, and I shot out. I got half way across the road before he noticed.

  I tore down Bootle Street and stood panting outside the big stern head-teacher of a police station, daring him. “Come on, then!” I taunted under my breath. “Come on, then!” Come any closer, I’ll tell my Dad, I’ll tell the teacher. I’ll set my brother on you.

  Hah. Some joke. But the building acted as a huge repelling magnet, pushing Peel away. Two or three times he started towards me and then backed off again. The third time, I scampered up to the entrance, half in, half out, but he didn’t back off properly until I had a foot inside the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  So then I had to go in properly and say something. “Er, I just wondered… is Inspector Higson here?”

  “I’ll check.” She looked at my tightly folded arms. “Your name is..?”

  “Williams,” I said. I didn’t want to be there. I’d already had too many interviews in small over-bright rooms. DI Higson hadn’t been bad, as policemen went, but I didn’t want any more. Bootle Street had the same repellent effect on me as on Peel. Arrest you as soon as look at you, said my mother, who should know. It had been hard enough for me to step through those forbidding doors the first time round.

  So I was relieved when the woman eventually reported back that Inspector Higson was out, and assuring her that it didn’t matter, it wasn’t urgent, no message, I edged my way carefully out of the door again.

  I suppose I should have asked for someone else, for anyone. I should have told them about Peel. But what was the point? What would they do? I could look after myself.

  Anyw
ay, Peel had gone. I scooted down the end of Bootle Street to Deansgate and through the sooty canyons of back streets until I lurched in a clatter of bins into the furnace of Tzabo’s kitchen.

  “You’re late,” snapped Klaus. Then he shouted at me for bleeding all over the langoustines as I rinsed my hand in the big sink. The cuts weren’t that bad; I’d had worse filleting a fish in too great a hurry. Cuts, like burns, were just marks of the trade.

  But I’d never had one make me feel so sick and shivery before. All the strength seemed to have been squeezed out of me, so that I had to sit down on the kitchen floor against the fridge, to Klaus’s disgust.

  “What the hell, Lannie?” He threw the big tub of plasters at my feet. “Get up and get your whites on.”

  I stood up and stumbled around, pretending to work. Everyone swore at me. I didn’t mind. At least I was safe in the busy clatter of Tzabo’s kitchen, fierce and fast and well-armoured as a steam engine.

  That was what I still thought back then.

  And I still thought I was safe at home. I thought they didn’t know where I lived. After the paint got thrown at the door of my precious studio flat, I’d moved out, swapping it for a mouldy bedsit in a Longsight terrace. Why did I not think they’d find me there? That stupid, shiny halo again. I expect somebody just followed me home.

  They came hammering on the front door at two in the morning, yelling my name. There was a crash of breaking glass. But I lived upstairs, so the breaking glass wasn’t mine. It belonged to the tenant below me, a big guy with dreadlocks and a skunk habit and, crucially, a shotgun.

  “It don’t work,” he told me once he’d seen them off. I suspected he was lying. “It’s just to encourage good manners, you know? Now who’s going to clear all that mess up?” He nodded meaningfully at the fan of broken glass across his floor.

  “I’ll do it now,” I said, good manners seeming a wise option. I swept up the glass, returned to my room, then packed a bag and sat on my bed the rest of the night. At six o’clock I got out, and never went back. I went to Charlotte’s flat instead, in the leafy sheltered cradle of Didsbury, and begged a piece of floor to sleep on.

  Not that I slept much. By then, I’d lost the knack. I would wake hourly, my heart knocking and bouncing wildly around my chest, as I strained to make sense of any furtive creak in the dark.

  My first night in the tent was no better. Every bark and snuffle, every murmur of the wind and rustle of the canvas, had me staring wild-eyed into blackness. When at last I slept, I dreamt that hordes of rats were crammed in Arthur’s barns, just waiting their moment to stream out and get me.

  I woke up with the sharp stink of rat under my nose until I realised it was Arthur’s blankets. He had hallooed at my tent the previous night while I was donning all my spare clothes ready for bed, after a long evening spent loading dishes under Rhoda’s suspicious eye.

  “It’s cold. You’ll want these.” Arthur had thrust two hairy blankets into my torchlight. They smelt of animal: not dog, but something ranker. But he was right, and despite the smell, I was grateful.

  I didn’t meet him properly till next morning, when I peered out of the tent to see a herd of disconsolate cows trooping through his yard towards the shippen.

  Arthur gave me a wave. He had holes in his woolly hat and parcel twine belting his buttonless raincoat. Arthur tied all his gates on with string and kept a fleet of redundant tractors in his farmyard. One of the old school of farmers, according to Brendan.

  The new school, as personified by the near-identical Killick brothers, wore green boiler suits and drove pick-up trucks or racing tractors, which roared into the Woolpack’s car-park at one o’clock sharp. They didn’t drink: they bought pints of orange squash, which they downed on the spot, and pasties to take away. Brendan instructed me to charge them forty pence for the orange and cost price for the pasties.

  “They don’t earn owt,” he said, though the smart new tractors indicated otherwise. He and the Killicks were terse through familiarity. I soon learnt to distinguish between Brendan’s mates and the casual customers. Abrupt with his friends, he gushed uncomfortably over strangers, who were usually elderly ramblers. There weren’t many of them, as this was only just the Peak District; and they frequently entered the Woolpack with an air of aggrieved surprise as if not sure why they were there. Most of them carried the same book of walks and complained about the amount of mud on the right of way across Arthur’s farm. They ate a lot of sticky toffee pudding.

  To me, none of them seemed real. I felt dislocated. They were just characters parading in a travelogue, while reality bided its time in shadow. Phantoms grinned at me across the bar. I was living in the land of the dead – a spiteful, vengeful dead with pockets full of blades and bullets, who turned into squeaking rats by night. I expect the customers thought I was a bit thick, the number of times I had to ask them to repeat their orders. Rhoda certainly did.

  I made the effort. I tried to ease myself into the cooking, but Rhoda wasn’t giving way. I ended up serving instead: lamb shank to the ramblers, salmon to the yuppie couples from Fylington, who compared the Woolpack audibly and unfavourably with the many pubs there: and steak and ale pie to the farmers, who had their own table and brought their dogs, a pack of twitchy, restless border collies who all seemed to know and not much like each other.

  The fourth category of pub users, which included Frank, was Brendan’s mates. They did not eat. They drank. Some of them had such beetling brows and wayward noses that I looked at them askance until I realised from their conversation that they weren’t bouncers but rugby players. I learnt that Brendan still played, at Fylington Rugby Club, and looked at him with disbelieving eyes.

  “I just can’t imagine him running,” I told Rhoda.

  “The bloody idiot,” said Rhoda. “His back’ll give way properly one of these days.”

  “You don’t like him playing?”

  “He does as he chooses,” said Rhoda sourly.

  It seemed to me that Brendan did as Rhoda chose. She constantly laid down the law about the state of the bar, the positions of tables and the cleanliness of the carpet. Brendan and Stu, the part-time barman, got it in the neck daily.

  Yet no matter how pernickety her demands (no bent beermats! Drip-trays washed and dried!) Brendan side-stepped argument and meekly did as she desired. A boy on a bike turned up every day after school to hoover for an hour, and when he’d gone Rhoda went round again with the hoover like a demented housemaid until Brendan seized it from her and did it instead.

  Upstairs, the place was spotless despite the presence of the children, Alice and Katy, whom I frequently heard squawking and whining but thankfully seldom saw. When I crept into the bathroom to use the shower, I felt obliged to wipe everything down afterwards and pick my hairs out of the plughole.

  There were an awful lot of them. Stress. Though maybe some of them were Rhoda’s; for in the misted mirror my hair looked as thick as ever, sticking out in an obstinate black wodge even when wet. Untidy eyebrows. And the nose, which didn’t look so bad from the front. It was more obviously broken from the side: dished.

  I thought my face would have grown old and gaunt from fear. You’re dead, Herron! We know where you live! The shouts outside the courtroom rang in my ears. There was a girl in our old street with rusty scars from brow to chin. Fifty-seven stitches they said, her face turned to patchwork for dissing her dealer. Her eyes were lifeless, looking at nothing and nobody.

  But my face bore no scars; nothing to show for all those sleepless nights. It still wore its familiar look of startled belligerence, younger than its twenty-seven years. My face refused to look dead.

  I had lost weight, though. Not surprising, as I’d been unable to eat at Charlotte’s and since arriving at the Woolpack was living entirely on leftovers: stale rolls for breakfast, limp garnish and cold chips for lunch, and anything going at tea. There was plenty to choose from. The Woolpack portions were big, but not especially tasty. I missed acutely the quality
of Tzabo’s leftovers.

  I would have to tackle the meals. I wanted to do this job right. It was partly pride, partly the desire to brick up my fears with work. But Rhoda guarded her menus and her freezers with the resolution of an aggrieved bulldog. I would have to slide into the kitchen unnoticed, smoothly, like a newly sharpened knife.

  Because Rhoda, I decided, was as mad as a Stockport hatter. She couldn’t cope; that was why Brendan had employed me. I wondered if she was on anything, and tried the bathroom cabinet, but it was locked.

  “It’s going great,” I assured Charlotte on the pub phone on Thursday evening, in earshot of the farmers, who weren’t listening, and their dogs, who were. “Not haute cuisine, but there’s plenty to get to grips with.” Mainly the big oven, whose thermostat was all to cock. “Brendan’s very nice and helpful, and the tent’s dry, so far.” Although everything in it was clammily damp. Even with Arthur’s blankets, I shivered helplessly at night.

  “That’s good,” said Charlotte. “I’m glad it’s working out so well.” Her voice sounded hollow.

  “Charlotte? Everything okay?”

  “Yes... Well, no.” She sighed. “Somebody tried to break into the flat yesterday. They made a real mess of the door. I’ve got to get it replaced and new locks.”

  The fear wasn’t bricked up at all; it leapt out and choked me. For a moment I was back in my bedsit hearing the almighty percussion on the door and the huge cymbal clash of breaking glass.

  “Charlotte? Are you all right? Did they get in?”

  “It was the middle of the morning. I wasn’t there. And they didn’t get in: it’s a good strong door, thank heavens. They set the alarm off and must have scarpered.”

  “Were any of the other flats...?”

  “No. Just me.” She paused, and the unspoken words beat between us until I said them.

  “Charlotte? Who knew I was staying with you?”

  “Hugh, Daddy and Jane. That’s all. The neighbours might have seen you, but they wouldn’t know who you were.”

  “And I didn’t tell anyone.” But my brother Karl might well have guessed, and perhaps my sister Nicole, and possibly even my mother if she’d bothered to think about it. Charlotte had been my best friend since we met on a catering course, years ago. Where else would I seek refuge but with her?

  “It was just burglars,” said Charlotte unhappily.

  “Is that what the police say?”

  “Opportunists most likely, trying their luck.”

  “But they don’t know,” I said. “That’s bad.”

  “It’s not so bad. It’s just one of those things.”

  “Oh, Charlotte, I’m so sorry.”

  “Why? It’s only a door. It’s insured. It is a mess, though. And I lost a day’s business while I sorted it out. I’ve got two dozen stale Chelsea buns, and the rest.”

  “Freeze them, and I’ll buy them,” I offered. “I’ll turn them into bun and butter pudding.”

  Charlotte tried to make herself laugh. “All right. Don’t worry about me, Lannie. You’ve got enough to worry about.”

  I rang off, knowing I had betrayed Charlotte. I had brought her bad luck, or something worse. “Flying bloody Dutchman. Jonah,” I muttered as I returned to the kitchen.

  Rhoda squinted at me as if I were a cockroach just crawled out from under the fridge. “We’ve finished the strawberry cheesecake. I thought you’d pulled another one out to defrost?”

  I was too knotted up inside to be diplomatic. “No. It tastes of soap. People keep leaving half of it. We’ll say it’s off. It is off.”

  “Nobody’s complained!”

  “They’re too polite,” I said. “We’d better cancel the order. The Black Forest’s dodgy too.”

  “The Black Forest is fine!”

  “It’s whipped lard and sugar. Coats the tongue like machine oil. I’ll change the supplier.” I didn’t know any local suppliers. But puddings seemed a good place to start establishing my authority. I was an expert on puddings.

  Rhoda’s jaw was jutting as I took pity on her craziness and added, “The mains are good value, though. They just need tweaking for the lemongrass set. You know, shaved Parmesan and crossed chives on everything.”

  She sniffed. “That lot! When I went to the Coleridge in Fylington I thought a toddler had been messing with my food. Built everything into a tower and dribbled on it. I hope you’re not going to introduce those stupid little towers here,” she said fiercely.

  “No, they’re passé.”

  “I suppose after your flash Zara or whatever it was called–”

  “Tzabo.”

  “Well, what sort of food was that, anyway?”

  “Mediterranean-Malay fusion. Whatever took the chef’s fancy.” Klaus had been a twisted genius with ingredients. He was busy building himself a reputation.

  “Oh, very trendy, I’m sure. Well, I can tell you, that won’t go down well here.” Rhoda had gone very pale. She tightened her mouth and gripped the edge of the table. Then, diving into the lean-to, she pulled a strawberry cheesecake from the freezer and slammed it down on the draining board.

  “You’ll have to microwave it. Don’t cook it.” She looked as if she was about to throw up. “Children their bath,” she added shrilly, and clattered out.

  I looked at the cheesecake for a moment. I knew what was right and what was wrong, and I wasn’t going to start backing down now, not after all I’d been through.

  I was damned if I would let my customers eat soap. So I picked up the cheesecake and dropped it in the bin.