The Buried Circle (53 page)
The day turned into flashes then, like the lightning that was flickering along the top of the Downs. Outside the hospital the sky was near black, the street lit with a last gleam of sunlight before the darkness swallowed it. The air was like a bath, sweat and electricity running along the nerves in my skin, which felt as tight as a tick. No recollection of asking permission to go home, though I must’ve stopped off at the office: I had my handbag, but no hat or cardigan. My belly dragged, like the baby inside had turned to a lead brick.
God knows how I got there, but suddenly I was on Drove Road, staggering like a drunk with the weight of my belly threatening to topple me. Still no one about, only the two little girls hopscotching, ignoring the livid sky. There was a blink of bright light, and I started counting, waiting for the thunder. Mam used to say if you went
one a hundred, two a hundred, three a hundred
, you knew how many miles off the storm was. I was up to eight a hundred and still no crack, and if it came after that I never heard because instead there was a cramp in my belly that near split me while I stood on the step fumbling for the key.
Then there’s no little girls, only the airless, silent hallway. Must’ve been stairs too, and bugger me if I know how I climbed ‘em, but the next flash comes and I’m on my bed, and counting again, but this time I’m counting the time between the cramps because I know that’s what you’re supposed to do. No question now but that summat’s coming, and I’m cursing myself for not stopping at the hospital where there’s doctors and maybe by now Cabbage, Cabbage who understands what’s wrong with me, Cabbage with his fat sausage fingers helping me down there, but then I remember there was a raid over Bristol way and they’ll all be busy with that, saving lives, doing important things for good people, stitching rips in flesh and straightening mashed bones and mopping up blood–
And there’s another flash, and that reminds me I couldn’t possibly have stopped at the hospital where people knows me and I can see their faces gawping, mouths open in shock, as they watch me writhing on the corridor floor, the monster wrestling with my body like the devil that was its father the night he caught me in the churchyard–
And now a rumble of thunder much closer and the monster’s got his teeth in me, I’m on all fours, panting like a dog, only way to stand the pain, and then comes something so strong and vicious I have to howl, only it isn’t me howling at all, it’s the Warning, middle of the afternoon, and I can’t take it in, there’s people out at work and little girls playing in the street and they’re sounding the Warning but there’s nothing I can do about it; no buggerin’ way will the pain let me off the bed to crawl downstairs to the Anderson shelter in the back garden. The bedroom’s gone black like it’s night, it’s one of them August storms that sometimes come near harvest, rolling off the Downs and flattening the corn, and there’s the crackle of electricity in the air and a burning smell and the rumble overhead–
And there’s another flash, which finally splits me open, and I’m back in the hospital but the lights have all gone out and Cabbage is laughing with his hands plunged up to the elbow in a woman’s guts and the nurse is screaming and holding a bucket out for all the blood that’s coming–
And then I’m back on the bed in my room on Drove Road, head twisted into the pillow half suffocated, and all the blood comes out of me in a gurt gush, and something else with it, slippery like a lump of greasy rubber–
I washed him in the basin but I knew it weren’t no good. When the blood and the sticky stuff came off him, he was no more’n a drowned animal, water making ripples in the fine straggly hair that was all over him like a little monkey. The Germans had hit something nearby and there was an orange glow lighting up the black afternoon, shining through the bathroom window to show me what I had in my hands. Ugly but not ugly: not a monster, after all, but a rubbery doll with a squashed blue face. No telling what colour his eyes would have been. My own eyes were leaking; it wasn’t his fault who his father was, poor little dab. Charlie. I’d have called him Charlie.
All the while the sky was splitting, the air-raid siren still howling, thunder in the air and the ground shaking. Ambulance bells drilled into my head, setting off a ringing. Then the water from the tap dried to a trickle and stopped. Bomb must’ve hit a water main. I stood in the bathroom with blood all down my legs and this lifeless thing lying on the cracked porcelain with
Twyfords Sanitary Ware
writ above him like a religious text, crying because I couldn’t finish the job, he was still not washed clean.
Charlie.
I picked him up out of the basin, held him against me, feeling his slithery wetness on my chest and the cold of him between my fingers.
Charlie
. I lifted his crumpled face, smaller than my own fist, to my mouth, and tried puffing into his nostrils like I’d seen Mr Peak-Garland’s shepherd do when the sickly lambs didn’t breathe on their own.
Next second the walls shook and tossed us on the floor because the house two doors down had been hit.
Before the ambulance arrives, John says, ‘I shouldn’t have wasted time phoning. I should have driven straight here.’
‘You couldn’t possibly have known,’ I say, then wonder if somehow he did.
The paramedic’s staring at his bit of paper, trying to pretend he’s not listening. He told us he’s almost certain she hasn’t had a stroke, not a proper one anyway, though she might have had one of those little ones, a TIA…
If it wasn’t for the bruising on her face. Red purple, already, eye puffed up and almost closed, a black crusty split in the swollen skin, like a mean mouth.
How long’s she been on the floor?
She’s still there, in the middle of the hallway, her eyes wide and frightened, drifting in and out, the lids drooping now and then. The grip of her hand on mine loosens. Still with us, though, and no intention of going away, I hope, said the paramedic, cheerily, when he first arrived. Her eyes were closed when we found her, and her breathing seemed dreadfully ragged, but what do I know? John was completely calm, called 999 on the landline, then sat cross-legged by her with his hand on her forehead, willing her to hang on. It seemed to take for ever for the paramedic on the motorbike to arrive, though apparently he made it in less than ten minutes. There’s a proper ambulance on its way, too, to take her to the Great Western at Swindon.
Amazing, the gear they carry about with them. The paramedic has already shown us the ECG printout with the extra spike, the blip that says Frannie’s heartbeat’s doing something peculiar, like a drum out of rhythm. Where everybody else’s heart usually goes
b’dum, b’dum, b’dum
, Frannie’s is going
b’dm’dum, b’dm’dum
. He said the proper name for it, but I’ve forgotten already. It might be natural, or a side effect of the blood-pressure tablets she takes–or it might be something much worse. She came to while he was sticking the electrodes on her chest and said, What in buggeration you doing, boy? Perfectly all right, just fell, din’ I?
The paramedic smiled, and said, We’ve a feisty one here, then. What’s your name, my love?
Frances Robinson, she said. The end came out like a sigh.
Well, Frances…
I think she might prefer not to be called by her first name, I said, remembering over-friendly Bob from the day centre.
Sorry, Mrs Robinson.
Mi…Hard to hear her.
What was that, my love? He bent forward.
Miss
.
Oh.
But you can call me Fran, if you like.
Contrary old bat, I thought. But she’s OK, isn’t she? She’s winning. Took a tumble, they’ll keep her in a couple of days for tests, then…
If it wasn’t for the bruising. Across her chest, as well, when he loosened her blouse to attach the electrodes. He narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, felt carefully down her side. She closed her eyes and her face went tight and she made a little puffing sound.
That hurt, my love?
Just a bit.
He fiddled about some more, said something into his radio to Mission Control, then stood up and said: Ambulance’ll be here any minute. Can we have a bit of a word, like, in the kitchen?
I’ll stay with her, I said. You go with him, John. Sick inside, terrified what the paramedic wanted to say. Maybe she’d had a stroke after all. What if she’d broken her hip falling? Old people die from that, don’t they? I clung onto Frannie’s hand. She smiled up at me, then closed her eyes. She’ll be OK. She’s tough. She bounces.
If it weren’t for the trace of blood at the corner of her mouth. The yellow-white fragment on the floor I put my hand on, hard like a piece of grit. When I held it up to the light, it turned out to be a broken tooth.
‘Oh, no,’ I hear John say in the kitchen. ‘No, really. She
wouldn’t
. She was at work most of the day, then…’
I can’t hear what the paramedic mutters next, but then John says, with utter incredulity in his voice, ‘Where
I
was? You can’t seriously think…’
I let go Fran’s hand and stand up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
In the kitchen, the paramedic has his radio in his hand.
‘Look, she must have hit her head on the hall table…’ But he’s shaking his head. Shit.
Shit
. He couldn’t really be saying that, could he?
Panic chokes off my voice as I stand there staring at them.
And at what they’d both missed, behind them, the glitter on the floor, the back door ajar an inch, and a small ragged circle in the glass next to the handle.
The two police officers, when they finally arrive, fifteen minutes after the ambulance has taken Fran to hospital, are less than thorough. They don’t even bother to fingerprint the back door. John’s steaming by now.
‘Fucksake man, she’s in her eighties. We found her on the floor. Could be a flicking murder inquiry, and you’re acting like it was kids scrumping apples.’ Then he catches sight of my face, and sends me an apologetic look, trying to make out he doesn’t really think she’s in any danger of dying, he’s laying it on thick to get some action out of these two turnips.
‘No need for that sort of language, sir,’ says the one who’s poking his nose round the house. The other one, a woman, is outside, in the police car, talking on the radio. ‘The scene-of-crime officers will be along later to fingerprint, if it turns out to be necessary. Any idea if there’s anything missing?’
‘I’ll take a look,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t live here, he wouldn’t know.’
I can see the wheels turning, the policeman thinking: What kind of a set-up have we here, then? Bit old to be your boyfriend, isn’t he? He gets out a notebook. ‘If you wouldn’t mind checking, Miss…? You
do
live here, then?’
‘Robinson,’ I say. ‘India Robinson. I’m her granddaughter.’
‘And she is?’
‘Frances Robinson. I haven’t seen her handbag.’
But there it is, on the bed, in Frannie’s downstairs bedroom. Zipped closed. Inside, purse, pension book, building-society passbook, credit cards. I open the purse. Last week’s pension and, by the look of it, the one from the week before too, hardly touched, a fat wad of folded notes.
‘Maybe the intruder was interrupted before he found it,’ says the policeman, following me in from the hallway.
By what, exactly? Wouldn’t a caller have seen her, through the glazed front door, lying in the hallway, and called an ambulance? The policeman is coming to the same conclusion: his mouth pursing, he writes something in his notebook.
‘Drugs,’ I say. ‘Solstice. Lot of strange people wandering about–that’ll be what they were after.’
‘And where did the old lady keep her…drugs?’
‘Frannie,’ I say. ‘Please call her by her name.’ The blood-pressure pills and the gastric reflux medicine, the sum total of Fran’s pharmacopia, are kept in the kitchen cupboard by the kettle. Broken glass from the back door crunches underfoot. The cupboard contains serried ranks of pill packets, neatly lined up, all full.
‘Bathroom?’ asks the policeman, still on my heels. Of course, I recognize him now: he’s Corey’s husband. Only met him once, at the National Trust staff Christmas party, and can’t remember his name. Doubt it would do me any good if I could.
Upstairs, the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet swings open to reveal a bottle of TCP, some out-of-date aspirins, an unopened box of codeine tablets the dentist gave Frannie when she had a root canal filled, and my contraceptive pills.
The policeman peers over my shoulder. Anything missing?’ I shake my head.
My iPod and stereo are still in my room, as well as my laptop, on the 1940s dressing-table that doubles as a desk. Through the window, I can see the woman police officer getting out of the car, stretching, hitching a bra strap back into place, and starting up the path towards the front door. Another car, a dusty blue Astra, slides round the corner into the cul-de-sac and parks behind the patrol car.
Downstairs John is on the phone. My stomach’s full of snakes.
‘The hospital?’ I mouth.
The paramedic said it would be better not to go in the ambulance, that we should wait for the police and come on later, but now that seems crazy and I wish I’d been more assertive. Fran’s scared eyes sought mine when the ambulance men carried her out of the house on a stretcher.
‘Where are they taking me?’ she said plaintively. ‘I’m all right, Ind, I don’t want to go to hospital. People die in hospital’
‘You won’t die,’ I said. ‘They’re only going to check you over. I’ll be along in a bit–look, if I was worried I’d be holding your hand in the back of the ambulance, wouldn’t I?’
‘Don’t need anyone to hold my hand.’ She struggled with the blanket wrapped round her and a feeble paw appeared. ‘See? I’m waving you bye-bye. Be sure you make them bring me back. I’d ruther be in me own bed.’ There was a smile on her lips but her eyes were pleading.
‘We’ll look after her,’ said the first paramedic, handing me a slip of paper with a phone number on it. ‘Soon as the police have been, you give the hospital a ring. They’ll tell you which ward she’s on.’ He mounted his bike, and the other paramedics lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. One jumped down, and started to pull the doors closed.
