During those first weeks in their new house, Giles had searched library vaults for old maps of the borough, and like a boy discovering a lost kingdom, he’d papered their floor with a geological survey and yellowed deeds. ‘Look, we’re here!’ His face was flushed as he pointed to the place their house now stands, where a hundred and fifty years ago a river had followed the course of the road; a valley at the bottom of gentle hills, part of the countryside buffer around London. Giles’s finger traced another line through woodland. ‘This used to be one of the main trade routes in and out of London. Apparently highwaymen used to lie in wait in the woods to ambush travellers.’ His eyes flashed with excitement as he looked out of the window at the metres of sidings that were all that remained of that wood, a number of mature trees still standing. ‘I wonder how many murders took place just over there. How many undiscovered bodies are still buried in the earth.’ The rail line conveniently took the place of the old road and cottages were built for the workers as the water was redirected into a culvert underground, where it still rushes below their feet. Sometimes Ruth thinks she hears the hidden river, like a bath left running in a distant room. Though since there’s no longer a natural valley for the weather to empty itself into, and the surrounding hills have now been forested by tarmac and bricks, there’s nothing left to absorb the rain, so their street’s become the storm gutter of north-west London, an energy sink where all the bad stuff gets stuck.
A flock of birds cruises through the sky, away from London, like an exhalation. Ruth presses ahead, peering into gardens, trying to guess from the plant pots, mopeds, old fridges or garden furniture what kind of people live in each house. She vaguely knows a few of her neighbours. Monica and Barry’s terraced house connects directly with hers on the left. The couple have four children, the last of whom is a newborn. Monica’s friendly in an arm’s-length sort of way, and Ruth senses she’s over the newbie mum phase, with bigger kids whose door-slams reverberate through their shared wall. She hasn’t the time for Ruth’s fuss and bother. Been there, worried about that, worked it all out, is the look Monica gives Ruth when they chat over the fence, but even so, there’s a fatigued kindness in her eyes. Monica’s husband, Barry, is skinny and small, as if no one bothered to feed him when he was a kid. He throws stones at a fox that slopes around the pavements and over a small strip of land just beyond the back gardens, which everyone here calls the allotments. ‘Foxes are worse than rats,’ Barry says, his eyes never leaving Ruth’s breasts as he speaks. ‘Vermin. They attack your kids, you know. The council should put down traps.’ In the summer, Ruth used to watch the fox from Bess’s bedroom window; he lay curled asleep on the roof of a dilapidated chicken shed in her own allotment that butts the railway fence, his sun-cooked fur shimmering. Since the weather’s turned, the fox has got skinny. Ruth leaves leftovers in her back garden at night, and in the morning the bowl is licked clean.
Walking up the pavement towards Ruth is an elderly woman who lives on the other side of their house. An alleyway divides their terraces, so thankfully they don’t share a wall. This woman is the mum of Liam, mother-in-law of Ruth’s friend Sandra. Ruth’s only ever seen her in her garden or allotment, tending her vegetable patch, taking photos of birds with a clunky Soviet-era camera, or in passing like now. The woman always keeps her head tipped forward, like she’s expecting the wind – or anything else that cares to have a pop – to give her trouble. Liam says his mum’s batty, and Sandra scowls at the very mention of her name. ‘Bloody witch,’ Sandra says. ‘She’ll try it on with you, Ruth, if you give her half a chance. Fill your head with nonsense about us, but you should ignore her.’ Ruth focuses on the distance in case today Liam’s mum should decide to say hello. Avoiding the enemy, neighbour though she may be, is the least Ruth can do to repay Sandra’s friendship. They pass without catching each other’s eyes, and Ruth breathes again.
The final house on the road is Sandra and Liam’s, only metres from Liam’s childhood home, the location of his mum and her trickiness when he’d been growing up, behaviour Sandra says continues to this day. He bought his place for peanuts ten years ago – ‘Before you lot bumped up the prices.’ His mum has health problems so he needs to be close apparently, although actually he only seems to visit her when he has to collect computer parts that get delivered to her address as his work takes him out and about, fixing laptops and other tech in the homes of ‘the morons’, as he likes to call his clients. Occasionally, when Ruth’s neighbour’s not been in, the postman delivers to Ruth, and she grudgingly accepts. The parcels are addressed to Mr Smith, c/o no. 40 – his mum’s house – and Ruth always experiences a kind of static coming off the packages as they sit on her worktop, in anticipation of Liam’s outline appearing on the other side of the frosted glass panel of her front door. When he eventually arrives, she can never stop apologizing as she hands the parcel over; for what she’s sorry she doesn’t know, but something about his expectant quietness makes her want to fill the space with words.
A roughly constructed brick wall surrounds Liam’s property where a fence should be, with trellis on top making it impossible to see inside, the perimeter fortified by a solid gate with entry buzzer on the street. Ruth’s never been invited over, any socializing between the couples always having taken place at Ruth’s or in the pub, but she imagines that inside their home it’s immaculate, unlike her own. Everything about Sandra is neat and safe, and Ruth yearns to spend time at her friend’s place where she’s sure she’d be purified by an osmosis of calm. Sandra recently admitted that it’s Liam who won’t allow visitors – ‘You know what blokes are like, wants me all to himself’ – and there was even a hint of pride that he loves her enough to need only her in his life. Once, when Ruth had been really unwell, she’d built up a rage about never having been inside, paranoid that Sandra was hiding something from her – what, though, she had no idea – and she snuck round the back of her friend’s house, held her phone up over the high wall and clicked the camera shutter a few times. Even now, weeks down the line and on the better side of illness, Ruth blushes at her craziness and the shame of spying on a friend.
As she passes Sandra and Liam’s today, she lowers her head, afraid if she sees either of them she’ll have to explain the earlier police visit, and she’s too tired to invent a more rational, less humiliating reason why the officer came to her door, scared too that having the police round might reverse Sandra’s renewed friendship – no one round here likes or trusts the police. Ruth has been building up to asking Sandra outright what she’d done to upset her, and now that she won’t have to, she wants to keep it that way. She pushes the buggy at speed.
A car’s been abandoned on the road, its broken windscreen shedding onto the pavement. Bored kids probably, slashing seats and tugging out wires for the hell of it. Why not, there’s nothing else to do here, though Ruth can’t fathom why they keep crapping in their own pool when a few streets away are posher houses, each a rich well of opportunity. Most nights, groups of lads race up and down this long straight road on mopeds, the noisy engines like wasps in a jar, and sometimes they set fire to wheelie bins. By the time the fire brigade arrive, the gang have escaped down an alley to stash their bikes in the allotments at the back and run into their houses. No one on the street likes what they do but no one’s going to dob them in to the authorities either; there’s only one thing worse than being a victim and that’s involving the police. Occasionally Ruth’s seen figures on the railway sidings and once a campfire. At least the kids have some wilderness, somewhere to escape to and be real children without bothering anyone else.
Bess’s pushchair crunches over the glass gravel and a couple of rough-cuts lodge themselves in the plastic wheels. This is Bess’s normality; it might be all she ever knows. Ruth questions for the millionth time how she and Giles thought a good place to set up home was on the industrial edge of the city, so deep north-west it’s possible they’re not even in London. But before having a child, colonizing what they thought of as ed
gy or undiscovered parts of town had been exciting, like missionaries in the cult of gentrification. They were the early adopters, front runners of the still affordable, only this road has yet to see a glimmer of the place it’s predicted to become. There’ve been rumours of a big new development on the acres of railway sidings that parallel the backs of the houses, though every application so far has got snagged in council planning. No Costa has yet appeared on the high street, no M&S Foodhall, but when these shops do arrive, Ruth and Giles will have made their money and can ship out if they choose. Houses these days are investments, not homes, and this particular buy is a step towards their dream of a spacious semi in a leafy suburb. No wonder all the families who’ve lived here for generations scowl at Ruth’s potted Japanese maple and pastel-coloured watering can. They see the aspiration, they know what’s coming. They don’t want a makeover, they’re fine as they are.
Bess has pulled off her hat and is waving it in her hand. Cold wind sweeps across her head, her dark hair wispy like the half-grown feathers of a baby bird. Ruth peers down at the soft spot of skin covering her daughter’s still-forming skull. Only millimetres of cells separate the baby’s essence from the outside world – such poor design – and Ruth’s heart contracts with a feeling closer to terror than love. She stops to put the bonnet back on, crouching to plant a kiss on Bess’s cheek, lips sinking into the baby’s pillow of skin, a little mole on her cheek that makes her look even more adorable. Ruth begins to unravel the plastic rain cover to keep the air from touching her baby, but Bess predicts what’s coming and kicks her legs, hurling the mohair hat – Ruth’s favourite, an expensive gift from a work colleague – into a puddle of black water. The material soaks up the scum. No amount of disinfectant will ever make it clean again. Ruth stands, walks on, leaves the hat where it lies.
Ahead is the car wash that’s taken over the petrol station. A grubby banner has been tied to the rear wall: RAY’S HAND WASH AND VALET. The sign has come loose at one end and flaps in the wind. A small queue of cars edges into the main road, waiting to join the conveyor belt of soaking, scrubbing, rinsing and vacuuming. The process takes place underneath a floating roof that’s propped up by a peeling plaster colonnade; a modern-day Acropolis. Ruth wonders how long the station’s been out of service, how many years it’s taken for the weather to pick at the paint like this. An old-fashioned mangle stands in one corner of the forecourt and the workers crank the handle to wring blackened water from their cloths before wiping down the cars.
Shouting and beeping as traffic slows to pass the queue in the road. Men on the forecourt call to each other across the mechanical hiss of the jet wash. These same sounds reach Ruth’s house every day, signalling the start of a world that moves to a different rhythm than her own, her shift seemingly never-ending. One of the workmen flicks his rag in the air and the sonic boom reaches Ruth as a gunshot, jolting her back to a memory of last night’s scream. The scream she’s been told to ignore, the scream that didn’t exist, the very hearing of which is proof of her fragility. Her brain overlays an image on the forecourt of a woman running in the dark, being chased, grabbed, thrown to the ground. Ruth’s come to a standstill, her hands tight round the handles of the pushchair. But nothing happened last night. Ruth knows that, even if part of her refuses to believe it. Bess kicks her legs to move on and Ruth jerks forward.
Customers whose cars are being washed sit on plastic chairs outside the shop, and they glance up at Ruth as she approaches. The permission to pause in the cold sun on a fume-thick road seems to be giving them enormous pleasure. A woman in a business suit with briefcase at her side is bewitched by her smartphone. A man leans on a wall eating crisps, staring at his car being vacuumed. He gives Ruth the briefest attention before returning to his interesting day. ‘Don’t forget to lift the seats to get the crumbs,’ he calls to a man using an industrial vacuum cleaner with eyes painted on the machine that seem to follow Ruth as she passes. Cleaning man nods and car man nods back. Ruth wonders if the driver has children, and if they know he loves his car more than them. To one side of the shop, two Mercedes are parked, shined to a mirror. They’re here most days and must belong to the owners. Next to these vehicles is Liam’s white Range Rover, a big step up from the nondescript sedan he used to own when Ruth first met him. Sandra says they have a deal with the petrol station to park here where it’s easier to find space than outside their own gate.
Ruth’s thirsty, and she rummages in her bag for the bottle of water she filled before leaving the house. She’s packed an item for every possible Bess-emergency but forgotten the one thing she needs for herself. A section of the old shop at the petrol station is open to the public for basics: toilet roll, plastic bread, nuclear margarine. Customers getting their cars washed and kids on the street use it mostly, as does Ruth in emergencies, and today it’s easier to buy some water than go back home. Manholes patchwork the forecourt and planks have been laid over the uneven surface where the petrol pumps used to stand. Bess’s head wobbles as they cross the pitted and crumbling tarmac, her little neck hidden inside a roll of chubby skin. The gravel kicks up an ancient tang of petrol and Ruth strains not to rush from this toxic fog; there’s only home to go to and it’s better to be here than reunited with her own four walls so soon.
On the main road, a vehicle jumps into a space in the queue. Ruth opens the door of the shop as, behind her, two men shout at each other through car windows. Inside the shop, a man in a shiny tracksuit reads a paper behind the counter and another man in a business suit stacks the shelves. They look up as Ruth enters. The man in the aisle is shoving cans next to bread, squashing the loaves into un-buyable shapes. His colleague behind the counter is well groomed, eyelashes thick and mascara-dark, verging on pretty. Behind him, a glass-panelled door opens onto a small room where several men have plates of food on their laps. They’re relaxed and chatting, perhaps on their break, their clothes grubby from cleaning. Desiccated moths darken the plastic of a flickering strip light and an untidy desk at the back of the room is heaped with dog-eared tabloids and a couple of mobile phones. Hanging from the door handle is a spotty silk scarf, the femininity incongruous in the unapologetically masculine environment. Perhaps a customer dropped it by accident and it’s being kept here in case she returns.
Business must be booming, Ruth thinks, to fill all these people’s time, plus pay their bills and buy expensive cars. What would a wage from a place like this be? Would they need to supplement their income with another job? Perhaps some of the men have to sleep rough on the floor here, and if they do, maybe they heard the scream last night, the scream Ruth’s already assured herself didn’t occur, although assuring and convincing are two different things. She wants to ask if anyone heard, imagines filling the air with the question, the words perverse in this snug of Heinz and Hovis and Cadbury. Then, as if it doesn’t belong to her, Ruth’s mouth begins to move.
‘Does anyone stay here overnight?’ She blushes.
‘No.’ Pretty-man frowns behind the counter. ‘Of course not, this is a car wash.’
Ruth’s eyes flit around without landing on anyone. ‘I know, I just wondered – for security, I mean.’ She picks at the foam handle of the buggy. ‘Because I thought I heard something last night and I was worried.’ She looks up. ‘I called the police.’
One of the men sitting in the back room catches her eye and stops eating. Shelf-stacking man walks behind the counter. He’s taller and wider than the other man, with a puffy booze pallor. His suit bags around the elbows and knees as if he’s slept in it. The two form a wall in front of Ruth.
‘It was probably foxes,’ shelf-stacking man says, his voice smooth and reassuring. ‘They sound like screaming. There are animals here, because of the railway and the land. Lots of empty land.’
Reflected in the glass panel of the door behind them is Katty, the eldest of Monica’s children. She’s only about thirteen, but seems older, probably because she’s always out on her own, desperate for space away from her siblin
gs in their tiny house. Katty’s at Ruth’s back, and her reflection shows her holding her index finger next to her head and rotating the digit in a she’s cuckoo way. Ruth turns and Katty instantly drops her hand, the teenager well practised in the art of piss-taking as well as avoiding getting caught. In Katty’s other hand is a vaping pen. She walks to the counter, chooses a packet of Haribos from the multiverse of sweets, opens and eats them even though she hasn’t yet paid.
‘Hello, Katty.’ Ruth tries to keep the nervousness from her voice. ‘How’s your mum? How’s your baby brother?’
‘He’s in hospital, got some lurgy.’ Katty looks Ruth up and down without moving from her relaxed position. ‘Went to see him today.’ She talks through a mulch of sweets. ‘The doctors don’t know what it is, but he’s got spots all down his throat.’
‘Oh God, that’s terrible! I’m really sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ She turns to face the counter and continues eating.
The men watch Ruth in silence. She leaves the pushchair at the counter to get a bottle of water from the chiller and her mouth salivates at the cans of Coke. She grabs two, the tins deliciously slippery with cold. Bess grizzles. Ruth turns to see Katty with her finger in Bess’s mouth. Bess is sucking hard while Katty smiles at Ruth.
The Hidden Girls Page 3
