Shadow Play (6 page)

‘I don't know,' he replied, restive with the lie. ‘I'll only know when I get there tomorrow.'

‘I'll miss you,' she said, simply. Nothing more. He was not sure what he had hoped for. Remembered the hymn singing of his childhood. Oh, thou who changest not, abide with me.

 

D
own the hill, far beyond the wilderness which was in turn far beyond the reaches of the football stadium, lit by arc lights still although the crowd was gone, Rose Darvey ran. She bore in her stride nothing but the encumbrance of her short skirt, her brutal shoes, a quantity of vodka and the dizzying effect of a light bulb swinging across her eyes. She knew she was pursued, knew she should not have stopped once to hide and howl quietly, should have known better than to give way to her fear of the dark. The car lights hit her full beam on the corner: the man who pursued her had gone round the back. She shrank into one of the hedges which skirted the tiny front gardens. Waited. A car door was shut carefully, with the deliberate movement of someone who was preoccupied. She breathed easier. Then footsteps came in her direction, hesitated, moved past with unerring pace, stopped, came back. If he had slammed the door, she would have maintained her hope: she was accustomed to such sounds, but the quiet precision made her want to scream. ‘Come out, will you?' A voice equally careful, but harsh. ‘I know where you are. Come on out. Don't be silly.'

When she moved, though, obeying him slowly, he caught his breath. He had expected a hard-bitten face and saw instead the beautiful eyes of a haunted child.

 

M
rs Mellors reached out her hand and stroked the head of the blond child who stood in front of her as they waited for the bus. She did so because she could not resist it. The child shook her head as if to dismiss a troublesome fly, then clapped her hand to her golden locks as the stroking continued, turned round, ready to be angry. When she saw who it was she grinned instead, the toothless smile of a six year old who had lost the top set of milk teeth early and was waiting for their replacements. She was an ugly little cuss, apart from the hair, a screamer and yeller, the kind Margaret Mellors particularly liked because there was something in Margaret which always applauded a talent for noisy hysteria. She didn't want to emulate it and besides, it was too late now to change the gentle habits of a lifetime, where the only vice was two drinks a night when she got the chance, but she still had an artless admiration for those born rowdy. Her own extraordinary patience with awkward children was one of many reasons to explain her popularity with the young parents in Legard Street. Yuppies did not live here. The newly partnered who started their dynasties in these tiny houses were not those who could employ nannies: they catered for their broods and their mortgages via more hazardous routes. There was the occasional father at the primary school gate, but mostly it was a question of babes in arms being ferried hither and thither by mothers grey with exhaustion.

Margaret Mellors had never advertised the fact that she would willingly look after any of the children with all the skill of the apple-cheeked grandmothers who featured in their books but not otherwise in their lives, but such news did not need to be shouted. In the last four years which had marked both a vacuum in her life as well as changing fortunes for the street, news of her willingness had spread into a kind of fame and her house had become inundated with children. Only now she was stroking that irresistible blond head with a tentative touch, because she had sensed a slight shift in attitude towards her from the mothers of children like this. There had been a perceptible if slow alteration in their willingness to leave children at her house. At first, Margaret thought it was all about the onset of winter and the deep suspicion held by all these young people for the old-fashioned decrepitude of her spotless abode, but she had come to recognise it as something more. The disparity of the lives somehow made the grapevine of unwelcome gossip appallingly slow, as well as inaccurate, but still Mrs Mellors was being sent to Coventry by those who needed her most.

‘Hallo, Margaret! How are you? Say hallo, Sylvia, will you please. Nicely.' The warmth of the mother's greeting made Margaret relax and the acceptance of the child gave her a feeling of authority. Whatever it was that had blighted the reputation of her own home, it was not herself. No-one despised her bird-like body and her clean, talcum-powder smell. She hoped not, but in a way she would have preferred it if the opposite was true; if only they did not all dislike poor darling Logo as much, and if only they could realise that the lies which framed him were utterly and completely unfair. Talk about screamers and shouters, he was certainly one of them, but essentially a good boy, despite the Bible and the singing, if only they would see it. The problem around here was they were all so busy.

‘Hallo to you too! Where are you going then? Shopping? God save us, you won't have much chance, will you?' Margaret's hand was still in the child's hair, touching the delicious warmth of the neck lightly. She knew when not to irritate and the child did not resist, squirming happily before she came to rest straddled over the old woman's leg, resting against her stomach and her stick, biding her time for attention.

‘You haven't been round to see me lately, have you?' said Margaret, brightly. ‘Are you going to nursery school now?'

‘Yeth,' said the child.

The mother shifted her weight from one foot to another unhappily.

‘Well the truth is, Margaret, she's supposed to go, but half the time they can't have her, so it only works out to two mornings a week, and the rest of the time she drives me round the bend. I take that much time off work and I'm only part time as it is—'

‘Why don't you send her to me then?' Margaret asked mildly, looking away from the woman and peering down the street as if she had just seen something worth close examination. The child began to hum loudly, then set off round them both in close circles, making the dangerous noise of a wasp.

‘Oh, do shush, sweetheart,' said Margaret. The child shushed and came back to rummage in Margaret's half-full shopping bag with noisy rudeness. Margaret did not protest, while the mother looked at her big, calm face, at odds with the little body, with something like hunger.

‘Look, Margaret, I'd send her into you like a shot, but you must know I can't, not with that man next door to you. You know what I mean. Is he really your son? People says he's your son, you're both so … petite, but he doesn't look like you. Well anyway, if it's true, and someone told me it wasn't, I don't mean to be rude but I can't send Sylvie into you with him hanging around the place, can I?'

‘Why ever not?' Margaret asked, stupidly.

‘Don't you know? You must know, surely?'

But the look on Margaret's face confirmed an incredible level of ignorance of anything to Logo's detriment. She clearly did not understand that there was anything more than the merely indistinct vibrations of embarrassment which Logo attracted from his neighbours. For pinching the odd spade out of a garden, Margaret thought defensively; for looking through their rubbish bags like the scavenger he was. He was only a little bit crazy, poor Logo, and nobody likes anybody who carries a black Bible around with them, the reverse of a talisman. This wasn't a wicked neighbourhood, but it was godless. Margaret braced herself. If he looked like the son of hers who never was, Logo was her problem: she certainly didn't want him to be anyone else's.

‘No, he isn't my kin, but I've lived next door to him and his family, when he had a family, for nigh on twenty years, so I know him better than anybody, you might say. It was when his wife and his daughter went off, you see, only a year or two since, that he went a bit barmy. You shouldn't take offence at him, he's all right really. Gentle, wouldn't hurt a fly, and he's been good to me, really. Ever so good.'

The younger woman's cross-examining glance was so sharp, Margaret thought for a second that the powder would be stripped off her own face. She always wore face powder, just a little, to correspond with the talcum on her body: she dressed and undressed in a shower of sweet-smelling dust and she tried to keep herself decent. It was her own compensation for age, infirmity, the bad hip for which treatment had never been successful, and as far as compensations went, it worked. Margaret Mellors, with her cakelike face, neat little frame and her almost edible gentleness, was never less than easy on the eye.

‘Someone said,' the woman was saying, trying to keep the aggression from her voice, ‘he's been arrested ever so many times. But he always gets off.'

Margaret rallied, she did not raise her voice because she never felt the need.

‘Well, that'll be because he never actually does anything. He's always looking for some kid who looks like his daughter used to look, don't know what she looks like now, but that's what he does. Silly, but he does it …'

Her voice was fading softly into nothing. She knew as she spoke, with the child pulling on the shopping bags and dragging her sideways, that any attempt to explain or excuse the enigmas of Logo were useless. She had better try another route.

‘Never mind what he does, it hardly matters,' she said. ‘Anyway whatever gave you the idea he was ever in my house during the day? He does work, you know, after his fashion, but oh no, he's never in my place. Never. He's out with his trolley.'

It was almost the truth and she meant it to be the truth. She paused for dramatic effect. ‘Never,' she added, with quiet emphasis, feeling disloyal as she spoke, but still determined. The child began to move again, re-creating the humming sound, but louder, until it became a kind of growling. The mother looked at her in alarm.

‘I'm a dog, really,' the child announced.

‘Of course you are,' Margaret murmured comfortably. ‘Are you a big dog or a little dog? Only they make different noises. Wouldn't you be better as a cat?'

The mother's last defences were gone. Some persuasion had been necessary, but not much.

‘Listen, if you could … Only I've got so much to get, and she's a nightmare round the shops—'

‘Of course I'll have her if it helps. You just relax, you look a bit tired. Late-night shopping, isn't it? You'll be able to get a lot done. No need to hurry home.'

So Margaret Mellors had the company of hyperactive Sylvie for an hour or four in the dying afternoon. It hadn't strictly been a lie about Logo, she told herself. They did, after all, have an unwritten rule that they never went into one another's houses without invitation – never – but still the conversation left her uneasy, reminded her too much of things shoved under the carpet and best not brought out. His door would open with a kick, but something about the view from the window stopped anyone trying. And he was kept busy, she wasn't lying about that, cleansing officer he was called, she reflected with pride, that's what he was called. The Council wanted rid of him too: everyone picked on him, he said, but Logo remained on the equal opportunity pay roll, come what may, for a number of reasons. They liked an eccentric for a start and there weren't too many volunteers to brave the graveyard ghosts on his patch, even less to clear the rubbish after football, nor anyone else who came so much into his own for certain special tasks. They could raise him from the pubs where he was regarded as a singing-and-dancing mascot, though never quite a drunk. He would deal with burst water mains, drains in suppurating basements, the removal of a decade's worth of rotting rubbish: he would touch the untouchable with his bare hands; shovel up a dead dog or cat from a cellar, singing all the while. You didn't sack a wiry little man like that, whatever his timekeeping.

‘Oh God our help in ages past …' Logo shouted, pushing the trolley. Big old thing, not the new-fangled plastic, double-binned variety, ergonomically, economically sound, he wouldn't have any, got the ole bin on wheels, hadn't he, suited him fine, but he'd fought for it. Despite the memory of that battle, the energy was low that afternoon and his feet in his training shoes were icy.

 

L
ogo took many of the opportunities his job presented for doing nothing, but he always noticed litter. Down in the gutters as he walked, some of last autumn's leaves were still half frozen from the morning frost, the slyest litter of all, unrecyclable, with nowhere to go, pretty at dawn but now becoming so much damp rubbish until the next night's frost would crisp them like toast, where the bugs and the slime slept easily until they melted and the smell came up. Logo liked that scent: he liked the earth when it was damp and stuck to his feet. He made his own timetable; lazy one day, industrious the next. Today he was finished with the graveyard: he could go home, but he didn't want to, he would rather sit on a wall and read his dog-eared Bible. He liked the stories.

‘Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles as the brethren of the Lord? Or I only, have not we power to forbear working?' he intoned, his voice a high enquiry as he went towards his street.

It had been one of those days when light had never properly featured at all; there had been nothing to the dying of it. Turning the corner, Logo saw the figure of Margaret Mellors retreating from him with her narrow back, dressed in the same clean, dun-coloured coat which went on from year to year with no pretension to style. She was in the act of reaching inside her bag for an orange which she then bowled down the street like a ball towards a wicket. A small child whooped, yelled, barked in pursuit of the orange until she waylaid it in her little fist, catching it like some terrier while it was still rolling.

‘There's no need to bite it,' Margaret was calling. Logo saw the blond head in the intermittent light of the lamps. Watching with quiet intensity as Margaret threw the orange again, he became slowly aware of disturbing sounds. People gathering for a footie match. Beyond their road he could sense the traffic bearing down on them, felt from a distance the arrival of the first hordes. It always reminded him of flies descending on a carcass but Margaret did not notice. He was trying to work out why she threw fruit for her charge; to tire her out, perhaps, you threw sticks for a dog and more edible things for a child, but his interest soon died. The creature did not resemble his own child, dark as a gypsy like him, run away a long time ago; she'd be a woman now.