Trick or Treat (20 page)

She focuses her eyes on Rodney and it looks as if the blood is thickening on his head. That is good – no use cleaning while it's still flowing. She stands up and her own head hurts as she moves and she knows she must look a fright, and there is blood on her apron too, and on her cardigan. She dithers for a minute, unsure where to start. She goes to the airing cupboard and finds an old sheet which she folds into a pad, and then, to be quite sure, backs with a polythene bag. She tries to roll Rodney over with her foot. It is difficult, for he is heavy and struggles clumsily against her, and she has to kneel down eventually and use both hands and all her strength to roll him away from the sticky patch on the carpet. She puts the padded sheet under his head to prevent any more damage.

In the bathroom she takes off her blood-stained clothes and puts them to soak in a bath of cold water. Cold water is quite sufficient to lift blood out of clothes, so long as it isn't allowed to dry. She puts on her housecoat and her rubber gloves. She fills a bucket with water and detergent. She takes a scrubbing brush and a sponge, and then she sets to work. Once she is scrubbing it is all right. The important thing is to save the carpet. It keeps her warm, working so hard, and there is not even any need to switch on the fire after all that, and that will save on the bill. But the important thing is to save the carpet. Never mind about tea, tea can come later. Rodney will probably turn his nose up at it anyway. Poached eggs she'd thought. But no, eggs are not safe any more. Welsh rabbit then, with a splash of Lea and Perrins. Two slices, for this is hard and hungry work. Her stomach rumbles at the thought, a cold mechanical sound. She has a good technique: first she scrubs a patch of the carpet with detergent until there is a vivid pink foam and then she sponges it up and squeezes the sponge into the bucket. It is coming up a treat. She'll scrub the whole stain and then fetch clean water and go over it again and again until eventually the foam remains white, and the carpet is clean.

The redness reminds her of the cochineal she used to use to make pink icing for birthday cakes. She remembers a birthday party when she was a child, her own party. In the centre of the table there had been a pink and silver cake, a great glamorous mountain of a cake, and everyone had sung to her and raised their glasses. And she made cakes like that for Rodney every year, wanting him to have happy memories, beating the cochineal into the butter icing until it was the most delicate shade of pink. Perhaps it would have been better if she'd had a girl. Perhaps she could have managed a girl. She always iced birthday cakes with pink, until she learnt that cochineal was made of crushed-up beetles' wings. And anyway, there's been no call for birthday cakes, not for donkey's years.

‘Mum,' says Rodney suddenly, bringing her back to the moment with a start. She'd almost forgotten he was there.

‘Don't fuss,' gasps Nell. The scrubbing is hard, it makes her breathless. ‘I'll just get this done and then I'll see to tea.' Her head is beginning to throb in earnest now. The claws are tightening again. And maybe it was wrong of her to throw the iron at Rodney like that when he came at her like a wild beast. Maybe it was wrong, but she didn't mean any harm. She didn't mean
such
harm.

‘I think it's time you went to bed.' Nell leans over Rodney and pokes him with her toe. ‘You can't lie about there all night like a spare part. And you've let your tea get cold. Come on.' She kneels beside him and lugs him up into a sitting position. The cut on his head has stopped bleeding although it gapes still and his hair is clotted with big blobs of blood, shiny as black currants.

‘Can't,' murmurs Rodney.

‘No such word,' Nell says. ‘Now come on, set your mind to it. Turn over onto your hands and knees …' She half shoves, half helps him over. ‘Good,' she encourages. ‘That's very good, see, you can do it if you try.' She picks up his glasses and rubs them with her apron. ‘Now, crawl to the stairs.' She stands behind him, her arms folded, watching him inch precariously forward. ‘A bit further,' she says. It feels all right with him down on his hands and knees, a harmless baby. She feels better about him as she follows him along, urges him up the stairs and into his cold clean room.

‘I had to do it,' she says, closing the window. ‘There was so much rubbish, so much old junk. Mites can live on anything, you know, and worms eat through the pages of books. Don't know what I was thinking of, harbouring such rubbish.' She refrains from thinking about the rubbish still floating in the toilet. ‘Dustbin day tomorrow,' she says. ‘First thing I'll get out and get that lot bagged up.' She looks out into the dark garden where the page of a book flaps feebly to and fro in the light from the window.

The bed is in the middle of the floor and there is nothing else. The curtains have gone and the rug, and the bookshelves are bare. One cupboard stands empty, its door open. The room smells of bleach. ‘It's all right now,' Nell says comfortingly, looking round. She helps Rodney heave himself onto the bed. He is the only unclean thing in the room. His jacket and shirt are bloody. He must be washed, she realises, looking unhappily at his trousers, undressed and washed – but that can wait till morning. Her head will stand no more tonight. She puts the pad of sheet under his head to stop him soiling the pillow, takes off his shoes, covers him with a blanket and tucks his glasses under the pillow.

‘God bless,' she says and the words dislodge a memory. There was a lullaby she used to sing. She hums feebly for a moment until the words come back, and her voice vibrates through the coldness, a high mosquito whine:

‘Wink and Blink and a Nod, one night,

Sailed off in a wooden shoe,

Over a river of crystal light

And into a sea of blue.

‘“Where are you going and what do you wish?”

The old man asked the three.

“We're going to fish for the herring fish,

That live in the beautiful sea.”'

Rodney's face twitches once, as if he is puzzled, and then he is still. ‘God Bless, my cherub,' she whispers and she goes out, closing the door silently behind her, for her baby is sleeping, as peacefully as ever.

‘What's been going off?' asks Jim the moment she enters the bedroom, ‘all that banging and shouting.'

‘Nothing, love,' Nell says, undressing beneath her nightdress, ‘nothing to worry yourself over.' She touches his frame with her fingertips. ‘God bless,' she says and then, without warning, flips him onto his face, for she is in no mood for his fretting tonight.

Her head is heavy on the cool pillow and she arranges her arms outside the bedspread to keep herself from overheating. Her head throbs, the soft coldness blotting the pain like lint. In the mirror she has seen the bruise on her cheek. She will look a proper sight tomorrow.

It takes her a long time to get off to sleep. The thought of the cherry hat will not go away. She meant to go next door and ask Petra for it back, but how could she in all the kerfuffle? It is only a stupid hat, a thing, anyway. What does it matter what becomes of it? She knows all that but the thought of it will not leave her alone. When she closes her eyes she sees Olive in the hat, her lips as red as the cherries, her eyes blacker than the straw. Her eyes are bright and dancing, looking into Jim's. Oh yes, Nell is not so naïve that she didn't notice the fancy Olive took to Jim. Not content with one man, the alley cat. Lucky that Jim was the faithful type – not that he wasn't flattered. Perhaps he was even tempted momentarily by Olive's flashy charms, she can accept that. And to look at Olive now … if only Father
could
see how his little Gyspy had turned out.

Nell's face, blank in the dark, eyelids closed like lids of stone, tries to smile, but there is something niggling, something else other than the hat, other than Rodney, something wriggling almost like a worm in her mind, something she cannot identify. She cannot put her finger on it, but it is to do with Olive, something to do with Olive.

Eventually she drifts into a troubled sleep, and in her sleep she dreams. In her dream she holds the cherry hat and Olive, the young Olive, beautiful in a white dress with a blood-stain down the front, tries to take it but she cannot. Somehow she cannot, her hand goes right through it and Nell holds tight and she feels a power, shocking, like a blast of warmth, that wakes her. In another snatch of dream, Olive is old and she is wearing something on her head, something mad, but Nell cannot quite see what it is. She has to get closer to look, walk across stepping stones, walk across stepping stones to Jim's allotment, and there is Olive sitting outside his shed. And even though she knows in the dream that he is dead, he is still there, inside the shed, making something. She can hear him hammering and sawing. And when Nell gets close to Olive she can see that she is laughing, and her hair is thick and black again, and on her head is balanced the silver cup, the school prize.

Nell wakes suddenly and sits up in bed, suffering with her head, feeling sick. The cup. She stole Olive's cup and she stole Olive's hat and now Olive is poor and fat and ridiculous. And oh how things seem different in the dark of night. She climbs out of bed and she has to use the lavatory and there are the coloured fragments bobbing in the water, the fragments that will not flush away. Nell goes back into her room and switches on the light. She stands Jim up.

‘All right, love?' he says.

‘The hat isn't burnt. I thought the children next door would have burnt it but they didn't.'

‘That's good, isn't it?' Jim says, squinting at her through the old sunshine.

‘I was thinking, dreaming about the cup. I didn't steal it, not really, Jim, you know I didn't. I found it, on the night of the Blitz when their house was hit. Things were thrown everywhere and in the morning I found the cup in our garden. It was filthy and I picked it up and polished it and I meant to give it back. I did. I always meant to give it back … but it was a difficult time, Jim, with you away and Rodney just a baby. I put it away in the sideboard, well you know, you found it there and I never got round, well I forgot all about it. After all it was a silly gimcrack really, wasn't it, Jim? Wasn't it? Not worth worrying about.'

‘Important enough for me to bury.'

‘Well I couldn't give it back then, could I? Not all that time later. She didn't need it. I don't suppose she gave it a thought. I don't suppose she missed it. She has everything. Olive. Wonderful Olive … deserved what she got, her poor bastard…'

‘Her baby, Nell, her infant.'

‘And she …' but Nell cannot think now where her bitterness has gone. She is shivering. ‘No,' she says, and there is a tremor in her throat, an odd fluttering, ‘she did not, after all, deserve that.' She switches off the light and climbs heavily back into bed and the slight warmth she's left there.

‘Sleep now, my love,' says Jim.

‘Yes,' Nell says. She lies flat on her back as usual, but unusually, tears trickle down the sides of her face. Olive is not to be envied. Perhaps she never was. Olive has not got everything, never had everything. She has not got a child. She has old Arthur, of course, but he is no man, not like Jim, he is more a lap-dog, foolish and devoted. She does not sleep again until the milky dawn seeps round the edges of the curtains.

Ten

Rodney is dead. Nell stands looking at him for a few minutes, puts out her finger, and touches his cheek. It is perfectly cold. His eyes, fortunately, are closed. ‘That's that then,' she says. In death, she can see a trace of the boy Rodney, a trace even of Jim in the set of his lips, or perhaps it is her father. ‘Good,' she says, and shocks herself. But it is true. It is good. It will save a lot of trouble.

Downstairs, she sits at the kitchen table and eats her All-Bran and sips her cup of tea. She feels that a weight has been lifted from her shoulders, they feel as light and fluttery as if she is sprouting wings. The beast-claws have loosened from her head and she feels clear and light. Almost light-hearted. But, of course, there is the problem of the body. Corpses are far from hygienic. Bodies are full of bacteria, live bodies that is, that are there from the moment of birth, from before birth even, lying dormant, like time bombs, waiting only for the moment of death to begin their repulsive life cycle, devouring the body from within as they spawn, making it fizz, ferment, explode. Nell read this somewhere and it has been with her ever since, just like the bacteria in her own body. And here she is with a corpse on her hands, in her Rodney's bed. All she knows for certain is that the eyes should be closed with coins. After breakfast she visits the corpse and places a shiny ten-pence piece on each of its eyelids. She does not undress and wash it yet; that must wait until she has the time to be thorough. She does tuck a white sheet neatly around it, but she does not cover its face like they do in the films.

If she called an undertaker, questions would be asked, would be sure to be asked. Doctors might be consulted, even the police dragged in about the gash on its head. But she has done nothing wrong. It was self-defence was the iron, and anyway, Rodney was her son. She gave him life, and she took it away. What could be fairer than that?

In the weeks before Rodney was born, she had knitted a shawl. It was a huge complicated affair in fine white wool, a great insubstantial cobweb of a thing, but warm. A most excellent shawl. The first time she had held Rodney swathed in the shawl he had seemed to weigh almost nothing in her arms. He was such a tiny boy, but strong, and he would wave his hands about and catch the little shrimps of his fingers in the net of the shawl and wail until she freed them, and smoothed and wrapped him again into a neat soft parcel. She flinches against the remembered tenderness rising like a forgotten taste in her throat. For a moment she is almost lost. She darts her eyes around the bare bright room as if for the first time. She remembers the warm shadowy folds of the shawl and the woolly tenderness. She stands on the chilly floorboards and for a second she is caught between the two things: the warm shadows and the bare brightness; the one too far distant, too long lost, and the other too terrible to contemplate. She wavers between them for an awful elastic second and then she snaps out of it, back into the present.