Breakdown, page 24
I shake my head.
‘Then you’ll wait for our decision. If we let you stay and work, we’ll house you and feed you and you’ll join the cooperative and sign up to our terms and conditions, according to our council rules.’
I don’t like the idea of his council rules.
‘But if we decide against you, we’ll send you back, trussed up like geese if need be.’ His smile evaporates. He looks at Tarquin like he’d send him back regardless.
Lenny’s face drains of colour. The angle of his jaw sticks out. He clenches the edge of his seat. Tarquin half rises. Instantly I drop my hand over his arm.
The oldest woman comes forward.
I squeeze Tarquin’s wrist.
‘I’m Bridey,’ she says. She’s wrinkled and her voice is slightly scratchy. ‘I’ll take you and the little one to mine.’
I can feel his pulse banging.
‘We women live separately from the men. It’s our choice. Your fella will have to go with Colin or Bert.’ She nods at Tarquin.
‘Lenny needs to eat,’ I whisper, scared Tarquin will explode.
Bridey tucks her grey hair behind an ear. ‘Don’t worry about your family, young man,’ she says, seeing his mind. ‘You’ll be right next door, and you can talk to each other in the backyards.’
I grip Tarquin harder, whisper, ‘I’ll make sure.’
But before she leads us off, Lenny breaks free. He runs to Alfred Glover, cries out: ‘Please don’t send us back to the prison farms. We shouldn’ta never gone there. We wasn’t doing nothing wrong.’
The woman with the shrunken head leaps up, holds her arms out to Lenny, shrieks out a mangled cry.
Instantly Alfred Glover’s on his feet. In one swift movement he crosses to the woman, slaps her arms down, roughly thrusts her back in her chair. As her small misshapen head cracks against the chair back, she cries, ‘No life for a child here!’
No one moves.
Lenny stares first at the woman, then from face to face.
‘We was only trying to go north,’ he whispers.
56
The terrace of cottages stretches up the hillside. All gone to grime. No sign of life. Just a grey line of grey doors. Everything coated with dust.
We climb up the narrow street. Chill wind, thin sleet. Moonlight. We pass an old churchyard. Rows of small graves. Tiny mounds barely grassed over. One fresh. On top, a wet and wasted teddy.
An old set of steps. Through the door of Bridey’s house, straight into the front room. Tiny. Perfect. An antique sideboard. A coatstand in the corner. Stuffed furniture. Every chair cover, curtain, darned and mended. Even the skirting boards intact. Nothing half stripped out. And a coal fire. A real coal fire.
Oh Nan, a burning coal fire.
Glowing coals, dancing flames.
And heat!
Lenny stares at the fire, crowds closer, stretches out his thin hands. His eyes wide.
And china, Nan.
Plates lined up on a dresser, cups hanging from hooks. Real blue and white china and a nest of little polished tables. Just like you used to tell me. I cross the room and pick a plate off its shelf, carefully wipe the dark patina of dust off. Real china! Lenny looks and looks, all eyes. Then he says, small voiced, ‘What’re them black stones for, missus?’ He points at the hearth.
Bridey laughs and says, ‘Get away, that’s coal.’ Her voice tender, like she loves him already.
I take off my coat. Warm my freezing hands. Maybe it’s not going to be so bad. Maybe it could work out? Can working down a mine be so awful?
If they let us stay.
‘You can get scrubbed down in there.’ Bridey points up the stairs to a door. ‘There’s a proper tub.’
Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll truss us all up and send us back down on the next train.
She brushes past, climbs the stairs. I shake my head. That’s not going to happen. I won’t let it. We follow her into a tiny bathroom, white tiles, a sink and toilet and bathtub. She turns on a tap. Hot water gushes out. It’s not only Lenny now that’s got big eyes.
I won’t. I’ll think of something.
Bridey laughs again. ‘We’ve got our own electricity up here,’ she says, and puts down her candle and flicks a switch. The room floods with light. ‘We fire the generators from rough we don’t sell. It works part of the mine and gives us a decent life.’
I gawp. Real electricity.
‘If you’re prepared for the danger and you work hard, you’ll get along fine.’ Her tone is cheery, as if we’ve all already got her vote.
It’s so bright, I actually blink.
Bridey turns the light off again. ‘But light bulbs is hard to get, so we won’t leave it on.’
Lenny’s already hopping up and down with excitement, trying to strip his clothes off. ‘Can I get in now, missus?’
Bridey smiles. ‘Bless the child,’ she says.
She plugs the bath. She lathers soap in, turns on the tap again, starts filling up the tub. I’ve never seen hot water coming out of a tap before. I watch, mesmerised, as it plunges and steams. Bridey brings out some old plastic toys. Yellow ducks and ducklings. She sails them out on the bath.
Lenny looks up at her. His face like magic. He scoops out one tiny duckling caught in a swirl of water and cuddles it to his chest.
The woman bends over the bathtub too. She mixes round the suds. Foam flecks combine with the fine dust in the air. She pushes a yellow duck through the grey bubbles with one finger. She smiles at Lenny with this look on her face, like all she ever wanted was a kid at bathtime, with those yellow ducks.
‘You can go,’ says Bridey, turning abruptly to me. ‘Hannah will find you food.’
I think her eyes have filled with tears.
‘I can take care of the child,’ she says.
Maybe it’s just the soap suds and the bending.
I step back onto the small landing, dismissed.
Maybe it’s going to work out. Maybe I can have a bath too. In bubbles, all the way up to my neck. Sit in a hot bath under electric lights!
How I wish you could see it, Nan. Everything just like it was when you grew up. If I go downstairs now, maybe there’ll be a working television too, a computer and a mobile phone!
I peer back at them through the slightly open door. Steam half obscures Bridey. She lays out towels for Lenny. She passes him a sponge. His shape wavers in the mist. Ghostly, like a spirit child. She sets out slippers on the bath mat. The slippers are way too big. She bows before him like an antique handmaiden. If he said: ‘I command you to bring me a plate of food in the bath!’ I think she would.
Half scared he will and I’ll be caught watching them, I turn away. I catch sight of a little bedroom at the end of a corridor, its door slightly open. I creep down and peer inside. A child’s room. A cot. A stuffed toy cat on a quilt. A set of childish clothes folded and laid on a chair. Another child in the house? Lenny will like that. I step inside. The clothes are coated with coal dust. The room’s strangely still. Quiet as the grave.
I creep back down the stairs and peer into the kitchen. Looking for more wonders.
It all seems too good to be true.
Inside the kitchen is one of the other women I saw at the meeting. The young one that looks old. She warms herself by a big cooking range. She smiles at me, pulls up a chair and says, ‘You’re Melissa, aren’t you? I’m Hannah.’
I cross over and sit down. ‘It’s so nice here,’ I say.
‘You’re very pretty.’
I blush. ‘And so warm. I’m not used to coal fires.’
Deep shadows around her eyes. And a faraway look.
‘Electricity neither,’ I say.
She reaches out a hand to touch my face.
‘It’s only us that’s got it,’ she says. ‘I mean us up here, near the mine – and when they close up, it’ll go off.’
I smile. I don’t really understand.
‘It’s the mine, you see,’ she explains, stroking my hair.
I still don’t understand. I suppose my face shows it.
‘They power up the generator,’ she says, ‘with coal dust and slack and the graded coal that ain’t put on the trains. They use it to make steam and that, to power the winding room.’
I look at her blankly.
‘So they can lower the men down and the coal up,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘It doesn’t go nowhere else, just for the mine and us.’
‘That’s so clever,’ I say. ‘All warm and full of light and everything working.’
‘It wasn’t always like that. It wasn’t like it when I was born. They done all this in the last ten years.’
A wave of relief settles over me. Lenny won’t mind if there’s no Scotland, if he can be here, washed, fed. Other children to play with. If it works out here, we won’t need to go anywhere else.
And suddenly I know they’ll want us to stay. I see it in the sad lines of her face. It showed in the eyes of the men, when they kept staring at me and Lenny.
‘If I could live here and have a warm house and light in the evening, I’d smile all day,’ I say.
The woman lets go of my hair, drops her hand. Her fingers tremble. I realise something’s very wrong.
‘What is it?’ I say, uncomfortably aware she’s near tears.
She doesn’t answer. She bites her lower lip, drags a hand across her nose. She stands up, goes to the sink, splashes water on her face.
I don’t know what to say, what to do. I twist my fingers. Suddenly everywhere looks less shining than before.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Have I upset you?’
She turns, a sad smile forced across her face. ‘Oh no, it’s nothing,’ she says, her voice empty. ‘Just a cold.’
A huge fear starts inside me. There’s something I don’t know. Something I’m missing.
Something I should know.
‘Is the room upstairs your child’s?’ I ask, trying to change the subject. ‘Lenny’d love to have someone to play with.’
Her face goes grey. Her chin quivers. She makes no reply. Instead she puts a bowl of soup on the table, nods at it and leaves the kitchen.
Somehow I’ve touched a raw nerve.
And all of a sudden, despite the warmth, I feel cold. My heart starts racing all over again. I knew something was wrong. I knew it was too good to be true. I look at the fire smouldering inside the old cooking range. The glowing coals. The dancing flames.
They aren’t dancing at all.
They’re twisting.
Hungry. Insatiable. Devouring.
Turning everything to ashes.
57
I sip on the soup. What to do? Ignore the signs? Pretend? I’ve got food. I’m by a warm fire. No Careem. No General. I’m not worrying about Lenny. He’s got a woman fussing over him and a hot bath and I’m getting one too. I won’t be ungrateful. I fix my brain on that.
But my heart is racing. And with every beat it pounds out, Beware. Beware. Beware.
Nothing is what it seems.
Even the surface of the soup is coated with that thin film of black.
Tarquin. I’ll talk to Tarquin. Maybe he’ll know what’s wrong. I put my spoon down and blow on the hot soup. Maybe he is what is wrong? That’s it. That’s part of it. They want me and Lenny. They don’t want him.
Why not?
The soup steams up. I stop blowing. My heart falters, seems to miss a beat.
Why don’t they want Tarquin?
I take my bath, I smile and pretend. Then I lie in bed and think. I lie very quietly, because Lenny’s lying asleep beside me.
They want Lenny and me. But they don’t want Tarquin.
The shrunken-headed woman who cried out, ‘No life for a child.’ What did she mean? That headman, Alfred Glover. So sugary. That row of tiny graves in that old churchyard. That wet and wasted grey teddy. Everything covered in dark dust. A sudden shiver goes down my spine.
The electricity and the tasty soup and the hot baths and the little yellow ducks and the loveliness of knowing that soldiers are nowhere near. Nothing is what it seems.
From somewhere inside my head I hear Nan’s voice.
‘There’s always a snake, Melissa. In every garden there’s always a snake. Oh beware, my beautiful child. Run swiftly, run fast –’
Her warning stuns me into action.
I’ve got to do something. Find Tarquin. I glance at Lenny, fast asleep. His tangled locks all combed out, washed, cut. His head a halo of curls glinting in the lamplight.
Find Tarquin. I get up. I go straight to the window. There’s a light shining out from one of the houses. I see the pale square of it on the back yard. Tarquin? Maybe he can’t sleep either. Maybe that’s his light.
I creep back to the bedside. I pull on my shoes. I slip on Nan’s coat. I get to the door. It’s locked.
It’s locked.
I try the handle again.
I’m locked in.
I can’t believe it.
Hannah and Bridey locked me in?
I’m tempted to rattle the handle, kick the door. Shout. Scream. How dare they? But I don’t. Instead I swallow my breath, press my lips tight, check the lock and smile.
Without a bolt on the outside, no lock can hold me. Certainly not this flimsy one.
I squat down. I push gently on the base of the door. It gives slightly. I try the top. No bolts. Good. Now the lock.
It’s a simple pin and tumble affair and the key’s still in it. Quickly I take down one of the posters tacked to the chimney breast, and try the old trick of slipping a sheet of paper under the door and poking the key out. Fingers crossed. I’ll find you, Tarquin. It nearly works, too; the key falls onto the paper, but as I try to drag it back under the door it sticks. Shit. The gap isn’t big enough.
I hunt around, remove a loose nail from the wall. It’s the right thickness and the shape of the nail head gives me hope. I’m coming, Tarquin. I set to work.
I slide the nail into the lower portion of the keyhole to act as a tension wrench. Then I use it to apply a twisting force to the cylinder, first clockwise and then counterclockwise. I experiment until I feel the firmness of the stop. Clockwise. Yep. Gotcha. There’s that telltale bit of give.
I insert my hair clip as a pick into the upper part of the keyhole and feel for the pins. This is going to work. With the pick in the keyhole, I press up and along, feeling out each individual pin. One after the other I push them up. I’m gonna get out, all right. I feel the pins spring back down when I release the pressure. I work out which one is the hardest to push. You know you can do this, Melissa. I turn the nail to increase the torque. Gently does it. Then I press up hard with the hair clip.
The stubborn pin yields, slips completely out of the cylinder. I hear a faint click as it falls back out of its housing.
One down – how many more to go? Can’t be more than five. Probably only a couple. I feel for the next stubborn pin. Yep, just one more. It gives without trouble. You see. Only a double mortice-lever lock.
And I turn the handle.
As I pass Hannah’s, maybe Bridey’s bedroom, I poke out my tongue. Take more than a cheap tumble and pin to stop me. But before I go downstairs I creep to the end bedroom again. I want to check something out.
Quietly I push open the door. As I expected: empty.
I think I’m beginning to understand.
I pad through the rest of the warm house, out and down to the back door. None of the stairs creak. None of the doors whine. Everything works. They have time to oil hinges, mend floorboards.
The back door is bolted on the inside. They obviously didn’t think I’d make it this far.
I slide it back and escape into the night.
58
Outside I hurry towards the square of pale light. Everywhere is order. The vegetables all grow in straight lines. All are neatly covered in plastic. There’s some kind of chicken coop and a tiny greenhouse at the end of the garden. In the shadows, I see a beehive beside it. I hope there’s bees inside. Can bees survive up here?
I reach the pale square. I look up at the light from next door. My heart’s hammering. I don’t want those women to discover I’m out. It’s not that I’m scared of them. When I think about it, they’re probably only following council rules. But Lenny’s still there, and being caught might mean being shipped back.
I stand there, pressing my hand against my face, biting the inside of my cheek.
I stare up at the window. What to do now?
Suddenly a voice.
‘Meliss’?’ It comes from somewhere just behind me. I jump. Standing in the shadows by the greenhouse is Tarquin.
Tarquin.
A rush of something sweet and wonderful. My fears evaporate. He came out to find me. Together we’ll find a way. Maybe they don’t want him, but they won’t separate us. We’ve come so far. We’ve been through so much. This sad, dust-blackened place can’t part us. And suddenly I understand something about myself.
I’m scared of losing him.
And with that understanding the old spectre rises.
The lie.
The fear that when Tarquin learns the truth, he’ll leave me. There, I’ve admitted it to myself.
I don’t want to lose him.
No need to tell him yet, though. I look up at him, smile into the darkness, throw my arms out. My voice falters. But I should tell him.
We’re alone. There may not be another chance.
But I only manage, ‘You can’t sleep?’
Oh Tarquin why didn’t I tell you everything right then?
He smiles. ‘Crazy,’ he says. ‘Here we are with good food and the best bed in ages and neither of us can sleep.’
Why didn’t I trust you? Why didn’t I open my heart and let you in?
We both stand there.
‘Let’s get into the greenhouse,’ I say. I’m still nervous about being out. We slide open the door, step inside.
We could have faced things together.
He brushes against me. I shiver as if an electric current has short circuited inside me. My voice trembles. ‘I –’
