by Helen Mort
3.15. He stopped. Half an hour passed in silence before he went back to his vigil.
The crossings-out across the grainy print on the screen, the public access police statements. Pages of bad handwriting. Emphatic statements with large, curved ticks over them.
Struck through: Still we received no information. Written over the top: We still did not know exactly what had occurred.
Then the passages that reminded him of the way he’d write, the way he’d put things. Sentences he thought he might have said.
I talked with a London woman and her friend, they were the Liverpool club London section. They had chips and shared them. I joked about my diet.
Some of the statements were written on a typewriter, the lettering small and squat.
An Inspector appeared and ordered us to go and clear the bridge over the Don, which was packed with supporters. They were simply waiting. Twelve of us cleared the bridge, very diplomatically. The bridge filled up behind us with fans … I felt that his decision to clear the bridge was totally wrong and that a riot could easily have started. I remained there until the last of the bodies had been removed.
Sometimes he would read something and hear the voice behind it.
I then saw several people pressed against the fencing obviously being crushed and to one side of the centre was a pile of bodies all blue faced white skinned clothing disarrayed apparently dead. It looked as if they had been stacked neatly at first resemblant of scenes from the concentration camps of WW2.
Often, he read things and they did nothing to him at first, or just made him feel like there was a cool stone lying flat in the bottom of his stomach. Then the words would come back to him, pulling up to the garage or waiting in line at the bakery while the girl – a daughter of a friend, he was sure – was splitting open cobs and buttering them. Like that, the rest of the world going quiet. A voice he almost recognised, a voice that might have been his own.
I said, ‘We’re going to have to do something, someone is going to die.’ ‘They’ll die at the turnstiles,’ he spoke. I can remember what he said.
In the library, he had to check himself, make sure he wasn’t speaking out loud. Some days, his notebook stayed blank, open on the table.
Other times, he remembered everything he did all day. Too well. He walked down The Moor as if someone was watching him and ducked into the shops. He spent as long as possible in the back room at work, pretending to count the stock. He didn’t go to The Byron or, if he did, he went when he knew Sandra wouldn’t be on her shift, and he took a newspaper and held it high in front of his face. Crossing the street, he’d glance back, wondering if his route through the city seemed logical. He saw the same man – tall, thin, mid-thirties, with a long ginger beard – twice between the town hall and the roundabout, and he quickened his pace.
He visited the library café only once. It was a bare place on the ground floor with red plastic seats fastened to the floor, walls covered in posters about healthy eating – a large image of a green apple that looked plastic. There was one other man in there and he stared at the back of his head, a bobble hat pulled down over the dark, wiry hair. The shape of him, his rolling shoulders and the strange thinness of his arms, reminded him of a madman in a taverna in Greece, four or maybe five years ago, the one who steadied himself on the edge of their table and then sat down. He kept saying the same phrase over and over in Greek. His eyes were deep. Not piercing exactly, just vivid, as if they went a long way back into his head. Perhaps he was not mad at all, that was just a word the other diners used. The café owner moved him along, flapping a dishcloth after him as if he was a stray dog. When they asked what the words had meant, the owner told them: ‘He is saying “They silenced me.”’
Thinking of it now, he wished they had let him sit down.
In the café there was no sound, except the man who faced steadfastly away from him, slowly drinking his pint of tea. When he walked back upstairs to his computer station, his hidden place, the sign on the wall urged SILENCE in black letters. He began to read again, hoping nobody could hear him.
Sharrow Vale
I’m full of things that mattered to people once. Some of them were loved and some weren’t. The yards and glass rooms of the antique shops that display them are jammed between converted garages selling coffee and sourdough and tiny art galleries. The girl always comes on her own. The woman, I mean. On Saturdays, when it rains, she walks past the open doors of The Lescar, the smoke and laughter of the beer garden, and steps into one of the yards. There are two Weimaraners keeping guard, impossibly blue eyes and alert, quizzical faces. She looks bored, but she fondles the brooches and bric-a-brac with care, asks what exactly the expensive paintings cost. She is small, built for strength, and she likes compact objects best. Squat vases, an ashtray in the shape of a frog. Sometimes she raises a hand to her face, touches her nose ring as if to remind herself it’s still there. She stands for hours in an outbuilding that the shop owner had to open specially for her, stands beneath a huge painting of the Ascot horse races, a multicolour scene in which everything is happening at once, slanted bodies in bowler hats, the diagonal charge of the horses, bright tickets attached to the frame. She never buys anything. Sometimes she walks towards the till, but she doesn’t commit to it. Hats and matchboxes. Things she loves, but can’t justify. Behind her, impatient drivers go too fast down Hickmott Road. A child stands with her hands pressed flat against the window of a doughnut shop. The woman asks the antiques dealer to show her something, fetch something from the storeroom and when he’s gone she slips out.
Alexa
If Alexa smoked, this would be the time to light up. Leaning against the fence outside Wild Walls, listening to her own breath. The windows of the ex-warehouse were open and she could hear climbers falling off and slamming into the plastic holds. Someone was shouting Take! Someone else was yelling Hold me there!, which could almost be intimate if you didn’t know what it meant.
The girl had been missing since Friday. Her face was on every lamp post round here, all the way through Brightside and Atlas. For all the good it would do. She was thirteen. From Rotherham. She had a face that was older than her. Eyeliner. Crusty mascara. Her name was Maria.
Alexa stared until Maria’s photo stared her out. Having MISSING printed under your face changes it forever. When the picture was taken, Maria was probably at home in the school holidays, smiling up at her mum and brother. But now she was missing, you couldn’t help seeing it in her eyes. Maria looked like she was expecting someone else to walk into the photo.
Alexa watched the cars crawl down to the roundabout, indicators too bright in the twilight. Left to Meadowhall, right to the city. Being in the police was bad for you, she thought. It made you wonder who might be in every car. It made you listen for other people’s silences through their windows and wonder if they were friendly silences or not.
She tipped back her head and exhaled her imaginary cigarette.
A slim girl with a severe haircut careered out of the entrance to Wild Walls and almost took Alexa out. She was about Alexa’s height and build, but her face was rounder and her pixie crop made her look boyish. Her cord trousers were too baggy and her sleeves almost hid her hands – it was as if she didn’t want anyone to see the shape of her. She got into a battered Micra and slammed the door. You could hear the tremble of the radio over the car’s tinny engine. Alexa always wondered where strangers were going and who they were going home to. Maybe that went with policing, too. Or perhaps it was just her. She used to play a guessing game as a kid in the supermarket with her dad. She’d make up names for people and tell him what they were doing later. Her dad never wanted to play. He must have been embarrassed. The girl in the Micra looked like an off-duty nurse. Someone whose patience was always worn out by midday. The car was flecked with mud, so she must live out in the Peak. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere that ought to make her happy but didn’t.
While she was watching the Micra edge down the hill, Caron sidled
out of Wild Walls with a bright green rope coiled over her shoulder and a pen tucked behind her ear.
‘Boo.’
‘You took your time.’
‘Lighten up, officer. I was working on a bouldering problem.’
‘What kind of problem?’
‘The kind you can’t solve in a night. A slab with no holds on it.’
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed Alexa’s cheek. She’d started doing that in public recently. There was something oddly formal about it. Alexa never kissed back. It was OK to lean up to someone, but leaning down to peck someone on the cheek seemed somehow patronising. They walked out of the car park and turned right. Alexa was wheeling her bike along. It was miles into town, but she always liked walking next to Caron, keeping pace beside her, while she detoured to walk along low walls or took running leaps at puddles.
Caron gestured to the lamp-post pictures. ‘That your doing?’
‘Not mine exactly, but yeah, she’s the concern of the police. She’s called Maria.’
‘Where do you think she is?’
Alexa shrugged. ‘In a hotel somewhere in the West Riding. That’s where they found the last one. She was with four different men.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Thirteen.’
Caron didn’t say anything about her day and Alexa didn’t say anything much about hers. They walked along the ring road, past the multicoloured Tesco and the empty office spaces and the empty warehouses, under the bridge that led back to the city centre, the small shops and buildings that were still used. By the Wicker, someone had stuck up posters about a missing cat. Dennis. Black and White. Last seen being helped across the road on Tuesday. Alexa wondered how you help a cat across a road. There were no posters about Maria in this bit of town. She was starting to feel faint, as if her head was in a bubble. Or her legs weren’t part of her own body. The lights from the cars and the shops all stood out too much.
Caron stopped outside Bargain Booze.
‘We should get some supplies. Party drinks.’
‘Sure.’
‘What do you fancy?’
‘That Desperate beer. You know. The one with tequila in.’
‘Desperados!’
Alexa watched Caron through the window of the shop as she paid, the way the cashier couldn’t help smiling at the pen tucked into her hair, her hands still white with chalk from the wall. She liked watching her as if it was the first time and they were nobody to each other, as if this was Weston Park and the last year of uni again, Leyton and Caron flat on their backs in the short grass puffing out smoke and her approaching them, imagining for a daft moment Caron’s hair was on fire.
Caron came out with two packs of Desperados and a bottle of Shiraz. Balanced on top of them was a pack of beef jerky.
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
* * *
The party was at a peeling terrace somewhere on Abbeydale Road. When they got close, there was a girl leaning out of an upstairs window, cackling, and a group of men in paint-stained fleeces huddled outside the front door, holding cans of Carling. The house belonged to a friend of Matt’s, someone he worked with in Rope Access. Alexa had met some of his mates before. She liked them, but she thought they were nutters. She wondered what it was like to spend every day up a girder or a crane, high above the roofs. You probably had to stop noticing the view after a while. Matt said some of them took coke on quiet days to make the work more exciting. They were always short men for some reason, strong and nonchalant. Most of them didn’t meet your eye. As they walked up the garden path, Alexa was conscious of her scraped-back hair. She pulled the elastic band out and let it fall limp over her shoulders. She must smell of the police station, of stale sandwiches and instant coffee and Dave’s sweat. He had the kind of smell you could catch.
As soon as they were in the hallway, Caron slipped away from her in the crowd, taking their booze to the kitchen. The stairs looked far too steep. There was a kid on the top step, dancing on his own to an imaginary rhythm. He kept stepping both feet down and then up again. He had his eyes closed, but he never stumbled. On the bottom step, two women who looked like climbers were passing a bottle of white wine back and forth, whispering about something that was probably less than it seemed. Alexa picked an empty cup off the hall table, for the sake of something to hold.
When she caught up with Caron, she was in the kitchen watching a huge man open bottles of San Miguel with his teeth. He’d done three already. Everyone was clapping. His face was flushed with effort. Caron winked at her.
‘Beats a keyring. Take your pick.’
Alexa swiped a bottle and squeezed in next to her.
‘I keep losing you,’ she said.
Caron could pass through parties as if she belonged in every room. She never made a conversation last too long, never asked unnecessary questions. She gave the impression of being interested, even when she wasn’t, of being surrounded by people even when she was making her own way through the house, more or less alone. They’d always separated from each other at these dos. Tonight shouldn’t be any different.
‘Your hair looks better tied back.’
Alexa shrugged. ‘It makes me feel like I’m still at work.’
‘I know. It’s a turn-on.’
Parties like this always had someone who knew three chords playing guitar, while someone who could really play, but was too drunk, conducted from an armchair. A couple shouting requests and getting the song names wrong. Alexa thought she could hear banjo music from the living room. In the kitchen, someone was telling the large bloke it would be more impressive if he could open bottles with his cock.
It was at a party like this one that Alexa had first felt that twinge of compassion and excitement that was possible when you saw your partner animated by someone else. That faint stirring and warmth that started somewhere below your heart and seemed to move upwards through your body. Caron had told her that there was a man she was interested in and wanted to kiss at the party, to see what happened afterwards. Alexa had registered it in the abstract, but when she’d come to find the two of them and Caron was sitting on his lap in the attic room, Caron’s eyes were shining and her face was alight. The man was attractive in the way tall dark men are supposed to be, his face and beard built for bad weather, his eyes incredibly green, his skin permanently tanned. But it was something about the way they sat together that started the feeling. Like their bodies didn’t just fit around each other, they grew to fill the same spaces. She felt a laugh bubbling inside her, genuine and bright. That night, Caron seemed to hold her even tighter than usual in bed and she got that jigsaw-piece feeling again.
Alexa slunk off to the living room, leaving Caron with Matt’s mates in the kitchen. One of them was demonstrating a hand jam in between two cupboards. The lounge was the darkest room in the house; someone had lit a few candles that teetered dangerously close to the edge of the table and they’d draped some sort of sheet or fabric over the window, giving everything outside an eerie red quality. Someone was playing cards on their own, cross-legged. Someone else was wedged between the sofa and the wall, squeezed tight in the gap, rocking slowly to the beat from the radio. The back of the room was entirely dominated by a group of older men – climbers, surely – laughing too loud; and Alexa recognised the girl from the climbing wall on the edge of the group, the one with short hair and a pissed-off look. Without knowing why, she found she was watching. The tilt of her face. The way the bloke on her right liked to punctuate his sentences by slapping her on the back. It was as if the whole room wanted to impress her, but they didn’t know why.
Leyton appeared at her shoulder. ‘You look like you need a shot,’ he said.
It was slivovitz. Slovakian plum brandy. The taste of plums and then the afterburn, the dry heat. The first shot made her smile. The second made her shoulders drop. The third one made her throw her arms around Leyton and try and make him dance with her. The fourth made her irritable, scanning the house for C
aron. She went to find the bathroom. She thought she saw her on the upstairs landing, laughing with a younger woman with blue hair in plaits, touching her shoulder, touching her face. But she was drunk.
By the fifth shot, she was on another side of the room, talking to a bloke her dad’s age and the girl with the pixie crop and sarcastic expression about why climbers were shit. The climbers were all agreeing with her and the conversation was a muddle of anecdotes about forgotten birthdays, sick days spent at Burbage, doomed relationships with women who thought Sundays were for roasts and telly. The short-haired girl wasn’t really joining in, but she cracked a thin smile occasionally. Alexa realised she was addressing her with all her slurred remarks. Leyton passed her another slivovitz.
‘Climbers are shit?’ he said. ‘Did I hear that right?’
‘Yeah. Cheers. Down the hatch.’
‘What do you think? Leigh, isn’t it?’ Leyton was looking at the girl with the short hair, too. She shrugged.
‘Shit,’ said Alexa, leaning in to him. She nodded at the girl. ‘You should ask my partner. Or my dad. He used to climb. Maybe still does.’ She turned to Leyton for approval. ‘Shit,’ she said again, for effect.
He put his arm around her and helped her to the floor. Alexa sat with her eyes closed and let everyone else’s conversation wash down over her face. She’d thought she was interested in the girl, in Leigh, but she knew now she wasn’t interested in anything. All she could see with her eyelids shut was the poster of Maria. Her broad mouth. Her pink hairclip. Maria standing up and stepping out of her own photograph. Now she was walking down a long white corridor with a bad carpet and lights that were too bright. There were doors on either side of her, doors that opened and shut. A man in every room. Most of them looked at Maria and just closed the door. But at the end of the corridor, there was a darker panelled door and it was ajar. Behind it Alexa could see movement, bodies like shadows. Maria kept walking towards the end of the corridor, straight ahead of her. She didn’t look at any of the other doors, any of the room numbers. 8, 10, 12. The corridor counted for her. 14, 16, 18. The door at the end was the only one that didn’t have a number on it. Maria walked slowly but purposefully. She reached the end of the corridor and stepped into the gap. And the wall closed around her, easy as a hand.
