Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  Sheila sipped on her drink. The two friends said nothing for a moment. Liza gazed off into the middle distance, lost in her thoughts. For all her tan, and her tight, aerobicised body, her careworn complexion was starting to show her age – or her distraction. She came to, quickly flashing another apologetic smile at Sheila.

  ‘Sorry. Miles away.’

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘Oh. No. Still adjusting back from holiday time.’ She forced another smile but her eyes were troubled. Sheila took another deep glug. When she put the glass down, Liza was looking at her intently.

  ‘What is it, Liza? You can tell me …’

  Liza glanced down at her glass, gave a little snort while she made up her mind but then, clearly and decisively, swallowed the urge to confess – whatever it was. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Is it Vernon? Is everything OK?’

  She seemed to bridle at this. ‘Well, your husband’s job is safe, if that’s what you mean. For now …’ Liza gulped hard.

  Sheila got to her feet, went to her. She took her hand and looked into her eyes. ‘No. That’s not what I meant at all.’

  Liza gulped again, her eyes watering over. ‘Sorry.’

  Sheila took the glass from her hand, leant across for the bottle but Liza caught her wrist. She put her arms around Sheila and hugged her.

  ‘Oh God, darling. It’s such a mess.’

  Unsure how to react, Sheila felt the sinews of Liza’s arms and neck pressing into her, tight to snapping point. Keen to extricate herself from the hug, Sheila sprang up, poking at Liza’s upper arm. ‘Here,’ she soothed. ‘Sit back. Let’s see if we can loosen this up a bit.’ Positioning herself behind Liza’s narrow back, Sheila dug her thumbs into her friend’s shoulders, kneading and plying the taut muscle. Gradually, she let her neck fall slack, drifting off in a reverie while Sheila probed and caressed.

  ‘Wow, yes …’ she said. ‘That is really doing it for me …’ She let out a girlish chuckle and tilted her head right back so her scalp was grazing Sheila’s breasts. ‘I’m drunk,’ she whispered.

  Sheila continued to manipulate her tense lower neck, her earlobes. With minimal restraint, Liza began to writhe beneath her touch. Sheila scratched behind her ear, aware she was making love to her now, not caring, wanting to make her purr again. Liza strained back, lifting her lithe hips from the floor. Sheila could see right down her top to her breasts, freckled from the sun, straining against the fabric. Lightly, only grazing her skin with the membrane of her lips, she kissed her neck. And when Liza did not object she kissed her again, scraping her scalp with her long fingernails. Liza went limp now, letting it all happen to her. Instinctively, Sheila went to slide her hand across her stomach. Liza’s hand clamped down, stopping her. She sat up, hair tousled, eyes squiffy. She looked Sheila up and down with a mixture of love and fear. A second’s hesitation, then the two women tore into each other in one crazed, impassioned kiss. Then Liza was pulling away again.

  ‘Oh my God! God. Sheila. Where the fuck did that come from?’

  Sheila couldn’t look at her. There was a long, loaded silence. Liza got to her feet. Sheila could feel her eyes pleading with her to meet her gaze, but she couldn’t look up. She picked out an amber-glowing plastic coal and fixed her eyes on it and sat there, dead still.

  ‘I … I can’t. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so very sorry, Sheila. I’m going to go now.’ She paused in the doorway again. Sheila didn’t move a sinew until long after she heard the door click shut behind her.

  Twenty-one

  Robbie’s head thumped wildly as he pulled into Hayes Close. The gig at Blackburn had been a success. They’d offered him a residency, good lol too and to cap it all off he and Jodie had pulled into a lay-by on the way home and had the best sex of his life. But now, his mind was spinning. It was Christmas, he should feel merry, he should feel something. But all he felt was trapped. Trapped by the aspirations of his wife and kids; trapped by what was expected of him, especially this time of year. It was all about stuff – stuff that he had to get, stuff he had to deliver else he’d have failed. All the other fellas at work seemed electrified, convincing themselves they could buzz off their kids, mad excitement. But not Robbie. It all seemed wrong. And part of what made it wrong – a big part of it – was himself. His failings. The way he’d let his family fall away before they’d even got going. He’d let that happen. He’d allowed it. He’d be sat there on Christmas Day, carving a big, succulent turkey, with a cheerful brood he cared little for, wishing himself elsewhere.

  Robbie was trapped more than anything by his own refuge from all this. His escape from reality was Jodie. But she was his jailer now as well as his sometime lover. Lover – hah! Time and again since Blackpool he’d tried to shake her off, but she was always there, knowing where he’d be, knowing how to get to him: a drink, a roll-up, a bunk-up, a silly joke, sure to make him guffaw; and how he needed to guffaw these days, the primal and cathartic release of a man pent up. His bladder seemed to swell as the house came into view, reminding him all over that here his children slept, excited for Christmas, unaware that their father was slowly killing himself. He stopped outside the Bishops’, steadied himself against the lurch of his hangover and fired a dark, polluted stream of Jodie’s whiskey into the thick of their holly bush. He smiled as he zipped himself up.

  He hesitated outside the house. The silence and the dirty sepia light flushing the mottled windows gave out a sense of a safe, secure, family unity. If only. He inserted his key quietly, careful not to wake Ellie. The last thing he needed was her expectant little face, beseeching him to take her out walking. He wouldn’t be right for the day until he’d had at least a few hours’ kip. He’d do the usual – bed himself down on the sofa until dawn broke, then slip upstairs to his guilty limbo next to Sheila.

  Robbie didn’t see her at first, sitting dead still on the couch, staring out at the nothingness of the garden. He snapped on the light and jumped back, shocked. He stared at her, knowing it was her but unable to grasp how that was his Sheila sat there. ‘Fuckin’ hell! What have you done?’

  Sheila’s heart raced away from her. Her first thought was that he knew – knew what had taken place in this very room, only hours before. But then she followed his eyeline, and remembered. Laughably, out of sheer habit she found herself explaining, apologising. ‘It’ll drop. It’ll grow out.’

  ‘Jesus. What happened? What did you do …?’

  She glanced at herself in the mirror, the dim light picking out the whites of her eyeballs, her teeth. She looked like a savage. Weirdly disembodied from the moment her eyes flickered back over Robbie’s puce-red face. But this time she made no attempt to placate him, to diffuse the imminent dispute. The fact that he felt entitled to an opinion enraged her. Yet she didn’t shout. She crushed the vitriol and said, ‘What do you care, anyway?’

  ‘What do I care?’ He steeled himself up. ‘You’re my fucking wife, Sheila!’

  She eyed him, bitter, disappointed. ‘Am I?’

  He was not expecting that. He sat down.

  She carried on glaring at him, cold and furious. Hating him. ‘Who else is your wife?’

  He stared up at her, eyes on the verge of popping. He’d never been a great liar. He looked away. ‘What you on about, stupid?’

  She knelt down in front of him, looked right into his eyes. ‘Who else, Robbie?’

  He wouldn’t look at her. He shut his eyes tight.

  ‘Who is she?’

  Robbie got up, went to say something and paced back out into the hall. Ellie was sitting on the stairs.

  ‘Is it time?’ She grinned. Robbie scooped her up, smothered her with kisses and placed her gently back down. He let himself out, walking on, out through the dull grey cold, no notion where to go. All that was important was to have a target, a focus, something to aim at next. The canal. After that could wait. He pushed on, head and throat clotted with hurt.

  Everything was grey and grieving, the sky streaky and miserabl
e. The canal was starting to thaw. Dirty icebergs bobbed along the oil-choked flow of the narrow waterway, groping to stay afloat among the debris of crushed cans and cellophane chip trays – the dregs of last night. Robbie was desperate. Every house wore lights or decorations, singing out the joys of Yuletide. He felt none of it. None. He headed over the locks, aching and hungry for Jodie’s musty embrace, the lover he no longer loved.

  Twenty-two

  It was the last day of term. From his store-room lair, Vincent heard the scrape and shuffle of chairs along the dining-hall floor and the clang of plates being stacked away as the noisy diners emptied out into the playground. He heard the giddy whispering of boys who had managed to sneak back into the corridor sail past his cubbyhole and pause at the tuck shop, trying to rattle its shutter free. The braying laughter of teachers welled up in the pipes that ran from the staffroom. All of these sounds seemed magnified and hyperreal, and with them came the faintest whiff of some remote shard of misgiving – so slippery, so tenuous that it would ebb away before he could properly register it.

  Vincent put down his jotter and looked around the room with new suspicion. There was nothing tangible to point to intrusion, yet the hollows and silences of his lair were suddenly stained by something nearby. The smell appeared again, softly spreading like a rustle around him. A stretch of silence where nothing stirred, not even the pipes, but then the fresh beat of footsteps from the corridor beyond. The steps seemed to quicken with his pulse. The smell drifted all round him once more, thickening to a soup. As the footsteps grew louder and closer, he suddenly recognised the smell. It was him. It was the stench of dread.

  The creak of the door handle being pulled down shot through him like a current. He snubbed the light from his pocket torch and shrank back into the muggy silence, stiff with fear. The door opened, cast a band of light across the floor, then closed and sucked the room back into darkness. Vincent felt his lungs seize up, his chest clenching with terror. He bit hard on his lip, and tried to master the old man’s rasp of his chest. His inhaler was way out there, out of reach, in his desk. He saw two silhouettes advance across the room. A boy and a girl. They stopped at the gym horse, giggling, whispering. And he recognised the voices then. It was Simon. Simon Blake and Isobel Cohen. His heart banged out of kilter. Then a flame shot forth and lit up the room.

  The flame tilted back then died. Vincent squinted through the slats of half-light. He could no longer see them, they had receded into the groggy shadows of the room but he could see the talons of smoke streaming from the red eye of the fag they were sharing, dancing from mouth to mouth. Vincent’s heart beat louder and faster till he could no longer hear anything else in his ears. There was a long breathless moment and then the room was suddenly flooded with light.

  He heard his name being dragged out from the pits of her stomach. Had the boom of his heart given him away? Or had he simply called out in the reeling oblivion of his fear?

  ‘It is you! Fucking Gaylord, would you believe it? You were spying on us!’

  Vincent pulled himself up, his legs buckling to jelly. ‘I wasn’t,’ he stated weakly. ‘And just so you know, I haven’t seen a thing.’ He mugged a smile. ‘Mum’s the word.’

  Simon came flying towards him, kicking his way through the rubble of old Christmas decorations and medicine balls. ‘What you saw? And what did you see, Bud Bud?’

  Isobel lurched towards him, grabbed him by the collar and shook him violently. She’d tossed away the cigarette but its incriminating stink poured all over him. ‘Cos I know what I saw. We saw what you were doing in here, didn’t we, Simon?’

  ‘Yeah. You were playing with yourself.’

  Vincent peered out at her from beneath the cowl of his fringe, angry now. ‘Whatever,’ he mumbled and muscled past them.

  ‘Pervert!’ Isobel screamed at him then pushed him out into the corridor.

  Vincent had nowhere to go but the playground. He hung by the doorway, cowering against the fierce silvery light like a hunted animal smoked out of its den. The refuse sheds and the safety of the bins lay on the other side of the school. There was no way he could make it there, not now the playground was in full throttle. If he could just make it through till the end of lunch though, he could get a plan together. If he could get through today, the last day of term, he’d go back to spending the rest of next term hidden away in those stinking, freezing sheds.

  Skirting the walls like a shadow, Vincent was able to steal round the infant block to the blind side of school by the playing fields. He shrank back into a crevice and contemplated his watch. Fifteen minutes to survive. Fifteen minutes for them to find him and flog him. Time dripped by. He slid his head around the corner, willing the dinner lady to brandish her whistle. That same foreboding funk hung over him, bringing him out in goosebumps. He could feel it deep inside, that animal sense of danger – and survival, urging him to flee across the playing fields, deep into the woods. He looked out across the battlefield. Would he make it? What would happen if he just went to ground, out there? Would the police be brought in?

  He rose to a half-crouch and inched towards the lip of the fields. He was edgy now, jumping back and forth, unable to make a decision. He threw his blinking eyes up to the heavens, scouring the roiling hulks of cloud for some kind of sign. And it came. A ball rolled round the corner, stopping centimetres from his foot. The slap of chasing footsteps pushed him back into the hollow, flattened him to the wall. A lad came tearing round the corner, a diminutive little ginger nut with his two front teeth missing. He was nothing, but Vincent was instantly at his mercy, pleading with his eyes. The lad gave Vincent a reassuring close-lipped smile, retrieved the ball and capered off. But Vincent already knew. The heroic buzz of leading the mob towards its victim was going to prove too delicious for this small boy to resist. He cocked an ear and waited for the signs: the clamour, the mounting stampede from the far reaches of the playground, the hooves and cries steaming closer and closer. And it didn’t seem so bad. Just like that, he came out and began to walk easily towards his fate. In offering himself up he was at least denying the mob the thrill of the chase. As he came round the corner, they were already roaring towards him, their battle cries carried high above the playground.

  Sheila waited for Vincent at the school gates, heart pounding. The bell sounded and the school exploded into the playground. A cold knuckle of fear pressed up against her neck. All day long she’d been clutching the envelope, madly excited for him, anticipating the celebration party she was going to throw for her son – Vincent Fitzgerald, the writer. Not once had she stopped to consider the possibility that he might not have won. Standing at the school gates now with the wind licking her damp neck cold and the moment of truth so terrifyingly imminent, she wasn’t so sure all of a sudden. She was sick with dread.

  Vincent looked shocked to see her. His hair was ruffled, his top lip encrusted with a faint trail of blood. He walked quickly in front, refusing to answer her questions, eager to march round the corner and out of sight. Sheila pressed Ellie, her tone soft and encouraging. ‘Do you know anything about this? Has Vincent been in a fight, honey?’

  Ellie shrugged her shoulders, looked away guiltily. Then unable to resist the lure of another drama, she reneged on her pact with Vincent and told. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ Her bottom lip quivered.

  ‘It’s OK, honey, I know that. Just tell me what happened? How did it start?’

  ‘It was one of the twins. I don’t know which one.’

  There was a long loaded pause while Sheila digested the unthinkable.

  ‘Not Liza’s twins?’ Her heart boomed. She could barely keep the dread from her voice. Ellie nodded. ‘Vincent was fighting with Liza’s girls?’

  ‘Not just them, there were big boys too. But they were the ones who were kicking him the hardest.’

  ‘Kicking him? Why on earth would they do that, Ellie?’ Panic and rage had crept into her voice. Ellie dropped her head, afraid she was in trouble. ‘It’s OK, Ellie, I�
��m not mad at you. Just tell me what happened.’

  ‘I don’t know what happened. They were kicking him and calling him a name and then the dinner lady came and everyone ran away.’

  ‘A name? What kind of name?’

  Ellie focused on removing a stub of gum from her sleeve, reluctant to meet her mother’s gaze. ‘Vincent said I’m not to say it again. It’s a very bad word.’

  Sheila didn’t need to ask what it was, she knew instinctively. But surely this couldn’t be happening here, not here in Thelwall? She curbed the impulse to head back up the school path and thrash this out with the headmaster. Had the culprits been reprimanded? Why hadn’t she been called in? And as for Liza, did she have any idea? She would have to be told. But not now and not today. She put on a smile and forced some levity into her voice. ‘Well, whatever it was, Ellie, I’m sure it will have all blown over by the time you come back to school next term.’ Then, with her heart smashed to a thousand fragments, she caught up with Vincent. Resisting the urge to reach out and touch his wrecked, broken face, she handed him the envelope.

  He refused to open it in front of them. He ran ahead with the house key while Sheila carried his school bag. She felt certain he’d be unable to hold out that long. She pictured him rushing round the corner, hunkering down against a wall and tearing it open. She half expected his head to bob back round any moment. But with each step that didn’t happen and with every step closer to home, she began to fear the worst. How foolish she’d been. How silly, just to assume. And today of all days. When she turned into the close and saw his bedroom light on, her heart sank further. It was over. He’d have come out to tell them, if there was anything to tell. He’d have been halfway down that road, grinning. She squeezed Ellie’s hand – and Ellie wondered what was wrong this time.