Tamara sidled up to the window and looked out. That warrant bloke was still there, waiting for her. Crackle would have to take Storme to the prison with him. She wouldn’t play up. Not after this morning. She’d had to hit her to stop her touching things. She had to learn not to touch things. Crackle had given her big licks as well, which he was entitled to do. It was his CD player she’d touched and it was only a week old. It wasn’t a toy. She had to learn. After she’d hit Storme hard on both hands, Crackle had said, “Don’t give her no breakfast either.” Then he’d put his face next to Storme’s and really shouted, “You touch the fucking knobs on my sounds again and I’ll chop your fucking fingers off.” Then he’d took her out of her pushchair and given her big licks round the side of her head. She had to learn right from wrong. If she didn’t she’d grow up bad, and Tamara and Crackle wanted the best for her.
♦
Crackle was explaining his dilemma to Christopher. He had this mate, Bilko. He was in Welford Road on remand, innocent of course. The police didn’t like him, that was all. His girlfriend, Tamara, should have been here to pick the kid up, but she’d let him down again. Thing was, he had a VO to visit Bilko.
Christopher frowned. “VO?” he queried.
“Visiting order,” said Crackle, pleased to explain the jargon to the unshaven man with the hard dog.
Storme was picking at pieces of cold chip, and putting them into her small mouth.
“I can’t take her with me, can I?” Crackle said, indicating Storme.
“No, you can’t,” said Christopher, who couldn’t bear the thought of the baby going back out into the cold without a coat. He looked outside. The wind was whipping at the clothing of the passers by. The sky was the colour of lead. The clouds bulged with snow.
“Leave her here, with me,” he said.
Crackle got to his feet. “Yeah?”
Christopher put his hand on the pushchair.
“If Tamara don’t come, I’ll be back in an hour,” said Crackle, heading for the door. When he’d gone Christopher looked at the baby and stroked the dry hair back from her face.
“Hello, my chick,” he said. “You’re with me now. I’ll look after you.”
Christopher took off his anorak and wrapped it around Storme until only her eyes and the top of her hair could be seen. He sat her back in the pushchair and looked for the restraining straps, but there were none.
“There, that’s nice, isn’t it? Warm as a bug eh? You’re a good girl aren’t you?”
He called the dog and it got to its feet. He pulled the pushchair backwards out of the café. A young man about to come in held the door open for him, nodding when Christopher thanked him. Storme closed her eyes briefly against the east wind and Christopher exhaled sharply as the cold struck at him through his plaid workman’s shirt. They stopped at a traffic light and stood with other people, waiting to cross the road. Traffic thundered by. A woman carrying heavy shopping bags looked at the dog and moved away.
“We have to wait for the green man,” explained Christopher to Storme. “There he is.” They crossed the road in the middle of the small crowd and walked along the pavement away from the prison.
Christopher stopped outside the Canine Defence League charity shop, and looked at the sparse display in the windows. There was a boxed set of tarnished fish knives, a mug decorated with the heads of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a bright yellow teddy bear with glass eyes, and a tower of large boxed jigsaws against which somebody had leant a hand-written notice, ‘Contents not checked’. A child’s all-in-one snow-suit was draped across a boxed salad spinner. Christopher opened the door and asked an old woman, who was on her knees beside a black plastic bag full of old curtains, if he could bring the dog inside. She looked at the dog and smiled.
“Of course you can come in,” she said to the dog. “We can’t leave you outside can we? Not today.”
She got to her feet by bracing one hand against the shop counter. Christopher saw that her rings were almost lost inside the flesh of her swollen fingers. Storme watched as she crooned over the dog and stroked its hard flanks. Christopher unwrapped Storme from his anorak and sat her on the counter and asked the woman to fetch the snowsuit and the teddy bear from the window. When he gave Storme the bear to hold she took it without any sign of pleasure.
“They get so much nowadays,” said the woman disapprovingly.
Christopher struggled with the zip on the snowsuit. He carried Storme to the full-length mirror and stood her in front of her reflection. She stared gravely back at herself.
“You look beautiful, chicken,” said Christopher. He looked at the woman for confirmation, but she had evidently reached the age where she felt she had earned the right to speak her mind.
“I don’t like this fashion for thin babies myself,” she said, “but it’s a good enough fit.”
When Christopher paid her he noticed that the till was almost empty.
In a shop called Shoes! Shoes! Shoes! he bought a tiny pair of red Wellington boots. When she’d tried on the boots, Storme’s socks had fallen off, and Christopher had been dismayed at the sight of her filthy feet and neglected toenails. He imagined her in his bath at home, pink and clean and splashing in the warm scented water. He would buy a bottle of that children’s shampoo he had seen advertised on the television, the one that didn’t sting their eyes. Storme walked carefully around the shop holding on to Christopher’s finger. “Boots,” said Christopher. “Red boots.”
She stiffened slightly when he picked her up to place her back in the pushchair. Christopher guessed that she had enjoyed the novelty of walking in her new boots, but he was running out of time. It was time to take her back to the café, where one or possibly both of her parents were waiting to take her home.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Eight
On her way back to work Angela passed Woolworths, and was unable to resist going inside. She promenaded around the Pick ‘N’ Mix console twice before she made her selections. She noticed that there was something new since yesterday: cherry nougat. She would try that. She tore a plastic bag from its holder and began. A handful of chocolate limes, six chocolate brazils, a few nut crunch, four raspberry ruffles, a scoopful of liquorice torpedoes, a couple of cherry nougat, several sherbet lemons, half a scoop of chocolate raisins.
In the days immediately after she had left Christopher, she had turned to sweets and chocolate as other people turned to drink. She gorged herself with them in an effort to feel full again. She would wake in the night, in the bedsitting room she’d rented, and grope for the Mars bar that was waiting on the bedside table. She couldn’t get out of her head the terrible noise he’d made when she’d told him she was leaving him. It was the saddest sound she’d ever heard.
She took nothing with her, apart from her clothes. Her friends thought she was mad to leave such a lovely man. But how could she have stayed? He rarely spoke and every time he looked at her she saw the accusation in his eyes.
The sides of her jaw ached, and a rush of saliva came into her mouth. She was hurrying now, desperate to get outside, to plunge her hand into the bag which she would conceal in her overcoat pocket. “If I burn some extra calories tonight, I’ll be all right,” she said to herself as she tore off another bag. She filled this second bag with assorted toffees (apart from the rum flavour, which she disliked), peppermint creams, fruit pastilles encrusted in sugar and, last of all, jelly babies in the sweet powder that she liked to lick off, leaving the babies clean and gleaming and new-born.
She waited until the queue had gone and then placed her bags on the scale. The pretty girl behind the cash till was wearing dark red lipstick. She opened her mouth to say, “Five pounds, sixty-five pence,” and Angela saw with pleasure that there was a smear of lipstick on the girl’s front teeth. It made her feel better about herself to see the imperfections of other women.
As soon as she got out of the shop she went to the litter bin in the street. She stood over it,
unwrapping and discarding all the sweet wrappers and putting the sweets back in the bag. It was easier to eat them that way, and it meant that Gregory and the girls in the shop would find no evidence of her addiction.
♦
As Christopher pushed Storme back towards the café, he glanced down and saw that the teddy bear he’d bought her had gone. It was too late now to retrace their steps and look for it. He’d already kept her out longer than he’d intended. If a stranger had been out with his own child for so long he’d have been frantic with worry.
“Are you all right, chick?” he said to her.
Storme threw her head back and looked up at him, and he wondered again what his own daughter would have looked like. He had two distinct pictures of girls in his mind. One was the passionate adolescent Catherine Earnshaw, with whom he had fallen in love during his reading of Wuthering Heightsat the age of fourteen. The other was the golden-haired toddler, Eppie, in Silas Marner. He had pretended to Angela that he didn’t care about the sex of their baby, but he had secretly hoped that it would be a girl.
It was seventeen years ago when Christopher had driven up the gravel drive and stopped his Bedford van outside the front entrance of The Elms Nursing Home. Before he could switch off the engine a woman in red-framed glasses came out and indicated irritably that he should have parked round the back. He blushed and in the slight confusion pressed his foot hard on the accelerator, the back wheels spun and sent the gravel flying. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that the woman looked angry now. He wanted to explain that he had not disturbed the gravel intentionally, but she had turned her back and was walking through the stone entrance of the building.
Christopher’s life seemed to be dogged by these small misunderstandings. It was the same woman who told him where to find Angela. Though she refused to tell him why Angela was in the nursing home. She knew nothing about the phone call he’d had at work that morning.
“She’s in the Lilac Room,” she said, jabbing in the air with a Bic pen. “You’re early,” she added. “You’ll have to wait.”
There was a smell in the building, a sticky red smell that made him feel slightly sick. He waited outside the Lilac Room until the minute hand on his watch touched half-past. Then he went in with the other subdued men, a legitimate visitor. There were eight beds in the room, all of them occupied. None of the women spoke, some lay on their sides, some on their backs. Angela was on her side, watching the door. When she saw him walk into the room, she pulled herself up on to her pillows. Christopher saw her glance at his work clothes and he wished he’d stopped off to change. He didn’t know that his baby had been born and had died the night before. He’d thought that Angela was at a conference.
“What’s wrong?” he said. He was shocked at her appearance. Her face was white and one eye was filled with blood.
She saw him looking and said, “A blood vessel burst.”
“Is that why you’re in here?” he said.
“No,” she said.
It hadn’t been part of her plan that Christopher would ever come to this place. She had worked out what to tell him when she returned home: that she had suffered a miscarriage. But she had bled heavily and there had been trouble with the afterbirth. They had phoned Christopher as her next of kin.
“I lost the baby, Chris,” she said.
“No,” he said. “That can’t be right.”
“It happened last night.”
He looked down at the outline of her belly under the bedclothes.
“No,” he said.
There was still a slight swelling, he was sure of it.
A nurse came to the bedside and put a thermometer in her mouth, silencing her.
Her hands smoothed the stiff white sheet. He felt as if he were a stranger to her. The quiet presence of the other people in the room oppressed him and made him dumb.
He sweated inside his work jacket: every word he had ever known had gone from his brain. He looked around the room. Was it a hospital? The walls were a shiny mauve, the linoleum floor was pitted with the heel marks of women’s shoes. The hot air was heavy with the red smell. He touched Angela’s hand, and stroked the eternity ring that should have had seven tiny diamonds in a claw setting. He’d bought it for her the day her pregnancy had been confirmed.
“You’ve lost a diamond,” he said. It came out sounding harsher than he had intended. His tone was almost accusatory. Angela examined her ring.
“Sorry,” she said, mumbling through the thermometer.
“No, I didn’t mean…”
The nurse came back, removed the thermometer and said, “It’s gone down. You could be going home tomorrow.”
“They might find the diamond,” he said. “Shall I ask them to look?” He couldn’t talk about the baby. If he did he might fall apart and never be whole again.
“Everything will have been cleaned by now,” she said. “Tidied away, disposed of.” She was scornful of his ignorance of the procedures of the place.
“We’ll get another diamond fitted, eh?” he said. “We’ll go into town on Saturday.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want another diamond.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then she said, “I’ll never go through that again.” She looked at him with a stricken face. He felt an intense love for her. He leaned forward and put his arms around her. His coat flapped open and got in the way, its rough texture pressed against her face, and she pushed him away from her.
Five months before that day she had told him that she had missed her period and could be pregnant. He had immediately left the shabby top-floor flat they’d rented in a street of gloomy Victorian villas, and visited three off-licences before finding one that had proper champagne for sale. He had lied to her and said he was going out to buy cigarettes. She’d had a bath while he was out, and was drying her long black hair in front of the gas fire when he returned.
He placed the bottle of champagne on the coffee table and went into the small kitchen. Angela watched the condensation trickle over the Moet et Chandon label. She could hear him looking through the cupboard where they kept the glasses. She went to the kitchen door. He was polishing two glasses with a clean tea-towel. He was smiling to himself.
“Do you want a boy or a girl?” he said.
“For God’s sake, Chris,” she said.
He handed her a glass of champagne.
“This is ridiculous. I’ve only missed a period.”
“You’re pregnant, I know you are,” he insisted. “You look different,” he added.
She glanced into the speckled mirror that hung over the sink where he shaved and she put on her morning make-up.
She hadn’t had the heart that night to tell him that she didn’t want a baby. She liked leaving the flat in the morning carrying her briefcase, and wearing her smart clothes. She didn’t tell him that she almost despised the young mothers she passed at the school gate, with their pushchairs and their air of dependency, and their neglected appearance.
When the cork exploded from the bottle, it hit the cracked ceiling and flakes of plaster floated down on to their heads. Christopher filled the glasses and laughed. “We’ll have to move from here, we can’t bring a baby up in the red-light district can we?” A woman with a grotesquely over-made-up face had recently moved into the bottom flat with two noisy children. She solicited on the doorstep during school hours.
Angela and Christopher touched glasses and drank. The moment had passed when she felt she could be honest with him. She watched him as he smiled down into his glass. His thick fingers held the stem delicately. Later, in bed, he asked her if he could hold her belly. She had said yes, but as she felt his hand slide under her nightgown and come to rest on her warm abdomen, she knew it wasn’t her he was caressing. He made love to her with an intensity that frightened her. Afterwards she lay in the dark, and willed the blood to come between her thighs and stain the sheets.
The next day Christopher started to look for somewhere suitable to br
ing up their baby. Angela would be at home, of course, and they couldn’t afford a second car, so things like schools, shops and bus stops would have to be within easy walking distance of their new house.
One day he was on his way to a hotel on the western outskirts of the city, where he had a contract to service all eighty-three of the in-room television sets, when he saw a ‘For Sale’ sign in the front garden of a semidetached house. March sunshine gave the brickwork a pink glow that appealed to him. He stopped the van and opened a small waist-high gate, and walked up a path lined with grape hyacinth and narcissi. He lifted the brass flap of the letterbox and peered inside. There was a parquet floor in the hallway, and a child safety gate on the bottom of the stairs. He walked around the back. There was a long lawn and apple and pear trees.
The house was called Avalon. When Christopher arrived home that night he looked it up in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and found that Avalon was the Island of Blessed Souls. He knew there and then that he and Angela and their baby would live in this house.
Angela was three and a half months pregnant on the day they moved in. She walked through the empty rooms listlessly. He wouldn’t let her carry any of the boxes or help him remove the furniture, even the small pieces, from the van.
Unknown to him, she had tried many times to rid herself of the child. She had sat in baths of water so hot that her legs and thighs had turned scarlet. She had once drunk half a bottle of gin and made herself so ill that Christopher, returning from work, had called the doctor. She had bought laxatives from the chemist and attempted to purge the baby out of her, but it clung to her like a limpet.