Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘You haven’t been round to see me lately, have you?’ said Margaret, brightly. ‘Are you going to nursery school now?’

  ‘Yeth,’ said the child.

  The mother shifted her weight from one foot to another unhappily.

  ‘Well the truth is, Margaret, she’s supposed to go, but half the time they can’t have her, so it only works out to two mornings a week, and the rest of the time she drives me round the bend. I take that much time off work and I’m only part time as it is—’

  ‘Why don’t you send her to me then?’ Margaret asked mildly, looking away from the woman and peering down the street as if she had just seen something worth close examination. The child began to hum loudly, then set off round them both in close circles, making the dangerous noise of a wasp.

  ‘Oh, do shush, sweetheart,’ said Margaret. The child shushed and came back to rummage in Margaret’s half-full shopping bag with noisy rudeness. Margaret did not protest, while the mother looked at her big, calm face, at odds with the little body, with something like hunger.

  ‘Look, Margaret, I’d send her into you like a shot, but you must know I can’t, not with that man next door to you. You know what I mean. Is he really your son? People says he’s your son, you’re both so … petite, but he doesn’t look like you. Well anyway, if it’s true, and someone told me it wasn’t, I don’t mean to be rude but I can’t send Sylvie into you with him hanging around the place, can I?’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Margaret asked, stupidly.

  ‘Don’t you know? You must know, surely?’

  But the look on Margaret’s face confirmed an incredible level of ignorance of anything to Logo’s detriment. She clearly did not understand that there was anything more than the merely indistinct vibrations of embarrassment which Logo attracted from his neighbours. For pinching the odd spade out of a garden, Margaret thought defensively; for looking through their rubbish bags like the scavenger he was. He was only a little bit crazy, poor Logo, and nobody likes anybody who carries a black Bible around with them, the reverse of a talisman. This wasn’t a wicked neighbourhood, but it was godless. Margaret braced herself. If he looked like the son of hers who never was, Logo was her problem: she certainly didn’t want him to be anyone else’s.

  ‘No, he isn’t my kin, but I’ve lived next door to him and his family, when he had a family, for nigh on twenty years, so I know him better than anybody, you might say. It was when his wife and his daughter went off, you see, only a year or two since, that he went a bit barmy. You shouldn’t take offence at him, he’s all right really. Gentle, wouldn’t hurt a fly, and he’s been good to me, really. Ever so good.’

  The younger woman’s cross-examining glance was so sharp, Margaret thought for a second that the powder would be stripped off her own face. She always wore face powder, just a little, to correspond with the talcum on her body: she dressed and undressed in a shower of sweet-smelling dust and she tried to keep herself decent. It was her own compensation for age, infirmity, the bad hip for which treatment had never been successful, and as far as compensations went, it worked. Margaret Mellors, with her cakelike face, neat little frame and her almost edible gentleness, was never less than easy on the eye.

  ‘Someone said,’ the woman was saying, trying to keep the aggression from her voice, ‘he’s been arrested ever so many times. But he always gets off.’

  Margaret rallied, she did not raise her voice because she never felt the need.

  ‘Well, that’ll be because he never actually does anything. He’s always looking for some kid who looks like his daughter used to look, don’t know what she looks like now, but that’s what he does. Silly, but he does it …’

  Her voice was fading softly into nothing. She knew as she spoke, with the child pulling on the shopping bags and dragging her sideways, that any attempt to explain or excuse the enigmas of Logo were useless. She had better try another route.

  ‘Never mind what he does, it hardly matters,’ she said. ‘Anyway whatever gave you the idea he was ever in my house during the day? He does work, you know, after his fashion, but oh no, he’s never in my place. Never. He’s out with his trolley.’

  It was almost the truth and she meant it to be the truth. She paused for dramatic effect. ‘Never,’ she added, with quiet emphasis, feeling disloyal as she spoke, but still determined. The child began to move again, re-creating the humming sound, but louder, until it became a kind of growling. The mother looked at her in alarm.

  ‘I’m a dog, really,’ the child announced.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Margaret murmured comfortably. ‘Are you a big dog or a little dog? Only they make different noises. Wouldn’t you be better as a cat?’

  The mother’s last defences were gone. Some persuasion had been necessary, but not much.

  ‘Listen, if you could … Only I’ve got so much to get, and she’s a nightmare round the shops—’

  ‘Of course I’ll have her if it helps. You just relax, you look a bit tired. Late-night shopping, isn’t it? You’ll be able to get a lot done. No need to hurry home.’

  So Margaret Mellors had the company of hyperactive Sylvie for an hour or four in the dying afternoon. It hadn’t strictly been a lie about Logo, she told herself. They did, after all, have an unwritten rule that they never went into one another’s houses without invitation – never – but still the conversation left her uneasy, reminded her too much of things shoved under the carpet and best not brought out. His door would open with a kick, but something about the view from the window stopped anyone trying. And he was kept busy, she wasn’t lying about that, cleansing officer he was called, she reflected with pride, that’s what he was called. The Council wanted rid of him too: everyone picked on him, he said, but Logo remained on the equal opportunity pay roll, come what may, for a number of reasons. They liked an eccentric for a start and there weren’t too many volunteers to brave the graveyard ghosts on his patch, even less to clear the rubbish after football, nor anyone else who came so much into his own for certain special tasks. They could raise him from the pubs where he was regarded as a singing-and-dancing mascot, though never quite a drunk. He would deal with burst water mains, drains in suppurating basements, the removal of a decade’s worth of rotting rubbish: he would touch the untouchable with his bare hands; shovel up a dead dog or cat from a cellar, singing all the while. You didn’t sack a wiry little man like that, whatever his timekeeping.

  ‘Oh God our help in ages past …’ Logo shouted, pushing the trolley. Big old thing, not the new-fangled plastic, double-binned variety, ergonomically, economically sound, he wouldn’t have any, got the ole bin on wheels, hadn’t he, suited him fine, but he’d fought for it. Despite the memory of that battle, the energy was low that afternoon and his feet in his training shoes were icy.

  Logo took many of the opportunities his job presented for doing nothing, but he always noticed litter. Down in the gutters as he walked, some of last autumn’s leaves were still half frozen from the morning frost, the slyest litter of all, unrecyclable, with nowhere to go, pretty at dawn but now becoming so much damp rubbish until the next night’s frost would crisp them like toast, where the bugs and the slime slept easily until they melted and the smell came up. Logo liked that scent: he liked the earth when it was damp and stuck to his feet. He made his own timetable; lazy one day, industrious the next. Today he was finished with the graveyard: he could go home, but he didn’t want to, he would rather sit on a wall and read his dog-eared Bible. He liked the stories.

  ‘Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles as the brethren of the Lord? Or I only, have not we power to forbear working?’ he intoned, his voice a high enquiry as he went towards his street.

  It had been one of those days when light had never properly featured at all; there had been nothing to the dying of it. Turning the corner, Logo saw the figure of Margaret Mellors retreating from him with her narrow back, dressed in the same clean, dun-coloured coat which went on from year to year
with no pretension to style. She was in the act of reaching inside her bag for an orange which she then bowled down the street like a ball towards a wicket. A small child whooped, yelled, barked in pursuit of the orange until she waylaid it in her little fist, catching it like some terrier while it was still rolling.

  ‘There’s no need to bite it,’ Margaret was calling. Logo saw the blond head in the intermittent light of the lamps. Watching with quiet intensity as Margaret threw the orange again, he became slowly aware of disturbing sounds. People gathering for a footie match. Beyond their road he could sense the traffic bearing down on them, felt from a distance the arrival of the first hordes. It always reminded him of flies descending on a carcass but Margaret did not notice. He was trying to work out why she threw fruit for her charge; to tire her out, perhaps, you threw sticks for a dog and more edible things for a child, but his interest soon died. The creature did not resemble his own child, dark as a gypsy like him, run away a long time ago; she’d be a woman now.

  Margaret called to the child and when she ran back, seized her firmly by the hand and led her up the street towards her house. Disconsolate, Logo remembered his icy feet and stamped them. He courted the cold, did not really mind it and the stamping was more ritual than necessity. He waited until Margaret was out of sight, then drew in a lungful of air and began to sing.

  ‘Jesu, saviour ever mild, Born for us a little child, Of the virgin undefiled:

  Hear us Holy Jesus.’

  Keeping close to the walls, backing out of Legard Street, pushing the cumbersome trolley like a big old pram, he moved in the direction of the crowds which would throng the thoroughfares beyond. Looking for a small, dark child, with a headful of black curls cascading from the neck to her waist and streaming out behind her like the tangled mane of a thoroughbred filly as she ran away. From him.

  Dinsdale Cotton thought Helen West was beautiful. He did not say as much, but the conclusion had been on his mind from the moment he had first met her. He could follow the present discussion with his brain all the more easily because it gave him a better opportunity to look at her eyes, hands, hair, legs in whatever order they happened to present themselves without quite seeming to devour her. He knew it was still far too soon to do anything else, that would be like spitting in public, but he planned it anyway, enjoying what he had for now. Besides the conversation was always worth while, even if they both chose to deny the undercurrent which flowed between them.

  ‘Evidence,’ she was saying. ‘Come on, Dinsdale, why the hell aren’t you doing this? Why me and not you, giving a lecture on evidence? How come I even got volunteered and not you, when you can talk the hind leg off a donkey and everyone knows I’ve never understood law at all? I only practise it. What do I say to them?’

  He took a covert look at her slender crossed ankles, as she sat back in the beastly lounge of the Swan and Mitre, and decided he could look no further so he might as well entertain himself by intellectual effort.

  ‘What you say always depends on the audience,’ he said. ‘And there’s no audience, apart from a symposium of scientists, who do not want their information as simple as possible.’

  ‘Just as well. I can’t manage more than that. Come on, surprise me. Ten minutes is what I have to deliver, on the subject of, What is evidence? The audience being Justices of the Peace with nil legal training. Your starter for ten, please.’

  Dinsdale sipped his drink, vodka in tomato juice, which did not look at all effete in his hands. He removed an imaginary pair of glasses and shuffled an imaginary sheaf of papers on the rather dirty table.

  ‘Evidence, my dears, is fact. It comes in the form of brick or cement. There are basically three kinds of evidence. The first is the most direct, say from an eye or ear witness to an event, the horse’s mouth evidence. Then it comes, less directly, from those who follow on behind, picking up the pieces of the smashed car, testing the blood samples and the semen stains and who can thus say, this event happened. This is circumstantial evidence, although they are recycled bricks, they are the most certain of all. Evidence also comes from a number of unrelated facts which surround the victim and the defendant but have nothing to do with them, and this is the cement. They are little facts, positive and negative, which point to one conclusion. Thus, one witness hears a door slam at three in the morning, another sees a man in a street soon after; a third person mentions someone he met in the local earlier that evening who looked the same; a fourth mentions, by chance, a possible motive. By the smallest and most innocent innuendos brother betrays brother. A network of facts, individually irrelevant. You need this cement if you do not have enough of the bricks alone. Like bloodstains and fingerprints.’

  ‘Confessions?’ Helen asked, vastly amused. ‘Are they direct enough evidence to make into bricks?’

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ Dinsdale said airily. ‘Finest kind of brick, but in this generation, it has a tendency to crumble. What you must tell this audience, of course, is that the only evidence which can be used in the construction of a case is evidence that has been properly obtained. Thus if you make the defendant shit the brick, you cannot use it to build the wall around him. Will that do?’

  ‘Certainly. But your recitation has taken precisely two minutes. What shall I do for the other eight?’

  ‘Tell them stories. The taller the better. Another drink?’

  Helen was about to refuse, responding to the automatic pilot-light which ignited inside her head some time before eight in the evening to remind her it was time to go home. Then she remembered there was no Geoffrey Bailey at his home or her own, hadn’t been for a week. There’d been no trailing around a supermarket in her inefficient pursuit of their needs. The thought of her own relief brought into her throat an indigestible lump of guilt which she decided to swallow. She might well love Geoffrey Bailey, she was usually well aware that she did, but freedom from the routines of the relationship, from the sheer time it took to be with another, felt like a prize she had worked towards for months. Especially if the privilege included sitting with a man of Dinsdale’s distinguished ease, warmed by his admiration and his sheer ability to talk. It made a change from the barks and grunts of familiarity.

  ‘Well yes, why not? Aren’t you due home, or something?’

  Dinsdale shrugged noncommittally. Helen could not imagine his life to be unaccompanied by less than a select harem, but his domestic loyalties were his own concern and she did not have to consider them. She did not, at this moment, have to consider anyone or anything at all apart from the state of her digestion.

  ‘Speaking of evidence,’ said Dinsdale, returning from the bar with a napkin which he used to wipe the table clean in small, fastidious movements, ‘is what I see over there evidence of anything at all? Or is it a figment of my over-fertile imagination?’ Helen looked and whistled softly.

  The Swan and Mitre was a pub with little to recommend it apart from proximity to a thousand offices and a heavy sense of age created by sherry casks hung above the bar. The grime was unfeigned and the crowds stumbled their way through raucous gossip in the artificial gloom. Smoking was mandatory: scores of men and women had been released from work to indulge a number of bad habits before retiring to the rigours of their homes. The wooden booths lining the walls gave some scope for intimacy: for the rest, the assignations were as public as a meeting in a telephone kiosk. In one booth, selfishly occupying space enough for four, prohibiting invasion by the cunning placement of coats which made it look as if someone else was expected, sat Rose, flanked by a young man. The size of him, the uniform shirt and the short haircut betrayed him as a policeman or a security man or suchlike, but there was no need for guesswork.

  ‘Don’t look so obviously, Helen, you do stare so. Is that PC Michael? He of boxing fame?’

  ‘I think so. Why shouldn’t I look? My God, they’re actually talking to one another …’

  ‘Well, so were we, it’s a natural consequence of human proximity.’

  ‘Among others,’ Helen sa
id lightly, ‘in which Rose is supposed to be something of a specialist. She’s been looking very pretty over the last couple of days, have you noticed? More subdued, less spiky.’

  ‘I thought that might have been your influence. You know, having a little chat with her, woman to woman, like Redwood asked you to do.’

  ‘Asked once, then again and again, after more complaints and a fight in the section house. Yes I did try and talk to her, you know, Rose-is-there-anything-worrying-you? kind of thing, anything-where-I-could-help-you? But I didn’t do much good. Quite the reverse, I must be losing my touch. I’ve never heard such a stream of insults in my life. No, that isn’t true, I have, but not usually so fluent. The message was, Fuck off, leave me alone, you old cow, how can you understand at your age? And if Redwood wants to sack me, let him try. I made a tactical withdrawal.’

  ‘Bloodied, but unbowed?’ Dinsdale asked, smiling to show teeth which were admirably white.

  ‘No, both bowed and bloodied. I wish there weren’t such a thing as the age gap. I like her, I can’t bear to see this brooding anger of hers, but she finds it impossible to like me. You can’t convince her you might know what she means.’

  ‘The effort was commendable,’ said Dinsdale gravely, sensing a real humiliation. His hand on the now clean table hovered close to hers. The sight of it, pale, with its neatly pared nails, made her feel unaccountably lonely. The fingers tapped a neat rhythm, as if listening to some hidden music which was not hers to hear. Like the music which vibrated between Rose and her man, hidden but harmonic, cutting across the smog of the room to where they sat, the two adults. Helen thought she remembered what it was like, the music of romance, and felt older than Noah. Older than the sherry casks and just as deaf.