Should We Fall Behind, page 14
Later, when she was eating her lunch in front of the television, Mummy said there was only going to be one more day before the end of the half-term holiday.
‘It’s a special Inset day for teachers so they can get everything ready for all the children.‘
Tuli pictured Mrs Enisuoh and the other teachers standing on the big cushioned chairs in the staff room and screaming about all the creepy crawlies in the same way Mummy screamed when there was a spider in the bath.
‘Can’t there be more Insect days?’ Tuli said, pushing her gloopy food around the plate ‘I don’t want to go back to school.’
‘Don’t play with the food, Tuli, just eat it or you’ll be hungry later.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Yes you do. You love macaroni cheese. You always eat it.
‘I don’t want to go to school.’
‘It’s okay,’ Mummy said putting on her soft voice. ‘That horrible Finn won’t be there anymore, he left, remember? And you can see all your friends again.’
‘I don’t have any friends, Mummy. I don’t want to go back.’
‘Tuli, eat your mac cheese before it goes cold.’
‘I don’t like it. It tastes like soap. It’s not nice, Mummy.’ She tried hard not to cry but failed.
Mummy picked up the plates and went to the kitchen. She came back with custard creams in her hand.
‘Come on, baby,’ she said. ‘It’s not so bad. I need to work and if I do more hours at my job we’ll have more money and I can take you for pizza.’
Tuli took a biscuit and nestled into her mother’s lap; she smelled of warm bed even though it was the middle of the day and she felt bad for wishing Mummy was at her job.
‘Don’t worry, Tuli. There’s still one more holiday left and that means school will only be for four days this week. And, I’m not at work tomorrow so I can take you to the big park with the boats on the pond and we can get doughnuts on the way home. How about that?’
Tuli wanted to say no thank you; she definitely had to see Storyman tomorrow or he would be waiting for her all day when she was back at school, not knowing where she was. She needed to tell him she wouldn’t be able to talk to him until after school from now on. She bit her bottom lip and nodded at Mummy.
14. EBELE
Ebele often slept badly; it was no different on Saturday night. At first it was the new driver, Driverman, Daban who filled her dreams but his face quickly melded into that of her stepfather, Brian, and then into Michael, the boy who once pinned her down in the damp grass and put his grimy hands all over her childish body. Both were frequent spectres, appearing in the dismal recesses of sleep. This night they came disguised as people she loved: her mother, pushing her over a cliff edge into an implacable sea; Papa, holding his hand over her mouth, preventing her from screaming out; and worst of all, Tuli, lurking behind doors with a kitchen knife in her hand. She called to her mother to save her but she never came, not even in dreams. Ebele woke drenched in heavy sweat. These night panics were not unfamiliar. Soon after Tuli was born, they began to creep up into waking hours too: on short walks pushing the buggy through quiet streets; in innocuous places like the library or the hairdressers, in the supermarket buying Marmite or toothpaste; pushing Tuli on park swings; a trip to the post office. The panic took a grip, possessing her until she was no longer in control: throat tight, mouth dry, her tongue a foreign object, obstructing breath; palms clammy; flames raging beneath taut skin. In those moments it was hard to hold on to who she was, even though she’d long been aware this stalker was meshed within her own being, manifesting itself in a deep and sudden anguish, roused by a smell or a sound, a throwaway comment or a half-seen headline. To cope, she restricted how far she would travel across the city alone, conscious the stalker might take hold, paralyse her and keep her from getting back to Tuli. She developed other strategies too: vodka to blot it all out; weed to calm her racing heart. For years she managed to keep it from drowning her completely. Eventually, bad dreams faded into the background, and, for a short time, the crippling anxiety abated.
After Jamal left, she was adrift again, barely treading water. Some mornings she wished the day was over before it began, even with Tuli asleep down the landing. It was hard to get out of bed, to dress or eat. The pounding in her chest was constant, blocking out all other sounds. Neither she nor Tuli left the house for several days, wearing the same pyjamas until one night she forgot to lift her child onto the potty and she wet the bed. The smell of soiled sheets hung about the flat until Tuli dragged them out of her washing basket and into the bathtub where she squirted bubble-bath on them and started the taps running. Ebele was ashamed. Soon the school secretary began calling and threatening to get the local authority involved so she finally made an appointment to see Doctor Razak.
The doctor was happy to give her pills but told her they wouldn’t work on their own and she’d have to speak to someone too. He arranged for a therapist called Tessa to call when Tuli was settled back at school but it was weeks before the first call came. The initial conversations were awkward and Ebele decided it was a waste of time, but Tessa was patient and said it was often like this to begin with, and when she called a third time, Ebele felt like a dam had burst in her head. She told Tessa about the way Michael touched her and how she couldn’t wash the stain of him off her body; how Brian stood over her at night and threatened her with his eyes and his rasping voice. The more she spoke, the more she realised it wasn’t just Brian or Michael who haunted her but something else too, way back in the far reaches of her memory. They talked about the car containing Papa and how it crashed into a wall and into her childhood at the same time.
‘They all disappear in the end. Why would anyone want to stay?’ she said in one of the calls.
‘Including you?’ Tessa said.
‘What?’
‘You left your mother. Disappeared from her life. Ran away.’
Ebele was stunned. No-one had ever said this before. She knew instinctively the Tessa woman shouldn’t have mis-spoken but it was said and couldn’t now be unsaid, and it was said without judgement, a statement of fact. She imagined the blank face of the prim middle-aged woman whose image she’d searched online taking notes on the other end of the phone. At exactly half past the hour, Tessa said,
‘We have to leave it there for now. Time’s up.’
When the call ended, Ebele sank to the floor and sobbed until she was wrung dry. With her back against the wall, she held her knees to her chest and rocked, calling out for her mother, wishing her world could be like it was before Brian, before Papa’s accident, before life happened. She stayed on the floor until her phone alarm beeped then searched in her handbag for her sunglasses and dragged herself to get ready to fetch Tuli from school.
Tessa called every Tuesday morning for the next seven weeks and, as each call ended, Ebele cried without expecting to. As the sessions progressed, Michael was shoved from the conversation, pushed away to the edges along with Jamal and Tuli’s father; even Brian became less significant, mentioned only in passing. On week seven, she sat and waited for the phone to ring, holding on to a photograph of her father from just before she was born. It was the only one she had. He stood proudly in the back garden of their little terraced house with his hand on her mother’s swollen belly, both of them partially dappled in the intermittent shade of a sprawling silver birch which stretched above them. She peered closely at the picture, focussing on her mother for the first time; she was smiling broadly, looking not at the camera but at Papa, her face lit up with speckles of sunshine. The final conversations with Tessa focussed on a different time, after Papa but before Brian, when it was just her and her mother, like it was with her and Tuli now. After the eighth and final session, she searched out her mother’s Facebook page and discovered the image of herself as a baby in her arms. She guessed it must’ve been Papa behind the camera. Eventually, going out became easier, to the pharmacy to pick up her prescriptions, and to the job centre to present them with the letter from Dr Razak, only to have them roll their eyes and shove it away in a drawer. The panic attacks started to ease again, occurring less often in streets she was used to. She managed to arrange her life to avoid crowded stations and shopping centres but the school playground was another matter; it was harder to avoid the perfectly made-up women who grouped together at the gates with their backs towards her. They were a daily reminder of demons which could resurface at any moment.
Early on Sunday morning, Ebele crept into Tuli’s bedroom and whispered into the darkness.
‘Stay in bed Tuli. Don’t get out until I’m back. I’m just going to get milk. I’ll be two minutes.’
Tuli rolled over and pulled the duvet over her head. Ebele slipped on her trainers and grabbed the door keys. It was cold outside and daylight struggled to break through leaden clouds. She tightened the belt of her coat around her pyjamas and headed to the alleyway to see for herself whether there was someone in the abandoned car.
The alleyway was unlit and all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, loud against the faint tread of her feet in mud and leaves.
She saw the broken window plugged with cardboard first. She peered in through the back windscreen: there was a bulk in a sleeping bag curled across the seats. She held her breath and walked to the front to get a better view. The sleeping bag, pulled up, covered the lower part of a face, a woollen hat, pulled down, covered the top. Only the middle was visible, obscured by a thick beard. A scar linked the woollen hat to the rim of the sleeping bag like a zip. Ebele covered her nose and mouth with a cupped hand and stepped backwards. She rushed towards the road and leaned on a wall near the entrance, trying to regulate her breathing in the way Tessa had taught her to over the phone. She looked around. Curtains were open in a house across the road and a dishevelled man stumbled from the front door, tugging an arching toddler in a buggy out behind him. She wanted to say something to the man but she couldn’t catch his eye. She wanted to tell him: He’s too close to our children, close enough to touch them, What are you going to do about it? How can you carry on as normal?
Back in the flat, Makrides’ number went straight to voicemail. She dialed again, still no answer. She glanced at the clock, it was almost eight now; a decent enough hour even for a Sunday. On the third attempt she left a message:
If you don’t get back to me soon I’m going to call the police. There is a man in the car on your land. He can see into my daughter’s bedroom. He could be a pervert or a murderer. What are you going to do about it?
Makrides didn’t call back.
She washed the breakfast dishes whilst planning what to say to the police or the council or whoever else might force the man away. Sunday meant the council offices were closed and if she phoned the police they would only say it wasn’t an emergency, as though a strange man hanging around the backs of houses where little girls lived wasn’t urgent! She couldn’t understand why Grace and Mandy and other neighbours weren’t alarmed as she was. He could be surveying the houses, checking when they were in or out, watching Tuli move around her bedroom. She picked up a soapy mug from the bowl and rinsed it under the running tap for far longer than necessary.
Tuli came out of her bedroom.
‘I’m bored, Mummy. Can I ask Grandy about playing in the garden?’
‘No!’ Ebele said abruptly.
‘Please, Mummy.’
‘Don’t whine, Tuli. We’re staying in, just you and me. It’s an inside playing day.’
‘But you went out this morning already. Without me. That’s not fair. I want to go outside too.’
Tuli sloped off down the landing with her arms hanging limp by her sides. Ebele ignored her. She wished her daughter didn’t have it within her small body to demonstrate defeat so clearly. She finished the washing up, dried her hands on her thighs, pulled her phone from her back pocket and dialled Makrides’ number again.
At midday, rain came hurtling down without warning. Ebele was relieved.
‘See Tuli, I knew it would be wet today.’ she said, peering into her daughter’s bedroom. Tuli didn’t look up; she was pulling at the knots of an old doll with a comb. ‘Be careful, Tuli. Do it gently like I do yours, you don’t want to hurt the dolly.’
Tuli put the doll down and grabbed a book from the floor. She looked up at her mother briefly,
‘Please go away, Mummy. I want to read my book, alone,’ she said.
‘That’s not very kind, Tuli.’
‘I said please.’
‘Okay but you need to say sorry too, for speaking in an angry voice to me.’
‘I learn angry from you, Mummy.’
Tuli bent her head low and stuck her thumb in her mouth. Ebele left the room and moved around the flat checking each window, assessing viewpoints and distances. From the front bay, she watched people dash across the park, trying to escape great slants of rain. She returned to Tuli’s room and peered through the window towards the space at the back of the houses. The haze of the day made it impossible to see anything so she stood with her back to the window and watched her daughter for a moment.
‘Tuli,’ she said, ‘put your book down for a minute, I need to talk to you.’ Tuli did as she was told without looking up. ‘Have you seen anything at the back of the house?’ Tuli shook her lowered head. ‘Well don’t look out of the window, okay?’ Ebele said as she pulled the curtains closed.
Tuli said, ‘It’s daytime, Mummy. Why are you making it all dark?’
‘So no-one can look in and disturb you,’ she said.
Tuli mumbled something about her story. Her voice was so quiet, Ebele couldn’t quite make out the words. She kissed the top of Tuli’s head.
‘You just read your story and keep away from the window.’
Ebele tried Makrides a fourth and fifth time. Straight to answerphone. She left another message, and another: Mr Makrides, please call me back. I’ll be phoning the police at five o’clock. She wiped the moist handset on her pyjama top and pushed it into her pocket.
In the middle of the afternoon, there was a loud knock on the door. She ignored it. It would only be Grace or Mandy complaining about the music, on loud to block out thoughts of the man in the car. She turned the volume up: lyrics about swimming pools full of liquor blasted out. The knock became persistent. Eventually, she paused the track and shouted down the stairs,
‘Go away!’
The booming response made her jump.
‘Mangaroo, what is this nonsense?’
It was Makrides; he’d let himself in with his landlord’s key. His sonorous voice irritated her before she’d edged open her door.
‘All these phone calls one after the other like some insane kind of person.’
Nikos Makrides pushed past her, up the stairs and into her flat. He looked her up and down disapprovingly as she crossed her arms over Bart Simpson. Toys, books and shoes dotted the narrow landing and damp towels were hung to dry across the bannister. The door to the front room was open, exposing the unmade sofa bed. A muddy anorak was slung on the balustrade. Makrides rolled his eyes.
‘You should clean up, Mangaroo, it’s not healthy to be living in such filth.’
She said, ‘Why don’t you fix the mouldy wall in the living room? That’s not healthy!’
Makrides changed the subject.
‘Why are you disturbing my one day of rest in the week, Mangaroo?’
She tried to explain about the man in the car but the presence of Makrides in her space unsettled her.
‘It’s your responsibility Mr Makrides. We can’t have someone like that so close to where we live.’
‘You call me twenty times for this nonsense? Pah, you are ridiculous. I will get rid of this thing in five minutes if I want to. Why do you have to panic in this stupid way? Don’t phone me again on a Sunday, Mangaroo. Do you hear me? I will get rid of this beggar in my own time.’
‘Do it now, Mr Makrides. It’s dangerous. I have a child. He might hurt her.’
‘Don’t you order me around. Remember who I am. Speak to me with respect.’
She felt like shoving the old man down the stairs but instead she held her breath, exhaled slowly and said,
‘The man shouldn’t be there. It is your duty to get rid of him.’
‘How do I even know there’s a man there? Only you have seen this creature. Everyone knows this is my land, why haven’t they told me?’
‘I don’t know why other people haven’t told you. Maybe because you never answer your phone; but he’s there. I saw him this morning, asleep in the car. An abandoned car which has, by the way, been an eyesore behind the gardens for weeks now. You should’ve removed it ages ago then we wouldn’t have this problem. I have to protect Tuli.’
‘Protect? You are overreacting, Mangaroo. These people are vermin like rats but they go as quickly as they appear; it is the nature of these gypsies, always moving around. You are making too much fuss; typical of you. I soon got rid of the beggar sleeping in the shop doorway. I will do the same here but you need to stop making up crazy things in your head, Mangaroo. Why should he hurt your child? What proof do you have?’
‘I’m not saying he will.’ She caught a glimpse of Tuli in the slit in the doorway behind Makrides. ‘Tuli, shut the door please,’ she shouted. Tuli did as she was told.
Makrides said, ‘I will go and see what he is doing and tell him to get off my land but don’t call me again and spoil the only peace I get in the whole week away from you.’
‘I don’t want him here. Not with Tuli being so young.’
‘Don’t be late tomorrow, Mangaroo. You have already ruined my weekend. Don’t spoil the new week too.’
‘It’s my day off tomorrow,’ Ebele said.
‘Good. I get a day off from you. Don’t be late on Tuesday and don’t call me again. I don’t want to hear your voice until then.’
