Scissors, Paper, Stone (32 page)

He felt hopeless then, as if he were about to cry because he had lost all hope of holding it close to him. But he found he could not cry, even though he felt the tears welling up inside. He could hear the sound of his sadness and it was a jangling minor chord, like a string-tuning crescendo of orchestral dissonance.

But then the black shape suddenly re-emerged and he was so joyful it was hard to remember what the sadness felt like and he thought how strange it was to be experiencing this battering of emotion, see-sawing from one extreme to the next when he usually exerted such control over what he felt. The black shape came closer and closer to him, transforming from a nebulous coalescence of dots into a more solid form with four legs and a wagging tail and two triangular ears like envelope flaps and all at once he knew that it was his dog Sooty. It was Sooty!

The relief of certain knowledge was intense and it swept over him so that he found he could move his arms and he could clasp the dog to his chest and bury his head in its fur, that smelled of cow parsley and river water dried by the sun.

And then his mother was calling him in for tea and he could hear her voice, shrill and tuneless, but not the formation of her words. The dog was bounding off in front of him across the fields, its paws cantering across muddy divots, its pink tongue lolling as it panted, the coat of its for glistening in the early evening light. He was running after the dog, attempting to catch up with Sooty’s receding black shape, and he realised that he no longer felt the unadulterated happiness that had swept over him seconds before. His chest was constricting, like a pool of molten metal that had cooled too rapidly. The crushing weight of it was becoming unbearable as it pushed down on him.

His legs were slowing down even though he was willing them to keep running, but they weren’t responding to his brain. He felt a dreadful panic then. He wanted to stop moving altogether, to go back into the gentle nothingness of his daily normality, but his legs wouldn’t let him. Instead he was trudging forward with painful slowness and when he looked down he saw his Wellington boots were filled with rocks and heavy mud that spilled out with each step he took and yet never emptied no matter how far he walked.

After several hours, he seemed to get to where he was meant to be, which was a doorway but with no house around it: a simple frame opening into blankness. His mother was still calling him. He pushed the door open and he saw her facing him, a blue-striped apron tied neatly around her waist. Her hands were behind her back. Her blonde hair was set in careful curls. Her face was expertly made-up and her plump red lips were stretched in an awful smile, her eyes bulging as they always did when she was angry. She was much, much taller than him and he felt intimidated by her size. He tried to cower down, to make himself as small as possible, as invisible as he could, but her face was contorted with string-veined rage and he knew there was no escape.

‘Your bloody dog has traipsed dirt all over my clean kitchen floor,’ she started saying, and she was speaking softly, which was always a bad sign, softly but with an undercurrent of unnatural brightness. He could see the pulse at the corner of her head throbbing, beating out a code of disappointment.

She took two steps towards him, two giant steps that covered the whole of the kitchen floor, and then he saw why her hands had been concealed behind her back when he walked in, because she was holding a heavy-bottomed saucepan in one of them, her fingers gripping the handle so tightly that her fingernails had turned white-pink. Quickly, too quickly for him to raise his arms to protect himself, she brought the saucepan down, hitting him across one side of his head with a clattering thud that sent him crumpled to the ground. The pain was so blinding, so acute, that he wanted to scream but he found that no sound came.

His mother was shouting at him but he could no longer see her face, so that his entire sensory perception was taken up with the sound of her words. ‘You filthy little bastard,’ she screamed. ‘How dare you. I cook and I clean and I do it all and for what? For a stupid, ungrateful boy like you to ruin it all.’

She hit him again with the saucepan but this time it seemed almost perfunctory, as if the strength had gone out of her, as if the thrill of it had lessened. He felt the coolness of the saucepan’s rim against his hairline and then he fell back into a sort of wakeful numbness and he went very, very still for what seemed like hours, during which his mind was blank. After a while, he heard his mother walking away, her step incongruously dainty against the floor tiles.

He opened his eyes and saw nothing and he realised he was safe again and cocooned by the strange fluid of incomprehension. A few seconds later, the blackness appeared from the corner of his eyes, looping in and out of his vision like the tantalising twirl of a gymnast’s ribbon.

He did not know where he was or what he was doing or how long he had been here. He simply knew that he had to stretch out and get hold of that black shape. He had to touch it, to grasp it, to keep it next to him. He tried to grab its edges but they dissolved in front of him and re-appeared somewhere else. His arms would not move. He could not get at it. The black shape kept swooping and slipping out of his reach.

He felt like crying.

Janet

Janet had been preparing the dinner for days. She would be queuing in the post office to buy airmail stamps and the thought of what kind of napkins to buy would rise, unbidden, to the surface of her mind. Or she would be doing her usual thirty lengths in the local pool only to find that she had lost count because she was thinking about whether serving cold soup as a starter would be too pedestrian.

Almost as soon as she had issued that impromptu invitation to Charlotte on the pavement outside Anne’s house, she had felt herself engulfed by a wave of pleasure, tinged with incipient panic. Janet hadn’t meant to ask Charlotte over and she certainly hadn’t expected a positive response, assuming, as she tended to do, that bright young people probably had far better things to do than charitably keep her company.

But Charlotte had looked so upset, so bereft standing there on her own, struggling to get the key into the lock of her car door, that Janet couldn’t help herself. She had seemed so alone, like a child fumbling with the edges of the adult world, trying to pin down its confusions and contradictions, and something plucked at Janet deep inside so that, before she knew it, she had asked Charlotte to dinner and Charlotte had accepted. And not just Charlotte, but Gabriel too, a man whom she had never met and whose presence was bound to make her a nervous wreck, given how unaccustomed she had become to male company in the eight years since Nigel’s death from a cruelly aggressive form of colon cancer.

Janet and Nigel had never had children. They had tried, of course, but there was some problem and, curiously, neither of them had felt the need to pursue it. If it happened now, Janet thought, they probably would have gone through endless rounds of futile IVF treatment, but in those days, there hadn’t been the option. She had grieved for her lack of children but, at the same time, Janet was of the belief that if things weren’t meant to happen then it was best not to tamper too much with the natural imperative. They had talked about adoption briefly but she could tell that Nigel, a kind, mild-mannered man in all other matters, was horrified at the thought of having to bring up someone else’s child. And, in the end, she came to the conclusion that their life together was enough: it was a gentle, contented existence of mutual respect and affection, underpinned by a deep, deep love that neither of them ever felt the need to vocalise.

When he died, Janet had been shocked by her reaction, by how viscerally she felt his loss. She did not leave the house for two weeks. She could not sleep but spent the nights pacing through the corridors, as if perpetual movement could banish the unutterable emptiness and chase her grief away. She did not wash or get dressed and she picked at food that gradually spoilt and went stale and had to be thrown away and then, when there was nothing left to eat, she drank her way through the spirit bottle dregs that had accumulated over the years in various cupboards. She had tried, half-heartedly, to kill herself with a kitchen knife but she discovered she was a coward and could not go through with it.

And then, at the end of a fortnight, Janet had been hungry. It was the first purely physical feeling she had experienced for some time and she felt grateful for the uncomplicatedness of an urge that required her simply to act rather than think.

So she had got dressed and gone shopping and since then she had been proud of the fact that she had never once relapsed. She had dipped a toe into the darkness and it was enough. Her optimism returned. She regained the equilibrium of good-natured friendliness. To the outside world, Janet became Janet again. It was only in her loneliest moments that she allowed herself to walk to the brink of the crevasse, to peer into the cold, sharp oblivion beyond the fringes of her consciousness. And then, scared by her own ugliness, she would pull back quickly. No one else would ever know. No one suspected that Janet’s banal, likeable appearance contained within it such twisted shadows.

She had recognised this same darkness in Anne the first time she met her at the annual carol concert, an event that never failed to cheer Janet up with its air of bonhomie and festive celebration. Anne had seemed disconnected from what was going on around her, a translucent vapour in a roomful of brightly coloured solids. Janet felt for her immediately without quite understanding why. It was only afterwards, as she got to know Charles, that it began to make sense.

Janet had never liked him, although she could see, objectively, why so many women found him charming. But there was something about Charles that invited her mistrust. He seemed slippery and, at the same time, there was a blankness to him that she found disturbing. Janet felt she was unable to pin his personality down to any one characteristic. He was a strong man, aware of his own power and undoubtedly charismatic. Yet his personality seemed to shift shape according to its surroundings; he seemed to reflect what you wanted to see rather than reveal himself in any substantial way.

Janet knew that Charles found her perplexing: one of the few women he was unable to win over and control. She presented a sort of challenge to him and, as such, he had always gone out of his way to try and please her, to flatter her into submission, to cajole her into the sort of unquestioning admiration he was used to. But she had never been convinced, partly because she hated what he had done to Anne – stamping out her small sparks of joy and leaving bitterness to fester in its ashes – and partly because she could occasionally glimpse the ragged edges of a nastiness he tried so hard to conceal. It was only ever a tiny moment – his mouth would twitch in suppressed anger when Anne clattered a plate too loudly, or his eyes, after twinkling with some joke he had just made, would seem to drain away, voiding themselves of emotion. It was the sort of thing that was easy to overlook but Janet was a shrewd observer of people. She knew that her own unremarkable appearance and quiet nature gave her the privilege of watching without being noticed.

‘Janet. Always so quiet and always so watchful,’ Charles had said to her once when they ran into each other at the Trenemans’. Janet had met Giles Treneman at one of the Salvation Army jumble sales. He was red-faced and cheery from the exertion of unpacking various boxes and clumsily re-arranging the contents on the fold-out table in front of him. Janet felt for Giles instantly: he seemed like a small, lost boy who needed looking after. It was only much later that she discovered he was Anne’s neighbour of more than thirty years. He started inviting Janet to small social gatherings arranged by his plump and kindly second wife, Peggy.

‘His first wife died,’ Anne told her. ‘Cancer.’

‘Oh,’ said Janet, taken aback by the brisk way in which this information was relayed. ‘What was she like?’

Anne looked at her levelly. ‘I never particularly took to her,’ she replied, her voice emotionless. ‘Peggy is much nicer.’

On this occasion, it was a summer lunch party and everyone was slightly sozzled and over-tired after too much food. Janet had gone into the drawing room after the meal to look at two small watercolour landscapes by an artist that she thought she recognised. As she was peering at the pastel brushtrokes, trying to make out a signature, she felt Charles loom up behind her, his bulk displacing the air around her so that it seemed to drop in temperature.

‘I just wanted to take a closer look at these,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. For some reason, she had never been intimidated by Charles. She suspected this was because she had no need of his attention and therefore could not be bullied by him.

He smiled, one side of his mouth curling upwards. He stood so close to her that she could feel his breath against her cheek. It smelled of the bubbled sourness of champagne.

‘I know you don’t like me,’ he said, out of nowhere, his voice perfectly level.

Janet, taken aback, did not know what to do. She started to fidget with her wine glass. ‘Of course I like you, Charles,’ she blurted out, feeling herself go red in the face.

‘I know you don’t,’ he repeated. ‘But that’s all right, Janet, because, you know what?’

She shook her head. He grinned, took a swig from his glass and snorted loudly with laughter. The mood changed. He seemed to be moving too quickly, his pale blue eyes suddenly manic and unfocused. Janet started to feel frightened and then told herself not to be so silly – all the other guests were in the next-door room. He wouldn’t do anything to her here, would he? ‘Because, Janet,’ he pronounced her name with cutting precision. ‘I’m not sure I like me either.’