(1990) Sweet Heart

  Knew that inside it she would find a note, carefully folded. Her head throbbed and her vision became blurry. Slowly, with fingers that felt like hams, she lifted the locket out. There was a tiny hinge and an even smaller clasp which, though rusted, moved under the pressure of her thumbnail. A minute piece of paper nestle inside, yellowed, brittle, folded several times. The wind fluttered it and she shut the locket, scared it would blow away. She felt giddy.

  She wet her fingers with spittle and wiped them as clean as she could on her jeans then, shielding it from the wind, she took the tiny square out, and unfolded it. The ink was blurry, smudged, brown with age, and the paper so brittle she was frightened it would disintegrate. The handwriting was just legible.

  ‘Dear Rock, I love him. Please bring him back. Barbara.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  It felt as if a lever had been pulled inside her, switching her blood flow from slow to fast. A small boy was watching her, brown-haired, an earnest freckled face. He was about seven.

  ‘Are you making a wish?’ he said.

  She nodded and managed a weak smile. A voice called out. ‘Timothy! Come on, darling!’

  He scampered out of sight. ‘Mummy! Mummy! There’s a lady up there making a wish!’

  Her face was burning red with embarrassment. And guilt. This was someone else’s locket, someone else’s note. She had no business digging it up, reading, prying.

  She refolded it, placed it inside the locket and snapped it shut. Then she laid it in the tin, closed the lid firmly and put it in the hole. She scooped the earth in and stamped it down with her foot. When she turned around, the boy was there again.

  ‘Is that your doggie?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘I made a wish here,’ he said.

  ‘What did you wish?’

  ‘I wished that the rock would make my daddy better.’

  ‘Did it work?’ she said smiling, almost relieved to have company.

  ‘No.’ His face puckered. ‘He died.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tom hit a four off the first ball.

  ‘I knew he could bat,’ said Vic, the landlord from the George and Dragon, as glumly as if he had been clean bowled. ‘I can tell a good bat when I see one.’

  ‘Well done, darling!’ Charley yelled, applauding the loudest. She stood beside the tea table, watching as the bowler paced out his run, rubbing the ball on the left cheek of his buttock. He started his run, slow, quick, slow, quick. The ball sailed through the air, Tom lunged out, missed, and it passed the wicket keeper.

  ‘Yes! Go!’ yelled the batsman the far end, already halfway down the crease. Tom ran, made the far crease long before a fielder ever got to the ball. There was more clapping. Fielders waited as the second batsman took his guard.

  Charley felt a spot of rain on her face. The doilies under the cakes on the trestle tables flapped in the wind. Viola Letters’s terrier ran in and out of the table legs yapping.

  Charley squatted, patted the dog and tickled its chest. ‘Hey, chappie, are we going to make friends?’ It licked her hand tentatively.

  Hugh Boxer came over, padded up, a weathered bat under his arm, cap tugged down over his head, wearing an old-fashioned college cricketing jumper and baggy white trousers. The outfit suited his aura of faded nobility.

  ‘That was a bloody fine hit,’ he said. ‘Bold shot for an opener. He looks like rather a useful player.’

  ‘He used to be very good.’

  ‘Still is. Thank you for last night by the way,’ he said.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed it.’

  ‘Very much. It was a good evening. Laura’s a bright girl.’ His eyes were probing.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ she said. ‘I went up to the rocks this morning, the Wishing Rocks.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘You’re right. It’s a pretty walk.’ She glanced at her nails, which were not completely free of mud, then back at Hugh. ‘This custom — of burying things — does it still go on?’

  ‘You might get the odd kid doing it occasionally. I think people have got more cynical about things like that these days.’ He stretched down to tighten a strap on one pad.

  There was a crunch and a silence on the pitch. The middle stump was bent backwards behind the batsman. Tom was at the other end she saw, relieved.

  ‘I’m on parade,’ Hugh said, and grinned.

  ‘Good luck!’

  ‘I’ll need it.’ He strode out, tugging on his gloves, pads flapping.

  There were a couple of hundred people, Charley estimated, crowded around the jumble stall and the tombola and seated on the benches in front of the tiny pavilion. Several families lay sprawled on picnic rugs around the boundary, and two old buffers sat in front of the wooden scoreboard in deck chairs, surveying the match from under their green sun visors.

  A batsman stood at a practice net while two others alternately bowled at him. He returned the ball each time with a proficient snick. A group of children played their own game with a tiny bat and a rubber ball. Hamburgers and hot dogs sizzled on a griddle, and the banner ‘NSPCC CHARITY MATCH’ shook precariously in the wind.

  ‘’Ow much is the cup cakes?’ a child asked.

  ‘Twenty pence,’ Charley said.

  He handed her a grubby coin, which she dropped in the tin, and helped himself to a pink one.

  Viola Letters stood on a milking stool behind a trestle table covered in upturned cups on saucers, and peered into a massive steel urn. There was a half-hearted ripple of applause as Hugh reached the crease, and the unfortunate opening batsman arrived back to face his team mates.

  ‘Bad luck, Johnny!’

  ‘Got me on a Yorker. He used to bowl for Kent, that one.’

  Charley watched Hugh and Tom. The ball came hard at Hugh and he blocked it neatly. An umpire called, ‘Over!’

  Cricket. Lazy days. It brought back good memories. Tom played regularly when they first went out and she had spent happy hours lying with the sun on her back, watching, reading the same page of a paperback over and over, chewing sweet blades of grass.

  The urn hissed steam. Viola Letters lifted a huge metal teapot from underneath the table and filled it with boiling water from the urn. ‘Be a dear, Charley. Give it a couple of minutes and start pouring.’

  Charley staggered under its weight. She put it down on the edge of the table and waited for the tea to steep. Tom hit another run. Hugh hit a four. It was a pretty village green, bounded on two sides by houses, and a wilderness of common land on the other two. She was glad Tom was playing, glad to be here herself, helping with the teas, a part of it. Belonging. She was glad Tom was doing well.

  The tin and the locket suddenly swirled through her mind, and fear followed like a wave, crashing through her. The terrier yapped.

  ‘Oh, Peregrine, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you.’ She put her hand down to stroke it, but it scuttled away and yapped again.

  Dear Rock, I love him. Please bring him back. Barbara.

  It was coincidence: the gum, the stables, the old man.

  But not the tin.

  A cold gust blew through her and she smelt a strange, musky perfume, strong, so strong, as if the woman wearing it were standing next to her; then it was gone like a snatch of smoke whipped away by the wind. She glanced around, wondering where it had come from, then picked up the heavy teapot, holding the handle with both hands, and tilted it towards the first cup.

  It happened quickly. Just a jerk, that was all, and the handle became weightless for a fraction of a second as the top of it sheared away from the pot, which swung upside down dumping two gallons of scalding tea straight on the terrier.

  She heard the howl almost before she realised what had happened, before the hot metal banged into her legs, before she even felt the sting of the scalding liquid on her own feet.

  The dog fell sideways, rolled on to its back, twitching, steam rising ar
ound it. Its howl constricted into a tight screeching scream.

  Viola Letters dropped to her knees to help it, and it twisted its head, bared its teeth and bit her hand savagely. Then it slithered a few feet across the grass on its belly, tried to stand and fell, howling, snapping at the grass, snapping at one of its legs. It rubbed its face on the grass and most of the skin of its nose came off.

  A child screamed.

  ‘Peregrine!’ Viola Letters bellowed, desperation in her voice, blood streaming from her finger as she ran after it.

  The tiny dog rolled in agony, thrashing one way then the other, frothing, steam rising from its coat, like some grotesque beast from the pit of hell.

  The shower was running upstairs, the plumbing creaking, water spurting up the pipes. The kitchen was snug from the heat of the Aga. The wind had died and a steady drizzle fell outside.

  The cricket had gone on in the way games always went on, with a barely perceptible change in the tone, as if someone had tweaked the volume control and maybe the contrast knob. The children went back to their own games of cricket, except for a couple of tots who had leaned against their mothers, crying, their thumbs in their mouth.

  The dog had been wrapped in towels to prevent it from biting anyone else, but by then it had given up struggling and lay helpless, twitching and whimpering. A girl from St John’s Ambulance had bandaged Viola Letters’s finger and someone had driven her and the dog to the vet. Charley had offered to go with her too, but Viola Letters had stoically told her to stay and carry on with the teas.

  ‘It’s not your fault, old girl,’ a man with a handlebar moustache had said to Charley kindly. He held up the teapot, its handle twisted and hanging on by one bent bolt, and pointed at the jagged holes where the top bolts had sheared. ‘Metal fatigue. Happens in aircraft.’

  Later a tall woman in galoshes announced they had raised three hundred and forty-two pounds and eleven pence for the NSPCC. There was a ragged cheer. Tom had scored forty-two runs and bowled two of the other side out. He was voted man of the match and presented with a pewter tankard, and Charley’s eyes had felt moist as pride broke through the cloud of shock and doom.

  There were two messages on the answering machine, one from Holly Ohm thanking them for the party, the other was from Tom’s squash partner, Paul Lerond. ‘Tom, I got your message about cancelling tomorrow. How about Wednesday evening at six fifteen?’

  Charley dropped a couple of pinches of food into Horace’s bowl and chopped up the ox heart for Ben’s supper, wrinkling her nose at the stench of dried blood.

  Tom was lying on the bed wrapped in a towel, the Sunday papers strewn around him. The television was on: Only Fools And Horses.

  ‘What do you want for supper?’

  He combed back his wet hair. ‘What have we got?’

  ‘Tons of leftovers.’

  ‘Fine. You look frozen.’

  ‘I am frozen.’ She peeled off her clothes, and examined the blotches of brown tea stains on her white trousers. There was a rash of small blisters on her feet from the scalding tea, and a larger one on her heel from where her wellington boots had rubbed earlier in the woods.

  She went through into the bathroom. ‘Do you think I should call Mrs Letters, or go round?’ She stared at herself in the steamed mirror. Her face was sheet white, her eyes like dark beads.

  ‘Call her.’

  ‘If it’s died — I —’ She bit the skin below her thumbnail. ‘Perhaps I should send her some flowers.’

  ‘Or donations to its favourite charity.’

  ‘Don’t. That’s horrible.’

  Fatter. She was definitely getting fatter and losing some of her muscle tone. Her breasts were larger. Maybe that was going to be a perk of growing old? Tom always complained they were too small.

  ‘Bernie the builder said he’d keep an eye on Ben tomorrow. Want to meet up in London?’ she said.

  ‘I won’t have time. It’ll be hectic after two weeks away and I’m playing squash.’

  ‘With Paul?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  There was a roar of laughter from the television.

  ‘There’s a message on the machine from him, about cancelling.’

  Another roar of laughter, more feverish.

  ‘Oh, ah — yes,’ Tom said, his voice sounding rather odd, she thought. ‘I forgot. We’ve got a partners’ meeting.’

  Her birthmarks stood out tonight, two fine straight lines, each a couple of inches long, one on her stomach, the other on her right thigh. They were red, livid, like weals. They seemed more pronounced than usual. She touched them gingerly.

  She heard the rattle of the locket, saw it again, in her mind, lying in the tin. Something inside her rattled too, something dark and cold and ominous. She looked again in the mirror. Her eyes stared back.

  Afraid.

  She could not sleep. Her mind was alive, crawling, echoing with the pitiful howling of Viola Letters’s dog and the image of it thrashing on the grass with the steam rising.

  She tried to think of something pleasant, but instead recalled the Chinese box. She could hear the maggots, smell them, wrestling, sweating, climbing over each other with their sharp claws, their concertina bodies heaving, eating through days and nights of never-ending darkness. Eat or be eaten. Their jaws chomping, chomping, each chomp echoing around the tin, a dull boom.

  The biggest one had the blunt face of a snarling pug. It was faster, uglier, greedier than the rest. It twisted in the darkness, its body bulging, chopping the rest up until it was surrounded by writhing white shapes that waited, helpless, to be sucked into its mouth until there was nothing left for it to eat, nothing left but to lick the tin shiny clean and wait.

  For her.

  Inside the folded piece of paper inside the shiny ruby heart inside the tin was a tiny speck of darkness. It was a speck only because it was far away in a dimension she did not understand. A vanishing point on a far horizon. As she opened the tin, opened the heart, unfolded the paper, the speck came at her. Huge, dark, its teeth like rusted blades, fire hurtled out of the dark tunnel of its throat, fierce volcanic flame that stank of Doublemint and melted away the skin of her face.

  Tom rolled over and snorted air.

  The killings of the night went on out in the darkness, under the light of a moon shrouded in mist. The shrieks, the cries, the crackle of undergrowth. The ecosystem taking care of its own.

  Water tumbled down the weir. Boiling water tumbling from the kettle. The howl of Viola Letters’s dog joined the screams of the night.

  The teeth of the maggot closed, severing her in half below the shoulders. She tossed, twisted, trying to shake the image from her mind.

  ‘Christ, you’re restless,’ Tom said grumpily. She snuggled up to him, put her arms around him, held him tightly, kissed him, slid her hands down his body.

  ‘Charley, for God’s sake! I have an early start. Let me sleep.’ He turned away.

  She laid her head against the small of his back, smelled his skin, felt its heat, pressed her cheek against him as warm salty tears slid down past her mouth.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The marigolds had wilted. Charley dropped them in the bin and changed the water in the cut glass vase. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come last week, mum, but there was a lot to do in the house. It’s in pretty bad condition — worse than we realised. The builders say we should really have a new roof.’

  She held the flowers before the blank gaze of the old woman in the bed.

  ‘Michaelmas daisies. They’re from the garden.’ She arranged the daisies and ferns in the vase by the window. ‘We’re planting lots of flowers.’

  A blind girl with a guide dog walked across the park below.

  ‘Lies death.’

  She spun round, but her mother was staring motionless into space. She did not look as if she had moved or spoken. ‘What was that?’ Charley said. ‘What did you say?’

  The old woman blinked once and continued her eternal motionless stare.
>
  ‘Lies death?’

  No response.

  ‘Is that what you said, mum?’ Charley sat down beside her, took her bony hand. It was the first time she had heard her speak for months. Since before Christmas. ‘Lies death, mum? Where does it lie?’

  Silence.

  She rubbed the old woman’s hand. ‘What did you mean, mum? Please tell me.’

  There was no reaction. Charley waited. Five minutes passed, ten, half an hour. Her mother did not move. Charley stroked her hand gently. ‘I went to a hypnotist the other day. To go back into my past lives. Have you had any past lives? Do you believe in that?’ She didn’t expect a response. There was a faint smell of urine.

  ‘I don’t think I believe in it,’ Charley said with more conviction than she felt. ‘But what was strange was that he made me go back through childhood. I had to tell him what I’d done on my sixteenth birthday, and my tenth. You took me to the zoo, do you remember? I had a ride on a camel. And my fourth birthday. I could remember it in such incredible detail. Daddy spanked me because I rode the bicycle you’d given me into his rhododendron bush. It was a red bicycle, a Raleigh, with whitewall tyres and a white saddle and it had a horn instead of a bell and little fat wheels, and two extra ones on the back for balance. He’d never spanked me before. You said it was his medicine that made him do funny things.’

  She thought she detected a faint pressure from her mother’s hand, but it might have been her imagination, her own wishful thinking.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about childhood a lot recently. Maybe because I’m trying so hard to have a child of my own, maybe it’s the move. Everyone says moving is pretty traumatic. I’ve had so many bizarre thoughts. It’s noisy in the country, you know? Much noisier than London. Most nights I’ve lain awake, listening to the animals, watching the moon, thinking about how I used to sit on the floor with you, playing with Florence Doll, packing the bows. I used to feel safe then, with you.’ She looked at the bedclothes, at the loose knit of the blanket that heaved gently up and down like the swell of a calm sea. ‘I don’t feel safe any more.’

  As she was leaving she heard the voice again behind her.