Play Dead (4 page)

This was one of the bonuses of bringing Toby to the play centre. Occasionally, amid the repetitions and banalities of the conversation Poppy would be given glimpses of other lives, or scraps of gossip and other social titillations. They weren't often actually startling, though last year, before she'd begun coming, a girl called Jane had been working for one of the protagonists in a thoroughly English headline-making scandal involving sex, insider dealing, a viscount and a feud in a cricket club. Jane had left now, but Big Sue had told Poppy things about the case which hadn't appeared in the newspapers. And more recently she'd heard Big Sue herself telling her friends about her previous employer, some kind of BBC executive, who'd been in the habit of coming home while his son was having his pre-lunch rest and trying to get Big Sue into bed with him. Big Sue was diabetic and earned her adjective but was still attractive in a creamy, cushiony way, so the episode was easy to imagine. Poppy was interested too in the conventions of these exchanges—suppose the man had been her present employer, would Big Sue have been so forthcoming? Probably not. She would have told Little Sue, and perhaps Fran, in confidence, Poppy thought, and that would have been it.

By now Toby and Deborah had joined forces. Deborah had commandeered the Wendy House again, and together they'd rolled a barrel over to it and jammed it endwise into the entrance, like the tunnel into an igloo, so that Toby could carry out a variant on yesterday's acoustic experiments. Further up the slope Nell was helping Nelson use the slide, encouraging him to abandon himself to the pull of the earth and waiting to catch him at the bottom. Her love, his trust, were manifest in stance and gesture. Together they composed an idyll, sufficient to each other, Eden-innocent in the perfect afternoon.

The thought itself must have been the serpent. Poppy sensed a change in the mood on the bench next door. Fran had stopped her recital. The girls had been muttering, notes of doubt and warning, and now their poses stiffened. They were all three gazing steadily towards the clump of trees outside the fence, between the play centre and the pond. She switched specs to see what was bothering them, saw, and joined her stare to theirs. This was how you dealt with this problem.

Rapt in his own interest the man didn't for the moment notice he was being watched. He was a silhouette, black as the tree-trunks against the grass glare and pond glitter beyond the patch of shade. He was slight, and was wearing a short, Burberry-style coat. He had a beard, but his other features were invisible in the shadow. He didn't move. His stance, as he dragged on his cigarette and dropped the butt on to the ground, declared that this was not a casual passer-by, stopping for a moment to enjoy the pretty antics of the children as he might have enjoyed the bright-feathered ducks on the pond, but a watcher, serious, intent, motivated. He seemed to Poppy to be looking at Toby.

Deborah was inside the Wendy House, singing through the barrel. The round bulge of Toby's nappy-padded overalls, where he knelt to call back into the apparatus, was all there was for the man to study. There were no other children near. Poppy concentrated her stare. Any moment now he would realise, turn and go. It always worked. They couldn't stand the focused gaze of twenty women. This sort of thing had happened a couple of times since she'd been coming to the play centre, and then, though disgusted at the necessity, she had found the power of this communal weapon actually exhilarating. Now, with the man seeming to be particularly intent on Toby, she felt only hatred, fright and shock.

In less than a minute most of the enclosure, including some of the children, had joined the gaze. Without looking, Poppy was aware of the accumulation of energies. In her peripheral vision she saw someone wheel a push-chair through the gate, stop just inside and turn to stare too. Now the man's concentration broke. He looked round, mimed a moment of bravado by tapping at his pocket as if for another cigarette and realising that he needed to buy a fresh packet, turned and walked away.

Poppy's heart was hammering. She watched him dwindling into the sunlight along the path by the pond, his pale coat flapping at his hams. The coat looked newish. His walk wasn't a derelict's shamble. She tried to summon up the proper thoughts into her mind—just one of those things, poor sod, something must have gone badly wrong in his life, way, way back … (They should be painlessly done away with and buried six feet deep in lime!)

She shivered. The sun, so honest and strong ten minutes ago, had no warmth in it. She was aware of the girls beginning to talk again, a group of them now, five or six.

‘I'd like to see them all hanged, that sort.'

‘Hanging's too good.'

‘If I got my hands on him.'

‘Probation's all he'd get, till he actually went and did something.'

‘Cut their cocks off, first offence, that's what I say.'

‘Got his eye on Toby, hadn't he? You OK, Poppy?'

She looked up.

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘It's just one of those things.'

‘Don't be so bloody soft,' said Big Sue. ‘Sorry, Poppy, but it makes me sick, that line. Pussyfooting around with psychiatrists. Not their fault. Jesus! I'd teach him a thing or too if I could get hold of him!'

She meant it, too, for the moment at least. Her big face was a mask of primal anger, the muscles bunched, the dark and usually rather dreamy eyes now hard and glittering.

‘Easy, Sue, easy,' said Fran.

‘I'd cut their cocks off, then I might feel easy.'

There were mutters of agreement. Poppy said nothing and felt ashamed, partly at the feebleness of her liberal conscience in not attempting to reason with them, but more because in her heart she knew she didn't believe that conscience either. She welcomed the distraction of Nell coming down the path, shoving the push-chair with one hand and with Nelson looking bewildered on the other arm. Nell's face was set.

‘It's all right,' said Poppy, ‘he's gone. He won't come back. It's just one of those things.'

‘See you tomorrow,' said Nell and strode past.

Slowly the mood of outrage subsided. Those children who had noticed anything strange quickly forgot, and scampered and triked and dug and explored as usual. The girls split into smaller groups. Poppy forced herself back into
Floodlight
, marked possible courses and made decisions. Later on a policewoman turned up, summoned by the play-leader, George, on the hut telephone, and took statements. Poppy excused herself on the grounds of her poor distance vision and left early.

The man was waiting for her by the entrance to the park.

She was almost sure it was the same man. He sat on a bench in the rose garden just inside the gate. His head was bowed aside as he lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of an old one. He had a beard and wore jeans and a dark green, thin sweater. A pale coat, folded to show its tartan lining, lay on the bench beside him. Solitary people often used those benches, and Poppy was already past him before she realised that it might have been him.

Waiting at the crossing it was natural that she should turn to watch for the stream of cars to stop. Seeing the push-chair they did so almost at once, but not before the man had emerged from the gate and stood on the kerb, his head turned away as he too watched the traffic. She was aware of him threading between the halted cars to her right as she crossed. She felt angry and frightened, but reasonably in control.

The first thing was to verify that he was in fact following her. Then she must shake him off, or find a policeman, or confront him. Above all she mustn't lead him back to Janet's house in Abdale Grove. She walked up the wrong side of Belling Road to the chemist's, where she bought an unneeded spare toothbrush. Waiting for change she could study the road outside. He'd gone. No, that was him in Frith's opposite. She walked back down Belling Road, past her usual turn, and swung the push-chair round to back in through the door of Jinja's Megastore, a perfectly natural manoeuvre apart from the suddenness of the move. The man wasn't ready. He was still on the opposite pavement and she'd caught him sufficiently by surprise to make him turn his head away and thus collide with an elderly man in a turban who was trudging in the opposite direction bowed down by two carrier bags full of vegetables. Toby was restless by now—shopping didn't amuse him if he couldn't do it himself—so she bought him an illicit packet of crisps.

‘There's a man following us,' she told Mrs Jinja at the till. ‘That chap with the coat over his arm. Will you take a good look at him, just in case? I'm trying to think how to get rid of him—I don't want him to know where Toby lives.'

Mrs Jinja swung her bulk round to look through the window. The man was in profile now, studying the window of the Halal butcher's on the corner as if choosing a meal. The face was pale above the beard, with a curving nose repeating the curve of the high forehead. Nothing special.

‘You must go down to the school crossing and speak to Jim,' said Mrs Jinja in her gentle, toneless voice. ‘He is good. There were boys making racial remarks to Farah and her friends when they left school. Jim dealt with them.'

‘That's an idea. Thanks.'

She went back to the main road, turned right and right again into Starveling Lane. Jim was at the crossing waiting for school to end. She had never spoken to him but knew him by sight, a stolid-moving, pink-faced middle-sized man. She knew his name because according to Darlene at the play centre he'd saved some child's life on the crossing last term, something to do with a skidding motor-bike. He was standing by the beacon with his lollipop, but seeing her turn the push-chair for the crossing he came into the road, though there wasn't a moving car in sight, and signalled her to cross, accompanying her back to the far pavement. She slowed her pace to prolong the time for talk.

‘Thanks,' she said. ‘Mrs Jinja told me to come to you. There's a man been following us—Toby he's after. Jeans, green jersey, coat over his arm.'

He didn't hesitate in his stride, look back or question her.

‘Spotted him,' he said. ‘Straight into the school, through the swing doors. Right, and all the way along the passage. Takes you out past the school office at the senior entrance. Have a good look round soon as you're out. If he's there, back into the office and tell Trixie as I sent you. She'll call the police.'

They had reached the far pavement and stood facing each other. His pale greyish eyes gazed confidently at her.

‘That's marvellous,' she said. ‘Thank you so much.'

‘Don't you worry, love. I'll sort him out.'

He upped his lollipop and turned to recross the road. She pushed into the school, opened only two years back after the fire, now bright-coloured and angular, like a bit of play apparatus for a brood of giants, but already pocked and scarred with the abrading tide of children that sluiced in and out each day. As she turned at the top of a ramp to buttock her way through the swing doors she could see Jim on the far pavement, facing her follower, the embodiment of sturdy civic decency.

Toby had finished the crisps and fallen asleep. The main corridor was almost empty. The feel of a new academic year just started hung in the air. A few older children scurried past with loose-leaf folders. No one questioned her. From the classrooms came the stir and scuffle of books being stuffed into desks, equipment being cleared, chairs reordered. A boy held the far door for her. Out in the street the follower was nowhere to be seen.

She pushed home through side-streets. Since Jim had confronted and presumably accused the man she felt there was no harm in turning suddenly at random to look behind her, until it struck her that to passers-by she might look like a batty old woman running off with someone else's child. There was no way of not crossing Belling Road. If he'd gone back to wait for her there he'd be difficult to spot amid the shoppers. She crossed it and took a roundabout way back to Abdale Grove, pausing on corners to check behind her.

3

Too tired to cook but pleasantly on the edge of wooziness after the second gin, Poppy opened a can of mackerel fillets, cut up the last of the Chinese leaves, spooned on oil and vinegar and told herself it was a healthy meal. What had she done? Walked a mile or so further than usual. Why should fright and anger make her feel as though she'd crossed half a county, physically fought a troop of men, to bring Toby safe home? Radio 3 was Delius, moody-ethereal, so she'd put on a tape of Aida to buck herself up.

A third gin? Wicked, and if she had a third there'd be only a couple more tots in the bottle and she'd be bound to have them too, even if she'd tried locking the bottle in the filing-box … Elias rubbed against her calves, purring like an outboard motor. She'd given him the can to lick with a few scraps in it, but the smell of mackerel on her plate roused him from his normal lethargic calm to gluttonous ecstasy.

The doorbell rang. It would be those young men from that scheme, selling dusters and oven-gloves. Poppy balanced her plate on the lampshade, out of Elias's reach, and went to the door trying to think of excuses. There's a limit to the number of ironing-board covers a single woman in a basement flat can wear out in a year.

It was Jim.

‘Just thought I'd look round, see you're all right,' he said. ‘Mrs Tasker, isn't it?'

‘Oh, do come in. I'm so glad to see you. I was going to come and thank you tomorrow. You were marvellous. And I want to know what happened.'

He didn't hesitate but followed her into the living-room. Elias's purr as he rubbed himself against the lamp-standard competed with Caballé. Poppy snatched the teetering plate and turned the volume down.

‘That's a cat and a half,' said Jim. ‘Shown him, ever?'

‘He hasn't got a pedigree. He just turned up at a friend's house three years ago, half starved, and they didn't want to keep him. We thought he was full-grown then, but he wasn't, nothing like. I'm afraid that if I showed him someone might say he was theirs.'