Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (20 page)

It was a mistake, like telling Purvis her name, like telling Alice Jim was a boy; it would lead on and on, unstoppable.

From the silver man himself there was no reply. He just
took another step. He raised his arms. ‘Stop! Stop, please!' There was no defence. And then, with immense effort, a trick learned from television all those years ago when she lay beneath the plaster vines in the Grapes, she managed to open her eyes and make the silver man go away.

She saw that Jim had pushed his arms almost straight. One of them buckled as she watched, and he slipped sideways to the floor
.
‘Silly,' she muttered, checking beneath the down on the back of his head. Though of course, she thought, at least brain damage need not be my concern—and there's another Silver Lining. Then he began to wail.

‘
I am sorry, Silly,' she said as the cries swooped and fell. ‘I
am going to let you down. I am going to fill the laundry bag
and then we are both going around to Alice and Tom's to do the washing and watch television in their front room. That's all—don't worry—just that.'

Tom answered the door, still in his work clothes: grey suit-trousers, braces, a candy-striped shirt undone at the neck. He held the door wide open as if for her to pass, but said nothing. Behind him, Liz glimpsed the hallway, doubly familiar now: the ‘Home' doormat, a pinkish carpet scrupulously clean, an old-fashioned coat stand on which hung the jacket to match Tom's trousers; a pine table with a drawer, a vase of dried flowers, bunch of keys, the soft light from a frosted glass fitting set in the wall.

She hadn't expected it to be Tom. But really, what did it matter? She adjusted Jim on her hip, pulled a smile and pushed the words out.

‘Hello. I just wondered if I could put this in the wash and watch your television while it does?'

‘Like Alice offered,' she added when he didn't reply. Both the bag of washing and Jim seemed inordinately heavy. ‘I brought the baby, too,' she said and smiled again.

‘Oh.' Tom didn't blink. Tom's face looked, she thought, as if it had been slapped and got stuck.

What was wrong with him?

‘Please,' Liz said, ‘It would be a big help.'

‘Oh—well. You see the police are here.' He said this quite naturally, matter of fact, as if he knew Liz knew why that must be. He inhaled sharply, then let go of the door and slipped both hands in his trouser pockets like an older man taking the night air.

‘Andrea's lost her baby,' he continued. ‘She's in hospital, and she's decided to press charges against Alice. Grievous bodily harm! They want to take a statement. We haven't had supper yet. I think I'm in shock.' He was, she now realised, on the verge of tears.

To his left a door opened briefly on a blaze of light. A police officer emerged. Liz stiffened—a habitual reaction. Jim squirmed and she shifted him from her hip to a front hold.

‘We will have to take your wife to the station I'm afraid, sir,' the officer said in a low voice. The door behind him opened again. Accompanied by a WPC, Alice stepped into the narrow hall. All of them were crammed together and everyone's face was in someone else's shadow. Alice looked like someone else. Her make-up had gone; her curls seemed to have thickened, darkened, grown wild. Her jaw was set hard, her eyes puffed and narrow.

‘Is there anything you want to take? Toiletries?' the WPC asked.

Alice ignored her and turned instead to Tom. ‘Thanks. You were a lot of help,' she said dully. ‘You're glad, aren't you? They'll lock me up and you can rush around to the hospital and hold her
hand. Screw her as well, why don't you, while you're there?' Tom looked at the floor, didn't answer. Then Alice noticed Liz, standing in the shadows at the threshold of the house. For a moment or two, she just looked. The hairs on the back of Liz's neck and arms rose and stiffened.

‘You,' Alice said, ‘you haven't the first idea, have you, you and your stupid bloody baby, that you probably got without ever trying at all!' Her voice was deeper and hoarse, her hands clenched into fists: this was another Alice. Did Alice even remember, Liz thought, that she'd gone with her that day to look at Andrea's house? They'd retuned by different routes and that must have been when it happened, when this version of Alice last emerged. A few words, the flung fist, giant strides as she burned her way home…

‘
And
I'm pregnant!' Alice added, as if it was Liz's fault. ‘Found out this morning. Joke! What made me think I wanted a
baby.
I want someone to look after
me!
So why am I the one being arrested here? Who started all this?
'
Jim began to moan, a thin sound.

‘Let's keep calm, Mrs. Foster. If there is anything you want to bring, please get it now,' repeated the WPC, while her colleague positioned himself to restrain Alice if required.

‘You can't stay,' Tom said. And Liz wanted to leave, but she couldn't quite because Alice was still staring at her, speaking out her rage as if she was the only person there, the one who could take it away––

‘Goodbye,' Tom hissed at Liz, then slammed the door.

She paused with her hand on the latch of her new gate. Why the hell am I crying? She thought. This is pure TV, she told herself. Not the best TV, soap, really, or one of those cheap detective series, or even a bad zombie movie, but still, TV. ‘But the thing is, Silly,' she said aloud, ‘you watch TV. You don't want to be in it.'

She wished she had said something to Alice. She wished, as she had while the tramp flapped down the road the night before, that the words would come easier and quicker when she really needed them. She should have given some advice, as she'd stood there dumbly watching. Alice, run! she should have shouted. Run! Leave! You'll be fine on your own! This is your last chance! But she hadn't, and it was too late.

The police car, which she hadn't noticed before, was parked a little way further up the street. Any minute they'd come out: Alice and the two officers. Tom would stand at the door and watch them go. Then he would climb into his own car, drive off, turning the lights on as he approached the junction. She didn't want to see it. And she didn't want to spend the night, after such a day, alone with Silly in a house without the gravity of things to pull them in, hold them down, to muffle them, without a carpet to pad them against impact, without a curtain, a television set or even a telephone to dial 999. The place was miserable and empty. She hated it. She was afraid of the silver man, and afraid of herself.

She gripped Jim with one arm and heaved the bag of washing into her front garden. She could ask the writer man if she could watch his TV, she thought, but using his washing machine might be going too far.

There was an old-fashioned bell-push on the door, and she pushed it hard.
Sssh, ssh, she said, and kissed the top of his head. Best behaviour. The man was taking ages to come to the
door.

The End of a road

Liz long ago gave up carrying Jim in a sling. Instead she pushes him in a pushchair, two woven shopping bags hanging from the handles, a striped shade fixed over the top. It is approaching midday and very hot. Both of them are dressed in the cream-coloured cotton sold locally and Liz is wearing a straw hat. She's beginning to learn. She knows the words for bread, cheese, oranges, no and yes. She knows husband, brother, sister, wife, child, petrol. She knows which, where and when, tomorrow, sometime, stars, the verb to work, the numbers to twenty and the adjective beautiful. The women in the village say Jim is beautiful. They whisper questions in his ear, and afterwards slip coins into his hand.

Liz has told them in sign language that Jim will never speak—has widened her eyes, tapped her forehead and pressed down her tongue. It is beginning to show now, anyway: a lostness in his eyes. But still they whisper, brushing their lips against his ears, and sometimes Liz can understand a word or two: work perhaps, or child, the intonation of a question. Perhaps, she thinks, they believe that one day Jim will wake up with perfect answers, having thought hard and deep for many years about their questions, their wishes and nothing else. Or he could be seen as a transmitter, beaming the questions to a far wiser planet, years away. Or perhaps they believe that the words they whisper fade and are lost somewhere between his ears, and so, as a result, the questions themselves and the feelings that prompted them will vanish—just as warts disappear if you rub them with fat and then bury it.

Actually, Liz believes, she could answer many of their questions herself. When she is more fluent, perhaps she will. She has a great urge to talk. In another language: it's different, she tells Jim, without moving her lips. Doesn't count. She walks slowly down the dust-white path, her limbs soft in the heat.

The truck took a month to find, and it took two more to pass her driving tests. This achieved, she drove slowly, with no plan. She arrived here and parked, two months ago.

It's a strange thing to come to the end of a road. After all, most of them simply join seamlessly on to other roads, going to elsewhere and back. In this instance it happened gradually, the surface rendering growing thinner, as if the builders had run out and tried to make it last, but failed. The road grew uneven, pitted, became a track, a crust gleaming with nuggets of flint, dusted with sand. It turned a corner, then finished, still half a mile from the sea. Liz didn't know this, when she took it for the first time, driving just anywhere.

There is a house to the left of the road's end. The people in the house let her use their water pump. To the right is an orange grove and the truck is parked by one of the older trees. Her washing is suspended on string lines between several of the others. Two breeze blocks support a plywood table-top.

The cab of the truck is brand new, gleaming with chrome and painted rich maroon. Behind it, bolted to the chassis, is a wooden structure rather like a garden shed, though the roof is convex rather than pitched and the windows on each side are less than a foot square. Green-painted steps lead to the door in the back. From the road she can see that there's a letter jammed under the handle of the door to the cab. She sits in the shade to open it. She knows there will be a money order inside; she'll cash it and put it in the tin with the rest.
Just ask if you want more,
writes Frank, in careful longhand.

When Katie Rumbold did arrive, dressed for out-of-town in a cocktail of beiges, Frank shook her hand and led her through the whisky-smelling front room where he had plotted her rape and his own death, and into the kitchen. There, Liz Meredith was feeding Jim and at the same time sipping a mug of hot milk with sugar and a dash of espresso. Katie Rumbold stood a few moments, taking everything in: the soft but immaculate room, the smells of coffee and a baby's sourness. The curious, strong-looking girl with her tatty purple skirt, faded leggings and rather grubby feet; the silver-haired child, who looked nothing like either of them. Then she sat straight-backed in her chair and smiled at all three of them.

‘I had no idea,' she said, ‘no idea how you lived.' Her
shoulders relaxed. She looked interested.

‘No,' Frank said, slowly, after a pause. He went to fetch her coffee. When he looked at Katie he felt nothing other than relief. But when he so much as thought of Liz Meredith he was helpless. He had much, he thought, to learn. He was glad he wasn't dead.

‘What are your plans?' Katie said, looking at both of them.
Liz ignored her.

‘Really, I don't know,' Frank had replied.

‘He bought this truck,' Liz tells Jim.

If you ever want company,
Frank writes,
I will join you. I would like to see more of the world. On the prize money and the proceeds of the house we could live simply, all three of us, for years. Perhaps we could stop somewhere, in the end. I think what I would like to do eventually is open a restaurant 
. . .

The truck's engine is well-maintained. If it hasn't been used Liz turns it over once a week and checks everything, the way Frank showed her to. The sheet of plain paper in her hand slips a little. The writing is small and neat with large gaps between the lines. Her eyes are heavy as she reads on:
I have begun to write poetry. It is not very good but I enjoy doing it. Perhaps some people stay the same all their lives, but I am changing, I feel it inside 
. . .

Strange, Liz thinks, lazily. To feel the tug of ties that bind. . . Even if they are still easily snappable: one to a baby that will never speak, another to a man with a blotch on his face, and both of them stretched slight by distance. Beyond the trees' stippled shade the light is very bright, sky and earth faded and powdery like old paint. Despite the heat it makes her think of that first winter in the carriages. The only sound is Jim's pushchair, inching forward and back on the stony ground despite the brake.

Any time she likes, Liz thinks, she could strap him up in his special seat and drive the truck away, leaving nothing but the ash from her fire, some faint tyre tracks and the things village women say and think about her and Jim. Or she could drive away quite alone, leaving Jim in the village square. Because here, no one would call the police. Here, they would know how to look after him, do it easily, and no form-filling would be required . . . She could arrive at a new place, and not even tell Frank Styne where it was . . . He knows it, she thinks. He gave me the truck, put it in my name, the driving lessons, the pushchair, the money. Not because we fucked. Or not
exactly
. For lots of reasons, including that he hopes for something back. But he'll send it anyway, because it's the best thing he can think to do at the moment. Freedom of movement, money, quick fingers, a sharp knife. Sun, the beach, my little TV . . . do I need anything else?

Avoid, Grammy said, sitting upright in snowy sheets that were slurry and brown slush underneath, avoid the ties that bind. Her eyes burned, her finger jabbed the air and hairs used to rise on Liz's legs and arms . . . But now she feels a lump in her throat: something's gone, and Grammy has become rather sad. She is an old woman who sat in her own shit, fearful of discovery and recrimination, a person who lost all but the last shreds of her power years before she died, so that only a child could feel what was left. The commands and prohibitions: simple, strong, unchanging, unambiguous, physical—etched, embossed. Small fingers could feel them, even in the dark.