So Pretty, page 3
I forced myself to smile.
‘No one. Not a soul. The shop was empty. He was talking to his things. All those strange things tucked up inside there. Just talking.’
Brown bottles, copper pans, pocket watches on a bed of green velvet. Wax dolls, porcelain dolls with full pink lips, pursed to kiss. Or bite. Voodoo dolls stuffed with straw; a hand in a preserving jar, a lump of cancer across the thumb joint; shrunken tsantsas heads hanging together like strange baubles.
Why does he have all this? Why did he advertise for an assistant? And why hire me?
I move behind the counter, a barrier between myself and these questions, these strange faces inside the shop. There is a drawer open, cutting into my leg. Usually it is locked, the key kept somewhere on Mr Vincent’s body. I wonder if he left it open for me. Or did he simply forget? Inside is a leather-bound book, heavy as a brick, curling at the edges. I open it and see hundreds of photographs, Mr Vincent’s scrawl fanning around them. Everything in this place has been catalogued, studied. Revered.. This is not just a shop, this is a collection. His personal collection. I back away, my breath caught like a rock in my throat.
‘Jesus!’
I’m slouched over a plate of fish and chips in The Mermaid, the salt and vinegar pricking my nostrils, but I can’t stomach it. Sweat has dried on my skin, a covering of it that makes me itch. How does he afford his collection? How does he pay for the shop? Is he funding it with his own money? There are no customers.
Charlotte smiles at me from across the room. I wave and she reluctantly comes over, grey curls bouncing on her neck. I offer her a seat. ‘Something the matter with your meal, son?’
‘It’s fine. Can I ask you about the shop?
‘No. Not about the shop. I’ve told you that already, son.’
I touch her hand, then snatch it back. I’m overstepping the mark but I am desperate. ‘Please.’
She glares at me, folding her arms. ‘Fine. Because I don’t think you’re fully aware of the job you’ve taken on.’
‘I don’t think I am either.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘When was the last time you went in the shop?’
Her mouth pops open. ‘It … well, it was years ago.’
I lean closer to her. ‘How many years ago?’
‘Around the time Berry left. Why?’
‘What was the shop like when Berry lived here? What was it like inside?’
‘Well, it was just a shop. Lots of tat. It was a bit cramped. Stuff everywhere. Toys and old clothes. Jewellery, clocks, even had a unicycle. The kids used to go in there and mess with it, spin the wheel round and round. Berry thought it was hilarious. He’d let them do whatever they wanted, as long as they were careful.’
‘Where was Mr Vincent?’
‘He used to just stand behind the counter or disappear into the back room. He never spoke to us.’
‘Do you remember anything odd inside? Anything that seemed like it didn’t belong in a little junk shop in Rye?’
‘What are you talking about? It was just full of crap. Stuff the kids liked and the tourists bought cheap.’
I nod. It changed after Berry left. That was when he must have started his collection. When the shop became his.
‘You look very pale. Just a minute.’ She goes to the bar. ‘Here.’ She passes me a glass of water, three fingers I wish were vodka. I gulp it down nevertheless, and suddenly there is an ocean inside of my stomach, waves roiling, curling, restless. It makes me sick.
‘Thanks.’
‘My old friend came to the town a few years back. To stay with me and my husband for the week. She wanted a break from the city.’
‘London?’
‘Hastings. Why do you keep asking that?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Anyway. She told me she went in the shop, but the whole time she just wanted to bolt. Said it creeped her out. When she went to pay, she said the man, the proprietor, was behaving weird. Kept fidgeting, twitching, sort of. She told me it was like he didn’t want her to have the books. Like none of the stuff in there was for sale.’
It’s not.
I suck in a breath, the tension built up over the morning making me feel lightheaded, winded. All my suspicions have been confirmed. ‘Did your friend say anything else?’
‘No. But I could tell it bothered her.’ She pauses. ‘Has … has he ever behaved like that in front of you?’
‘There have been no customers. How does he even keep the place open? He never sells anything.’
‘Tourists. The summer season is always profitable for him. Apparently. He hasn’t gone out of business, after all. Does it bother you? Working there?’
‘I…’
‘It’s OK. You don’t have to tell me. I was just wondering.’
I want to tell her everything – he watches me but never speaks – I don’t, though because I don’t know how to frame the words.
‘I … Well, I suppose I was taught to keep going, not to give up.’ It’s a weak answer and she knows it.
‘Right, well, that’s very noble of you, son.’ She shakes her head, and I can’t tell if she pities me or thinks I’m a fool. Both. She stands, glances at my untouched meal. ‘I’ll let you eat. Have a good day, Teddy.’
She heads to the bar. I want to call her back. I don’t because then I would have to give her the truth: Berry & Vincent is a distraction. Beside the shop, I am a nonentity. No one spots the tell-tale clues in every line of my face, my father’s face. How can I leave that? When I have been looking for anonymity for so long?
ADA
Everything and Nothing
I stand by the window and listen to the voices in the street:
‘He shouldn’t be here. Why has he come? Why work there? Of all the places.’
I know who they are speaking about. Come, come to the window, I think, I want to know more. But they do not.
‘He’s stirring things up. He’s waking up a lot of ghosts.’
‘And more besides.’
Berry & Vincent, of course. And the strange man arrived in Rye to work there. ‘He must be strange,’ one says. ‘How can he not be, working there?’
‘Oh but he’s not strange. Not like that. He just doesn’t know what he’s got himself into. That’s what Molly says. He will do soon enough.’
‘What can he do all day in there? Has he said anything about him? Mr Vincent?’
‘No.’
‘I saw him the other day through the window. He was stood behind the counter. He looked frightened out of his wits. He was polishing a … a—’
‘What?’
Her face empties of expression. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it was.’
‘He should leave.’
‘He should leave.’
TEDDY
Needle and Thread
She laughs when she squats and pisses against the wall. And when she holds a spoon to her eye, says, ‘Look at this little fork.’ Fat tears slosh onto her cheeks. There is much in her face, I do not recognise now.
Every morning, I bring her a cup of tea because I don’t want her to feel glum when she wakes. ‘Tea makes everything better, Teddy,’ she used to say. She doesn’t say it anymore.
‘Morning, Mum. Good sleep?’
‘Johnny, your bathwater was filthy last night. What were you doing while you were away?’
‘Mum?’
‘Soil. So much soil. I had to scrub that tub clean. Took ever so long. You been rolling round in flower beds?’
‘No.’
She means the girls. Where he took the girls.
‘I’ve made you tea: milk, three sugars. How you like it.’
‘I have my tea black.’
‘No you don’t, Mum. You can’t stand anything bitter. You’ve always taken it like this.’
She harrumphs. ‘You’ve not answered my question. Where were you?’
‘I was nowhere.’
‘Well you must have been somewhere. They run you ragged with that job. All that driving. You hardly spend any time with your son. You’re going to miss him growing up. I keep telling you this.’
‘He wasn’t delivering packages though, was he, Mum? Don’t you remember? Why don’t you have some tea and relax?’
‘It’s got to be black, Johnny. Never mind about the coffee now. Were you listenin—’
‘Tea, Mum.’
‘Do you want to miss your little boy’s childhood delivering all these packages to God knows where? Hmm? Take some time off.’
‘It’s not coffee.’ There is a lump in my throat, a lot like a coffee bean.
‘You’re going to miss it. You love Teddy. Be there for him.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘You love Teddy, don’t you?’
I swallow the coffee bean, scratch at the tear on my cheek. ‘Yes. I love Teddy very much.’
Lines appeared in my mother’s skin, a restlessness sat deep inside her bones so she couldn’t remain still. She’d walk back and forth – you could tell where she’d been by the worn tread in the carpet, then she’d hug me, drum her fingers against my spine.
‘Teddy. Teddy. Teddy. Teddy.’
‘I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.’
But those days didn’t worry me. What did worry me were the quiet days, she could barely move, barely walk, and when she did, she would often come to a halt, I thought I could hear the grinding, like her bones were old machinery.
I found myself wondering if I would return home one day fetching milk from the corner shop and see her. Between one step and the next, dead yet still standing somehow.
‘Mum?’ I would say. ‘Mum?’
But she wouldn’t respond, she’d lived until finally she could stop. So I’d curl my arms round her body, still and solid, snuffling into her woollen jumper. And I would stay like that, with her. No one would find us because no one would be looking.
I hear him, in the home he keeps above the shop, tapping away. It’s a typewriter. An old-fashioned one that lets off a ring at the end of each line. The noise breaks upon the shop. He has been typing all day, and I struggle not to burst out of the door and slam it shut.
I look at the death mask hanging in the corner, pinch myself to remind me I am real, and it is not. Would my father have liked these masks? That strange stranger. Would he have made little casts of all his little girls? A much more life-like memento than photographs. I glance at the ceiling. The tapping, it is getting louder.
Stop that! I would like to scream. STOP making that noise! If only I had the courage.
The police, the papers, the magazines and news anchors called my father the Hidden Devil because his handsome, kindly face could charm clutches of women with a word and a wink, but if you looked hard enough, you could glimpse the part of him that was bent, twisted up. Hidden.
‘Johnny Colne, isn’t he a looker?’
‘He’s handsome. Aren’t they always, these murderers?’
‘That’s how they reel you in. Get you on side.’
‘Isn’t that the truth? I’ve always been a sucker for a pretty face.’
Stories and theories swirled round him, growing more sensational. Soon he was known in the US, Europe. Worldwide. Once, everyone knew my father’s name.
I wish someone, anyone, would come. I pray the bell will ring. Earlier, in my desperation, I stood in the doorway, trying to draw walkers into the shop like a man on a market.
‘Do you like birds, miss? We have flocks of them at Berry & Vincent. Blue tits and black birds and robins and birds, exotic and rare. The brightest feathers I’ve ever seen. Would you like to see?’
‘How about you? Do you like puzzles, mysteries? We have all sorts of mysteries inside Berry & Vincent. Care to solve one?’
Please, I am really saying. Please. Come inside. Please. Let me talk to you. Talk to me.
They did not come.
Darkness arrives in great swathes, unfurling across the shop. He is here, Mr Vincent. His silence is loud as a handclap. I am speaking suddenly, words sluicing into the air.
‘It’s dark out, isn’t it? Very quiet. Everyone has gone home, haven’t they?’ I try not to look at the array of votives to my right, miniscule and repugnant. ‘It’s strange in here at night, isn’t it?’
He looks at me.
‘Do you ever mistake these faces for real ones? They seem very real to me? Where on earth did you get them?’ Will they speak? When the lights are turned off, will they live? These strange creatures and odd, leering faces? Will they lift their eyes and gather? I pray they will not gather around me.
‘You have a two-headed dog. It’s quite frightening.’ I laugh, nervous and high. ‘It almost seems as if it’s about to move.’
He does not speak. He does not speak. So I imagine words in his mouth:
‘What happened to Berry?’
Questions are doors, they can open into something good, or something bad. Which door is yours?
‘Why did you come to Rye?’
Why did you?
‘They say you’ve put a rot in the town.’
Only dying things rot.
He is looking at me, when a moment ago he was not. Have I been speaking this? I touch my lip. Check for words. No. No, I haven’t but he is looking at me. My God, I think, he knows. He must know.
His lip twitches, and I want to take up a needle and thread, put a stitch in it so it will never move like that again.
TEDDY
Death and Co.
Two men walk ahead of me on my way home. I slow to listen in on their conversation. They are in their thirties, these men, balding heads and golden wedding bands. I wonder is this what I would look like if I wasn’t me? If I was ordinary? Wife, ring; child, wrinkles. I like to think it would.
‘He’s a handsome little bugger. Like his dad,’ says one smugly.
A child.
‘Sure. Emphasis on the “little”.’ A smirk, a wink.
I would like a piece of this. I walk closely, and who’s to say we are not three – three friends together. And I am a person like other people.
‘You’re Teddy?’
She knows, I think. She knows who I am. She is thin, birdy, this woman, standing outside my house. A gust and her coattails will flap and she will wing away.
‘Yes.’
‘What do you know about the man you work for?’
I scratch my neck, dig at the chill there. ‘Only what the townspeople have told me.’
‘Not much. They haven’t told you much.’ I want to pinch her wings down, pinch the answers from her lips.
The woman has hair the hue of straw, shadows under her eyes, dark enough to look like muck.
‘Who are you?’
She lowers herself into the plastic outdoor chair, offers the seat beside her, even though she is on my property and I should be offering it to her. I join her, nevertheless.
‘I’ve lived in Rye all my life. I remember when they came, Mr Berry and Mr Vincent. It rained so much that day. We put our furniture on stilts, packed our doors with sandbags. The way the rain hammered down, we wondered if it would ever stop. I imagine you’ve already been told that though. I wish it had washed those men away, out of Rye.’
‘Why?’
She folds her fingers together, unfolds, folds. Carefully, as if she is trying to fold the fear in her into a neater, more manageable shape.
‘The shop wasn’t always like it is now. I imagine you’ve been told that too.’
‘Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?’
She looks at me. ‘You’re young, Teddy. And this will knot you up. You should leave.’
‘I’m not leaving,’ I say. I’m not leaving because if it were not for this shop, your thoughts would now turn to my face, the familiarity of it. It is a thin guise but it is one I cannot tear through. ‘Tell me.’
‘Nobody knows him. Not really. But he has become a bad story.’
I want to rest my hands on hers, make them still. ‘Tell me what you do know about him.’
She sucks in a breath, blustery and loud, and I wonder how her small body can fit all that air inside. ‘He was always such a silent, strange man. Berry knew it.’ She pauses, then says, ‘It happened outside the shop. Twenty years ago now.’
‘What did?’
‘It was all so quick. Quicker than it is to say out loud, “She’s dead. That child is dead.”’
I scratch my neck, driving my nails into the skin at my hairline. I only stop when I feel blood. ‘The child is—?’
‘She was always so fast, bounding about like a mountain goat. We used to say, “Slow, down, slow down, you’ll hurt yourself.” I watched it all happen. She was running down the street. And as she passed the shop, she saw something. Her head swivelled round and her mouth pinged open. It was strange, how fast and slow it all seemed.’
‘And she…’
‘She died. Her head hit the cobbles. I remember her skinny arm hooked over her head, her little bare foot poking through the door of Berry & Vincent. We couldn’t find her shoe.’
‘She couldn’t be saved?’
The woman shakes her head. ‘No. It was instant. I went to her, tried to help her. Everyone was indoors, no one heard me. But he did. Mr Vincent, he watched from his window. I screamed at him to help me, but he just stood there, watching.’
I grit my teeth. There is a sickness in my throat, rising.
‘I couldn’t make him move. He just watched.’ Tears are in the eyes of this woman I do not know the name of. ‘I scrubbed and scrubbed to fetch the blood from the cobbles after she was taken away. And still he watched, like it was simply mud on my fingers and what happened hadn’t happened at all. We don’t know what frightened her so much, what she saw in that place. We don’t know who he is, but we know he brought something bad into Rye.’
‘I … I …’ I cannot speak.
She rises, moves away, turns back. ‘I tell you this because you’re young. I tell you it because I don’t think you know what it is you’ve found.’
