Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  ‘I’ve been round there to complain about our back bog window again. That’s the third time it’s gone in a month and what if anyone’d been sitting there—well, it’s not funny—it’d give anyone a heart attack, and that cheeky bugger Marcus came out with his arms crossed, in that way he has. He swore it wasn’t his football but her at thirty-eight insists she saw him climbing over the wall after it.’

  As for the parents, Duane and Jackie Skinner, they were, ‘Never in, and she’s every bit as bad as him. Only ever interested in a good time, only ever has been, and hasn’t she heard of contraception? Every year since they’ve been here she looks as if she’s pregnant, she walks as though she is even when she’s not, and when have you known that house without a baby bawling outside?’

  ‘Duane Skinner has never done a full day’s work in his life, and he’s not ashamed of the fact, oh no, he boasts about it down at the Queen’s Arms, but he’s got plenty of money when it comes to the booze. They’re never without the things they consider essential.’

  Ellie had chatted with Jackie Skinner on several occasions, on her way to work and back and once, one Christmas, she had nervously packed up a box of reject toys from Funorama and taken it round on Christmas Eve. She’d told Jackie Skinner, ‘No one’ll miss them and they might as well come here as go back to the factory and be thrown into some furnace.’

  ‘The kids’ll love these.’ Ellie had watched how Jackie Skinner seemed to turn into a child herself as she rifled through the box… you’d think she was staring at a treasure chest full of gold. Their house was a riot of decorations, some already torn loose from the sellotape and wafting about the room; a real Christmas tree stood at a precarious angle in one corner with a baby pulling at the chocolate baubles that decked the lower branches, and even the motor bike that made progress through the narrow hall well-nigh impossible had its handlebars twisted with tinsel. ‘They’re all new!’ exclaimed Jackie Skinner over the toys, her huge blue eyes bright with excitement, ‘and I can’t find nothing wrong with any of them.’

  ‘Well, I just thought…’ began Ellie, feeling embarrassment because her last-minute idea had been so well received. ‘I’m glad you like them. I quite often get the opportunity to pick up odds and ends, and now that I know you don’t mind I’ll make a point of looking out…’

  ‘Oh, I’d be ever so grateful.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Ellie, feeling terribly pleased.

  And then there had been that cold frosty night, eerily silent, when Ellie had been unable to sleep for the slap slap slap of Jackie’s mules as she wandered up and down the street. Ellie had caught sight of her last thing, when she’d been putting the milk bottles out on the step. She’d felt concern even then. Poor soul, wrapped in a blanket, traipsing up and down looking all huddled and worried.

  Eventually the weary slapping got too much for Ellie. She’d drawn on her dressing-gown, clutched her hot water bottle to her, picked up a torch and gone out to see.

  Jackie Skinner shuffled eagerly towards her. ‘It’s Duane,’ she cried. ‘We had a row earlier and he just went off… said he was never coming back. I’ve been up the Queen’s and I’ve been down the Boot but nobody there has seen him.’

  ‘Oh, Jackie my love.’ Ellie shivered in the piercing cold. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go and wait indoors by the fire? It’s brass monkey weather out here and you rushing up and down isn’t going to help. I’ll come and sit with you for a while if it’s company you’re wanting.’

  ‘I can’t go back in. It’s no use, I have to stay on the watch.’ And Jackie Skinner, thin yet pregnant, had worn a look of such total despair it made Ellie shiver more than the cold. Her metal curlers seemed shot with the frost, and the hairnet full of holes let through clumps of peroxide hair the exact colour of the lifeless stars.

  ‘Well, I’ll walk with you for a while then. Hang on a minute and I’ll go and brew us a cuppa and bring it out.’

  ‘Ta, Mrs Freeman.’

  ‘Oh no, you must call me Ellie.’

  ‘That’s a pretty name. Is it short for Elinor?’

  ‘Yes, yes it is,’ lied Ellie. She hated her real name of Elspeth.

  So they huddled there talking out on the step, drinking their scalding tea, and they weren’t halfway through it before the lean, lank figure of Duane Skinner, meandering from side to side, came out of the shadows and slurped towards them.

  Jackie Skinner had instantly returned her cup to Ellie’s frozen hands and with a wild yelp of joyous recognition, she and her slippers and her dowdy blanket had gone shooting off up the road; where the two met the shadows came together, and stayed there resting in each other’s arms. Who was supporting whom was hard to say…

  And the next morning, to Ellie’s amazement, came this Thank You note through the door, and a tiny little lighthouse with A Gift from Blackpool on it.

  Yes, Ellie considers that Duane and Jackie Skinner, so hopeless and so hopeful, are a most deserving couple. And she’ll be doing the rest of Nelson Street a favour, also, because everyone will be thrilled to see the back of them.

  Dwarfy Sugden is a different proposition entirely. He lived with his tiny, twittering, bird-like mother until she died… he never married, never had a girlfriend—and it was whispered that he took women’s underwear off lines. He was called Dwarfy, Ellie supposes, because the man was so huge, in width as well as in height. ‘Never all there, never quite right in the head,’ is what people used to say about Dwarfy, and he did not come from Nelson Street but from Gatby Terrace, which ran along beside the coalyard.

  Ellie has always suspected that Dwarfy knew exactly what he was at, that his performances were all acts, designed either to draw attention to himself or in order to get away with murder.

  His expression is that of a martyr. He wears his hair long, like a Red Indian, over the collar of his old Army greatcoat, and he walks, sometimes, when it suits him, with an exaggerated limp. To hear Dwarfy approaching in the dark is to hear a dragging, hollow sound, and his shadow rises and falls against redbrick walls in the street-lights.

  Dwarfy Sugden is a lurker in dark doorways, and a flasher, and the police, considering him harmless after all these years, have given up trying to contain him. Keeping him locked away is no answer, and there is no corrective treatment yet for his numerous and distressing little problems.

  Ellie thinks that the first-floor apartment might well suit Dwarfy. It wouldn’t really matter where he lived because he would always need to roam about, oh yes, to try and restrain Dwarfy would be a cruel thing to do. There are lots of dark corners, alleyways and angles around and about Gabriella’s Waterside apartment block. And he would soon fill those vast bedrooms with the strange collections with which he fills his barrow… Too much space would not intimidate Dwarfy, he would utilize it or ignore it, in his very own individual manner.

  In her carefully composed letter to Barker, Base, Trial-Cody, Ellie stresses the sadness of Dwarfy’s predicament, living all alone and on the breadline like that, with nobody around to talk to or understand him. ‘I think he would enjoy living near the water,’ she writes. ‘He would enjoy all the activity. He could find a seat, eat his dinner and watch it all go by and I think it would do him good.’

  Ellie smiles happily to herself as she considers the most suitable residents with whom to fill her last vacant flat.

  Ellie was at school with Fern and Blanche Peters; she has shared the odd fag in the bike sheds with them in her day. They weren’t there for long and she doubts that Malc would even remember them, for they were quiet and drab, stooped a little and had thin, pointed features. They didn’t stand out, in fact they always seemed to be trying to get away and not be there. Someone said their childhood was very sad but nobody knew any of the details. It was true that Fern had a terrible stutter and used to flinch a lot, while Blanche had a knicker-wetting habit, even at fourteen.

  They were close, as sisters, even then. They always went round together.

  Ellie doesn’t
know them to speak to any more… well, they are rarely about in the day, they hang about Lime Street station and the gambling arcades in the city. But she knows where they live, still in their old home in the high windy tower block on Sefton Hill. And Ellie only knows that because Margot mentioned it years ago: ‘Couple of old pros, you’d never have thought it, would you, not after what they were like at school. Weren’t you in the same class as that Blanche once, Ellie?’

  Ellie did not like to admit that once she’d gone round with the Peters sisters. She answered, ‘Yes, I remember Blanche, and nobody wanted to sit next to her because she stank.’

  Margot looked affronted. ‘Well, let’s hope she’s got her act together by now. She must have done, surely, to be doing what she’s doing. Men wouldn’t like… And there’s all sorts of trouble in the block because of their drunken parties and that parade of sordid louts who line up outside their door. It’s terrible, Edna Rawlings at number eighty told me when I was speaking to her yesterday. The Peters sisters live next door and she says that some nights they get no sleep at all. And then there’s always the fear of fire… it’s not so much Fern and Blanche, it’s the people they attract, you see.’

  ‘These are old acquaintances of mine who need a hand up in the world because of an appalling childhood,’ Ellie writes now. ‘So you can see how absolutely essential it is that nobody knows who owns the apartments, and that all sorts of precautions must be taken in order to keep my name out of it.’

  Ellie has not bothered with decorations this year; hers is a different kind of Christmas but the excitement she feels is that of an expectant child… she almost feels that she still believes in magic. There is great and enormous pleasure to be had, over the quietness of Christmas, in going back to the solicitor’s letter and amending it, just ever so slightly. Sometimes Ellie gets up in the night, opens a packet of cream crackers, covers them with cheese spread and pores over the letter with a pen in her hand, for hours. She is pleased with it by the time she comes to send it. She thinks she has conveyed just enough to get her false motives accepted, and she has stressed, again and again, the importance of remaining an anonymous benefactor.

  With only good in her heart.

  Every week Ellie keeps her appointments at the Plaza Lifestyle Centre and comes out feeling better than ever in spite of her increasing size. Janey, her trainer, says she can’t understand it. ‘I wish you’d take home one of our special diet sheets,’ she whines, but Ellie is perfectly happy. She even has a go on the weights in the gym, and has been into Liverpool to buy outsize clothes to accommodate her new and expanding figure—she’s found a special shop that deals only in size sixteen and up. She chooses very loud colours, and she is especially fond of a cape which she thinks makes her look like Margaret Rutherford. When she is wearing it, she flies along on top of the world.

  She buys magazines like Homes and Gardens and Country Life; she dreams about her Georgian house. She tries not to go near it again as she doesn’t want to go in and tempt fate until it is really hers. When the right time comes she wants to go round it and savour it all on her own.

  By the end of January, Ellie has paid the four deposits—one for each flat and the other for number twenty-eight Ridley Place. One evening she takes a chance and goes to the Waterside but cannot get in. She sees that the strips across the windows outside saying For Sale are missing, and the bold Sold signs in bright red already replace them. She rubs her hands with glee and chuckles fatly to herself.

  And then she decides that the time has come to accept Gabriella’s kind invitation for lunch, and she agrees to meet Malcolm at the Canonwaits offices in order ‘to get things straightened out’.

  ‘How are you?’ asks Malc on the phone, as he always does. ‘I am perfectly happy, Malc, much to my own surprise. At last I seem to have found a new interest.’

  ‘Oh, that’s marvellous! And might I ask what?’

  ‘Furnishings and fabrics,’ says Ellie brightly.

  ‘Oh, you mean you’ve gone back to your patchwork quilt.’

  ‘Something along those lines, Malc,’ says Ellie, tucking into a jar of peanut butter with her finger, and her eyes are twinkling. ‘Something like that.’

  28

  INTERESTINGLY, OVER THE LAST few years the Skinners have obviously acquired a selection of animals.

  The tip-up truck has come to rest on the newly-laid cobbled area outside the Waterside and a grey-furred dog, a cross between a lurcher and an Alsatian, lollops out of the truck’s driving seat, slides between the dangerous metal slithers of the half-opened door and lazily cocks its leg against one of the glossy bollards.

  Inside in the hall, past the front doors—which have been propped open by a stout iron washing-line post—is a homemade hutch with God knows what living inside it; only its smell is relevant here, and the structure is held together by ugly pieces of four-by-two with nails spiked ferociously through them.

  Ellie follows Gabriella inside. It is the second Saturday in March and they have just finished lunching together. Since January this has become a regular habit. This time Gabriella chose a seafood restaurant with sawdust on the floor, rigging strung across the ceiling, and decking the walls were lobster nets with strange pieces of cork and coloured balls hanging inside. Throughout their meal a muted quartet in pirate costume sang sea shanties to an accordion. Gabriella has asked Ellie back for a coffee and it is her very first chance to see the result of her carefully planned action at first-hand.

  ‘Absolutely ghastly things have been going on,’ confided Gabriella when they arrived at the restaurant and first sat down. She leaned forward and fiddled nervously with pieces of hardened candle grease. ‘And nobody can quite understand how it’s possible. We have written a joint letter to the developers… not only the residents of the Waterside but the residents of all the other new houses and maisonettes overlooking the river. Well, we were all given to understand… The owners of the Marina are on our side, too. You just wouldn’t believe the trouble it’s all caused.’ Gabriella looked around furtively before she confesses, ashamed of her weakness, ‘I haven’t been sleeping.’

  ‘What has happened?’ Ellie looked suitably shocked. She had been wondering when Gabriella was going to mention it.

  ‘There were three empty flats,’ said Gabriella, trying to explain without losing her cool. ‘They were behind all the others in being sold because the contract for the interiors had been given to another firm… I don’t know why… and that firm tried to cheat the developers by cutting down on the cost. Anyway, the long and the short of it was that these three flats were not completed with the rest and it was only just before Christmas that they were put up for sale. Everyone believed, quite naturally, that they would be bought by right-minded people.’

  ‘Well, naturally. They must have been expensive.’

  ‘Oh, they were. Very expensive. They were advertised in all the right places, you know, magazines and supplements, but everyone knew they’d be snapped up quickly.’

  ‘There wasn’t a waiting list, then?’

  ‘No, funnily enough, the developers were embarrassed about the mess they’d got into with the interiors so it didn’t work quite like that. They had to take them off the market, you see, and I suppose they didn’t want to be plagued by unhappy customers…’

  ‘Who did buy them then?’ asked Ellie smoothly, picking up a bread stick and snapping off the end.

  Gabriella chewed at a raw carrot and stared challengingly at Ellie. ‘There’s an obnoxious family on the ground floor—the weirdest, dirtiest old man you ever saw on the first, and a couple of whores have moved in at the top.’

  ‘I don’t believe it! How could people like that afford the Waterside?’

  Gabriella shook a well-groomed head. She wore a crisply-fresh cotton headscarf on the back of her hair, and huge anchor earrings that tugged at her tiny earlobes. A diamante fish sparkled on the breast of her wide-ribbed jumper. She looked slightly French this morning with those black fish-net s
tockings. ‘That’s what everyone’s asking. That’s what we’ve asked the developers, too, but they say they’ve washed their hands of the place, it’s not their concern any more. They swear that they don’t know, either. All the properties are out of their hands and all the agreements have been signed. We’re still looking into it all, of course.’

  ‘Well of course you would, you’d have to,’ said Ellie, who spread over the whole of the little wooden chair so that the embroidered hem of her scarlet smock swept the sawdust.

  ‘I must say,’ said Gabriella, coming out of her misery for a moment, ‘you look absolutely wonderful.’

  ‘I feel good at the moment, yes, I do,’ Ellie smiled.

  ‘Living alone must be good for you!’ joked Gabriella, watching as her seafood platter came over on a round wooden breadboard. The waiter wore blue and white knee-length breeches, and from there he was bare all the way down to his thonged sandals.

  ‘There is something to be said for it, although I am not used to it yet, not after twenty-one years of marriage.’

  Gabriella stared at the sucker of a squid and stuck it hard with her fork.

  Ellie said, ‘But I have put on weight.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Gabriella, ‘but it seems to sort of suit you, you know. You look better for it.’

  ‘How’s the gallery going?’

  ‘Have you ever been in to have a look round? Have you ever seen it?’ Gabriella’s eyes lit up and Ellie could see that what Malc kept telling her was true, that along with her apartment, and Malc, this was another pride and joy.

  ‘Once, a while ago, but I wouldn’t mind going again.’

  ‘We’ll have coffee at the flat and go there this afternoon then,’ said Gabriella happily. And then she amended that to, ‘If Malc’s not back.’

  ‘He used to play squash on a Saturday,’ remarked Ellie.

  ‘Yes, he still likes his squash—and I encourage him to go. I don’t want him going all middle-aged and unhealthy on me!’