Relatively Strange (17 page)

Neighbour Joan had leaned over the stretchered Mrs Brackman and said not to worry dear she’d see to Shirley and me and would lock up the house right and tight after the lads and all had done the necessary. We both went upstairs to get Shirley. She greeted us brightly, accepting without question Joan’s brisk explanation about her mother’s fall and Faith going with her to the hospital to keep her company. We went back next door, accompanied by one of the constables. Shirley hadn’t seen the shape lying under the picnic rug and I think the rest of us were only too delighted not to see it any more. I finally got my cup of hot tea. Neighbour Joan phoned my mother and a policewoman turned up and sat down on the sofa with me, put a kindly arm round my shoulder and said she just needed to ask a few quick questions and, if I felt up to it, could I say what happened?

I could of course, say exactly what happened but decided it might be best not to. I could read clearly that D.C.I. Brackman had been a hugely popular member of the local team, respected enormously, liked by colleagues and public alike. Always the bloke to step forward for an extra shift without a moan, first to put his hand in his pocket at the pub and invariably ready with a word of advice and help with the paperwork, for many an out-of-depth raw recruit. I didn’t know exactly what Faith and Mrs Brackman were going to say but I did know how very important to them was all of the above. I didn’t lie.

I said it was all muddled in my head because it happened so fast. I said, truthfully, that I couldn’t say exactly how Mrs Brackman had come to fall and I didn’t fib when I confirmed Chief Inspector Brackman was in a very cheerful mood and not at all unwell when he arrived home. When the policewoman said was there anything I thought I might have left out, I sobbed quite a bit and she said, now, now, I’d done very well and had known to go for help and to try and put it all out of my mind now.

At one point I looked up and caught the knowing and saddened eye of neighbour Joan and she smiled and nodded at me encouragingly. She was thinking what a blessing it was it had all gone right over my head and shortly after that, my mother arrived in a state, in a taxi to take me home. She and neighbour Joan, complete strangers, nevertheless came into the room with arms around each other’s waists, the way women do in a crisis and I could see from my mother’s appalled expression that she remembered our conversation a while back.

“Was it you?” asked my parents with terrible apprehension, that evening when I was finally home and in bed.

“No.” I said. And because they couldn’t live with thinking otherwise, they chose to believe me.

*

Faith didn’t come back to school for a week and when she returned people did their best, which wasn’t brilliant. They either tackled things head on, went up and said how really sorry they were or else pretended not to notice her as she came into class, developing an urgent interest in the contents of their case until the teacher entered and talking was prohibited anyway. She deeply loathed both approaches, any approach actually.

They said it was an aneurysm, a blood vessel that burst in his head, a time-bomb they said, which he’d probably been walking around with for years. It could have gone anytime.

I didn’t go to the funeral but, with my parents, attended the impressive memorial service. Mrs Brackman had only stayed in hospital for a couple of nights, insisting she needed to be with the girls. At the service we learned how and why her husband had earned such a string of commendations during the course of his career. Several high-ups, sombrely blue-uniformed and silver-buttoned spoke movingly and told us that not only the family but the Force had lost a true one-off. When at the end Mrs B, flanked by Faith and Shirley stood to bid farewell to the attendees, her normally pale face, despite red-rimmed eyes, was flushed, with pride alongside the grief. The swelling round her eye and lip had gone down but she still moved stiffly, grimaced at certain angles. She thanked my parents for coming, accepted their condolences but reserved a special hard hug for me which I returned, as fiercely as I thought her bruised ribs would allow.

When Faith and I were alone there was a certain amount of constraint between us, inevitable I suppose if you’ve just killed somebody’s father, although of course she didn’t know that and we certainly never talked about what she knew I knew. There was never one single breath of scandal, the story was Mrs Brackman – and wasn’t accident her middle name? – had yet again come to grief, falling off something unspecified in the kitchen. Faith and I, arriving home from school had found her and Chief Inspector Brackman had arrived shortly after that. It was entirely probable that the shock of seeing her like that, combined with trying to lift her had just been enough to fracture that traitorously unsuspected, weak vessel, deep in his brain.

We were with Faith a lot, Elaine, Rochelle and I, celebrity status conferred as best friends of the bereaved and with each recounting, the lines of memory and knowledge blurred and shifted, obscured by repetition and I almost bought into the fantasy, wanted to so much, but couldn’t.

I felt completely frozen inside, unable to think about what had happened, unable to stop thinking about it. I was sleeping poorly. Mrs Brackman and Faith wailed through my dreams, Shirley turned and smiled blankly at me and I woke to find the Chief Inspector rising on his toes beside my bed, cheerfully inquisitorial. I often couldn’t move, muscles locked in place by what my father said was sleep paralysis. Quite common, you think you’re awake but you’re not really, a fraction of time when the brain thinks it sees something but doesn’t let the body respond to disprove it. Lots of people have it apparently, although of course not a lot of them shared what lay on my conscience.

I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Chief Inspector Brackman at the point I’d stopped him, had crossed some sort of a line. What was in his head was the conviction that unless he sorted out his misguided wife and daughter, they didn’t stand a chance in this life and the fact that he might have had to beat them to death to do it, wasn’t going to stand in his way. One small part of me and it shamed me then and appals me still, was unmoved by what I’d done. It was common sense, one life against two – four, if you factored Shirley and me into the equation. Because I’d had no doubt that once that line had been crossed, there would have been no going back – only forward!

Chapter Twenty

Over the weeks and months that followed, Faith began very slowly to heal but despite all my rationalisation I didn’t. As well as not sleeping, I lost my appetite and my mother fussed over me, cooking my favourite meals and buying me special little treats. But I was feeling continuously haunted and guilty and at the same time, desperately ashamed of not feeling guilty enough.

Mock exams came and went and I did my stuff in a daze. Faith’s mother who was coping, everyone said, wonderfully well, under the circumstances, decided to take them to the seaside for the Easter holidays. I was pleased that she and Faith seemed, in the turmoil of the last few weeks to have rediscovered their relationship. There was laugher coming back to that house and if it was a little less feverish than before, then that was a good thing too.

*

Other changes were also happening round me. Within the extended family, seismic shifts altered the landscape of our lives, as marriages took place, babies arrived, new in-laws were integrated and people you thought would be there forever, suddenly weren’t. Auntie Yetta moved to the big Kalooki club in the sky. She was followed, quietly, a few months later by Morrie Schwartz who breathed his last so unspectacularly, in his normal armchair, that it was a good hour amidst the noise and kerfuffle of a Saturday Tea, before anyone spotted he’d gone. And then, just as things were settling down again, Grandma suffered another, much more severe stroke and my parents’ attention shifted away from me and my issues, to a new regime of hospital visits and a different anxiety.

I cried off from those visits as much as I possibly could. Truth to tell, I found the hospital unbearably painful, as if I was wearing my nerves on the wrong side of my skin. Accumulated vibrations of hope, fear, pain, humiliation and acceptance were densely there even before we entered the building, overpowering once we were inside and I seemed, somehow to have misplaced the knack of keeping things out as well as I should. Equally painful was the fact my mother swore Grandma was reassured we were there and could hear us, whilst I knew for certain she wasn’t and couldn’t, but lacked the courage to say so.

*

When our doorbell rang one Saturday afternoon, my parents were at the hospital and I was deep in
Jamaica Inn
, with a Beatles LP providing anachronistic background. I ignored the bell. We weren’t expecting anyone and I had the rest of the book and a Walnut Whip to get through. It rang again, longer and harder. The impatient finger obviously wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Peeved, I padded out in slippered feet, it was probably an over-enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness.

It wasn’t, it was a slim coffee-skinned woman and close behind her, the largest, squarest person I’d ever seen, he looked like a fridge on steroids – shoulders bulging and moving independently under a tweed jacket which seemed ready to split under the strain. He wasn’t old, mid to late twenties I thought, with a disproportionately small and slightly misshapen head, a pale, expressionless face and a nose that looked as if it had been in several fights, with or without him. I took a rapid and astonished step back into our hall.

“You could at least,” said Glory Isaacs, as tartly lemon sherbet as I remembered, “Say good afternoon.” She put out a hand and the big man moved smoothly forward so she could rest it on his arm. Bending his head slightly to clear the doorway, he led her inside. I gawped after them and as an afterthought, shut the door. The big man looked at me and I indicated the open door to his right and he nodded and walked her in to our through-lounge.

“Tea might be nice?” she seated herself on the sofa, back straight, the same elegant posture I remembered. She slipped off her long, belted mac, folding and placing it neatly next to her. Revealed, was a purple and gold emblazoned, kaftan top over wide black trousers. Where full sleeve dropped away from narrow-boned wrist, several thin, dull-gold bangles slid against each other and in her ears, cascading gold links looked too heavy for the lobes from which they swung.

“Whenever you’re ready?” She’d not lost the sarcastic edge in the years since I’d seen her. “Ed,” she added, “Sit, you must be making the place look untidy.” The large man and I looked around dubiously. My mother favoured contemporary furniture, armchairs with splayed black-painted wooden legs and multi-coloured cushions. Ed opted, sensibly, I thought for one of the upright dining room chairs which were a tad sturdier than the rest.

“Tea.” she reminded me. As I left the room I scanned and wasn’t really surprised to hit a couple of blank walls, although I could have sworn I could hear faint music, Andy Williams and Moon River?

Tea and biscuits and a surreal gathering. Glory and I, either end of the sofa and Ed on his chair nursing one of my mother’s delicate, good-china cups.

“How did you find me?” I asked. I had ghastly visions of my Brackman-inspired guilt, broadcasting far and wide. She ignored my question and followed her own agenda,

“We need your help.”

“Help, how?”

“You owe me a favour.”

“A favour?”

“Dear Lord,” she tutted in exasperation and carefully but accurately centred her cup in its saucer on the coffee table in front of her, “Why is it not possible to have a conversation, without you repeating every single damn thing I say?”

“Sorry.”

“We have …” She paused, “… A bit of a situation.”

“Situation?” I couldn’t seem to help it.

“I’d like you to come and meet a couple of people – easier for them to explain than me. You know,” she continued without pausing, “You really shouldn’t feel quite so dreadful, you had very little choice.” For one moment, with the lemon sherbert flooding, I was thrown completely. But of course she’d know about my fatal brush with the law, it was, after all, always at the forefront of my mind. I didn’t say anything, I thought it wisest, but an icy lump I’d been carrying around in my chest since it happened, now seemed to be rising unpleasantly. It lodged, uncomfortable and thick in my throat.

“There was something wrong with him wasn’t there?” she asked. I thought of what I’d seen in his head, opened my mouth to try and explain but didn’t have the words, so flashed what I’d sensed. She nodded briefly in acknowledgement.