The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  The tenement on Methven Street, when I found it, looked much more like somewhere a girl would have digs while she waited for her baby than somewhere her parents would make their home for all their married life. It was two streets back from the main shopping precinct, with businesses below and flats above and, although some of the stairs looked trim enough, this one with its scuffed paint and lopsided rush-blinds was definitely bedsits, or at least private lets. Great for transients but pretty hopeless for me. I opened the front door, went upstairs anyway to 4C as Lynne had told me, and knocked.

  It took a long time for it to be opened, but one good thing about a bedsit is that there’s a good chance whoever lives there doesn’t have a job and doesn’t get up very early either, so I wasn’t surprised when eventually I heard slow footsteps approaching, a pause while the person inside looked through the peephole, and the clink of the chain being taken off.

  It wasn’t who I was expecting. The woman who stood there was neatly dressed in a soft cream fleece and stretchy leggings with crocs on her feet. Her hair was brushed smooth and her face was made up with blue eye shadow and pale lip gloss. She was enormously pregnant, impossibly pregnant, carrying her belly in front of her like a snail carried it shell on its back, the rest of her looking insignificant behind that massive billow.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. She smiled and shook her head. “I’m looking for someone who used to live here.” She shrugged and shook her head again. “Scarlet,” I said. “It was a long time ago, but I just wondered … Can you understand me?”

  “No English,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Oh,” I replied. “I see. Well, good luck with the baby,” I said, pointing. She ran her hands over the expanse of soft cream fleece stretched across her front and smiled. Then she shut the door and I heard her footsteps retreating again, their slowness making sense now. I imagined her waddling back to her seat and easing herself back down from where she had struggled up and was sorry I had disturbed her.

  Maybe a neighbour, I thought, turning round and looking across the landing at the opposite door. I thought I heard a noise inside when I first knocked, but no one came, not even to look through the peephole. Maybe they only ever had trouble, never good news, knocking at the door.

  I looked up the stairwell. There was one more storey above, two more flats in all, and I had come this far, two hours driving and two hours back again. It would be silly not to be thorough. So I grasped the banister and started to climb the stairs.

  I knew I had hit the jackpot as soon as I turned onto the top landing. One of the flats was the same as the two down below—dulled paint on the door and the glue from old stickers partly peeled off again, but the opposite door was exactly what I was looking for. Its plastic mat, its wrought-iron trough on spindly legs with the plastic begonias, its polished brass name plate—Thomas—and the brass lock plate, knocker and handle all glittering to match it; even the fanlight above with its arch of ruffled net and its small bowl of dried flowers picked to fill the space the arch left bare—everything proclaimed that here lived a resident of many years’ standing, one who could not possibly fail to have a view of the neighbours whose housekeeping lagged so far behind her own. I rang the doorbell, resisting the urge to pull my cuff down and polish the button after my finger had touched it. This time the footsteps sounded right away, the soft thump of slippers. The pause as their wearer peered through the peephole was a short one, but this time the door opened a crack with the catch still on.

  “I’m not buying anything and I’m not changing my gas and electric,” said a reedy but firm old voice. I could see one eye behind the lens of a pair of spectacles and below it a very firm mouth, pursed so that the flick of pink lipstick it wore looked fluted around the edges.

  “I’m not from a company,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about one of your neighbours.”

  The door banged shut. She took the chain off and then threw it wide.

  “Are you from the letting agency?” she said. “Because I don’t know where to start. That lot over there come and go at all hours and the minute they’re in the door they’ve got the music on. Downstairs is as bad—tromp tromp in their work boots and they’ve no need to be wearing them because none of them work. None of them are up before noon and then the telly’s on till the small hours. I don’t even know what they can find to watch. And as for her!” The little woman jabbed a finger down and across the landing.

  “She seemed nice,” I said. “As far as you can tell when she doesn’t—”

  “She doesn’t!” said the woman. “Not a word. The good Lord alone knows where she’s from, but she doesn’t understand a single word I say to her. And that man of hers is not much better. Please and thank you and good morning and good night, but that’s it. And he’s out twelve hours a day. It’ll be worse when there’s a new baby screaming the place down and kicking up mud in the back green.”

  “It’s not actually any of current neighbours I wanted to ask about, to be honest, Mrs. Thomas,” I said. “But it was a young girl with a baby, right enough.”

  “Another one of these whatever they are?” she said. I had to bite my lip on the retort. What they were—more than likely—was citizens of an EU member state, and it sounded as if the husband of the girl in the soft cream fleece worked long hours every day and had a courteous word for his neighbour when they passed on the stairs.

  “No, she was Scottish,” I said. “This was a while back, mind you.”

  “Aye, it would have been,” said Mrs. Thomas. “You’ve to hunt to find a Scot getting given these flats these days. So what was her name then and when was she here?” I opened my mouth to speak, but before I had the chance, she changed her mind. “Look, away you come in,” she said. “Come and sit and I’ll get the kettle on. There’s no use standing here letting the dust blow in on my good carpets. For they’re no better at closing the front door than they are at sweeping the stair.” This last was delivered in ringing tones, in hopes, no doubt, that the deadbeat neighbours would hear it and be chastened. Then she drew me in with a hand on my arm, shut the door behind me, locked it, and applied the chain.

  The sitting room, at the front with the big bay window, was stuffed with furniture. Good ugly post-war furniture, skinny chairs with wooden armrests and a gate-leg table with a matching sideboard. Mrs. Thomas settled me and went through to the small kitchen, shouting over her shoulder as she fussed about, making tea.

  “What was the name, dear?” she said.

  “Scarlet McFarlane,” I said. “But it was twenty-odd years ago.”

  “Twenty years is nothing when you get up as far as I am,” she said. “Of course I remember. It’s not every day you have two Scarlet women living underneath you. Ho! But, mind you, there was never a lad coming or going in the time they were here. Just the two girls and then the baby. And then the trouble and they were all gone.”

  “Trouble?” I said, with a cold, sinking feeling inside me.

  “Post-natal depression they’d call it these days,” said Mrs. Thomas. She was back already, as if the kettle was kept constantly on the boil and the tray set. I hadn’t seen those brown smoked-glass teacups since I volunteered at the charity shop ten years ago, and even then we used to get stuck with them. “Baby blues it was when I was a young mother,” Mrs. Thomas went on. “Not that we had the time. Slopping around in a housecoat and letting the baby scream. When I had mine, I was up, curlers out, along the street with the baby in the pram for an airing. Cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Mr. Thomas and knitted every stitch they wore. I couldn’t stand to live that laxadaisy way these girls go on now.”

  “So the trouble was depression?” I said. I took a cup of tea and a biscuit, balancing it in my saucer.

  “And if somebody had nipped in quick and had the kiddy away to a good home, it might have worked out just fine in the long run,” said Mrs. Thomas. The cold feeling was sprea
ding through me. “But three times she left that poor mite lying and came home without it, until finally one day it was gone for good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, it was all over the papers here,” Mrs. Thomas said. “I’ve probably still got the clippings from the Courier but goodness knows where, because I’ve been meaning to turn out that big cupboard since I put the tree away last Christmas and devil if I’ve got round to it.”

  “But can you remember the gist of what happened?”

  “She took the baby out in its pram, must only have been a month old the first time. Then she came back screaming and wailing saying someone had stolen it. Stolen the pram with the baby in it. There was police, neighbours out searching, the works. And then it turned out the poor soul was right outside the shop where she’d left it. She’d walked away without it and then caused all that stink to try and cover up after herself. You wouldn’t credit it, would you?”

  “Well, sleepless nights can leave you quite … ” I said, before Mrs. Thomas withered me with a look.

  “So you can well imagine that the second time it happened, we were a bit more thingwy about it all. Oh, the police came back, but there were no neighbours out scouring the streets, and that time she got taken to the station and given a talking to. Got a social worker, if you don’t mind, who—wait till you hear this—had the cheek to come knocking on my door.”

  “What for?”

  “Assessing,” Mrs. Thomas said. “Assessing the environs. Seeing if we were good enough for that piece to live beside or if she needed a shift.”

  “I can see why that would be offensive,” I said, wondering how badly she was garbling what the social worker had actually said.

  “The third time she left the kiddy out lying somewhere, she kept quiet, but there was letters stuffed down the folds of the pram hood, and the woman that found it lying there abandoned—away up the back of the swing park where it might have been hours before someone passed—anyway, she saw the address and brought it back again. Young Scarlet hadn’t come back from her jaunt and it landed to me. She was a very nice woman, well-dressed and neat—a lot like yourself dear—and she knew it was safe to leave the baby with me.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “What could I do?” said Mrs. Thomas. “I phoned the police, of course. And the lot of them—all three—were gone within the week. The baby to Social Services and the two girls, I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  “Heavens,” I said. “What a sad story.”

  “I never saw hide nor hair of either of them again for twenty-two years,” she went on.

  “Twenty-two?” I said. “Then what?”

  “Then two years back I was in DE Shoes, just browsing,” said Mrs. Thomas. “And there she was. I knew I knew her, but I couldn’t just place her at first. Then she saw me and I haven’t changed much. Her eyes flashed and her face turned as white as a sheet, and it was then that I knew who I was looking at. There she was, bold as brass, helping a kiddy try on winter boots.”

  “DE Shoes in Perth?” I said. “Two years ago?”

  “It’ll be two years come Christmas.”

  “Thank you for the tea,” I said. “I’m going to have to rush off, but you’ve been very helpful.”

  “Here’s your hat, where’s your hurry,” said Mrs. Thomas behind me. “You’re as bad as the rest, madam, with those manners!”

  She was still clucking and fussing after me as I pulled her front door shut behind me and trotted downstairs to the street, holding on to the banister, trying not to turn my ankle on my wedge heels, praying that it wasn’t too good to be true.

  Twenty-Eight

  There was a DE Shoes on every High Street in the country. Cheap trainers, vinyl boots, novelty slippers. When I was a child I’d have died for a pair of anything but brown Clark’s sandals in the summer and black Clark’s lace-ups in the winter. I was glad of them now, proud of my straight toes and high arches, although Lynne always said nice feet were wasted on women who earned them. She wore strappy stilettos all summer long and for winter parties, and her bunions made it look as if her feet were chewing gumballs. That made me think of Zöe and her pink and white toenails. She might wear pretty shoes now, but she must have been Clark’s all the way when she was young to get that even row of little piggies.

  I found the shoe shop sitting in between a Greggs and a Samuels, took a deep breath, and went in.

  There was a woman in her sixties, with glasses hanging on a gold chain over the bust of her hand-knitted jersey, and a boy of twenty with that ugly, brushed-forward-and-gelled-to-death hairstyle that always seems to go along with very bad skin, as if the glop is creeping down from the scalp and blocking all the pores. But, as well as those two, there was a woman who could easily be forty and who had a well of sadness inside her deeper than any I had ever seen.

  “Scarlet?” I said.

  She nodded, squinting as if to work out where she knew me from, and my heart soared inside me. Scarlet McFarlane. I had found the last of them! One of the last of them anyway.

  “I don’t suppose you’re due a break, are you?” I said. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee and have a word?”

  “Do I know you?” she said.

  “Friend of a friend,” I said, “from the old days.”

  “Is it about Rosie?” she said. I thought about it for less than half a minute. I’m a registrar. I see fashions come and go, and I can guess a person’s age from their name, like a party trick. The Lynnes and the Laurens and the Emmas in order. And the Rosies too.

  “Your daughter Rosie?” I asked. Her eyes seemed to grow until they were half as big again and she leaned forward, searching my face for clues.

  “Di?” she shouted, without looking away from me. “I’m going on my break. I’ll work through later.”

  She didn’t say another word until we were sitting at the smoking tables outside a Caffé Nero.

  “What can I get you?” I asked her. “The millionaire shortbread is really lovel—”

  “Are you her mum?” she asked me. “How did you find me?”

  “I went to ask your old neighbour round on Methven Street,” I said. “I got your old address from her birth certificate.”

  “You’re her mum, aren’t you?” she said “Is she with you?”

  “Scarlet, I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m an old friend of a friend of yours from Eden.”

  “Scar’s friend?” she said. She lit a cigarette and sat back, considering me. “Huh,” she said. “I haven’t thought about that place for twenty years and then it pops up twice in a week.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was on the news, in the papers. Someone who went there died again. April Cowan. And they’re looking for one of the other kids to ‘help with their enquiries’.”

  “Stig Tarrant,” I said. “What do you mean ‘died again’?”

  “I mean another one. There was Alan Best. Do you know who that is? And Scar, of course.”

  “Scarlet’s dead?” I said. “The other Scarlet?” I felt my face prickling, and I knew I had paled. I put both hands on the table to steady myself.

  “Hey,” said this Scarlet, putting a hand out and covering mine. “Sorry. I thought you would know. If you know Rosie. ‘My daughter Rosie’.” She smiled again. “It’s nice of you to say that. But she’s certainly not my daughter now.”

  “How did Scarlet die?” I asked. “When?” I really had no idea when, but I thought I could guess how.

  “She killed herself,” came the answer, just as I’d been expecting. “Jumped off the bloody bridge into the Dee when the baby got taken away.”

  “I heard about that from your neighb—”

  “If you heard from old Mother Thomas, then you heard a load of crap,” said Scarlet.

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “So. Your baby got taken away
and Scarlet’s dead. I’m really sorry. I know it was a while ago, but I’m sorry for your loss. Losses.”

  She nodded a thank you.

  “But why is there no record of her death?” I said. “I looked and there’s nothing under Scarlet McInnes. Did she change it?”

  “Ohhhh,” Scarlet said, sitting back. “I thought you were being kind saying ‘your daughter,’ but really you’re just mixed up. I’m Scarlet McInnes. And there’s no records on me because I never did anything to record. Scar had Rosie and we all changed our names after.”

  “You all did?”

  “Yeah,” Scarlet said. “Rosie was our baby, but it was Scar who had her. Scarlet McFarlane. And when she was found unfit, I might as well have been … what’s the expression?”

  “Chopped liver,” I said. “You and Scarlet were a couple?”

  She nodded, narrowing her eyes, waiting to see what I’d say next.

  “And you had a baby at sixteen?” She relaxed a bit. “Deliberately?” Now she was almost smiling. “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t judge you. I waited until I was twenty-five and then married a complete wanker who left me and our disabled son.”

  I spoke as if these truths had been lodged in my head for years, growing roots; not at all as if they had been sprung on me that morning in Rena Irving’s kitchen.

  “Rosie was a surprise, actually,” Scarlet said, “but a welcome one.”

  I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but they were intrusive and probably offensive, so I left it. “About what Mrs. Thomas told me,” I said instead, wondering how to ask what I needed to ask.

  “Nobody believed Scar except me,” Scarlet said. “She wasn’t depressed and she wasn’t confused. And she would never have done anything to harm Rosie. The truth is someone kidnapped Rosie. Three times.” She saw my look. “The first time was easy. Everyone left their prams outside wee shops back then. Not like today. And the second time was because Scar was trying not to overreact to the first time.”