Cat Step, page 10
15.
The young policeman knocked on our door at lunchtime. He seemed unintimidating as he took his hands from his pockets. I thought if I was being arrested there would be two of them so I relaxed.
He looked beyond me into Audrey’s painted flat.
‘Do you want to see inside?’ I said.
‘Better not.’ He had another peek over my shoulder and said, ‘It’s a courtesy call. They’ve arrested someone in connection with the attempted robbery from your vehicle.’
‘Oh.’
‘They’ve kept him in custody.’
‘Why?’
‘He tends to go walkabout on the day of his trial.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’ll be required to attend the trial as a witness. You might not be needed to testify depending on what he pleads but you must attend court all the same.’
‘When?’
‘You’ll get a letter. It will be within two weeks.’
He looked up at Audrey’s windows.
I took a breath. ‘Can I bring my daughter?’
‘Children aren’t allowed in the courts.’
‘Is there a crèche?’
‘No.’
Funny, the thoughts that come. My first worry was for Emily and who would look after her. My second was for me. ‘This is nothing to do with me is it?’
‘You’re called as a witness.’
‘No. The caution. The car park. My daughter.’
I caught distaste in his face. ‘No. This is the case against Aaron Long. But stay out of trouble because you’re on file.’ He spoke as if he was doing me a favour.
‘Will they mention it in court?’
He softened and a little of his mildness returned. ‘You know what lawyers are like. They might ask. Be prepared.’
He stepped away from me, down the path towards the gate, glancing at the violas I’d bought from Lidl and put in pots on the drive looking all sweet and pretty.
Of course. The man’s lawyer would want to portray me as the unreliable witness, the irresponsible woman. I’d watched films. I knew how these things went. I didn’t even care about the boy or the break-in.
The policeman said, ‘So, the Sheriff Court in Glasgow, expect a letter.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘By the river. Google it.’
He walked further down the path then stopped. ‘You’ve done a good job on the weeds.’
‘Yes.’
‘She kept it beautifully.’
‘Who? Audrey?’
‘Aye. Until she couldn’t manage it. Then it got a wee bit overgrown.’
The policeman must have been ten years younger than me and Robbie. He was unlined, unruffled, a boy policeman.
‘You grew up around here,’ I said.
‘Her grandson was the reason I joined the force.’
‘Robbie? Or Aidan?’
‘Robbie, aye.’
Wind rustled leaves and I was rushed with pride. I wished Robbie could have heard that. The fitness, the discipline, the morality, if you believed that police possessed it, and this young policeman just about seemed to: it didn’t surprise me that Robbie would inspire other people because he inspired me.
‘I’ve wanted to ask if people here knew him but I’ve been afraid to—’
‘I can see why—’
‘—in case they didn’t know him.’
‘Yes.’ He frowned slightly and closed the gate behind him. ‘You’ll get a letter. Glasgow Sheriff Court.’
I watched the tree branches, their new leaves shaking, and I thought again about Emily. I could put her into nursery at eight-thirty but I would have to leave the court at eleven to pick her up by twelve. If it went on for longer I didn’t know what I would do. Of course it would go on for longer than eleven. I’d have to bring her with me. But I couldn’t leave her on a seat outside with some pens and a colouring book. Maybe I could ask Caroline to come with me. But she had children too. I thought about asking Paul and I thought about asking June. I felt less ashamed at asking June. She didn’t get visitors. She might appreciate a day out to court.
16.
I picked up Emily from nursery and promised her a Freddo and lunch in the back seat of the car if she would walk on the Campsies with me. This spring day needed us in it. Our bodies needed to be tousled by the first breeze that wasn’t freezing. She agreed.
I knew where we’d go. As the Crow Road climbs the Campsies it passes a car park opposite a path up the fellside. We stopped there and weren’t the only ones eating our lunch in our car. I noticed several vehicles with couples or lone men inside, parked with their windscreens taking on the wide open fells. We watched people emerge from their front seats, hair blown about as they shut their doors and zipped their coats. As they passed they looked in at us and then they were gone, up the hill on the other side of the Crow Road.
I climbed from the front to the back seat and ate next to Emily which she loved, handing her sausage rolls and a boiled egg from a plastic pot we’d bought at the Co-op. We watched the clouds shifting and moving, breaking up to let the sun stream through for a few seconds. Shadows slipped fast across the grass.
Emily got boiled egg down her front but who cared about that when you were trying to bond with your child. ‘Mummy, I’ve had an accident,’ she said, egg yolk on her lips and chin.
‘It will come out in the wash,’ I said, but she wasn’t talking about the egg.
I lifted her out of her car seat and inspected her. Her bum was wet so I told her to stand outside the car while I looked for some spare clothes. I found a pair of leggings and a pack of wipes. Sweet victory. See, why couldn’t those women at the nursery witness this? There were no pants in the car so I said she could go knickerless under her leggings and she didn’t seem to mind.
The path up the hillside was well worn and I felt the jagged corners of stones through the soles of my trainers. There were tufts of grass either side of the path and patches of mud that I had to walk around. Emily trod straight through them.
‘Tell me if you need a wee,’ I said to her.
‘I don’t.’ She let go of my hand and squatted to pick a dandelion. Robbie called dandelions pee-the-beds. I held back from telling Emily that. See, I did try to be a good parent.
‘Tell me something you did at nursery today.’
‘Um,’ Emily said. She dropped the dandelion, put her finger up her nose then into her mouth.
‘Stop that.’
‘I like the taste of it.’
‘It’s dirty.’
She touched her palm to the tips of some wild grass.
‘I told a joke.’
‘What joke?’
‘Why did the banana cross the road?’
‘I don’t know. Why did the banana cross the road?’
‘Because it needed a poo.’
I pretended to roar with laughter and Emily roared too.
‘Do you need a poo?’
‘No, Mummy, it was a joke.’
We threw stones and snapped sticks and ran and balanced on clumps of grass. I liked the kick of the hills and the wind churning my hair. I loved the billowing tree tops and the soft moss that covered the rocks. I wondered if I would ever tell anyone else about Emily and the car park and the court case and the social workers or if I would keep it between me and these hills. If I told my mum she would come racing here, using up her leave and telling me she’d tried to warn me this might happen. What would Robbie say? He would call me the unluckiest girl in the universe.
This was a start, though, our hillside climb, and although Emily was happy to sit in the dirt by a hut and scrape sticks into the earth whereas I wanted to scramble higher, I sat down with her and watched her play. This was a childhood, surely? Wasn’t I doing something right? I leaned back onto my hands, lifted my face to the sky and felt a small warmth on my cheeks.
When I opened my eyes I saw a woman tramping towards us. She was coming down the hill with turned out feet and swinging arms as if intent on giving someone a telling off. I stood up.
‘Don’t look so frightened, Liz, they do let me out sometimes,’ June said when she came close by.
I called Emily out of the hut and said, ‘Say hello to June. She’s one of my dancing ladies.’
Emily made us both smile as she stood in the doorway, taking us in, like a shepherd.
‘I’ve been traipsing these fells since I was as wee as you,’ June said. Emily didn’t answer because children don’t, not shy ones like Emily.
I looked behind June to see if anybody was accompanying her. There were other walkers and some dogs, but nobody who seemed to be taking an interest in the three of us.
‘Are you here on your own?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was put-on patient.
‘How did you get here?’
‘I got the bus and I’ll get the bus back.’
‘How far did you go?’
‘Up to the ridge.’
Beyond us, towards Glasgow, the fields were soft, and the trees newly green. Hazy sun made the clouds gold, as if sunset was upon them already.
‘Do you have a phone?’
‘Stop it, Liz. Look after that child there, not me.’ She was ferociously endearing.
Emily played in the hut, venturing in and out of its dark insides to bury grass and hide stones.
‘She looks like you,’ June said.
‘If you saw her dad you wouldn’t say that. But thanks.’
June put her hand to her forehead and squinted. She gestured towards a cluster of houses. ‘That wee hamlet there was where my Aunty Betty lived. When we were weans my mum used to send us up the road to help her. I used to watch the farmer collect the sheep from up in the hills and bring them down for shearing. I used to help my uncle chop firewood. And I used to sit on the back of the truck and drive out to Twechar to pick the tatties. I see it all from my window still. What I would do if they took that view away from me.’ The lines in her face were thick as potato drills, her hair as blown about and wild-looking as the grass at our feet.
Emily threw a stick out of the dark hut.
‘That’s a good house you’ve got there,’ June said into the darkness. Another stick scudded from the doorway and Emily’s face looked out and ducked in again.
‘Does anybody know you’ve come out today?’
‘It’s not a lock-up I live in. It’s sheltered housing. We come and go as we please.’
‘But what if?—’
‘What if I got lost and perished out here?’
I shook my head and chose not to speak. June closed her mouth and raised an eyebrow as if she’d won.
Emily walked out of the hut holding a worm on a stick. It was a thin, young worm, pink and sinewy like the underside of a tongue.
‘Go find a home for it,’ I said to her.
‘I want to keep it.’
‘You can’t take it home.’
‘I want to play with it.’
‘Are you a ballet dancer like your mummy?’ June said. ‘She’s a good dancer, your mum.’
Emily stood close to my legs and put an arm around me.
‘Keep that worm away from me,’ I said. Emily took her arm from my legs and went off again with her worm and her stick. I watched her tread over mounds of grass as tall as her knees, holding her stick straight out. If June hadn’t been there, I know I would have felt a frisson of stress, I would have braced myself for trouble over the worm – a tantrum or a lengthy whine – but I felt sheltered from all that because of June’s company.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ June said. ‘It was you who left her in the car.’
I turned to see her small firm face. There was no point denying what was true.
‘How did you know?’
‘English girl with a small daughter. It had to be you.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Gossip goes round a place like this.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘I wouldn’t worry. My Aunty Betty left me outside a pub for three hours and I turned out all right.’
I shook my head. June continued and I stopped listening, imagining the gossip, the half-truths and the untruths.
‘She was what you call a functioning alcoholic and the urge must have come upon her. She left me outside in my pram, had a few drinks, went home and forgot all about me.’
Emily came towards us with the worm still on her stick.
‘What happened to you?’ I said to June.
‘Someone pushed me in my pram to the police.’
‘What happened to your Aunty Betty?’
‘Not a lot. My mother battered her.’
‘Nobody called social services?’
‘Nobody called social services. But she wasn’t my mother. I didn’t have to live with her.’
‘Mummy, look.’
Emily wanted me to look, really look, at the worm. ‘It’s like a noodle,’ she said.
‘Don’t eat it.’
She laughed and said, ‘That’s disgusting.’
‘You’re doing fine with that lassie.’
I sighed. ‘Thanks. This is a good moment.’ I wished my mum could have seen us. For so long she’d witnessed me struggling and I was sure she resented us deep in her sherry nights. ‘Keep taking your small steps, keep taking your medicine,’ she used to say to me. She wanted my recovery to keep pace with her desires, which included Alan, and I was too slow. She would have looked at us today and seen that we were doing okay.
‘You’ve come a long way to be on your own,’ June said, tilting her chin in a superior way as if expecting a bad reaction from me or a remark she might have made herself had anyone commented on her own life circumstances.
‘I know,’ is all I said.
‘If you need anything you know where I am,’ she said, closing her mouth and clenching her teeth in a way I was becoming used to.
It felt right. Or at least it didn’t feel wrong. ‘I do need some help.’
‘Go on.’
‘Could you come to court with me and sit with Emily while I give evidence?’ Emily took off her coat and dropped it on the ground. ‘I can’t risk leaving her at nursery in case it overruns.’ I picked up her coat and folded it over my arm.
‘That’s a bit more than I bargained for,’ she said. ‘But I did offer. You don’t know when it will be?’
‘Within two weeks.’
‘I’m not busy.’
I told her about the trial of the man who broke into my car and how I had no one to look after Emily.
‘Of course I can,’ June said. ‘But I’m not standing up in court.’
‘You might have to if they put me on trial.’
She shook her head. ‘You’ll be all right.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Three seagulls flew above us, wide wingspans, white and gold.
‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ I said. ‘Are you ready to go?’
We walked comfortably down the hill, June nimble, seemingly unafraid of falling like my other dancers at the sheltered housing. Emily ran on and I worried she would crash onto the road in front of the traffic.
‘Emily, stop!’ I shrieked down the hill and hurt my throat.
‘You’ve got some gub on you,’ June said.
‘You should have heard her dad.’
Emily waited for us, like a good girl, and I told her I was pleased with her. I was.
‘I hope he’s paying you maintenance,’ June said, after I’d told Emily to look left and right before we crossed the curving road.
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘No. You’ve got it wrong.’
No cars came but I couldn’t move.
‘Can I have my Freddo, Mummy?’ Emily pulled at my arm, wanting me to cross the road.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve spoken out of turn.’ June looked back the way we’d come and I thought she might take off up the hillside.
‘Robbie…’ I said, and I let Emily tug my hand and walk me across the road. ‘Robbie… do you want to know what happened to him?’
To her credit I saw nothing but patience in her face, none of the fear or awkwardness that people can show when they’re about to hear a god-awful story they aren’t expecting. I gave Emily the Freddo I’d promised her, put a plastic bag on top of her wet car seat and shut the door. Then, high in the hills above Lennoxtown, with the sun a pink glow behind the rainclouds to the west, while Emily kicked her legs against the driver’s seat and ate her Freddo, I told June about the part of my life that had drifted into the black and left us washed up here.
In July we flew to London where I had my audition. I got the Lido, Robbie got on his physiotherapy course, we made our plans and changed them again when we found out I was pregnant. All I could think of was how we might sail again one day, either with a child who would live with us in our cabin, or later, when our baby was grown and independent and we were free to go back as a couple. I knew a magician and his assistant, a singer and guitar player duo. It was done, husband and wife teams.
So Emily was an intrusion before she was even born, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t anticipating her, if I didn’t secretly hope for a girl, if I didn’t think that me, Robbie and our baby would be a formidable three. I tucked away the dream of the Lido. Such opportunities would come again. I was strong then, physically and mentally. And naive.
We found a one-bed flat to rent in Leytonstone on the Central Line, because we could just about afford it and it wasn’t far from my mum. We didn’t like it at first; the tube, the city, the waiting room in Whipps Cross Hospital with people not on holiday and not enjoying themselves. It was hard not to think about Paris.
I got a little teaching in a dancing school. Robbie worked in a gym while he waited for the new term at university. They offered him some hours while he was studying too. It wasn’t a lot of money and we knew we’d be skint for a few years while he finished his training. I would be on statutory maternity pay. I’d paid my national insurance, thank God, my mum had seen to that. She does things properly.
