Shadow Play (8 page)

 

L
ittle Sylvie's mother was further up the road, trying to fight her way through a barrier of parked cars, three deep, no room for a leg in between. She was late to begin with, stopped at the Tube because of a football fight, then the bus stopped for the same reason. All transport became coy on football nights. She was panicking a bit but not greatly until now. She knew Margaret would take care of Sylvie but everything seemed to take longer and longer, and the child was in Margaret's house. She had tried to phone, but there had been a queue, so she hadn't done and now it was half-past eight. Never mind. She click-clacked down the road, on the long walk from the Underground, wondering when her husband would be home, looking forward to that, and then halfway home, at the back of her head, she heard the child screaming in the way only her own child could scream. She felt it in her bloodstream: the pain in her chest like swallowed razor blades as she began to run, stumbling with shopping. She ran and she fell down in the dark alleyway between Margaret Mellors' and the house alongside. She was sure, from the distance, she had heard the child scream: she could feel it. Crashing through the broom handles which struck out from a rubbish cart in the alley, knocking her hip and all the shopping against the brickwork, she pushed into Margaret's house without ceremony, still hearing screams.
Where are you? Where are you, my love?
She was panting with the effort, but there she was, Sylvie the tyrant, in Margaret's arms, in front of the television.

She was lying there, the next best thing to unconscious, with her arms around Margaret's neck and one of her feet twitching. There was ravelled knitting at their feet, a jumper sleeve poking from a bag, the child clutching rather than resting, and the mother was jealous. Then she saw the merest suggestion of tears at the corner of the old dear's eyes. Oh, she must be tired, the inevitable price of rendering Sylvie so quiet. But for all the reassurance of the scene, despite the comforting smell of powder, oranges, cocoa and the bright light, the mother could still feel something pulsing in her veins. She threw a couple of pound coins on the sink, made effusive thanks and removed her child with speed. Sylvie was sullen, almost catatonic, her little feet making leaden sounds on the lino of the kitchen floor and the passage outside.

Only when she was inside her own door, did the mother recall that the trolley against which she had collided on her way in had not been any sort of obstruction on the way out. It had been a bit like a pram. The memory flitted through her mind in a brief and inconsequential passage.

 

‘C
ome in, Margaret, why don't you? Every other bugger does. All your friends.'

There was his whisky on the table, dusty from passage in the trolley, now out of sight in the yard behind. Logo's skin was as ashen as the dust on his shoes. He had taken off his jacket, revealing the drab, worn, black clothes he bought from second-hand shops, and Margaret had time to wonder how it was he always managed to keep up the appearance of being clean when his clothes were so ingrained with dirt.

‘Listen, Logo, I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. Oh, she's a trial that child, she really is, but I thought she was tired out, and then I gave her something to eat, and then, I sat down, dropped off, I suppose, and she was gone. I was calling to her, thought she was upstairs in my place, and soon as I knew, she was upstairs in yours. Come on, you know you only have to push the door. So I'm sorry, but you shouldn't have done that. Wasn't her fault.'

He turned his big eyes on her.

‘Done what?' he questioned. ‘Done what, exactly? She done nothing.
You
did plenty.'

She sat heavily, exuding her clean dust, making a whoomphing sound, which was part chair, part a sigh of exhaustion. She settled herself into the chair and curled her fingers over the ends of the greasy, cloth-covered arms. She showed no signs of tension, but looked as an old woman might look after a doze, adjusting herself into the realms of dignity as if she hadn't been caught napping. Or been frightened.

‘Oh don't be silly,' she said comfortably. ‘All the poor thing did was wander out of my place when I dozed off and wander into yours, she can push the door as well as anyone. She turns on the lights, 'cos she's just about high enough, and has a look around. Then I came and found her, but by that time, you'd frightened her to death, you daft bastard. Why did you have to do it? Flapping your hands at her like that, was it a game?' She spoke as she always did, never raising her voice or changing tone. She could have calmed a herd of wild horses, and out of the corner of her eye she watched him relax and hand her a grubby glass, half-full of his precious nectar.

‘I don't know,' she continued, in her grumbling, placating tone. ‘All the years I've known you and I've never been upstairs in your house. Wouldn't want to either, looking at the rest of it. Never did have cause to go further than the kitchen. All the best parties are in kitchens. Where everything happens. Kitchens. About the only important room in a house. Yours could do with a bit of a clean.'

She stretched out her legs to prove her point. ‘Ooh, this is nice,' she said, raising her glass to him with a well-rehearsed wink. ‘Very nice.' She was choosing not to notice how dirty the glass really was, but whisky would save her from the germs, and she wasn't frightened of them anyway. You swallowed them as an infant and you were therefore preserved for six generations. Bleach and disinfectant featured in her own home, but she never really expected it to have the same dominion in another's.

If she was frightened, and she was, severely frightened, she did not show it. Margaret had kept from her husband the knowledge of his own terminal illness for two years; and she had always played games with children, so she knew how to pretend. She did not tell Logo that she had followed Sylvie into the house, not once but twice, had gone upstairs the first time and into all the rooms until she had found her hiding. Sitting in apparent ease now, it seemed better to say nothing; it was cold, so she drank. Two glasses a day, and she loved him as ever, but now, she was beginning to see what the neighbours meant. The child had been terrified: it wasn't fair to do that to a child; she felt ashamed of him.

 

G
eoffrey Bailey found his room on the third floor. Inside his locker was his own bottle of Scotch, from which he poured a large measure into the tooth mug. Nothing else was his own, of course, it was provided by the Establishment, which left him the freedom of the guest to abuse it. He rubbed his thinning hair as he looked in the mirror. He could colour it purple in here and no-one would notice. The smile faded: he had been surprisingly well fed for a canteen service, as he had been the night before. He might nip out to a pub with Ryan later to watch his black eye fade. The swelling seemed to diminish whenever he smiled, which was often.

It wasn't even late, half-nine of a Thursday evening, and he was pleasantly tired, stimulated by learning.

He could be going home on weekend leave tomorrow, he had that option. On balance, he thought he wouldn't.

It wasn't a Rest Home, but it was a rest. And it was Ryan's turn to buy a round.

 

T
he panda car cruised down Legard Street rather faster than usual. It turned right at the end and began a dizzying circumlocution of the streets, left, left, right, right, a progress which seemed to owe nothing at all to the military precision of a prescribed route. It sped down Seven Sisters, looking neither left nor right, in search of the nearest exit which would take it round the back. There was no point pausing here in a car with a stripe down the side: observing the ladies of the night had to be covert or not at all. The punters might not notice a train bearing down on them, but the girls doubled up and disappeared into the black of the road itself, leaving male faces staring out of car windows on the third, desperate time round.

The policemen in the panda car looked straight ahead. It was an unacknowledged fact that neither was interested in finding anyone whose behaviour would necessitate arrest. Even after an hour and a half, they needed another five minutes with one another to formulate a conversation which was as necessary as it was difficult. Both of them hoped it would be brief. Past Seven Sisters, where the unsuitably shod women had run like athletes, sharp right, to the back of the still-lit stadium, all gone safely home, the car radio silent to their mutual amazement, the moment now riper for a talk, although neither could be described as a talker.

‘Shit, I don't believe it, nothing's happening, nothing at all. Football out, all gone, nothing. Is it always like this?'

‘No.' Police Constable Michael was less reticent than most, which still made him, on matters emotional, very reticent indeed with his fellow man. ‘It's usually different, but it's early yet. We don't break till twelve, pubs aren't shut yet, there's no telling.' Suddenly he pulled the car into the side of the road, wound down the window and fished in his pocket for a packet of fags. The car rocked as he explored.

‘Whoops,' he muttered, checking the brake, still fishing as his huge body arched against the wheel, the better to dig into his back uniform pocket. ‘In here somewhere, everything is, everything's always the wrong end of your bloody trousers.'

The youth beside him rocked with mirth and the ice of awkwardness melted into something like slush. The cigarettes, when finally produced, came in the form of a battered pack of ten, all squashed and so pathetic in appearance, it was difficult to fathom what they might achieve. Probationer Williams, a lad from Wales, did not really smoke at all, once a year, Mum, but this would be an exception. His mouth hurt still, especially when he laughed.

‘Looks like my cock on a good day, this does,' said Michael, staring at his cigarette, bent in the middle, a poor, pathetic thing, held between his fingers by the filter, smoke drifting drearily from the other end. ‘Needs rewiring. And what's the matter with you then?'

The youth to his left took a drag on his fag and trembled. He was a good-looking lad, Michael thought, but he'd be useless in the ring where you couldn't let nerves show, awful. Might be just as bad if they had to get out of this car and show muscle to a group of youths on the other side of the stadium, fresh out of the football match and the front door of the pub, all crazy shouting and wanting to slap.

‘Look,' said the youth, breathing in the fag smoke which clearly made him as sick as an over-rich cigar. ‘Look, about the other night …'

‘What night?'

‘The other night, you know, whenever it was. God, ages ago, at least a week. Well, I thought you were all right. You know.'

‘Oh, that. Never mind about that. I wasn't going to tell, was I? Why should I?' Michael became almost belligerent, chewing on the cigarette rather than smoking it. ‘Might have been different if you'd hit her, but you'd none of you done that, and no, I don't want the story.' Williams was puzzled. He'd expected Michael to want to know how it started, and there he was, only thinking about the girl. Michael threw the half-done cigarette out of his window. It hit frozen leaves and remained lit. He turned his head and watched in wonder. Fire and ice, ice and fire, neither capable of extinguishing the other. Informed by strangely exquisite and painful moments of the last few days, he noticed everything with peculiar anguish. Trees, leaves, rubbish, the detritus of life and nature had all assumed some poetic status, but he was still what he was before. A kindly and loyal man with a better brain and greater heart than most of his colleagues, but still a policeman, whose greatest loyalties were his fellows. Only now he had other loyalties too.

‘Bit daft, wasn't it?' he said softly. ‘You lot, fighting. You took quite a thumping. How did it start?'

‘You can guess, can't you? That bloody girl. I heard, through the wall of my room. Brian screwing her, God he makes such a noise, like a pig. I'd heard her voice first, then the sounds of it, and well, I saw red, because she'd been doing the same with me the night before. And with the others, but I didn't know that then. Cow.'

‘All using your rubbers, I hope?' said Michael paternalistically, wincing all the same despite the calmness of his voice and wishing he still had the cigarette for his fingers to fondle. It was quite true he had not needed to ask about the origins of the section house brawl to find out what had happened, but he had needed this verbal endorsement. Suddenly he relaxed.

‘So, I gather you'll have taken her home once or twice?'

‘Once or twice,' the other muttered.

‘Right, you can show us where she lives then.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Where she lives. Which street, which number.'

‘I can't,' said the youth, surprised. ‘I can't because she never let you take her to the door, did she? She'd say, “Drop me off on the corner,” and I was late and Oh …! I see.'

The respect and the gratitude which had illuminated his face earlier, disappeared and he looked at his companion shrewdly, attempted a laugh which emerged as a yelp. ‘Oh, I see. You're on to her now, are you. Picking up the pieces. God, you—'

‘Bastard,' Michael finished for him helpfully, starting the engine. ‘And yes, maybe I am, but not in the way you might think. There's a difference, see? I'm not screwing her. Now, show me the corner where you dropped her. So I know if it's the same place as mine.'

His mind changed smoothly with the gears. The man beside him sat silent and defeated, waiting for the radio to give them work and dispel the gloom of jealousy.

 

R
ose sat in the window of the second-floor flat she occupied with two other girls. She had been waiting all evening to watch the car go by. Not any car, but this particular car, with the white paint and the crowded wall of bodies on the inside.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen ride by.
She'd learned that poem in school, taught by some silly old fart who was trying to get across to them that all speech had its own rhythm, but no-one she knew talked like that. She was idle in her badly lit bedroom, watching her face in the mirror, over which there was the only light she was willing to use. Even a presence behind half-closed curtains was not something she wished to advertise. The street outside was peculiarly silent: the cold had driven all revellers and would-be visitors indoors. From the window opposite came the eerie neon light of a television.