Kansas in August

by Patrick Gale

  Her face fell. ‘Oh shit, I’m sorry,’ she said.

  So did his. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got to go out for a bit. That was work on the ’phone.’

  ‘Work?’ he demanded.

  This was definitely not the moment to tell him what she really did.

  ‘Yes. There’s a bit of an emergency, you see. A man put his back out and I’m the only one on call tonight. It’s very near here, in fact. I’ll be back within the hour.’

  ‘I thought you only worked during the day, visiting hospitals.’

  ‘Well, I do, but sometimes I have to work at nights too, for overtime.’ She started to look for her coat and some dry shoes. She hated PC Rivers, but at the same time she suspected that Andrew was about to prove extremely childish and was prepared to hate him too. ‘Now I must rush. Make yourself at home. There are candles in the drawer of the table if the lights go out. The telly’s on the blink, but the radio works … sort of. It is sweet of you to buy supper. I’ll be back by nine at the latest.’ No, Henrietta, that’s quite wrong. ‘But look …’ she blurted on. ‘Don’t bother to make it unless you really want to.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, dumping the bag on the floor. ‘I won’t.’

  He turned on his heel and stalked out, leaving the door ajar. She stood listening to him stepping into the lift.

  ‘Andrew?’ she said, then louder, ‘Andrew? Wait a bit.’

  The lift door closed as she hurried on to the landing. The lights over the door were clicking on and off. Three. Two. If she raced down the stairs and risked breaking her neck, she might just catch him. One. G. But there again, he had been absurd. She walked round the flat switching off lights. It wasn’t her fault if PC Rivers thought someone was anti-socially deranged. Andrew hadn’t even waited for an explanation; she hadn’t asked him to buy supper. She locked the flat door. It was sweet of him, though. She summoned the lift. G. One. Two. Darkness pounced. The lift halted in the shaft with a moan and a belch. Henry began to grope her way down the stairs. She would have to call Paris on her return.

  It was no surprise to find that the Grosvenor Estate had no emergency generator. It was solely by the light of her head-lamps that Henry found her way along Vanbrugh Drive and made out the tin title of Walpole Tower in the near-blinding rain. There was precious little sign of Constable Rivers. Precious little sign of anyone.

  Henry turned up the collar of her mackintosh, pulled out her torch and scurried on to the porch. The wind was rising, whipping the water against the sides of the building. She leaned against the heavy swing doors and found herself in the stairwell. For a tower block with forty flats, there was an eerie lack of the common signs of life. No children raced on the stairs. No youths fooled with the lift. No women ran outside to save their soaking washing. No one welcomed anybody home or called anyone in to supper. Thin brushes were taped to the edges of the doors to keep out the draught, but the wind still came through, catching on them as it did so to produce a thin, chill sound like a rough cloth against glass.

  ‘Constable Rivers?’ she called, tentatively. There was no reply. She shone her torch around the walls and found a plan of the tower’s residents. The ink had run in places, but she discerned that Flat 47 on the topmost floor was indeed inhabited by N. Phelps. In the car on the way over, Henry had racked her professional memories and her files for a trace of N. Phelps and had come up with a woman who had passed through Jock Jonas’ care over a year ago. Nancy had run away during treatment, but had been tracked down by a social worker who had said that she was now quite well and living on a council estate.

  Henry sighed and pushed through the next set of doors to find the lift. Gambling, she pressed the call button. The doors swung open, evincing the presence of at least a small emergency generator. The stench ground in her nostrils. She started forward, prepared to bear it for a few seconds, then stopped as her torch caught the face of quite the least washed old man she had seen in months. He seemed to be lying on the lift floor. He grinned up at her.

  ‘Just in time, sweetheart,’ he chuckled.

  Hastily she reached over his head and pressed a button at random. The doors closed. Angry now, she took a deep breath and shouted,

  ‘Constable Rivers? It’s Dr Metcalfe.’ There was no reply. ‘I’m down here,’ she added, then wished she hadn’t.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said a woman’s voice behind her.

  Henry spun round. The woman was holding open a door to flat number one. Her candle lit her from beneath; a scrawny neck, white of twisting eye and a melodramatic halo of tallow-grey hair.

  ‘Oh, no. Has he?’ asked Henry.

  ‘He’s gone,’ the weird sister repeated. ‘He waited but now he’s gone. Friend of yours, was he?’

  ‘No, not in the slightest. I mean, not at all.’ The woman made as if to shut her door once more but Henry forestalled her. ‘I’m the doctor he sent for. I gather there’s some problem. Nancy Phelps, I think; on the top floor.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The woman froze. She spoke without turning back, just froze in her tracks. ‘Been screaming the place down, she has.’

  ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘You will if you wait.’

  ‘But surely,’ Henry protested, ‘the top floor … I mean, isn’t that too far for the sound to … ?’

  ‘Listen.’ The weird sister held an encrusted digit to her ear and Henry listened. There was a bloodcurdling scream from on high, distorted by its passage down the stairs. ‘Told you,’ laughed the woman, with no apparent concern and shut the door.

  Henry ran out to the car to find her bag. A sedative would almost certainly be needed. On her way in, a shower of large pieces of glass smashed onto the pavement to her left. No body landed with them, but a small stool splintered on the tarmac a few feet away. Rivers had been and gone. The van, if it were coming, had yet to arrive. This was a job for Dr Metcalfe. Toute seule. Oh God!

  While her figure was athletic, Henry’s heart was not. Once she reached the penultimate floor, she had to sit on the stairs to regain her breath. The screaming had petered out when she was passing the eighth floor. Sitting in the darkness, she could hear that, though considerably quieter than before, all was not peaceful on the floor above. Furniture was being moved; less dragged from place to place than bumped on the floor in irregular tattoos. Occasionally something would smash to the ground – a bottle, or a glass. After each outburst, Nancy Phelps, if indeed it had been her who had screamed, could be heard sobbing. There was no other voice, but from this close it sounded as though she were being attacked. ‘Anti-socially deranged’ my foot, thought Henry. While the elusive PC Rivers was listening to neighbourly slander and dialling the funny farm, the poor woman was probably being raped by some local lout. Repeatedly.

  Henry jumped up, bracing herself, and started up the stairs again. A notice was slung on a chain across the way to the top floor: ‘Construction Unsafe’ it read. ‘No Residents Beyond This Point’. She paused, shining the torch around the stairs ahead. There were pools of water, certainly, but no gaping ravines or treacherous holes in view. The lift was all too occupied.

  Suddenly the screeching started afresh.

  ‘Coward,’ jeered Henry at herself and clambered over the chain. This lack of curiosity among neighbours was unnatural. With neither light nor television, perhaps they were all in bed? The doors to Flats 45 and 46 stood ajar. She shone her torch into each and found them empty, if not quite derelict. Henrietta had never been timid, but the possibility that she might have just climbed in pitch darkness through a deserted tower block was more upsetting than she cared to admit.

  ‘No!’ screamed Nancy Phelps. ‘No! Please, no! I couldn’t help it. You seen I couldn’t. I had to. I had to. Oh no!’

  Her yells subsided as what sounded like an armchair was tossed across the flat. Henry felt the vibration through her feet.

  ‘Nancy! Nancy! I’ve come to help you. Open up,’ she shouted and smote the door with her fist. It flew open. There was
a flurry of wet wind, then silence. She stepped across the threshold.

  Where the window had been smashed was an irregular star of rain. A curtain, half torn down, flapped like a broken bird.

  ‘Nancy, where are you?’

  Someone was weeping nearby. Henry shone her torch around the room. Paper was hanging down in strips from the walls. Polystyrene tiles chequered the floor, along with chunks of plasterboard. Somewhere water was dripping into a bucket. Not a stick of furniture was unmolested; chairs lay on their sides, cushions were gutted. The contents of the kitchen drawers were scattered everywhere, sharp instruments having been rammed into any available soft surface. A table was flickering gently and Henry beat the flames down with a cushion. The smell of burnt feathers brought a taste of panic to her senses. She followed the weeping with her torch. A small woman lay naked on the bed, her head and shoulders covered with one of the curtains. Sobs shook her. The sofa had been jammed across the bedroom doorway. Henry climbed across it and approached the bed.

  ‘Nancy?’ The sobs stopped. ‘Nancy, who did this? Have they gone?’

  Nancy said nothing, but flung herself into Henry’s arms. Her flesh was clammy and cold. Henry sat on the edge of the bed, which smelt sharply of fresh urine.

  ‘I couldn’t stand any more,’ Nancy sobbed. ‘I told her I had to do it.’ She started to pant.

  ‘I can’t bear it if she screams again,’ thought Henry and reached for her bag. ‘This will help her go away,’ she soothed, and injected a strong sedative. Nancy flinched, then sank her head into Henry’s lap. Down below an approaching bell jangled. The van.

  ‘Now, tell me who did this?’

  ‘My sister.’

  ‘Where is she now, then?’

  ‘Dead. She died last year.’

  ‘But who did this just now?’

  ‘She was angry, you see. ’Cause of what I done.’

  ‘What was that?’

  Nancy sighed, almost contentedly, as the drug coursed through her system.

  ‘Because I ate her. I know it’s terrible and I shouldn’t have done it, but like I said, I couldn’t help it. Not really.’

  High up in the night, amid this whistling mayhem, the confession sounded almost plausible. Henry shivered … from the cold.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ll find you something to wear and take you away from her for a bit, till she calms down. Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes, please. There’s a dress over there. On the door.’

  Henry lifted Nancy’s head back on to the bed and walked to the door. By the light of the torch she found a summer frock; a neatly ironed floral print strangely unmolested in the chaos. She brought it back to the bed.

  ‘Arms up,’ she commanded and started to slip it over her charge’s head. It would take some time to manoeuvre the stairs with one so sleepy, but with luck the ambulance men would meet them half-way. She longed for the sane rituals of the ‘Nine O’Clock News’. There were those Martinis left in Sandy’s fridge …

  ‘She came back, you see,’ confided Nancy, taking Henry’s hand after they had pushed the sofa out of the way. ‘Came back and said she’d do me over for what I done to her.’ They were starting down the stairs when a plate smashed on the wall behind them. ‘Ate her, I did, ’cause I was that jealous,’ said Nancy and sneezed like a cat.

  Chapter twenty

  The conductor brought the bus ride to an abrupt end in Shepherd’s Bush Road; arbitrary spite, it seemed, was reason enough. Somebody had gone to considerable trouble to remove the bus shelter roof and break it into small pieces on the pavement. As he stood, clothes blackening beneath the rain, icy-damp soaking through the soles of his shoes, Rufus’ pocketed hands discovered that he had used up his final pound coin and had left his wallet in the grocery bag in Sandy’s flat. Wet beyond care, he blew his nose richly into a rain-sodden handkerchief and struck out along the route to White City.

  The herdsmen had long departed Shepherd’s Bush. Wood Lane boasted three sickly trees. The motor sounds of heavy traffic were dulled behind the continuous agitation of water by wheel, like the unfurling of a limitless box of cooking foil or the drawing of a shower curtain without end.

  She was no more a physiotherapist than he was Flash Gordon. He had been duped. She had played a role to mock his fantasies in the realization. Had he told the truth and shamed the devil, had he sat in her little sports car and said, ‘I’m a bisexual concert pianist who gives piano lessons (and occasionally other services) while waiting for his first concert booking, and who now has the compulsion to neglect his boyfriend and pursue the bubble normality by going to bed with you,’ she would still have lied. It seemed more likely than ever that she enjoyed a temporarily absent lover; this would explain why she didn’t mind his being ‘married’. He had betrayed Hilary so that she could play games. And now Hilary …

  Rufus was forced off the pavement by a squadron of television executives with designer umbrellas. A passing taxi sent a small wave over his shoes and socks.

  There was still time. He would trudge to North Pole Road. He would plead stress, plead love’s confusion, beg time. Rain-soaked prodigals were so appealing. A pure and contrite heart thou wilt not despise, Hilary, especially a drenched one with a rueful smile and no change for a home-bound bus. He would halt. He would stammer. He would make as if to turn and go. Lured by his bluff disarray, Hilary would catch him by the sleeve and tug him inside. A toad-in-the-hole would be raising a golden crust in the oven and a chorus from Carousel would be jangling on the air. A pile of marking would wait half-done in a pool of light on the desk.

  ‘You can stay, can’t you, Roof?’ Hilary would falter. ‘I mean … after all I’ve said, it’s entirely up to you.’

  Contrition, the name is R. Barbour.

  He reached the flyover and turned off into the subway. Suddenly into the well-lit dry, he was aware of his sopping condition. Water was actually squelching between his toes as he walked. A baby was crying up ahead. He rounded the bend into the main corridor beneath the road and made out an oblong form at the far end. As he drew closer he perceived a dark blue carrycot. The abandoned cries were issuing from the same. For all his dislike of things nursery, he was shocked at the brutality that could abandon a baby in such a place and on such a night. He clean forgot his own plight and hastened, curious, forward.

  It passed dimly through his mind that a drama of unwanted baby might deflect any wrath with which Hilary might conceivably welcome him. He bent over to peer inside.

  ‘Gotcha, wally!’

  He had barely glimpsed the cassette recorder tucked under the blanket when strong hands seized his arms and pushed him roughly against the wall, face to the tiles. He made no attempt at self-defence beyond a brief struggle that was savagely quashed by a further shove against the wall. All the voices he heard, as hands dived into his pockets and frisked over his arms and legs, were female.

  ‘What’s ’e got, then?’

  ‘Nuffink.’

  ‘Bastard!’

  Something struck him on the head. The blow hurt intensely and provided as good a reason as any for sinking, eyes closed, to the floor. There was a tough-booted kick to his left thigh, at which he almost cried out, and a gratuitous swivel of heel on hand which caused him to bite his tongue; then the ‘baby’ was silenced with a click and stout-booted footsteps receded.

  Brief suicidal declines notwithstanding, Rufus had never found it easy to weep. As he sat up slowly against the wall, rubbing the burgeoning egg beneath his hair with one hand and sucking the bruised fingers of the other, there was a prickling in his eyes and a keen sense of personal injustice in his heart, but no tear stained his cheek. He rose, uncertainly. There was a stab of pain where his thigh had been kicked. Swearing, he limped out into the rain once more, torn between gratitude that his attackers had not held razors, shame at his cowardice at not putting up a fight, and loathing of babies in general and the paternal instinct in particular.

  A pure, well, contrite-is
h heart thou wilt not despise, Hilary, especially when it could pass muster as a drowned rat and has just been mugged by three – or shall we say five – lesbian gypsies.

  A few yards into North Pole Road, a small boy was standing on the roof of a faintly familiar, elderly Volvo estate, throwing his entire weight into twisting off one of the windscreen wipers. Rufus saw a window sticker advertising a Cornish music festival and recognized the car as Evelyn Peake’s, but was too tired to do anything but stare at the boy who, pausing in his vandalism, stared back.

  Far from there being no light but the bachelor glow of a desk lamp, the windows of the flat were ablaze. Frowning as he drew near, Rufus could make out several voices singing drunkenly along with Shirley Bassey’s rendition of the Bach/Gounod ’Ave Maria’. The curtains were all drawn, but there was a six-inch gap between two of them. He crossed to the other side of the street and shifted into the best view. His heart sank, his thigh throbbed and he began to feel extremely wet indeed as he saw first Evelyn, then Bridget, then Richard – laughing, in party hats. There were other guests he failed to recognize.

  Hilary, who never threw parties, was finally throwing this one to celebrate their divorce.

  A different window was thrown up. ‘Rufus! Hi! Wait a second, I’m coming right down.’

  It was Hilary. He had been watching him stare. Before Rufus could answer, the window was flung down once more and the sweet familiar face was gone. Rufus promptly lost what little nerve was left him. The thought of being hauled into the role of ‘Little Matchgirl’, of being kindly led, lame and dripping, amidst those sly laughs and knowing looks – possibly too, the thought that so public a reunion would be a little too final – sent him hobbling wildly into the night.

  Chapter twenty-one

  Bridget stood swaying against the table. She raised her glass in one hand and adjusted her pink party hat with the other. Her hair sprouted in auburn cascades; she had grown it to play Marianne in last year’s BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and had retained the look to play Perdita at the Old Vic. Hilary thought her Perdita execrable, but she had looked so appealing that no one else seemed to have minded much.