Undercurrent (28 page)

The same garments were unrecognizable on a different body; they changed with a new owner. Reborn, rejuvenated, given a lease of life, Peter said. The shops were an acceptable aspect of change, decay and death, but there was another thing about the clothes. Displayed on hangers, crushed together like a crowd trying to get out of a door, it was impossible to visualize who might have worn them last. There were uniformly coiffed, grey-haired ladies who wore the stock and counted out change with great precision, sharing the excitement of bargains. Maggie had a distinct preference for one shop out of the five, Timothy preferred Oxfam for the towels and sheets, while she favoured Age Concern for varied clothing and the manager's frivolous inability to turn away any kind of hat.

There were better things to do; she knew it, but she could not do what she had set out to do

– find Angela - and she did not want to digest her encounter with Tanya; she did not want to do very much at all.

It was a state of non-specific indecision, halfway to misery and useless introspection, so she pressed her nose to the window of the shop. Dear God, there was a swimsuit in there, draped artfully over a plastic plant and topped with a deerstalker, dreams of winter and summer combined.

Someone would buy it to encourage the weather to change, and if it didn't fit, It didn't matter.

Seasons did not dictate stock; winter coats were next to summer cottons, woolly scarves along with beads and boots marking time with sandals on the floor.

Maggie loved an organized mess.

New hats, right at the back there, hats left over from forgotten weddings and christenings and never kept for funerals, all the more interesting for being dented.

She needed a hat like she needed a hole in the head.

She needed prayers, not a hat, but Henry needed a hat and as long as somebody needed a hat, there was reason to look.

Think of the devil and he arrives; never was the saying truer than in a small town. Pausing for a minute, she caught Henry's reflection in the glass, standing beside her looking through the window in perplexity, as if her thinking of him had conjured his presence. He had noticed the dirt on his leather jacket and was trying to rub it off. She touched his arm; the material felt rough and ruined and his arms were held stiffly. He smiled his infectious, forgiving smile and she found herself smiling in return. Oh dear, what had she done to him.

'Were you waiting for me?'

'Nope, but I'm glad you're here. I've never been inside a thrift shop. Don't know the code.'

'Henry, you haven't lived. There is no code.'

There was a surge of warmth and a draught of smells. From the makeshift changing room at the back there came a bellow of laughter before a woman emerged in a skirt which touched her ankles and gaped round the middle. Henry could see how this was a place where looking ridiculous and being too fat was a cause for celebration and perhaps in this town, the beautiful people were few and far between. He eased himself out of the jacket which saturation or something had wrecked to the extent that it had changed in colour as well as in size and made him feel fatter than anyone.

His eye was drawn to the deerstalker, he reached for it and put it on his head. It was oversized for a large man and the brim descended to his nose to land on the bridge of his glasses, so that he had to tilt his head back in order to see. A very silly person was visible in the cheval glass, looking like a retard newly released from an institution which could have kept him in, while next to him, made a foot higher by the addition of a large black hat with an excrescence of veil and a broken feather, Maggie peered at them both with her head at a similar angle.

The black hat was like a piece of broad stovepiping, the net which exploded from the top a desiccated bird's nest. The feather had once been turquoise.

They looked at their own images seriously and nodded in unison. The hats wobbled. Slowly, Maggie removed her hat with a flourish and handed it to him.

He took off the deerstalker and handed it to her. Each donned the other hat. Sizes were deceptive. She wore his hat halfway down her face with the peak turned to the side, giving her the profile of a duck, while the stovepipe sat on his crown like a saucer on top of a cup.

'I'll take two,' Henry said.

'No sillier than the hat you lost,' Maggie said.

He handed her a scarlet beret which made her look like a tired streetwalker in a 1950s French film, while the blue Breton cap she handed him gave him the look of an idiot savant. The balaclava he tried next was so difficult he knew he was as honour bound to buy it as never to wear it. Released from temporary blindness, he saw Maggie, wearing a tartan cap, leaning against the counter and shaking silently while immediately behind her the manager was in the act of selling Henry's leather jacket. He watched without protest as it was carried out of the door by a man several sizes smaller than himself and wondered why he had ever liked it, and there was a moment as the door closed when he seriously wondered if it was his coat at all.

'How did you know I lost a hat, Maggie?' he asked over his shoulder as, now well into the swing of things, he looked at a crowded rail of unattractive and musty-smelling woollens. There was a way of behaving in here which would not be useful in other shops.

Here, you could treat the clothes as if they were already yours and nobody gave a damn.

'You told me,' she said airily, and he tried to remember if he had.

He found a jacket: brown, serviceable and cleanly nondescript, seven dollars and big enough for that sum to be able to shrink with impunity. She had bought nothing and said that was not the point. To the side of the lady counting change and yelling comments into the tiny changing area beyond, there was a wodge of scarves spilling from a basket. He sorted through them, feeling the harsh texture of synthetic fabrics, and then his fingers encountered something softer. Pulling at it, he saw the edge of a cream, embroidered shawl.

He felt the texture between his fingers, thrust it back and then pulled it out again. It was old and yellowed, but still soft. Henry held it against the light and saw the holes and a label stating £5.

No wonder it had not moved: £5 was a lot in a thrift shop. He seemed to remember he had spent much more than that, even in India, twenty years ago.

He fancied it smelt of heat, spices and dust. Maggie had stopped laughing and looked at him with concern. Tears stung his eyes. 'Nobody should be thrown out, he said. 'Nor their belongings either.'

'Would you want them all to die with you, Henry?'

'No. I hate waste.'

'Time we talked properly. Henry. No messing.'

'Time you stopped fobbing me off.'

'Yes.'

The jacket felt inexpensive rather than cheap and he felt it gave him anonymity. Now that his shoes were broken in and his hair unstyled he could meld into this street by the simple expedient of wearing someone else's clothes. Maybe he would begin to think and talk in the same roundabout way, never quite getting to the point, like they did. People who looked like Edward seemed to command respect, people who looked like him certainly did not. No one would know him now. Out in the street, the sunlight blinded him. It ricocheted off the wet ground and straight into his eyes. He stuffed the balaclava into his pocket and resolved to get rid of it soon, lifted his face to the light and sniffed in sheer pleasure at the sensation of relative warmth. Maggie pulled at his arm and he resisted the irritated urge to shrug her off, not because he didn't like her close, for all her cryptic commentary, but really, she should stop leading him round. He wasn't a dog.

'This way,' she said, urgently.

'Which way?' And he must stop asking questions.

She pulled, he resisted, bumped into a person made featureless by the reflected light.

'Sorry,' he said, automatically.

'Angela,' Maggie said formally. 'How nice. I was just coming to see you.'

The figure of Angela Hulme recoiled, shopping bags rustling angrily.

'Oh, really? Don't bother. And don't bring him.'

She leaned forward, thrusting her face into Maggie’s, close enough to exchange breath, speaking through clenched teeth, loud enough for everyone to hear.

'Do you know what he was doing on Sunday? He was putting his dirty hands up my little girl's jumper, that's what he was doing. He won't leave her alone.

He wants locking up. So keep him away or I'm getting him arrested. Are you listening to me?'

Henry saw himself captured in a brief reflection, in the plate glass window of the betting shop on the other side of the road, where a posse of men were visible only because their noses were planted against the glass. He looked like a shifty specimen himself and all he got was the impression of a dozen sets of cold eyes. The urge to make a face and stick out his tongue was quick in passing.

The population moving through the bottleneck at the junction of two streets parted like a wave against a breakwater. This time, Henry allowed himself to be guided away. He did not feel quite so anonymous any more.

Inside these walls, dress becomes important. 'Taking care' with appearance is encouraged and
we have our own clothes. Taking care of washing and clothes is tantamount to taking care of self, not
letting go entirely, although the thought is tempting. There's a sharp division in the reactions to
compliments, so that if I were to say to my friend in the kitchen, 'You look nice', the response could be
pleasure, hostile suspicion or a denial of looking nice at all, accompanied by the explanation that the
dress, skirt, whatever are really pieces of shit. This may mirror the generally low self-esteem: I'm not a
shrink; I don't know, but I still think a compliment is worth the risk of a slap in the face.

There's a hairdressing salon, too, as part of the educational programme; there are some fine
hairstyles. It looks like a regular salon, bit old-fashioned, with the difference that all scissors and
implements, numbered and coded, go back into a safe, triple locked against the wall, at the end of the
day. Just like the knives in the kitchen, displayed beneath bulletproof Perspex to show how the regime
is only a distant relative to normal life after all, although the odd reactions to compliments are
probably the same when I think of it. If ever I told Maggie she looked nice in the days of her
metropolitan chic, she'd always tell me what a bargain it was. Tanya loves clothes in her own
fastidious and possessive way, they had huge importance for her, because she'd once been dressed in
rags, I suppose. Harry was too messy to notice.

There, I was going to write a page without mentioning either of them, but since there will
never be a day when I do not think of them, trying to evade it on paper is futile.

I was trying to resist telling the story, but it has been gnawing at me, the fact that no one
knows the truth, no one who is ever going to tell it, I hope, and while I thought I wouldn't mind that, I
do. Each night I write a little of this, either resisting or avoiding the urge to write a literal description
of what happened.. and at first I didn't do it in case someone found it. Now I know it would make
precious little difference if they did; it would be my fantasy, but it grows and grows, this cancerous
need to confess.

It was the old rule in murder that the victim had to die within a year and a day of the crime in
order for a charge to be made.

This perpetrator has only to relive the facts on her own anniversary.

A strange, garbled message from Edward.. I do not want anyone to pry .. I cannot have them
adding up two and two to make five . . and yet... and yet, I wish they would.

There, I have survived his birthday and neither kissed nor told. I hope it will last the week.

FMC.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

'The awful thing about loss of reputation,' Henry said, 'is the way it makes you feel a stranger to yourself.

Like this can't be you with this dirty mark stuck to your forehead.'

'A shouting match on a street corner hardly involves a loss of reputation. Henry,' she said sharply. 'Especially if you didn't have one to lose.'

'Well a minor form of it, then. I certainly felt disgraced.

Even you let go of me for a minute.'

Maggie was silent, acknowledging the fact. 'I didn't mean to let go of you. I was going to hit her. She's neurotic.

Everyone knows that.' Henry shook his head.

'Nobody knows that I'm a guy who fights shy of kids,' he said. 'This kind of stuff sticks like shit on a shoe.'

'It's a convenient accusation,' Maggie said, furiously. 'It justifies her in locking you in the castle and it makes sure you don't go near her again. It panders to the idea of the paedophile as bogeyman; it justifies her calling the cops and making up anything she wants.'

'She wouldn't want to make her daughter tell lies.'

'She wouldn't have to. It wouldn't have to go that far. She could get you brought in for questioning, stuck in a cell for an hour or two and--'

'No, NO.'

'... And then withdraw the accusation. The object would be achieved, wouldn't it? An hour of that and you and your claustrophobia would be gone.'

Henry let that pass. They sat in the pier caff. Henry had watched her walk straight through the door with the unerring sense of direction of someone who came here often and always sat in the same place, away from the counter and the cosier area of the place. She would always sit in the spartan summer room, with bare Formica tables and big metal windows showing nothing but sea.

The tide was high, lapping at the fishing platforms, echoing through the slats. Facing to the front, it felt like being in the prow of a ship, watching other ships and the endless theatre of the sky.

With the sun casting arrows into the waves, he could believe the water was warm, welcoming, harmless. There was a large brown pot of tea between them, so strong it reminded him of the bitter tea of Ceylon. He wanted to say as much, but resisted it. It was for the English to discuss irrelevancies and set people tests.