Читать книгу The Trouble with Goats and Sheep - Joanna Cannon, Joanna Cannon - Страница 11

It was Are You Being Served? on a Monday, The Good Life on a Tuesday, and The Generation Game on a Saturday. Although for the life of her, Dorothy couldn’t see what people found funny about Bruce Forsyth.

She tried to remember them, like a test, as she did the washing-up. It took her mind off the church hall, and the look on John Creasy’s face, and the spidery feeling in her chest.

Monday, Tuesday, Saturday. She usually liked washing up. She liked to watch the garden and idle her mind, but today the weight of the heat pressed against the glass and made her feel as though she were looking out from a giant oven.

Monday, Tuesday, Saturday.

She could still remember, although she wasn’t taking any chances. They were all circled in the Radio Times.

Harold became very irritable if she asked him something more than once.

Try to keep it in your head, Dorothy, he told her.

When Harold became angry, he could fill a room with his own annoyance. He could fill their sitting room, and the doctor’s surgery. He could even fill an entire supermarket.

She tried very hard to keep things in her head.

Sometimes, though, the words escaped her. They hid behind other words, or they showed a little of themselves, and then disappeared back into her mind before she had a chance to catch them.

I can’t find my … she would say, and Harold would throw choices at her like bullets. Keys? Gloves? Purse? Glasses? and it would make the word she wanted disappear even more.

Cuddly toy, she said one day, to make him laugh.

But Harold didn’t laugh. Instead, he stared at her as though she had walked into the conversation uninvited, and then he had closed the back door very quietly and started mowing the lawn. And somehow the quietness filled a room even more than the anger.

She folded the tea towel and put it on the edge of the draining board.

Harold had been quiet since they’d got back from church. He and Eric had deposited John Creasy somewhere, although Lord knows where, she hadn’t even dared ask, and he had sat down and read his newspaper in silence. He had eaten his dinner in silence, and dropped gravy down his shirt front in silence, and when she asked him if he wanted mandarin segments with Ideal milk for afterwards, he had only nodded at her.

When she put it down in front of him, he said the only sentence to come out of his mouth all afternoon. These are peaches, Dorothy.

It was happening all over again. It ran in families, she’d read it somewhere. Her mother ended up the same way, kept being found wandering the streets at six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, breadbin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind, although Dorothy always thought losing your mind was such a strange phrase. As if your mind could be misplaced, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier, as if it was more than likely your own fault for being so bloody careless.

They’d put her mother in a home within weeks. It was all very quick.

It’s for the best, Harold had said.

He’d said it each time they went to visit.

After he’d eaten his peaches, Harold had settled himself on the settee and fallen asleep, although how anyone could sleep in this heat was beyond her. He was still there now, his stomach rising and falling as he shifted in between dreams, his snoring keeping time with the kitchen clock, and plotting out the afternoon for them both.

Dorothy took the remains of their silent meal and emptied it into the pedal bin. The only problem with losing your mind was that you never lost the memories you wanted to lose. The memories you really needed left first. Her foot rested on the pedal, and she looked into the waste. No matter how many lists you wrote, and how many circles you made in the Radio Times, and no matter how much you practised the words over and over again, and tried to fool people, the only memories that didn’t leave were the ones you wish you’d never made in the first place.

She reached into the rubbish and lifted a tin out of the potato peelings. She stared at it.

‘These are peaches, Dorothy,’ she said to an empty kitchen. ‘Peaches.’

She felt the tears before she even knew they had happened.

*

‘The problem, Dorothy, is that you think too much.’ Harold’s gaze never left the television screen. ‘It’s not healthy.’

Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.

Dorothy picked imaginary fluff from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘It’s difficult not to think about it, Harold, under the circumstances.’

‘This is completely different. She’s a grown woman. Her and John have probably just had some kind of tiff and she’s cleared off for a bit to teach him a lesson.’

She looked over at her husband. The light from the window gave his face a faint blush of marzipan. ‘I only hope you’re right,’ she said.

‘Of course I’m right.’ His stare was still fastened to the television screen, and she watched his eyes flicker as the images changed.

It was Sale of the Century. She should have known better than to speak to Harold whilst he was occupied with Nicholas Parsons. It might have been best to try and fit the conversation into an advert break, but there were too many words and she couldn’t stop them climbing into her mouth.

‘The only thing is, I saw her. A few days before she disappeared.’ Dorothy cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to clear. ‘She was going into number eleven.’

Harold looked at her for the first time. ‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked,’ she said.

‘What was she doing going in there?’ He turned towards her, and his glasses fell from the arm of his chair. ‘What could they possibly have to say to each other?’

‘I have no idea, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it? She speaks to him, and then a few days later, she vanishes. He must have said something.’

Harold stared at the floor, and she waited for his fear to catch up with hers. In the corner, the television churned the laughter of strangers out into their living room.

‘What I don’t understand’, he said, ‘is how he could stay on the avenue, after everything that happened. He should have moved on.’

‘You can’t dictate to people where they live, Harold.’

‘He doesn’t belong here.’

‘He’s lived at number eleven all his life.’

‘But after what he did?’

‘He didn’t do anything.’ Dorothy looked at the screen to avoid Harold’s eyes. ‘They said so.’

‘I know what they said.’

She could hear him breathing. The wheeze of warm air moving through tired lungs. She waited. But he turned to the television and straightened his spine.

‘You’re just being hysterical, Dorothy. All that’s over and done with. It was ten years ago.’

‘Nine, actually,’ she said.

‘Nine, ten, what does it matter? It’s all in the past, except every time you start talking about it, it stops being in the past and starts being in the present again.’

She gathered the material of her skirt into folds and let them fall between her hands.

‘Would you stop fidgeting, woman.’

‘I can’t help myself,’ she said.

‘Well, go and do something productive. Go and have a bath.’

‘I had a bath this morning.’

‘Well, go and have another one,’ he said, ‘you’re putting me off the questions.’

‘What about saving water, Harold?’

But Harold didn’t reply. Instead of replying, he picked at his teeth. Dorothy could hear him. Even over Nicholas Parsons.

She smoothed down her hair and her skirt. She took a deep breath to suffocate her words, and then she stood up and walked from the room. Before she closed the door, she looked back.

He had turned away from the television, and was staring through the window – past the lace of the curtains, across the gardens and the pavements, to the front door of number eleven.

His glasses still lay at his feet.

*

Dorothy knew exactly where she’d hidden the tin.

Harold never went into the back bedroom. It was a holding place. A waiting room for all the things she no longer needed but couldn’t bear to lose. He said the thought of it gave him a headache. As the years turned, the room had grown. Now the past pushed into corners and reached to the ceiling. It stretched along the windowsill and touched the skirting boards, and it allowed Dorothy to hold it in her hands. Sometimes, remembering wasn’t enough. Sometimes, she needed to carry the past with her to be sure she was a part of it.

The room trapped summer within its walls. It held Dorothy in an airless museum of dust and paper, and she felt the sweat bleed into her hairline. The sound of the television crept through the floorboards, and she could picture Harold beneath her feet, answering questions and picking at his teeth.

The tin sat between a pile of blankets her mother had crocheted and some crockery left over from the caravan. She could see it from the doorway, as though it had waited for her, and she kneeled on the carpet and pulled it free. Around the edge were photographs of biscuits to tempt you inside, pink wafers and party rings and Jammie Dodgers, all joining cartoon hands and dancing with cartoon legs, and she held on to them as she lifted the lid away.

The first thing she saw was a raffle ticket from 1967 and a collection of safety pins. There were Harold’s tarnished cufflinks and a few escaped buttons, and the cutting about her mother’s funeral from the local paper.

Passed away peacefully, it said.

She hadn’t.

But beneath the pins and the grips and the buttons was what she had come for. Kodak envelopes, fattened with time. Harold didn’t believe in photographs. Mawkish, he called them. Dorothy didn’t know anyone else who used the word ‘mawkish’. There were very few pictures of Harold. There was an occasional elbow at a dinner table, or trouser leg on a lawn, and if anyone had managed to capture his face in the frame, he wore the expression of someone who had been the victim of trickery.

She searched through the packets. Most of the photographs were rescued from her mother’s house. People she didn’t know, held within white, serrated edges, sitting in gardens she didn’t recognize and rooms she had never visited. There were Georges and Florries, and lots of people called Bill. They had written their names on the back, perhaps hoping that, if their identity were known, they would somehow be better remembered.

There were few photographs of her own – an infrequent Christmas gathering, a meal with the Ladies’ Circle. A photograph of Whiskey fell to the carpet, and she felt her throat fill.

He had never come home.

Just get another cat, Harold had said.

It was the closest she had ever come to losing her temper.

The photograph she wanted was at the bottom, a weight of memories pressed upon it. She had to see. She had to be sure. Perhaps, over the years, the past had become misshapen. Perhaps time had stretched their part in it, and bloated her conscience. Perhaps, if she could see the faces again, she would recognize their harmlessness.

They looked up at her from a table at the British Legion. It was before everything happened, but she was sure it was the same table – the table where the decision had been made. Harold sat next to her, and they both stared into the lens with troubled eyes. The photographer had caught them by surprise, she remembered that, someone from the town paper wanting pictures for an article on local colour. Of course, they never used it. John Creasy stood behind them, his hands pushed into his pockets, looking out from under a Beatles fringe. Sitting in front of John was that daft clown Thin Brian, with a pint glass in his hand, and Eric Lamb was opposite Harold. Sheila Dakin was on the end – all eyelashes and Babycham.

Dorothy looked at their faces, hoping to see something else.

There was nothing. They were exactly as she had left them.

It was 1967. The year Johnson sent thousands more to die in Vietnam. The year China made a hydrogen bomb, and Israel fought a six-day war. The year people marched and shouted, and waved banners about what they believed in.

It was a year of choices.

She wished she had known then that one day she would be staring back at herself, wishing that the choice they had made had been a different one. She turned the photograph over. There were no names. After all that had happened, she was certain none of them would care to be remembered.

‘Whatever are you doing?’

Harold’s footsteps weren’t usually so discreet. She turned away from him and tucked the photograph into her waistband.

‘I’m going over a few things.’

He leaned against the door frame. Dorothy wasn’t sure when it happened, but Harold had become old. The skin on his face had thinned to a lacquer, and his posture was bowed and curved, as though he were slowly returning to the womb.

‘So, why have you buried yourself in here, Dorothy?’

She looked straight into his eyes and saw his mind stumble.

‘I’m making …’ she said, ‘I’m making …’

‘Headway?’ Harold peered into the room. ‘A mess? A nuisance of yourself?’

‘A choice.’ Dorothy smiled up at him. ‘I’m making a choice.’

And she watched as he wiped sweat from his temple with the sleeve of his shirt.

*

When Harold went back downstairs, Dorothy walked on to the landing and looked at the photograph again. The smell came to her first, a smell that seemed to live on the avenue for weeks afterwards, held in a bite of December frost. Sometimes she thought she could still smell it now, even after all this time. She would be walking along the pavement, wandering around in her own thoughts, and it would creep up on her again. As if it had never really disappeared, as if it had been left there on purpose to remind them all. That night, she had stood where she was standing now, and she had watched it all unfold. She had replayed that scene to herself so many times, perhaps hoping something might change, that she would be able to let it go, but it was a night that had nailed itself to her memory. And she had known even then, even as she’d watched, that there would be no going back.