Raymond Nickford - Literary & Psychological Suspense
EXCERPT :
CHAPTER ONE
Gerard Botolph picked up the child-sized violin he’d bought for his daughter. He plucked. The reply was a strange baleful tone, an eerie jangling… reminding of the music tutor’s advertisement in the Malvern Gazette. Seven-year-olds were welcome.
‘Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow, Rosie. I’ll take you to see Miss Stein.’ He found himself speaking into the empty room.
He took a last glance at her violin. An unaccountable sweat had transferred itself to the soundboard.
‘What does “ Miss Stein LRAM” mean, Dad?’
‘Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music. Don’t point, Rosie, please.’
Twice over, he’d been clumsy. He’d remembered to add the “please” but a “sorry” might have taken some of the bite from his correction. After all, Rosie only pointed her finger at the brass plate above the middle panel of an imposing front door. Yet no Botolph, right back to Joseph Babbington Botolph, the first in the line of stockbrokers would point, except to the size of his wallet. Even the surname was as ugly as their love, for none was ever given, unless in return for success. Success first. That was the Botolph expectation.
‘We don’t want Miss Stein to come to the door and find a finger pointing into her navel.’ He spoke softly this time, trying to relax his hand around hers. It was just a playful shake, he told himself. Yes, playful.
‘Remember ? First impressions?’
Her hand felt snug in his, the warmth not just thermal.
‘Why are you holding my hand, Dad?’
He peered down. She stood smart in the freshly washed cotton dress which Sandra, the au pair, had ironed. Rosie’s hand slid out of his.
She stood, corrected, in her school’s blue-and-white check summer dress. He’d tried, but it was too late for his “sorry”.
‘What are first… ’
‘Impressions, Rosie?’
‘Are they like… ’
The door opened before Gerard could answer. The bronze plate gave way to a blaze of exotic summer flowers. They cascaded on a cream background designed into a smocked sun dress. The dress was strappy enough to have adorned to better effect the figure of a lady fifty years younger than the wrinkled old woman standing inside the garment.
‘You must be little Rosie! Can I call you Rosie?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Oh come on, those big brown eyes are looking up at Ruth! Not “Miss”.’ Ruth isn’t your dragon of a schoolteacher!’ Ruth mimicked a dragon, but judging by Rosie’s fallen mouth, the tutor must have appeared to her more ape than dragon. If so, the moment of trauma was passed, for Rosie’s lips melted into a smile.
‘See? Ruthy’s funny… and a teacher!’ Ruth assured.
‘Not - not “funny” like -’ Rosie turned to her father, then bit her lip.
‘Come on now, dear. I’m going to show you the wonderful new world in music and you’re going to show me the wonderful world in your smile, before it wilted. The bending heads of my petunias wilt, so forlorn when I forget to water them. You haven’t lost it have you? The smile?’
‘Daddy loses his smile - often! So wouldn’t his wilt ?’
‘Well, dear, we won’t go to places we shouldn’t, don’t you think?’
Rosie’s lips were quickly sealed again. He had made her serious when, beneath, she was precocious, even though sometimes stumbling on her words, Gerard realised.
As Ruth bent closer to her pupil, he puzzled at the innocence which Ruth cultivated to disguise a woman in her late eighties. She possessed girlishly-long hair, bouffant at the front but elaborately worked to a single plait, hanging down a half-bare back, the miracle ultimately terminating at the base of her spine.
‘I’m Gerard Botolph - and you are Ruth Stein, I presume?’
‘Oh yes! Your Daddy can presume! Can’t he Rosie?’ Ruth said, taking Rosie’s hand and speaking through her instead; Ruth the ventriloquist but Gerard the dummy still standing on her doorstep.
‘My goodness me! Where did you get these nice long fingers? Are they going to play on one of my violins? Are they? I’m afraid they can’t play on the violin Daddy has bought for you. It looks too large to me and we have to look at the length of your little arms first.’
‘I’ve got quite large arms.’ Rosie seemed to plead for Ruth’s approval.
‘We must test, compare, measure, Rosie Botolph!’ Ruth cupped her hand around Rosie’s head and began to lead her into the hall of Laburnum Lodge.
‘Test, compare, measure!’ Rosie enthused, smiling up at the tutor. ‘And maybe be dragons after?’
‘Most certainly dragons after - and Ruth is the biggest dragon of them all!’ Ruth awkwardly bent to meet Rosie at eye level.
Biggest dragon of them all... Gerard shivered. The doubting was due to his tablet. He’d be calm once the Diazepam kicked in. Halston said it might be early symptoms of paranoia but too early for the doctor to treat as such. He was no psychotic, more a wreck of the Botolph expectation.
After all, the tutor, as she engaged Rosie, was so refreshingly open. As Ruth spilled with high spirits she seemed, at times, as readable as a child’s fairy tale. Gerard would rely on sixth sense. She possessed energy too, liveliness, exotic flowers, sunshine and little kindnesses in the form of caramelised eggs; like the one she was placing in Rosie’s palm… there could be nothing sinister about kindness.
She was taking a metronome off the hall table, holding it out to Rosie, making a pantomime of a hen clucking to its rhythm. Silly, childlike - but winning. No Botolph could ever do that. She’d brought to Rosie a smile to make the sun come out.
Rosie was looking up; her smile transferred to him.
‘Dad? You’re - you’re waiting for me,’ she frowned, ‘watching me choose my egg sweet and watching Ruth when she makes me laugh with her clucking hen noises. You - you can smile too, Dad. Ruth isn’t a dragon, like Mrs Fenton at school. Ruth’s a play dragon!’
Rosie seemed as comfortable as an ivy on a tree trunk to stand beside Ruth. Gerard would forget his reservations about the tutor. That’s all they were - qualms. The lady was zany, dressed like a cockatoo but not unhinged.
‘... inside, Mr Botolph?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, you’re welcome - to step inside? Wait? ’Til our Rosie’s lesson is finished?’
Gerard turned instead to his daughter for a response. ‘Daddy doesn’t seem too sure - does he, Rosie? Are you coming inside, Mr Botolph?’
It registered; for the quizzing and kindliness in the tutor’s eyes told him he was welcome.
‘Inside, yes, just the “dire tonic”, Ruth - if you’ll forgive the pun.’
‘Oh ho! An ex stockbroker who appreciates the diatonic! He starts on the right note with Ruth!’ she grinned.
He followed the music tutor into the hall. She was holding his daughter’s hand while Rosie looked up at her, seeming to make a solemn vow to be a model pupil. For the old lady was surely the first adult ever to allow Rosie to play clucking hens.
But as the door chain rattled behind the three, Gerard felt a wave of nausea; a warning he needed to get Rosie and himself out, but there was no way out. He crushed the packet of Diazepam in the lining of his pocket. The doubting had started.
‘Shall we see if you’re as tall as my double-bass, our Rosie?’
‘“Our” Rosie?’ Gerard challenged. Something about the intimacy with which the tutor crouched level to his daughter’s face made his question slip out.
‘If we’re to test your height: it’s back right in to the wall and stand - straight!’ Ruth, apparently unaware of his rebuke, hovered around Rosie.
“Our” Rosie… he wondered again whether he could repeat his question, oblige her to face what seemed her delusion; for forty minutes Rosie might become her child. Had she fulfilled herself as a musician and tutor but, too late, craved to fulfil herself as a mother ?
He’d seen plenty of photographs of her, collections of them framed on the wall, some propped on slim pedestal tables along the hallway, but none with husband or child. Yes children, flocks of them, but always showing instruments or presentation certificates in their hands or junior ensembles behind them.
‘Can’t get any straighter, our Rosie. Now, let’s see who’s tallest, shall we?’ Ruth said, distracting Gerard from his thoughts as she loomed over his daughter again before the double bass. ‘Well, I think Rosie Botolph’s got just a little bit more growing to do before she’s as tall as: “Bertie the Bass. Tall and deep. Rosie to chase, with lots of sleep”!’ she sang.
The old Botolph decorum dictated he should do no more than stand and watch her pantomime until he was invited from the hallway into the music room itself. After all, the diversion must have only been Ruth’s practiced way of relaxing her pupil before instruction, little different to his relaxing a fresh recruit on a first day at the bank.
But the diversion seemed to have gone on a shade too long. He felt unease again; this time about the lady whose advertisement seemed to have left him standing half-willingly yet irreversibly in the hallway of her house.
‘I’ve now ten little followers coming to my Thursday lessons. Two more and I’d have twelve - just like disciples. Wouldn’t I, Rosie?’
But Rosie was more interested in following with wonderment the pattern of deep velvety colours in the flowers of her new friend’s dress.
That word - “disciples” - it returned to Gerard while he glanced at a child-size violin propped against a recess beside the fireplace; the instrument reminded of the small violin he bought for Rosie and thought of breaking.
Disciples… breaking… like bread at the Last Supper… the last…
The violin seemed to warn, still more loudly than when he first plucked its strings and they replied with a grotesque jangle. But if it warned, who was going to be crucified?
He glanced again at Rosie. She was abandoned to laughter as Ruth pretended now to hide her in the case to the large double bass.
But then he caught something in the glint of Ruth’s eyes and the shiver wouldn’t leave him.
CHAPTER TWO
The “hurricane” was a more acceptable name for Ruth, Gerard decided, as she fluttered like a trapped bird around Rosie, busying her, ushering her through the paraphernalia of the music room.
Pride of place was taken by a Steinway grand. Its length stretched into the bay window. A smaller Bechstein upright faced a wall. In nearly every other available space, there was a clutter of violin cases of all sizes, music stands and sheet music exercises already opened on the upright. Through all of this, the hurricane seemed able, miraculously, to move without dislodging anything she had lived with so long.
‘Is Daddy going to sit in or will he want the waiting room?’ She lowered a music stand for Rosie and found the strength in her bony fingers to tighten the nut home.
Why should he sit in? It amounted to vetting the lady as he would a new recruit to the Stock Exchange before stress reduced him to a bank manager.
‘There’s always the New Statesman, if Daddy wants. I even take the Economist for Daddy-stockbrokers who’ve become Daddy bank managers and who invariably cringe on hearing first endeavours of bow on string. More in the waiting room.’
He duly shuffled the pile. He might as well have taken a newspaper with him into the waiting room, for the backs of both tutor and pupil were turned on him.
But he must always remember, for there would come a time when Rosie would remember, his indifference, if he sought nothing but the sanctuary of the quiet room at the far end of the hall. Now was a chance to be more than all the other Botolphs… retreating to their clubs, hiding themselves behind big newspapers on whose pages Rosie would hardly read, still less comprehend price indices.
He would sit in.
Ruth’s frame seemed to creak as she bent to lower the height of the music stand for her pupil. She was going through the motions now, rubbing the hair of the child-sized bow with rosin, plucking each string close up to her better ear to follow with the striking of the same note on the piano, tightening and loosening each string, to ensure that Rosie’s A’s were pitched true A’s and D’s true D’s. It was beginning to seem more businesslike - what a Botolph should expect.
Rosie must have felt the tutor’s breath on her cheek as Ruth demonstrated how to pluck strings while singing:
‘Busy bee, roaming free,
Gathering honey for our tea.
Stroke him now, he won’t sting,
Kindness conquers everything.’
There was no reason to feel envious of her physical closeness, not while Rosie seemed so relaxed. And wasn’t his intolerance of an octogenarian - happiest when looking and sounding like a child - only the bank-manager’s-staff-meeting persona he showed every Thursday morning at review?
‘Again, Rosie? Yes. I can see. Again. “Busy bee, roaming free...”’
‘Ruth, the strings spell a word. G,D,A,E can be “AGED”!’ Rosie seemed at last to have relaxed from being overly proper for her newly discovered heroine.
‘Yes, yes, they can. But you’re forgetting our song! Come on now. ‘ “Busy bee, roaming free..” ’
Ruth’s tone was suddenly flat; a songster whose song, broken by age, squeaked and fell embarrassingly out of tune whenever her head tilted and her hearing aids shrilled in unison with her. Her song, for a child - her child for so long as she sang it, seemed to ask: wouldn’t you too want to cling on to your youth, try to sing like a child, be a child if ever you came to live like me... alone in a large Victorian house where silences could remind you that the next morning could be your last?
The violin lesson over, wasn’t the tutor only harmlessly opening up her miniature wicker basket full of chocolate caramelised eggs from which Rosie was to choose her favourite?
Rosie’s hand hovered over the little heap of sweets. She was marvelling at one wrapped in its bright foil, glittering like the pleasure she’d seen in the eyes of the old tutor who bent to study her so indulgently. Ruth’s was surely kindness, as in her singing to his daughter and yet which seemed to exceed anything earned by Rosie, a mothering, almost a smothering...
‘Well, our Rosie. Hetty the hen seemed to like your first violin - so much, I can hear her saying she’ll let you have another of her chocolate eggs. Maybe her very best egg if you can do as well on piano. But not until you’ve come with Ruth into the garden to look for my friends, the squirrels. Daddy can come too - as he’s not reading my periodicals!’ she said, without looking at him.
‘Shall I finish folding the music stand? Miss Stein - Ruth ?’ Rosie remembered. ‘I can carry it for you and then you won’t have to bend again.’
‘That’s sweet of you Rosie, but remember, the dragon’s still got lots and lots of strength in these!’ Ruth flexed her fingers as if limbering up for a fight - and it was a fight as she fumbled with the nut to collapse the stand and set it by the others.
She surprised him again. Despite all her apparent fussing and bustling, her plucking of strings, tightening of pegs, singing of songs, despite her two hearing aids and a back permanently turned on him, he sensed Ruth knew he wasn’t really reading her newspapers but that she was reading him.
Having manoeuvred his way through the upturned furniture, jardinières and half torn parasols in Ruth’s conservatory, Gerard looked through the grimy windows towards the most distant stretch of the garden where Ruth took Rosie for the interlude. The interval would be just long enough between violin instruction and piano to “introduce Rosie to my dearest squirrels” as Ruth put it.
She was girding up all the movement that age left in her bones, struggling to chase Rosie about trees then stopping, panting, contenting herself to please Rosie by swinging bags of cashew nuts she’d strategically hung in branches.
The more he watched, vision without sound, it seemed that Rosie - perhaps like all Ruth’s other pupils - followed not only her instruction, nor even her pantomime, but herself… ducklings following the duck until they were her own.
Rosie was already trying to stretch her arm about Ruth’s waist, jumping up and down, sometimes a little pain etched in Ruth’s face as she tried again to gather her bones and do… a danse macabre up the garden. He dismissed the thought. It was only his demons come to taunt. The sight of the old tutor hobbling beside Rosie was bizarre but it was happening and he was the spectator on his daughter, as he would always be.
Ruth Stein had worked a private alchemy. For all forty of those minutes, she transmuted baser things to her gold. Transmutation… wasn’t that mutilation of a kind? But he recognised the thought for what it was; a growing habit of allowing words to enter his mind and become distorted. As Heather said, he’d been bringing home stress after his fall from stockbroker to bank manager, a Botolph trait to cope with demotion.
He edged round the window frame again to watch the tutor strain to bend and then roll Rosie down the undulations in the lawn, Rosie gurgling with laughter… so simple, achieved in twenty-five minutes of Ruth’s first acquaintance, yet he couldn’t do it. No Botolph ever saw any sense in rolling a child down a garden. Yet for Ruth’s part it was obvious, whether Rosie flourished musically or not, the point hardly entered her consciousness; so busy was she with the little girl who came into her house and, it seemed, her life.
Rosie picked herself up and ran back to the house to start the piano session, grass stains on her dress at the hip and over her knees. Gerard inched back from the window. His girl didn’t have to see the truth; he was a spectator.
Then he sneaked another glance around the edge of the frame. The old tutor lingered alone at the top of the garden, wistfully brushing her foot through the tall grass which she could have hardly mown without pain. She seemed in a daydream; as if savouring the moment she’d spent with his daughter… perhaps tracing out in the grass an imaginary world in which she might have lived, alone with Rosie, as though… as though she would one day possess her, as mother and daughter.
CHAPTER THREE
Rosie turned around from the smaller of the two piano stools to glance back at her father. Her seat was drawn up close beside her tutor’s and yet she still needed, it seemed, to know he was there. Or was she hoping he would finally leave for the newspaper in the waiting room, no longer to see her fingers faltering over the keys?
Gerard was distracted by the flashing red bulb above the music room door and, simultaneously, the ringing of Ruth’s front door bell. She was completely unaware of either. He remembered her dependency on two aids.
‘Shall I answer for you? Miss Stein?’ Gerard spoke louder.
‘Ruth, please!’ she at last registered. But she wasn’t going to take her eyes off his child’s fingers.
‘I think your front door bell’s -’
‘Yes! Would you? Be a dear?’ Ruth shouted above her playing.
The visitor came as a relief. It was Heather.
‘Thought I’d collect Rosie, take her home. Want to see whether your Miss Stein is as superlative for Rosie as her advert makes her,’ she whispered.
The door of the music room opened, the tutor finally emerging. Hearing aids or not, Ruth surely couldn’t have heard them discussing her.
But Rosie… her walk… it seemed different... almost a somnambulist’s, Gerard thought. No, it was just another of his doubts catching up on him. If Rosie was sleepwalking towards some goal, it was nothing more than to keep the chin-rest of her violin firmly cupped beneath her chin all the time Ruth kept an unwavering eye on her struggle.
Smiling at Rosie seemed to be necessary. It might assure his child she was approved of in the adult world full of expectations he knew too well. Her drift towards him rose to hardly even an exchange of smiles, just a thought between he and Rosie...
For her part, Ruth seemed oblivious to both parents, walking beside her charge, bending and cupping her palm beneath Rosie’s elbow until the child found the best stance for the instrument.
‘Remember, Rosie - level, always level with the chin.’
No, Ruth wasn’t mothering or smothering, just dedicated. It felt like an eternity before the tutor looked up from her pupil to become aware of him and Heather.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Ruth planted a studied silence, after her theatre.
He and Heather waited for more melodrama.
‘I thought you were the next parent for me! But you’re childless!’ Ruth stalked conspicuously around Heather’s skirt in the pretence of finding her next pupil hiding there.
‘I’m - I’m Mrs Botolph, Miss Stein.’
Heather’s voice was monotone. Like him she must have been struggling to make allowances for the naivety which came with the gifted old woman.
‘Of course! Of course, you’re Mrs Botolph!’ Ruth announced, conceding that of biological necessity such existed on the planet. ‘And you’ve come to collect our little Rosie. If you’d been Mrs Sharp and her little Gregory, I’d have my eleventh today,’ Ruth said, finally easing the violin’s weight from Rosie’s arm.
Eleventh… little disciple... Gerard stopped himself from saying.
‘Now, turning to you Mr Botolph, perhaps you’re interested in violin lessons?’
‘Sorry I - I was light years away.’
‘Light years! Science!’ She playfully nudged the arm of his bewildered daughter to make her an ally. ‘Well, I’ll have to bring Daddy back to Earth, won’t I? Won’t I, Rosie? Do you think Daddy wants to come back to Earth? Who’s for Earth? Not Beethoven. Not Handel. One wanted Apollo, the other the Messiah!’
Gerard noticed his wife lapse from smile to grimace.
‘I was saying, Mr Botolph - Gerard. If, as your wife assured me on the telephone, she finds you alone in the orangery, lost in your acreage at Jacaranda and trying to play a violin into the night, then perhaps you too may want lessons?’
He flinched at Ruth’s hand, the skin cool… a slug searching over his, she turning it over, making some sort of compliment about his fine long fingers.
‘Never too late! True, Mrs Botolph?’ Ruth acknowledged his wife who was retreating by inches closer to the front door from where she’d first ventured.
‘A whiff of success and Gerard would remember the violin you gave him but forget to collect his little girl and take her home,’ Heather volunteered. ‘A Botolph “trait”, Gerry would say.’
‘Your Daddy wouldn’t forget to take you home! Now would he, our Rosie?’
Botolph slipped his hand free of the shrivelled flesh he considered to have been holding him longer than friendliness required.
Now there were two wrinkled hands, one clutching his arm, the other clutching Heather’s, clinging, as the tutor waited for them to take their daughter away.
Behind all the exotic flowers in her dress and her little boast about her more important clients, he could see now - she was a lonely figure. He wondered what she would feel when she could no longer cling nor covet the pupil she tried to make into her child. What now would go through her mind… what did Ruth Stein do when the solid door of her house closed with her alone behind it and she parted with her eleventh little disciple…
Through the heavily veined hand which clung to his arm, Gerard felt the same loneliness in Ruth as in himself as each watched Heather’s car get smaller the further it took Rosie back to her home.
‘Do you think you’re up to a “mere branch manager” then Ruth?’
He noticed the aid where her hair failed to cover it.
‘Ready to lead the blind, Ruth?’ Gerard tried more loudly.
‘Oh! Violin? Of course! I promised.’ She stopped clinging.
The car carrying his wife and daughter away disappeared around the distant corner of the road and at last Ruth acknowledged there were other sentient beings in her world - one being her new adult pupil standing beside her.
‘Romance,’ she spoke wistfully, taking up a violin. ‘This, Gerard, is Beethoven’s Romance, in G. See how he modulates? From this - to this - and then - ’ Ruth drew back bow on string, fierce. ‘To this!’
Gerard waited for her elbow to trace still more positions in the air.
‘Isn’t that marvellous? Isn’t that romance!’
‘It is,’ he said. All he could say. It was marvellous; an elbow so bony, skin so parboiled and shrivelled, a face transported, produced from an array of notes that baffled him, romance of a kind which she made hers.
‘Where else will you find that?’ Ruth gently laid the violin into its bed of felt as though it was both her lost lover and… and maybe even her child...
As for giving instruction, she seemed now disinterested, to the point of offence.
‘You see? Just like old Ruth, you could have lovely sounds at your fingertips – romance. One day! Keep coming,’ she whispered, surprising him. But he knew her romance was a dream of its own kind and would never be directed at him.
‘Ruth will show you how to bow; how to produce pizzicato lovelier than a harp; to make a violin sing! Like me, you want to have again true romance which comes nowhere in this world but from my violins? Doesn't it come from the violin?’
‘It does. When you play.’
‘Of course!’ She burst into melodrama which hid the depth of her frustration yet made him question the stability of the woman to whom he would entrust Rosie at six p.m. next Thursday.
‘Romance, Gerard, comes from every loving stroke of bow on string, each hushed tremolo,’ she creaked as she bent forward, then whispered theatrically, ‘each sliding glissando, each lush vibrato. Of course there’s still romance!’
She flung a pile of newspapers to come cascading down from ceiling to floor.
‘In Bach, his love for the instrument abides with order - like this.’ Ruth fanned out the crisp, folded dailies. ‘In Beethoven, love is passion of another kind - chaos of the spirit! Now tamed,’ she whispered, ‘now rampant! Fury, rage! Like this!’ The hurricane forced him to step back as she flung all the newspapers into the air.
‘And like this! And this and this! Fury! Rage! Passion! Romance, Gerard Botolph. Can’t you see it? It’s all around us, in the air!’ She scooped up more newspapers, tossed them across the music room, the hurricane swirling about its eye. ‘Can you see it? I can see it. You only have to look and it’s there!’ She scooped up a whole pile of papers until she lost her balance, stumbling forward into two music stands before careering towards the upright.
He reached out for her, a wrist and then his arm around her waist, but there was a sickening thud as her head nicked the edge of the upright.
‘It is - isn’t it? she whispered, subdued as she looked up at him unaware of her bloodied ear. ‘Isn’t it? Romance? Everywhere?’
‘Will you allow me? To pick up the rest of the papers? Ruth?’ He leaned closer to the aid hanging precariously from her ear.
She was still admiring the instrument which Rosie’s hands had touched.
‘Come on. Let me put them away. A nasty fall for -’
‘I got a little excited with my little lecture to you, on music and romance, didn’t I ? I’m sorry. I’ve made a spectacle of myself - again. I do that. More and more often.’
You can ask her. The silence tells you - now’s the moment…
‘Did you ever -’
‘Did I ever?’
You’ve got to ask her now...
‘Did you ever - tie the knot, Ruth?’ He felt impertinent.
‘The knot? Tie the knot?’
Ask her - if she ever bore a child - of her own!
‘I know it’s not part of my lesson, not my brief, but I couldn’t help seeing a very young “you” next to - ’
‘This is what you must mean by “the knot”? My friend in the photograph? Gustav? You thought I might - ’
He waited while her fingers curled the photograph into a cylinder so he couldn’t look again at the faces of Gustav and her in it.
‘You were talking to me about romance - in music, I mean.’
‘Yes, yes I was.’
‘Look, I only stayed for beginner’s violin. I -’
‘No, you’ve lost a certain romance too - I think, in a way, you’ve lost your Rosie, haven’t you?
How could you know the distance between me and Rosie ?Nobody could know…
‘Curiosity is a natural thing, Gerard. And you were curious about such a young Ruth beside such a young man,’ she said, keeping “the man”, it seemed, curled up in the cylinder she’d formed.
She took a long look at him, let the silence say she was his friend.
‘I met Gustav at the conservatoire in Prague. Wonderful days.’ She patted her ear to assure herself her aid was secure; discreet, in harmony with a lady’s salad days.
She stared out of the window, her eyes glazed, registering nothing, except perhaps fleeting images returning across nearly seventy years.
‘We used to walk beside the Vltava, our dreams flowing free as the river. Used to laugh. About how we’d both one day find a place across the border in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Gustav on violin, me on viola - both knowing the competition would ensure our dreams remained only dreams.’
Ask her, ask her now. Did she ever have her own child?
‘We shared the simplest things... sitting on the benches in the shadow of the Golz-Kinsky Palace, our sandwiches soaked when, inside, they ate caviar. Then we’d find a warm fire in a coffee house. It all seemed to be enough - without the dreams. The war came. Our studies were cut short - as if by the surgeon’s knife, but an evil surgeon who wore a silly moustache, ranted, beat his chest. As for our joining an orchestra in dear old Leipzig, it was bombed to rubble by the allies and -’
She swallowed awkwardly.
‘And under the rubble - ’ she stopped.
‘It’s all right, Ruth. It was insensitive of me. I - ’
‘No. Not insensitive, curious. Remember? We said curiosity was a natural thing?’
She pulled off her sequined taffeta neckerchief and started dabbing an eye.
So she didn’t marry. But what about her own child? I can’t ask her. Not now. Not through all the taffeta and tears.
‘Here. Ruth? You dropped your photo - of you and Gustav.’
‘But I have the sweet wrapper. Rosie’s,’ she sniffed, ashamed to turn and let him see, full on, the mess of mascara and lipstick with which she’d tried to rejuvenate her face. She seemed rooted, as if conscious only of the sensation between her fingers as she rubbed at the crumpled sweet wrapper which Rosie left on the sill just behind the hang of her velvet curtains. Her thumb kept pressing out the sweet paper, taking out all its wrinkles, preserving it for the moment when she would finally be alone.
He wondered whether to return the photo of her and Gustav, but her hands didn’t want to release Rosie’s sweet wrapper, nor to stop trying to straighten it out...
‘Well, thanks for seeing me. Ruth?’ He came closer to her hearing aid. ‘Thanks for letting me be a buffoon on one of your violins.’
‘You just bring your lovely daughter to me, Gerard.’
The spark making her Hurricane Ruth seemed to have died.
‘Some Czerny would be useful for you. From here to here.’ She marked out some forty bars. ‘Exercises, lots of them, for strengthening the third finger. And never let me hear you call yourself a “buffoon”! Life’s too short to annihilate yourself.’ She finally looked up from the exercises. ‘Others will always try to do that for you!’
‘I’ve plenty of experience, from my staff. I’ll - I’ll bring Rosie then. Next Thursday, six o’clock sharp.’ Gerard assured her, then realised his promise sounded like a crude form of barter; as if the only thing of any value he could offer in return for her interest in him was a toy; the toy his seven-year-old daughter.
She stood in front of her white panelled door and waved… waved as though he might have been the Gustav who could have once given her a child of her own.
He felt feverish. He’d be all right, once the responsibility came for him to concentrate on the road until home. Then he’d again be able to accept the beaming face in the fading photograph of she and Gustav, accept the frantic waving, the good sense of what he still wanted to believe; despite all his misgivings, he must bring his girl again to the slightly stooped music tutor who was still waving from her porch. He stumbled, then righted himself before she could suspect his wave of nausea.
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CHAPTER ONE
Gerard Botolph picked up the child-sized violin he’d bought for his daughter. He plucked. The reply was a strange baleful tone, an eerie jangling… reminding of the music tutor’s advertisement in the Malvern Gazette. Seven-year-olds were welcome.
‘Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow, Rosie. I’ll take you to see Miss Stein.’ He found himself speaking into the empty room.
He took a last glance at her violin. An unaccountable sweat had transferred itself to the soundboard.
‘What does “ Miss Stein LRAM” mean, Dad?’
‘Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music. Don’t point, Rosie, please.’
Twice over, he’d been clumsy. He’d remembered to add the “please” but a “sorry” might have taken some of the bite from his correction. After all, Rosie only pointed her finger at the brass plate above the middle panel of an imposing front door. Yet no Botolph, right back to Joseph Babbington Botolph, the first in the line of stockbrokers would point, except to the size of his wallet. Even the surname was as ugly as their love, for none was ever given, unless in return for success. Success first. That was the Botolph expectation.
‘We don’t want Miss Stein to come to the door and find a finger pointing into her navel.’ He spoke softly this time, trying to relax his hand around hers. It was just a playful shake, he told himself. Yes, playful.
‘Remember ? First impressions?’
Her hand felt snug in his, the warmth not just thermal.
‘Why are you holding my hand, Dad?’
He peered down. She stood smart in the freshly washed cotton dress which Sandra, the au pair, had ironed. Rosie’s hand slid out of his.
She stood, corrected, in her school’s blue-and-white check summer dress. He’d tried, but it was too late for his “sorry”.
‘What are first… ’
‘Impressions, Rosie?’
‘Are they like… ’
The door opened before Gerard could answer. The bronze plate gave way to a blaze of exotic summer flowers. They cascaded on a cream background designed into a smocked sun dress. The dress was strappy enough to have adorned to better effect the figure of a lady fifty years younger than the wrinkled old woman standing inside the garment.
‘You must be little Rosie! Can I call you Rosie?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Oh come on, those big brown eyes are looking up at Ruth! Not “Miss”.’ Ruth isn’t your dragon of a schoolteacher!’ Ruth mimicked a dragon, but judging by Rosie’s fallen mouth, the tutor must have appeared to her more ape than dragon. If so, the moment of trauma was passed, for Rosie’s lips melted into a smile.
‘See? Ruthy’s funny… and a teacher!’ Ruth assured.
‘Not - not “funny” like -’ Rosie turned to her father, then bit her lip.
‘Come on now, dear. I’m going to show you the wonderful new world in music and you’re going to show me the wonderful world in your smile, before it wilted. The bending heads of my petunias wilt, so forlorn when I forget to water them. You haven’t lost it have you? The smile?’
‘Daddy loses his smile - often! So wouldn’t his wilt ?’
‘Well, dear, we won’t go to places we shouldn’t, don’t you think?’
Rosie’s lips were quickly sealed again. He had made her serious when, beneath, she was precocious, even though sometimes stumbling on her words, Gerard realised.
As Ruth bent closer to her pupil, he puzzled at the innocence which Ruth cultivated to disguise a woman in her late eighties. She possessed girlishly-long hair, bouffant at the front but elaborately worked to a single plait, hanging down a half-bare back, the miracle ultimately terminating at the base of her spine.
‘I’m Gerard Botolph - and you are Ruth Stein, I presume?’
‘Oh yes! Your Daddy can presume! Can’t he Rosie?’ Ruth said, taking Rosie’s hand and speaking through her instead; Ruth the ventriloquist but Gerard the dummy still standing on her doorstep.
‘My goodness me! Where did you get these nice long fingers? Are they going to play on one of my violins? Are they? I’m afraid they can’t play on the violin Daddy has bought for you. It looks too large to me and we have to look at the length of your little arms first.’
‘I’ve got quite large arms.’ Rosie seemed to plead for Ruth’s approval.
‘We must test, compare, measure, Rosie Botolph!’ Ruth cupped her hand around Rosie’s head and began to lead her into the hall of Laburnum Lodge.
‘Test, compare, measure!’ Rosie enthused, smiling up at the tutor. ‘And maybe be dragons after?’
‘Most certainly dragons after - and Ruth is the biggest dragon of them all!’ Ruth awkwardly bent to meet Rosie at eye level.
Biggest dragon of them all... Gerard shivered. The doubting was due to his tablet. He’d be calm once the Diazepam kicked in. Halston said it might be early symptoms of paranoia but too early for the doctor to treat as such. He was no psychotic, more a wreck of the Botolph expectation.
After all, the tutor, as she engaged Rosie, was so refreshingly open. As Ruth spilled with high spirits she seemed, at times, as readable as a child’s fairy tale. Gerard would rely on sixth sense. She possessed energy too, liveliness, exotic flowers, sunshine and little kindnesses in the form of caramelised eggs; like the one she was placing in Rosie’s palm… there could be nothing sinister about kindness.
She was taking a metronome off the hall table, holding it out to Rosie, making a pantomime of a hen clucking to its rhythm. Silly, childlike - but winning. No Botolph could ever do that. She’d brought to Rosie a smile to make the sun come out.
Rosie was looking up; her smile transferred to him.
‘Dad? You’re - you’re waiting for me,’ she frowned, ‘watching me choose my egg sweet and watching Ruth when she makes me laugh with her clucking hen noises. You - you can smile too, Dad. Ruth isn’t a dragon, like Mrs Fenton at school. Ruth’s a play dragon!’
Rosie seemed as comfortable as an ivy on a tree trunk to stand beside Ruth. Gerard would forget his reservations about the tutor. That’s all they were - qualms. The lady was zany, dressed like a cockatoo but not unhinged.
‘... inside, Mr Botolph?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, you’re welcome - to step inside? Wait? ’Til our Rosie’s lesson is finished?’
Gerard turned instead to his daughter for a response. ‘Daddy doesn’t seem too sure - does he, Rosie? Are you coming inside, Mr Botolph?’
It registered; for the quizzing and kindliness in the tutor’s eyes told him he was welcome.
‘Inside, yes, just the “dire tonic”, Ruth - if you’ll forgive the pun.’
‘Oh ho! An ex stockbroker who appreciates the diatonic! He starts on the right note with Ruth!’ she grinned.
He followed the music tutor into the hall. She was holding his daughter’s hand while Rosie looked up at her, seeming to make a solemn vow to be a model pupil. For the old lady was surely the first adult ever to allow Rosie to play clucking hens.
But as the door chain rattled behind the three, Gerard felt a wave of nausea; a warning he needed to get Rosie and himself out, but there was no way out. He crushed the packet of Diazepam in the lining of his pocket. The doubting had started.
‘Shall we see if you’re as tall as my double-bass, our Rosie?’
‘“Our” Rosie?’ Gerard challenged. Something about the intimacy with which the tutor crouched level to his daughter’s face made his question slip out.
‘If we’re to test your height: it’s back right in to the wall and stand - straight!’ Ruth, apparently unaware of his rebuke, hovered around Rosie.
“Our” Rosie… he wondered again whether he could repeat his question, oblige her to face what seemed her delusion; for forty minutes Rosie might become her child. Had she fulfilled herself as a musician and tutor but, too late, craved to fulfil herself as a mother ?
He’d seen plenty of photographs of her, collections of them framed on the wall, some propped on slim pedestal tables along the hallway, but none with husband or child. Yes children, flocks of them, but always showing instruments or presentation certificates in their hands or junior ensembles behind them.
‘Can’t get any straighter, our Rosie. Now, let’s see who’s tallest, shall we?’ Ruth said, distracting Gerard from his thoughts as she loomed over his daughter again before the double bass. ‘Well, I think Rosie Botolph’s got just a little bit more growing to do before she’s as tall as: “Bertie the Bass. Tall and deep. Rosie to chase, with lots of sleep”!’ she sang.
The old Botolph decorum dictated he should do no more than stand and watch her pantomime until he was invited from the hallway into the music room itself. After all, the diversion must have only been Ruth’s practiced way of relaxing her pupil before instruction, little different to his relaxing a fresh recruit on a first day at the bank.
But the diversion seemed to have gone on a shade too long. He felt unease again; this time about the lady whose advertisement seemed to have left him standing half-willingly yet irreversibly in the hallway of her house.
‘I’ve now ten little followers coming to my Thursday lessons. Two more and I’d have twelve - just like disciples. Wouldn’t I, Rosie?’
But Rosie was more interested in following with wonderment the pattern of deep velvety colours in the flowers of her new friend’s dress.
That word - “disciples” - it returned to Gerard while he glanced at a child-size violin propped against a recess beside the fireplace; the instrument reminded of the small violin he bought for Rosie and thought of breaking.
Disciples… breaking… like bread at the Last Supper… the last…
The violin seemed to warn, still more loudly than when he first plucked its strings and they replied with a grotesque jangle. But if it warned, who was going to be crucified?
He glanced again at Rosie. She was abandoned to laughter as Ruth pretended now to hide her in the case to the large double bass.
But then he caught something in the glint of Ruth’s eyes and the shiver wouldn’t leave him.
CHAPTER TWO
The “hurricane” was a more acceptable name for Ruth, Gerard decided, as she fluttered like a trapped bird around Rosie, busying her, ushering her through the paraphernalia of the music room.
Pride of place was taken by a Steinway grand. Its length stretched into the bay window. A smaller Bechstein upright faced a wall. In nearly every other available space, there was a clutter of violin cases of all sizes, music stands and sheet music exercises already opened on the upright. Through all of this, the hurricane seemed able, miraculously, to move without dislodging anything she had lived with so long.
‘Is Daddy going to sit in or will he want the waiting room?’ She lowered a music stand for Rosie and found the strength in her bony fingers to tighten the nut home.
Why should he sit in? It amounted to vetting the lady as he would a new recruit to the Stock Exchange before stress reduced him to a bank manager.
‘There’s always the New Statesman, if Daddy wants. I even take the Economist for Daddy-stockbrokers who’ve become Daddy bank managers and who invariably cringe on hearing first endeavours of bow on string. More in the waiting room.’
He duly shuffled the pile. He might as well have taken a newspaper with him into the waiting room, for the backs of both tutor and pupil were turned on him.
But he must always remember, for there would come a time when Rosie would remember, his indifference, if he sought nothing but the sanctuary of the quiet room at the far end of the hall. Now was a chance to be more than all the other Botolphs… retreating to their clubs, hiding themselves behind big newspapers on whose pages Rosie would hardly read, still less comprehend price indices.
He would sit in.
Ruth’s frame seemed to creak as she bent to lower the height of the music stand for her pupil. She was going through the motions now, rubbing the hair of the child-sized bow with rosin, plucking each string close up to her better ear to follow with the striking of the same note on the piano, tightening and loosening each string, to ensure that Rosie’s A’s were pitched true A’s and D’s true D’s. It was beginning to seem more businesslike - what a Botolph should expect.
Rosie must have felt the tutor’s breath on her cheek as Ruth demonstrated how to pluck strings while singing:
‘Busy bee, roaming free,
Gathering honey for our tea.
Stroke him now, he won’t sting,
Kindness conquers everything.’
There was no reason to feel envious of her physical closeness, not while Rosie seemed so relaxed. And wasn’t his intolerance of an octogenarian - happiest when looking and sounding like a child - only the bank-manager’s-staff-meeting persona he showed every Thursday morning at review?
‘Again, Rosie? Yes. I can see. Again. “Busy bee, roaming free...”’
‘Ruth, the strings spell a word. G,D,A,E can be “AGED”!’ Rosie seemed at last to have relaxed from being overly proper for her newly discovered heroine.
‘Yes, yes, they can. But you’re forgetting our song! Come on now. ‘ “Busy bee, roaming free..” ’
Ruth’s tone was suddenly flat; a songster whose song, broken by age, squeaked and fell embarrassingly out of tune whenever her head tilted and her hearing aids shrilled in unison with her. Her song, for a child - her child for so long as she sang it, seemed to ask: wouldn’t you too want to cling on to your youth, try to sing like a child, be a child if ever you came to live like me... alone in a large Victorian house where silences could remind you that the next morning could be your last?
The violin lesson over, wasn’t the tutor only harmlessly opening up her miniature wicker basket full of chocolate caramelised eggs from which Rosie was to choose her favourite?
Rosie’s hand hovered over the little heap of sweets. She was marvelling at one wrapped in its bright foil, glittering like the pleasure she’d seen in the eyes of the old tutor who bent to study her so indulgently. Ruth’s was surely kindness, as in her singing to his daughter and yet which seemed to exceed anything earned by Rosie, a mothering, almost a smothering...
‘Well, our Rosie. Hetty the hen seemed to like your first violin - so much, I can hear her saying she’ll let you have another of her chocolate eggs. Maybe her very best egg if you can do as well on piano. But not until you’ve come with Ruth into the garden to look for my friends, the squirrels. Daddy can come too - as he’s not reading my periodicals!’ she said, without looking at him.
‘Shall I finish folding the music stand? Miss Stein - Ruth ?’ Rosie remembered. ‘I can carry it for you and then you won’t have to bend again.’
‘That’s sweet of you Rosie, but remember, the dragon’s still got lots and lots of strength in these!’ Ruth flexed her fingers as if limbering up for a fight - and it was a fight as she fumbled with the nut to collapse the stand and set it by the others.
She surprised him again. Despite all her apparent fussing and bustling, her plucking of strings, tightening of pegs, singing of songs, despite her two hearing aids and a back permanently turned on him, he sensed Ruth knew he wasn’t really reading her newspapers but that she was reading him.
Having manoeuvred his way through the upturned furniture, jardinières and half torn parasols in Ruth’s conservatory, Gerard looked through the grimy windows towards the most distant stretch of the garden where Ruth took Rosie for the interlude. The interval would be just long enough between violin instruction and piano to “introduce Rosie to my dearest squirrels” as Ruth put it.
She was girding up all the movement that age left in her bones, struggling to chase Rosie about trees then stopping, panting, contenting herself to please Rosie by swinging bags of cashew nuts she’d strategically hung in branches.
The more he watched, vision without sound, it seemed that Rosie - perhaps like all Ruth’s other pupils - followed not only her instruction, nor even her pantomime, but herself… ducklings following the duck until they were her own.
Rosie was already trying to stretch her arm about Ruth’s waist, jumping up and down, sometimes a little pain etched in Ruth’s face as she tried again to gather her bones and do… a danse macabre up the garden. He dismissed the thought. It was only his demons come to taunt. The sight of the old tutor hobbling beside Rosie was bizarre but it was happening and he was the spectator on his daughter, as he would always be.
Ruth Stein had worked a private alchemy. For all forty of those minutes, she transmuted baser things to her gold. Transmutation… wasn’t that mutilation of a kind? But he recognised the thought for what it was; a growing habit of allowing words to enter his mind and become distorted. As Heather said, he’d been bringing home stress after his fall from stockbroker to bank manager, a Botolph trait to cope with demotion.
He edged round the window frame again to watch the tutor strain to bend and then roll Rosie down the undulations in the lawn, Rosie gurgling with laughter… so simple, achieved in twenty-five minutes of Ruth’s first acquaintance, yet he couldn’t do it. No Botolph ever saw any sense in rolling a child down a garden. Yet for Ruth’s part it was obvious, whether Rosie flourished musically or not, the point hardly entered her consciousness; so busy was she with the little girl who came into her house and, it seemed, her life.
Rosie picked herself up and ran back to the house to start the piano session, grass stains on her dress at the hip and over her knees. Gerard inched back from the window. His girl didn’t have to see the truth; he was a spectator.
Then he sneaked another glance around the edge of the frame. The old tutor lingered alone at the top of the garden, wistfully brushing her foot through the tall grass which she could have hardly mown without pain. She seemed in a daydream; as if savouring the moment she’d spent with his daughter… perhaps tracing out in the grass an imaginary world in which she might have lived, alone with Rosie, as though… as though she would one day possess her, as mother and daughter.
CHAPTER THREE
Rosie turned around from the smaller of the two piano stools to glance back at her father. Her seat was drawn up close beside her tutor’s and yet she still needed, it seemed, to know he was there. Or was she hoping he would finally leave for the newspaper in the waiting room, no longer to see her fingers faltering over the keys?
Gerard was distracted by the flashing red bulb above the music room door and, simultaneously, the ringing of Ruth’s front door bell. She was completely unaware of either. He remembered her dependency on two aids.
‘Shall I answer for you? Miss Stein?’ Gerard spoke louder.
‘Ruth, please!’ she at last registered. But she wasn’t going to take her eyes off his child’s fingers.
‘I think your front door bell’s -’
‘Yes! Would you? Be a dear?’ Ruth shouted above her playing.
The visitor came as a relief. It was Heather.
‘Thought I’d collect Rosie, take her home. Want to see whether your Miss Stein is as superlative for Rosie as her advert makes her,’ she whispered.
The door of the music room opened, the tutor finally emerging. Hearing aids or not, Ruth surely couldn’t have heard them discussing her.
But Rosie… her walk… it seemed different... almost a somnambulist’s, Gerard thought. No, it was just another of his doubts catching up on him. If Rosie was sleepwalking towards some goal, it was nothing more than to keep the chin-rest of her violin firmly cupped beneath her chin all the time Ruth kept an unwavering eye on her struggle.
Smiling at Rosie seemed to be necessary. It might assure his child she was approved of in the adult world full of expectations he knew too well. Her drift towards him rose to hardly even an exchange of smiles, just a thought between he and Rosie...
For her part, Ruth seemed oblivious to both parents, walking beside her charge, bending and cupping her palm beneath Rosie’s elbow until the child found the best stance for the instrument.
‘Remember, Rosie - level, always level with the chin.’
No, Ruth wasn’t mothering or smothering, just dedicated. It felt like an eternity before the tutor looked up from her pupil to become aware of him and Heather.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Ruth planted a studied silence, after her theatre.
He and Heather waited for more melodrama.
‘I thought you were the next parent for me! But you’re childless!’ Ruth stalked conspicuously around Heather’s skirt in the pretence of finding her next pupil hiding there.
‘I’m - I’m Mrs Botolph, Miss Stein.’
Heather’s voice was monotone. Like him she must have been struggling to make allowances for the naivety which came with the gifted old woman.
‘Of course! Of course, you’re Mrs Botolph!’ Ruth announced, conceding that of biological necessity such existed on the planet. ‘And you’ve come to collect our little Rosie. If you’d been Mrs Sharp and her little Gregory, I’d have my eleventh today,’ Ruth said, finally easing the violin’s weight from Rosie’s arm.
Eleventh… little disciple... Gerard stopped himself from saying.
‘Now, turning to you Mr Botolph, perhaps you’re interested in violin lessons?’
‘Sorry I - I was light years away.’
‘Light years! Science!’ She playfully nudged the arm of his bewildered daughter to make her an ally. ‘Well, I’ll have to bring Daddy back to Earth, won’t I? Won’t I, Rosie? Do you think Daddy wants to come back to Earth? Who’s for Earth? Not Beethoven. Not Handel. One wanted Apollo, the other the Messiah!’
Gerard noticed his wife lapse from smile to grimace.
‘I was saying, Mr Botolph - Gerard. If, as your wife assured me on the telephone, she finds you alone in the orangery, lost in your acreage at Jacaranda and trying to play a violin into the night, then perhaps you too may want lessons?’
He flinched at Ruth’s hand, the skin cool… a slug searching over his, she turning it over, making some sort of compliment about his fine long fingers.
‘Never too late! True, Mrs Botolph?’ Ruth acknowledged his wife who was retreating by inches closer to the front door from where she’d first ventured.
‘A whiff of success and Gerard would remember the violin you gave him but forget to collect his little girl and take her home,’ Heather volunteered. ‘A Botolph “trait”, Gerry would say.’
‘Your Daddy wouldn’t forget to take you home! Now would he, our Rosie?’
Botolph slipped his hand free of the shrivelled flesh he considered to have been holding him longer than friendliness required.
Now there were two wrinkled hands, one clutching his arm, the other clutching Heather’s, clinging, as the tutor waited for them to take their daughter away.
Behind all the exotic flowers in her dress and her little boast about her more important clients, he could see now - she was a lonely figure. He wondered what she would feel when she could no longer cling nor covet the pupil she tried to make into her child. What now would go through her mind… what did Ruth Stein do when the solid door of her house closed with her alone behind it and she parted with her eleventh little disciple…
Through the heavily veined hand which clung to his arm, Gerard felt the same loneliness in Ruth as in himself as each watched Heather’s car get smaller the further it took Rosie back to her home.
‘Do you think you’re up to a “mere branch manager” then Ruth?’
He noticed the aid where her hair failed to cover it.
‘Ready to lead the blind, Ruth?’ Gerard tried more loudly.
‘Oh! Violin? Of course! I promised.’ She stopped clinging.
The car carrying his wife and daughter away disappeared around the distant corner of the road and at last Ruth acknowledged there were other sentient beings in her world - one being her new adult pupil standing beside her.
‘Romance,’ she spoke wistfully, taking up a violin. ‘This, Gerard, is Beethoven’s Romance, in G. See how he modulates? From this - to this - and then - ’ Ruth drew back bow on string, fierce. ‘To this!’
Gerard waited for her elbow to trace still more positions in the air.
‘Isn’t that marvellous? Isn’t that romance!’
‘It is,’ he said. All he could say. It was marvellous; an elbow so bony, skin so parboiled and shrivelled, a face transported, produced from an array of notes that baffled him, romance of a kind which she made hers.
‘Where else will you find that?’ Ruth gently laid the violin into its bed of felt as though it was both her lost lover and… and maybe even her child...
As for giving instruction, she seemed now disinterested, to the point of offence.
‘You see? Just like old Ruth, you could have lovely sounds at your fingertips – romance. One day! Keep coming,’ she whispered, surprising him. But he knew her romance was a dream of its own kind and would never be directed at him.
‘Ruth will show you how to bow; how to produce pizzicato lovelier than a harp; to make a violin sing! Like me, you want to have again true romance which comes nowhere in this world but from my violins? Doesn't it come from the violin?’
‘It does. When you play.’
‘Of course!’ She burst into melodrama which hid the depth of her frustration yet made him question the stability of the woman to whom he would entrust Rosie at six p.m. next Thursday.
‘Romance, Gerard, comes from every loving stroke of bow on string, each hushed tremolo,’ she creaked as she bent forward, then whispered theatrically, ‘each sliding glissando, each lush vibrato. Of course there’s still romance!’
She flung a pile of newspapers to come cascading down from ceiling to floor.
‘In Bach, his love for the instrument abides with order - like this.’ Ruth fanned out the crisp, folded dailies. ‘In Beethoven, love is passion of another kind - chaos of the spirit! Now tamed,’ she whispered, ‘now rampant! Fury, rage! Like this!’ The hurricane forced him to step back as she flung all the newspapers into the air.
‘And like this! And this and this! Fury! Rage! Passion! Romance, Gerard Botolph. Can’t you see it? It’s all around us, in the air!’ She scooped up more newspapers, tossed them across the music room, the hurricane swirling about its eye. ‘Can you see it? I can see it. You only have to look and it’s there!’ She scooped up a whole pile of papers until she lost her balance, stumbling forward into two music stands before careering towards the upright.
He reached out for her, a wrist and then his arm around her waist, but there was a sickening thud as her head nicked the edge of the upright.
‘It is - isn’t it? she whispered, subdued as she looked up at him unaware of her bloodied ear. ‘Isn’t it? Romance? Everywhere?’
‘Will you allow me? To pick up the rest of the papers? Ruth?’ He leaned closer to the aid hanging precariously from her ear.
She was still admiring the instrument which Rosie’s hands had touched.
‘Come on. Let me put them away. A nasty fall for -’
‘I got a little excited with my little lecture to you, on music and romance, didn’t I ? I’m sorry. I’ve made a spectacle of myself - again. I do that. More and more often.’
You can ask her. The silence tells you - now’s the moment…
‘Did you ever -’
‘Did I ever?’
You’ve got to ask her now...
‘Did you ever - tie the knot, Ruth?’ He felt impertinent.
‘The knot? Tie the knot?’
Ask her - if she ever bore a child - of her own!
‘I know it’s not part of my lesson, not my brief, but I couldn’t help seeing a very young “you” next to - ’
‘This is what you must mean by “the knot”? My friend in the photograph? Gustav? You thought I might - ’
He waited while her fingers curled the photograph into a cylinder so he couldn’t look again at the faces of Gustav and her in it.
‘You were talking to me about romance - in music, I mean.’
‘Yes, yes I was.’
‘Look, I only stayed for beginner’s violin. I -’
‘No, you’ve lost a certain romance too - I think, in a way, you’ve lost your Rosie, haven’t you?
How could you know the distance between me and Rosie ?Nobody could know…
‘Curiosity is a natural thing, Gerard. And you were curious about such a young Ruth beside such a young man,’ she said, keeping “the man”, it seemed, curled up in the cylinder she’d formed.
She took a long look at him, let the silence say she was his friend.
‘I met Gustav at the conservatoire in Prague. Wonderful days.’ She patted her ear to assure herself her aid was secure; discreet, in harmony with a lady’s salad days.
She stared out of the window, her eyes glazed, registering nothing, except perhaps fleeting images returning across nearly seventy years.
‘We used to walk beside the Vltava, our dreams flowing free as the river. Used to laugh. About how we’d both one day find a place across the border in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Gustav on violin, me on viola - both knowing the competition would ensure our dreams remained only dreams.’
Ask her, ask her now. Did she ever have her own child?
‘We shared the simplest things... sitting on the benches in the shadow of the Golz-Kinsky Palace, our sandwiches soaked when, inside, they ate caviar. Then we’d find a warm fire in a coffee house. It all seemed to be enough - without the dreams. The war came. Our studies were cut short - as if by the surgeon’s knife, but an evil surgeon who wore a silly moustache, ranted, beat his chest. As for our joining an orchestra in dear old Leipzig, it was bombed to rubble by the allies and -’
She swallowed awkwardly.
‘And under the rubble - ’ she stopped.
‘It’s all right, Ruth. It was insensitive of me. I - ’
‘No. Not insensitive, curious. Remember? We said curiosity was a natural thing?’
She pulled off her sequined taffeta neckerchief and started dabbing an eye.
So she didn’t marry. But what about her own child? I can’t ask her. Not now. Not through all the taffeta and tears.
‘Here. Ruth? You dropped your photo - of you and Gustav.’
‘But I have the sweet wrapper. Rosie’s,’ she sniffed, ashamed to turn and let him see, full on, the mess of mascara and lipstick with which she’d tried to rejuvenate her face. She seemed rooted, as if conscious only of the sensation between her fingers as she rubbed at the crumpled sweet wrapper which Rosie left on the sill just behind the hang of her velvet curtains. Her thumb kept pressing out the sweet paper, taking out all its wrinkles, preserving it for the moment when she would finally be alone.
He wondered whether to return the photo of her and Gustav, but her hands didn’t want to release Rosie’s sweet wrapper, nor to stop trying to straighten it out...
‘Well, thanks for seeing me. Ruth?’ He came closer to her hearing aid. ‘Thanks for letting me be a buffoon on one of your violins.’
‘You just bring your lovely daughter to me, Gerard.’
The spark making her Hurricane Ruth seemed to have died.
‘Some Czerny would be useful for you. From here to here.’ She marked out some forty bars. ‘Exercises, lots of them, for strengthening the third finger. And never let me hear you call yourself a “buffoon”! Life’s too short to annihilate yourself.’ She finally looked up from the exercises. ‘Others will always try to do that for you!’
‘I’ve plenty of experience, from my staff. I’ll - I’ll bring Rosie then. Next Thursday, six o’clock sharp.’ Gerard assured her, then realised his promise sounded like a crude form of barter; as if the only thing of any value he could offer in return for her interest in him was a toy; the toy his seven-year-old daughter.
She stood in front of her white panelled door and waved… waved as though he might have been the Gustav who could have once given her a child of her own.
He felt feverish. He’d be all right, once the responsibility came for him to concentrate on the road until home. Then he’d again be able to accept the beaming face in the fading photograph of she and Gustav, accept the frantic waving, the good sense of what he still wanted to believe; despite all his misgivings, he must bring his girl again to the slightly stooped music tutor who was still waving from her porch. He stumbled, then righted himself before she could suspect his wave of nausea.
amazon.co.uk
NOOK KOBO ( W H Smith )
Google Smashwords
EXCERPT :
ARISTO’S obsessive need to trace and belong to his family - even though he was told they were all burnt and left unidentifiable during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus — has estranged his English wife, and is gradually distancing his only child, while in turn, Pavlos has an increasing need to belong to a father who will make time for him. As the practices at Papas’ late-night museum ‘staff meetings’ unfold themselves to Pavlos, the boy is led deeper into a sinister confrontation with what Papas calls his ‘family’.
A strong blend of eeriness, suspense and the poignancy of lives which could be yours when driven to extremity.
The first few chapters are atmospheric; intriguing. They made me want to keep reading. The beautifully observed characters and exotic setting have all the makings of a first class novel. Barbara Erskine
An atmospheric, vibrant, almost spooky page-turner
that might easily become something of a cult.
Reay Tannahill
The promise of the early chapters is more than well-maintained. This novel is a real page-turner, worthy of comparison with the early John Fowles The Magus - and yet the book is distinctively Raymond Nickford.” Allen J Millington Synge
A psychological suspense as poignant and powerful
as Nickford’s Greek sojourn in his book Aristo’s Family. www.hauntedbooks.com
CHAPTER ONE
'The doorbell, Papas! Papas? Bell's ringing!' Pavlos began to wonder whether his voice would reach beyond the basement and all the way up to Papas' study. Soon his father would remember to come down and that his son was still where he'd locked him to keep him away from his “drunken fish of a mother”. Soon he'd unlock the door. Soon even if it was only to give him the “Greek lesson”.
Papas had only to bother to glance at camera No.1 which monitored anyone standing close to the iron entrance doors of his museum home.
'Papas! Bell!'
That sounded like a key scratching in the basement door. The dim of the narrow steps was suddenly replaced by a dazzle, and right at the top his father stood, a dark outline silhouetted against the light, dust particles cascading around him, a total eclipse.
'Quick! Mister Spiropoulos! He’s here! We’re for inspection! Have some textbooks ready! Say nothing of what we do in the Greek lesson.'
So the visitor was just Spiropoulos from the Education Authority in Nicosia, come to check Papas' home tuition was satisfactory. Spiropoulos, as readable as Genesis when he came, as welcome as Exodus when he went, but at least his ringing of the bell had brought Papas down from his study, the basement door was at last open, and Spiropoulos' visit might delay for a day that sick feeling, the overwhelming drowsiness which came with the instruction.
'Quickly! Some books! And remember our little secret, eh Pavlos? You say nothing about what we do in the lessons. Soon they will bring
you closer to your Papas. Closer to your family, eh?’
‘You don't have family, Papas Mum might have drunk too much but all she ever tried to tell you was that we’re your family! You know it was three Turkish soldiers who took them, leaving a village burning. People burning!’
‘Just say nothing - remember?’
Papas had reminded him to keep silent so many times it had been impossible to let the inspector know anything about Papas' actual teaching method ever since ten years ago when Spiropoulos had seemed so easily persuaded to stamp the green form...
SCHOOL PHOBIC: Home tuition.
Approved: C. Spiropoulos
'Pavlos! What you dreaming of now? Quick!'
Pavlos transferred the pile of texts which were always left for show on a wine cask should Spiropoulos visit from his office in Nicosia.
'Say nothing Pavlos!'
Nothing... two... three...
Pavlos heard the fingers click, felt the jolt in his head. It was like the day Papas had the workmen put in the goods lift, and afterwards he and Papas had stood inside to test it. The cage had dropped so suddenly he felt nothing beneath his feet, and his stomach was falling out. Now it was the same, except there was no lift, and he was still falling, drifting down with Papas' words.
Papas hadn't needed to click his fingers nor to instruct, for however unusual his home teaching technique, he'd be sure to get heaps of praise off the man from the Education Authority - at least, by the time he had offered mister Spiropoulos what the inspector was always waiting for; another glass of Papas’ best Metaxa in his precious English cut crystal.
'Are we ready, Pavlos?'
'Yes, Papas,' he answered wearily.
'You hidden the headphones?'
'Yes!'
'The mike? Where is the mike? Pavlos, where - ’
'In the empty wine cask, Papas! We're ready!'
Papas had snapped up one of the books and was eagerly scanning a page.
'Good! Yes, I tell him some “story” about this one, eh Pavlos?'
It was routine with Papas now to greet mister Spiropolous armed with an impressive-looking text and to make sure he quoted something - anything which would make it look as though his son had been enjoying to the full one of the twenty “contact” hours “per week” of tuition which the authorities said a school phobic should have until he could go to school with others of his age.
Pavlos waited for the sound of the main entrance doors and voices.
'I tell you, Stavrovouni, he’s better with all this around him.' The education inspector's voice was a bit closer, and “this” must have been the sixteenth century ceremonial dinner gong mister Spiropoulos had tapped for the third quarter this year.
'That's kind of you to say, Spiropoulos. As you see, I try to give my boy history only first hand.'
'From the soil, eh Aristo? This all from good Cypriot soil not like the syllabuses they preach from the offices up on the Mesaoria. This one, who is he?'
'Fragment of skull of one in Zeno of Citium's company three twenty before Christ. We still working on reconstruction of full head with help of computer graphics from conservation department near you!'
Pavlos heard another of Spiropoulos' usual raps on the skull, this time producing his quirky little drum roll for added gratification.
'Zeno? He good boy in his time, eh Stavrovouni? Like your Pavlos is going to be. We see him now just for the record, eh?'
The inspector's confident voice seemed a lot nearer to the basement. Next it would be buckets of praise for Papas' “teaching facilities” and his “resources”. At least, maybe Spiropoulos would take up so much of Papas' relic “dusting off ” time this morning that there would really be no Greek lesson to go through today.
'Ah! Pavlos! Pavlos, my boy!’ Spiropolous appeared beside Papas. ‘I see you much further with your history than those at the gymnasium!'
The inspector's smile had widened. He looked much like a contented imbecile; as though the world was made of honey and almond blossom.
'You see, Pavlos, I embrace your father and why? Because your family, it has proud reputation young man. Very proud your Papas, his little museum, it will certainly help you keep family tradition alive, eh?' Keep alive…lessons bring you closer… family…
'If Aristotle Stavrovouni's son is going to be the one for keeping the museum alive, then sure as the proud cedars on ancient Troodos the curator Aristotle Stavrovouni, he’s the best education for you! The best!' Spiropoulos repeated, jerking Papas' shoulders to him again as if he was in a wedding dance.
'Hey, Pavlos! You ever bigger, taller aubergine, and absolutely stuffed with knowledge!' The inspector pronounced, inflating like a balloon.
Pavlos forced a smile. He did remember something much nearer the truth about Papas' family than Spiropolous' easy manner was prepared to reveal... something Mum had once said. She'd drunk all morning before facing Papas about the crazy things he'd excavated and filled her home with ever since she'd come to live in Cyprus... yes, she'd sworn, sometimes slurred but there had been that quiet moment when words no longer belonged between them. Mum had spoken, just as if Papas was her boy and she was holding out sweets to a kid who'd lost his dream...
Come to terms with it, Aristo she’d begged him… August I974... Turkish soldiers... drunk... torched everyone in the houses you've revisited. Do you want Pavlos to grow up seeing what you bring home in those polythene bags? Even an archaeologist can't dig up bits of his family if there's no record.
‘…hear me Pavlos, my boy?'
'Sorry mister Spiropoulos. I I was just thinking.'
'I said, your Papas, his lessons help you. He is the best person to keep your family tradition alive, eh?'
Pavlos managed another smile, hoping it wouldn't show the anger that burnt inside as the inspector turned to Papas for freer conversation.
'A very useful little museum, eh Aristo? Yassou!' Spiropoulos was raising his glass high. 'Inspection complete! We forgive you if your teaching method seems '
a little eccentric...
‘- a little eccentric - ’
shall we say...
‘ - shall we say.'
That was the wink, and now Spiropoulos jerking Papas' shoulders into him so hard that some Metaxa had spilt on to the inspector's suit, and he was now so close to Papas he was in danger either of kissing or anaesthetising him with his breath.
'Kopiaste?' Papas turned from the man’s breath with a pained smile.
Spiropoulos was tearing a pink sheet from his pad, leaving himself the green sheet to waggle in the air.
'Another two of these and a trip to Kakopetria to go, Aristo, my good friend! You keep up the lessons and you save me the next glass for another time!'
The inspector was muttering something to Papas somewhere up in the foyer. There was a lull, a bit more muttering, and now the screech of the great studded entrance doors opening, the surge of traffic noise drowning out all Papas' soft soaping politeness, and the door hinges themselves beginning to screech closed, leaving only the bolts being shot... that was top, middle, bottom... one, two, three... and fingers click ... he was alone again with Papas.
‘It’s too late for lesson now, Pavlos Pavlos?'
Papas' sandalled feet were slapping their way towards him across the tiled floor, and now he’d propped himself against the door frame.
'Old Spiropoulos he take all my time! Pavlos, I can't settle to my work. I drive up to Troodos now and stay over the night with my family.'
'Over night? You said now Mum's gone you wouldn't leave me on my own any more not here.'
‘Pavlos, I know I said, and you know the seat is always very empty beside me in the Land Rover, but the family, they say '
Keep him happy, Pavlos, pretend he's got a family, keep pretending or else you'll get the lesson right now...
'What, Papas? What do they say?'
'Ah Pavlos! You make it difficult for me. I can only tell you the truth. They not ready to "accept” the son of Stavrovouni until they sure his drunken wife is no longer "influence" on you.'
'Is that good enough for you? You're going to listen to that? You're happy to leave me here because of that?'
'How you mean "here"?'
'Papas ' but he couldn't tell his father what seemed to happen around him when left alone at nights, how there always came the moment when he panicked because he couldn't tell the difference between himself and the wall mounted ancestor masks which seemed to look down at him from every angle of his home, no matter which turn or corner he took to get away from them.
'Papas, don't go not tonight.'
'Why - why not "tonight"? Listen, Pavlos, I take you up with me, I promise, but the family they not ready yet.'
Papas was sitting on the ground floor, the history text he had taken back from Spiropoulos still in his right hand, his legs stretching down the basement steps, his feet resting on the third tread... as if he was afraid to stand and take the first move towards his son, afraid to look him in the eyes, face to face and promise.
'Listen, in the morning I bring something from the family eh?'
You don't have a family!
'We keep the museum closed another day and we sit together, have a little drink? Maybe a nice big drink, eh? Menas has brought us some good Meze from his delicatessen. I tell you all about the family, and then we have time for nice long Greek lesson. After I give you something nice from my brothers, eh?'
'Papas! I don't want ' he felt the jolt, couldn't say what he needed; that he didn't want any more of the craziness which made Papas leave him for a night to drive up to a rendezvous... a rendezvous where still there was nobody to meet, nothing but the occasional grip of the cold night air, drifting clouds, swirling, rolling silently as they had for ages between the darkened ravines, spreading upwards to the barren razor thin scarps where only the moon came to touch the high Troodos.
No, he didn't want to be alone again. Nor did he want the promised “something nice” to come from Papas' so-called “brothers”. The “gift” would be only another relic in a polythene bag to accompany Papas straight up to his study when he got back in the morning. But most of all, he didn't want the morning to bring that drowsiness which bordered on nausea, and then all that would come with that pit of complete obedience into which he'd fall as surely as the next Greek lesson.
CHAPTER TWO
Outside, the cicadas shrilled into the night. Inside, the museum seemed quieter and cooler than it had been during the long afternoon down in the basement, not just quiet... there was a sort of hush...
Since the “injunction”, Papas had been going out more and more in the early hours to “give some time” to his family, and now to “spend the night”. Pavlos looked at his wristwatch. By now, his father would be somewhere well up on the mountain roads. They must have twisted and narrowed between the cedars whose branches would be spreading high over his old slate blue estate as it kept on cornering towards the scarps, but Papas had never carried his fantasy so far as to say where his journey ended... where his family lived…
With every minute that passed, he would be further from home. Already it seemed that the building's walls had started their gradual movement inwards; as if they wanted to squeeze him in until crushed. There was something ancient at every corner; crude Stone Age cutting tools, the flaking metal on the curve of an early iron scythe which, the more he stared at its hook like blade, threatened again to open him up from head to foot. Then there was the copper penis squashed between the breasts of Aphrodite as an early fertility charm and the same grumpy stares from the Cypriot ancestor masks which, for lack of wall space, had to be hung on either side of the doors to his and Papas' bedrooms. The masks even stared out of the tiny damp cell that had been Mum's kitchen. It wasn't home - whatever Papas had said or done - not now that Mum couldn't come back to break the hush.
Papas' bedroom door seemed to be confronting, holding behind it the cause of the disturbance which had made Pavlos leave his bedroom and walk up the extra six steps to the top landing.
The doorknob had given only a half turn. He tried turning one way then the other, pushing and turning, turning without pushing. Whichever way, it was useless trying. He held his breath, straining to listen. Sounds were always clearer up on the landing after the sturdy entrance doors had closed and all the visitors' voices had been drained out of the building. He was sure that he'd heard something... someone…
'Papas? You in there?'
It was no use expecting an answer. His head flopped on to the door panel. As rapidly, he straightened it. It was easier to face the truth it wasn't that he'd heard anything behind that door, not even that the ancestor masks lining the walls of the landing had seemed to beckon him further up the extra half flight of steps; simply that he had to believe there was some sound somewhere in the museum. He ran his fingers over the faces which seemed to form in the wood grain of Papas' door, then jerked them away exactly as if he'd scolded the tips on the downstairs kitchen hob. He had to look at the two ancestor masks, right into the dark hollows where slits had been made for mouths... Learn more Greek and you closer to your family... Papas ... family... Papas ...
He felt dizzy, as if he was going to fall into the door, but the spell had passed and the door was cool and hard beneath the palm he'd put out to support himself. He tried to avoid the mouth slits until he could think straight again.
Family - if there was any truth in it at all, his father had never let him glimpse even a faded sepia photograph of any relatives... no parents, no uncles, nor aunts, nor cousins, not a single grandparent, not even great grandparents... what if there were no records at all?
None Pavlos, none the mouth slits of the masks seemed to insist. The dark hollows behind the eyes stared until he could have sworn he had been looking at tissue glistening in the half light of the moon.
He glanced again at the doorknob, regarded with revulsion the room upon which it might open. But nor could he stand back, smash his foot through the panel, prove to Papas his “family” was myth, that “closer” didn't have to mean the “lessons” any more. It only had to mean a walk... tomorrow, out of the basement... out of the museum... into the morning and the baking sun of August... down to the little bar kiosk where there was cool shade, and his father could buy him a beer, treat him like a son, a friend - a man even!
But all that was left was to wait until morning, to stare stupidly into the half human shapes which seemed to lie in the wood grain, to wonder about that family for which Papas' honey soft Cypriot voice had always said the Greek lessons were preparing him.
Still, at least Papas would be clockwork when it came to the starting time for the Greek lessons, and that meant his being home by morning. By the time he'd torn into any post, run the video back on the security cameras, made some telephone calls, Papas would call him and they'd have to go together down to the conservation room at the back of the basement... sure as the sun would rise outside the museum tomorrow.
Then Papas and he would step over the cordon rope which separated the door with the PRIVATE sign from the basement exhibits where visitors were allowed to walk freely. Once on the other side of that door, Papas would double lock it from the inside, pull out and position the lesson chair away from any bits of limbs and tools waiting for cleaning and repair, rest the microphone, strap, and headphones on the old olive press which served as his basement desk, and complete the whole ceremony by swivelling the lesson chair so that the only shaft of light which shone into the room through the little reinforced glass window at pavement level shone down straight into his student's eyes... then would come Papas' fidget with the headphones to make absolutely sure they were cupped fully around his pupil's ears and then the final fuss to strap the microphone round the throat.
Papas had always said it was best if the mike was round his pupil's throat; that way, with the headphones covering his ears, the pupil could hear, amplified, the regular sound of his own breathing until the rhythm made him drowsy, and being drowsy made Papas' “star” pupil “more receptive” to his lesson even the ancients high up on the Troodos had known about the rhythm, his father had always said.
Yes, Papas would be with him soon even if it meant the lesson. Soon the dark would lift, dawn would come, the big iron entrance doors would open to let sunshine flood the foyer... moments after 08:30 he'd find himself in the basement and all he'd know would be the sluggishness which wasn't quite sleep, while all his eyes would be aware of would be the single ray of light through the little basement window, Papas' lips moving and The Voice, as certain as day following night... and then he'd feel the first of his jolts, his heart missing a beat every time he heard The Voice call “Pavlos?”
He knew he shouldn't have come up to Papas’ door, allowed himself to think of the lessons. Even thinking of them made him sway and brought the drowsiness. If he tried to fight it, he might lose. His legs were buckling. He gripped tight the doorknob to his father’s bedroom but the last thing he saw was the ceiling.
The rocking must have been loud to wake him, Pavlos reasoned. It didn't matter that he'd found himself lying on the small platform of the raised landing with two black ancestor masks staring down at him from the wall on either side of Papas' bedroom door. All that mattered was that now there was no mistaking the noise, and it had been coming from Papas' bedroom. But Papas was up in the Troodos, and his bed wouldn't rock like that if there was...
No, there was no family and even if there had been, then Papas wouldn’t have needed to lock the bedroom door.
Pavlos decided he had to raise himself off the floor, stay awake. The drowsiness could be overcome and he wouldn't let his legs buckle again even if they threatened to take over. If he could make just one big effort to shake away the sleepiness, forget the riot of his pulse, just gather up the strength, he might even tear that door off its hinges, hurl it over the giggly woman in Papas' bedroom, silence her... just as the silky Voice had silenced him all his life.
'Papas? Papas! All that about wanting to take me with you and bringing me a nice gift from your brothers how could you lie to me!’
Silence.
'Stuff your family! D’you hear me? They can go to hell - hell!'
There was more giggling... now a woman's throaty laughter and the murmur of his father’s voice urging her to be quiet, while the bed rocked harder.
He beat his fists on the door until the panel shook in its frame and boomed back at him like the skin of one of Papas' ancient Greek drums.
'They can rot! Like everything else of yours rots in this place! Papas? You can hear me! Any family you have, they can rot!'
The giggling had stopped. That was his father’s bed rocking harder, the woman moaning and Papas had given up trying to quieten her.
‘Papas? You can burn all your lying gifts that you said you were bringing me back keep them for her you've got in there!'
We don't shout after our lessons do we Pavlos? We no closer to real family if we shout...
He couldn't care what the silky Voice seemed to be telling him. He’d beat his fists down until they bled, if that's how long it took Papas to open the door, face the disgrace he'd made of himself, his wife, his son.
Another lesson, Pavlos... you need!
He felt the first jolt, a current shooting through every nerve in his head, and, each time he tried to hit the door, something seemed to push his fist back towards his own face until all he could do was try to shout.
‘You've lied to me! You've lied to Mum! What lies are you telling your easy woman in there? Papas?’
‘No, Pavlos, you have to believe me. My family, they still alive!’
‘Remember what Mum always tried to tell you Papas. Remember August 1974? Turkish soldiers, people burning, your family - ’
‘No! No, still alive, Pavlos. Still! My new friend, she's coming to meet my family too. After we we play a little, I speak to her again just as I - I speak to you, eh?’
Pavlos knew what that special, soft manner of speaking meant. The current lashed around in his head. It was still harder to shout out his anger even though the woman's moaning had stopped and all he could hear was the headboard of Papas' bed knocking harder and faster against the wall.
He kicked the door panel.
‘Get out of my father's bedroom! D'you hear?'
The headboard was still slapping against the wall. He was about to kick the door again but pulled himself back... the headboard, it had stopped... the room had returned to its hush, except for a kind of occasional scuffling and scraping and knocking of objects. If rats could dress themselves, there were rats on the other side of that door.
Maybe the woman didn't understand English, even thought 'bitch' was a compliment. In case she was a Cypriot, he'd fist the door. But it was still his father's bedroom, and his heart was thumping as fast as each thump he gave to the panel of oak.
'Send her away, Papas she doesn't belong here. Papas?'
'Pavlos, listen now. You don't understand. Athena, she wants to meet my family. Soon you have new mother, eh? And we all three drive up to the Troodos to find them, eh? You calm down now. You calm.'
Papas' voice was still muffled by the door but seemed to have no more of the anger expected in it... no feeling at all. It was soft, infuriatingly soft.
'... down now, Pavlos... calm... calm.'
Soon he'd have to be calm, however much he fought against that softness.
'Calm? Calm! With her in there? Funny "Troodos" you were going to, Papas!'
'Listen to me now, Pavlos. You can picture my face, eh?'
'It's no good, Papas. I'm not listening this time. I won't - ’
'Yes, yes, you can picture my face now Pavlos? You picture my lips? And you hear my voice, calm, yes, we calm now, eh?'
'I can't hear you I can't - ’
But then he realised the absurdity of what he'd denied. Wherever Papas was, it seemed he could always hear him, for The Voice was always there... like God. All he could do now was to put his shoulder to the door, give one final push, inwardly pray it opened on Papas' shame.
'You tiring yourself, Pavlos, you tiring, eh? Yes, you tired. You calm now. I want you to be calm. Like the breeze that blows. You remember our breeze? That's right, you remember.. And in the breeze we forget everything but the gentle sigh of crisp clean air on your face. So gentle, the Mediterranean breeze, eh? So gentle on your face. Yes, gentle, eh?'
Pavlos felt the current searching, finding every nerve he had, paralysing thought, leaving him dangling in those soft silky strands of Papas’ web.
'You picture my lips Pavlos? Yes, you ready to answer me now, eh?'
Pavlos punched his knuckles into the door panel, his hand throbbing.
'Yes, that’s all right, that’s all right! You have to how they say, "get it out your system", eh? Now it’s out, Pavlos, all out of your system, the breeze flowing through you gentle, calm, clean, eh? And now all your memories, they cleaned out of you and you remember nothing, nothing of what you think you heard in Papas' bedroom.'
Pavlos bit hard into his lip, gave one more punch into the door which he knew would be his last. His knuckles stung. The sharper pain was replaced by the dull throbbing, until he forgot his hand, his head falling forward on to the door panel. The oak was cool on his forehead until his legs buckled beneath him and he felt himself sliding down the door, fighting against the instinct to crawl like that late summer fly he'd once watched slide down the window pane where, for distracting Papas from his work, Papas had sprayed it with fly killer, the insect in its last seconds struggling stupidly against the thickness of the glass, only millimetres separating it from the free air it had once known outside… free air…
'Mum she was fit enough to be introduced to any family you could have Papas! Are you still hearing me?' he asked on his knees, his head propping him against the door, his voice tamed to a soft pleading.
That was the screech of the wardrobe hinges which Papas was always too busy to grease, and again that rat like scuffling against the hush in the room. Papas would be throwing on clothes to hide what he'd shared with the woman he’d called Athena.
Pavlos rolled his head on the door panel, wanting it to hurt. There was only one thing that woman in there could want to learn from Papas, and that was how soon it would be before he spoilt her with more little handouts from the Museums' catalogue - silver preferred to brass, and never mind the date on it.
That was the clop of shoes on the tiles near the vanity sink in there. The woman could have been angling her feet into Mum's shoes. And now there was that hush again. It seemed to paralyse the whole museum, everything inside its walls. He knelt where the Voice had left him, on the floor.
The door opened. He fell forward, confronting the toes pointing out of Papas' brown sandals. Another pair of feet had arrived, the manicured toenails varnished in soft pink. He looked up at the woman who was looking down at him as though she'd had her first sight of a worm. She looked like a Cypriot, but was definitely no virtuous villager maybe someone amongst the museum's occasional visitors from the seedy night life Papas said had befallen Ayia Napa. Her dusky brown body was what his mother would have called “starkers” where Athena couldn't hide it behind Papas. She was clutching a pillow to herself to cover her privates. She seemed to have had her fill of viewing the worm and was backing towards the dress Papas had once intended as a “peace offering” to Mum. So this was the “lady friend” more fit than Mum to be “introduced” to Papas' make believe family.
Pavlos still couldn't raise himself from the floor, only watch, let the anger mount. He wished that if there was the family of which Papas had always spoken, then now it might offer him a hand, pull him up where his head could be as high as the one tossing her long black hair over her naked shoulders and starting to fill out the dress Mum had never seen.
CHAPTER THREE
A soft hand smoothed over his shoulder, and The Voice followed the hand. Pavlos pulled away.
‘... stand now, eh Pavlos? Come now, give me your hand.'
The words reminded Pavlos where he was. He stayed kneeling, bit through the graze on his knuckles.
'Eh, eh, eh! You still not calm are you?’ he heard his father ask. ‘No, I see you still not calm as the breeze that flow, the breeze all the way through you, cleaning out all your memories... cleaning...'
He would count, daydream, think, do anything now not to slip and slither on The Voice. Pavlos shrugged again, rejecting the hand his father massaged into his shoulder.
'Mum you might not have been able to make her believe in your "family", but she was a good woman, Papas!'
Papas had stopped massaging, was raising his finger up in front of his lips, cautioning.
'Sh! Keep your voice down! Your mother! Your mother! All she ever did was remind me of the Turks. What they they did.'
Nothing was “calm” about Papas' voice as he made a poor attempt to whisper. 'Why you always go back to your mother? Eh? I, Aristotle Stavrovouni, have educated you not your mother!'
There was a draught just a shave from his nose as Papas' hand flopped disdainfully in front of him, 'I work like crazy to keep museum. Every night museum close, what do I do? I break off my work to give you scholar's time. Every morning you have your lessons without fail. Where your mother come from it’s different. Today in England, even the plumber, if he runs his own business, he calls himself this and calls himself that, puts his tool kit down, sinks his hand into fat wallet and sends his boy to public school. But, how many English boys have Greek father, expert in Classical Greek? Eh?'
'And an English mother I can't see because of all the times all the times, Papas, you've rowed over the things you've dug up and crammed into our home, all the times you've taken her to court over me, and her drinking?'
He clung to his father's trouser legs, yearning to get up off the floor for once without needing The Voice to help him.
'She wouldn't wouldn't have drunk if - ’
'Yes, say it! Go on, say! You want to say? She never have drunk, if I had been "ordinary"? If I never talk of family; if I pretend my own family never exist; if I never give you your lessons and send you instead to the gymnasium like any other father want to see his boy educated with other boys, eh?'
He had legs beneath him now. Papas had pulled him on to his feet. But the legs were trembling.
'No wrong. If you'd just not expected me and Mum to worship your your forefathers! We're your family, not '
'Shut up! Shut up! The lady, she doesn’t want to hear this. Athena, she is the only woman who will see my family.'
The slap stung, and the carefully subdued Voice had finally broken into a shout. He was as tall, taller than Papas now, and Pavlos could feel himself trembling between submission to the slap, and hitting back... calm… calm as the breeze over the Troodos... no, he couldn't begin to raise his hand to his father.
'Come. Down the stairs!'
That was Papas' hip nudging him ; the full weight of a panicked man barging him downstairs, tread by tread.
'Athena, she believes me. She understand we find my family up in the Troodos. She come with me.'
Pavlos thought he saw Papas' eyes watering, but that wasn't going to stop him clinging stubbornly to the banister railing, his wrists trembling to hold himself fast against his father’s weight. He barged, bracing himself for another slap, trying to stand his ground before the Cypriot woman filling out the frame of Papas' bedroom door.
'Down! Quickly! Down the stairs! You don't want to study your fore-fathers any more? You born partly of English, but you not "Paul", you "Pavlos", born of Greek, from Troodos Mountains!'
Papas was beside himself, struggling to speak between ever shorter breaths, the creamy smoothness of The Voice beginning to desert him now, his neck reddening as it always did when he was trapped in anger.
'In the Troodos mountains, I want you to remember Pavlos, the villagers had something special, many, many years…’
No. No, this time I won't listen. I won't repeat what The Voice tells me.
He'd turn away now from the eyes which always commanded.
This time, surely, he was breaking free. The Voice wasn't soft and creamy smooth, and Papas was no longer the “best person” for his education as that creep Spiropoulos always said. For once, Papas' eyes had shifted. There was panic in them. Papas had allowed himself to shout, despite his “lady”.
'You prefer your mother, eh? You go to her? Eh?'
'Speak up, Papas, you don't have to whisper let her hear!' he said, scowling at the woman who was still lolling in the doorway and fussing to improve the hang of Mum's dress on her. 'Go on! Why don't you let her hear it all!'
The shoulder shoving was making him slide against the banister railing as Papas kept trying to swallow what he wanted to yell.
'Listen! Listen to me!' Pavlos could feel Papas' pipe tobacco breath on his cheek as his father leaned forward and he could see the woman behind Papas, now turning from side to side to get a better view of herself in the wardrobe mirror.
'Come, down - now! Down the stairs, Pavlos! You prefer go to waitress who slop cloth across tables outside café in Limassol? For all you think you heard behind my door, at least Athena will come to meet our family?'
‘“Our" family? I like that! "Our" family? You call her "our" family?' Pavlos chided.
'Is that what I have spent years to educate you for?’ his father replied. ‘To be forever - how your mother would say "doubting Thomas"? Eh?' Papas continued, bulldozing through the question. ‘Eh?'
Pavlos felt his father's index finger stab at his shoulder again.
'Don't you want to be educated? Know our family? All the hours I -I speak to you! Eh!'
“Speak” the word dizzied, jolted, sprang between every nerve inside Pavlos’ head. He thought of the tangle that Papas' Greek lessons had sewn into his brain... the writhing snakes of Medusa's head. His head spun, his hands, his legs, they were trembling again, with anger.
'I work for you!’ he heard his father continue the sermon. ‘I leave my research in drawer to teach you your birthright! And what your mother ever do? She run. She run from your home with her bottles '
'This? You've got to be joking! This isn't a home! Didn't anybody ever tell you? Home is where it's no good Papas you wouldn't understand.’
'Yes! I understand! A home is where you have comfort, and if you lucky you have antiques, and if you very lucky you have ancient antiquities and somebody who can help you understand your culture!'
'Even our bedrooms!’ Pavlos retorted, ‘They’re right above those rotting remains which you have to label and keep under glass. History's okay Papas, but how long are you going to live in your fantasy world? How many other boys have to live above ancient humans!'
'Don't we all? Go back ten thousand years! A man, a woman, they right beneath your feet! Except their bodies they go. But something remain... something remain, eh? It’s history!'
'History? What's history, Papas? My last fart's history! Your history's just the gloss '
Mustn't be a nuisance, not a nuisance.
Speak! Speak out ... for once…
‘ - culture freaks like - like you, put on the passage of time because it makes you seem so much glossier next to ordinary people like Mum.'
The slap hadn't come. The Voice wasn't counting to three. There was no click of fingers.
'Yes...Yes, I see now,’ his father began, ‘I see you are the duplicate of your English mother. I tell you, she has as much respect for Cypriot history as for how you say fart! She treat priceless relics like they tins of macaroni from Moudis superstore, she treat my family like they never exist! What is she saying? I, Aristotle Stavrovouni, never exist? And still she try to fight me in the courts - a waitress, eh?’
It wasn't just The Voice coming from Papas, but Papas himself... speaking like a father. In that case he could carry on speaking to him like you should be able to speak to a father, Pavlos considered.
'She's not just a waitress! She's my Mum! D'you hear that? Not one of your "lady” friends you can make to believe in some crazy family!'
'Eh! Eh! Eh! You not care if she hears?' he said, nodding back to his bedroom door where Athena had kicked off one pair of shoes and was trying her foot in some shiny black stilettos. 'Perhaps you care about this, eh? And this!’
The second and third slaps turned Pavlos’ head from side to side, but they came as a relief. His face could sting, for all that mattered any more was that The Voice, the silky Voice was for the first time unsure, not in command.
'Mum was a good woman worth more than all your family put together see!'
'And this!'
Pavlos tried but failed to dodge the harder slap which stung and throbbed on his face.
'There's no expensive clothes, nothing you can put on that that tarted up thing in your bedroom there, which will make her fitter to see your "family" than Mum would have.'
'And this! And this! Eh?'
The slaps left his cheeks raw. Papas' eyes were shifting again. He'd never seemed like this before, out of control.
'Here!'
That was Papas' expensive after-shave Pavlos had smelt, and Papas' hand rubbing Cyprus pounds all over his face, over his nostrils, searching for his lips until he felt all the notes being stuffed into his mouth. Pavlos struggled against the fingers, moved his head from left to right to avoid them, then retched when he could no longer stop the notes reaching the back of his mouth. But it was still his father's fingers that pushed them in, and those he didn't dare to bite. The notes were choking. He had to spit them out if he was to breathe while Papas' greater weight nudged him tread by tread down the stairs.
'Here, take money! Go to your mother! Go, eh? But you no come back you no part of my family. You come back I '
Papas couldn't say what he'd do, except that he had slackened his grip and shoved out a bent palm before flicking it away into the air only centimetres from his nose; a Greek Cypriot's way of ramming home ‘you no longer exist'.
'Some ' Some scholar! he wanted to shout, but Pavlos could only stay bent forward, retch again and pull at the soggy notes still clogging his mouth. Papas had returned for a moment to close the slit where his bedroom door still hung slightly open. His “lady” was doing a last few wriggles to get used to the feel of the dress that had been going to be Mum's best for the summer; the one with the red roses and dusky purple chrysanthemum heads cascading between each other on a fresh white background; the dress Mum said was going to be so bright in all the August sunshine with Papas once she'd got herself “dried out”.
Pavlos had intended to shout at the woman, but the words wouldn't come out. There was something about her which he knew. He must have worn that face of hers himself every time The Voice had stung him until all he could do was stare ahead. Maybe she wouldn't have visited at all, nor have been in Papas' bed, if it hadn't been for Papas first taking her down to the basement to show her the museum's “introductory” slide show, “Journey with My Ancestors”, The Voice craftily slipping its instructions between the guide notes whenever Papas paused the tape and spoke... slowly, softly, slowly, softly...
She too had listened to The Voice, he was sure. Papas had tried - like he must have tried with other “lady friends” to take her into his confidence, “speak” to her, “introduce” her to what he still believed to be his family.
Pavlos’ face still stung from the slaps as he sat alone in the empty ticket kiosk downstairs in the Reception foyer. The museum was closed and there'd be nobody to come for tickets. He could wait, unseen, until he'd calmed down and his heart had stopped thumping so wildly in his chest. Soon the woman's voice would no longer be inside his home. Every time she called 'Aristo', as if she'd shared what Mum had shared with him, the falseness of it made him cringe, but he knew he wouldn't be able to stand up or move out of the kiosk, not until the entrance doors had been slammed closed, the bolts shot, the woman gone.
Papas was mumbling something to her now. That was the entrance doors slamming for the night, echoing through the foyer until he could hear Papas scraping the chair across the tiles and standing on it for his routine of stretching up to check the angle of the security camera.
'Pavlos? Come now. Pavlos?'
The Voice seemed to carry to every corner of the museum until nothing could hide from it in the tiniest recess. Even as Papas' sandals were slapping their way towards the ticket kiosk where he sat crouched, the museum seemed empty... except for The Voice. Papas was leaning over the little wooden counter of the booth. There was nowhere to hide.
'Hello down there! You going to sell tickets to "ghosts" eh? What you doing down there? Come. You don't want to spend the night hiding like snail in ticket office. You want to stay there for rest of the night?'
Pavlos waited for the next “come” and The Voice's first instruction. Maybe if he could fake a smile or look alert, Papas wouldn't notice his drowsiness this time. But Papas was squeezed into the ticket booth, right beside him now. There was nowhere to move, nothing else to do but hold his hand up to the hand Papas offered and stand. The lips... they were already moving.
For as long as he could think of Mum, he might fight against the drowsiness... Mum... she'd be alone in rooms above a restaurant in Limassol... after finishing her shift serving tourists at tables beneath parasols... after snuffing out the flickering candles that brightened an evening between smiling lovers... after hoping for a tip and then stacking the chairs as her boss wanted them...
He'd forgotten the numbness that Papas' slaps had left on his cheeks, the soggy Cyprus pounds he'd had to spit out.
Soon, Pavlos... REAL family...
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NOOK KOBO ( W H Smith )
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EXCERPT
PROLOGUE
A breeze carrying a hint of damp earth, newly mown grass and a faint beery odour from the Hare and Billet lightly brushed Matthew Kreasey’s face. His eyes watered as he stared through his open car window at the distant glow of street lamps along Shooters Hill, fields sprawling to the gaunt twelve foot walls of Greenwich Park. Something urged him to start the engine, drive away while he could, but he needed the street lamps' glow, the fields’ freshness breathing into him, their space, their quiet, the anonymity late evening brought to the heath.
Waitin’ for you teacher, even on your heath…Class 12d…
The glow, the freshness had gone.
His ex-students, he was sure, were gathering from the wrong side of town with the only thing their breadline households didn’t deny them, tantos and long-bladed hunters, bush rangers, like the one staff-room chatter claimed to have pricked, pierced and slid as a blade through butter eight inches into colleague Margaret Fielder’s lower back. She’d misjudged, turned to the blackboard to kindle a spark of enthusiasm in them for ‘Marvell & The Metaphysical Poets’ but it had been their last lesson on a Friday and they’d wanted out - out on the streets.
Gently, Kreasey ran his hand along the frame of his car window, longing for it to be the window of his rooms in the Old Rectory again, near the quiet village school of Padbury. It had overlooked a cottage garden from where once he could breathe the perfume of night scented stocks. If only he could hear the breeze whispering once more through the copper beeches of ages past, not the horns of that flash coupe and the juggernaut vying for supremacy on the tarmac of Shooters Hill. That tarmac led down Blackheath Hill to run-down back streets... to those youths in History 12d for whom, in a moment’s missionary zeal, he’d chanced teaching. He bit his lip. At forty-five, he shouldn’t need the sixteen-year-old who’d so far been his passport to them.
He could hear Eddy Fallows’ voice. It had to be Fallows… telling him to forget Amy and that Amy was “theirs”, which seemed to reduce her to no more than class 12d’s mascot. He could even see those same burning eyes searing into their prey, the eyes of “Thickneck” as he’d privately christened the tallest. And Thickneck’s voice would always haunt, carry in it calculation; the incessant calculation of how he and his class sycophants could best pull the carpet from under teacher’s feet.
‘Mix the sleepers with them in the brown bottle, mister Kreasey,’ Fallows had said. ‘Eat them all up, then you won’t need no cuttin’ up.’ That loud assertive laughter... he could hear it... anyone could hear it - if they listened... swelling from the chorus who always sat in their rows of chairs and grinned when Fallows grinned… yes, they were laughing and now their volume was ramming its way through the shell of his car, its message forcing its way down his ears in their warm moist breaths.
‘Remember them corridors Kreasey? Night time if you like, even when you don't see us, we’re here. Come on! Don’t be anxious,’ the class, now Fallows’, seemed to insist; their invitation carrying their hate.
But a distant, gentler voice whispered… Matt? You can be amongst them - with me!
‘Amy? Amy, is that you?’ he called towards the heath, his hand touching the window pane as if it might have touched the smooth face of his student lover. But she was still a girl. He shouldn’t rely on her. He’d shut 12d’s voices out, just as he’d shut all his doors and windows. And one day he’d be able to drive to the college again, get out of his car, even enter those corridors. But for now he could still hear Fallows’ voice ringing in his ear, telling him to take himself back to his ‘nice quiet flat’ where he’d be ‘safer’.
Don’t listen, Matt… came that other softer voice… And remember the little diary I said I’d keep for you - “Mister Kreasey’s Demon” ? I’ll keep it Matt. I’ll keep it until, one day, we’ve found the demon and killed it.
‘Amy? Amy?’
CHAPTER ONE
Kreasey nudged the spectacles back where they’d slipped down the bridge of his nose. He peeped through the squat brown bottle of tablets wondering whether he might need to take Diazepam for life. Young Amy would, sooner or later, find him an embarrassment beside her peer group once he was seen to rely for his strength on capsules rattling in a bottle which he couldn’t hold without a tremor in his hand.
The face of Eddy Fallows seemed to loom up beneath his chin and then confront him, nose to nose, until he felt he could almost smell the garlic on Fallows’ breath.
‘Keep eatin’ them pills,’ he was sure he could hear Fallows and his following urge… ‘then you won’t need no cuttin’ up...’
There was no bad breath. It was the memory of Fallows that would always smell foul. He’d heard only a rapping on his bedroom door.
‘Kreasey? Mister Kreasey?’
The tone had risen nearly an octave, the rapping more insistent, distracting Kreasey from his thoughts. He held tight the cap to his medicine.
‘Mister Kreasey?’
our girl... cuttin’ up... Fallows seemed to interrupt. The knocking was becoming louder, more urgent. He held the cap tighter.
‘Anyone at home?’
Cut you, teacher... cut you nice... nice!
‘Mister Kreaseeeey!’
The only owner of a female voice - with access via the stairway to the inner door of his flat was his neighbour, the now retired and widowed doctor Mallaby. It had to be her, a woman fiercely proud of her elegant first floor flat, in Wisteria House; itself a small mansion bearing an imposing stucco facade and hinting of late Regency among the fine houses on Vanbrugh Park. She wasn’t going to be ready for the culture shock when she pushed open his unlocked door to be confronted by the chaos in his conversion on the other side of the party wall.
If he stayed silent, she might not poke that enquiring nose in, see his sweat-soaked sheets, the shabbiness into which his once presentable first floor flat had slid, nor the kind of tablets on which he’d continued to depend since his dismissal.
‘Can I come through? I’m not very good at shouting!’
His neighbour had invited herself down his inner hall and now she stood in his bedroom doorway, resolute, a lean old widow retired from the wards, no hint of a cream cake or a contour in her five-foot-five, hair fine, silvery, impeccably groomed, bun tied and clipped tastefully, spine straight, a paragon of deportment, invincible, that delicate bridge of her nose delicately nosing. He hadn’t had time to conceal the sweat-soaked sheets and those sedatives lay scattered in his bed coverings like currants in a Spotted Dick - he the Dick.
‘Sorry to disturb you. I - I know you haven’t been too well with your -’ her eyes had fallen to the stray capsules on the carpet close to her exquisitely polished brogues, ‘your troubles at the college - shall I tell your visitor you’re - indisposed?’
‘I’m okay - tail end of flu - anything wrong misses - doctor Mallaby?’ he corrected, noticing her face newly sculpted with disgust.
‘It’s - it’s the student girl again - she’s standing in the lobby. Doesn’t seem to distinguish between the ground floor bell and the first floor,’ she added, blinking the more rapidly over her intelligent eyes, wincing as though she wanted to spit out soap which had crept on to the tip of her tongue.
Mallaby appeared to have billeted herself, as if quite unable to disengage until she had a prognosis delivered into her hands explaining the likely progress of the exotic snake that was sure to slither across her hand-tufted Axminster and irretrievably shed into its pile some unsavoury impedimenta.
‘I could tell her you’re not here,’ she tried.
The doctor looked hopeful. She might just succeed in ridding the first floor of his sixteen-year-old visitor. It wasn’t so much that her ‘middle-aged-dismissed-teacher-cum-neighbour’ might have been baby-snatching, but that “the student girl” might bring in the type of mud that Mallaby must have always noted on the heels of stilettos - the mud of youth’s promiscuity, mud too late to blemish the doctor but always liable to depreciate her investment a tad at the upmarket end of Blackheath’s Vanbrugh Park.
‘It’ll be Amy - a pupil,’ he tried.
Doctor Mallaby hadn’t blinked, her back still erect, her face tight, discerning, a long, dried prune - but a quality prune.
‘She’ll have brought her coursework authentication sheet. As her - her former teacher, I’ve still to endorse it - in absentia’ he added, hoping to sound plausible enough to distract his neighbour from what she would regard as the more lurid truths starting to worm their way out of the backstreets and up on to the hallowed soil of her beloved Wisteria.
‘It’s your property. You see who you like mister Kreasey,’ she said turning from him, her lips pursed rigid to contain her defeat and anger.
‘... managed to keep your balance across a gravel drive - on those?’ Mallaby’s voice had resurrected itself at the bottom of the stairway.
‘Is it okay then? If I see ’im?’ Kreasey heard the younger voice try again.
He wondered whether Amy had appeared before Mallaby in her very highest heels, the ones that gave her an extra three-and-a-half inches of height over a world that had always seemed to look down on her. On her first visit, he’d noticed, Amy was slightly undernourished and shivering in a short skirt with a slit up the side. She’d been clutching her essay to her low-necked top and he’d wanted to, but couldn’t, tell her that she’d made him happy enough - just by appearing on his doorstep with her essay and those eyes which spoke of deprivation and yet which held, for him, openness more beautiful in itself than any he’d seen in any student before.
He heard first the outer door, then doctor Mallaby’s door shut. He waited for “Charlie” perfume and the new voice bubbling on a fire of youth and pheromones to fill his room.
‘Remember these?’ Amy chuckled.
Amy’s newly varnished fingernails, like red-tipped washing pegs, pinched each trouser leg of the boxer shorts he’d worn for lunchtime badminton sessions at the college. She was suspending the shorts to the side of her face, that openness and expectation in her greyish-blue eyes so good-natured and irresponsible, as he wanted to be.
‘Haven’t seen you in these yet, have I? Want me to...’
He’d lost her words, could only smell the sweet perfume masking a vague hint of TCP in the room. He wished the tablets he’d taken hadn’t left him staring so foolishly at the lips of a vibrant sixteen-year-old in his bedroom
‘You know, there's a spot on your face?’
‘Is that what you see?’ she responded. ‘Are you being my teacher, or something else?’
‘I am your teacher’, he said, as he stood looking at the girl. ‘And I don’t like spots - not on your face.’
‘You want me to be perfect? Like my essay?’
‘You - you are perfect - well, almost,’ and before his eyes there seemed to parade the mass of pimply post-pubic youths - her set in History 12d.
She was searching his eyes, confused. He recalled better times, those moments when her face had shared that open comic side of her lovemaking with him. He so wished he could deliver her from the dross that was her peer group. Unblessed though their encounters had been, he couldn’t forget that she’d tried to be his passport to those from 12d... those who always seemed to be gathering, getting closer...
Mr Quiet, Mr Whisper, leave our Amy, she’s our sister...
He smiled to pretend he hadn’t heard a voice which he couldn’t share with her, smiled to melt away for her the teacher and the pedant in him. She’d have been the closest thing to a goddess if she could have granted him passage amongst the thick necks, the close-crops and the ear-ringed who only needed to understand.
But the more her glossed lips moved and the longer she stood rooted in the middle of his bedroom holding up his boxer shorts, the more it was clear she was no Persephone offering to deliver him from that cadaverous underworld on the teacher’s side of the desk. All that was left was to wonder what Amy could really want... of him....
‘Well, are we going to see you in them?’ she smiled, still holding his shorts out like her trophy.
But as he watched her lips they seemed to shape like those in a poorly dubbed film where the voice is out of synch’ with the words… reminding him now to “eat up” all his tablets and that, then, he wouldn’t need to be “cut up”.
Kreasey managed to turn away from her smile, wondering whether the 2.5 milligram mustard-coloured tablets to which he’d switched might have left him more confused this time than the slow-releasers. One thing was for sure, from where he’d been lying in bed, half-mesmerised by Amy’s swaying of his shorts, he must have been gripping the neck of his medicine bottle under the top sheet. It was only now that he was aware of something he should have noticed before.
The bottle’s cap, shoulders and neck... they seemed to feel thicker... the neck of the ugliest in 12d; the one who might have grown most resentful of his sleeping with Amy and now right inside his flat... beneath his top sheet... brushing his left thigh, cold … cold as steel.
He tried but failed to snap the neck of the bottle between his fingers.
‘Can’t break it? Too weak, teacher?’ The voice of 12d’s most idle, Jake Blacksmith, seemed to be escaping from the bottle where the lid had been partly loosened.
He was forty-five, Kreasey thought, middle-aged and he still needed a sixteen-year-old girl to open the bottle for him. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he should eat up all his tablets. He was going to need the next so badly when Amy had left his bed and the night seemed as if it feared returning to morning.
Every tablet that huddled inside the bottle seemed to be a face - not just Jake Blacksmith’s - but every shaven head and ring-in-the-nose that noisily packed out room 329 where he’d once had to cope…
‘Long night teacher,’ they seemed to chorus. ‘Long is for lithe, panting tiger waitin’ for you.’
Something warm and fleshy had covered his eyes, the whole mattress had sagged deep beneath him, his body sprung with the bed... all was dark as moonless night.
Kreasey turned his head to left and right to escape the form spread-eagled above him. It wasn’t going to go away. He could feel himself sinking deeper into the mattress beneath the warm pulsing belly that sagged between his thighs, over his stomach and chest. Reflex forced him to stretch his arms back over his head and try to take hold of what seemed undeniably, thick highly muscular forelegs, the creature’s strength overwhelming. He could feel. a moist tongue filling out his ear, searching, squelching around until he loathed himself for beginning to enjoy the feeling...
He could hear History 12d’s jeering and laughter... mounting...
‘... Little Percy isn’t going to play today?’ a chirpier voice asked, silencing his musings.
This voice was clearer, this time occupied his room rather than his head and came, he was sure, from the girl he so wanted to be with him now… with him to take away the great tiger which seemed to have pinned him to his bed.
He felt another leg but, for sure, this one wasn’t muscular and there was no more rub of fur over his face, nor that unwelcome odour. It was smooth... chiffon smooth... a teenage girl’s inner arm, a slight muscle in it flexing against his inside leg.
‘Isn’t he coming out today then? What’s wrong with our little -’
It was definitely a girl’s voice but now the words had stopped – as had the massaging. The other hand was no longer cupped over his eyes. Above was that familiar face, not as usual; pale and slightly undernourished but flushed and confused. It was Amy… Amy Carter, arching her body off him, her top and skirt strewn behind her and caught on the end post of the bed. Her shiny crimson shoes, one scuffed at the toe, had been kicked on to the other side of his carpet, his brown medicine bottle now in her hand, she frowning at the label, concentrated.
‘Diaza - what? Di-az-epam. Is this why Percy doesn’t want to play with Amy today?’
‘Amy, what do you want? I suppose it should be crystal clear but -’
‘You’re sweating! I mean - down your face. There’s tablets in your sheets, and tablets - hey! How many of these have you had?’
‘Do you have to hold those up on display - as well?’
‘ Look! What’s the matter with you tonight!’ she said, throwing the bottle away from him until it somersaulted into the folds and rattled.
‘Isn’t it obvious? Haven’t I been displayed enough? Before the Principal? Before the Board? Before 12d? Whose exhibit am I? Course, all you notice is what you see, what you can massage, until you’ve got what you want.’
He hated himself for the ugliness of what he’d said but, say it he had to; if only to test why he and she had found themselves so intimate, so soon and at such different ages.
‘You telling me I don’t have feelings, or something? Amy replied. ‘Is that what you’re telling me? Oh you’ve got a lot to learn, “mister Teacher”!’ she said, trembling as she pulled on her skirt. ‘If you’d had a bit more feeling for boys who weren’t brought up to speak all la-di-da like you, and didn’t dress in tweeds and be some - some monk hidden away in “whatever-you-call-it House”, and if you hadn’t give them bad grades ’cos they didn’t know no better, 12d wouldn’t have pulled the plug on you. They wouldn’t have become like -’
‘A circus?’
‘See what I mean! You think they’re animals! She said, vigorously jerking her top down and struggling to angle each foot into her best stilettos.
‘Just animals - is that what they are? Is that all I am? Some animal? I’m an animal ’cos I tried to make up for you getting the sack?’
There was nothing he could say to her.
‘You think I’m shit, ’cos I hopped in bed with you?’ She said. ‘You think 12d are shit - don’t you? And why? I’ll tell you why - sir. ’cos like me they happen to have poor parents who knew they come from losers, who were born on a conveyor belt, born to work with machines, to become machines on cars down Dagenham or stuck at Tilbury dock or sweating to stitch cardboard into cartons and pack cans into them in some soft drinks factory until a zombie at clocking off. And mothers washing and ironing rich people’s clothes for them until they don’t know what pride is no more - all ’cos blokes in 12d just happen to have woken up to matchbox houses in streets where you don’t see a tree like them you did near your nice little village school. That’s what they have round ’em - not tight-arse Blackheath like you! It is - isn’t it? Tell me I’m wrong Matthew! Tell me it’s different! Can you?’
He wanted to tell her he’d had to work for everything he owned, that he’d had humble parents who’d deprived themselves of the luxuries that others enjoyed so that they could keep paying his fees at a private school and who’d always told him you could work for something better. He wanted to tell her how he detested the ‘hard-luck’ stories the street wise in 12d had manufactured with a grin lingering as long as their unfinished homework. But if he tried explaining, it might be those capsules speaking again.
Even if it wasn’t the effect of his prescription, then he still couldn’t speak - not while he watched the girl who’d sweated in walking nearly two miles from her back street all the way up Blackheath Hill, across the heath until reaching the elegant façades of Vanbrugh Park. She had tapped the lion-head knocker against the newly-glossed door, stood uneasily on those steps which led up between pillars that dwarfed her, and argued her way passed doctor Mallaby’s immaculate flat; all to make love to him… to “make up” for her getting him summarily dismissed.
He watched her standing in the middle of his bedroom. In her anger she’d shaken her watch strap until the wristwatch had whipped across her face startling her.
Kreasey tugged on the boxer shorts, the mattress a trampoline as he dragged his feet across the crumpled sheet which sent another bottle of Diazepam rattling again as he approached her. He bent to pick up her watch, then examined the pink and plastic bargain-shop strap lying before her.
‘Broken,’ he observed, ‘like a lot of things round here don’t you think?’
She was backing away... as if believing she could deny that moments ago she’d been close enough to bring him to orgasm. He watched her, arms folded beneath her breasts, trembling. He accepted her eyes, her distance, her watching ... like one cat watches another. But as she waited for her wristwatch, Amy Carter was just a little cat now - one that had been in more scraps than he by the time he was sixteen but whose eyes were reddened as she stood, stubbornly trying to hold her tears from him.
‘I’ve a jeweller friend. Commutes to Clerkenwell. He’d do a decent repair - for peanuts, if I talk to him,’ he said, holding the wristwatch in front of her.
She seemed unable to speak. It was the first time he’d glimpsed what lay behind her brashness. Now her eyes, behind the film of water, seemed only to shift as if struggling to find some answer, confused eyes, torn between fleeting instincts of adolescent fancy, love and hate.
‘It’s not just ’cos of you sleeping with me that 12d made it difficult for you,’ she began, ignoring his offer to repair her watch. ‘I was just the last thing you took off ’em. I know I’m to blame for that. But - if you want to know - what started the trouble was the low grades you give them, telling them their writing was “hieroglyphics” when they couldn’t do no better, and you never having a laugh with them, looking all bored at your desk ’cos they were miles away from all the literature and dream world you live in. You was too quiet for them Matthew! Can you understand that? Too bloody quiet! They could feel your disgust - they knew you’d given up on them!’
‘Like some of their streets and their homes gave up on them?’ he said, trying again to return her wristwatch to her.
‘It’s not as easy as that - is it? It’s you!’ she said, oblivious to the wristwatch. ‘Look at yourself! Hidden away up here with all these books and all this fancy-looking furniture. You’re ancient! Some kind of monk you are! You live in the past - look at your tweed jacket hanging up on that there door - and look at him!’ she said, pointing to a moustachioed Elgar on the box cover of a CD disk. ‘How are you going to understand them in 12d if all you listen to is - this - “The Dream of Geron - Gerontius?” Jesus!’
‘Jesus won’t help you - not just at the moment. Elgar might.’ he said, feeling insecure in his smile.
‘Right. That’s it. I’m not having you laughing at me! No bloke laughs at me. Not now. Not never!’
‘Amy -’
‘12d were right about you -’
‘Amy, I was only -’
‘You deserve to be on them pills!’ she said, whisking the sheet off his bed, sending loose capsules scattering. You don’t want nothing to do with my friends and nothing to do with me. And by the way, you couldn’t get nothing up - not even if I’d stayed all through the night with you.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘What was I to you then?’ she asked in a slow measured way that humbled him. ‘Just a piece of chewed up meat in your bed, was I ? Not quite right for that snotty doctor woman in the next flat? Not quite matching with your nice fireplace and all this grand design round your ceilings? Not -’
‘Amy -’
‘No! Don’t give me “Amy”! My mum’s name’s Amy. You sound,’ she swallowed awkwardly, ‘- you sound like that bastard stepfather of mine! “Amying” Mum, “Amying” her when he wanted her to forgive him for giving her a “little shake” every other week he come back from the Rising Sun at nights, stinking!’ she added, wrinkling up her nose as though the smell would be with her to her grave. She tried to break the rest of the strap from her watch as if it was the breaking of the tenuous bond she loathed between her stepfather and her mother.
‘And all he did was rob me of my real Dad’ she said. ‘Mum should have stuck with him. He was worth a hundred of that Mickey of hers - and ten of you!’
Kreasey wondered whether the concession to ‘ten’ of his own kind - whatever his kind was - left him a ‘bastard’ too. For the first time he wanted to be near her, put his arm around her. Both seemed fraudulent.
‘I only wanted -’
‘Shut it Matthew! Shut it! Shut it!’ she cried, banging the watch against the wall until she’d done more damage to her knuckles than the watch face. He could see her other hand trembling, slipping off her cheek as she tried to hide a tear.
He picked up the watch she’d finally dropped..
‘I’ll - I’ll get you a new one. Gold strapped. Amy! What the - ’
She’d smashed her fist through the window, leaving dagger-shaped shards of glass askew in the frame, her blood smeared on glass, an insidious trickle of red travelling down her pale white hand, a bead bulging into a drip from one of the big glassy rings she’d worn to give her the style she thought she needed.
‘Don’t get me nothing!’ she shouted, turning on him, her face ashen, her eyes so full of that strange wildness that had at last run freely as tears, her make-up a mess of colours streaming into one another like blood and gravy at the end of a poor man’s dinner. ‘But get this mister - Kreasey - never laugh at me! My second Dad did that to Mum, when his belly was full of beer, laughed at her, after he’d shaken her for not wearing the skimpy tarty things from his ex’s wardrobe.’
‘Come on Amy - I’m not your stepfather! I’m just me ! Trying to get you and that hand of yours down to the bathroom! Okay?’
‘Get off me! Get off!’ her screech came raw. ‘I don’t need your help!’ she said, flinching from the arm he’d tried to curve round her shoulder, tottering on her heels. He respected her distance, let her nurse into her stomach the bleeding fingers she’d wrapped in the top she’d pulled out of her skirt; wrapped, like her fifty pence worth of chips.
Kreasey reopened the door she’d slammed on him, tried to step over the stars of blood on every other tread until he’d started to catch up with her as she reached the bottom of the stairs. But she’d turned again... her eyes full of pain.
‘I’m warning you! Don’t follow me!’ she shouted up to him.
If she’d turned again she might have seen his eyes, filling with water. But she wouldn’t have heard the mindless choruses nor seen the stone-faced griffins that could hold those inane grins for him from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, through the evenings, the long nights, every week, every year.
CHAPTER TWO
Kreasey was going to need the car. Amy could still be hobbling across the heath, splinters of window glass still embedded in her hand. She’d lost blood, she’d still be overwrought, probably exhausted as she tried to make her way between the dips and rises that had pockmarked the heath since early quarrying between Vanbrugh Park and the War Memorial at the boundary walls of Greenwich Park.
He scuttled down the iron treads of the fire escape, his heart panting with the unaccustomed exercise as he leapt every other tread to get down to his car parked on the gravel drive. He hadn’t wanted his neighbour to intercept him in the communal hallway between flats - not when teacher was running after girl young enough to be a daughter and not, doctor Mallaby would remind him, when he still had in theory a professional duty of care.
As the sun swept across the windscreen of his car he thought he’d seen a pig’s head suspended by rough string from his driver’s rear view mirror, the boar’s snout stuck with a hunting knife. His heart raced but then he’d been running and palpitations were common just before he took his tablet. He dismissed the image of the pig’s head. Anyway, Fairfax had said there could sometimes be mild hallucination until the treatment fully kicked in.
He was ready now. If he drove straight out on to the heath he could still have a good chance of spotting Amy and getting her down to hospital.
‘Nice to see the invalid out and about! Is it going to start up?’
It was his neighbour, doctor Mallaby, standing in the crescent of the house’s gravelled drive, black lacy shawl supported over arm - she clinically clean.
‘Sorry?’ he queried.
‘Your car,’ she said, ‘See you’ve decided to bring it out of mothballs!’
‘Indeed. Indeed,’ he replied, hoping the economy of words would free him to start up the car before he lost Amy on the heath.
‘Do you good to get out of that flat. You could do with some red in those cheeks.’
He smiled, wondering whether those bright eyes of hers had noticed any sign of the pig’s head he thought he’d seen.
‘I’m off to the conservatoire.’
I’m off to the abattoir, he managed to bite his lip.
‘Why don’t you follow me? Mister Kreasey?’
‘Sorry. I was daydreaming.’
‘I said, why don’t you follow me? Come along to the lunch-time recital. Only recorded music of course but it’s not just for pensioners like me you know - invalids can benefit! You’ll hear an early recording of Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony - next best thing if you need a tonic!’
The doctor’s pun hadn’t escaped him but he wasn’t ready for polite company, and the real invalid was young Amy Carter who’d be stumbling across that heath, confused and badly cut.
‘Well? Mister Kreasey? Is that door ever going to fully close? And - is the doctor going to divert you?’
There was something in her expression which balanced delicately between maternal pity and medical concern. He needed both; for the demon’s chorus was returning, the twenty-five pairs of eyes that were coming to take the measure of him as they did when he sat behind his teacher’s desk, a good six foot long…as one day his coffin would be…
‘See, teacher? The doctor woman’s got you sussed ain’t she?’ the voices of 12d seemed to combine… ‘She knows what we’ve known all along. She thinks you’re mental! You’re not fit to drive across that ‘eath Kreasey... as our Amy said, you’re not fit to follow nobody.’
That dryness was over his tongue, the roof, the whole of his mouth. He couldn’t swallow, only feel his heart thumping. The more he willed himself to be calm, the more his heart laboured in the walls of his chest.
‘You’d better not drive for a moment,’ he heard as he felt the design of Mallaby’s shawl drape across him and became aware of her trying to keep the driver’s door open to take his hand off the steering.
‘I’m okay. It’s okay!’ he said, embarrassed by the attention, impatient to get driving across that heath before he’d lost Amy.
‘I know what you’re taking,’ she said. ‘The capsule I found under the hall carpet. It’s one of the common benzodiazepines - I’d say T-Quil or Valrelease. More likely the latter. You’re suffering from some form of acute anxiety state, I’d say, mister Kreasey.’
‘Matt.’
‘Matt, then. I think you can see, I wasn’t being entirely flippant when I said the invalid could do worse than accompany the pensioner to the recital. You do need that kind of diversion.’
‘Another time, Ira.’ he said, gathering her shawl back over her arm for her. He started the engine.
‘First time!’
‘No “mothballs”!’ he smiled back at her, pleased that the engine had started from cold.
‘You’re - you are keeping to your regimen, are you?’ she asked, bending forward into the car.
‘Like a saint!’ he smiled, smelling a sedate perfume close to him. ‘And I’m okay to drive! You enjoy the Vaughan Williams, Ira! I’ll be there in - in soul!’ he said, finally slamming closed the driver’s door.
She’d opened the door again.
‘Look. Just remember, you’re living in the flat next to a doctor. A pensioner now, but a doctor. Don’t be too proud if you need any help!’
He smiled, a little wearily this time and then turned to look through the windscreen.. Before him was the narrow exit in the garden wall to the fields which would soon open out before the bonnet of his car. He was conscious of the doctor standing on the gravel. What he really wanted to tell her had to remain a secret. He drove off.
‘I need her, Ira!’ he shouted into the shell of his car, gripping the steering still harder. ‘D’you find that so strange? he continued, as if his neighbour might have been beside him to hear his confession. “I need my sixteen-year-old ex-student who’s hobbled away from your smart flat in Wisteria House on her crimson stilettos, with her Cockney twang and her hand cut where she fisted my window. It doesn’t matter what the principal and his board of governors say. I need her eyes to smile at me and bring me their life. Now they’ll be a mess of tears, eye-shadow melding into mascara, lip gloss smudged over her cheek and she runs, somewhere across this heath she runs – away from me!’
Kreasey circled twice around the heath. There’d been no sign of Amy making her way across the fields and now, as he approached Blackheath village for the third time, there was the added frustration of having to pull up sharply for three mongrels who, perhaps unsettled by the impending storm, had dashed across the road. A father, still on the fields, was drawing-in a kite, his boy scuttling into the back of a small estate as the first hailstones rattled on the windscreen. Crisply dressed office juniors had started scurrying off the streets for paper-bag lunches from the patisserie, their mentors allowing themselves a subtle quickening of step and shaking off umbrellas as they disappeared into the doorways of wine bars.
He switched the wipers to double speed. He took another look, then quickly wound the window down, slowing the car so that he could glance again at the figure running ... almost limping. The person had stopped sheltering in the porch of All Saints church to run for the bus which was slowing to the stop outside a smart row of Victorian shops along Royal Parade. The runner’s hair was matted, rain running down the forehead, dripping off the nose... it was a girl all right, carrying her shoes, her bare feet slipping through the grass, a rag of a handkerchief flapping round her right hand, a low- cut top clinging to her where she’d already been drenched. The stylish Gucci stretched across her bosom had become commerce’s mockery of her. It had to be Amy.
Kreasey pulled up, leaving his car half on road, half on field, door gaping open on Blackheath Vale. He ran to make ground towards her.
‘Amy! Amy!’ The wind snatched her name from him, pellets of hale pecking and stinging his face, but she’d slipped on the wet grass in front of the church giving him his opportunity to gain more ground.
‘Amy!’
She’d seen him but she’d picked herself up and was sprinting again to her bus, not bothering with the grass and mud sticking to her leg where there was a slit in her skirt. Those wretched mongrels were back on the field, circling and barking ... as if, to them, he and the girl who’d slid on her side were both part of their own circus where humans showed their tricks to best effect. Perhaps the dogs were right and it was all an entertainment deserving their barking. For, surely, what he was doing wasn’t his style - if he had any left - not sprinting after a scantily dressed girl just so that he could seek her forgiveness for the way their friendship and their intimacy had ended, nor to draw from her some tender assurances, some quick fix. For the first time in his time-tabled life, he was afraid that nothing could be time-tabled any longer.
Amy had reached the bus, was pushing through others to get on the platform, she fighting to get away - from him...
He squeezed between the passengers trying to get through the doors but succeeded only in getting a brief touch of bare wet calf.
‘Amy! You don’t have to run - not from me!’
‘Leave off!’
‘Who are you running from? It’s not me - is it?’ he shouted up the stairs, oblivious to the onlookers.
‘Leave off me! I told you!’
He could only watch her pale legs and then the ankles and balls of her shoeless feet disappearing up the stairwell before he became aware of himself again, squeezed between the scrums of passengers nattering round him at the bus’s door. The driver was turning to him, leaning forward over his metal pulpit.
‘Look mate. If you’ve got problems, I don’t want ’em on my fucking bus! All right? If you want a bus, you wait for the next one. Understand?’
Kreasey looked from the driver to the front seats where some of the passengers were sitting. There was an old man wearing a flat cap, resting both his hands on the curve of the walking stick before him, he studiously looking ahead at nothing. Assuredly, he had heard the driver’s language but with the disgust that said, “In my day it was always manners maketh man”. Then there was a couple, looking at him as if a shade more melodrama would give them that injection of joie de vivre which had washed out with the first two years of marriage. And now the bus driver, himself, was pointing a cigarette-stained finger at him as if he was about to be recruited into Kitchener’s army.
‘Off! I’m closing the doors!’
But it wasn’t the pointed finger or Kitchener that worried. It was the other faces he thought he’d caught a glimpse of at the back of the bus... strangers and yet... half familiar…
The doors concertina-closed in his face, forcing him away from the platform. Kreasey tried to push them open but the bus had started to move off. He stepped back and looked up again at the windows lining the top deck, wondering whether the face behind the hand wiping mist from the window could be Amy’s.
‘Who you running from? Who Amy?’ he shouted up at the windows.
He beat his fist against the body of the bus. It was useless.
He watched the vehicle until it turned down the hill into Blackheath village. A wicker seat on display outside Pine Interiors tumbled over in a gust of wind and somersaulted down to the gutter while the hanging sign of the Princess of Wales seemed to be the only thing waving goodbye for Amy.
He looked across at the porch of All Saints church where he’d first seen her running from shelter. The wind from the open heath took his breath away. He let the hailstones sting and melt down his face until he had to turn from the wind to gather his breath. But it had gusted in his ear blotting out the sounds of the village and the road that would lead down to New Cross and the eyes of 12d until something else came to fill that silence.
The voices, they seemed to be laughing this time. He fancied he could see again those faces he thought he’d glimpsed at the back of the bus, the misted windows, teenage hands wiping away the condensation,
juvenile grins pressed up against the glass like grotesques and, amongst the griffins, a face that looked like that of class 12d’s hero, Eddy Fallows.. The only thing Fallows had ever stirred was chaos in classroom 329 and now he was leering at his ex-teacher, his expressionless lips moving mechanically and, from those lips, that warning which came now like a chant whose errand was as cold as steel…
Kreasey walked, bending forward against the wind, thinking only of being inside his car again, of slamming the door closed on those he was sure to be hiding from him somewhere out there on the heath. Another more persistent gust had flapped open his jacket making him turn to free himself from his tie which had blown into his face. And then he realised he was looking at the porch of All Saints a third time.
He stood, not noticing the wind, tempted to walk instead towards the porch. The shelter there seemed more than his car could afford him... so complete... needing no wind to carry its message. But behind the church windows there were more faces, again like grotesques and, from them, the voices were telling him he must return to the college.
If he didn’t return, walk that same corridor, sit in room 329, alone, in the dark, where at least he could answer to his conscience, then the disgust of his colleagues for his sleeping with Amy would always stare him in the face, go to bed with him - for it was obvious now, Amy wouldn’t oblige. He wouldn’t look back towards the village. He didn’t want to see another bus like the one Amy had boarded, nor the wind making that pub sign swing hopelessly backwards and forwards. He’d return, drive through the village, through the main street... towards the college... tonight...
Kreasey shook and picked at his keys before groping for the ignition. Yes, he still had the duplicate to the small tradesman’s door at the rear of the college’s Mowbary Building. Tonight he’d go, when the adult extra mural evening classes had finished at eight-thirty. After that, anything moving near room 329 would have to be picked up by the CCTV cameras.
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NOOK KOBO ( W H Smith )
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EXCERPT:
The Rum Barber’s Baby
At 32 stone it was indisputable that Barry the barber was vast - he obviously had some form of congenital glandular disorder which had left him like a Sumo wrestler without the wrestle. But to the few customers who came down the gloomy alley of Haddon Close, half-hidden on the edge of London's Soho red light district, Barry still presented an unfailingly cheerful appearance. While he cut, he was always ready to listen. Yet there was one person who knew that, underneath it all, Barry hated himself, felt his great folds of fat to be an object of disgust to others and, ever since the article printed in the newspaper, Jim Claydon knew Barry needed a friend.
The article said that two vandals had snatched the few cans of shaving foam Barry had for sale and sprayed the cream in boot-high capitals over his shop window for all the world to see I'M TOO FAT TO - - CK, the paper generously omitting two of the capitals. Barry was resigned to almost everything, but not this. This would hurt him more than the barber's razor the numb-skulls were alleged to have used on him. For one thing was sure, Barry had never been able to attract a woman - not enough to stay with him, bare his child. His shop was his home and right now he had only one real friend.
‘Giving the ants their share are you Barry?’ Jim was looking at the remnants of Barry's cream doughnut which had dripped on to the alleyway as Barry sat outside his shop supported by his favourite stone bollard, biting into that squidgy confection as if it was his only consolation for working and living in the Godforsaken Haddon Close.
‘All right Alf?’ Barry mustered..
“Alf ” was Barry's little intimacy. It went with Alfred Einstein - an oblique reference to Jim's background in the Genetic Engineering Department some streets away on the respectable side of town near University College Hospital.
‘It's all right, take your time, it's only a trim I'm after today.’
But it was just clip-clip, snip-snip, once in the chair. Each time an attempt was made to tease something out of him about his attackers Barry seemed to move away from his mirror, embarrassed by the scar the vandals must have made down his face. Snip-snip, clip-clip.
‘Yep, yep, get all kinds in here, don't I? True, true!’ was his handy conversation-stopper. Snip-snip, clip-clip.
Something caught the corner of Jim's eye; the movement of net curtains hanging behind the lattice of grimy stained-glass windows in the partition to Barry's private quarters. The head darted back behind the drapes but not before he'd noticed it was a woman with peroxide blonde hair, dazzling crimson lip-gloss, oceans of mascara and brassy earrings which hung from her with a suggestion of police handcuffs. That face was familiar. It had been connected to a voluptuous figure in a bottom-pinching micro-skirt and fish-net tights, the whole ensemble trying to angle itself into a curb-crawler's car where Haddon Close met civilisation on the Tottenham Court Road.
Still, silence.
But what could Barry have said? That he was paying a prostitute to prove to those meat-heads they were wrong about his being too fat to perform as any red-blooded male who knew his Arthur from his Martha performed? The obvious was going to hurt him more when he faced it: the woman would have no more feeling for him than any of her other clients, just a mix of gratitude and contempt. She would be giving him no more than he'd paid for. Trying to prove something about his virility only made Barry seem a bigger fool. When that truth caught up with him it was going to hurt, really hurt.
‘What's this? Clip-clip, and no lip, eh Barry?’
Barry tried but failed to smile in the mirror. It was depressing to see him like this, all clammed up. When Barry the barber didn't have a word in him, the world didn't have a word in it, and this backstreet shop seemed... dispossessed, empty, except for that feeling of another presence... that woman behind the partition.
Barry had stopped cutting. Reflected in the mirror was his barrel of a body, shapeless in that grey polythene cutting overall as he wearily lumbered across the room. Jim glanced in the mirror to see him flip the CLOSED sign. Barry was sliding the half-curtains closed. Then he peered above them, left and right into the alley before lolloping back to resume his cutting. Perhaps he'd been worried about those vandals coming back to give more trouble. As soon as those scissors had done their job, it seemed, he had other business to attend to... behind that partition.
The silence seemed locked in. A joke was worth a try... the bawdy one which could always tickle Barry... about the decimal place being in the wrong position where he'd priced those packets of contraceptives on sale by the sink.
‘See you're still selling your packets of joy for £5.50 Barry! Does the lady come included?’
Clip-clip, snip-snip. The joke must have backfired. Perhaps he'd reminded Barry of his failure with women; the reason why Barry had let his appearance go; why he would never cut women's hair.
Jim felt his whole body being jolted up in the air, stage by stage, as Barry pedal-pumped the barber's chair.
‘What's that about my “packets of joy” ? What's that I heard?’
At last, Barry’s face had broken into a smile.
‘Don't know if I can let Einstein down if he's being a touch rude!’ he added.
‘Your pump-action’s a dubious pleasure, Barry!’ Jim said.
Barry pedal-bounced him down in the chair and amiably made to throttle him with his big fat arms. Jim leapt out of the chair. It was so rare, so good to be children for a moment, to wrestle each other around the shop.
Fun - until that partition got in the way, the whole frame swaying with the impact of Barry’s body.
Jim felt something like the cold cut of steel… slicing and ripping into his back.
‘That's for you! Bastard! Bastard! And that's for your dirty graffiti!’ the voice shrilled. ‘ And that's for 'urting Barry!’
More rips. It felt as if skin was being shredded from his back. Blood had already formed into a small pool at his feet, his head was swimming. He fell forward into what must have been Barry's fat arms. He felt himself being dragged back to the barber's chair.
‘For Christ's sake Sylvie! Put the scissors down - he's no yob! He's a mate!’ he heard Barry shout.
‘But he - he was - ’
‘He was only fooling with me! Are you crazy? For Christ's sake, don't just stare! Ring an ambulance! Drop the scissors! Ring! Sylvie? Don't hold back on me. This towel, it won't stop it - the blood, it just keeps coming! Pull yourself together! D'you want the man to - here, take the towel. Keep it pressed. Right here! Come on, press it! I'll ring.’
Jim felt the cold compress pulled away from his back as Barry's bulk moved away from him and stumbled across to his Sylvie. She'd taken to one of the salon’s benches where she lay on her back, heaving and gasping, her legs spread open. From the reflection in the mirror it was clear now; the woman was not only massively pregnant, she was having contractions.
Those meaty hands of Barry's were just fumbling in the air above her; as if looking for something to do with themselves.
‘What is it Sylvie? What is it Love? What d'you want me to do?’
‘For God's sake Barry! Can't you see? She's in labour! You've got to call an ambulance! Now! If I could get up out of this chair I'd - ’
But Jim knew he couldn't help and nor could any ambulance for he remembered now what he had left in his case on that wet and gloomy November day after a haircut from Barry in Haddon Close last winter.
He'd dropped in to see Barry between visits to different sites of Genetic Engineering's annexes. Barry had assured him that, while his “favourite customer” had his hair cut, the contents of the case would be quite safe from any undesirables who might walk in - providing he left the case in the room behind the little private partition. Barry had been trying to elicit what juicy tit-bits of information he could about the Genetic Engineering Department's research in relation to enhancing artificial insemination... it had all started as small-talk, conversation-filler while he cut. But he’d been persistent, searching.
A portable refrigeration unit containing a special flask of semen had been missing from the case when its absence was noticed later that day. On the phone Barry had denied any knowledge of the unit or the flask. The Department had assumed that nobody finding the flask would properly follow the instructions for maintaining refrigeration and the sperm would, slow but sure, die a gradual but discreet death.
As Sylvie lay there, her fingernails clawing the bench, that pale green discolouration of the skin on her legs was quite obvious, replicating exactly what Jim knew of the experiments carried out at the Westleigh Laboratories on rats shaven of their fur. In effect, Sylvie had been artificially inseminated with VP 5 the preserved contents of the flask Barry must have removed from the case.
The sweat trickled down Barry’s fat cheeks, his hands still fumbling helplessly above Sylvie. It was easy to imagine the way he must have fumbled with a standard AI kit to inseminate the woman the only way he might.
‘You'll need gloves, Barry, if you want your - your baby.’
‘Gloves?’ he asked, staring blankly at the beginnings of the birth.
‘You must have some rubber gloves?’
‘Gloves?’
‘Barry, use gloves !’
There was no time now to explain to him the dangers of what he would be touching but he might prolong Sylvie's life a little longer if he could pull himself together. The task seemed hopeless. Barry was seized up, reduced to a spectator on what was spilling... now beginning to crawl out of Sylvie and on to the bench.
At first it looked like after-birth. Maybe, mercifully, the product of VP 5 was stillborn. But then Jim could see why Barry was rigid with fear. There was a movement of its own in the substance... co-ordinated movement. The whole mass was thickening, gelatinous but tough and honeycombed with numerous tiny but clearly defined suckers not unlike those on an octopus, the whole rhythmic and developing with a rapidity which was quite astonishing.
‘I want to know,’ Barry began, ‘I want to know... whose this is,’ he said, trembling and not taking his eyes off the enlarging form which pulsed as it struggled for its oxygen.
‘That, Barry, is the result of what you took out of my case, last November. I'm sorry. You're looking at the growth of VP 5. Eventually, the product of Semen VP 5, whatever shape it takes, is going to have a toxic chemistry - very much so. If you're not going to use gloves you'd better get away from that bench before - before full development.
‘Toxic?’ At last Barry turned. ‘You mean poisonous?’
Jim looked at him gravely. Words seemed irrelevant.
‘Nothing - nothing of Sylvie's is poisonous!’ Barry pronounced. What d'you mean ! “Poisonous”? What are you saying!’
‘Let’s say “venomous”, Barry.’
Jim felt Barry was staring right through him, ‘ “Venomous” ?’
‘Yes mate, mammal, venomous, prehistoric, Semen Type 5,’ Jim said.. ‘Found preserved on the bodies of two - ’
Jim had to stop, bite his lip. The pain of the wound Sylvie had given him with those scissors was still shooting up his back. He knew he was weakening.
But Barry should hear something of the truth about what he'd taken from the case, he should know something of the pain he'd caused.
‘I’m sworn not to say anything but I’m going to tell you this much Barry: VP5 was found on the bodies of two copulating Xyantheporous - as the team have christened them – found in Iceland, frozen and perfectly preserved. They must have been caught in a hot geyser. Sodium salts had reacted with their fat to form glycerol which perfectly preserved the semen when they must have tumbled into ice. That flask you took from my case. Controlled re-heating - ’
‘No! It's science talk! That’s all. Science talk!’ Barry said, cringing as he allowed himself to take the briefest glance back over his shoulder. His baby was now little more than a heap of bubbling, rapidly multiplying offal. He couldn't watch it any more. He cradled Sylvie's head so far as his fat arms would allow, refusing to see that she'd died in giving birth.
‘You'll be okay Sylvie! You just rest now. I’ll – I’ll work something out,’ he said patting her corpse. You’re going to be… fine! That's all that matters - isn't it Sylvie? Just you and me? Being fine?’
But then those great arms jolted. Something was being hammered noisily against his shop window. Two grinning masks appeared over the rim of the half-curtains and the aerosol can was smacked down on the window again.
‘Barry boy? Barry boy-ee !’
There was an inane chuckle from one of the mouths.
‘Remember us Barry boy? We remember you! We know you're in there - Barry boy!’
His huge frame, parked on the bench, panting and still clutching Sylvie to himself, Barry's bloated face and neck streamed with sweat. Confusion and defeat were written in every movement of his eyes as he looked first at one mask and then the other.
Again the aerosol was smacked against the window where this time
an ugly crack rent the whole pane.
‘Yes, Barry boy! We've come to do your window. Just for you! ’
From the veins swelling in his neck it was obvious Barry had already worked out what filled the four spaces that the vandals had sprayed after the words: I'M TOO FAT TO - - - -. Still staring at the words, Barry was propping Sylvie gently so that she sat on the bench and was supported by the wall. He produced a yellow rubber glove out of each of the pockets in his cutting overall.
‘ “Venomous” you said, Jim? You said - that which comes from semen, VP-whatever-you-called-it, it’s venomous?’
‘Leave Barry! If you still care about anything, just forget your - move away from it! Barry!’
But Barry was already trying to hold on to the knot of offal, his face drawn with disgust and wonder, as if he was wanting to deny what kept slipping between those yellow gloves, wanting to believe his Sylvie had born him a normal, bonny child, into a world which stretched free of Haddon Close, where there were no more vandals, no more pimps.
The shop door burst open where one of the masked men had shouldered it. Barry must have seen them too, but he'd just managed to conceal the birth beneath the flap of his cutting overall, his arms folded to support its bulk. The youths, annoyed that he'd just stood his ground in his little barber’s shop and apparently unmoved by their graffiti, looked as though they were going to play with him, manhandle him where his weight made him slow, give him the beating that would humiliate for life.
But Barry was tugging the mask off the bigger of the two. His cutting coat flapped open. The first vandal to see it had just enough time to run back out of the shop but the bigger one jerked his hands away from Barry's lapels.
‘You like my baby?’ Barry insisted, pushing the birth forward.
The hoodlum couldn't move.
‘You like it, eh? Say you like it! Show us how brave you are now. Say it! You low-life! I want to hear it ! I - LIKE - YOUR - BABY!’
But it should have been obvious to Barry. The youth couldn't bring
himself to speak, even if he'd wanted to - for Barry had squashed the pulsing knot that had come from Sylvie square into the vandal’s gaping mouth. It had already started exploring and probing relentlessly with those fatty cilia, the young man struggling as his neck rippled like the gullet of a snake obscenely bloated on a large kill.
Jim screwed his eyes closed. When he looked into the reflection of the mirror again it was evident Barry had also been compelled to take another look. The whole knot of cilia, now attached by its numerous suckers to the vandal’s face, was unyielding in its rhythmic movement. Where its transparent bulk concentrated in what appeared to be the first stages of a head, the birth pulsed most powerfully. Sure enough, just as the rat trials had shown, there was the expected greening of the youth’s skin spreading down to his neck as the venom from the product of VP5 must have concentrated and diffused.
It wasn't possible to turn away from its reflection in the mirror now, Jim thought. He was still a researcher in the field. In any case, after ages of preservation near that Icelandic geyser nobody, not even those funded to spend their days researching the contents of the flask, had seen how VP 5 would behave, conceived and ready to use the venom sacs in its suckers.
A draught of cool evening air blew into the shop where the door still hung open on the alley. People were approaching, perhaps to satisfy their curiosity about the shouting, the smashed shop window and the forced door, but still they were people and, best of all, Barry was still smiling as his baby sucked.
He must have still trusted in what he'd said while he wrapped his big arms around the body of Sylvie and believed he was bringing comfort to what was cold, stiff and unaware…
‘Everything's going to be all right Sylvie. You just see. You're still going to come off those streets, make a family with me !’
Soon, he would have to return down that long road to reality, find an answer to his conscience, answer for Sylvie.
But for a moment, just a moment, as their baby sucked, his smile was broad and childlike; etched seraphically in all the blubber from his face to his double chin; a smile he’d never before dared to wear inside the grimy little shop that tried to look out on the narrow side street where once Sylvie chanced to pass.
Amazon.co.uk
NOOK KOBO ( W H Smith )
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EXCERPT:
Haunted by Amy
1
Nauseous, Matthew let go of the scissors in his pocket. He’d realised how easy it would be to find himself using them, the moment he looked on the face of the girl who let Philip, the simpleton who had placed every ounce of his trust in him, burn to his death on a live rail. For that’s who she was, flicking her head away, her fine hair draping now on the shoulders of her coat. His teenage student, Amy Carter, slowly back-stepping into a recess from the platform, between the station buildings. She must have seen him, decided that by not openly running, she could make herself scarce enough to pass unnoticed.
He stared at her black coat. Black was “the thing” she’d once told him. He noticed her hem well above the backs of her knees where she always felt it did her legs “justice”, as she’d put it. And for a moment so much was true; for the curve of her calves and the line of her ankles tapering into her shoes distracted him. He wanted to believe that he, Amy's middle-aged teacher, had not just taught her about the metaphysical poets in classroom 12d but that she was the young woman who, despite all wisdom or logic, he'd grown to love. Even now, despite all the warnings that returned to him from his tormentors in 12d, it could still just be that Amy had back-stepped into the recess only because she was tense and rigid with the cold sweeping up the empty platform. She stood now behind trolleys stacked with luggage, trying to shield herself from the gusts. Yes, that was it; she wasn’t avoiding him, just the wind and the rain.
‘I know it’s you - from the rattle of those tablets. Don’t creep, Matthew!' The closeness of the voice took him by surprise.
He felt ashamed that her tone carried a weariness of him, was almost indulgent. He moved his hand inside his pocket to edge his handkerchief against the medicine bottle there and so muffle the embarrassing rattle of Diazepam tablets. But still it rattled, as did his nerves. At least his hand was no longer gripping what the voices of Jake Blacksmith and Darren Bassindale of the notorious classroom 12d had seemed to be nagging him to use on Amy, for he was no longer gripping tight to the scissors.
He pulled his hand from his pocket. He couldn’t begin to touch those scissors again – any more, it seemed, than the girl who stood next to him could begin to run from him. She didn’t need to run, he reasoned. And surely, Amy couldn’t have had it in her to push a simpleton on to a live rail. So far, at least, the truth had to be as simple as that: Amy Carter hadn’t tried to run because she had nothing to fear from him - except, he sensed, from a fear of being his.
Yet now he was standing cramped beside her in the recess, feeling foolish, conscious he and she were standing as rigid as queen’s sentries in their boxes, looking out across platforms at nothing, guarding only themselves from each other, neither able to turn and acknowledge the other. Words, once whispered over a pillow in a warm, shared bed, seemed to return where now neither he nor she could share even the cold. Their promises, their dreams, pulled like stitches.
He could smell her perfume, “Charlie” she’d called it, and from the corner of his eye he could see her face beneath the station lights. Amy was looking up the track, rigid, determined not to fully acknowledge him. She needed only her train… to come and take her off the platform; a platform which now she had no choice but to share, alone, with the man who’d been her college teacher, the man who’d owned the flat across Blackheath where she’d lain through the night giving herself...
Her arms, he noticed, stayed folded beneath her bosom. She was hugging herself from the chill, only her silence to protect her. He loathed himself for wrecking perhaps the only moment which could have been used to build a bridge. Yet his tablet had done nothing to stop the doubting; the ugliness that was welling again.
‘I’ve been the mug all along! Teacher, lover and mug,’ he had to speak to her profile. ‘I should have gone to the police after I’d read all the self-harm reports on you - the yellow carbon your father didn’t want me to see after the damage he must have known you’d done to Philip. You can’t walk away from that,’ he said.
She moved by degrees out of the recess and closer to the edge of the platform. He waited, watching her as she looked up the track where it narrowed into the distance.
Her back stayed turned on him, a wall which yet seemed to shiver inside. Yet when she did turn, there were no wild yellow eyes of recrimination to command his own, no supple tiger, poised unseen for its nightly hunt… only the short awkward breaths of a teenager, young enough to be his daughter, a girl wholly out of her depth with him or his regimen of Diazepam tablets, unable to cope with him any more.
‘Are we “detective superintendent Matthew” now we’re no longer employed as “Matthew the history teacher”? Or perhaps you just like stalking girls on empty train platforms?’
Amy jerked the strap of her bag over her shoulder. She seemed wary of him... like a girl afraid of being imminently mugged for the contents of her bag. He felt cheap. She was stiff, looking up the railway track again. He could feel her willing - for the tiniest dot of her train to appear on the horizon.
‘The only person who wants to hurt you, Matthew, is yourself and those pills you take because the world seems so full of all your 'enemies'!’ I know that back-street inner London students are not your forte but where do all the 'enemies' come from?' she said, still refusing to turn.
He wanted to put an arm around her, tell her she did have a possession - himself - and she was safe with him. But he sensed she was right. His accusations about her and her father's indifference to the simpleton's electrocution on the live rail shamed him.
A larger can rolled back and forth where the wind blew it between the legs of a bench seat. A Jack Russell barked at it before circling round the base of a platform pillar and proceeding to cock its leg while taking a fleeting look at him and Amy as if it recognised them as two of life’s wasters.
‘So nought out of ten for your detective work!” she called back into another gust of wind. She was walking, he noticed, along the edge again, close to the single yellow line, hugging herself beneath her breasts, back rigid with the cold, she still straining to see if there was any sign of her train from some distant spot down the track.
Matthew watched her hair toss and billow out on her shoulders. A Topic bar wrapper somersaulted down the platform and across her shoes until it toppled down between the lines, carrying it seemed as her life had carried her... into places, with people, where she didn’t belong. He wondered who would care for the girl on the platform if he didn’t... if he couldn’t...
‘My car’s -’ he checked himself. He’d been about to say: ‘If you can trust a burgeoning paranoid schizophrenic, I can still drive you home’.
But he couldn’t speak, not while his eyes settled on the glassy tubular object which the platform lamp had picked out. It looked like a tube of glass jutting at an angle from the corner of her shoulder bag. It was best, he thought, if he sidled up to her until he was in reach and then eased the stem of the bottle upwards, being quick to read the label. It was cherry brandy – De Kuypers, the same that had been reported to have been found in large quantity in the body of Philip Sidderton at the time he took the voltage on the live one.
‘Hey! Who give you the right to go in my bag!’ she shouted, snatching the bag back and holding it tight to her hip.
She eased the strap of her bag over her shoulder, there being nothing else to hide from him. He watched her as she folded her arms beneath her bosom again and stood, back erect, as if now was the moment when she needed to be a foot higher than her parents had made her.
Matthew waited and then, still holding the bottle firmly, confronted her with it, making sure she could see the label.
‘The papers reported that Philip had got the liqueur off a street sleeper. The sleeper had apparently lifted it from some seedy little general store near New Cross Broadway. That’s right Amy!’ he said. ‘Turn away - again! You don’t want to look at the label do you! It reminds you too much of who helped a simpleton drink the stuff - a whole bottle before his last walk down to an empty railway line!’
‘Listen to it! “The whole truth and nothing but the truth” is it? Now we can't be employed as teacher Matthew, we’re magistrate Matthew are we? Judge and jury! Is that it!’
‘Look at it!’ he insisted, curving his arm around her, forcing her to see the De Kuypers label. ‘The same that would have put Philip Sidderton into a bigger maze than his mind must already have been in after you’d led him to the tunnel!’ he said.
‘That’s a lie!’
He hadn’t been ready for the slap. He was confused, had no answers. A slap didn’t seem logical and he needed logic when all he’d got was a stinging and throbbing across his cheek. But he had a moment now to study her face, see if her indignation and her hurt were genuine.
‘And that’s my bottle! It’s for my Mum!’ she scowled. ‘I always have to buy her one of them De - Kuypers things - an errand every Tuesday after tenpin at Lewisham bowl.’
She’d surprised him again, for the bottle slipped out of his hand as she pulled it from him and returned it to her shoulder bag. He watched her bending into the bag, fussing to find a position for it that satisfied her, before squeezing her elbow into her side, making of it a vice that would hold the bag’s contents firmly to her this time.
‘You can’t look at me,’ he said to her. ‘Can you Amy! Then try looking at the other end of the track. You won’t, will you? You can’t, because it’s not far enough away from that tunnel - is it? The same tunnel that must have taken the echo of his cry when the line put more than 750 volts through Philip Sidderton, until his body took its last convulsion on the line.
He intercepted her hand in mid-air and clung on to it before it slapped his face a second time.
‘No Amy! I can understand what’s twisted your life up but I’m not going to have theatre! Not from you. Not from a teenage murderess.’
‘Stop it! Matthew! Stop it!’ she screeched, panicked as he clumsily urged her off the platform towards the tunnel where Philip had been found. 'And stop these!' she said, rummaging in his pocket to remove his bottle of Diazepam and stamp on it with her foot. Concrete eventually gave to the grass and bracken of the bank. Matthew led her up the line closer to the tunnel.
Her eyes… he couldn’t tell whether they warned of danger or signalled her fear. She was still, after all, a girl in high heels, sheer tights and a smart black coat, the whole incongruous against the dirty cable boxes, the graffiti-daubed maintenance hut and windblown litter behind her... but those eyes...
‘I want to see you stand! He tried to explain to her. ‘To stand near where Philip took hundreds of volts of current for up to a minute - God knows, maybe two minutes or more!’ Matthew said holding her fast again.
‘Off!’ she shrieked, jerking her hand free, having waited for the moment when he’d relaxed his grip. He’d been glancing down the line at the bouquets of flowers which still marked the scene where Philip had been electrocuted. He turned back to her. She seemed afraid to stay, afraid to run, standing back from him, trembling in what seemed genuine indignation.
She was right. He had become what Fairfax and Alexander, two psychiatrists, had skirted round, calling “only a tendency” - while half acknowledging that he might be clinically paranoid.
‘I can’t go down there - not with heels,’ she said, a first hint of concession in her tone. Matthew took it that she might be amenable if she swapped to her flat shoes.
He watched her bending over her bag and rummaging again, busying herself to the point of panic. She’d pulled out the pair of espadrilles she must have worn before leaving her evening at the bowling alley. The gust along the bank muffled her complaints as she bent, her hands trembling now as she busied herself fastening her laces. He wondered now, how he could have openly called the girl a murderess.
‘You can follow me! I’ll show you this time - what kind of nut you are! You’ll see me stand; you’ll see me stand right where Philip had his - accident. I’ve nothing to hide, not from nobody!’
Her plaited fibre soles slipped on the damp grass of the embankment as she began sliding on her bottom, her coat stuck with grass, seeds and spores, crumpling, making her whole demonstration a folly. Her arm sprang out to clutch on to the turn-ups of his trousers and then, he went with her, sliding down, the two bound, his own weight carrying her with its momentum, both tumbling backwards, rolling towards a bruising encounter with sleepers, pebbles and rail.
Matthew flinched back from the line, jerking Amy clear with him. As he stared over her at the line, his heart still raced at what he could see - the live rail. It hadn’t been that one which had ended their fall… it hadn’t been the live one he felt like reciting, until the full meaning of the words sank in to him.
Amy, he realised, had disentangled herself. It seemed as if she’d been embarrassed to be caught looking at him. She was pulling her skirt back over her thighs, picking out the crumples in her coat and standing, ready to show that she could walk, with a clear conscience, up the line, towards the bouquets and wreaths which lay on the bank before the opening to the old tunnel.
‘Are you coming or not!’ she challenged.
He looked up at her, cursing his greater age and weight for making him less agile.
‘You can watch me - stand, next to where I found your Philip! And holding this!’ she said, defiantly, advertising the bottle of De Kuypers to him as if it had been his own dirty linen.
‘Philip’s - his accident - was, it was his own. What you’re suspicious mind invents about me is evil - evil! Come on! Watch me! Watch me stand there, Matthew! I’ve nothing to feel guilty about - like you want me to feel guilty! Come on! What are you waiting for?’
He got himself back on his feet and brushed his trousers to give his hands something to do, all the time wondering whether he or his tablets had, after all, made a disgrace of him.
‘Come on then, sir! Watch me! Accuse me then of being the boy’s -’ she’d stopped short of “murderess”, and now she’d turned her back and begun to pick her way over the shingle between the lines so that she could be on the side where the bouquets had been set out a bit further down on the opposite bank of the cutting.
The thing they’d both forgotten, the only thing she’d come to the station for - the Blackheath to New Cross train - it was minutes late but, Matthew noticed, coming... and making ground - fast...
‘Come on! Watch me!’ she challenged against another gust of wind.
‘Amy! Amy, the train! It’s coming! Ameeee!” he shouted, the wind carrying her name.
‘Watch me!’ she shouted again, turning to see if he was following and then doing precisely what he’d most feared. She’d twisted her ankle, fallen between two tracks trying - if only to salve her dignity - to stand on the sprain. She reminded him of a fully grown mosquito, damaged and trying, in pulses, to raise itself before the next blow came to finish it but, for all her bravado, Amy Carter wasn’t going to get up this time.
There’d been no sounding of the train’s klaxon. Whatever else the driver had been doing, he hadn’t seen the figure in a black coat prone between the lines.
Matthew shuddered. If he couldn’t pull her clear - within seconds - the girl who’d once slept beside him and who, after all, had tried to hold out hope for him when all the voices from his students said he was ‘mental’, could end, eviscerated between two bland stretches of steel.
He ran along the track, losing the rhythm of his stride to tumble forward. He corrected himself to avoid an outright fall on his face. Matthew was afraid to look up again at the yellow face heading for him. But this yellow had been sprayed on metal to form a face which had a bright main lamp for its mouth, a number for a nose, two windows for eyes, a trunk of piping hanging beneath each eye like tears and, beneath those, shunting discs for death rattling towards him, rattling louder now, vibrating beneath his feet...
‘Tiger’ Amy's fakin’ teacher!’ Class 12d seemed to remind. ‘Wise up! When it’s too late for you, she’ll get up, turn and push. Just like she pushed your Simple Simon on that there track.’
Amy was huddled in her short coat, rigid, as Matthew tried to get his hands under her armpits. He strained to heave her up, conscious only that she was still clutching her shoulder bag into her bosom as though it, at least, might be her friend to the end. And then he remembered. There was still one rail that had to be live and that no part of Amy or he should touch it.
He willed his legs not to buckle, not to let the wall of iron hurtling closer have its way, smack their two bodies into the air leaving them heaped on each other; an abandoned human sandwich metres down the rails. He put in the extra effort, swearing, while he heaved Amy beneath her arms. He had to hump her safely over each line, pick his way carefully, so carefully between each of the stretches of mute iron that seemed still to wait for his first and last mistake.
The sight of the lines reminded of what Philip’s last seconds must have been like. Those seconds were becoming his and Amy’s... justice finally meted to them... from Philip Sidderton’s cold grave. The shock, the current that silently waited, could convulse himself and, by attachment, Amy; if in panic he stumbled on the live one. Both shock and current would be the more hideous if it was to be the workings of a dead man’s discontent… the moment of Philip Sidderton’s final equalling of the score that had been stacked against the simpleton from his birth.
From the line, Philip’s face seemed to be returning... that wide grin which had once been so slow and endearing, now making the boy’s mouth appear stiff and unyielding... like that uncompromising slit smiling out of a pumpkin on the night of Halloween...
Matthew toppled and stumbled backwards, Amy rolling on top of him on the opposite bank. The rattling of wheels was diminishing, the waft of wind the train had left in its wake confirmed... it had passed... passed and he... and Amy... they were both unscathed. They were... intact... perfectly... intact...
He was exhilarated. He laughed until he wasn’t sure whether it was the dust the train had wafted into his eyes or his own own tears which made the water stream down his cheeks in the cold air. But neither mattered, for he was laughing, hysterically now. It was only the sight of Amy Carter’s right espadrille made him stop.
A thick disc of glass, the base of a broken beer bottle was hanging from the canvas on the inside edge of her shoe, the material itself smudged into a bizarre pattern where her blood had seeped and spread. Beads of blood were building up and beginning to slide down the shard of broken glass where it must have completely penetrated the shoe and lodged itself into her foot. Her blood was filling and circling round a groove in the brown glass. She must have tripped while trying to avoid the bottle someone had tossed between the lines, but she’d been too late to stop her weight falling on it. The shard had easily penetrated the canvas, scything into her skin.
She was writhing on the bank, letting out weak moans. Matthew removed his anorak and tried to wrap it round her legs; making out of her short skirt something between a dress and mummification where she’d had nothing to keep out the cold gusts of wind and the long wet grass. He did up the buttons of her coat to her chin where only a lucky-heart necklace had kept the night air from her neck. Crumpled in her pocket he found the Indian red shot taffeta neckerchief she said she wore for him but which, she always said, embarrassed her when before the others of her age who came along on her bowling alley nights. He wound the fabric round her neck, crudely stuffing the flimsy material into her collar to give as much warmth as he could before propping her back against his chest.
With glass lodged deep into her foot, he couldn’t risk trying to hump her any further back along the track nor out into the little side road opposite the station where he’d left his car. She’d have to be carried off the bank on a stretcher. If he tried to remove shoe or broken glass, either could be tortuous for the girl so long as she remained conscious. He had a hand he could free to press out three nines on his mobile.
The paramedics had been preoccupied with administering pain killer and carrying Amy back to the waiting ambulance. Matthew took his opportunity, climbing up into the back of the vehicle. For a second, the platform dipped with his weight but the paramedics seemed too busy to notice. The movement had made Amy momentarily open her eyes against the sedation.
‘You didn’t see me?’ she moaned, needing his assurance.
‘See you? How d’you mean “see you” - Amy?’ he asked, not sure whether she could re-open her eyes. She did. Her eyes, from what he could make out, were dull but carried in them a deep dependency.
‘Stand!’ she strained to assert. ‘You didn’t see I could do it - stand, like you said, stand and face the line, near the tunnel? Face where your friend, Philip -’ her eyelids closed on her again.
‘Don’t fret,’ he said. ‘I can see! Now I can!’
He shifted an oxygen cylinder so he might find a space to sit closer to where the paramedics had laid her.
‘No - don’t come with me!’ She insisted, trying to keep her eyes open for a moment longer.
He sat cramped on the stretcher base.
‘I made a mistake Amy - when I saw you with that bottle of cherry brandy I -’
‘I don’t want you to come!’ she said, her lids now too heavy to open against the drug.
‘“Don’t” because I’m an embarrassment?’ he tested, ‘Or “don’t” because -’
‘You - you called me a murderess!’ she said trying to raise her voice against the wind and the ambulance’s engine, finding strength for a moment to flutter her eyelids.
‘Teachers make mistakes, Amy!’ he tried to speak softly. ‘They make them all the time! Paranoiacs more than others!’ he tried to joke but feeling inches tall.
‘I said, go! Leave me!’ Her face creased with the ultimatum.
Matthew knew he was doing more harm than good. Amy's lids had closed on her again, her mouth hanging open. Her bag, where it lay beside her, seemed the only friend she knew, its mouth seeming to flop open, like hers; as if equally unable to defend her against his suggestion that with the cherry brandy she may have lured Philip Sidderton, a simpleton who had put all his trust in him, to the live rail.
Matthew looked into the bag. Only the stem of the De Kuypers bottle pointed up towards him, as if telling him now what he should have always accepted; that the liqueur could have been no more than the errand her mother gave Amy on Tuesday’s after tenpin.
2
Matthew was relieved to be away from the railway lines but, equally, ashamed to be watching the AMBULANCE sign shift away along the road before him. Lying on a stretcher inside, part of the base of some slouch’s discarded beer bottle still lodged in her foot, painkiller in her veins, was a sixteen year old girl who could have been in her bed... in her home.
He could have stayed with her in the ambulance but instead he’d lamely done what she’d insisted, leaving her alone with the two paramedics for her journey to the hospital. He could start up the engine, follow, wait for her in Accident and Emergency. He wasn’t her lover any more, not even her teacher. How was he going to swallow the studied silence of those paramedics again when he tried to tell them he was Amy’s “friend”?
He started the engine. If he was sharp about it, he could follow the ambulance before it turned the corner into Belmont Hill.
But had she snubbed him out of anger in the ambulance… did she want to conveniently cut herself off? Did she, after all, have something to hide? Had somebody been watching in those moments when Philip Sidderton took enough voltage from the live rail of the Blackheath to New Cross line to make him move like a worm cut by a spade?
Matthew was driving almost against his will now, mesmerised by the back of the ambulance which was beginning to circle the tiny island at the top of Belmont Hill. He couldn’t settle the fight between head and heart as to whether he should continue to follow or turn back to his flat. Despite Amy’s effort to demonstrate that she’d had no qualms about leading him along the track to stand before the scene of Philip’s accident, they hadn’t, in the end, reached the scene - not together. If they had done, he would have sensed, for sure, whether there was more to the newspaper headline than her simply “finding” Philip's body.
The car horn and the Cockney voice bawling inanities at him from the side window of a four track made Matthew brake suddenly. He was on the wrong side of red lights and, worse, he had forgotten whether the ambulance had turned in the direction of Lewisham or New Cross. He’d let the red traffic lights and the irate driver be his omen, decide for him that there was another direction in which he should have been driving all along.
Matthew? WE’LL always be f-f-friends... Philip seemed to whisper to him from the back seat of his car as if the boy was still alive and leaning forward to speak. The thought was madness, Matthew told himself, but not before finding that he’d had to glance in the rear-view mirror.
Even so, something had spoken to him, perhaps his conscience. He’d take another route.
Yes, he’d lay down a bouquet for Philip Sidderton, lay it on the railway embankment. He’d never been able to properly say goodbye. If he circled, returned via Eliot Hill up to the heath and across to Blackheath railway station, he could find a moment when the platform was empty again, walk down the track until he came to that lonely spot near the entrance to the tunnel. There, quiet, except for the occasional gusts of wind along the bank, he could share - still share - with Philip. Then, he might know whether his head or his heart told him the truth about Amy... whether, as Philip had always said, she “wouldn’t hurt nobody”…
The Digoxin which Matthew had found in his glove compartment was beginning to do its job, keeping down his pulse as he knew he’d have to do when that moment came for him to walk beneath the arched entrance to the station foyer, down the steps to the platform and finally edge his way to the end before quietly slipping down the embankment towards the part of the line on which Philip had been electrocuted.
3
Matthew walked along the track. His eyes watered in the wind which channelled between the embankments as he looked into the distance. He hoped to get closer to the bouquets which marked the spot where Philip’s body had lain.
You should have followed Amy, M-M-Matthew. I’m not cold and not hot any more and I don’t have to take in-j-jections to kill the pain like Amy does. And I’ll never have no glass in my foot like her...
‘Not cold, not hot, no pain, no glass!’ Matthew found himself saying, his heart pacing faster than his legs could carry him towards the bouquets. He wondered whether his next stride should make it his turn to feel a broken bottle pierce his foot; pierce it for every hurt done to Philip Sidderton and to Amy Carter.
Like broken friendship Matthew... if you don’t turn and follow Amy!
‘What d’you call “death on a live rail” Philip? Isn’t that broken friendship?’ Matthew called, scanning the embankment, half afraid that Philip might materialise there, perhaps burnt beyond recognition.
Forget the bouquets, Matthew. Turn back to Amy…the voice from beneath the spread of nettles and long grass seemed to implore. Amy’s kind! Gave me lots and lots of track!
‘And cherry brandy, Philip? Did she give you the cherry brandy?’ Matthew called towards the spread of bouquets.
Wouldn’t hurt nobody, Matthew...
‘No, she “wouldn’t hurt nobody” - would she Philip?’ he said, booting more shingle along the track as he went, glancing every now and again at the live rail.
It’s you who’ve got to live now M-M-Matthew. I want you to live with a kind person. Can you hear me? From the tall grass? L-Live with Amy… L-L-Live!
‘And who have you got to live with now, Philip? Didn’t you ever want - a different kind of friend?’
This time Matthew heard no voices from the embankment or the tracks, nothing but rain which now began to sweep across his face and puddle in potholes around the sleepers.
‘I mean a lady friend Philip? Someone to make daffodils look brighter and fresher in April? To make the white cherry blossom in May, when New Cross slaps your face with concrete and graffiti? Didn’t you want that kind of friend? Someone to make the song of a harp or cello lovelier when the traffic of students spits in your ear? Someone to make you feel you’d something to build, something so much more tender than a piece of metalwork or a model train? Didn’t you ever want that?’
Again there was not the reply from the line to which Matthew had become accustomed. Of course not. He’d heard nothing… except his own longing to speak again with he to whom there’d never been, nor ever could be, a goodbye. Some bouquets and a wreath had rolled down the bank to float in a muddy puddle beside the track where days ago Sidderton had burnt… here there’s no more graffiti, no din, no ugliness Matthew. I watch all the trains I want go by! For ever! For ever... Philip’s voice seemed to gurgle from beneath the puddle.
It sounded so real and Philip... he was, he was approaching ... running, with a wreath. The lad was hugging it, wanted to show his teacher friend that the boy from the college’s basement corridor basic metalwork class had become important to someone.
Matthew stopped walking, wanted to step sideways, off the track, altogether. Philip was who he’d come to see, but not running towards him... not as real as the last time he’d seen the boy, when he’d given him the little note of his telephone number, watched Philip’s big clumsy fingers stuff it excitedly into the cabin of his miniature loco’...
See Matthew? My prize from college! For best metalworker and best train spotter! Fast one’s coming now - see? No? No! ’Cos only I can see! It’s coming! Look closer! I’m on it - see?
Matthew held his breath. He recognised his fear and it was not founded on any likelihood of an approaching train; it was a fear that made him stand still on the shingle between the track, strain to keep control of his bladder; a fear of Philip Sidderton... approaching still…
Of course there was no sound of wheels, no vibration beneath his feet, nothing to see, yet the banks of the platform seemed to have become walls, threatening to move in on him from either side... the night sky had swooped down to become a roof, shutting out the stars. It was a building in which he seemed to stand... a corridor, in which there was no further he could go sideways, no further backwards... doors lining both sides but none to exit, all locked to him... like classroom doors... and Philip... Philip Sidderton still running, moving steps closer to him with his prize of a wreath...
And now the wreath was shaped like a ring of model train track. Approaching behind Philip there was a score or more of his students from 12d, Matthew was sure, and at their head stood Amy Carter. Another ring of track was dropped over Philip’s head, this time by one of the tall, gangling youths. He was Darren Smith and Smith’s gang were laughing while Philip grinned, knowing only the pride and pleasure of clutching his wreath to his chest as he ran closer…
See Matthew? My prize! K-K-Kind! Like Amy, they’re all so kind!
Track was being stuffed down his neck by the close crops and the unwashed who followed. Now they were surely stuffing track into Philip’s pockets, down his trousers, a single corner-curve even pushed into his mouth like a bone to a dog and those students behind him... all those who’d made classroom 329 impossible… laughing… at Philip.
‘Give me the track Philip. I’ll break it, to pieces! As they broke you and me,’ Matthew said, conscious that he was talking to nothing except a chimera, yet unable to stop himself from calling.
No Matthew! Matthew? Don’t take my prize away!
‘Give it to me, you fool! Can’t you see? 12d, they’re laughing - at you!’
Matthew ran, occasionally stumbling forward, just succeeding in righting himself as he stretched forward to take from the approaching
figure the model track which it seemed still to clutch to itself so full of pride.
‘Philip! Philip!’ Matthew called, ‘They’re laughing at you! Can’t you see? Let me break the track! Every bit of it!’
No! Please! Don’t take the prize they give me!
‘Give it to me! Philip! You’ve got to let me take, at least, the piece they’ve stuck in your mouth - are you going to let them make a-dog-with-a-bone out of you? Their puppy and retriever?’
Matthew grasped up into the air to snatch the curve of model tracking out of Sidderton’s stretched mouth.
No! Matthew! I was your sp-specialist friend!
Matthew stopped, unable to believe what seemed to be the figure of the girl behind the boy, trying to stuff into the baggy side pocket of Philip’s coat ... a bottle... with one of those stems... and now the label De Kuypers. And the girl had the face of Amy; a pale yellow now in the uncompromising light that shone from a lamp above the embankment... it was smiling, teasing; a smile that had once been teased from her.
‘Don’t snatch the track out of his mouth Matthew! I told you, it’s rude to snatch. Like Philip snatched you off me when you came to - to pity him!’
It didn’t matter that he knew Amy to be in hospital, for she… her voice was also here… as free, as real as the present could be.
He wondered whether he should turn back along the track, forget about laying his bouquet now only yards ahead on the banking. He hesitated, turning to look at the length of track he’d walked. Behind him… standing the breadth of the track from both sides of the cutting and preventing his exit were his ex-students from 12d…
‘Remember what we told you teacher? It was tiger Amy give your Simple Simon friend the De Kuypers,’ they seemed to be saying. ‘Then gentle, so gentle, Amy tiger give ’im that - push! It was “Bar-B-Q time” for Simon! Confused teacher? Feel like wettin’ yourself right where you’re standin’ dumb as a scarecrow between them lines of track? You’re afraid to go back to Amy tiger. You’re afraid to go forward to 'im who lies cold, cold as steel. Afraid eh? Like we made sure you was! Your mental teacher! Mental…mental…men’aaal!’
Matthew decided on “forward”. He would continue for those last few yards, lay his bouquet on the embankment. After all, that appearance of Philip running up to him between the tracks was just that and no more – an appearance, like that of his students gathering on the line, as doctor Fairfax could have told him. Of course, there was nothing but track and the beginnings of that old tunnel ahead of him, he decided. He zipped his anorak tighter beneath his chin, turned the collar up around his neck, feeling foolish to have believed in appearances.
He turned once more to look behind him at the track he’d trodden. Just as he’d reasoned, there were none of his ex-students forming a barrier across the width of the cutting. The track was free for him to walk and his task was done, bouquet placed, farewells said. That track would lead him back to the station, his car and the roads to the hospital where he might find Amy Carter in a hospital corridor...
Go back M-Matthew, to the hospital! She needs you! You need her! Philips voice seemed to return faintly on the wind. But there were no more appearances of Philip anywhere on the tracks. Of course there weren’t. Philip was dead.
‘She killed you, Philip – you, a lad who couldn’t properly dress yourself,’ Matthew called along the tracks, deserted now except for a few tossed cans and the occasional soggy cigarette packet.
‘She killed you!’ he shouted. ‘Killed!’ he cried, opening up his lungs.
No, M-Matthew...
‘It was slaughter!’ Matthew shouted into the night.
Needs you, M-M-Matthew…Philip’s voice echoed… Amy needs you like you need her!
Which was it to be? Matthew wondered. He kicked shingle along the line until it scattered before him and then kicked. Which?
When he saw Amy again, the truth would be in her face.
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