Imperfect Strangers (5 page)

*  *  *

The clock sounds loud in my ears. I feel the blistering heat before noticing the scorching smell. My shins are burning. Hot, hot, is all I can think as I step back holding the smoking trousers away from my skin.

The open fire was too much
like hard work. Bringing in the coal, arranging the kindling, cleaning the grate, tending the flue. Birds blocked the chimney and the room filled with smoke. Too much bother. Electric is instant. It’s easy. It doesn’t scratch at my memory. A sheet of charred plywood stops the cold from coming in. I firm the silver-tape that holds the wooden sheet in place, before ripping open the envelope and removing a card. A fiver floats to the floor, new looking, fresh and crisp, like it’s been ironed. I look at it a moment before carefully folding it (delighting in the placing of sharp creases on such perfection) and slide it into my wallet.

The card has an image of a man in a flat cap. He’s s
itting on a basket of woven willow, fishing from the bank of a river. Translucent mist skims the water and captures a pale yellow sunrise that filters through a tangle of naked branches on the opposite bank. A heron stands on a half submerged log someway up stream. The black water looks cool, verging on cold, maybe. Crisp. That’s the word. Crisp: a delightful coolness that tingles the skin. It looks like the beginning of a hot day, the warmth of which will be threaded with a rippling chill from the water. The picture is full of promise. The man, not as old as his clothing suggests, will relax around eleven o’clock, take off his jacket and have a sandwich, maybe a bottle of beer too. In a few years time, perhaps five or six, maybe as little as three, the man’s son will go on these fishing trips. They will share the sandwiches and talk about the best place to bait the water. The man will have his beer and the boy will have a bottle of lemonade. At the end of the day they will laugh, oh how they will laugh, about how the heron caught more fish than they did. When they pack away their rods, and toss the unused maggots to the water, they will talk about next time and promise to do better.

The man will die tho
ugh.

He will die before
Keith is old enough to even remember him. The cap, and the fishing reel, and the other small items from the willow basket will stay in the sideboard-coffin. Other things belonging to him are in there too, things the boy wanted to look at, to hold and ask questions about. But he was not allowed.

She wouldn’t let him.

Private. They’re private things. You don’t touch them. Y’dont-tchum, you hear
?

The man and his belongings were laid to rest. He was burned and scattered
by a stone that named him John, a much-loved husband, but no mention of father, and his belongings were entombed in a sideboard coffin.

I can look now, though.
And I do, every birthday. I empty the drawers and rifle through the cupboards, taking out every last item. I let the ritual last for hours, taking one thing at a time, smelling the trace of him, imagining him using things, before putting them back exactly as I found them.

Y’don’t-tchum, y’hear
?
Stuff in there is private
.
Y’don’t-tchum.
The voice of her everlasting voice, over and over, until it becomes not words to my ears but an irritating, humming, string of a noise.

I will touch these things, all of them. You can’t stop me.

That treat is for later, though. I’ll get some sleep first.

There are words on the front of the card –
Happy Birthday Nephew –
framed by the black tangle of branches. The gold lettering is smoother than the printed image, raised from the surface, as if bright things have the right of prominence.

“From
Aunt Madge. Never forgets.”

Yes she did! She forgot our eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth birthdays.

No, she didn’t. I found those cards in mother’s wardrobe. She sneaked them away and hid them beneath her clothes. She told you that even Aunt Madge doesn’t love you any more. She told you that bad boys don’t deserve birthdays. But Aunt Madge did send the cards. I found them. We’ll look at them later if you like. One has a kangaroo on the stamp
.

Mrs
Seaton looks up and flicks her tail.

I stand the card on the mantle and then select a relatively clean plate from the coffee table. When I head for the kitchen, Mrs Seaton glides to her feet and trots after me, weaving between my legs, purring, her tail erect. I look down and can’t help but smile as the words enter my mind.

“Sally spoke to me today. Smiled too. She asked if I like her. That’s a start isn’t it? People don’t ask such things of people that they don’t like do they?”

CHAPTER
6

Kerry glances at each of the wedding photographs with the sort of disdain a vegetarian would show a hamburger, before quickly passing each in turn to Philippa. Philippa peruses slightly longer than Kerry, but digests only the tastiest morsels, before handing them to Colleen, who takes her time, gorging on every microscopic detail of each and every image.

“Who’s this then?”
Colleen asks, her eyes flicking to me before delving into the depths of the image. And, “whose is the baby? What’s her name? How old is she? Isn’t she just adorable? How much did she weigh? Is that your granddad? Bet he was a handsome man in his day,” and so on, and so on, each picture lavished with abundant attention. “Who’s the youngest bridesmaid?”

“My niece, Poppy.”

“Never! Well hasn’t she grown up?”

“I’ll say. Eleven going on twenty and sharp as a sock full of pins.”

“For the love of fashion, will you look at them sleeves,” Philippa cries, shoving under Kerry’s nose the photograph that Kerry only just handed to her.

“Disgusting!” Kerry offers without so much as a glance.

“Looks like an explosion of white lace. I’d wear sommat classy me, silky and short and slinky.” Philippa sashays her hips by way of an illustration as she takes the last photograph from Kerry. With a theatrical double take, she punches me on the shoulder. “Oy! Where’s the one with him groping the bridesmaid?”

The punch was rather too hard to be considered playful, especially in my delicate condition. I throw her a snappish stare. “In pieces on my bedroom carpet.”

“He’ll have moved back in by next week,” Kerry states, before taking a gulp of coffee, savouring the flavour a moment before swallowing. Her eyes lock on mine as if inviting a negative response.

I’m not even going to give Kerry the satisfaction of a reply. Silently
, I gather up the photographs and slip them into the wallet. Inevitably, the words do spill out. “He won’t. He’s had his last chance.”

Kerry raises her brow and look
s at the others, seemingly intimating the phrase,
anyone like to bet on it?

Amid this moment of silence, the telephone on my desk rings. As any
one of us in the office would, I glare at the telephone a moment before glancing at the clock, which shows the time of three minutes to nine: a direct call, then, not an internal one. Reception would not put a call through at this time. Nine o’clock I get paid from, and at nine o’clock, I decide, I will answer the phone. Not a minute sooner. No longer will I be a pushover, freely giving my time away, freely giving myself away. No longer will I be – how did Kerry so eloquently put it? –
Shite-wipe.
The phone continues to ring. My lips form a pout as if of their own accord, and I just know my scowl is child-like and petulant.

Perhaps seizing the opportunity for a venomous exchange, Kerry picks up the phone. “No.
She’s not here.” Her features sharpen, forming the expression for which she has become known. It’s a look that from ten paces away can cause any man to blanch and cower into a corner.

I can guess who it is, and
, thinking he deserves to be answered by Kerry, I let her carry on. Meanwhile, I place the photograph wallet in the second drawer and slam it shut. “Is that Steve?” I eventually snap.

When Kerry nods I snatch the phone from her. I let him carry on a moment, though, let him carry on thinking that he’s talking to Kerry - “
I know she’s there,
”
he says. “
Put her on. Don’t ignore me! Put her on you – just... Listen, I just want to talk to her
”
Screwing my lips, I look at Kerry who is practically squaring-up, looking ready to fight, as if Steve were about to climb from the phone and face her.

“Tell him to piss off,” Kerry says, loud
enough for Steve to have heard.

Colleen
and Philippa glance at the clock and shuffle to their respective desks.

“
Is that you Sally? You on the line? Listen we’ve gorra talk. Worrif
,” he says, giving his voice the air of a little-boy-lost.
“
Worrif I come round tonight, eh? I could bring a bottle, yeh?
”

I leave him
hanging a moment, enjoying the hesitant note in his tone. No doubt he thinks he might possibly have talked baby to a hard-nose like Kerry.

Talk-baby
! That’s one of Steve’s bedroom expressions. Recollecting this increases the anger I already feel. Not that I hate the phrase, just that – he’s just so damn, sucking, glued in my brain, and I want him out.

“NO!” I shout. “I’ve already got a case thanks
: an almost full case of Barolo. Catch that,
almost
full. Anyway, I said all I ever want to say to you last night. The answer’s no. No chance. Not in this life time.”

I bang the phone down, screaming the last words as the receiver crashes
home. The phone rings again and I pick it up, lift it an inch and then drop it back on the cradle.

“Hmmm, impressive.” Kerry, turns swiftly, looking pleased, and marches to her desk. When she sits
, I see that her face is lit with a victorious grin. Of course it is. I’m almost tempted to get back with Steve just to spite her.

CHAPTER
7

Had father not died, things might have been different.

I like to caress his flat
cap, but I’d never put it on. That wouldn’t be right. Disrespectful. I handle his fishing-reel, though, and salivate over his harmonica. All these things give me pleasure, but it’s the photographs I like best of all.

Y’don’t-t’chum, y’
hear
?

“Shut up,” I tell her
.

Even mother looks as though she was happy back then. I don’t remember him, the man in the photographs, my father. He almost always wears the flat cap. When pictured with her, he usually has one arm around her wa
ist. On this one, she’s gripping his fingers loosely in hers. In his other arm, lovingly cradled, is me as a baby. I wouldn’t have known but it says so on the back:
Keith, 10 months
. That would make it August.

In this photograph they’re standing in almost the same position. My father looks much older, but I do not. Months at the most have pas
sed. The trees in the background are bare. He died mid January, I know that much, because Mrs Sewell told me. Perhaps this was the Autumn before he died. Maybe not. Maybe it is the Autumn before that, over a year before he died.

On the next photograph my father
is sitting on a willow basket, on the bank of a river, frail looking, huddled against the cold in a heavy looking coat. There are daffodils, so it must have been the following spring. A member of the fishing club must have taken the picture. He never missed a match, so said Mrs Sewell. She also told me that, when it came to fishing, my father and her husband had a friendly rivalry. Her thoughts drifted elsewhere, but a moment later her face lit up and she chuckled. “He was a funny man your dad,” she’d said. “Ooh, he did use to make me laugh.”

Everything I know about my father came from the mouth of Mrs
Sewell. Mother never mentioned much more than his name. It was some years after his death, so Mrs Sewell tells, that my mother went a little withdrawn.

I remember
her as being rather more than a little withdrawn. I never told anyone about the worst of it. And what goes on behind closed doors can only be guessed at by even the closest of neighbours, so I suppose she would have seen it as such.

She got worse when I brought trouble home, as she used to call it.

You always was a bad un
, she’d say.

But she never said it like that. When she got angry her words became a connected string of sound. Word snakes, I call them – venomous word snakes.

Yawlas-worrabadun
.

At first she was just a little odd. Perhaps withdrawn
would
have described her in the early days. She wouldn’t cook.

She did cook.

Did she?

Yes. Just after he died she used to cook. She cooked for herself, and for us, and for
Daddy. She cooked lots of food. Nice food. Too much food. Delicious dinners and stodgy puddings thick with warm custard. She would set three places, but say, we may as well eat, looks like your daddy’s going to be late again. But Daddy was already dead. After weeks of scraping food into the bin she stopped cooking altogether.

So she wasn’t nasty in the beginning?

No. Sometimes she was nice to us. She gave cuddles, but sometimes a hard slap across the face.

If it w
eren’t for you, I would forget all of these memories.

That’s why you keep me here, isn’t it?

I often wish you’d just disappear. Perhaps it would be better if I remembered nothing. She rarely shopped. I remember that. There was precious little to cook even if she’d had the inclina
tion. You became skin and bone.

We survived because of Mrs
Sewell
.

A jam butty here
, a piece of pie there.

Little Keith’s memories
: they’re like shadows within shadows, making the darkness all the darker just for being there. Little Keith’s memories mostly remind me of things I would rather forget. Had little Keith died, people would have known what she was like.

People did know.
When I went to school, she would leave the house a few moments after me. She would watch me walk to school, hiding around street corners, crouching behind hedges. She thought I didn’t know that she was there. I knew though. Other people did too, they would watch her sneaking along, shaking their heads. I’d look out of the corner of my eye and see her, the bun on her head bobbing along the top of a privet hedge like a fat wingless bird. I knew she followed me, but I never told her.

Other mums held their child by the hand, as if the child was a delicate ornament. Our mother followed me with suspicion on her mind
.
A man called Elvis sang on the radio about it. He sang, we can’t go on together with suspicious minds. I agreed with him.

She was suspicious right up to the end. When I came home from work, while I cleaned the
poo from her bed, she would question me.

Who are you talking to about me
? She would screech, though she said it more like,
Whoar-y’talkin-tabartme
? Word-snake. Little Keith knows more of them, lots of word-snakes, much more than I myself would dare to recall. The very idea of them makes me shudder; they squirm like eels through my thoughts.

Wat’re-yupta
?
Whydyershitinmibed?

What happened when you got to school?

When I got to school, she would stand at the other side of the railings, looking into the yard, face pressed between the bars, a hand gripping the rails on either side, her venomous word-snakes lashing abuse at any who dared to glance at her.

Wotyur-lukinat?

That’s when the bullying began
.

Yes. But keep that memory in the dark, please.

Why didn’t you die instead of my John, she’d say
.
Mymanomymanomymano, why’d he have togoandieo? And then she’d cry and cry for ages and ages, rocking back and forth in a chair by the fire.

Sometimes
I wish little Keith would just go away. I know he’s just an element of me, my younger voice constantly rattling around in my head, reminding me of things I’d rather forget. Go away, I think, and take our horrid memories with you.

I need to move on.

I’m going to ask Sally today. It’ll be like a birthday present. There’s no time like the present. It’s settled. I’m going to ask Sally this evening.