The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
‘For Christ’s sake, Sheila, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.’ There was no one else in the bar. Even the old men had left. Still Harold scanned a room of empty chairs behind him, then turned back and edged himself nearer the table. ‘Stop scaremongering. We agreed back then that we just made our feelings known, that’s all. The rest of it was chance.’
Brian leaned back in his chair. He could feel the edge of the cigarette machine biting into his shoulder. ‘She talked to everyone, though, didn’t she? She went round the whole avenue. You don’t know what she found out. She was smart, Mrs Creasy. Really smart.’
Sheila pushed her purse back into her handbag. ‘I hate to bloody say it, but Brian’s right. Perhaps she knew more than any of us.’
‘It was an accident,’ said Eric Lamb. He stretched the words out, like instructions.
Now his glass was gone, Brian didn’t know what to do with his hands. He pressed his thumb into the drips of beer on the table, pulling them into lines, trying to make a pattern. This was the problem when people had known you since you were a child, they could never quite let go of assuming you needed to be told what to think.
‘We just need to stay calm,’ said Harold. ‘None of this loose talk. We did nothing wrong, understood?’
Brian shrugged his shoulders, and his jacket creaked and crackled in reply. Probably wasn’t leather after all.
*
They walked back through the estate, Sheila linking her arm through Brian’s to steady herself, because her shoes were bloody impossible to walk in. Brian didn’t think her shoes were the problem, but he offered her his arm anyway. It was almost ten. Eric Lamb had gone on ahead, and they’d left Harold at the Legion, helping Clive to close up. It was the best part of the day, Brian thought. The heat had faded into a heavy silence, and there was even a pale breeze, pushing into the quietness and tracing a path through the highest leaves.
As they reached the garages at the end of the avenue, Sheila stopped to pull at the strap on her shoe, and she wavered and swayed, and leaned into Brian to keep her balance. ‘Bloody things,’ she said.
He stared at the road. Light escaped from the sky and pressed against the horizon, taking the familiar and the safe along with it. In the dusk, the houses looked different, exposed somehow, as though they had been stripped of their disguise. They faced each other, like adversaries, and right at the top, set back from the rest, was number eleven.
Still, silent, waiting.
Sheila looked up and followed his gaze. ‘Makes no sense, does it?’ she said. ‘Why would you stay when you know you’re not wanted?’
Brian shrugged. ‘Perhaps he feels the same about us. Perhaps he’s waiting for an apology.’
Sheila laughed. It was thin and angry. ‘He’ll wait a bloody long time for mine.’
‘But do you really think he did it? Do you really think he took the baby?’
She stared at him. Her whole face seemed to narrow and tighten, until the whites of her eyes were lost to hatred. ‘He’s the type, isn’t he? You’ve only got to look at him. You’re not that thick, Brian.’
He felt colour wash across his face. He was glad she wouldn’t notice.
‘Strange Walter,’ he said.
‘Exactly. Even the kids can see it.’
He glanced at the lights in Sheila’s window. ‘Who’s sitting with yours?’ he said.
She smiled. ‘They don’t need no sitter. Our Lisa’s old enough now. She’s sharp, just like her mother. I trained her well.’
He looked over at number eleven again. It was becoming lost to the light, the edge of the roof slipping into an inky black. ‘It’s what kids do, though, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘Copy their mams and dads?’
Sheila’s shoes dragged on the pavement, pulling at the concrete with their heels. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And don’t you go feeling sorry for Walter Bishop. People like that don’t deserve sympathy. They’re not like us.’
The rattle of the latch reached across an empty road.
‘Do you really think the police will be interested in the fire?’ he said. ‘After all this time?’
She turned in the half-light. He couldn’t see her face, just an outline. A shadow slipping and shifting against the darkening bricks. When she answered, it was a whisper, but he heard it creep across the silence.
‘We’d better bloody hope not,’ she said.
And her shoes scraped against the step, and a key twisted in a lock, and Brian watched as the last piece of daylight was stolen from the sky.
He crossed over, towards home, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He thought he’d imagined it at first, but then he felt it again, cardboard rubbing against his knuckles. He stopped and pulled at the ripped lining until it broke free.
A library ticket.
He stood underneath the street lamp, and the name on the ticket was caught in liquid, orange light.
Mrs Margaret Creasy.
He frowned and folded it in half, and he pushed it back against the lining, until it finally disappeared.
*
Brian stood in the doorway and looked into the sitting room. The giant cave of his mother’s sleeping mouth looked back at him, and it made the rest of her face seem strangely trivial. The Milk Tray was disembowelled on the footstool, and the debris of her evening decorated the carpet – knitting needles and crossword puzzles and television pages torn from a newspaper.
‘Mam?’ he said. Not loud enough to wake her, but loud enough to reassure himself that he’d tried.
She snored back to him. Not the violent, churning snore that you would expect, but something softer. A thoughtful snore. His father once said that his mother was delicate and graceful when they first met, and Brian wondered if her snoring was all that was left of that narrow, fragile woman.
He stared at his mother’s mouth. He wondered how many words had fallen out of it and into Margaret Creasy’s ears. She couldn’t help herself. It was as though she used hearsay as a web to trap people’s attention, that she didn’t believe she was interesting enough to hold on to them any other way.
His mother’s mouth widened a little more, her eyes squeezed a little more tightly, and from somewhere deep in her chest came the faint rasp of unconsciousness.
Brian wondered if she’d told Margaret Creasy about the night of the fire. About what she saw, or thought she saw, in the shadowed corners of the avenue.
And he wondered if these had been the magic words that had made Margaret Creasy disappear.
20 December 1967
Brian draws the flame of the match into his roll-up, and watches the tobacco spark and flicker in the darkness.
He can smoke indoors if he wants to. The rooms are painted with the yellow skin of his mother’s cigarettes, but he prefers to stand outside, to feel a bite of winter against his face and stare into the blackness undisturbed.
The avenue is held in a frosted quiet. All the houses are buttoned up against the cold, three bars on the fire, condensation climbing high in the windows. There are Christmas trees peeping through gaps in the curtains, but Brian doesn’t feel very much like Christmas. He doubts anyone does, in all honesty, after everything that’s happened.
The roll-up is thin and quick. It scratches the back of his throat and tightens his chest. He decides to take one last drag and go back into the carpet warmth of the kitchen, when he sees a movement at the top of the road. Somewhere at the edge of number eleven, there is a shift in the darkness, a brief change of light which catches the corner of his attention as he’s about to turn.
He shields the cigarette in his palm to cover its glow, and tries to pull the view into the eyes, but beyond the orange pool of the streetlight, the shapes die away into an inked black.
But there was definitely a movement.
And as he closes the back door, he’s sure he hears the sound of disappearing footsteps.
*
‘You can smoke in here, Brian.’ His mother nods at a bloated ashtray. ‘You could help me string these Christmas cards.’
She is pushing the cards into tiny red and green pegs, like bunting, and coming to the end of a packet of custard creams.
‘I fancied a bit of fresh air, Mam.’
‘As long as you don’t forget your kidneys,’ she says.
He walks over to the window and pulls the curtain a fraction, just enough to stare through an inch of glass.
‘What are you looking at?’ Her voice twitches with interest, and she rests the cards on her lap.
‘Number eleven.’
‘I thought you said he’d gone away with his mother. I thought we’d all agreed there was no point watching the house until he gets back.’
‘There’s someone in his garden.’
She is on her feet. A pile of Christmas cards somersault into the air, and three lowly mangers and a donkey fall to the carpet.
‘Well, if you’re going to do it, do it properly,’ she says. ‘Switch the big light off and pull the curtains back.’
He does as he’s told, and they both stare out into the darkness.
‘Do you see anything?’ she says.
He doesn’t. They watch in silence.
Sheila Dakin visits her dustbin, and the avenue fills with the sound of glass drumming against metal. Sylvia Bennett draws the curtains back in one of the upstairs rooms and stares into the road. It feels as though she is looking straight at them, and Brian ducks below the windowsill.
‘She can’t see you, you daft bugger,’ his mother says. ‘The light’s off.’
Brian resurfaces, and when he looks up, Sylvia has disappeared.
‘Perhaps it was those lads from the estate again,’ says his mother. ‘Perhaps they came back.’
Brian leans into the window. His legs are going dead and the back of the settee is pushing into his ribcage. ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ he says. ‘Not after what happened.’
His mother sniffs. ‘Well, I can’t see anything. You must have imagined it, there’s no one out there.’
As she speaks, Brian sees it again. Movement behind the thin, leafless trees which stand in Walter Bishop’s garden.
‘There.’ He taps on the glass. ‘Do you see them now?’
His mother presses her face against the window and breaths of fascination travel across the view.
‘Well I never,’ says his mother. ‘What on earth is he doing?’
‘Who?’ Brian joins her at the glass. ‘Who is it?’
‘Move your head, Brian. You always get it in the way.’
‘Who is it?’ he says again, moving his head.
His mother folds a pair of satisfied arms across her chest. ‘Harold Forbes,’ she says. ‘That’s definitely Harold Forbes.’
‘Is it?’ Brian risks putting his head near the glass again. ‘How can you tell?’
‘I’d know that hump anywhere. Very poor posture, that man.’
They both stare into the dark, and their reflections stare back at them from the glass, ghostly white and open-mouthed, and painted with curiosity.
‘There are some very odd people about,’ says his mother.
Brian’s eyes adjust to the night, and after a moment he sees the figure, slightly bent and occupied with something he’s holding in his hands. He is moving between the trees, making his way around the front of number eleven. It’s definitely a man, but Brian has no idea how his mother can be so certain it’s Harold Forbes.
‘What is he carrying?’ Brian wipes breath from the glass. ‘Can you tell?’
‘I’m not sure,’ says his mother, ‘but that’s not what interests me the most.’
Brian turns to her and frowns. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What interests me the most,’ says his mother, ‘is who has he got there with him?’
She’s right. Beyond the stooped, wandering figure in the trees, there is a second person. They’re slightly taller than the first, and straighter, and they are pointing to something at the back of the house. He tries to press his face further into the glass, but the image just blurs and distorts and becomes an untidiness of shapes and shadows.
Brian puts forward a number of possibilities, all dismissed by his mother as too young, too old, too tall.
‘So who do you think it is, then?’ says Brian.
His mother pulls herself to her full height and presses her chin into the flesh of her neck.
‘I have my suspicions,’ she says, ‘but of course, it would be wrong of me to speculate.’
There is only one thing his mother enjoys more than gossip, and that is withholding it from an interested party, based on her sudden unearthing of the moral high ground.
They argue. Brian never wins their arguments, his mother is far too practised and far too stubborn, and by the time he gives up and looks back into the avenue, the figures have disappeared.
‘That’s that then,’ says his mother. The cards still lie on the carpet, and she gathers several Virgin Marys on the way back to the settee.
‘What do you think they were doing?’ Brian says.
She takes another biscuit, and he has to wait for an answer until she has prised off the lid of the custard cream and examined its contents.
‘Well, whatever it is,’ she says, ‘let’s hope it involves getting rid of Bishop once and for all. We’ve had too many incidents around here just lately.’
For once, he agrees with her. The last few weeks had seen one disruption after another. The police never used to visit the avenue at all, now it seems as though they’re never away from the place.
‘I know one thing.’ His mother bites into her custard cream, and a spray of crumbs settle themselves down on the antimacassar. ‘It’s a good job you’re here, Brian. I wouldn’t be able to sleep in my bed, otherwise. Not as long as that man’s still at the top of the road.’
Brian leans back on the windowsill, but it digs into his spine, cracking against his vertebrae. The room is too hot. His mother has always kept it too hot. As a child he would stand in this very spot, staring through the window, trying to work out a way of making the heat escape and disappear forever.
‘I’m going for another cigarette,’ he says.
‘I don’t know why you don’t smoke in here, Brian. Isn’t my company good enough for you?’
She has gone back to threading Christmas cards. There is a theme, Brian thinks. She is threading another Baby Jesus on to a row. There are thirteen stars of Bethlehem. Thirteen preoccupied donkeys. A queue of Baby Jesuses to hang across the mantelpiece and watch them eat their Christmas dinner in silent, paper hats.
‘I just fancy a bit of fresh air,’ he says.
‘Well, don’t be gone ages. You know with my nerves I don’t like being on my own for too long. Not until all this nonsense is sorted out.’
Brian takes his tobacco tin and box of matches from the windowsill. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he says.
And he walks back into the darkness.
Number Four, The Avenue
5 July 1976
It was Monday. The first real day of the holidays. The summer built a dusty bridge to September, and I lay in bed for as long as I could, holding on to the moment before I took the first step.
I could hear my parents in the kitchen. The noises were familiar, a sequence of cupboards and plates and doors, and I knew which sound would come next, like a piece of music. I squashed the pillow under my head and listened, and I watched a breeze press into the curtains, sending them billowing like sails. Still I knew it wouldn’t rain. You could smell rain, my father said, like you could smell the seaside. All I could smell as I lay in bed was Remington’s porridge and a drift of bacon climbing into the room from someone else’s kitchen. I wondered if I could get away with going back to sleep, but then I remembered I needed to find God and Mrs Creasy, and my breakfast.
*
My mother was being very quiet. She was quiet when I walked into the kitchen, she was quiet for the entire time I ate my Rice Krispies, and she was still quiet when I put my bowl in the sink. Although it was strange that, even when she was quiet, she still managed to be the loudest person in the room.
My father sat in the corner, cleaning his shoes on a piece of newspaper, whilst my mother orbited the cupboards. Every so often, he said something very ordinary to see if he could tempt someone into a conversation. He had already tried the weather, but no one had joined in. He’d even spoken to Remington, but Remington just beat his tail against the lino and looked confused.
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