‘Feel poorly,’ he mumbled.
‘What’s up?’
‘Can’t rightly say.’ He creaked his head from side to side. I went and put the kettle on.
I sat by him again so he could see my lips. ‘So Sarah’s back,’ I said. ‘She staying?’
‘Didn’t I say? Could of sworn I said. She’s thinking of packing her course in.’
‘She didn’t mention that,’ I said. ‘She must have only just started it.’
‘And coming to Sheffield to work at a kennels. She’s staying with a friend for a couple of days, thinking it over. It’s in bag if she wants it, connections, you know. And she’s a looker,’ he added, irrelevantly. ‘Got a way with animals, she has. Ever since she was knee high to a sparrow always rescuing baby mice and feeding them with eye-droppers.’
The kettle started whistling so I went to bring the tea through.
‘Going home for Christmas?’ he said.
It was like someone had suddenly got hold of my guts and squeezed. ‘Dunno,’ I said, which was true because I hadn’t let myself think about Christmas, even though the shops were all choking up with tinsel like some sort of mutant weed.
Last Christmas I minded my American lady’s house – not one of my ladies any more. I was only meant to be going in twice a day to feed the cat, switch the lights on and off and draw the curtains to fool any watching burglars. Instead I stayed in the bath practically all week or in bed watching TV. When I was in bed I kept the electric blanket on and the warmth got right into my bones till they almost melted – which made it all the worse when she came back. I got the sack after that. She knew I’d been staying, someone must have said. But what difference did it make? Surely it was better if there was someone there? Not the sack exactly. She just said they’d be moving back to the States soon and she could manage herself till then so she’d have to let me go. Only they didn’t move. I kept walking past to see and she even saw me once and looked away quick.
Christmas makes me think of my mum and I can hardly bear to think. We used to have Christmas lunch with the friends. The morning always started off the same right up till I was fifteen. I’d take my Christmas stocking into her bed really early and we’d take everything out together. We’d drink tea from her Teasmaid and unpeel and eat the tinny-tasting chocolate money. Then we’d have bacon sandwiches for breakfast because they were our favourite thing and she’d mix up fizzy white wine and orange juice to drink while we opened our presents. We’d put on our best clothes and lipstick even though it was only us and still early in the morning and we’d take turns to watch each other open the presents and make noises like fireworks going off though we already knew what half of them were.
We’d walk to the friends’ house which was a long walk but we always did because it was good for us and so that she could drink. We’d take bags of presents and bottles of wine and spot the kids playing out on their new bikes or roller skates, spot the new hats and scarves. The lunch would be long and hot and noisy with crackers and silly jokes and a flaming pudding.
Walking home was always the best bit. The friends always said for goodness sakes get a taxi but we would love to be walking with ringing heels in the frosty dark, our breaths puffing out in front of us and the path glittering in the street lights. We liked to peep in windows where the curtains hadn’t been drawn yet and see snatches of other people’s Christmases, televisions flickering, streamers flopping down, someone snoring in a chair. The moon would be a flung-up silver threepence and cats would prowl and we would link arms and hardly need to say a word.
Anyway this Christmas I don’t know what yet and I don’t really care, to tell the truth. It’s just another day in a line of days.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
Mr Dickens said, ‘Don’t fuss with it myself. Meals on Wheels usually drop off a cracker.’ Which made me laugh.
It seemed like hours before Doggo, Norma and Sarah came back and when they did there was a look between them which left me out. I couldn’t look at Doggo. I wondered what he’d told her. After all that they hadn’t even got to see her friend. The surgery was closed, and Sarah had decided that anyway Norma wasn’t seriously ill. They were going to try again tomorrow.
‘Back to work then,’ I said, but Sarah said, ‘Oh no, let’s have a cup of tea first.’
I said, ‘Well we’ve just had one.’
But Mr Dickens said, ‘I could do with another, Sarah makes a good cuppa,’ which I know was only him being polite but still made me think, what about me, don’t I make a good cuppa too?
I have to admit she’s pretty even though she’s big. She’s got the kind of smile that makes you want to smile too, just some trick to do with a dimple and a look in her eye. She told us a story about her friend who had to do an operation on a goldfish and operated on the wrong one. Imagine operating on a goldfish. It’s a mad world, isn’t it? One end of the street there’s someone frying great hunks of slaughtered cod and haddock and at the other someone fiddling about taking a lump off a goldfish.
I needed to pee after all that tea. I went out into the hall to what Mr Dickens calls his cloakroom which is a toilet with coats hanging in it – including a blue fur-collared one of Zita’s – and a washbasin with a cake of leatherish cracked soap.
When I came out I stood in the hall and listened to their voices sounding happy, sounding like they were part of something and I wasn’t. I stood by the nailed-up door. I put my nose against the wood and sniffed to see if there was any smell of burning left. It seems wrong to me, to nail it up like that and leave it burnt. If it was my room I’d clean it up and use it, fill it with light and flowers, not nail a plank across the door and leave it empty. I think that’s what I’d do.
When I went back in they were sitting cosily round, drinking a second cup of tea. Norma hopped up and sat on Sarah’s lap which she has never done with me. ‘Uh-ho,’ Doggo said, ‘she’s fallen in love.’
‘She’s always had a way with them,’ said Mr Dickens, giving Doggo a dirty twinkle. ‘Animals I mean.’
You have perked up, I thought.
We finally managed to get away. It was always worse when you first went into the cellar, the dismal light, the cold and damp. It got better when you were used to it. I lit the Calor gas. ‘You didn’t tell her about the cellar – or anything?’ I asked.
He flicked me a look like I was stupid. ‘She’s cool,’ he said.
‘Sure?’
‘She’s OK.’
‘Yeah?’ I didn’t really mind. I was relieved. And pleased to think we had our secrets, Doggo and me and no one else.
Twenty
It’s hard to have someone always in your space. You might want to be private. You might have things you need to deal with without another person there. He asked me if I’d fetch him some chips. I should have said yes but I said no. I said Fetch your own chips. I mean if he could go to the vet’s and go to the pub he could go to the chippie, couldn’t he?
Soon as he’d gone, I rolled my sleeve up to look at my arm. The blood had stopped but it was sore, the toilet paper sticking to the scabs. There was plastic left in but I couldn’t pick it out, it hurt too much. Not like the clean first hurt, this hurt is dirtier and more like guilt. I washed it and put fresh toilet paper on.
Doggo came back with chips and a pickled egg. I ate a few chips which were cold and tasted of the paper they were wrapped in. He scrubbed his beard with his fist.
‘Here,’ he said, looking embarrassed, shoving me something.
‘What?’
‘Happy Birthday.’
It was a silver pendant shaped like a hand with fine-etched lines like the lines on the palm of a hand. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Indian,’ he said. It still had the price tag on. ‘You might want to take that off,’ he said. He grinned and snapped it off with his sharp side teeth. There was no bag or wrapping paper. I think he stole it. I wanted to ask, to tell him off. What a stupid risk that was. But a risk taken for me. His gloved fingers fum
bled the nape of my neck as he fastened it.
‘Well ta,’ I said.
We held one dog-lead each and he took my arm as we walked along but it was my sore arm and I yelped. ‘What’s up?’ he said. I said I’d hurt it.
‘How?’
‘Dunno. It’s nothing.’
‘Let’s see.’
‘No.’ I would rather die than have Doggo know what a stupid thing I did.
He had his shades on because we were out in public. I said it made it look obvious that he was disguised, wearing sunglasses at night in the dark. He thought about that for a bit but he kept them on. A police car cruised past and I watched his face but he didn’t look any more dodgy than usual. You’d think if someone was lying low they’d stay in all the time, under the bed or crouching behind a sofa, but it isn’t like that. People in hiding keep a low profile but that doesn’t mean they don’t go to the pub or walk in the park just like anybody else. They go about a sort of life. I know all about that myself.
The pub was brown inside and there was folk music going on in the back room where we had to take the dogs. A haystack of a man was whining through his nose with his finger in his ear. But I didn’t care. We found a table and the dogs curled up underneath it. Doggo plonked a couple of pints down in front of me. ‘Finished your essay?’ he said.
A sip of beer went down the wrong way. He thumped me on the back. When I’d finished choking he kept on. ‘On lighthouses, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh that,’ I said.
‘What kind of stuff? History or what?’
‘Just a kind of general survey,’ I said, ‘you know, the meaning of lighthouses in … books and you know art and that.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ he said and he was right, it did. Maybe someone really has done it, I don’t know. ‘You must be fucking clever.’ He stared at me till I could nearly make out his eyes through the dark plastic. I shrugged modestly. ‘At university then?’ he said.
‘Yeah, sort of,’ I said. ‘Mr Dickens didn’t look too great today, did he?’
Doggo drank his beer about ten times faster than me. He got up to get another but I said I’d get it.
I hated standing at the bar, knowing he was watching me, watching the way I stood and the way it took me ages to get served, as if I was invisible. I could just imagine how Mrs Harcourt would deal with it. She’d burst in saying, ‘Excuse me,’ in her loud posh voice, pushing in and getting her Campari-soda or whatever before anyone else.
Thinking about Mrs Harcourt reminded me. I’d gone back to the Harcourts’. I wasn’t going to but something made me. I let myself in and there was the note on the kitchen table as usual. This time I read it. It said:
Dear Lamb, I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate our agreement as from today. Please leave your key behind. No wages, which under the circumstances I’m sure you’ll understand.
Myra Harcourt.
Fuck you, I wrote at the bottom which was a bit childish so I screwed up the note and chucked it in the bin. I didn’t care anyway. I crept upstairs really quietly just in case he was tucked up in bed again and he wasn’t. It was messy and dark with the curtains drawn. ‘Who’s going to pick up all your shit for you now?’ I said to the bed.
I went in the en suite and had a last bath. I used up all her bath milk and dried myself on three towels. I slapped on half a bottle of body lotion. Then I went. I didn’t empty the bath, flush the bog or hang up the towels or anything. I thought about smashing the sentimental Shepherdess but I didn’t. I just went, left the key on the table and went.
I wonder what Mr Harcourt told her? Not that I give a flying toss. Don’t need that job anyway. Don’t need to clean for anyone any more. I’ll keep Mr Dickens on but I’d do that whether he paid me or not. I’ll keep Mrs Banks on too because she’s Doggo’s mum but apart from that I’m not doing it any more, anyone else’s dirty work. Not for a while, anyway. The Harcourts and the Brown-Withers can get stuffed.
Doggo and I shared a packet of crisps and I tried to eat them in normal big crunches. There should be a law that everyone has to clean their own mess. If everyone did that there would be just one lot of cleaning for each person and that’s not too much to ask, is it?
‘Why are you doing that?’ Doggo said.
He was looking at the beer-mat I’d shredded up into a million pieces, like a pile of snow. I am always ripping things up without knowing.
‘Dunno,’ I said.
We listened to a man play the concertina for a minute then Doggo started going on about gardening.
‘It’s ace,’ he said, leaning forward so I could feel his warm breath on my ear. ‘Never even thought about gardening and that but I fucking love it. Never even used to notice plants and trees and that but now they’re everywhere, know what I mean? I wish …’ He looked wistful.
‘What?’
‘Oh fuck it.’
But I know what he was going to say. In another kind of life he’d like to have a garden. To have time to watch a garden grow. I smiled. See I was getting to know him now, to understand. I was wondering if you could count this as a date.
The evening was going fine then someone jolted right into my bad arm and it hurt so much I yelled. I was on the edge of tears. But you should have seen Doggo in action. He leapt up, spilling his beer, and took a step towards the harmless twitching little man who was blurting, ‘Sorry, mate, accident, sorry.’
Doggo raised his fist and went, ‘You watch it, right?’
‘Right, right,’ burbled the man. ‘Can I buy you a drink, both of you?’ So Doggo let him buy us both another pint. It was the first time anyone’s stuck up for me for years and for some reason that nearly set me off crying too, but I was worried that he was drawing attention to himself. Another risk for me.
We smiled at each other. Just looking across the table and smiling straight into each other’s faces. It’s not often you do that. It was like a sunrise in my chest. The man brought us our drinks.
‘Ta,’ Doggo said, not even looking up. Then he said, ‘What about that Sarah then?’
‘What about her?’ I said.
‘She’s something else, isn’t she?’
‘Hmm,’ I said. The sun set at once. Did I mention he was still wearing the shades. In a pub at night? If I didn’t know him I might have thought he was a prat what with the sunglasses and the woolly gloves and a kind of fugitive hunch in his shoulders.
‘She’s not a student vet any more,’ I said, ‘she’s given up. She gave up before she’d hardly started.’
‘She hasn’t decided yet,’ he said. ‘She were finding it hard-going. If she takes job managing kennels she’ll be earning right off. We were discussing it in car.’
Discussing. That is not a Doggo-type word. What else were you discussing? I wanted to say. But didn’t.
There was a long silence. ‘Tell me about the murder,’ I said. ‘Have you escaped from prison?’
‘Einstein,’ he said.
I felt like walking out of there. Sometimes his voice has such a horrid scornful edge. I was losing him again. I didn’t know what to do. He downed his beer and got up to get another. Sometimes I hate the way he walks, kind of cocky, like his whole body is swinging from his shoulders. You’d never see a woman walk like that. He sat down with his beer. He hadn’t even offered me another drink. Fair enough I’d hardly started mine, but still. He took a long swallow and I watched the bobbing of the Adam’s apple in his soft white throat. He said, ‘What about you, Lamb?’
‘What?’
‘Who are you hiding from?’
My throat went so knotted I couldn’t breathe let alone speak.
‘Go on,’ he said.
I looked down and saw another beer-mat was in shreds. My fingers were trembling. I tried to take a sip of beer but my lips wouldn’t bend the right way. Someone started playing the bagpipes.
‘Christ,’ he said flicking his eyes over to the bagpiper and back. He smiled and put his gloves out to cover my hands and keep them
still. ‘Come on,’ he said. His voice had gone soft and coaxing. I looked up at him. Trying to imagine the dagger or the gun. I could not imagine. There was nothing I could tell him. The moment stretched between us till it broke. He took his hand away. We sat there a bit longer, listening to the dreadful racket. I found I was fingering the silver hand. He saw and smiled. I dropped it.
The music was really getting on my nerves. The company was shit, the smoke was thick, the beer was horrid and even the crisps were stale. I got up. Gordon heaved himself to his feet.
‘We going?’ Doggo said.
‘I am,’ I said, ‘you do what you like.’
I walked off and he followed. We walked along and after a while he grabbed my hand. It’s the first hand, well glove, I’ve held since I don’t know when. We didn’t say much. As I walked I was trying to let all the tension go. It was still him, Doggo. And he was still choosing to be with me. He needed to be with me. Nothing had changed. It was him and me against the world.
He had Norma’s lead and I had Gordon’s and I liked the patient way Gordon plodded along unlike Norma who skips all over the place only not so much when she’s poorly. It was like we were a kind of group or even family, all joined together by hands and leads. OK, so there were things about each other we didn’t know. There are always things you don’t know about other people and most of all about yourself. You don’t know what you would do in certain situations. It makes me laugh the way people sound off about how they’d never do this or how that is so wrong because they simply do not know. But me and Doggo, even though we knew there were no-go areas between us, were still holding hands and I suddenly got a feeling inside which is happy and I squeezed his hand but he yelled and yanked it away.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
We carried on walking. I didn’t know what to say any more. It was misty, the mist thick and fuzzy orange round the street lights. I didn’t dare get hold of his hand again and he didn’t reach for mine. Him yelling about his hand had reminded me about my bad arm and that whole sickening subject.
Now You See Me Page 12
