Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

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  Play Dead

  A Crime Novel

  Peter Dickinson

  GEOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  The London Borough of Ethelden and Ormiston lies east of that of Hammersmith and Fulham, and west of that of Kensington and Chelsea, and combines many of the characteristics of those two. It does not, however, contain any character who in any way resembles a resident or politician living or active in either of its neighbours.

  AUGUST 1989

  1

  The new child seized the tricycle and screamed. Denny looked at her in astonishment for a couple of seconds, then his lower lip projected, quivering, and he launched into a bawl of outrage. His face contorted and went scarlet and his body became rigid, except for the arm which pushed flailingly at the aggressor, who clung on, still screaming.

  Poppy Tasker watched the encounter with mild interest. It was the sort of thing that happened every few minutes in the play-group, especially when a child turned up who hadn’t yet learnt the rules—rules unwritten, of course, and largely unspoken because most of the children’s vocabularies were still limited to ‘Mine!’ and ‘No!’. Adult rules did exist, but were different, less subtle than those the children had evolved among themselves to govern such confrontations, the gestures and stances by which one would attempt to take over a toy or piece of apparatus and the other assert primacy of possession. It was these conventions of the instinctive democracy of childhood that the newcomer had ignored.

  She had started her scream while still a good yard from the tricycle, before Denny had even noticed her approach and refused to yield, but it wasn’t that that had aroused Poppy’s interest. It was the way she screamed, on a very pure and piercing note, like a magnified electronic timer. When she ran out of breath she stopped, drew a fresh lungful and immediately, without having to work up to it, struck the same note, full volume, spot on. Her face meanwhile remained calmly concentrated on the central act of screaming. She might have been an operatic soprano doing her exercises—Brünnhilde, perhaps, honing up the voice before a sequence of hoya-hoyas but not yet working on the character, the bouncing, virginal harvester of dead heroes.

  The encounter was broken up by Big Sue, Denny’s nanny, and George, the chief play-leader. A strange girl, presumably the screamer’s nanny, hovered uselessly by. Poppy couldn’t hear what was said because it was almost the only wet day of that fabulous summer and the roof of the hut, a handsome, pavilion-like, circular structure, tended to resonate to the rain, and the children at the Lego table were smashing up the structure they’d been making, banging and scattering the pieces as they did so. Anyway, some sort of draw was agreed, another tricycle was produced and Denny moved slowly off, propelling himself along with his toes on the ground. The screamer climbed on to her tricycle but made no effort to move it, sitting erect and triumphant as if posing for a war memorial.

  Brünnhilde, thought Poppy. Wish I felt like going to the opera again. How long? A good four years, not counting that experimental once with dear old Aunt Liz, all pleasure made savourless by having seen Derek and Veronica settle into their seats at the other end of the row in front. She’d known it would happen. He never missed a production of Tosca, but that was what Liz had insisted on seeing, and since she was paying for the seats … Did he still go to the Escargot afterwards? Probably. Then home, and bed. Had Veronica yet worked out what female singers did for him, that while they were making love he in his imagination was slowly disrobing that night’s diva in the luxury of her hotel room, she still throbbing out arias for him as he did so? It had made his love-making livelier than on non-opera nights, so Poppy had never minded, but now she hoped Veronica knew, and did.

  Deliberately she decided to run a fantasy of her own, a new one. Start with the opera—Figaro, because he’d never tried opera before and she wanted it easy for him. After the interval they hold hands, his thumb exploring her palm. Not a restaurant. Taxi home through rain-glistening streets. Supper ready, taramasalata, duck salad, bottle of burgundy—they don’t drink it all—share one scrumptious pear, calvados, and now they’re in the living-room undressing each other and laughing and caressing and sipping from the same glass and spilling dribbles of calvados on to each other’s flesh and licking it off. Just the firelight …

  Hastily Poppy reran a section of fantasy and arranged to have sold the bracket clock after all so that she had afforded to install a proper open fire.

  … firelight from dry logs, faint wood-smoke. He …

  He was still too vague (what he looked like, what he did for a job, how she’d met him) for the fantasy to take proper hold. What about a big, craggy man with a very hairy chest? (Derek was smooth as a Canova and Alex merely downy.)

  … so a softly furry strong obliterating weight on her …

  ‘All right if I sit here?’

  The voice was nervy, northern. Poppy abandoned the log fire with more regret than she felt for the furry lover, but both had been an effort to keep going. The girl was the screamer’s nanny, a thin-faced, small-eyed girl, skinny apart from a disproportionate bust under her yellow T-shirt. A plea to save the whales was printed across these undulations. She wore jeans with the regulation tear on one kneecap, and sneakers.

  ‘Of course,’ said Poppy. She could see half a dozen places where the girl could have settled among people her own age. ‘You’re new, aren’t you? I’ll introduce you to the others in a minute. My name’s Poppy.’

  ‘Never! Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘I’m used to it now, but I know it’s a shock for strangers, like having different-coloured eyes or something.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean … only my name’s Peony, see?’

  Poppy crowed with laughter. She saw several of the girls look across the room and smile. They’d often said they liked to hear her laugh like that, though to her it was an odd, unbidden eruption, not really expressive of the doubts and subtleties of her inner self, a bit like a harmless sort of poltergeist to which a family has become inured but which still manifests itself to surprise strangers.

  ‘All we need now is a Pansy,’ she said. ‘Come and meet the Nafia.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘The regulars. Somebody must have called them that years ago. They’d have been a different lot then, but the name’s just gone on. They call themselves that without thinking about it. Who’s here? You’ve met Big Sue—she looks after Denny, the boy who had the tricycle. That’s Nell, at the paint-table, with the long hair, all in black. And that’s her son with her, Nelson. By the way, don’t ask if that’s a joke—she called him that for political reasons and didn’t realise till after …’

  ‘I’ve got a cousin lives in Mandela Road. You know, Runcorn.’

  Poppy nodded, though she knew nothing of Runcorn. Peony wasn’t as dumb as she looked, then. None of them were. They might have extraordinary patches of ignorance, but then so, in their eyes, did she.

  ‘Who else?’ said Poppy. ‘That’s Fran in the red track suit. She brings her son, Jason, and a neighbour’s little girl, only she hasn’t got her today. And that’s Laura, the older one, next to her, and now that’s Little Sue going across to talk to them—she looks after Peter, there, hitting that ball with the paintbrush … Heavens! What on earth can Sue have said?’

  The exclamation was involuntary. From across the room Little Sue seemed to have spoken briefly, to Fran rather than Laura, but Laura’s head had jerked back and her hand had flown to her mouth. Sue turned away, concealing her, and looked round the room
, and by the time she moved Laura was looking down at her knitting, her face invisible.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Poppy. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, Laura—she’s a real nanny—sorry, I didn’t mean that, but most of the girls do it as a sort of between job, until they start families of their own. Laura’s never done anything else. At the moment she’s looking after …’

  ‘You’re not one yourself then, Poppy?’

  ‘A nanny, you mean? No, I’m a gran. That’s mine.’

  She pointed at Toby, sitting on the floor a few feet away, enclosed in his own absorption which was like a force-field round him shutting out the wails and shouts and scurryings as he repetitively threaded a length of red ribbon he had found into the funnel of his plastic steam-engine and out through the fire-box. The engine had its own plastic driver and fireman for putting down the funnel, but as usual Toby was more interested in other possibilities.

  Poppy looked at him with slightly uneasy pleasure. The pleasure was rational—he was a lovely baby, by any standards. The unease was stupid superstition, but there. He was too good to be true, slept all night, teethed without whingeing, cried for acceptable reasons, finished his plate, shook off colds and other bugs in a couple of days, played with you if you felt like it and by himself if you didn’t, and above all put out his arms with a smile of delight to greet you as you came through the door and stumped across to be picked up and hugged. However much reason might tell you to enjoy your luck, unreason squatted always in the dark beneath the stairs mumbling not-quite-audible fragments of doom. When people praised Toby to his face Poppy had a strong wish to shut them up, just as if she’d been a peasant in some mountain hamlet where the evil eye was still a living dread.

  ‘Look at those curls!’ said Peony. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Toby, and very male. A right little chauvinist, in fact.’

  ‘You ought to meet my brothers,’ said Peony. ‘Three of them, I’ve got, and each worse than the last, and Dad he’s worse than the lot.’

  She shrugged, smiled and looked away, trying to avoid any attempt on Poppy’s part to take her off and introduce her to her own age group. This had happened before, with other newcomers, until they lost their shyness, in fact Poppy tended to be treated by many of the younger nannies and mums as a sort of substitute elder relative, a combination of lonely hearts column, Citizens’ Advice Bureau and non-marriage counsellor. She had mixed feelings about this. The acceptance and trust were welcome, and so was the company, though the chat was narrow in its interests. Occasionally there were nuggets of gossip, about their own lives or the doings of their employers, which gave her titillating insights into alien modes of living. The couple of times when she felt she had actually helped with a problem had been rewarding. On the other hand the vague but real assumption on their part that she was different, old, any part of her life that could be called interesting now over, was irritating and depressing.

  She campaigned unobtrusively to narrow the perception gap, avoided grannyish clothes, varied her make-up enough to make them comment and suggest, eavesdropped on their talk so as to be able at least to pretend that she’d watched Neighbours, learnt to tell Madonna from Michael Jackson from Kylie Minogue, and when it was her turn to provide a joint lunch for some of them and their charges produced frozen peas, chips and baked beans and microwaved fish fingers.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ said Peony on a note of warning.

  Her own charge, the screamer, had returned, having left the tricycle and then gone wandering round the room in a dreamy way, as though her burst of screaming had for the moment satisfied her lust for domination. Most children coming into the confusion of the play centre tended to cling to their minders, often for several days, before gaining confidence to face their peers. This girl was different in that way, too. Now she stopped at the edge of Toby’s force-field and studied his game with the ribbon and the engine. She concentrated. Poppy could sense her energies focusing for another outburst, but did nothing to intervene. Reason told her Toby had to learn that life wasn’t all admiration and cuddles, and unreason added that it needed a daily sacrifice of delight to appease the mumbler under the stairs.

  Peony did nothing either—too cowed, probably. But at the moment of crisis Tony decided that he had mastered the ribbon-down-funnel phenomenon and that he now needed an audience to whom to demonstrate his triumph. He looked up for Poppy, not having realised that in the process of discovery he had moved a half-circle round the engine and was facing away from her. He was confronted instead by the screamer, at the point of onrush. She would do. (Anybody would in fact do. At Poppy’s flat he would reveal his intellectual breakthroughs to her cat, Elias.) He held up the ribbon in front of the screamer’s face like a busker about to startle passers-by with a conjuring trick.

  The scream stuck. Toby bent to the engine to begin his demonstration, but dissatisfied with the level of her attention turned back and took the girl by the wrist, pulling her down. Docilely she knelt and watched while he slid the ribbon through the engine three or four times, then, as he was reaching in to withdraw it from the fire-box, plunged her hand down the funnel to snatch it back. Their fingers met. They realised what had happened, looked at each other and laughed. It was one of those instants of communicated joy with which small children are programmed to reward their adults, lollipops to make the slavery of child-care worth enduring.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Peony. ‘I reckoned we were in for a bust-up. Some days she sort of blows up every ten minutes like one of them, you know in that park place, America, was it?’

  ‘Geyser? Yellowstone? Old Faithful, or something.’

  ‘’Sright.’

  ‘My father-in-law was a bit like that. You’d be having a perfectly sensible conversation with him and then you’d ask for the salt and he’d blast your head off for ruining perfectly good food. It didn’t mean anything. If you’d mentioned the Common Market at that moment he’d have blasted you about that. What’s her name?’

  ‘Deborah. Not Debbie. Mrs Capstone wants her called Deborah.’

  ‘I’ll try and remember,’ said Poppy.

  ‘You don’t look old enough for a gran.’

  ‘Thank you very much. Actually I’ve got three, but the other two are in New Zealand. Not that you’ve got to be that old to have grandchildren—there must be some grannies under thirty. It’s probably in the Guinness Book of Records.’

  ‘Dead thick, they must of been. I’m not starting till I’m twenty-eight, and I’ll have a girl and a boy, and that’s it.’

  Poppy smiled—she had no wish to add family planning to her other unofficial duties. Capstone, she thought. The name rang a bell. Deborah Capstone—you’d have the makings of a formidable woman with a name like that. Deborahs ate Poppies for breakfast …

  Deborah lacked the scientific bent. Toby would have spent a good ten minutes verifying the hands-down-funnel-and-up-firebox effect, but before she’d finished laughing she was on her feet and looking for other objects to insert. She scurried round snatching up toys regardless of size and shape and whether another child happened to be playing with them. Toby was looking with disbelief at Nelson’s yellow polka-dot cuddle tortoise when Nell brought Nelson over to retrieve it.

  The tortoise had come from Harrods, the gift of a great-aunt. Nell had removed the label, but even without that the toy was still curiously expressive of values antipathetic to her, lazy, complacent, bourgeois, frivolous. Maybe that was why Nelson had chosen it to be his sacred object—almost from the cradle children seem to be preparing the ground for later revenges. Deborah saw their approach and knew what it meant. The delayed scream erupted.

  She stood stock still, firmly in the centre of the imaginary limelight, clinging to the tortoise like a soprano to her lover who has been called to distant wars, letting the sound come. Nell and Nelson halted, but Toby rose and gazed at her in wonder. Slowly he lifted his hand, extended his forefinger and inserted it
into Deborah’s mouth. The note modulated from C to D flat, then returned to C as he withdrew his finger. His movements were characteristically decisive but gentle and Deborah, rapt in the ecstasy of her scream, appeared not to notice. He repeated the experiment, this time as she drew breath. She found his finger in her mouth and pushed it away.

  ‘More,’ he said.

  Her mouth was still open but no sound came. She actually seemed unsure of herself. Perhaps it was beyond her experience that anyone should ask her to scream.

  ‘More,’ he said again, but she seemed to have forgotten the cause of her outrage. To show her what he wanted he let out a hoot and varied it by putting his open palm over his mouth and moving it away, a trick Hugo had taught him some months ago. She copied him, no longer screaming, nor hooting like him, but singing a definite note, something Poppy hadn’t heard other children at that age do. Nell took the chance to ease the tortoise from her grasp. Poppy made the introductions.

  Poppy both admired and liked Nell. She admired her for the way she faced the world, her courage in her principles, her sureness of purpose. She lived in a squat. Greenham had been a second home to her. At some point she’d spent a month in Holloway following a destructive break-in at another American base. She joined protests, stood on picket lines, and so on. From chat among the other girls Poppy had gathered that Nell had deliberately decided she needed a child to fulfil her femininity, and had equally deliberately chosen a black friend to be the father. Nothing else was known about him. He clearly didn’t live with her and she never mentioned him, or referred to Nelson even having a father. It all sounded egocentric, cold-blooded, almost ruthless, but despite those adverse aspects of the modern zodiac, the act of childbirth had triggered the primeval necessary responses. When she was with Nelson every line of her body expressed her love, her intelligent, aware absorption in her son and his needs and nature. That was why Poppy liked her.