Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  Said in this fashion, Helen believed her. She ached for the intensity of the other’s feeling. All the world loves a lover and she was no exception. She felt a fierce hope that all the optimism would be justified. No wonder the result of the test had been so important.

  ‘It sounds like a bit of old-fashioned true love, if you ask me,’ she said gravely. ‘Anyway, it has all the symptoms. But who was the one who might have put you in the club? One of the other boys?’ Her desire for information was compulsive.

  ‘Yeah, one or the other.’ Rose was not quite beyond embarrassment: there was still a trace of it and more than a hint of reserve. She would only talk about what she wanted to talk about. ‘I don’t know why I did all that. I didn’t even like it. Why did I do it, Aunty? You can tell me. All those blokes.’

  ‘I don’t know why any more than you do. We all do strange things and the daftest thing you did was not to take precautions.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Rose with all the old aggression, ‘you can bloody well talk. What about you?’

  ‘Yes, OK, but I’m an old lady and I did know where my bloke had been. I don’t know why you were giving it away when you could have been making your fortune. Could be something like being afraid of the dark. Not wanting to go home alone. Something like that.’ Rose looked at her in consternation.

  ‘How did you know? How did you know that?’

  ‘Been there,’ said Helen promptly. ‘And you don’t have to pay for protection. Not that way, anyhow.’

  Rose shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yeah, I know now. Oh, I do love Michael. I really do. Nothing else matters. I can’t see anything the same way. Nothing at all,’ she added, fervently. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’

  And I loved Geoffrey once in that delirious kind of way, Helen thought, and there are times when I still do. I hope he’s home this evening. Rose sensed her preoccupation.

  ‘Here, Aunty … you wanted a baby, didn’t you? And here’s me rabbiting on, but you weren’t like me at all. Michael see, he knows quite a lot about me, what I’ve been like, but he couldn’t have stomached a baby any more than me … Different for you, though, isn’t it?’

  Helen hesitated. ‘I’d got a bit used to the idea, and when someone told me, No, you aren’t, I felt as if I’d been robbed. Sad, furious, deprived, confused. Does that make sense?’

  Rose nodded, but it didn’t really. ‘Listen, I’m sorry I made that crack yesterday about you carrying on with Dinsdale. I knew you weren’t.’

  ‘No, but I am tempted,’ said Helen lightly. ‘Who wouldn’t be? You weren’t so far off the mark.’

  Each of them was lost in her own thoughts. Rose was looking forward to seeing Michael with a level of anticipation that gave her pain, but she was not going to tell him any of this. She wanted to shout. She was feeling hope for the first time that she could remember. Michael today, Gran tomorrow; she was fighting her way through all her shadows. Helen was pensive.

  It must be age, she thought, where optimism was failing to triumph over experience and mistrust triumphed over everything.

  ‘More coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘More shopping?’ said Rose, shyly. ‘If you’ve got time. Only I’d like a jacket the same colour as yours, only decent thing I’ve ever seen you wear, Michael would like that.’

  ‘Did you know,’ said Helen, ‘that shopping for clothes for me or anyone else, is one of the greatest pleasures of my existence?’ Rose grinned, cheekier than ever.

  ‘Better than sex?’ she queried. Helen paused, grinning just as widely.

  ‘Not all the time.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Redwood waited in the office until everybody had gone. No-one lingered on a Friday night and although he resented their defection, his own staying behind was a self-imposed obligation for which their absence was crucial. On a Friday evening Redwood acquired nerves of steel and turned himself into a spy. He forced himself to come out of his room to join the ghosts in which he believed as much as the idle doorman, although Redwood, as a man of logic, could not let himself acknowledge the belief and so could not allow the fear to deter him. Like a ghost, he was licensed to go wherever he wished at any time, but if he did so in office hours, all those over whom he lorded it would know how often he got lost. More to the point of his present subterfuge, they would resent what he did in their absence – sneak around their desks, look in the cupboards and cabinets, read letters, check schedules, investigate all those aspects of his domain which he should have known about but was too ashamed to ask. He alone checked how many times per annum each person cited a visit to the doctor or dentist as the reason for an afternoon off. He checked by desk diaries what people had done on those days when court finished at twelve and they had failed to return before five. During the weekend ahead, he would analyse all the information and work out how to use it without revealing his source, thus preserving his reputation with his superiors for effective, if unpopular, management. He called it keeping one step ahead. Helen called it something else.

  The contents of Helen’s room (all drawers open to the touch, had she never heard of thieves?) revolted him. It was hygienic but a complete mess. Helen West was the only one who had ever caught him at this game. With her own version of the thumbscrew, she extracted from him his promise never to repeat the exercise if she promised never to reveal it. One of them had been honourable about this deal: it was not himself.

  There was an Anglepoise lamp on her desk he rather fancied, if it would only go with the odd decor of his own room. There were three comic cards from Dinsdale Cotton, signed affectionately, plus cryptic notes in her diary about meetings. Oh, ho, ho … Redwood found himself chuckling like a malevolent Santa Claus. Then he had stayed even longer, still rejoicing, to read a set of notes headed, ‘Evidence’, ah yes, that lecture. Bricks and mortar, she was talking about, then she sidetracked on to the duty of the prosecutor. To sift and evaluate evidence, it said; to make sure no inconsistently sized stone was left unturned; to render the bricks and mortar with compassion; never to create the facts or deny them either; always to give the benefit of the doubt without allowing sabotage. All so much specious rubbish, he thought, fine-sounding crap, but could be useful next time he had to stand up and spout. Worth copying and she had such a legible hand.

  He turned off the lamp, then found himself fumbling round the room, tripping over files, cracking his shin, stumbling, banging his wrist on the sharp edge of the filing cupboard she never used, preferring the floor. Why, oh why did they still have such savage furniture, full of lethal angles and poisonous metal? Pain made him incautious. Hobbling down the endless corridors, lit only by the red light of the goods lift which always reminded him of a dumb waiter in an old café, he was level with the photocopying room before realising it was occupied, full of light and the clack-clack of the machine. Too late to go back now. He coughed and strode into the room, looking businesslike. At the last minute, as darkness turned into blinding light, he remembered to shove the notes inside his jacket, from which they lurched, too heavy for the pocket, as bulky as a gun. Redwood was not built for stealth.

  ‘Ah! Dinsdale! Late, isn’t it?’

  Dinsdale Cotton smiled his enigmatic, patrician smile, the lazy smile of the winner, which seemed to say, I love you, even when it didn’t. He worked efficiently, like a man well used to a graceful economy of movement, retrieving documents from the feed tray with a flourish while the machine still clack-clacked out the copies then fell silent.

  ‘Is it so late?’ he said genially. ‘Really, I’d forgotten the time. Actually, I’m glad to catch you. I was trying to help out Riley. Bit of a débâcle at court yesterday. Can’t really work out how it happened. Just running off a copy of the computer printout for next week, to make sure the thing isn’t fooling us. It seems to write things off of its own accord. Or one of the case clerks does it. For what purpose, I don’t know.’

  ‘What happened yesterday?’ Redwood asked for want of anything better to say. The lump of paper inside his
jacket felt most uncomfortable.

  ‘Well, the computer record on one of Riley’s cases was altered by mistake to say no evidence offered last time, or the case was finished, don’t know which. File put away, so poor Riley has no file, but defendant live and well, expecting to be tried, magistrate lets him go and we have egg all over face. No-one could possibly mind,’ he hastened to add with the same charming smile, ‘except the defendant, who is not complaining, and the police who do not know since none of them was warned to attend court.’

  Redwood slumped. Another crisis. Another example of how the office managed without reference to him. His shin hurt, but he could not say why, so he said nothing at all.

  ‘No complaints?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘Oh no. Except from Riley.’

  ‘Is that all? No publicity?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Redwood fervently. ‘Good man. Sort it out. Tell me next week.’ Dinsdale nodded, still smiling as if Redwood had his approval in everything he chose to do. Unable to meet his eyes because of his own sense of having been found out, Redwood focused on Dinsdale’s hands. They were rather like his own, small, feminine, unscarred as women’s hands were, awkward, soft little things, no good for holding a golf club. Redwood crept back down the corridor, into Helen’s room and replaced the notes where he had found them.

  The sergeant told Logo that he would be charged with assaulting a police officer, unless he would like to admit it and accept a police caution for breaching the peace. Predictably, Logo said no to the latter. He had recovered enough of his wits to remember that he’d liked the drama of the courtrooms as much as he had enjoyed his arrests up until now. The sergeant had looked at the collator’s records on Logo with some anxiety: there it was, all the handwritten, locally known facts for police eyes only; a dozen arrests recorded, no convictions, mostly enclosed premises. The man had a talent for getting in, always said he was looking for his daughter or someone, otherwise he kept harassing children, harming none, a recent record too, nothing much before the last five years, never violent. Nothing to justify these livid bruises and that much blood. No broken bones, but injuries consistent with a beating, the divisional surgeon had said. Two paracetamol; fit to be detained, just. Whether the surgeon was drunk or sober, there was no fooling him. He cleaned Logo up and advised him to see his own doctor in the morning.

  Then the sergeant told Logo that his trolley would be safely parked down his own backyard, if that was all right. Better than taking it back to the council depot and letting everyone there know he’d been arrested, wasn’t it? Logo agreed. Telling this brought the sergeant the only real pleasure of his whole evening as he envisaged brave, young PC Williams wheeling the trolley through the streets as instructed. Most likely it was the only piece of retribution the rookie would get – and there was more than one way to skin a cat.

  Logo was offered a lift home, by different officers the sergeant hinted delicately, but the prisoner declined. The half-mile walk would be good for his soul and he went down the steps clutching the piece of paper which ordered him to report on bail to court the next week. Watching him go, the sergeant wondered if the bruises would have faded by then, considered it unlikely and was not displeased by the thought that he had done what he could within the parameters of well-established tradition. He hoped some lawyer would notice the gaps, but doubted they would. That was all he felt he could do.

  Down the damp streets, coldly, Logo went, his clothes not quite dry and his body weak, sick and aching. Halfway home, he noticed something which made him laugh – the lit football stadium and the blocked streets. Friday night, special match, was it? So some bastard copper had been wheeling his trolley back, clanking with brushes, in the teeth of the descending crowds. Logo hoped they had leered plenty. A modest attendance tonight: not the same density of cars or sound that signified a real gathering of the first-division tribes with all their war cries. There would not be the same level of chanting and he would scarcely hear them at home, unlike the other days when their communal breathing and gasping hit the windows of his house like a gale and drowned the sound of the television in a hundred living rooms. Logo tried to sing.

  ‘Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm doth bind the restless wave …’

  The foot on his neck and the pressure on his throat made his voice sound cracked and the same mood of bitter self-pity which had sat on his head while he waited in the cell descended on him again. He needed to talk, he needed Margaret’s soft, scented bosom in which to confide; he had to make a plan in which she would assist him to find her, his missing child. His daughter, find her and bring her home before the cancer of her loss affected all the extremities of his life and limbs. Love or revenge, either would do.

  Lurching down the alley, he saw first the light of Margaret’s door, then his trolley, upturned in the back yard with the contents spilled. He picked up the broken chair and threw it feebly, and when he bent over to examine the rest, smelt the whisky from the broken bottle and thought his head would burst. He knocked at Margaret’s door, heard a scuffle inside, followed by a suspicious silence. The second knock was a good deal more aggressive. After another long pause, he saw her silhouette through the reeded glass of her half-glazed door, standing back.

  ‘Who is it?’ She sounded muffled, unwelcoming. In the near distance, he heard a ragged cheer from the football crowd.

  ‘Me,’ he said impatiently. ‘Who else? Come on over, will you?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a child here, asleep, Logo, I can’t.’

  ‘Well, let me in then. Open the door when you’re talking to me, can’t you?’

  ‘No I can’t do that either.’ Her voice was firmer. ‘Not tonight, another night. Or maybe later.’

  ‘Let me in, you old cow!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Just let me in! I need you, I need you …’ He kicked the door hard with one foot, winced as pain jarred through his ankle. Her voice rose in reply.

  ‘You aren’t the only one who needs me. Stop it, Logo, don’t be silly. I’ll see you later.’

  He kicked the door again, with the other foot, sulkily.

  ‘Go away!’ she shouted. ‘Go away!’

  The surprise of this unprecedented rejection made him obey. He lurched across to his own door, pushed it open and turned on the light to his dirtyish, cold kitchen. An acidic bitterness burned through his bruises. He had helped that woman rebuild her fire while he had none, he had brought home the kindling and sometimes stolen fuel even when he needed none for himself, the old cow. Logo switched on the electric fire with its two sparking bars and waited for the warmth to fill his bones with that cheerless heat. He huddled over it, tempted to weep and watch his tears sizzle themselves to death. Oh, they were all such turncoats, women, beyond redemption. Tempted a man with their bodies and their creature comforts and kind words and in the end gave nothing, took back all you had given with the talent of usurers, extracting the last drop of interest.

  ‘Man that is born of woman is of a few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as shadow and continueth not … Who can bring a clean thing out of unclean? Not one.’ He was moaning, words came out by themselves.

  Shivering still, he dipped back out into the backyard and in the light from his own doorway, found his Bible on the ground. It, too, smelt of the spilt whisky, another desecration, but the damp solidity of the paper still gave comfort. He had never really needed to read his Bible, only to hold it and quote his disjointed quotes from it which memory jumbled into meaningless mantra phrases.

  He went upstairs and found his daughter’s school exercise books. Saw the handwriting of old essays and spelling tests, school projects all stored with the dismembered torso of a teddy bear in a drawer in his room. She had left so little behind. The central light in the room had no shade; neither did the lamp by his bed which shone on the immovable suitcase. Logo lay down, still cold, raised his hands in front of
his eyes to examine the red weals left by the handcuffs, felt his grazed and grossly bruised face, wondering at its whole new set of swollen contours. God help me, even with these afflictions, Margaret would not let me in. A deep and dark suspicion began to haunt him. Then he looked at his hands again, more carefully, balled them into fists and punched them. Then hooked them together by the thumbs and began against the far wall, his game of shadow play.

  What should she do next? What did a person ever do when they were waiting, especially if they were not used to waiting? Helen had found it thus when waiting for a jury to come back with a verdict, waiting for a case to come on for trial, the waiting time was useless, captive to expectation, a vacuum where logic and concentration were displaced by rage or anxiety. Waiting time was the only time in which she could ever acknowledge boredom. People waiting together grew close; people waiting for one another grew distant with every passing minute.

  Helen was waiting for Bailey. The tersest of messages on her answerphone announced his presence which was more than half expected this Friday evening anyway. He could get away with a week, not with a fortnight. She had been turning somersaults in the last eight days and she had been shopping.

  Shopping was always that mixture of excitement and guilt, but better than yoga in terms of total distraction. She and Rose had parted with genuine regret. Rose’s boy would not keep her waiting, he would be straining at the leash. If ever Helen had flung a leash round Bailey’s neck, now would be the time to pull it. Instead she was doing housework because he was very late indeed and she was storing up trouble like gas in a balloon.