Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  Adam shook his head.

  “Why are you hiding in there, then?”

  “I don’t like her,” Adam said. Then looked anxious, as if such an answer might not be allowed.

  Tom suppressed a snort of laughter. “Neither do I. Why don’t you go up to Mum’s room?”

  She would be in bed—she always lay down in the afternoon even if there wasn’t a new baby—but probably not asleep.

  “She’s with the baby.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You can be in there too. Mum won’t mind.”

  Adam looked down. He rolled a blue and yellow dump truck back and forth along the edge of the rug. Tom felt frustration rising. Did his mother simply not see Adam? Could she not see that he was feeling displaced? Wouldn’t any normal mother be aware of that possibility, with the coming of a new baby?

  He thought back over the arrival of his various brothers, trying to remember how his mother had behaved, but it had all been different because Megan was there. He had a memory—many memories—of his mother drifting around with a baby curled between her breasts in a sling contraption she had devised in order to have her hands free. Probably she had been just as preoccupied then as she was now, but no one was aware of it because Megan, in her fearsomely efficient way, provided for all their needs. It came to Tom suddenly that his mother didn’t actually care for her children very much once they passed the baby stage. It was just babies she liked. Maybe that was why she kept having more.

  Now he looked at his youngest-brother-but-one and reluctantly took pity on him.

  “You can come up to my room with me until she goes,” he said, deciding not to risk staying downstairs. If Sherry spotted him she’d start talking to him, and the thought of it made his stomach turn. “Just this once. Understand?”

  Adam nodded. He stood up quickly and gathered a few cars from his Matchbox fleet in his arms and the two of them crept up the stairs.

  They sat on the bed. Adam ran his cars up and over the mountain ranges of the bedclothes. Tom stared at the wall, loathing Sherry Rutledge. He’d left his paper downstairs and didn’t have anything to read. The safe, smooth pattern of his day had been reduced to rubble. This is ridiculous, he thought. In his mind’s eye he saw himself and Adam, sitting side by side on a bed in a freezing cold room. Hiding from the hired help. How absurd could you get? He should go downstairs, tell her to get out and from now on to come in the mornings like she was supposed to. But that would mean talking to her.

  Something was gnawing at the edges of his mind, demanding attention. It was a smell. A bad smell. He looked around the room trying to trace the source and found it right beside him. Adam.

  Tom looked at him properly, saw that his hair was matted, glued down with something or other, possibly snot. There was food encrusted around his mouth, his ears were disgusting, and he was wearing pyjamas with a sweater on top, socks that didn’t match and no shoes. Plus he stank. There was no other word for it.

  “How long is it since you had a bath?” Tom demanded, still keeping his voice low.

  Adam looked up at him guiltily.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong,” Tom said impatiently. “I just want to know when you last had a bath. Have you had one since the baby was born?”

  Adam thought about it. Shook his head.

  How long ago was that? Three weeks, more or less. Apprehension joined the frustration washing around in his guts.

  “Has Mum been up today? Did she come downstairs this morning?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Did she get you lunch?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “Soup.”

  Well, that was something, Tom thought. And at breakfast there had been cornflakes and milk and bread. So the basics were under control, which meant he didn’t have to worry about it. He wouldn’t worry about it. He refused to. So what if Adam smelled like a cesspit; he had his own bedroom—Megan’s old room—so no one had to sleep with him. No one ever died of needing a bath.

  There was a sound from downstairs—the kitchen door opening. Tom found himself holding his breath. What if she came upstairs and saw the two of them sitting there? Who gives a shit? he told himself furiously. Who gives a shit what Sherry Rutledge sees or doesn’t see?

  He could hear her walking about in the living room. Her footsteps crossed to the foot of the stairs. Adam was holding his breath too.

  Abruptly, a door slammed—the outside door, and then the inner door—and Corey’s voice said, “—blood all over the snow! Go look if you don’t believe me!”

  The boys, coming home from school.

  “Blood doesn’t prove anything, moron.” (Peter’s voice, curdled with contempt.) “Someone could have had a nosebleed, or run over a dog or something, and anyway if she broke his jaw it wouldn’t bleed, jaws don’t bleed.”

  Sherry’s voice, shrill and angry: “What’re you two doin’ comin’ in here in your boots? Now you’ve tracked snow and muck all over the floor!”

  There was a brief pause during which Tom imagined Peter and Corey giving Sherry their dead-fish stares and then Peter said, “And anyway she wouldn’t be strong enough to break anybody’s jaw. She’s a girl, in case you didn’t know. She’s got tits.”

  And Corey said, “I know she’s got tits, stupid, that’s why she hit him—he tried to grab her tits, right there in the street! And it bled ’cause she knocked out some of his teeth. Teeth bleed, in case you didn’t know. She didn’t just slap him, she hauled off and punched him. She punched him right in the face and knocked him down and somebody had to go get Dr. Christopherson and everything. And she just stood there, looking down at him, and then her brother came and she got into his car and drove off. It was fantastic!”

  A crow of delight from Peter: “You’re in love with her! I’m going to tell everybody, I’m going to tell the whole world !”

  There was a crash and a yell and a violent thump and then Sherry’s voice shrieked, “You are the stupidest kids I ever seen in my life. I’m goin’, and if this house isn’t clean it’s you two’s fault!”

  And there was the sound of her stomping across the room and into the entrance hall and a minute later the inner door slammed and then the outer door and she was gone.

  Tom looked down at Adam, who was looking up at him, hope in his eyes.

  “Saved!” Tom said, and Adam grinned at him and the two of them got up and went downstairs.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Megan

  London, February 1966

  Megan’s first job was selling cosmetics at Dickins & Jones on Regent Street but she only lasted a week. It wasn’t the makeup that got her down—she’d had a lipstick herself until it got stolen along with her suitcase—it was the day creams and night creams and the promises of eternal youth. She went back to Mrs. Jamison in Personnel and asked if there might be a job in some other department.

  “What’s wrong with cosmetics, Megan?” Mrs. Jamison asked. “It is Megan, isn’t it?” She was in her late thirties, Megan guessed, and very smart in both senses of the word. She wore a crisp black trouser suit just like a man’s but it looked better on her.

  “It’s the face creams,” Megan said. “They’re just …” She was on the point of saying “ridiculous”—why not call a spade a spade—when it occurred to her that Mrs. Jamison might use them herself. “… So expensive,” she finished lamely.

  Mrs. Jamison nodded gravely. “Some of them are,” she agreed. “But you don’t need to buy them, Megan, you just need to sell them. If women want to spend their money on such things, it’s their choice, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but …,” Megan said. She liked Mrs. Jamison and didn’t want to appear difficult. “… Sometimes they ask if the creams actually work, if they really keep you looking young. It doesn’t feel … it just seems …”

  Mrs. Jamison looked as if she was trying to hide a smile. “You don’t have to say they work,” she said. “If you like, you can say you haven’t tried them yo
urself so you can’t say for certain. You don’t know they don’t work, now do you? Not everybody is lucky enough to have lovely skin like yours, Megan. Some women feel they need a little help with their appearance, especially as they get older. And if it makes them feel better, what’s wrong with that?”

  It seemed to Megan there was something wrong with that, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what. “I think I’d rather sell something people actually need,” she said decidedly.

  Mrs. Jamison studied her for a moment, the smile still lurking at the corners of her mouth. “How about clothes?” she said. “There’s a vacancy in women’s fashions. You’d agree that people need clothes?”

  “Absolutely,” Megan said gratefully. “Especially in this weather.” It was still raining—it hadn’t stopped since she arrived—and it felt colder outside than she remembered ever being in Struan, despite the fact that the puddles she negotiated on her way to and from work weren’t even close to freezing.

  Mrs. Jamison laughed, though Megan hadn’t meant to be funny. “Go and see Mrs. Timms,” she said. “First floor. Tell her I sent you.”

  Women’s fashions got Megan down too, but she stuck it out for Mrs. Jamison’s sake and because she knew there wouldn’t be anything better. She had no objection to the clothes—not all of them were absurd and some of them, mostly the sweaters (“jumpers” or “jerseys” they called them), she liked very much and wished she could afford. It was because a lot of the time there was nothing to do and doing nothing nearly killed her. On Saturdays and on Thursday evenings (Thursday was late-night shopping) the store was frantic but during the week there were sometimes more sales assistants than customers.

  The other assistants, most of them her own age or younger, seemed quite happy chatting with each other for hours on end. They talked exclusively about clothes and boys and wore miniskirts and skimpy dresses with bright circles or squares all over them. When one of them bought something new the others got so excited they screamed.

  Megan, conscious of her sensible skirt and plain white blouse, both bought for the interview, did her best to join in, though not with the screaming. She’d smile at some new purchase and say, “That looks nice,” but the girls would look at her with puzzled smiles as if she were talking a foreign language.

  Tracy, who was small and pretty with hair cut in a neat dark cap, was getting married as soon as she and her boyfriend had saved enough money to buy a house because she “refused full stop!” to live with his parents. She was on “The Pill” (when she first mentioned it, Megan had no idea what pill she was talking about) but kept forgetting to take it and was constantly having scares. Julie’s mum was divorced and going with a man who drove a Bentley and had a son who looked like Mick Jagger but without the lips. (Ooooh! the other girls said, and shrieked with laughter.) Viv, who was tall and thin with elegant legs and long blond hair, wanted to be a model. She practised walking as if her hips were dislocated, up and down the aisle between the dresses, when Mrs. Timms, the floor manager, was on her lunch break.

  All these things and more Megan had learned about her fellow shop assistants, and yet the girls remained as unknown and unknowable to her as a flock of flamingoes. It wasn’t that they deliberately tried to exclude her—she could see that—it was that they seemed to exist in a different world. Like aliens, she thought. Except that she was the alien. They were so strange that sometimes she wondered if she were making them up—maybe the whole thing was a dream and when she woke she’d be back in her own bed in Struan and it would be time to get up and turf the boys out of bed and get breakfast on the table. Many times she wished that were so, and that wish dismayed her. Who’d have thought she could be so unadventurous, so timid?

  You need to pull yourself together, she said to herself. This is what you wanted—something new, something different. You should be enjoying it! She gave herself an ultimatum: enjoy it or go home. But it was an empty threat. She knew she couldn’t go home, not yet anyway; she’d only been here six weeks. And no matter how hard she tried she didn’t seem to have the strength, or the will, to enjoy it.

  She searched the papers for other jobs but apart from being a waitress or a cleaner—and she’d spent her whole life so far being both—everything required qualifications she didn’t have.

  During her lunch hour she grimly put up her new umbrella (she’d have happily sold umbrellas all day long) and explored the streets around Dickins & Jones: Regent Street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, Carnaby Street—famous names, she knew that now. With the sole exception of those living in the Canadian North, everybody on the planet knew about Carnaby Street. She tried to immerse herself in this new world—the chaotically colourful stores, the constant background beat of music leaking out of doorways, the clothes and shoes and jewellery spilling out onto the streets—but there was too much of everything. She found herself longing for the drab ordinariness of the Hudson’s Bay store in Struan with its wide, dark aisles and piles of shirts and socks and underwear that didn’t change from one year to the next.

  She couldn’t seem to focus on anything here, far less become a part of it. Sometimes when she got back to Dickins & Jones she couldn’t remember a thing she’d seen.

  There was an ache inside her, centred more or less mid-chest. It was with her all the time; sometimes she was conscious of it even in her sleep. It exhausted her, she who normally had enough energy for ten people. She wondered if she could be ill. Maybe she had some low-grade infection that was pulling her down. Perhaps that was what prevented her from enjoying things.

  Morning and night she had to gird herself for the ordeal of travelling to work and back. She went by “underground,” which turned out to be a long tubular version of hell, especially at the end of the day. At the evening rush hour people poured down the steps at Oxford Circus in a flood, great waves of them surging down the escalators, along the echoing corridors and out onto the platforms, where they waited, heaving and swelling, for the trains. There would be a thundering in the tunnel, growing with tremendous speed, and a train would roar out of the darkness and come to a stop. The doors would roll open and people would pour out and then the waiting throngs would lunge forward, forcing their way onto the train, more and more of them, until they were crammed together so tightly Megan could hardly breathe. She was always dizzy with relief when she reached her station and could push her way out at last into the cold night air and walk home alone with her umbrella through the dark wet streets.

  She thought of the space, back home in Canada. The vast and glorious emptiness of the North. So much land, so few people. She hadn’t appreciated it, hadn’t realized how beautiful it was, until now.

  ——

  The journey into work and out again was not the hardest part of her day. The hardest part was the moment she opened the door of number 31 Lansdown Terrace. Although she had stopped expecting to find her suitcase waiting for her in the hall, she could not rid herself of the hope that the photographs would be there. Whoever stole the suitcase could have no earthly use for them and surely he or she would realize their importance to her. It would be so easy to put them in an envelope and slip them through the letterbox—or not bother with the envelope, just shove the photos loose through the door. Every evening she searched through the pile of bills and papers that no one else bothered to pick up off the floor. The first time she did it she found her last letter to Cora, unopened and mottled with footprints, but the photos were never there. Every evening she had to fight down the disappointment. You’re being ridiculous! she thought, heaping her coat on top of one of the bicycles in the hall and making her way through to the kitchen at the back of the house. Just ridiculous! Grow up!

  When she’d first seen the kitchen Megan’s immediate impulse had been to buy herself a pair of rubber gloves and an economy-size container of household bleach and scour it top to bottom, but she’d stopped herself in time. She hadn’t flown three thousand miles to fall into that trap again. Besides, none of the others would notice, or
if they did, they wouldn’t like it. They were like her brothers, the girls included: they seemed to like squalor; they created it wherever they went. So each evening she cleared just enough space on the kitchen counter to prepare and cook her supper and just enough space at the kitchen table to sit down and eat it to the accompaniment of music pounding through the walls. She knew the names of some of the bands now—Beatles, Monkees, Animals. Like a zoo. She sometimes thought that if she’d had control of the volume she might even have liked some of them.

  From time to time one of her flat-mates would wander into the kitchen. Megan would say hi and sometimes they’d say hi back, depending on how stoned they were. She’d figured out what the strange smell in the flat was.

  She never saw any of her flat-mates prepare a meal. Sometimes there would be a loaf of sliced bread sitting amidst the chaos on the counter, the slices gradually disappearing as the evening wore on, but that aside, they all seemed to exist on fish and chips that they brought home wrapped in newspaper and stinking of vinegar. The oily, reeking papers littered the flat.

  She was powerfully aware of not belonging. As with the girls at Dickins & Jones, there seemed to be no common ground. Sarah, the girl with the bug-like glasses who had been kind to her on the night of her arrival, Megan liked, but even she was exceedingly strange. It turned out she owned the flat—in fact, owned the whole house. Her parents, it seemed, were rich. Megan tried to pay rent, but Sarah wouldn’t take the money. When Megan protested, saying she couldn’t simply stay without paying, Sarah had smiled her gentle, unfocused smile and said, “Why not? Everybody else does.”

  Megan would have liked to get to know her better but somehow it wasn’t possible.

  “Do you have a job?” she asked tentatively one evening.

  “Oh, sort of,” Sarah replied, lighting a misshapen little roll-up. “I work in an art gallery. Just a commercial one.”

  “Oh,” Megan said. “That sounds interesting. What do you do?”