Kate and Emma (35 page)

On the train going down to London, I tried to read, suspended in a maddening vacuum of time between knowing what I had to do and being able to do it, but the shadowy chamber behind my eyes, where pictures only materialize clearly when you are not looking for them, was full of shapes and nightmare visions. Cold watery afternoon deepened into dusk and then to darkness on the frozen mud and blackthorn of the midland fields, and by the time I got to London, I knew with a kind of sick despair that I was too late.

Too late for what? Whatever Kate had done, she had done weeks ago, before I last saw her. It had been too late for too long.

It was after nine when I got to Johnny’s house. Nancy opened the door in a dressing-gown, and her usual doorstep smile dropped when she saw me.

‘What’s the matter, Emma?’

‘Where’s your father?’

‘In bed. He’s tired.’

‘Please get him down.’

‘He said not to—’

‘Get him down, Nancy!’

My hair was still untidy from Yorkshire, strands of it hanging down by my ear like a demented vagrant’s. She took two quick steps backwards and then turned and ran up the stairs.

Johnny in a dressing-gown. Heavy wool, tied low with a cord where men think their waists are, a thick brown pillar looking down at me from the top of the stairs.

‘It’s Kate,’ I said. ‘Please help me. I have to go to her. I think something terrible has happened.’

‘I thought you were in Yorkshire.’ He came down the stairs with animal feet in huge warm slippers.

‘I should be. I had to come back. Sammy isn’t up there with Molly. I don’t know where he is. Johnny, I—I—’ He came down the last step and put his hands on my arms, and gripped them when he felt that I was shaking.

‘I have a terrible feeling she’s killed the child.’

Driving to Kate’s house in the little blunt blue car, we hardly spoke. Johnny had his jaw set square as if he were riding in a steeplechase. I sat in a ball, holding myself with my arms, for the tension of the journey had left me all bones, freezing cold. I wasn’t shivering any more. Johnny had given me a shot of brandy and told me, quite harshly, to get a grip on myself and pin up my hair, or he would go to Kate’s without me.

‘What shall we say?’ I asked him, as we came up the hill from the housing estate and saw the humped silhouette of the lightless house, racing with the moon away from the shredded clouds.

‘We’ll ask her where the child is. See what she says. Don’t rush it, Emma. We may have to talk to her all night before we find the truth.’

‘What about Nancy?’

‘She’s all right. I often get called out at night.’

‘Here.’ We stopped by the rotted hedge. Most of the snow was gone from the trampled waste of garden, but it was white with frost, like concrete. The house was dark, but we must wake Kate. We couldn’t wait till morning. I beat on the door with my usual three flat-handed bangs. ‘Kate!’ I shouted. ‘It’s Emma-let me in!’ It was like beating on a tomb.

‘They’ve gone,’ Johnny said. ‘We’ll look for her in the morning.’

Almost I went with him, but I had to say, ‘Let’s try a window.’

The window of the big room was too high to reach because of the slope of the ground, but we went round to the stone trench under the wide front steps where the electric meter was, and knocked on the window of the underground room where Kate sleeps.

There were no curtains. Johnny shone his torch into the room, and I thought she would wake in a panic at the beam of light. The bed was empty. Unmade, filthy, the pillow on the floor without a cover, clothes and wads of paper thrown about, a
grotesque long-legged doll hanging from a hook in the wall like a suicide, but the room was empty.

‘She’s gone.’

‘Where to? She had nowhere to go. No one to go to. Smiler perhaps - he might know. Her friend, Mr Sullivan. He told me where he lived.’ As we went back round the side of the house, we heard a scratching and whimpering like an animal on the other side of the back door, which was Kate’s front door.

‘The dog,’ I said, ‘she’s left the dog behind.’ With visions of a starving skeleton hurling itself on me, all rabid fangs, I called, ‘Bruce? Here, Bruce boy!’

The voice of Emily answered me, an incoherent babble of words with only a few consonants shared between them.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Gaw a picya.’

‘Pictures?’

‘Yiss.’ She can say that all right.

‘Open the door, Emily. We’ll have to go in and wait for her,’ I said to Johnny, who stood quietly behind me, letting me take over. ‘How could she leave those tiny girls alone? Oh, how could she?’

‘You’d be surprised how many—’ he began, but I told him not to be so damned imperturbable, and he shut up.

There were some scuffling sounds from the other side of the door, as if Emily was jumping up and down. ‘Can’t you reach the handle?’

‘Naoo,’ she whined. She can say that too.

‘Get a chair,’ I said. ‘Get a box. Get something to stand on.’

She began to babble again in vowels, and the babble went away down the passage and didn’t come back, although I beat on the door and called again and again.

‘Smiler has the upstairs flat,’ I said. ‘Kate told me they were coming back when it’s warmer, so they must have the key to the front door. Let’s go and get it.’

I had started away, but he said, ‘I’ll stay here in case Kate comes home.’ He never gets excited. He never dashes off somewhere without thinking. It slows down the tempo, but it avoids mistakes.

Murray Road, Smiler had said. My wife’s sister has a big house with two rooms over the garage, so we’ve been lucky. I found it without difficulty. The other garages were single story, with pointed roofs. There was plenty of light here and everyone was awake, including all the children. They were scuttling about in droves, like clockwork toys, and there were enough grown-ups stamping about to man a regiment. But no Smiler.

‘He’s not well,’ I was told by a young man in a vest and very tight black trousers.

‘Bronchitis,’ said an older man, stepping over and round the children to look at me, and hacked out a cough or two to illustrate.

‘What is it, Ned? What’s all the noise?’ A woman in a dressing-gown and green quilted slippers, large but firm, as if she still had her corsets on, came into the hall with her eyebrows at the ready, although there had been plenty of noise before I came in, and I wasn’t making any.

‘Wants to see Smiler? Well, she can’t.’ She gave an akimbo impression without actually having her hands on her hips.

‘I’m a friend of Kate’s,’ I said, and her face relaxed as if that had been corseted too, and was now unhooked.

‘Poor Kate. Really let herself go, that girl has. It’s tragic,’ she said.

‘We’ve been out together, and Kate’s locked out. She’s lost her key. Could I borrow yours and go in from upstairs?’

‘Why didn’t she come herself?’ The corset began to go on again.

‘She’s waiting with the children.’ Lying is easy, to self-important women who are listening to themselves.

‘I daresay.’

‘Take her up to Smiler,’ said the young man in the desperately tight trousers. ‘Check her out.’

I was taken upstairs, with an escort of children on all fours, to where Smiler lay wheezing in a vast bed that filled a small room.

‘Hullo, Miss Emma,’ he said, to everyone’s relief. They didn’t want to be suspicious. It was their duty. They wanted to help. They wanted to be nice to me.

Too nice. Mrs Sullivan said she would get dressed and come with me. It’s a tricky lock.’

‘No, please. I couldn’t bother you.’

‘But I insist.’

‘I’ll manage.’ I rush from York in torment, letting nothing stand in my way, and then this, in a flowered rayon dressing-gown and quilted slippers.

A girl with a lot of hanging hair and a hanging lower lip to match had come to a doorway with a television set roaring applause behind her to watch me, treading over the sides of her shoes.

‘I’m good with keys,’ I said desperately.

‘I’ll bet.’ It didn’t mean anything, but the girl made it sound as if it did.

‘I’m going to get dressed.’

‘I can’t wait. It’s too cold for Kate and the children.’

‘As you wish then.’ She was a woman who took defeat ill. I was turning to go, when she said, ‘Linda can go with you.’

Ruin. But the girl in the turned-over shoes said, ‘Me go out in that cold? What do you think I am?’ So I got away alone with the key.

When I ran down the back stairs of Kate’s house and let Johnny in, his face was bright red from cold, and his ears on fire. He stood in the big room, stamping his feet and beating his gloved hands. From the filthy, hair-smothered chair in the corner, the sleek dog matched eyes with him, and decided to thump its tail.

Susannah was lying in the baby’s cot, and Emily was staggering about rather drunkenly in a pair of Sammy’s shorts and a jersey like a sieve, with the sleeves flapping down over her hands. I picked her up and found her smelly. The room smelled worse than the last time I was there.

‘This is where Kate lives,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it awful?’

I thought he would be professionally shocked, but he was professionally unshocked. ‘I’ve seen worse,’ he said.

Susannah was sleeping heavily, and she didn’t wake when Johnny turned her over to see her face. Emily did not seem properly awake. She yawned continually, and when I was holding
her, she put her tangled yellow curls against my shoulder and dozed off, even while I was walking about. I found a large aspirin bottle on the mantelpiece, half-full.

‘Could be for Kate,’ Johnny said.

‘Or to keep the children sleeping while she goes out. Mum give you these?’ I rattled the bottle in front of Emily’s closed eyes and she grunted and nestled into me like a nursing puppy.

‘Where’s Sammy?’ I asked her loudly.

‘Where’s Sammy?’ I shook her, and then put her on the floor so that she had to stay awake or fall over. I crouched in front of her, and she put her hand on my knee to steady herself.

‘Where’s Sammy?’

‘Gone.’ She rocked backwards, and I clutched her.

‘Yes. He’s gone away. Where did he go?’

‘Ow air.’

‘Where?’

‘Ow air.’ She jabbed a fat finger towards the window, squaring her bottom lip to yell with exasperation at the same stupid question. ‘In a garn.’

‘We’d better get the police,’ Johnny said quietly.

‘Let’s look by ourselves first.’

I put Emily on the bed and Johnny and I went into the garden. We didn’t need the torch. The moon was clear of the clouds now, making deep shadows. The piles of refuse and old iron were etched in black and white. Here and there a tin-can, not yet rusted, shone like a cat’s eye. For weeks the ground had been too hard for digging. We began to look among the frozen junk, picking it over with aching fingers, turning over a rusted water tank, shining the torch into a scrambled pile of old bicycle wheels with spokes sticking out like broken umbrellas.

I knew what I was looking for, and yet I didn’t know. I am nearly twenty-four and I have never seen a dead body. Imagination terrified me and held me back behind Johnny as he calmly searched, a large, slow, matter-of-fact figure in the moonlight. If he saw it first, the pile of rags, rotting flesh, bones - whatever it would look like, I wouldn’t be so afraid of it.

Sammy dead…. Johnny was working methodically down the slope missing nothing. I made myself think of Sammy alive, with
the round black eyes and pointed shaggy head, and suddenly I could step in front of Johnny over a little cracked concrete basin full of sodden filth, where someone had once made an ornamental pool, down to where the chicken house sagged against the iron fence. The door was bolted, dropped on the hinges. I pulled back the bolt, lifted, and tugged it open. I didn’t call to Johnny, but as I went inside, he was behind me with the torch.

I didn’t think Sammy was dead, not even at first when I saw him lying on the floor, with the piece of grey blanket over his legs, stiff as canvas.

He was asleep, curled up on the stinking mattress of old chicken dirt and his own filth, one hand under the sharp bone of his cheek, his hair a caked and sticky mass, his delicate eyebrows raised in sleep as if his dreams surprised him.

A rope was tied round his waist with a knot too tight for his fingers to undo. It was fastened to the wall, long enough to give him a few yards of movement, not to reach the door. There was no window. On the floor were a dented pan, and an empty jam-jar and a darkened lump of bread so hard that he had been sucking on it before he dropped it in the dirt.

Johnny stood very still, bent over under the sloping roof, with his torch shining on the sleeping boy. ‘Bear witness to this,’ he said to me. ‘Bear witness to what you see.’

He had to use his knife to get the rope loose. When he cut it, and pulled it free from underneath the child, Sammy woke and cried, and I saw as he turned him over that a small stain had spread through the many layers of clothes from a sore where the rope had rubbed him.

His gnome face was like a skull, the eyes sunk into the shadows of the sockets, his lips drawn back in a death’s-head grin when he tried to smile.

‘Ullo Emmy,’ he said, as I picked him up.

‘Why isn’t he dead?’

Johnny didn’t tell me about the other children he had known who had lived for more than three weeks tied up in a chicken shed. He didn’t tell me anything.

I wouldn’t let him carry Sammy back to the house. He was so light, only a bundle of clothes. I clutched him tightly to me. I
would never get the stink and filth of him off my coat, my hair, my skin, and I didn’t want to.

We put him on Kate’s sour, tumbled bed and covered him with all the blankets we could find, and I stayed with him, feeding him warm milk with a spoon while Johnny went to get a doctor. There was no time to think about Kate and what I would say to her if she came home now. When Johnny came back with the doctor, there was no time to think what we would say if she came blinking in from the dark passage and said: What’s going on? We would probably push her out of the way and get on with what had to be done.

The doctor did not spend long looking at Sammy. He stood up and nodded at Johnny. ‘Get him out of here.’