The Party Line (3 page)

The outgoing crowd had shown a mean ingratitude throughout the evening, bunching in a huddle close to the door, as though they couldn’t get out of the district fast enough. They’d barely acknowledged the gifts — hampers of meat and home preserves — and they’d mumbled in response to the
Go well
speeches.

It was the end of the evening. The women were clearing plates and glasses from the Supper Room and the men were draining the last of the keg. Jack Gilbert was bad-mouthing someone, nothing new there, and Joy, having drunk three Pimms, was brave.

‘Jack,’ she shrilled across the room, interrupting the flow of his
nastiness. ‘Just wondering … when are you going to fix your pathetic fences?’

The other women carried on with their chores. Hands wiped and stacked and picked things up, but eyes fixed, hawk-like, first on Joy, then Jack. Joy, heart thumping, searched the room for Audrey Gilbert, but did not find her. In the silence a broom swished next door in the main hall, Audrey on the end of it. Her tuneless humming faintly kept time with the sweeping.

The women looked at Jack but the men fixed on Eugene. Joy watched embarrassment spread thick across her husband’s face as he turned away from her. Jack’s eyes narrowed to a squint and his top lip curled under — almost a snarl — as he, too, turned his back on Joy.

‘Jack? What was that? Sorry … didn’t catch what you said.’ Not so shrill now. Joy knew it was a waste of time. She just wanted Jack to know that she hadn’t forgotten.

The sweeping and humming next door had stopped. Joy pictured Audrey on the other side of the wall, craning to hear what was not being said. Then, as if a starter gun had fired, the men turned back to the keg, and the women to their chores. But a few minutes later, Joy saw Jack in Eugene’s ear, glancing her way, wearing a look that said
Get your wife under control.

Eugene spoke quietly as they drove home. ‘There was no need, Joy.’

‘Whose side are you on?’

‘There aren’t sides. We’ve got to get on.’

‘Is that because they couldn’t tell Neville and the beast apart, after the accident? That’s what you mean, is it, about there being no sides?’

Eugene shifted gears. ‘For God’s sake …’

She was glad it was dark. She’d been strong in the hall, urged on by the memory of Neville, by the need, under glare of strip lighting, to put things right. But now she felt as though those few words, hurled recklessly across the room, had drained the last life spark from her.

Neville had been just fifteen when one of Jack’s scrawny steers stepped out of the murky night and tumbled through the windscreen of the car. Joy had been seventeen.

The last time she saw her younger brother, he was a silhouette in her bedroom doorway. There was a head and shoulders and arms, a body and legs; a paperdoll boy severed from his companions either side. The hallway light, which was always left on all night, shone around him.

It was a Sunday night, eleven o’clock, and he’d pushed open her door just as she was dropping off to sleep.

‘I’m going into town to see Jo-Lee,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll roll the car down the drive.’

Joy blinked in the darkness. She thought Neville was stupid going after Jo-Lee Henderson and she’d told him so lots of times. Jo-Lee was a townie and only fourteen and by all accounts had several boyfriends on the go. He said it was love and what would she know.

‘I’m not covering for you. If they get up.’

‘They won’t … they’ve been asleep for ages.’

Joy groaned and rolled away from the light.

‘I’ve stuffed my bed. Even if they look in they won’t know.’ Neville pulled her door shut again and was gone.

Joy heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel as the car passed near her window. She planted her face in her pillow and imagined Neville lifting Jo-Lee’s long hair, kissing her on her neck. She didn’t want to think about what happened next between her little brother and Jo-Lee. It wasn’t fair, anyway, that he was getting into girls when she was two years older and no boy would look her way.

She was still awake when her father shuffled past her door, not long afterwards. She listened as his muffled steps paused at the doorway of her brother’s bedroom, then carried on. She listened to all of this, just as she’d listened earlier to her parents talk about a heavy fog coming down at dusk, how the roads would be treacherous once night fell and how that bloody young Jack Gilbert better have secured his stock for a change.

There’d been a lot to listen to that night, not least her own angry thoughts about the unfairness of boys chasing girls and girls having to wait for someone to chase them. The final thing she heard was the telephone ringing, her father answering, and the thud as his body slumped against the wall, and her mother howling like a dog under the moon.

Elsie Shanks at the telephone exchange had spread the call for help. Just one long grind of the telephone handle per party line, one long eerie ring; that was how she let everyone know the
what
of the situation. Joy heard the night hum with short rings and long rings and combinations of shorts and longs as word circulated around the district.

The blood and bone of the boy and the animal coalesced to a point past identification. That’s what people remembered about Neville’s accident, that’s what made it a grotesquely unique thing. Those facts were there for the hearing — breathless murmurings in shop queues, behind library shelves, on the shared telephone lines that crisscrossed the fields and narrow roads — but Joy knew it was her fault that Neville had died and that, in itself, was enough to remember.

When she thought back on that night, the thing she remembered first, always, was the way the hallway light had formed triangles around his body and a halo around his head, and that, at that very last moment, he had been a whole, connected-up person.

Joy, after resisting the urge to cripple Jack Gilbert’s cow, spent the rest of the day tidying the house. The vacuum cleaner crashed against furniture, gouging marks in the woodwork. She scrubbed and mopped until the house sparkled. She was angry at Jack Gilbert for his murderous farming, angry at her younger brother for being dead, angry at Eugene for his lack of anger.

There was enough anger for some to be left over for herself. Over the years, she’d repackaged the facts of Neville’s accident, locking away and sealing the horror of his final seconds of life. She’d finally allowed herself to concur with her parents’ brave, wavering assurance that the accident had not been her fault, that nothing she could have said, or done, that night would have stopped Neville stealing the car. She’d accepted it not because it was true — it could never be true — but because her parents needed to believe it. They had just one child now and they needed to know she was a good person.

Jack kept his opinions to himself while families grieved. But not
too much later Joy had heard him talking down the telephone line to who knows who, quietly putting things straight.

The law was on the farmer’s side, when it came to collisions between stock and motorists. It was never the animal’s fault, always the motorist’s. Even when the motorist was fifteen and breaking no law except teenage rebellion.

‘I could have gone the Walkers, you know. I could have gone them the value of the beast,’ Joy heard him say.

Joy threw bottles of cleaning products into the back of the laundry cupboard and slammed the door. She sat, frumpy, on the end of her bed.

The little bottle of 4711 was on her dresser, in the centre of a crocheted white doily that, on close inspection, was clogged with dust. Neville had given her the perfume for Christmas — the last one before he died. Joy picked up the bottle and unscrewed the cap. She closed her eyes and held the open bottle under her nose, drawing a deep breath, remembering the rich, heady scent of Gabrielle Baxter.

A virtuous life would be conducted by the wearer of 4711. Joy put her finger over the top of the bottle and tipped it. She dabbed the scent behind her left ear, then her right.

Nickie did the dishes without being asked.

‘She’s a good girl,’ Eugene said to Joy, who was making sandwiches for Nickie’s lunch the next day. He gave Joy a shoulder rub as he walked past her towards the sitting room. ‘Isn’t she?’

Joy went
hmm
.

Nickie waited until Eugene was out of earshot. ‘If I ask you something, will you promise not to say no straight away?’

‘Maybe,’ Joy said.

‘Mum. Yes or no?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Nickie. What’s the question?’

‘Can I get my ears pierced?’

‘Of course not.’ Joy didn’t even look up.

‘Why not?’

‘You know why. It’s not a thing nice girls do.’

‘Gabrielle Baxter has pierced ears.’

Joy put the knife down. ‘Gabrielle Baxter is …’

Joy had that look, the one that meant she was going to talk about people less fortunate than themselves in Africa and China. ‘You know about Gabrielle Baxter’s mother, Nickie,’ she said.

‘Yes. She’s dead. So what? She’s got these cross earrings that her mother gave her, little silver ones, and a necklace that matches them …’

‘Just when a girl needs a mother the most … poor thing.’

Nickie didn’t understand. There was Gabrielle Baxter with earrings being called a poor thing, so she wasn’t a tart. This meant there was a new category of people who could have their ears pierced — girls whose mothers had just died.

‘They’re crosses.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Gabrielle Baxter’s earrings. I told you. They’re little silver crosses.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Crosses mean she believes in God. So how can someone who
believes in God be a tart?’ Nickie pushed on. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘You’re not getting your ears pierced. End of story,’ Joy said.

Religious instruction happened on the last Friday of the month. The Catholics had it in the Big Room and the Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists all went to the Little Room.

There was another small group of kids — the heathens, Joy called them, though Mr Burgess referred to them as Miscellaneous. They didn’t believe in anything, or if they did it was one of those weird religions like the God Squad who came to people’s houses and pretended to chat about the weather before getting around to the point, which was always Hell and Damnation. Anyway, those kids went to the staff room with books from the library and they had to wash and dry the teachers’ dishes. They came back saying they’d sneaked the teachers’ biscuits, which, if true, proved they were in the right group.

Mr Burgess read out the names of the new kids and told them which room to go to. Nickie waited for Gabrielle’s name to be on Miscellaneous — she was sure, with the pierced ears, that she’d be on that list. But she wasn’t. The next list was Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians. But he got right to the end of that one, too, without Gabrielle being called.

‘Catholics,’ Mr Burgess said. ‘Just one new one. Gabrielle Baxter.’

Nickie couldn’t help but grin at Erin. For days, Erin had been working hard to be Gabrielle’s best friend. Erin glared back. They both knew what this meant. The Walkers would see the Baxters at Mass. The parents would get to know each other. Everyone at church would be even friendlier to Gabrielle’s father because his wife was dead. Including Joy, who would have to be because of the situation.

The Catholics waited for Father Brindle to arrive. Sometimes he turned up and sometimes he didn’t. In the car on the way home from church, Eugene and Joy often talked about Father Brindle’s problem with the bottle. Eugene would say something like
That was a sermon and a half
and Joy would say
A dog’s breakfast
, and what they both meant was that the sermon had made no sense at all because Father Brindle was either drunk or hung over. Nickie didn’t know why they
bothered speaking in adult codes about it, seeing as the kids had to put up with the same problem at religious instruction.

Father Brindle sat down on Mr Burgess’s chair. Everyone moved back. He had a certain smell, a combination of incense from the church and a stink that could be onions but also the bottle the day after. He closed his eyes and tilted his head forward.

‘Let us start with the Lord’s Prayer.’

At the end, after
Amen
, everyone sneaked a look at Father Brindle. His eyes stayed closed and his head didn’t move. He’d gone to sleep. It happened at church sometimes, too — he’d doze off during one of those parts where you Take Time to Reflect. One of the men in a front pew would cough a few times, and the altar boys, who were usually Kevin and Kelly Flynn, would get the hint and shake him to wake him up.

The school kids did the opposite. They all sat absolutely still, not making a sound. They kept their heads down, avoided looking at each other and laughing. The record was four minutes. That time, Ryan Ferguson sneaked out, had a pee, and came back before Father woke up.

Nickie looked at Gabrielle, who was frowning, confused.
Hangover
, Nickie mouthed, slowly. She ran her finger across her closed mouth, like a zip.

There was a dribble of spit coming out of the corner of his mouth; it was getting to the stage where it was nearly ready to drop into his lap. His head leaned too far forward and he woke up.

‘Amen,’ he said.

‘Amen,’ everyone replied.

‘Today,’ said Father Brindle, ‘we are going to talk about sacrifice. How the Lord Jesus sacrificed His life for us, so that we can look forward to eternal happiness in Heaven.’

Nickie let his words hum away. She wanted to know exactly how much sacrifice was needed, to be sure to get to Heaven. And also the type of thing you’d need to do. She was worried about it enough to be prepared to do the minimum, but there was a risk of over-sacrificing.

Gabrielle was sitting with her legs crossed, leaning forward on her
elbows, listening hard to Father Brindle. Nickie tried unsuccessfully to catch her eye.

That lunchtime Nickie asked Gabrielle what she thought of Father Brindle.