Chapter Eleven
A new term at my Friday night self-defence class meant new faces. Ursula, our instructor, took this as a welcome opportunity to go right back to basics with us all. She took us through her ABC – alert, balanced, considered – illustrating her philosophy that our aim was to get out of any threatening situation without getting physical if at all possible. D (defuse) and E (escape) were better than F (fight).
The class was a mixed bunch. Some, like me, went because their work exposed them to risks. My sparring partner Brian was the same, he’d set up his own security business, offering door staff to clubs or parties and protection to people at risk who were worried and wealthy enough to shell out for his presence.
Other people came for a variety of reasons: they’d been on the receiving end of violence and wanted to prevent it happening again; they wanted a physical discipline that would develop their confidence; they saw it as a way to keep fit; or they’d seen a Bruce Lee film but wanted something without the martial arts trappings.
The old church hall we used was cold and echoey. As Ursula demonstrated the differing effects body language can have in a confrontation I thought about the woman who’d been attacked near Severn Road. Had she been out on her own since? Out in the dark? Was she recovering well or was she still traumatised, fearful of strangers and of her own dreams?
I knew from bitter experience how deep the scars could go. Coming to the classes was my insurance policy. And, after getting hurt before, I had promised Ray and my friend Diane that I’d make sure I was better equipped to protect myself in future.
Brian and I took turns to play the aggressor and to practise some of the techniques for calming the situation down. Tone of voice was important, eye contact or avoiding it, stance and so on. Lucy Barker kept disrupting my concentration. How was I going to tackle her? Why had she pretended to me that she’d talked to Ian Hoyle? Because she didn’t want me to hear his version of events which made her out to be the spurned party? A matter of pride? Foolish to be bothered about that when she was being threatened with more serious harm. And who did I believe?
I called in home afterwards and sorted out my supplies for my final stint at Severn Road for the Ecclestones. It was very cold and if I used the car heater I’d drain the battery. So I filled two hot water bottles, packed a space blanket to sit on and a nifty foot warmer that had caught my attention in one of those gadget catalogues. It was filled with gel and once heated up it stayed warm for hours. Hot soup in a flask, a couple of rolls of bread and a large chocolate bar completed my preparations.
When I parked up, just before eleven, the street was deserted. On Friday night the optimum time for any bother would be from closing time onwards. Manchester now boasted it was a 24-hour city. Bit of an exaggeration: there is an all-night supermarket somewhere but even that shuts at five on a Sunday. A handful of late bars and clubs run till five in the morning, but I compromised. I’d sit it out until three when the majority of places would have shut. Time stretched before me like a life sentence. I told myself to think of the money. After forty minutes I drove the length of the road and round the block, slowing as I passed the house where I’d dropped off the injured woman. The stained glass panel in the door glowed red and green from the light in the hall but there was no clue as to whether anyone was home.
By half-past eleven the first trickle of people began to return home on foot and I assumed most had been out drinking locally. I made another circuit to check whether anything was kicking off at the far end of the road but all seemed quiet. An hour or so later, with soup and rolls gone, I was startled by sudden loud noise, shouting and screeching. A gang of teenage girls came into view in my rear mirror. They were making a right racket. I found myself tensing up, my spine tightening as I imagined them noticing me, deciding to have some fun. One of them was copiously sick at the corner and the others reacted with a mix of hilarity and revulsion. Then they began to sing off-key and very loudly: Let Me Entertain You.
They teetered past on the opposite side of the road and stopped to light cigarettes. None of them even looked my way. With bare midriffs and exposed shoulders they were oblivious to the cold even though frost was visible, glistening on the pavement and the garden walls. It was a good job I’d resisted the temptation to buy a load of bedding plants over the Easter break. I’d have lost half of them.
At two I put my audio-book on to stop myself falling asleep. I kept the volume low and easily heard an alarm bell start up, cutting through the night air. I switched the cassette player off and tried to work out where the whooping was coming from. I drove down Severn Road and towards the flashing light that came into view near the end of the street. An old silver Nissan roared past me, young men in the front wearing baseball hats. Coincidence? Or had the alarm sent them on their way?
Lights came on inside the house where the box was flashing and a few moments later the awful din stopped. A huge man in a dressing gown peered out of the front door, scowled at me for a while and then went inside again. None of his neighbours in the terraced row made an appearance. Another attempted burglary or just a false alarm?
I drove back round the block but this time I parked lower down Severn Road opposite the ramshackle Smith house. Hard to believe that anyone lived there, it had such an air of abandoned neglect. An owl cried, loud and close by. The overgrown garden would be good hunting ground.
The place became very quiet then. A stillness hung in the air. It began to snow. Large, soft flakes hit the windscreen and melted slightly then they came down thickly. I shivered. Two forty-five a.m. The heat was almost gone from my hotties and my toes. I was weary and wanted to go home. What had I found out for the Ecclestones? One false alarm and a few high-spirited clubbers to add to the report: neither a crime wave nor idyllic seclusion. Would the dispirited feeling I had have been different if the place had been a hot-bed of car stealing and street fighting? You do your job, I muttered to myself, you gets your money.
I drove carefully leaving fresh tracks on the white roads. I saw no one. The sense of being the only person awake reminded me of the nights when Maddie was a baby and I would sit and feed her and look out at a deserted city. Now and then I would hear the shriek of brakes from a night bus on Wilmslow Road and just before dawn the clatter and hum of the milk float going by.
Saturday morning. I tried Lucy Barker’s numbers again and left more messages. Please ring and let me know that everything is all right.
The frosting of snow drew the kids into the garden like a magnet. There wasn’t enough to make a snowman but they scraped together a few snowballs and ran around. They came in not long after, peeling sodden gloves off to reveal bright pink fingers.
After breakfast I got on with the chores: washing, drying, cleaning, tidying. When Ray took Tom off to visit his grandma, Nana Tello, I suggested to Maddie that she get her pens out and do some drawing.
‘With you?’
I hadn’t meant that but if it made her happy.
We messed about doing snowmen and elves and goblins. Neither of us were much cop. She seemed quite relaxed until I told her I wanted to talk about the problems at school. Her face shuttered, she stopped colouring in.
‘I’m not going to tell you off or anything,’ I said, ‘I want you to tell me your side of things.’
She said nothing. Her mouth tightened in a little line, her fingers rolled the coloured pencil round and round.
‘It’s not like you to pick on somebody, to call people names. Is that really what happened?’
Mute.
‘Why did you pick on Carmel?’
A flush of guilt softened her face and my stomach lurched in sympathy. She still avoided looking at me and didn’t answer.
‘Maddie, you know I love you.’
She frowned, dug her pencil into the paper and began scribbling, a blot of colour, a spiral of red, round and round.
‘I want you to be happy, I want to help but it’s hard if you won’t talk to me.’
She shot me a black look and returned to her paper this time scribbling zigzag lines over the characters she’d drawn. Obliterating them. I reached out and put my hand on hers. ‘Come here,’ I said.
Reluctantly she sidled round to me. I pulled her onto my knee, put my arms around her. She didn’t yield. I’d been hoping for tears, a tantrum, anything to release her from this stiff withdrawal.
With mounting exasperation I cast about for another opening. ‘Is there anyone else you could talk to? Like Sheila?’ Maddie had a mutual appreciation society going with our lodger. ‘Or Ray?’
She gave a quick shake of her head.
‘Has Carmel done anything to you?’
No response.
My temper rose but I resisted the urge to shake her or shout. ‘When something horrible happens it feels better if you tell someone about it. If I’m upset or I’ve done something and wish I hadn’t, I talk to Diane or Ray.’
She gave a little breathy sigh, swung her foot with impatience.
‘Well,’ I ground to a halt, ‘you can always tell me about it some other time. And next week at school will be like a new start. Okay?’
She slid off my knee and left the room. I thumped the table and swore. Craving a coffee, I put the kettle on and got out the high roast. You couldn’t force a child to talk but my attempt had gone down like a lead balloon. I was stumped.
After my coffee I sought Maddie out. She was lying on the floor in the lounge watching television. ‘We could go to the park,’ I suggested. ‘See if the pond’s frozen?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s too cold.’
‘Okay,’ I said firmly. ‘You help me clear the playroom up after lunch.’
So we did. Sorting plastic, reuniting games and jigsaws. I tried to chuck away all the broken things that we’d never mend like legless dolls and a yoyo without a string while Maddie tried to stop me. ‘You can’t throw that away,’ she’d say, ‘that’s my favourite.’
‘You don’t play with this anymore do you?’ I gestured to the play cooker that took up a lot of space in one corner of the room.
‘We do – sometimes.’
‘We could put it in the cellar and just get it out when you want it.’
The cellar was an important strategic feature, a half-way house or handy staging post for items that would never come back upstairs but would move on from there to the next school fair, to other friends with younger children or to the bin.
After I’d carted it downstairs I saw it would make sense to rearrange the rest of the playroom. With Maddie’s help I shifted dressing up clothes and books, moved the worktop on trestles which they used for crafts and games to beneath the bay window.
‘It really needs a lick of paint,’ I said. It was years since we’d decorated and the pale yellow walls were splattered with blu-tac craters, sellotape marks, felt pen scribbles, fragments of stickers, and here and there in indelible red ink and small, poorly formed letters, the word ‘bum’ – Tom’s first graffiti.
‘We could do a makeover,’ Maddie beamed.
‘Yes,’ I tried not to think about the effort involved.
‘Like Changing Rooms,’ she referred to the television DIY show.
‘We’d have to agree on a colour, Tom as well.’
‘I like purple.’
‘It can look a bit dark.’
‘Bright purple.’
‘We’ll look at some brochures.’
‘Have you got some?’
‘Somewhere, probably in the cellar.’
‘Can we do new curtains?’
‘I think we’ll have to.’ The ones at the window had come with the house. They were brown velvet now bleached an uneven caramel by the sun and with several small tears and holes in them.
It was good to see her excited about something. I had a root around in the cellar but I couldn’t find any colour charts so we went off to B&Q and came back with a stack. Tom and Ray were back by then.
Before the two children had the chance to get into an argument about interior design I told them each to put a tick next to any colours they liked on the brochures and that we’d look at their ideas the following day. And we couldn’t do stencils, I told them, pretending they were expensive. There was sound reasoning behind my embargo – one of the paint ranges was aimed at kids and I knew that Tom would fall for the action adventure design with its stencils of planes just as sure as Maddie would clamour for the underwater world with mermaids and fishes.
Chapter Twelve
Laura, Ray’s girlfriend, joined us for tea. Ray made two lasagnes, one meat, one veggie and I got the lion’s share of the latter.
‘Whose party is it?’ Laura asked me. They were babysitting that night.
‘Chris, she used to live here.’
‘When they were very small,’ Ray nodded at the kids.
‘She and her partner Jo bought a house in Hebden Bridge.’
‘Very trendy,’ said Laura.
‘Yeah. They like it. I wouldn’t fancy travelling into Manchester to work every day though. Chris is in the Housing Department.’
‘Not a bad train service,’ said Ray.
‘When it’s running. It’s her fortieth,’ I explained to Laura. ‘Diane’s done a picture for her, from the both of us.’
It was ages since I’d been to a party and I was looking forward to having a bit of a bop and seeing old friends. I wasn’t dating anyone but there wasn’t likely to be any talent at the party. There never was.
My party gear consisted of silky green trousers and a long jade green tunic with a mandarin collar. If I got too hot I could shed the tunic, I’d a black vest top underneath shot through with glitter.
‘You look nice,’ Maddie came in, already in her pyjamas.
‘Thank you.’ I did a twirl then sat down to finish my make-up.
‘Tom wants red.’
‘Red?’
‘For the playroom. Man U.’
‘If we got the shades right we could do red and purple. It would look very … loud.’
‘I think it’d be yucky.’
‘We’ll see what you’ve picked tomorrow. You go to bed now, I’ll come and say night-night in a little while.’
When I looked in on her she was already asleep. Tom had kicked his covers off so I put them back.
Even with the central heating on their room was cool. The weather forecast predicted that freezing temperatures would continue until mid-week. And previous years were quoted when freak conditions had given us a Siberian spring.
I heard the taxi hoot outside and climbed in the back beside Diane, my larger-than-life friend. She’d got a parka style coat on with a fun fur trim on the hood. With her bulk it made her look like a Yeti. The heater was full on in the cab and I pulled off my own hat and gloves.
‘Aren’t you hot?’
‘Don’t laugh,’ she said very slowly and clearly. ‘Or scream.’ She pushed back her hood.
‘Bloody hell, Diane!’
I could see her skull, nearly all of it. There were three stripes of hair dyed a silvery colour, running front to back. Like an albino skunk.
‘You don’t like it,’ she accused me.
‘Since when did you care whether I liked it or not?’ Messing about with her hair was Diane’s hobby: striking cuts, blatant colours but she’d never had anything this … brutal. And she’d never expressed doubts before.
‘I’ve got a wig,’ she thrust her hand into her pocket and drew out a swathe of straight honey coloured nylon hair.
I shrugged.
She pulled it on her head. She still looked weird but not so extreme.
‘Try it off again?’
She complied then grumbled. ‘The other thing is it’s bloody freezing. If I’d known we were suddenly going to go sub-Arctic I might have gone for something else.’
My eyes betrayed me – she spotted the glimmer.
‘Pack it in,’ she shoved me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I giggled. ‘It’s good to laugh.’
‘Not when it’s at me.’
‘Reduces stress.’
‘For you maybe.’ She pulled the blonde wig firmly back into place.
‘It’ll grow.’
‘I know. I don’t often get it wrong,’ she said slowly.
‘There was that perm …’
‘Sal,’ she warned.
‘Okay.’
We paid off the taxi outside The Irish Club and made our way to the upstairs function room. The party was well underway. Chris had booked a disco: two blokes who played a good mix of music, not run of the mill stuff but plenty of Tamla and funk, dance music, disco and lots of Latin. Chris and Jo had been going to Salsa classes for ages and, judging by the gymnastics on the dance floor, so had some of the other guests.
Diane and I queued up to give our present to Chris, who already looked very merry. Jo at her side gave us a wink. She knew about the gift because Diane had talked to her about what colour-scheme would work best in their house. She also raised her eyebrows at Diane’s new look.
Chris stood up and gave each of us a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Diane hefted the large rectangular parcel up. Chris’s eyes widened. There wasn’t room to lay it flat on the table littered with drinks and gifts.
Bitter Blue Page 9
