by Paul Magrs
Tom said all our time was ruined by my son and the things I wanted doing to the house. I just wanted it decorated. I thought he enjoyed decorating. He took such a pride. I knew Tom was sinking into depression the first time because the dining room took such a long time to finish. He slowed to a rate of one strip of paper a day. He did one, very slowly, and you could see him fret over how straight it was. Then he would go and watch Sky Sports for the rest of the day. Then he stopped leaving the house, and that put more strain on the rest of us. He said he thought he was anaemic and he had gone very white. I said, “Have you gone off the church? Because you used to love going there, you couldn’t keep away before.” And he loved running the club for the kiddies, but that was all finished with now. He didn’t get out much at all and it took him two months to get the dining room ready.
“Talk to me about something, woman,” he begged me the night he finished. I’d come in to see how the new room was.
“What do you mean?” I admired the wallpaper.
“Talk to me about something that isn’t your house or your son. Tell me something.”
He looked strange and like he wanted something else off me. I was scared almost, except that it was only Tom. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. I look back now and I think, that was the moment things could have been different. If I’d known what to say to him then. But what was the right thing? And what do I know? Compared with Tom and his grammar-school education, I’m an ignorant woman. I told him I was doing chops for his tea and he laughed in my face. He laughed high-pitched, like a boy.
The last time I went to the hospital, he said, “I decided I would never decorate anything else for you.” We were taking a walk around the grounds of the home. It’s a beautiful old building. It’s like something out of a film. Lovely walks. He took me on a turn around the lake, pointing out the deer across the misty fields. I almost felt relaxed. Until he started talking, talking with almost no gaps for me. “I decided that was it,” he said.
“That was all right,” I said. “The house was finished. We’ve a lovely home together and it’s all down to you.”
“You almost crippled me, woman.” He looked at me and what was in his eyes stopped up my voice. “Do you realise what put me in here? Do you?” He stopped in his tracks. “You’ve bored me stupid, you pathetic woman! You’ve got nothing to give me. You’re all curtain rails and cups of tea and cheese sandwiches and the News of the bloody World. And mowing that rubbish bit of garden out the back of your house. Is that all you want out of your life? Keeping that house of yours nice? Forcing me to make it right for you? Couldn’t you see what you did to me?”
“Tom,” I said, and I wanted to say more. He looked at me, waiting.
“You’ve no excuse, have you?” he snapped. “You don’t know any better. You don’t know what else to expect out of life.”
His face was all contorted. He burst into tears and then he ran away, back into the main building.
What was I meant to do then? Go in after him again?
I have my pride. I wouldn’t beg him to listen to me.
He thinks I’m an ignorant woman. He thinks I’ve nothing to say to him. Well, maybe I haven’t. I came away and caught the bus home. Left it a full week before I came to see him again. Then, this time, I brought my pal. I brought Fran.
When he was shouting at me, when he was saying, “Couldn’t you see? Couldn’t you see how miserable I was with you?” I wanted to tell him, Yes, Tom, I could always see how miserable you were. But I didn’t know what to do about it. How was I meant to know? Why does everyone want to know the answers from me?
They were made to wait in what looked to Fran like a rather grand hall. The woodwork was dark and shiny, like toffee hot from the oven. The floorboards creaked under-foot and there were stuffed animals lodged high in the walls. She could imagine coming down those stairs in a frock, Scarlett O’Hara, maybe music playing for a ball. Again that antiseptic smell, which spoiled the atmosphere. Beside her Elsie was scratching herself. Both sweatshirt sleeves were up to the elbows and Elsie rubbed the skin fiercely. When Fran looked the skin was blotchy. She wanted to tell Elsie to pack it in.
“They’ve never kept me waiting out here before,” Elsie said. “Something’s happened. Usually they’ve let me straight in to see him. Something has been going on.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t,” said Fran, though she wasn’t so sure. Every time she heard a yell or the thudding of feet from elsewhere in the building, she flinched. But the only other soul they had seen so far was the nurse who showed them where to sit.
The nurse was back. “You’re Elsie?” She smiled, and Elsie looked up, wondering why they didn’t have these nurses in proper uniforms.
“Has something happened to him?” Elsie asked, clutching both her elbows and hugging herself.
It was the fair on the waste ground that came every holiday weekend. They set up on Friday and there were three nights of noise and music and everyone trampling through the heavy dirt. Elsie always loved the penny arcades. She took Craig after school on the Friday, and then the next two nights. He watched as she played for ten-pence pieces and, when she made enough, he was allowed to run off to jump on a ride. Nothing too dangerous. Elsie would train herself not to go after him and watch, not to call him down and show him up. Once she had asked the man in charge of the shuggy boats to switch it off, to bring down her son, because as he was going round and round, she could have sworn that he looked upset. Everyone had laughed as she ran up to help him down. Afterwards she kept to the penny slot machines and wouldn’t look at him enjoying himself.
It was on the slot machines she met Tom. He had only just started out with the Rainbow Gang, helping the underprivileged kids on the estates to find God. He brought his Friday-night kids to the fair because they had all insisted. He abandoned the games and the songs he had planned for that night in the Methodists’ hall and gamely walked his flock of forty over to the waste ground instead. “Stay together!” he called when they arrived and as they dispersed suddenly, noisily, he realised he had no hope of rounding them up again. The Rainbow Gang for that night was ruined. As he walked around the fair, the sun going down and the coloured lightbulbs strung between booths and canopies coming on, he kept glimpsing the different members of his flock. They waved and yelled at him from dodgem cars and swinging chairs on the rides that reeled above him. Tom always waved back and shouted a greeting, but he wasn’t sure if they were taking the mickey out of him. When he saw his children at other times, in shops, in the post office, slouching on the corners of streets, and they shouted out loud hellos, he wasn’t sure then, either, whether he was the butt of their jokes. On the whole he didn’t mind. He was bringing them together. He gave them a place to meet every week. Kept them off the streets.
Elsie watched him work the one-armed bandit to her left. She admired his greased-back hair and his worn black leather jacket. He had dark-blue jeans that looked new and he seemed the sort of man that shaved very carefully. You could see just by looking. His sideburns were straight and level. He would shave, she thought, in very hot, soapy water, with an old-fashioned razor. She breathed in and, through the sawdust and sweaty smell of hot dogs, she could catch the scent of his Brylcreem. He looked up at her as he collected his winnings. She must have inhaled too loudly.
“I’m new to the town,” he said to her. “Would you mind coming round the fair with me?”
So even for a man of God, she thought later, he wasn’t backward at coming forward. She’d be delighted, she said, and they left the amusements behind, to walk through the busy fairground. When he grinned at her she saw he had very pointed wolfish teeth. “My vampire teeth,” he said, smiling, when she pointed them out and she thrilled at this.
Elsie found that she could talk to him easily. He was an interesting man, he had travelled, he knew many sorts of people, he had studied and he knew a thing or two. She loved to hear him talk and the way his sentences had fewer gaps and mistakes than hers. She wa
nted to ask, Do you make up what you’re saying beforehand? There was something fluid and easy about him. She felt led around and light on her feet and she found that his arm was at her back, urging her along. Then she shamed herself by hoping that they wouldn’t bump into Craig. She didn’t want to have to explain — not just yet — to Tom that she had a son of twelve. She imagined Tom looking her son up and down. Craig at twelve was chubby and his clothes ill-fitting. He covered his mouth with both hands whenever he smiled and he walked slump-shouldered, which only drew attention to that foot of his. Elsie was ashamed of herself, but she didn’t want Tom to see Craig yet. First she wanted to get used to this new feeling of lightness, of swishing through the fair with all its crowds and its black mud. She was wearing a long, flowery cotton frock, which billowed round her in the breeze. They came to the edge of the crowd. Diana Ross blared from the distant carousel. As Tom led her round the back of a chugging generator, they had to step gingerly over the brightly coloured cables that wound through each other in the grass. He kissed her long and deep and pressed himself up against her. She was surprised. He’d already told her he did something like Sunday school for the bairns. Things had changed since she was a bairn, of course.
“Can I be your vampire?” he asked, and laid his head on her breast. She was taken aback. Then she thought, He’ll have that hairgrease on my frock.
“Lets see your teeth again,” she said.
He grinned at her and they were really frightening.
“I have a son,” she said.
“You hardly look old enough.”
“He’s twelve.”
“Never!”
“I’ve had a life already, Tom.”
“Good.” He kissed her again.
“You’re not really a vampire, are you?”
He hugged her and she felt the bones down her back — was it vertebrae? — she felt them click, one at a time, not unpleasantly. “I am, I am,” he said.
This time there was definitely something different, something wrong. They had to go to see the woman in charge of the hospital. Elsie seemed to go inside herself as they entered the smart, book-lined office. She stared at the heavy green lamp on the woman’s desk. Fran had to do the talking. The woman in charge had neatly cut hair, no make-up, a dark jacket and skirt. Fran thought she looked like a woman in control, like a woman off a Lynda La Plante TV show. The woman smiled pleasantly and explained that she had been trying to contact Elsie all day.
On the way up the stairs, up the green carpet that was so soft you felt obliged to save it by walking on the edges, Elsie had been chuntering away to herself. She had said, “The thing I couldn’t stand would be that he’s dead. That he’s gone and done himself in, like he always said he would. He always threatened me with doing himself in. I even hid the scissors from him. But the last time I saw him he was so angry he ran away from me. I’d be so guilty if that was the last I saw of him.”
Now Elsie stared past the woman in charge at the black tree through her window.
The woman said, “The thing is, he’s vanished.”
What a draughtsman he was! He could draw you anything. He used to draw all the time, on whatever was to hand. If you left an old envelope lying about, the leccy bill or a magazine, you’d find it again with a little doodle on. He always had a pen in his hand. Like I said, he should have been an architect. “Draw me! Draw me!” I’d say, and strike a pose. If I was being too demanding, he would quickly draw something hideous, like a monkey, and tell me that’s what I was. He would do that to make Craig laugh, and sometimes Craig would. Other times Tom would spend hours drawing me carefully, with pen and ink, with pencils, with coloured crayons and everything. Careful hours staring at me and I would let him, imagining what he was setting down. One of them drawings we’ve got framed on the wall. Me in my white blouse. It was the one that looked most like me. I watched him work and he did it biting his bottom lip, so you could see his pointy teeth as he concentrated. They were digging into his skin and I could feel myself melting just looking at that.
Some of his drawings, mind, they made me look hideous. I found some he’d done and they gave me the creeps. They didn’t look like me at all. Like some horrible woman. But what a draughtsman he was!
The first time I brought him home, to see the house and to meet Craig, he used his drawing skills to break the ice. That’s what it must be like to have a talent. You can use it in social situations like that. That must make things a lot easier. I have no talents. Tom shouted at me once, in one row we had, that I had no gifts whatsoever. And I haven’t. No, that’s wrong. Everyone has gifts from God. That’s something Tom told me too. And I think I’ve the knack for talking to people. But Tom’s talent was something that could draw him closer to children especially. At the Rainbow Gang he would have the children queueing when he drew cartoons for them to colour in. Mickey Mouse and the Power Rangers and what have you. Anything they could ask for and he’d scribble it down in a flash. The kiddies thought he was marvellous. I said, “You should sell them drawings.”
When he came to tea with Craig and me the first time, we ate iced buns and salmon-paste sandwiches. Craig was being quiet. The telly was on in the corner, like it always is, but with the sound a bit lower. Next to his plate Craig had his Etch-a-Sketch out. Tom stared at it with interest. I thought Craig was too old for it at twelve, to tell the truth. It was one of the few toys of his that had lasted the years. Something his dad had bought him. It was a kind of plastic board, full of grey, shifting sand. You twiddled knobs to make a black line appear on the screen, you could draw things on it. All through tea Craig was twirling patterns on the screen of sand. And you could see it was just a mess he was making. Just to make a point, just to annoy me, when he knew I wanted him to pay attention to Tom.
“May I have a go?” Tom put his hand out.
Craig shrugged and passed over the Etch-a-Sketch. I watched Tom’s strong hands take it and place it before him. He shook it briskly to make the screen blank and ready. Smash it, I thought impulsively.
Tom pushed aside his tea things and set to work. He twiddled those buttons and knobs and soon he sat back, satisfied. He held up the screen for us both to see. I gasped. He had drawn the most wonderful giraffe.
Later that night I said goodbye to Tom at the front door. We thought it would be pushing it for him to stay the night.
“Let him get used to me slowly.” Tom smiled, holding me. “We’ve got the time. I’m going to be around a while.”
I couldn’t help smiling back at him. When Tom spoke to me like that it was just like hypnotism. I watched his mouth and his teeth and those deep eyes of his and I couldn’t dispute a word he said. There was a slow, magical charm to him and I know it was all to do with sex. And how do you explain that to your twelve-year-old son? How do you explain that it’s important to you to feel sexy now, when you haven’t for so long? Craig would look at me resentful and I’d want to explain, but I never knew the words for it. When Tom wasn’t there I’d start to feel ashamed of myself. That was why it was easier, at first, when Tom did move in. Alone with Craig I would feel accused of things. He’d be looking at me and thinking that I was a silly, middle-aged woman trying to be sexy. I wanted to say, What’s wrong with being sexy? You have to keep yourself sexy, and nice and healthy. It’s all good for you. He couldn’t see that then. I think he can now. It’s about how life goes on. I took that chance with Tom. I fought my son to keep him.
That night I went to clean up the tea table and I saw that Craig had gone back to his room. He hadn’t even moved his own plate and cup. Everything was left lying around for me. His Etch-a-Sketch was left on the table, too. He had given it a vigorous shake and cleared the screen.
They went back home on the bus bewildered. The woman in
charge of the home had told them she would keep in touch. Perhaps Tom had just wandered off. He might soon be back. This had happened before. Confused people became lost in the woods, in the grounds, in the fields about the house
here. It wasn’t unknown. It was only this morning he had wandered off. Perhaps he would be home by nightfall. They would let Elsie know what was happening.
“I was certain they were going to say he’d died,” Elsie said to Fran.
“Oh, don’t say that,” said Fran superstitiously.
“But you know what it’s like. When something’s wrong, and you dread the worst.”
“Yes.”
“If he’s out in this cold all night, he might die.”
“They’ll get him back.”
“Exposure. Hypothermia.” Fran couldn’t believe the people at the hospital were being so casual. Who knew how many people they let walk away. There could be any number of missing patients.
“Our best days,” Elsie said, “were Sundays, when he was still big on God. Some of the Rainbow Gang would be invited to our house. The favoured few. Tom would invite these kids and we would have a big family Sunday dinner. Some of those kids had hollow legs. They ate and ate and ate.”
Fran thought she was talking about Tom as if she’d never see him again.
He had wrapped himself up warm, knowing that he would have to traipse the whole distance to Aycliffe across fields. Hitch-hiking didn’t even occur to him because he didn’t hold with it. It put people — hitchers and drivers both — in compromising situations, which Tom hated. It was dangerous, he used to warn the children in his care, and pleaded with them never to try it. Newton Aycliffe is a town beside the wide motorway leading north. It lies between a whole number of roads elsewhere. What a temptation to stand at its perimeter and let someone take you off.
The fields were frozen again as night started to come down. He fastened up his coat, tugging his scarf into multiple knots. The coat was stolen from a room at the home. He checked the pockets for gloves and found some balled-up leather ones, and some rolling tobacco and papers. If he knew how to roll he might have had one, to warm the space of air around him. Instead he held the envelope to his nose and inhaled the scent of soft, brushy tobacco. When he started to walk again, he followed the ruts in the ploughed field, crunching through the ice. It was like thin spun sugar, cracking under his heavy shoes.
