Asking For Trouble (3 page)

There was a viciousness in her voice that I hadn’t heard before, but it wasn’t that which shook me. It was the accusation itself. I hadn’t thought of myself as overbearing, pushing anyone around. I didn’t like the picture much and it made me defensive.

‘I don’t order anyone around! I’m just trying to be helpful! If you tried, it would be something! Even Squib tries!’

Squib looked surprised at getting a compliment. It must have been a first for him. He said, ‘Thanks, Fran!’

Nev said nervously, ‘Look, we’ve got to stick together. We mustn’t all fall out now.’

‘You, Squib and I were together – she came along later and she can go any time!’ I shouted. I was still mad at her and madder because she’d rattled me. I’m not proud of any of this. I shouldn’t have turned on her like that. She was right when she said I knew nothing about her.

Looking back, I don’t remember exactly how Terry got to be with us. I think Lucy introduced her. I’d once wondered if Terry had stayed originally because she fancied Declan who was still with us at that time. I think perhaps he’d fancied her just a little. But it didn’t stop him leaving. He was better off without her, if you ask me. But then, I never liked her, not from the beginning. It’s no use pretending. But I would never have wanted what happened. None of us would have wanted it.

All that was on Monday morning. We didn’t have a lot of time to waste, so on Monday afternoon, Nev and I made a long trek up Camden way, to see a squat he’d heard about. Just to see if there’d be room for us there. Only, when we got there, it was all boarded up and empty so their council had been and cleared everyone out. Pity, it was a classier area than the one we’d been living in. We went to Camden Lock and messed about. We saw a few people we knew and asked around.

Squib had gone up West with the dog. He’d taken along his chalks and a picture postcard of El Greco’s
Assumption of the Virgin
and the idea was to find a patch of pavement. He couldn’t afford to waste time, not with the weather threatening to break up again.

Terry hadn’t said what she was doing and we hadn’t asked her. None of us expected her to be doing anything useful, like finding us another place to live.

I suppose I oughtn’t to talk about the dead like that. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to say nice things about dead people or they come back and haunt you. I know that’s right because Terry haunted me. It was probably because of all the sour things I’d said about her over the time she’d been with us, quite apart from what I said after – well, after it happened.

Going back to Monday. Nev and I got back from Camden quite late. Some people had invited us to stay and eat with them. They were vegetarian, like Nev, so it was all beans but it was quite nice, very spicy and hot, but I knew I’d suffer later.

When we got back, the place was very quiet. It was dark because the electricity was disconnected. We used candles. Only, apart from the emptiness and the usual dry-rot smell, there was something else. It was a sort of impression, a different, foreign one. I knew, just knew, that someone had been there who wasn’t one of us. A stranger. A real stranger, someone totally outside our circle and not from the council. There was a very faint perfume as well, a type of cologne. I worked in a cut-price chemist’s shop one time. I know colognes. I know good ones from cheap ones. This was a good one, the sort that sells well at Christmas.

The scent of it there in the hall made me cross. I thought perhaps Terry had been shop-lifting again and I was always telling her off about that. It was possible she’d had more money than she let on, and had gone out and bought it for herself. Those colognes, frankly, smell better on a woman than a man, just my opinion. She always kept quiet if she had any money. She’d spend it on junk or on glossy magazines, the sort which tell you how to transform your semi-detached into something you’d be happy to invite a
Hello!
camera team into. And that at a time when we were putting buckets under the leak in the roof and were living on bread and marge.

I mentioned the cologne smell to Nev but he said he couldn’t make it out, not with the smell of the dry rot as well. The other thing, the impression of someone, an outsider, having been there, I kept to myself. It wasn’t something easily explained. Lucy had been into the paranormal and she’d have told me I was a natural psychic. I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Or I don’t think I do. If I had to explain what I felt at that moment, looking back with hindsight, I think I scented danger. If I’d been a cavewoman, it’d have been a woolly mammoth outside the cave. Only this wasn’t outside, it was inside, with us.

We went into the main room and got the fire going again because it was getting very chilly. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking that it was going to be a whole lot colder next week, when chances were we’d be sleeping rough until we found some new place to stay. After a while Squib came back with the dog and a four-pack of lager. He’d also brought a packet of sausages which he roasted over the fire using a metal shovel as a frying pan.

They smelled delicious. The fat spat up and fell in the flames so they roared up, red and yellow. It was very cosy and we felt happy. When they were done, crispy and dark brown, Squib offered them all round. Say what you like about Squib, he always shared. Nev refused the sausages because he didn’t eat meat and I refused them because the beans we’d eaten earlier lay on my stomach. Besides, I knew Squib probably hadn’t eaten that day.

Squib cut up half the sausages for the dog and put them up on the mantelshelf to cool off. Then he asked, ‘D’you think Terry will want any when she gets in?’

I said, ‘Why bother about her? She never bothers about us.’ That shows how I was feeling just then, because even if I didn’t like her, she was one of us and I wouldn’t normally have left her out.

But she didn’t come back that night, or we thought she hadn’t. We didn’t see her.

The next morning she still wasn’t around and Squib suggested she might have done a runner, like Declan.

‘She’s found somewhere else to live,’ he said. ‘She’s ditched us and moved in with some others. After the council came, you can’t blame her. There’s probably no point in hanging around here.’

Knowing that he was right, that our days here were numbered, didn’t make us feel any better. But it was still a relief to think we’d seen the back of Terry. She was one fewer to worry about.

Nev suggested we ought to check her room and see if her things had gone. If it was empty, fine. We could forget her.

We trooped upstairs, all three of us, and the dog. The dog was good at getting up and down the staircase even with its crooked legs.

But outside Terry’s room the dog began to act strangely. Its pointy ear flattened out to match its other ear and it crouched down and began to make a weird whining in its throat.

Squib knelt down and stroked its head and asked it what was wrong. But it just lay down and looked miserable.

Nev said, ‘Perhaps it’s eaten something it shouldn’t.’

That worried Squib who’d heard of squatters’ dogs being poisoned. He was sitting on the floor outside the door, trying to get the dog to open its mouth so he could see if its tongue was stained, when Nev and I opened the door to Terry’s room.

She was there, after all. She must have stayed behind indoors the previous day, when we’d gone out. She’d been there when we came back and there all night. There when Squib cooked his sausages downstairs and there when I got up in the night because of the beans.

Hanging there from the ceiling light.

I remember the scene very clearly, almost as if my mind took a snapshot of it which I can take out and mentally consult. The room, like the rest of the house, must have been beautiful once. Pale sun was shining through the tall, thin windows, one of which still had half a broken brass rod across the top of it. The sun just clipped the rod and made it gleam like gold. The corners of the high ceiling were festooned with ancient cobwebs and dead spiders. Running all around was a plaster frieze in Greek ‘egg and dart’ pattern. In the very middle of the ceiling a sculpted plaster round, caked with dust, displayed intertwined oakleaves and acorns. It was easy to imagine an ornate light, a chandelier perhaps, hanging from it in days gone by.

There was nothing hanging from it now but Terry. There was a length of something round her neck which turned out later to be the dog’s lead. Squib hardly ever used it because the dog was very well behaved and always kept to heel. It had been lying around the house and now it was round Terry’s throat.

Even given the shock of the moment, or perhaps because of it, the shutter in my mind snapped her in the same detail. She – rather, that thing which had been Terry – wore tattered jeans. The front zip fastening was undone and they gaped open over her bare stomach. A considerable gap had opened up between the gaping waist of the jeans and the bottom of a badly shrunk and faded tee-shirt. I could see her lower rib cage protruding over the convex stomach muscles, pulled taut. Her feet were bare, mottled mauve. She had the makings of a first-class bunion on her left big-toe joint, but it wasn’t ever going to trouble her now.

Like the room, she’d been pretty once, and, like it, she wasn’t now. Overnight the weight of her body had elongated her neck to resemble a giraffe-necked African tribeswoman whose head is supported on a stack of metal coils. The doglead had cut into her throat horridly, causing her face to puff and turn black with congested blood. Her mouth was open and her swollen tongue protruded as if, even in death, she was dishing out one last insult to us. Her eyeballs were popping out at us, netted over with crimson veins.

Nev gasped, ‘Gawd! She’s topped herself!’

I had no reason, then, to suppose he wasn’t right. There was a rickety old chair nearby, lying on its side, not far from Terry’s dangling bare toes. I imagined her climbing on to it, fixing the noose, jumping off.

You don’t die quickly that way. The old-time hangmen knew how to knot a rope to break the neck. This way, she’d simply strangled, slowly. Her flailing feet had kicked over the chair. Perhaps, in a moment’s realisation of how it was going to be, she changed her mind, and sought out the chair’s support again, intending to release the pressure on her neck, disentangle herself from the noose and climb down, bruised but wiser.

She wouldn’t have been the first to change her mind, nor the first to discover it wasn’t that easy. You didn’t fool around with death. It liked to be taken seriously. So, whether, in the end, she’d intended it or not, there she was.

And there we were, with a dead body for company, and an awful lot of trouble in store.

Chapter Two

I couldn’t have guessed all that lay ahead following our horrifying discovery. But I was aware that we’d receive much unwelcome attention from the authorities. The other two weren’t thinking ahead, too busy coping, or not, with the sight of that hanging shape. Nev rushed out and could be heard being sick in the loo. It turned out that he’d never seen a dead body before. I had, but it didn’t make it any easier looking at her.

Squib left the dog and came into the room. He’d stood his ground, but he had an even chalkier complexion than usual. He always had a pinched look about him and now must have resembled that white rat he’d once kept as a pet.

‘We’d better get out of here!’ he said. He was sweating. I could smell the odour, rising up from him as from a hunted animal. ‘Come on, we’re wasting time! Let’s get our gear together and go!’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I told him. ‘The council knows all about us, our names, everything. They’ll find us.’

‘Why’d she do it?’ he asked. ‘Was she worried about us being chucked out? Here—’ His eyes gleamed. ‘That’s what we tell that wally from the council! We tell him, he drove her to it!’

‘Shut up, Squib!’ I told him. I needed to think. No one else was likely to do any constructive thinking. It would be down to me, as usual. Squib in a blind panic wanting to run and Nev throwing up, that was likely to be the sum total of their contribution. Looking after Nev and Squib was sometimes like looking after a pair of infants. You had to do all the thinking for them and be worrying every five minutes where they were and what they were doing.

Nev came back, still looking ill but trying to pull himself together. ‘Oughtn’t we to – take her down?’ His voice couldn’t rise above a whisper and it cracked on the last word. ‘We oughtn’t to leave her hanging there. It’s obscene.’

It was obscene. He was right. But we couldn’t touch her. We mustn’t touch anything. I explained the point forcibly to them both.

Squib looked relieved. He wasn’t keen to touch her. Nev, however, reacted with a cry of dismay.

‘We can’t leave her hanging there!’ His voice sounded like something produced by computer. The sounds were all there, making up the words, but it wasn’t human.

He made a sudden lurch towards her and before I could stop him, he grabbed her legs. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do. Lift her down unaided, maybe. But as almost as soon as he touched her, he staggered back with a strangled scream.

‘She’s stiff . . .’

The body, set in motion by his clumsy attempt, began to rotate on the doglead like a grotesque mobile hanging from the ceiling. I took a look up at the light fixture. It wasn’t going to hold much longer. It was astonishing it’d held out so long. Any moment now, especially with the movement, the body was likely to come crashing down without our help. If it did, we’d be in even more trouble.

But the stiffness, if Nev was right, had set me thinking. I wasn’t clear on the finer point of rigor, but had an idea it took around twelve hours to come on and then lasted around another twelve before it passed off gradually, depending on circumstances. If she was good and stiff, she’d died yesterday afternoon. We had to fetch the police at once or we’d have to explain the delay.

Nev wasn’t in any state to object further and nodded listlessly.

‘I say we oughta make a run for it!’ Squib objected, unconvinced. He didn’t like the law. It wasn’t too keen on him. The dog sat up and lifted its muzzle to let out a howl as if it agreed with him.