“Dominic,” my mother said, “just take the dog for a little walk. See if your friends would like to go with you.”
“Not the dog,” Mrs Norris said, adding a shrill sound that came nowhere near a laugh. “My Herbert. Can’t someone keep him off me for a while?”
She was swiping at her jacket more wildly now, flailing at her shoulder as if to dislodge some object none of us could see. “Dominic,” my mother called over the incessant barking, “will you and your friends do as you’re told.”
As Jim and Bobby stood up like contestants at awkwardness, Mrs Norris lurched to her feet, flinging her chair away with such force that it tripped over the kerb and fell on its back on the grass verge. “He shouldn’t feel like that,” she cried. “I don’t know what’s done it. He’s making me afraid like him.”
She began to dodge about beneath the nearest tree, staying in its shadow. She was flapping at herself with both hands now, and I thought she looked desperate to ward off some kind of intrusion she was terrified to touch. My parents hurried to her, and my father reached for her arm. “Come in the house, Mrs Norris,” my mother said.
I’m sure she was being solicitous, but I felt as if she was anxious to shut away the spectacle for the sake of the neighbourhood. Did I see my father’s hand recoil for a moment from touching Mrs Norris? As he grasped her arm I was distracted by an odd sound—a microscopic clattering. It came from the tree, and I could have fancied that I glimpsed parts of the bark growing surreptitiously restless, an activity that swarmed up the trunk as if some form of life had taken refuge behind or among the scales of wood. I told myself I was seeing the shadows of leaves, and in seconds the movements vanished into the foliage. Winston had fallen silent as my parents ushered Mrs Norris towards our house, but he renewed his clamour when a bird flew away from the treetop with a screech that sounded close to articulate, not as birdlike as I would have preferred. “Take him right away, Dominic,” my mother said.
As Jim’s parents followed mine, Bobby’s father stood up. “I’ll go and phone the quack. She needs some help, your friend.”
Mrs Norris gave him a bewildered blink as he headed for the main road and the nearest phone box. “I’m all right now,” she protested, contradicting herself by repeating it several times. Jim’s mother and mine coaxed her into the house while our fathers lingered in the garden, and Bobby’s mother did her best to be involved by taking Mrs Norris her festive mug. As Jim and Bobby and I made for the railway bridge with the suddenly subdued dog I heard my father telling Jim’s “I hope you don’t still think it’s nothing. We need to think what we should do about their teacher.”
11 - The Prints
I don’t think any of us said much while we were out with the dog. I kept him away from the main roads, where the traffic might have unnerved him, but I didn’t venture near the graveyard either. People at street parties made sympathetic noises at the sight of us walking the dog, and quite a few invited us to join them. Jim looked tempted, but Bobby was committed to our mission, such as it was. We didn’t need to tell one another that we were anxious to find out what was happening to Mrs Norris, and in less than half an hour we turned back.
Ambulances rarely used their sirens in those days. You might think they were showing respect for the sick. When we reached the bridge we saw an ambulance parked just beyond it, as close to our street as the party tables would allow. Two men in white were guiding Mrs Norris to the open back doors, while my parents and Jim’s followed them at the pace of a funeral procession, miming concern on behalf of all the neighbours. The moment they saw us Jim’s father and mine gestured us away, but Mrs Norris called “Dominic, will you come here a minute?” My father threw his hands wide and his responsibility away, and I gave Jim the lead to hold while I hurried under the bridge.
Somebody had brushed most of the dog hairs off Mrs Norris’s suit. She looked calmer or at any rate more somnolent, though her eyes were fluttering a little. I suspect she had been given a tranquilliser. “Thank you for catching him,” she said. “There’s a good boy.”
She appeared to be trying to grasp a thought, and I hoped she wasn’t about to embarrass me in front of everyone by paying me a penny. My face had grown hotter than the summer afternoon by the time she said “Will you take him home?”
“How can Dominic get in?” my father objected. “If you give him your key he’ll have to give it back.”
I suppose he didn’t like the notion of my visiting her in the kind of hospital he thought she might end up in, but she said “Mrs Brough next door has my spare one.”
“Pardon me, but what are you expecting him to do with your dog?”
“Just put him in the house, Dominic. Mrs Brough will see to him. She always does when Herbert and I are away.”
“As long as you’re sure,” my father said, though she was plainly uncertain about a good deal. As the men helped her into the ambulance he called “I hope you’ll be home soon.”
The driver’s colleague stayed with her. The ambulance veered back and forth between the pavements several times before it was able to turn towards the bridge. Jim and Bobby had joined us, and as the ambulance sped away at last I said “Who’s coming with me to her house?”
“I will,” my mother said.
I hadn’t meant an adult, but her presence might be reassuring, even if I preferred not to admit that to myself. I was about to prompt Bobby and Jim—I wanted them to see whatever might be at the Norris house—when my mother said “The rest of you can go back to the party. We shouldn’t be long.”
Jim headed for the table readily enough, and Bobby tramped after him. Jim’s parents lingered as if they wanted a word with mine, but presumably I was the hindrance. Once they left us alone I took the chance to murmur “Dad?”
“No point in worrying about the lady, son. She’ll be looked after however she needs to be.”
This wasn’t the whole of my concern. “Why didn’t you want to touch her?”
“Who says I didn’t?”
His vehemence disconcerted me so much that I wished I didn’t have to answer. “I just thought you looked as if you didn’t like to.”
“I’ve never heard such rubbish. I’ve no reason to be scared of catching what she’s got. I didn’t look like that, did I, Mary? I know what’s true and it’ll take a lot more than the likes of her to make me start doubting it. Just you make sure you don’t pick up that sort of thing from this teacher of yours, son. Tell me and your mother if he starts saying anything he shouldn’t.”
“Come along, Dominic,” my mother said, though only when it was clear that he’d finished.
As soon as we were past the bridge, which would have amplified my voice, I said “Dad looked like that, didn’t he, mum?”
“Mrs Norris isn’t quite right in her head just now, son. It’ll be losing her husband and all the things your teacher told her, but some people don’t like being near anyone who’s in that kind of state.” I took her to be trying to defend my father. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen him flinch from touching Mrs Norris, but I could think of nothing more to say as I followed her to the Norris house. While Cherry Lane was clear of tables, a party was in progress round the corner. My mother was opening the gate, which was liberally spattered with bird droppings that put me in mind of panic, when a large woman in a politely floral dress left the nearest table. “Excuse me,” she said, “is that the Norris dog?”
“Yes, it’s Winston,” my mother said.
“Mrs Norris isn’t in just now. I live next door,” the woman said with limited enthusiasm.
“Are you Mrs Brough? Mrs Norris says you look after him.”
“I want nothing to do with that noisy creature. We’ve been kept awake half the night these last weeks, what with her shouting and him.”
My curiosity outstripped my shyness. “Was she shouting at Winston?”
“Tell me who else she’d be talking to.” Though the woman couldn’t quite ignore me, she directed the remark at my mother. “A
nd she answers herself too,” she complained. “She just puts on a voice as well.”
Before I could ask the question to which I was afraid I already knew the answer, my mother said “So aren’t you Mrs Brough?”
“I thought I’d made that obvious. You still want her, do you?” When my mother confirmed it the woman marched back to the party. “Mrs Brough,” she called, “you’re wanted at yours.”
The woman who plodded to find us was a head shorter than her neighbour but outdid her in width. “How can I help?” she said, and less eagerly “Is that Winston?”
“It’s him right enough,” my mother said, which the dog corroborated with a yap. “Mrs Norris has been taken off to hospital.”
“The poor thing. Do they know what’s the matter?”
“I think she may be having a bit of a breakdown.”
“That would explain it.” Before I could bring myself to ask what it explained, the woman said “Tell her she’ll be in our prayers.”
“I will if I see her.” My mother was making it plain that she thought Mrs Brough should as well. “She told us you look after Winston,” she said.
“I’ll have to. Can you leave him inside for now?” Mrs Brough said, reaching in her handbag. “I’ll let you in.”
“Will he be all right on his own?”
“Once he’s in his basket with his bone he’s never any trouble.” All the same, Mrs Brough paused on the way to adding “I’m sure he’ll behave now there’s nobody to disturb him.”
I wondered if she should just mean Mrs Norris. She waddled up the path, past the three clay pots full of weeds and dead flowers, and used both small hands to twist the key in the tarnished lock. “I’ll come and see you later, Winston,” she said, stooping to pat him as she retreated past the gate. “Shut the door of his room and give the front one a good slam on your way out, Mrs…”
“Sheldrake.”
“She’s talked about you, Mrs Sheldrake. You’re the only one round here who’ll listen to some of the things she keeps saying. Are you from her church?”
“I’m afraid we aren’t,” my mother said with no regret at all.
“Well then, you’re a true Christian.”
Perhaps Mrs Brough was eager to return to the party, since she waddled away at speed. As I followed my mother up the splintered weedy path I saw that every door along the hall was wide open, as well as all those visible up the stairs, and yet I felt that some kind of darkness was lying in wait beyond the front door. The bicycle propped against the wall at the foot of the stairs was home to several spiders now. The buttoned overcoat still hung by its gaping neck from the hook on the wall, and I told myself that nothing was poised to crawl out of the collar or the sleeves, though the coat looked less empty than dormant. “Do you know where the dog goes?” my mother said.
“He lives in the front, mum.”
She strode into the front room but halted on the threshold. “Dominic.”
It wasn’t a rebuke, just an expression of dismay. I could only wonder which aspect of the room had distressed her most, unless its entire state had. The right-hand curtain was heaped beneath the window, presumably having been torn off its rings by a bid to let more light in. Photographs were strewn across the sofa from one of the albums precariously stacked on its arm, while the butts piled at least an inch high in the overflowing ashtray on the squat table looked grey with dust as well as ash. I saw my mother frown at the cards pinned to the wall above the mantelpiece, expressions of condolence from nearly a year ago and greetings from last Christmas. She retrieved a card that lay among the ashes on the hearth and, having shaken it over the cold grey mass in the fireplace, stood the faded Santa on the mantel. “I’ll come round and give her a hand when she’s home,” she said mostly to herself. “I shouldn’t interfere when she isn’t here to see.”
I wondered if my mother didn’t want to be by herself in the house. Certainly she sounded urgent when she said “Bone, Winston. Bone.”
She lifted the chewed rubber object in the basket with the toe of her shoe, and the dog ambled to it readily enough once I’d unclipped his lead. As soon as he curled up in the basket my mother headed for the hall. “Good boy. Stay,” she said, and I was hurrying after her when I faltered. “Mum, what’s this?”
Was she reluctant to turn around? She looked impatient when she did. “Mrs Norris must have been looking at memories, Dominic.”
“I know they’re her photos. I mean what’s happened to that one.”
I saw my mother expecting me to pick it up and show her, but I didn’t want to touch it. With a breath that sounded like a declaration of an effort, or else relinquishing a word she might have uttered, she tramped to the sofa and peered at the topmost of the scattered photographs. “It’s Mr Norris before you knew him.”
“I know that, mum, but what are those?”
She squinted at the marks at the edge of the photograph, which showed the smiling Mr Norris in his army uniform. “They’ll be where Mrs Norris was holding it,” she said. “It shows how much it must mean to her.”
She made for the hall at once, but I lingered for a last glance. I supposed the marks could have been left by a pair of thumbs, though they seemed too large not just for Mrs Norris but for her husband. If she’d been overcome by emotion while gazing at the photograph, perhaps that could even explain why the marks were as indented as they appeared to be—so vigorously embossed on the glossy cardboard that the whorls of fingerprints were faintly visible—except that the prints weren’t merely blurred; in fact, they weren’t blurred enough. They looked as though the fingers that had made them were composed of a multitude of filaments that were trying to form the prints. While I couldn’t put it into words then, the marks suggested a desperate attempt to cling to the photograph and what it showed. I fled into the hall, where I hung the lead over the end of the banister. “Be good, Winston,” I called, and as I closed the door I felt as if I might be shutting not just him in the room.
When my mother slammed the front door I was afraid this would disturb him, but he didn’t start to bark until she’d shut the gate, and then gave only a token yap. It sounded like the way he’d greeted Mrs Brough, but undermined by a nervous whine. “Hurry up, Dominic. We’ve done what you promised,” my mother said and made for the railway bridge. I was tempted to go to the front window, but told myself I might rouse Winston. As I ran after my mother I was able to believe that all the voices I could hear were in the street or on television, not in the Norris house. The blurred one must belong to a broadcaster on a set that was drifting off the station, even if it sounded as though it was struggling to shape itself into a voice—as though it didn’t have much of a mouth.
12 - The Confrontation
“Well, I don’t think much of his Latin man.”
I was following my parents away from Mr Mcintosh’s form room. “Mum,” I muttered.
“I’m sorry but I don’t, Dominic. I’m just glad he isn’t taking you for anything important.”
The teacher’s lecture about Latin hadn’t impressed her, then. Perhaps she’d been preoccupied with his beery smell. He’d spent several minutes in demonstrating to my parents how Latin hid in words they used before he conceded my progress was adequate. “Maybe he’ll need it,” my father said now, “if he goes to university.”
It took me a few moments to grasp that he was talking about me, envisaging a future I couldn’t imagine, though years later it caught up with me. So did the insight that my parents must have been as nervous that evening as I was. I just wanted them to be proud of me and not to embarrass me, but they had Mr Noble on their minds. I should have known that when they left him until last, but I was busy being satisfied with how most of the evening had gone. Brother Titmuss praised my enquiring mind—“he likes finding out how the world is put together.” Mr Jensen proved to be content with my sporting abilities and in particular my sporting attitude, and took time to share my father’s zeal for the Everton team, which put me in mind of the crowd I
sometimes heard across the graveyard. Brother Monrahan enthused about my mathematical skills, which emboldened me to say red-faced that I wouldn’t have been so good except for him. Mr Clement said my French was passable but suggested that I could have learned more in France, which reminded me how much I’d learned that hardly anybody knew. Mr Bushell felt I needed to work on my sense of how geography dictated ways a place was used, and even this brought the moonlit field to mind. Brother Mayle was happy with my knowledge of the Bible and hoped I would model my life on it, a principle that made me feel uncomfortable, close to hypocritical. Brother Stimson said I wasn’t yet an artist and advised me to focus more on beauty, to find it wherever I could; I wonder if he’s still looking, dead as he is. Mr Askew declared that I was more eloquent on paper than in class but allowed this might be characteristic of writers. “I hear Sheldrake has written some fiction,” he said. “I understand it may not be for our magazine, but that’s not to say he shouldn’t keep it up.” Of all the comments I heard at the parents’ evening this was the one I valued most, and I was letting it repeat itself inside my head when we came in sight of Mr Noble’s room.
Jim and his parents were standing in the corridor. “We let someone else go ahead,” his father murmured as we joined them. “We said we’d all go in together.”
Jim stared at me, and I saw he knew as little of the plan as I did. “Will he see us all at once?” my mother doubted aloud.
“He’s letting people wait in his room. We want to be there so we can all hear what’s said.”
Mr Bailey was making for the form room when my father caught his arm. “Who wants to go first?”
“Maybe you should. You know the woman he sent off her rocker.”
It was clear that our mothers hadn’t been kept informed either. “You aren’t going to make a scene at their school,” Mrs Bailey protested.
“We’ve just got a few questions to ask,” Mr Bailey said. “We’ll be polite.”
The Searching Dead Page 11