Holes for Faces (24 page)

“They kept me right up at the top.”

“Can we see?”

“Yes, let’s,” said Valerie, and Karen ran after him as well.

Jacqueline was opening her mouth to delay them when Cynthia said “You’ll be going up there now, won’t you? You can keep an eye on them.”

It was a rebuke for not helping enough with the children, or for interfering too much, or perhaps for Jacqueline’s growing nervousness. Anger at her childish fancies sent her stumping halfway up the topmost flight of stairs before she faltered. Clouds had gathered like a lifetime’s worth of dust above the skylight, and perhaps that was why the top floor seemed to darken as she climbed towards it, so that all the corners were even harder to distinguish—she could almost have thought the mass of dimness was solidifying. “Where were you, auntie?” Karen said.

“In there,” said Jacqueline and hurried to join them outside the nearest room.

It wasn’t as vast as she remembered, though certainly large enough to daunt a small child. The ceiling stooped to the front wall, squashing the window, from which the shadows of the poplars seemed to creep up the gloomy incline to acquire more substance under the roof at the back of the room. The grimy window smudged the premature twilight, which had very little to illuminate, since the room was bare of furniture and even of a carpet. “Did you have to sleep on the floor?” Valerie said. “Were you very bad?”

“Of course not,” Jacqueline declared. It felt as if her memories had been thrown out—as if she hadn’t experienced them—but she knew better. She’d lain on the cramped bed hemmed in by dour furniture and cut off from everyone else in the house by the dark that occupied the stairs. She would have prayed if that mightn’t have roused what she dreaded. If the babies were with the angels, mustn’t that imply they weren’t angels themselves? Being stillbirths needn’t mean they would keep still—Jacqueline never could when she was told. Suppose they were what caught you if you weren’t good? She’d felt as if she had been sent away from her family for bad behaviour. All too soon she’d heard noises that suggested tiny withered limbs were stirring, and glimpsed movements in the highest corners of the room.

She must have been hearing the poplars and seeing their shadows. As she turned away from the emptied bedroom she caught sight of the room opposite, which was full of items covered with dustsheets. Had she ever known what the sheets concealed? She’d imagined they hid some secret that children weren’t supposed to learn, but they’d also reminded her of enormous masses of cobweb. She could have thought the denizens of the webs were liable to crawl out of the dimness, and she was absurdly relieved to see Cynthia coming upstairs. “I’ll leave you to it,” Jacqueline said. “I’ll be waiting down below.”

It wasn’t only the top floor she wanted to leave behind. She’d remembered what she’d once done to her sister. The war had been over at last, and she’d been trusted to look after Cynthia while the adults planned the future. The sisters had only been allowed to play with their toys in the hall, where Jacqueline had done her best to distract the toddler from straying into any of the rooms they weren’t supposed to enter by themselves—in fact, every room. At last she’d grown impatient with her sister’s mischief, and in a wicked moment she’d wondered what would catch Cynthia if she tossed her high. As she’d thrown her sister into the air with all her strength she’d realised that she didn’t want to know, certainly not at Cynthia’s expense—as she’d seen dwarfish shrivelled figures darting out of every corner in the dark above the stairwell and scuttling down to seize their prize. They’d come head first, so that she’d seen their bald scalps wrinkled like walnuts before she glimpsed their hungry withered faces. Then Cynthia had fallen back into her arms, though Jacqueline had barely managed to keep hold of her. Squeezing her eyes shut, she’d hugged her sister until she’d felt able to risk seeing they were alone in the vault of the hall.

There was no use telling herself that she’d taken back her unforgivable wish. She might have injured the toddler even by catching her—she might have broken her frail neck. She ought to have known that, and perhaps she had. Being expected to behave badly had made her act that way, but she felt as if all the nightmares that were stored in the house had festered and gained strength over the years. When she reached the foot of the stairs at last she carried on out of the house.

The poplars stooped to greet her with a wordless murmur. A wind was rising under the sunless sky. It was gentle on her face—it seemed to promise tenderness she couldn’t recall having experienced, certainly not once Cynthia was born. Perhaps it could soothe away her memories, and she was raising her face to it when Brian appeared in the porch. “What are you doing, auntie?”

“Just being by myself.”

She thought that was pointed enough until he skipped out of the house. “Is it time now?”

Why couldn’t Cynthia have kept him with her? No doubt she thought it was Jacqueline’s turn. “Time for what?” Jacqueline couldn’t avoid asking.

“You said you’d give me a throw.”

She’d said she wouldn’t then, not that she would sometime. Just the same, perhaps she could. It might be a way of leaving the house behind and all it represented to her. It would prove she deserved to be trusted with him, as she ought not to have been trusted with little Cynthia. “Come on then,” she said.

As soon as she held out her arms he ran and leapt into them. “Careful,” she gasped, laughing as she recovered her balance. “Are you ready?” she said and threw the small body into the air.

She was surprised how light he was, or how much strength she had at her disposal. He came down giggling, and she caught him. “Again,” he cried.

“Just once more,” Jacqueline said. She threw him higher this time, and he giggled louder. Cynthia often said that children kept you young, and Jacqueline thought it was true after all. Brian fell into her arms and she hugged him. “Again,” he could hardly beg for giggling.

“Now what did I just say?” Nevertheless she threw him so high that her arms trembled with the effort, and the poplars nodded as if they were approving her accomplishment. She clutched at Brian as he came down with an impact that made her shoulders ache. “Higher,” he pleaded almost incoherently. “Higher.”

“This really is the last time, Brian.” She crouched as if the stooping poplars had pushed her down. Tensing her whole body, she reared up to fling him into the pendulous gloom with all her strength.

For a moment she thought only the wind was reaching for him as it bowed the trees and dislodged objects from the foliage—leaves that rustled, twigs that scraped and rattled. But the thin shapes weren’t falling, they were scurrying head first down the tree-trunks at a speed that seemed to leave time behind. Some of them had no shape they could have lived with, and some might never have had any skin. She saw their shrivelled eyes glimmer eagerly and their toothless mouths gape with an identical infantile hunger. Their combined weight bowed the lowest branches while they extended arms like withered sticks to snatch the child.

In that helpless instant Jacqueline was overwhelmed by a feeling she would never have admitted—a rush of childish glee, of utter irresponsibility. For a moment she was no longer a nurse, not even a retired one as old as some of her patients had been. She shouldn’t have put Brian at risk, but now he was beyond saving. Then he fell out of the dark beneath the poplars, in which there was no longer any sign of life, and she made a grab at him. The strength had left her arms, and he struck the hard earth with a thud that put her in mind of the fall of a lid.

“Brian?” she said and bent groaning to him. “Brian,” she repeated, apparently loud enough to be audible all the way up the house. She heard her old window rumble open, and Cynthia’s cry: “What have you done now?” She heard footsteps thunder down the stairs, and turned away from the small still body beneath the uninhabited trees as her sister dashed out of the porch. Jacqueline had just one thought, but surely it must make a difference. “Nothing caught him,” she said.

As Adam ran to the school gates he cried “Look what the teacher gave me, grandad.”

It was an Advent calendar, too large to fit in his satchel. Each of the little cardboard doors had the same jolly bearded countenance, with a bigger one for Christmas Day. “Well,” Summers said as the mid-December air turned his breath pale, “that’s a bit late.”

The ten-year-old’s small plump face flushed while his eyes grew wider and moister. “He gave me it because I did best in the class.”

“Then hurrah for you, Adam.” Summers would have ruffled the boy’s hair if it hadn’t been too clipped to respond. “Don’t scoff all the chocolates you should have had already,” he said as Adam poked at a door with an inky finger. “We don’t want your mum and dad telling me off for letting you spoil your dinner.”

“I was going to give you one,” the boy protested, shoving the calendar under one arm before he tramped across the road.

Summers kept a sigh to himself as he followed Adam into the park opposite Park Junior. He didn’t want to upset the boy, especially when he recalled how sensitive he’d been at Adam’s age. He caught up with him on the gravel path along an avenue of leafless trees, above which the sky resembled an untrodden snowfield. “How did you earn the prize, Adam?”

“The maths teacher says I should be called Add ’Em.”

“Ha,” said Summers. “Who’s the witty teacher?”

“Mr Smart,” Adam said and glanced back to see why Summers had fallen behind. “He’s come to our school because Miss Logan’s having a baby.”

Summers overtook him beside the playground, a rubbery expanse where swings hung inert above abandoned cans of lager. “What else can you tell me about him?”

“I expect he was teaching when you were at school.” With some pride in the observation Adam said “He must be as older than you than I’m old.”

“Does he always give his pupils calendars like that?”

“I don’t know. Shall I ask him?”

“No, don’t do that. Don’t mention me, that’s to say anything I said.”

“Didn’t you ever get one?”

Summers attempted to swallow a sour stale taste. “Not that I could tell you.”

Adam considered this while his expression grew more sympathetic, and then he said “You can have mine if you like.”

Summers was touched by the offer but disconcerted by the prospect. “I tell you what,” he said, “you give me that and I’ll buy you another.”

He was glad for Adam as soon as the boy handed him the calendar. Even if only the winter day made the cardboard feel cold and damp, the corners were scuffed and the colours looked faded. The jovial faces were almost as white as their beards, and the floppy red hats had turned so brown that they resembled mounds of earth perched on the heads. Summers thrust the calendar under his arm to avoid handling it further. “Let’s get you home,” he said.

Beyond a bowling green torn up by bicycles a Frugo Corner supermarket had replaced a small parade of shops that used to face the park. As the automatic doors let out the thin strains of a carol from the overhead loudspeakers, Summers wondered if it was too late for Advent calendars to be on sale. He couldn’t bring the date to mind, and trying to add up the spent days of December made his head feel raw. But there were calendars beside the tills, and Adam chose one swarming with creatures from outer space, though Summers was unclear what this had to do with Christmas.

His old house was half a mile away across the suburb. Along the wide quiet streets the trees looked frozen to the sky. He saw Adam to the antique door that Paul and Tina had installed within their stained-glass wrought-iron porch. “Will you be all right now?”

The boy gave the elderly formula an old-fashioned look. “I always am,” he reminded Summers and slipped his key into the lock.

The streets narrowed as Summers made his way home. The houses grew shabbier and their doorbells multiplied, while the gardens were occupied by seedy cars and parts of cars. Each floor of the concrete block where he lived was six apartments long, with a view of an identical block. Once Elaine left him he’d found the house too large, and might have given it to his son even if Paul hadn’t moved in with a partner.

The apartment was something like halfway along the middle balcony, two doors distant from the only other number with a tail, but Summers knew it by the green door between the red pair. He marched down the hall to the kitchen, where he stopped short of the bin. If the sweets in the calendar weren’t past their edible date, why shouldn’t he finish them off?

He stood it on the mantelpiece in the main room, beneath Christmas cards pinned to the nondescript wallpaper. As he searched for the first cardboard door he heard an object shift within the calendar, a sound emphasised by the silence of the hi-fi and the television and the empty suite that faced them. At last he located the door in the midst of the haphazard dates and pried it open with a fingernail. The dark chocolate behind the door was shaped like the number. “One up for me,” he declared, biting it in half.

The sweet wasn’t stale after all. He levered the second door open as soon as he found it, remarking “Two’s not for you” as he put the number in his mouth. How many did he mean to see off? He ought to heed the warning he’d given Adam about dinner. “Three’s a crowd,” he commented once he managed to locate the number. That had certainly felt like the case when, having decided that Paul was old enough for her to own up, Elaine had told Summers about the other man. The taste in his mouth was growing bitter yet sickly as well, and any more of it might put him off his dinner. Perhaps it already had, but since taking early retirement he’d gained weight that he could do with losing. There was no point in eating much when he was by himself.