Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  Oh let me not be afraid of the dark.

  Michael put the phone down in his parents’ house, vaguely angry. So she’d said she could not come and see him today because of working, but he didn’t think that was the way Civil Servants ever worked, even her kind, and if she was at work, why not answer the phone? So she wasn’t at work, she was somewhere else, with someone else, doing God knows what, he didn’t want to know. A girl like that wasn’t for changing, he could hear it said, chanted by a thousand voices sounding as loud as the Red Army chorus or a first-division football crowd. Easily bored, was what she was, playing with someone else, off and away as soon as the new boyfriend was immobilised, that was what it was, it had to be something like that. Couldn’t-wait Rose, that’s what she was, and he had been taken for a sucker, played it all wrong.

  ‘She doesn’t answer, Mum,’ he said savagely. A woman sat in the corner of a comfortable living room a few feet away from him, sewing. They had just turned off the football. She became a travesty of her normal, tranquil self when she watched her team, even though she still continued to sew, with big, stabbing movements.

  ‘And I suppose that means that you think the very worst. You don’t think of an innocent explanation, do you? She’s been let off early, something’s happened, she’s out, that kind of thing. Even after she came to see you in hospital how many times? You men. You policemen.’

  Michael sat back, absurdly comforted but irritated as well.

  ‘I think about her all the time. I don’t seem to be able to stop it.’

  She put down her sewing, eyed the arm in a sling, sighed.

  ‘Well, think nicely then. If you’ve got to go up west, your dad’ll give you a lift. And back, if need be.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  She took up her sewing again. ‘We were robbed,’ she was muttering under her breath, ‘robbed blind.’

  It took him a while to realise she was talking about the football.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rose was looking at the files thrown out to lie on the floor, when the lift thudded down beside her, level with her waist. Ha, ha, ha, Helen upstairs joking, asking what the hell she was doing all this time. Rose smiled, pushed up the shutter and thrust her head inside, grinning and muttering, ‘Silly cow.’ Her mouth, still creased open in a smile, was suddenly full of a familiar smell laced with an undertone of nausea. Someone’s favourite powder, passed from body to body, sickening and cloying, mixed with dirt and sweat. That was her first impression, forming quickly, the second glance, from a distance, showed a kitchen knife, its blade swinging towards her like a wavering compass, faintly smeared, unmistakably a tool for cutting meat, suffering from use. Her whole body became rigid with shock; she put a hand towards the knife, withdrew quickly, extended again and forced her fingers to close round the handle which had the warmth of a reptile. Rose did not understand the message; it crossed her mind that Helen was playing with her. For a minute she thought the woman was mad, and stood winded by the cruelty of the joke, then some kind of logic prevailed. There was no sound but the ticking of the basement machinery as Rose stood gripping the knife, seeing its present purpose in a rush of images which came with the traces of scented powder and body-dirtied clothes, saw herself lying on a bed, and Daddy with his shadow play and his clothes not changed from work and herself stealing Gran’s favourite powder as she would a talisman. Daddy in the kitchen as she sliced at him with another knife, warding him off, hurting by accident.

  Rose did not think she would be able to do that again.

  Flight was the course she had always adopted and that was what she was going to do now. She wasn’t going to think of anyone else, she was going to run, leaving behind any loyalties and hopes in that headlong rush as she had before. Go home, don’t bother saying why because there is no point, pack a bag, never come back, find another job, it was silly to have come so close; there was nowhere safe, not in the whole wide world, if it wasn’t safe here. She had believed in this place. In one hand she had a sheaf of notebooks she had found behind the radiator. Rose dropped them on the floor, ran towards the back of the building, still holding the knife, but loosely, looking for the delivery doors. She took only a few steps, then turned back to stare at the open mouth of the service lift, big enough for a body. She ran left for the stairs, foolish and indecisive, feinting towards ideas like a fencer with a blade. Somewhere over her head, there were small sounds; the doorman, the enemy, both of them the same since the doorman must have let Daddy in; must have told him, pointed, go upstairs, that’s where she went. It might even have been the doorman who provided Daddy with the knife. She held it to the light. Smears without colour, perhaps used to cut a sandwich, even Daddy had friends. Suddenly Rose stopped. He wasn’t the only one with friends. Helen was upstairs.

  Rose bent down and eased off her shoes. Instead of the wider, main stairs which led off from the right of the lift, she sprinted left down the stone corridors, turning off the lights as she went. Past the fire-detection unit, the noisy monitor of water supply, the ticking boiler, she sped up the narrow iron steps two at a time, pushing through a stiff swing-door at the top. If there was ever a fire here, no-one would know how to get out. On the ground floor, there was a distant sound of a television towards which she was drawn and then she pulled back, inexplicably disgusted by the excited sounds of sports commentary, flew round the corner and up the next narrow set of stairs. She had lost the desire to sit and sob: by the time she reached the second floor, breathless, aching to cough but afraid of the sound, she was consumed with a terrible, attacking rage, the rat in the corner which would die rather than not fight. It was a familiar sensation, she had felt it sometimes during her loveless sex, biting back the desire to snap and snarl which moved her now, something remembered from the time she had lashed out at Daddy, not knowing or caring who or what she hit, hating them all, anything within the sweep of her arm would do.

  Someone had turned off the lights. Someone running in that wild way she herself had been running downstairs, she could feel the panic. In the corridor, the only light came from Redwood’s room. With her mouth clamped shut against the desire to shout and cough, Rose tiptoed towards the door and went in. The angle-poise was turned at a drunken angle to illuminate the far wall, the desk was as rumpled as a newly abandoned bed, there were papers on the floor and one of the windows was open wide to the floor sending a fresh draught of air. She was drawn to it, leant out, coughing, then caught the sides of the window frame in the midst of a spasm, suddenly dizzy. Careful, Rose, she said; it would be high enough if you fell into the basement well, but that’s no way out. The rain had begun again, spiky cold against her face, head clearing. The impulse to scream for help, on and on, into the silence of the side street, died in her chest, it was easily stifled; she might have been yelling into an Arctic waste for all the help it would bring, and she was still ashamed to scream. Helen: where is she? Where is the cow?

  There was a sound, a mirror of her own, spasmodic cough. Rose leapt away from the draught, poised for more flight. Helen was in the doorway, leaning against it, slipping slightly, the pose at first looking nonchalant, like someone lounging at the entrance of a party, ready to make a scene, languorous in the pose of a model but playfully pissed. So contrived was it that Rose was furious all over again, yelled at her with all the pent-up fury, ‘What’s your game, then? What’s your fucking game?’ The words out of her mouth as the resting position of Helen’s slender figure became less natural, sinister, the head supported on the arm, but lolling, the knees buckling, legs straightening in a sudden staggering lurch towards the desk, moving like an uncertain toddler aiming for the nearest knee, missing, ending up kneeling with a thump, her torso over a chair and her head bowed in contrition. There was a stickiness on the back of her neck, one sweater sleeve hung by a thread, and as she raised her head she stared fixedly at Rose, trying to summon the last powers of concentration.

  ‘Did he cut my face?’ she asked almost conversationally. ‘On
ly I need to know. I can’t tell.’

  ‘No,’ said Rose. ‘He didn’t.’ She stuck her fist in her mouth. Blood was running down the fingers of Helen’s left hand, which she stretched upwards with a strange elegance, focusing, bringing the fingers towards her face to rest gently on the bridge of her nose. Slight though it was, the movement cast a huge, brief shadow as the hand flickered down out of range of the light.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Rose wasn’t.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh, good. Listen,’ said Helen. ‘Did you get the knife?’

  ‘Yes.’ A whisper.

  ‘Good. I can’t get the phones to work. They’re switched through to the doorman on weekends, incoming only. He should be up on his rounds soon. Every hour, he does, Redwood says.’

  ‘The security bloke doesn’t do his rounds,’ Rose said, tersely. ‘He shirks. And he let my dad in, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Helen. ‘I didn’t think of that. Have you seen him?’

  ‘Who, the doorman?’ Rose asked stupidly.

  ‘No. I mean have you seen Logo? Your dad?’

  ‘You mean you knew who it was all the time?’

  Helen sighed without exasperation, as if everything she said was very, very difficult. It still looked as if she was playing a game of being drunk. Rose wanted to believe it.

  Under the sigh, Helen’s words came faster.

  ‘No, I didn’t know all the time, but I do now. He went downstairs, to find you. Did you see him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now he’s coming back up,’ said Helen dreamily, shaking her head slowly from side to side. ‘Like a plate of spaghetti. Go and jam the lift, quick.’

  Rose was slow, traumatised, mesmerised by that fluttering, bloodied hand, watching for more shadows on the wall.

  ‘Which lift?’

  ‘No, don’t: it’s too late. Listen, will you?’

  From below, came the grumbling of machinery.

  ‘Run,’ said Helen, her voice suddenly clear. ‘Will you bloody well run? It isn’t me he wants. Just run. Go on downstairs, I’ll keep him happy for a while. I’ll nag him.’ The face found the means to grin. ‘Keep moving till you find a way out, take the knife, threaten the doorman, but will you please run?’

  The lift was whining now, groaning beyond the first floor, coming closer. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Helen yelled, the languidness entirely gone. ‘Will you just, for once, do as you’re told?’

  ‘No.’

  But Rose ran, into the corridor. She was still holding the knife. The red light for the lift glowed. Rose dropped the knife, seized the steel handles of the pull-down doors, picked up the knife and shoved it down between them, jamming the wooden haft flat. Got you. The silence was deafening: the lift seemed to have stopped without any of the usual bump, stuck somewhere, below her feet. There was a dampness on the frame of the lift against which she leant, listening. Rose lifted her hand away in disgust, wiped it down the side of her skirt, not wanting to look at what was on it. She backed away in sudden exhilaration. Stuck, that’s what he was, let him rot. The smell of powder and body odour lingered. She shouted, barking like a dog at a safe distance, her voice full of gleeful venom.

  ‘You just stay in there, Dad. You stink, Daddy, you know that. You stink.’

  The use of her voice brought relief, then guilt. She stepped forward, less venomous. Was he all right? She tried not to care if he should smother, but did care a bit. Then she thought of Helen, bleeding all over Redwood’s floor. He’d done that. Rose could feel the onset of sobbing, confusion, doubt, tried to retrieve that brilliant feeling of rage which was such comfort, stood irresolute. Should she go forward or back, down to the washroom for towels? What did one ever do with blood but stare, fascinated and helpless, smothering the same old instinct to run? Then, like Helen before, the decision was made by the phone. Pealing from the clerks’ room. The response was automatic. Rose was in the room, banging the receiver against her ear in haste, wincing, no time to wonder why it was that the telephone’s sound was always first imperative, anywhere, anytime, even if it promised nothing.

  ‘Is Mr Cotton there?’

  ‘No, listen—’

  ‘He told me to ring him, this number, this time.’ The man’s voice was smooth, ragged at the edges with nervous irritation, not a man to be kept waiting. ‘Give him a message from me. Tell him it didn’t work. I’ve got a letter saying I’ve got to go again tomorrow, it didn’t work. Tell him I don’t like paying for something I haven’t got, and why hasn’t he done something. You tell him—’ The voice grew angrier, words a little slurred, fear lurking behind.

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ said Rose, the fury beginning to return. ‘Listen. I am locked in this building with a woman who’s hurt, a maniac and a phone which won’t dial out. Help me, please, phone the police. Now.’

  ‘… to stop mucking about,’ the voice went on. ‘You tell him what I said—’

  ‘Listen,’ said Rose again. ‘I’m stuck in this building with a maniac and someone hurt bad, will you please do something and call the police …’ This time the man registered. After an incredulous pause, he burst into a splutter of outraged laughter.

  ‘Call the police? What me? After what they’ve done? You must be joking.’ The line went dead. Rose continued to hold the receiver, looked at it in disbelief, began to punch numbers, any numbers, 999 numbers, the number of her flat, listened to the buzz of uselessness. She could not bring herself to fetch the doorman, didn’t know why, but she sensed the enemy, remembered him the other night, taking the whisky, leering a bit. Run, Helen had said, run. The doorman would let her out if she showed him the knife, though, wouldn’t he? But then she couldn’t take the knife out of the handles of the lift, could she, in case it decided to work again and … So she ran back to Redwood’s room and closed the door, dragging another chair across it, useless, the desk so old and heavy, it was unshiftable, but any kind of barrier was better than none.

  Helen was lying on the floor, her head against her wounded arm, the pose uncomfortable. Rose angled the lamp to see better, winced and looked away, then stripped off her jersey, took off the T-shirt underneath, looked around. A vase of flowers on a filing cabinet at the side, Christ there were enough silly chairs in here to seat an army, she thought impatiently, tossing the flowers to one side, sloshing water on the T-shirt. She dared not go out into the dark corridor again. The water from the flowers, early spring daffs, was none too clean, but it was cool. Rose cradled Helen’s head on her own lap, folded the arm with the tattered sleeve over the chest, thinking inconsequentially what a nice sweater it was, classy, she’d admired it this morning, hadn’t said so, of course. She dabbed at the clotted blood which had transferred itself to the cheeks, embarrassed somehow by the intimacy of this strange physical closeness.

  ‘Will someone please come?’ she said loudly. Then she looked down, adjusted the profile on her knees, more frightened of the sound of its breathing now than anything else, terrified it would stop. Hesitantly, she traced the line of the old scar with one finger.

  ‘He didn’t get your face, this time,’ she murmured. ‘Honest.’

  There was no reply. They would have to wait.

  It was quiet and warm, even with the window open wide. Rose began to feel unreasonably calm.

  Dinsdale Cotton was more than an hour late. He had missed his meeting in the pub, caught in the football crowds, and now he had missed the phone call. He bumped his car on to the pavement round the corner from the office, with scant regard for its ridiculously inflated value and sharp, metallic paint, not a car he could ever trust to a magistrates’ car park or want placed anywhere in sight of a colleague, even though he could pass it off as part of an inheritance. They would believe that, of course, in the same way his contemporaries at the Bar had believed his patrician background at first, the fabled public school (never quite specified, only suggested by the uniform, the speech, the tie, the well-worn-in quality clothes which looked as if the
y were part of an inheritance too), the patrician thinness, like a lean-boned racehorse. All of which belied the foundling survivor of endless scholarships obtained by cheating. There was nothing wrong with his intellect, but Dinsdale never could resist a short cut. Nor the materialistic ambition which did not equate with his instinctive imitation of a duke.

  The Bar rumbled him after a year or three; it was the women who sniffed him downwind with their nose for a thoroughbred, but the Civil Service, blindly egalitarian, had been easier to fool. And then he’d met Helen. Just at the point when she had begun to change her mind about him, the way women always did in the end, he had begun to think how nice it could be not to act all the time. She wouldn’t give a damn about his lineage. She had seemed to like him, might even forgive what he was with those big blue eyes, but really she didn’t want him, and he didn’t like the discovery of how much it mattered, just a game, but coinciding with everything beginning to go wrong.