North Sea Requiem (35 page)

Moira Forbes used her daughter to help with the more difficult tasks of looking after the boy. Maureen could quiet him when he started shrieking, banging the doors to be let out. When Charlie was particularly difficult—kicking and pushing to get out into the garden, Moira would say to Maureen, “Keep him happy, talk to him. Don't let the neighbors hear. We don't want the shame o' a backwards boy, do we? Think what your friends would say.”

The time Nurse Urquhart had come to visit, asking about the boy, had been horrible and set her mum off on a bout of crying and screaming that lasted days if not weeks.

“Mr. Forbes, the records show your wife had a boy five and a half years ago. You say he was committed to the hospital in Aberdeen, but I can find no record of that. If you won't give me more information, I will have to tell the police.”

Her mum tried to attack Nurse Urquhart at that visit, but her dad stopped her in time, saying Mum had forgotten to take her pills.

No, Maureen decided, she didn't want the shame of a loony brother, she didn't want teasing at school. There was a girl in her class whose brother had polio. Some of the children tormented this girl, saying she couldn't join their games; they would refuse to have her on their team or refuse to sit next to her on the bus in case they caught polio. Maureen hated the thought of what would happen if they found out about Charlie. It had been bad enough
being a new girl from Elgin with a different way of talking—one girl asked if she was from the moon. Another asked if she was a loony. They laughed at that.

Now that she was eleven and a half, Maureen found it hard when she and Mum and Dad went on their “wee holidays”—mostly on the train to Aberdeen, where her mum went to see a doctor. Not a normal doctor but a doctor in this huge, dark hospital outside the city. It's because your mum's delicate, Dad explained, she needs medicine for her nerves.

“Why can't Mum go to the hospital here?” Maureen had once asked.

“We don't want anyone knowing, do we?” Mal Forbes replied.

When they arrived in Aberdeen on the train, they then had to catch a bus to the hospital, which was way out in the countryside up on a hill, and could be seen for miles. A man in a uniform had to let you in, as the doors were locked. When Mum was with the doctor and she and her dad waited outside, they would watch the strange people wandering around, some talking to themselves, others saying nothing, just looking at the ground and shuffling their feet. If she walked like that, her dad would say,
You're walking like your slippers are too big.

The times when Maureen begged them not to leave her brother alone, her mother insisted,
It's only two or three days, he'll be fine.
But Maureen knew how he hated being left alone with cold food, mainly biscuits, and only water.
Milk goes off,
her mother said,
and lemonade is bad for your teeth
.

When her brother saw the biscuit tins he'd start this wailing noise that her dad said sounded like a wolf. Even though she did not know what a wolf sounded like, Maureen became upset; there was something haunting, scary even, about the boy's cries; it was like being at the pictures watching
Snow White,
waiting for something bad to happen, knowing it was not all
fine,
like Dad said it was.

Most of all, when they went away, Maureen was upset because her brother would have no one to empty his bucket for days. Her mum told her that as he was backwards, he wouldn't notice. She doubted that; when they returned, the stink was so horrible, you could smell it all the way across the garden and in the kitchen—even with the door shut. Her mother told her not to be ridiculous, but Maureen remembered Mum wrapping a scarf around her mouth and nose when she went in to clean after a holiday.

Maureen could hear the policeman in the hallway. He was leaving. She knew it was the policeman who came before from his voice. Maureen was ironing her school uniform. Dad said Mum always forgot to switch the iron off. She didn't mind, she liked ironing. She heard the front door shut. She came into the sitting room and asked, “Who was that?”

“Just something to do wi' work,” her dad said, but she looked out the window and could see a policeman in uniform open the door for another man, who had a hat on and a raincoat. She thought he looked like the detective who came to the school after Nurse Urquhart was attacked.

Her mum and dad were now arguing in a soft, half kind of way. She didn't mind arguing; it was the crying she hated. Especially her dad crying. She went to the kitchen. She ate a spoonful of the porridge her mum had put out. Cold. Salty. Lumpy. She took the porridge and flushed it down the toilet. One time she had put it in the bin, but her dad found it and shouted at her for wasting good food.

What's good about watery salty porridge?
she wanted to ask but didn't. Her dad would slap her, but not hard, just a wee slap on her hand or arm. He wasn't like Annie Ross's dad, who, another girl had told her, hit hard enough to leave marks.

Her parents were still arguing, shouting now, so she went out
the back door, looked at the sky. No rain on yet. She wheeled her bicycle to the side gate, heard a noise from the shed, and ran to say bye-bye to her wee brother.

“Help.” Followed by a banging on what sounded like a bucket. “Help, please help.” The voice was faint, and normally Mum had the wireless on loud so you couldn't hear anything from the shed.
She's forgotten to switch it on,
Maureen thought.

“Help!”

It wasn't her brother. It was that woman Mum said was staying in the shed to help her brother with music lessons. It seemed strange to Maureen that a woman would stay in a shed, but then, her mother had been getting stranger and stranger these past months.

“Charlie?” The boy had no name. He was just “the boy.” But Maureen had named him Charlie after Bonnie Prince Charles, who came from over the water to rescue Scotland. “Charlie, I have to go to school, but . . .”

“Please help us. She'll die if you don't get help.” The woman no longer shouted. Her voice sounded funny,
like when you forgot to wind up the old gramophone,
Maureen thought.

“Maureen! Get away from there!” Her mother was screeching in that voice that meant she was about to go “berserk,” as Dad put it. She ran back and grabbed her bike.

Who the woman was, Maureen didn't want to know. And why she had been there two weeks, she didn't want to think about either. There was a lot Maureen didn't want to think about—things like her mother, her brother, nits.

Her father came out, shooed her mother back into the house, unlocked the side gate, saying, “Your mum's not feeling great today.” Before he locked the gate after her, he said, “You're a good girl, Maureen, but mind and keep quiet about . . .” He looked towards the shed. “You know.” He nodded. “And we don't want them taking your mum away, do we?”

“I'll never tell no one.”

He patted her shoulder and gave her half a crown. She put it in her coat pocket.
It must be bad if Dad's given me a whole half a crown,
she thought as she cycled to school.

Mal then made his wife a cup of tea and gave her an extra one of the extra-strong pills, enough to knock her out whilst he decided what to do to get them out of this disaster. He shook the brown glass bottle. The pills were nearly finished. He knew Moira was feeding them to Mrs. Bell and he went along with the scheme.
Until I can work out a way to send her back to America or Paris or wherever.
That had been before this latest disaster.

Moira was weeping, quietly this time, weeping as easily and as naturally as breathing. Mal understood that she truly loved the boy; she was his mother after all, but she didn't love him the same way he did. He loved the boy in ways he didn't understand. He had given up so much—a job, his home, and his friends—for the boy. He had done something wicked to preserve their family. And now this.

Even Maureen suffered for the boy's sake, never having friends round to play, never having a wee birthday party in case anyone saw him. They'd all suffered. But he was worth it, their boy. One smile from him and everything was forgotten, forgiven.

Mal looked out at the dying daffodils along the flower borders beneath the high timber fence. The boy loved daffodils. He would clap his hands and shout,
dancing, dancing,
whilst the daffodils and jonquils and narcissus did indeed dance in the wind.

And now this.
Mal was looking out of the kitchen window, staring at the shelter at the bottom of the garden, half hidden by a lilac bush and a rank of parallel rows of raspberry canes. Moira had calmed down, the medication taking effect, sipping her tea, totally unaware that disaster waited—whichever way this finished. But Mal knew. He was repeating to himself,
How on earth are we going to get out of the mess? What on earth can I do to save us?

“Does Malkie still love his precious wee Moira?” Her voice was that of a seven-year-old.

“Always,” he replied. And he meant it. “You know I'd do anything for you.”

He took her cup, took her arm, led her into the bedroom where the bed was still unmade. He took off her slippers, he held her hand until she fell asleep.

He went back into the kitchen and turned on the wireless. He caught the news bulletin in the midst of a statement about a missing person. He heard the name, Mrs. Joanne Ross. He jumped up to switch the wireless off. He sat again at the table, his head in his hands, the tears dripping onto the tablecloth. He sat there for a long time. Nothing, no solution came to him. So he made another cup of tea.

It never occurred to him to take tea to the shelter. That was Moira's job. He seldom went there—except when he had to help Moira move Joanne Ross.

He didn't go there because he did not believe it was his business.
She's not right in the head,
he reasoned,
she can't help what she does, but it's nothing to do with me.

He'd done his part to save their family years ago. Moira and Maureen—keeping his family together was all he cared about. Then the boy came along. The calamity of their situation he refused to face.
If the women die,
he was thinking,
there will be no witnesses against us.

Imprisoning a child, letting him out in the dark of night, letting him sleep in the house the few days in the year when the neighbors were on holiday, was, he believed, kind, not wicked.
People are cruel,
he told himself.
If they see him, they'll laugh, say nasty things about him, about all of us.

He was angry no longer, only tired; everything that had happened was because Joanne Ross and Nurse Urquhart could not
stop interfering. He was scared yet accepting; Moira was ill, she was not to blame. Through the prism of distorted love he could deny his own past guilt and present complicity in acts so evil they could cost lives.

He got up, put the kettle on, then decided to bake a gingerbread.
Moira loves gingerbread.
Everything vanished in the ordinariness of beating the butter and sugar, adding the treacle, the ground ginger. The smell: everything hung suspended with the smell of baking filling the house. For two whole hours he could deny his complicity. Then Moira woke up.

M
ae was praying for Maureen to visit her brother. It seemed their only hope.

“Charlie, why don't you call Maureen?” she murmured, unable to find the energy to talk in the calm, soothing voice she used with the child.

“Reeeen.” He was rocking back and forth, arms around his knees, keening, “Reen, Reen, come for Charlie.”

Not loud enough,
Mae thought. “Let's try singing,” she said. She couldn't find the breath to sing. Nor to call out. And Joanne had even less breath. Mae felt her pulse for the eleventh time that day. Still there. Faint and slow. She had no idea what was normal, just that the pulse was harder and harder to find, Joanne's short bursts of semi-lucidity shorter and fewer.

In the morning,
Mae vowed,
I'll beat the shit out of that bitch. I don't care if she throws the acid; anything is better than this.
She felt better. She had her courage back. She dozed. She plotted and planned exactly how she would grab Moira, how she would hit her, kick her, shove the bucket, any bucket, in her face.

Then she remembered how once, in Paris, she had seen this woman's arms—the skin wrinkled and puckered, red and blue ridges standing out like roads on a map, the hands twisted, fingers missing; the damage was hideous, and the pain evident in every movement.
An accident when she worked in a factory making batteries,
a neighbor had explained.

How much worse will it be on the face, in your eyes
? Her breathing was rapid again, her legs and arms twitching.