Relatively Strange

by Marilyn Messik

  Faith very carefully and gently withdrew her arms from her mother, trying not to cause any more pain, lowered her to the ground and rose stiffly to her feet. She was a tall girl and nearly on a level with her father. Ice blue eye met ice blue eye. Within her head all those carefully constructed walls were coming down and from behind them was first seeping then trickling then pouring knowledge, known but denied for so long.

  “Don’t touch her.” She said. I could see her teeth were chattering and she had to clench her jaw against that to talk. “Not. Ever. Again. Do you hear me.” He smiled, cocking his head to one side, humorously quizzical as he’d been, to our amusement, so many times before.

  “Faith, sweet pea, don’t interfere in things you don’t understand. Helen?” he appealed mock-plaintively to his wife who had crawled a little way, reached up to the oven door handle and was trying and failing to haul herself up.

  “Tell her Helen. Tell her I’m not a difficult man. Now am I? Tell her I sometimes spot things you’ve missed, tell her I help you out with that.” He moved forward again. I didn’t know whether he had in mind to hit her or help her, because he didn’t know either, but whichever, he didn’t get a chance. Faith moved swiftly in front of her and blocked him. He frowned.

  “Now, Faith, if you really want to help your old dad, run upstairs, get my slippers, there’s a good girl.” Faith looked past him at me.

  “Call an ambulance.” She said. I picked up the receiver again. He slapped her hard round the face and she rocked back on her heels.

  “Ah now, look what you made me do.” He was genuinely sorrowful and I mean genuinely, there was no doubting what I read. She didn’t move one muscle, stood her ground his finger marks livid and reddening on her chalk white face. Mrs Brackman reached out with one hand and caught hold of his trousers.

  “Don, no, please.” It came out ‘pleashe’. He swung on his heel, moving swiftly across the kitchen as I was dialling the second 9 and knocking the phone clean out of my hand. As it hit the floor, he wrenched the brown plaited cord out of the socket on the wall and I thought he was going to hit me too, but no, he seemed to want to keep it in the family.

  He moved back to his wife on the floor and their daughter. He stood face to face with Faith again, shook his head, more in sorrow than anger drew back his arm, fist clenched tight this time.

  “Noooo.” I screamed. “Don’t.” He turned his body slightly to ensure maximum impact and I went into his head. I didn’t know what I was looking for yet I found it immediately and acted. Nothing very dramatic, just a small pull, a minor twist. The result was instantaneous and terrible.

  He toppled where he stood, falling backwards in strangely slow motion, not crumpling but going down full length like a felled tree. He hit the tiled floor with a solid thwunk and his cheerful blue gaze, glazing over already, contemplated the ceiling without much interest.

  I think we stayed in silent tableau for a good few moments, Faith, Mrs Brackman, me and of course the DCI, before movement returned to three of us. Mrs Brackman let out a high-pitched howl that seemed to last forever. Faith’s legs gave way and she sank to the floor beside her mother putting her arms round her again, to receive as much as give comfort. I moved around the Chief Inspector cautiously on stiff limbs. It wasn’t a big kitchen and there were a lot of people on the floor.

  “I’ll get help.” I said. But there was no doubt in the minds of any of us that he was dead. A tidy home, or lack of it, had ceased to be of any further interest to D.C.I. Brackman.

  I walked steadily down the garden path and up the adjacent one, to their next-door neighbour, no-one I’d ever met before. A nice lady who came to her door wiping floury hands on a flower-patterned apron and smiling inquiringly. If she was shocked to find a teenager she didn’t know, on her doorstep with a story of accident and emergency, she didn’t let it show. She didn’t panic and she didn’t ask unnecessary questions. She phoned for an ambulance whilst divesting herself of the apron, gave the address and the minimum details I’d passed on, yelled through to whoever was watching television in the living room that she was popping next door for a tick and, pausing only to gather up some sort of picnic rug from an under-stairs cupboard, followed me at a brisk trot back next door.

  She sucked in a deep breath at the scene that greeted her but wasted no time – the sort of woman who copes for England. She utilised the picnic rug to drape gently over the ex Chief Inspector, covering his rapt gaze and despatching me upstairs quickly to bring down eiderdowns from the bedrooms. I dragged one off Faith’s bed and then tiptoed into the room that I knew was Mr and Mrs Brackman’s and pulled another off the bed there, dragging them past Shirley’s closed door. I didn’t go in. She was probably better where she was for the moment. Neighbour Joan wrapped the eiderdowns swiftly round Faith and her mother, tucking them both in, tutting and there thereing all the while. She handed me the damp cloth, to rinse out so it could be re-applied to Mrs Brackman’s now purple, still-swelling lip.

  “Ah, Helen, Helen,” she kept murmuring, “There, there, my dear, there, there, you’ll be all right, we’ll get you to hospital, you’ll be all right.” She knew, had known what had been going on for a long time, had helped Helen before when she’d had ‘accidents’, tried and failed to get her to seek help. She glanced up at my ashen face and ordered me to make tea, strong, hot and sweet, mind. Actually, she didn’t think we’d have time to drink it, but she knew shock when she saw it and in her book, action was always by far and away the best course. I dutifully utilised the water, boiled, was it only a few moments ago, by the late, not yet lamented Chief Inspector and in no time at all there was the sound of sirens.

  The police arrived at the same time as the ambulance, a couple of very shocked constables from the local station who, of course, knew the family and were on first name terms with neighbour Joan. Mrs Brackman was lifted swiftly and efficiently on to a stretcher by the ambulancemen. She was, even in the midst of all the pain, grief and humiliation, still polite and thanked them over and over. She made them stop for a moment as they carried her out, pulled her arm from under the blanket and took my hand briefly,

  “So sorry, you were here pet, so sorry.” Faith was led out too, still eiderdown wrapped,

  “Shock, poor kid.” One of the nice ambulancemen had his arm around her and she rested against him heavily, she seemed to have forgotten I was there.

  Neighbour Joan had leaned over the stretchered Mrs Brackman and said not to worry dear she’d see to Shirley and me and would lock up the house right and tight after the lads and all had done the necessary. We both went upstairs to get Shirley. She greeted us brightly, accepting without question Joan’s brisk explanation about her mother’s fall and Faith going with her to the hospital to keep her company. We went back next door, accompanied by one of the constables. Shirley hadn’t seen the shape lying under the picnic rug and I think the rest of us were only too delighted not to see it any more. I finally got my cup of hot tea. Neighbour Joan phoned my mother and a policewoman turned up and sat down on the sofa with me, put a kindly arm round my shoulder and said she just needed to ask a few quick questions and, if I felt up to it, could I say what happened?

  I could of course, say exactly what happened but decided it might be best not to. I could read clearly that D.C.I. Brackman had been a hugely popular member of the local team, respected enormously, liked by colleagues and public alike. Always the bloke to step forward for an extra shift without a moan, first to put his hand in his pocket at the pub and invariably ready with a word of advice and help with the paperwork, for many an out-of-depth raw recruit. I didn’t know exactly what Faith and Mrs Brackman were going to say but I did know how very important to them was all of the above. I didn’t lie.

  I said it was all muddled in my head because it happened so fast. I said, truthfully, that I couldn’t say exactly how Mrs Brackman had come to fall and I didn’t fib when I confirmed Chief Inspector Brackman was in a very cheerful mood and not at all unwell when he ar
rived home. When the policewoman said was there anything I thought I might have left out, I sobbed quite a bit and she said, now, now, I’d done very well and had known to go for help and to try and put it all out of my mind now.

  At one point I looked up and caught the knowing and saddened eye of neighbour Joan and she smiled and nodded at me encouragingly. She was thinking what a blessing it was it had all gone right over my head and shortly after that, my mother arrived in a state, in a taxi to take me home. She and neighbour Joan, complete strangers, nevertheless came into the room with arms around each other’s waists, the way women do in a crisis and I could see from my mother’s appalled expression that she remembered our conversation a while back.

  “Was it you?” asked my parents with terrible apprehension, that evening when I was finally home and in bed.

  “No.” I said. And because they couldn’t live with thinking otherwise, they chose to believe me.

  *

  Faith didn’t come back to school for a week and when she returned people did their best, which wasn’t brilliant. They either tackled things head on, went up and said how really sorry they were or else pretended not to notice her as she came into class, developing an urgent interest in the contents of their case until the teacher entered and talking was prohibited anyway. She deeply loathed both approaches, any approach actually.

  They said it was an aneurysm, a blood vessel that burst in his head, a time-bomb they said, which he’d probably been walking around with for years. It could have gone anytime.

  I didn’t go to the funeral but, with my parents, attended the impressive memorial service. Mrs Brackman had only stayed in hospital for a couple of nights, insisting she needed to be with the girls. At the service we learned how and why her husband had earned such a string of commendations during the course of his career. Several high-ups, sombrely blue-uniformed and silver-buttoned spoke movingly and told us that not only the family but the Force had lost a true one-off. When at the end Mrs B, flanked by Faith and Shirley stood to bid farewell to the attendees, her normally pale face, despite red-rimmed eyes, was flushed, with pride alongside the grief. The swelling round her eye and lip had gone down but she still moved stiffly, grimaced at certain angles. She thanked my parents for coming, accepted their condolences but reserved a special hard hug for me which I returned, as fiercely as I thought her bruised ribs would allow.

  When Faith and I were alone there was a certain amount of constraint between us, inevitable I suppose if you’ve just killed somebody’s father, although of course she didn’t know that and we certainly never talked about what she knew I knew. There was never one single breath of scandal, the story was Mrs Brackman – and wasn’t accident her middle name? – had yet again come to grief, falling off something unspecified in the kitchen. Faith and I, arriving home from school had found her and Chief Inspector Brackman had arrived shortly after that. It was entirely probable that the shock of seeing her like that, combined with trying to lift her had just been enough to fracture that traitorously unsuspected, weak vessel, deep in his brain.

  We were with Faith a lot, Elaine, Rochelle and I, celebrity status conferred as best friends of the bereaved and with each recounting, the lines of memory and knowledge blurred and shifted, obscured by repetition and I almost bought into the fantasy, wanted to so much, but couldn’t.

  I felt completely frozen inside, unable to think about what had happened, unable to stop thinking about it. I was sleeping poorly. Mrs Brackman and Faith wailed through my dreams, Shirley turned and smiled blankly at me and I woke to find the Chief Inspector rising on his toes beside my bed, cheerfully inquisitorial. I often couldn’t move, muscles locked in place by what my father said was sleep paralysis. Quite common, you think you’re awake but you’re not really, a fraction of time when the brain thinks it sees something but doesn’t let the body respond to disprove it. Lots of people have it apparently, although of course not a lot of them shared what lay on my conscience.

  I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Chief Inspector Brackman at the point I’d stopped him, had crossed some sort of a line. What was in his head was the conviction that unless he sorted out his misguided wife and daughter, they didn’t stand a chance in this life and the fact that he might have had to beat them to death to do it, wasn’t going to stand in his way. One small part of me and it shamed me then and appals me still, was unmoved by what I’d done. It was common sense, one life against two – four, if you factored Shirley and me into the equation. Because I’d had no doubt that once that line had been crossed, there would have been no going back – only forward!

  Chapter Twenty

  Over the weeks and months that followed, Faith began very slowly to heal but despite all my rationalisation I didn’t. As well as not sleeping, I lost my appetite and my mother fussed over me, cooking my favourite meals and buying me special little treats. But I was feeling continuously haunted and guilty and at the same time, desperately ashamed of not feeling guilty enough.

  Mock exams came and went and I did my stuff in a daze. Faith’s mother who was coping, everyone said, wonderfully well, under the circumstances, decided to take them to the seaside for the Easter holidays. I was pleased that she and Faith seemed, in the turmoil of the last few weeks to have rediscovered their relationship. There was laugher coming back to that house and if it was a little less feverish than before, then that was a good thing too.

  *

  Other changes were also happening round me. Within the extended family, seismic shifts altered the landscape of our lives, as marriages took place, babies arrived, new in-laws were integrated and people you thought would be there forever, suddenly weren’t. Auntie Yetta moved to the big Kalooki club in the sky. She was followed, quietly, a few months later by Morrie Schwartz who breathed his last so unspectacularly, in his normal armchair, that it was a good hour amidst the noise and kerfuffle of a Saturday Tea, before anyone spotted he’d gone. And then, just as things were settling down again, Grandma suffered another, much more severe stroke and my parents’ attention shifted away from me and my issues, to a new regime of hospital visits and a different anxiety.

  I cried off from those visits as much as I possibly could. Truth to tell, I found the hospital unbearably painful, as if I was wearing my nerves on the wrong side of my skin. Accumulated vibrations of hope, fear, pain, humiliation and acceptance were densely there even before we entered the building, overpowering once we were inside and I seemed, somehow to have misplaced the knack of keeping things out as well as I should. Equally painful was the fact my mother swore Grandma was reassured we were there and could hear us, whilst I knew for certain she wasn’t and couldn’t, but lacked the courage to say so.

  *

  When our doorbell rang one Saturday afternoon, my parents were at the hospital and I was deep in Jamaica Inn, with a Beatles LP providing anachronistic background. I ignored the bell. We weren’t expecting anyone and I had the rest of the book and a Walnut Whip to get through. It rang again, longer and harder. The impatient finger obviously wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Peeved, I padded out in slippered feet, it was probably an over-enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness.

  It wasn’t, it was a slim coffee-skinned woman and close behind her, the largest, squarest person I’d ever seen, he looked like a fridge on steroids – shoulders bulging and moving independently under a tweed jacket which seemed ready to split under the strain. He wasn’t old, mid to late twenties I thought, with a disproportionately small and slightly misshapen head, a pale, expressionless face and a nose that looked as if it had been in several fights, with or without him. I took a rapid and astonished step back into our hall.

  “You could at least,” said Glory Isaacs, as tartly lemon sherbet as I remembered, “Say good afternoon.” She put out a hand and the big man moved smoothly forward so she could rest it on his arm. Bending his head slightly to clear the doorway, he led her inside. I gawped after them and as an afterthought, shut the door. The big man looked at me and I in
dicated the open door to his right and he nodded and walked her in to our through-lounge.

  “Tea might be nice?” she seated herself on the sofa, back straight, the same elegant posture I remembered. She slipped off her long, belted mac, folding and placing it neatly next to her. Revealed, was a purple and gold emblazoned, kaftan top over wide black trousers. Where full sleeve dropped away from narrow-boned wrist, several thin, dull-gold bangles slid against each other and in her ears, cascading gold links looked too heavy for the lobes from which they swung.

  “Whenever you’re ready?” She’d not lost the sarcastic edge in the years since I’d seen her. “Ed,” she added, “Sit, you must be making the place look untidy.” The large man and I looked around dubiously. My mother favoured contemporary furniture, armchairs with splayed black-painted wooden legs and multi-coloured cushions. Ed opted, sensibly, I thought for one of the upright dining room chairs which were a tad sturdier than the rest.

  “Tea.” she reminded me. As I left the room I scanned and wasn’t really surprised to hit a couple of blank walls, although I could have sworn I could hear faint music, Andy Williams and Moon River?