“Like you said. So’s they don’t worry Ros’s sister. So they don’t tell her about him and make her scared for Ros. Just like you said to me.”
That made perfect sense and I smiled at him.
“I need to ask you something.” His voice was back to normal. “I need you to tell me something.”
“Okay,” I said. He slid out of his chair and came shuffling over on his knees to just in front of me. He reached out and put the flats of his first two fingers on my cheek, right on top of the old dot where the puncture mark used to be.
“I saw it when you were sleeping,” he said. “And I want you to tell me what really happened when you pulled the feathers out of your granny’s quilt. Tell me the truth, eh?”
Inside
She was filthy now. She could smell herself with every breath, even over the stench from the dry toilet. She had tied a biscuit wrapper up into a jagged little ball of knots and spiky edges and she chewed it, like those dry toothbrushes you get in machines at motorway services. It kind of worked. But she stank. God, she stank. So she wasted some water and the sleeve of her t-shirt. Bit a hole in the seam at the shoulder and unpicked the stitching. Ripped the sleeve into two. One she kept, carefully folded inside her cardboard pillow. The other she wet with a glug of precious water, pouring it like anointing oils in some holy temple. She kneaded the cotton until the water was all the way through it, damp and cool, and then she washed herself, her face and ears. Her neck, under her arms, scrubbing hard, the stubble giving her some friction. She took off her jeans and pants and wept at the smell of herself. She turned the cloth and washed gently, lovingly, like a nurse would cool a patient after a fever. She turned the cloth and wiped her feet. It was nearly dry now. More water? A little. And her feet tingled as she scrubbed them.
She waited until she was dry before she put her clothes back on. Inside out. And tried to imagine she felt refreshed. She picked up the cloth with part of a wrapper over her hand and dropped it down the drain hole. And she made herself not touch her hair, not scratch her scalp. Keep her clean hands clean as long as she could. She would save the other part of the sleeve until the water bottle after next was nearly empty. She was good at making things last. It was her way. Good at distracting her thoughts too. Try countries: India, Kuala Lumpur, Laos, Malaya, Nepal, Oman, Poland. She curled herself into the shape of a nut—the lozenge shape of a child inside its mother—and wept the pain back into something she could bear. Try animals: rat, snake, tarantula.
It could be worse, see?
Eighteen
He put the lamp off and we sat in the firelight, side by side on the couch. It still had a bit of a creamy smell when you shifted.
“Okay. Well, first, my granny wasn’t angry,” I said.
“No?”
“But my mother was furious with me.”
“What for? For upsetting your gran?”
“My granny wasn’t upset. She laughed. She thought it was funny.”
“Really? She wasn’t pissed off?”
“Look, I’m sorry I lied before. I’ll tell you the truth this time.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.” A log shifted and fell and the flames burned brighter. “So my mum, right? One of her favourite bits of the Bible is, He who spareth the rod spoileth the child.”
He reached out and touched my cheek again. “What did she hit you with to leave a wee hole like that in your face?” he said. “I can’t understand parents who hit their kids.”
“Really?” I said. “You’ve never lashed out?” I remembered the day with the cakes and how angry he’d been.
“At the babies?” He sounded shocked. “Ruby’s the size of a button.”
“Did Becky?”
He was silent. “You’re telling the story,” he said at last, which was my answer in a way.
“Okay, so, my granny should have known better probably, but she told my mum the funny story of little Jessie making a snowstorm in the spare bedroom, and my mum went ballistic. She asked what punishment I’d had and my granny said none. Ballistic squared. Granny had been going to chuck the quilt but my mum stopped her.”
“Christ, she never made you stuff them all back in again.”
“I’m telling the story,” I said, nudging him. “And a bit of hard work wouldn’t have screwed me up as badly as I am.”
“You’re not screwed up,” said Gus. “You invented a phobia to stop yourself getting screwed up. Clever girl.”
“How come you know about phobias? You said to me the very first night you didn’t know anyone else—”
“I looked it up yesterday,” said Gus. “And a wee bit today. ‘A mistake in adaptive learning’, isn’t it? And not even that much of a mistake. You’re dead right to be scared of feathers after what feathers did to you.”
He sounded like every self-help book and website and first appointment in the world.
“After what feathers did to me,” I agreed.
“Which was what, exactly?” said Gus. “Go on with the story.”
“Yeah, okay, so, my mum, right? She put the quilt—dead thin now—on my bed and made me sleep on top of it. And to make me not me pick at it … she tied my wrists to the bed.”
A log settled in the fireplace. Gus reached out and took my hand.
“How old were you?”
“Five,” I said
“And how many times did she do it?”
“Just once.”
He was stroking my hand very softly now, like that game we used to play in school where you tried to tell when someone’s tickling finger reached your elbow and you never could. Just like that game used to do to me, his fingers tracing my skin made me pop out in goosebumps and I had to make myself not pull my hand away. He’d said something.
“What?” I asked him
“Your cheek?”
“A feather end was sticking in it,” I said. “It made a hole. Made me bleed, cos of leaning on it for hours and hours.”
“Why didn’t you turn the other way?”
I remembered it with the kind of sharp crystal-clear remembering you only get after hours and hours of regressive hypnosis. I’d looked at that bloody room from every angle: the bed, the floor, the ceiling, close up and far away, in colour, in black and white. Play the tape forward, play the tape backwards, double-speed, triple-speed, shrink it down, fold it up, put it in a box, and lock it away.
“I didn’t want to,” I said.
“Jessie?”
“Stubborn,” I explained. “There was a”—think fast, think fast—“a picture of Mum and Dad and me on my dressing table, from before he’d left, and I didn’t want to see it. So I kept my face turned the other way even though there was a feather end sticking in my cheek.”
“All night?” said Gus. I nodded. “But wasn’t it dark?”
I was stupid enough to try to remember. And then of course, it was the real room that came back to me. The real thing I didn’t want to see.
“Not very,” I said. “There was a street light right outside her house and just a cotton blind.”
“Whose house?” said Gus.
“Mine. My mum’s, I meant.”
“And a photo of your dad from before he’d left?”
“Yeah. Yep.”
“And you were five?”
I saw the mistake I’d made. Because Dad didn’t leave until I was seven. But Did Gus know that? Had I told him?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“That’s plenty,” he answered. “She tied you to your bed when you were five, even though your granny wasn’t angry. Even though your granny was absolutely fine.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Please.”
“Jessie,” said Gus, “you are the bravest, best little girl there could ever be. You worked out a way to hand
le things that hurts no one else in the world. But you know what?” I shook my head. “It takes too much out of you. It’s time to let go.”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s a case of being careful.”
“You love children, don’t you?” he said. I felt a sob bulge up inside me. “Why don’t you have one of your own?”
It burst out of me like a shout. And the pain. Christ, it felt like he’d cracked my ribs open and squeezed my heart in his fist.
“So it’s time to lay it down,” he went on.
“How do you know what to say?” That was a translation of what I was thinking. What I was thinking was that for someone who’d only looked it all up on a computer that day, he certainly talked a good game.
“Because I care about you,” he told me.
“Someone else cared about me once. And he didn’t get the first thing about it. Couldn’t stand it.”
“Becky said she loved the kids, but she didn’t love feeding them or changing them or bathing them or singing to them or playing with them. So what did she love? Babies need you to do stuff. That’s what babies are. And you’re fucking terrified of feathers even if you won’t tell me why. Loving Jessie King means getting that.”
“Jessie Constable,” I said. But even though I was correcting him I didn’t mind really. He’d nearly said I love you, and I knew it was true.
“Big excitement yesterday then,” said Steve when I arrived the next day.
I straddled one of the black bags piled in the doorway and started on the many locks. We have locks and alarms and deadbolts so that folk won’t break in and steal the free clothes, but nobody ever takes the black sacks of crap that people dump on us when we’re closed. The sign with the donation hours is two feet square and written in red and the note along the bottom—do not leave donations in doorway when shop is closed—is outlined in waves of orange and yellow highlighter, but it’s still an obstacle course every damn day.
“You said it,” I agreed, thinking about Kazek and then stopped and turned. “What do you mean?”
“The cops bringing those clothes,” Steve said. “Of course. Why, what else happened?”
“How did you know about that?” I asked him. I was booting the bin bags inside. I didn’t want to have to take my gloves off and touch them—it was that special kind of cheerless cold this morning, the river fog seeping up the side streets, beading our hair and clothes, dripping down the windows.
“Dot told me when she phoned to check the shifts,” he said.
I kicked a bag that didn’t have clothes inside and hopped about a bit until my toe stopped throbbing.
“That better be boots,” I said. But it felt like metal and my guess was pots and pans. The Free Clothing Project has a massive clue in the name, but when folk get to clearing out their cupboards they just think “charity shop” and if we’re the nearest to where they live, we get whatever they’re clearing. I usually bung it all in a supermarket trolley and trundle it up to Oxfam, who’re never that happy to see it either, but they can’t say no until they’ve at least checked it through.
“She said you might have recognised the jacket,” said Steve. “But you denied it. Quite right. You need to ask Management where we stand, confidentiality-wise. I’d have done the same.”
“God’s sake, Steve,” I said. The neck of the heavy bag looked clean enough actually—even though a doorway in St. Vincent Street is nowhere to leave anything overnight if you want it fresh in the morning, between the dogs, the drunks, and the gulls—so I squatted and untied the handles. “Think I’d give a stuff about line management when some poor bloke got slashed and chucked in the Nith? I didn’t recognise the coat. It was a work jacket with plastic shoulders. A donkey jacket.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Steve had a problem with donkey jackets. First, we weren’t allowed to call them that. And then he vetoed them altogether, along with army surplus, those silvery marathon blankets, and terry-towelling nappies. I reckoned the jackets and blankets were warm and practical, but Steve thinks they’re humiliating and one step up from asking tramps to stuff their clothes with newspapers. (He was all for the towelling nappies, mind you, and vouchers for the launderette, until I pointed out that you’re not allowed to wash nappies in a launderette, which he wouldn’t know because he’s never had to use one. And since nothing makes Steve madder than someone making out he’s clueless—or “insinuating that he’s out of touch with the reality of our clients’ lives” as he put it—that meeting ended on a sour note.)
“So how’s Gus?” he said, changing the subject. “Have you heard from him again?” This was very innocent-sounding, but I was sure Dot had told him I’d come to work in Gus’s car.
“Gus is great,” I answered, and I couldn’t help smiling. I looked down to hide it. “Wow. Cake tins,” I said. “Yeah, that’s the thing about destitution. It can play havoc with your home baking.” I retied the bag handles and took it through to the Oxfam trolley.
“When I say ‘great’, mind you,” I added coming back again, “I mean he’s doing really well for the kids. And he’s a great guy. He’s not so hot in himself, obviously. And he beats himself up like you wouldn’t believe.”
Steve was raking through the rest of the bags now. Holding up a shirt with an appraising look in his eye. He put it down quickly when he saw me watching. “For what?” he said. “Survivor guilt? He needs counselling.”
“Not exactly. Coffee? Tea? He doesn’t even think he should take time off work, if you can believe it,” I said. “He was freaked out because he couldn’t crack on with what he’s meant to be doing.”
“Sculptor’s block,” said Steve. “I never thought of that. Coffee.”
Sister Avril phoned then to tell me there was a volunteer care-worker coming in today to pick up some women’s clothing and take them to her client’s house for trying on.
“Why can’t the client come and choose her own?” I said. You hear about those care homes where they don’t even try to make sure the old dears get their own clothes back from the laundry. I heard once about a place where they washed the teeth in one great big bowl and just dished them out again. “The whole point of the Project is that it’s supposed to be a shopping experience. Not a—”
Sister Avril cut me off. “Size twenty-eight,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. Not much dignity for the client if we had to move the racks back against the wall to wheel her in. “Twenty-eight. Wow. I’ll see what we’ve got.”
“God be with you,” said Avril, like she always did, making it sound as if he’d phone her at the end of the shift to tell her what I’d been up to. She and my mother would have got on like a house on fire, if only each of them didn’t sum up the other one’s hunch that Satan still walked among us.
I took Steve his coffee and switched the computer on.
“So what’s he working on?” he said. “It wasn’t like a statue of her or anything, was it?”
So I told him about Dave’s House and was pleased to see the frown growing. Hah! I thought. You might have done a hundred and fifty Open University courses, but you’re still one of us. You don’t get it, do you?
“Have you seen it?” he said.
“No. Why?”
“Just … it sounds … ” He couldn’t seem to finish.
So I told him all about Shed Boat Shed, laying it on thick. His frown deepened.
“Yeah, that too,” he said. “Did you see that one?”
“No, it’s sold. That too what?”
“They sound … familiar,” said Steve. I could feel myself blushing. Not only did Steve get Gus’s kind of weird sculpture, but he’d heard of them, read about them in the kind of Sunday papers they’d get mentioned in. Maybe he’d even been to a gallery and seen them.
“There must have been publicity when Shed Boat Shed got sold,” I said. “I know it went for a b
undle.”
Steve shook his head and sipped his coffee. His wee round glasses steamed up and when they cleared, he was staring at me. “But the one you say he’s doing now sounds dead familiar too,” he said. “And you haven’t actually seen either of them.”
“What are you saying, Steve?”
“Just … sounds like he talks a good game,” Steve said, and I don’t think I managed to hide how I felt to hear my own thoughts come back at me.
“But I have seen something he made,” I said. “Listen to this, eh?” I might have made it sound better than it was. “Lights and like … landscapes inside, like a grotto. You can’t really see it. It’s a bit of a nightmare to be honest, and you wouldn’t want it in your house if you lived alone. But it’s totally brilliant and it’s right there in the workshop. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Steve had finished his coffee and he fiddled with the cup, not looking at me.
“You didn’t see him make it,” he said. “He might have bought it.”
“He couldn’t afford it! God’s sake, Steve. He’s got a workshop full of bits and bobs and a half-finished sculpture and a finished sculpture and he says he’s a sculptor, and you knew he was an artist from knowing his family, but you still can’t work out how all that fits together? What’s your problem?” I knew, of course. It was just like the disciples, except for the other way on. You believe what you want to believe, and you don’t believe what you don’t want to believe. Steve didn’t want to believe in Gus, so it didn’t matter what I said, he’d find away to make it seem dodgy.
“I don’t trust him,” said Steve, right on cue. “It’s been a week, Jessie, and he’s … it’s like he’s put a spell on you. He’s got his hooks right in you, and I can’t see why.”
“Thanks a bunch!”
“I didn’t mean that. God, hardly. Just, you’re usually so careful with people. Even with … us.”
He’d been going to say me.
“I just don’t trust him.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I trust him.” I felt a flicker, but it was small enough to ignore. “I’m glad I was careful with people all these years, so nobody else managed to get their hooks into me and I was free when Gus came along.” I didn’t care if I was hurting him. He didn’t look hurt, though. He looked puzzled.
The Day She Died: A Novel Page 20
