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Category: fiction
2020, Portobello Edinburgh
‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ Bessie’s voice has been de-husked since they last spoke. Had she given up smoking? Janet tapped up the volume on her phone.
‘Well, it is.’
‘Happy new year! A new decade. So exciting!’
‘Happy new year to you, too.’
‘After all this time. I can’t believe it!’ Bessie paused. ‘Has something happened?’ She tailed off, coughed and waited. Janet waited too.
She was sitting on the small chair in the bathroom, her feet solid on the floor in her green slippers. The chair wasn’t really a chair at all. A curious person would wonder at the depth of the seat, tap the top, hear the hollow, and prise open the lid. Inside the chamber, not a treasure but an old white ceramic commode bowl.
Janet had never used the commode, not in that way, but she found it comforting to sit on, a chair with an inner secret, a chair privy to our most elemental needs, a chair that just might have started its life in a forest on the other side of the world, and, picking up woodworm on the way, had somehow ended up in a charity shop in some antique shop on the wrong side of the Edinburgh bypass.
‘Are you there, Janet?’
‘Yes, sorry. Was thinking about the commode.’
‘The commode?’ Bessie sounded baffled.
‘Yes, you know, where the wood came from, who cut down the tree…’ She stopped, and looked up to the corner above the shower where Cyril used to live. There was nothing to show he’d ever been there. No misting on the shower screen. No odd feeling of cool dampness. No heavenly tinkling. What was she doing on the phone to Bessie? She didn’t understand why she’d called. And now she wished she hadn’t. She had nothing to say.
‘Are you alright, Janet?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s been, what, fifteen years? I can’t believe it’s been that long. Time is amazing isn’t it. So fast. Especially at our age!’
‘More, maybe.’ Janet crossed her legs. Her slipper dangled from her shaking foot.
‘I heard your mother had died. I’m so sorry.’
‘Did you?’ Janet couldn’t think how Bessie would know that, not with her living in Kent or wherever she was now.
‘Jeremy saw it in the paper. Cut it out and sent it to me.’ Jeremy was Bessie’s only child. Janet hadn’t seen him since he was around ten. He’d been an intense curious little boy with big glasses and big questions and a perplexing attention to detail. He must be in his forties now. Probably working for GCHQ.
‘Yes, the undertakers did that.’
‘I didn’t think you’d written it. You always had such pretty writing. The piece about your mother, it seemed a bit perfunctory.’
‘What would I have written? I regret to inform you that Bernadette Waters, mother of three, and wife of dearly departed Eric Waters, died without speaking to her daughter for decades?’
Bessie’s reply took a long time to come. She said ‘she’d lost both of her sons, Janet. Both of them. And her husband. No one could have borne that. The grief. Imagine losing two sons. God, if I lost Jeremy…’
‘I was still alive.’
‘Yes, you were but…’
‘But she thought I killed them? Is that what you were going to say?’
‘What is this, Janet? You called me, remember? We should get together. It would be lovely to see you properly. Celebrate old times!’
‘She always blamed me.’
‘Well, I guess she can’t anymore. She lived to quite an age though. And fit as a fiddle until the end?’
‘You’re right.’ Janet pulled her slipper back on. Felt the floor again solid under her feet. ‘New Year. Just rattles me you know.’
‘It’s okay. Jeremy’s the same. Always a bit tetchy at this time. Worries about all the resolutions he needs to make. I just say let’s see what happens.’ Janet stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. A long black hair had sprouted from a mole on her left cheek. She hooked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and tried to pinch the hair out.
‘Are you still there, Janet?’
‘Yes. What’s Jeremy doing these days?’ Janet abandoned the errant hair, went through to the living room and sat down heavily on the couch. She listened to Bessie talking about Jeremy. His fancy job that he wasn’t allowed to talk about in the military. But a mother knows! Her cottage in Dorset with its walled garden. Her collection of dinosaur bones. Best in the county! The death of Martin in a car crash six weeks after he’d left her for an older woman. Karma! The new lover she’d found on the Internet. Colin. An absolute sweetie! Amazing cook and green fingered too. He’d made a set of shelves for the bones out of drift wood. So handy! How she’d given up smoking. Colin had helped. So caring!
Janet put her feet up on the couch and lay back. A tiny beige clothes moth was making its way down the wall beside her. She reached for it, hovered a finger until it stilled, then pressed it firmly into the wall. She’d forgotten the way Bessie punctuated everything good about her life with a gleeful exclamation mark. Janet had no use for exclamation marks but perhaps, secretly, she wished she had. Exclamation marks were ebullient. Joyful. Energetic. Over the top. Exclamation marks didn’t shuffle around in green slippers and pine on woodworm-ridden commodes.
‘Enough from me Janet – you know how I go on!’ Bessie laughed. ‘Tell me everything.’
‘Well, the thing is, Cyril’s been kidnapped.’ The words were out before Janet could retract them. Think of a way to explain. Bessie’s intake of breath was sharp and voluble.
‘What? Who’s Cyril? How awful! How did it happen? The police?’
‘He’s my cloud. My pet cloud.’ Janet started to cry. Thick fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She tried to gasp them back. Clenched her eyes shut. Gritted her teeth. The harder she tried the more they came. Her chest shook. And then the sobs came. Anguished waves that rolled up from her belly, heaved through her chest, and blurted out through her mouth. Bessie was saying something but Janet wasn’t listening. She put the phone down and let herself weep.
Sometime later, she couldn’t have said how long, she sat up and checked her phone. Bessie had hung up but she’d sent her a message.
SEND ADDRESS AND I’LL COME. CAN HELP WITH CLOUD. JEREMY HAS CONTACTS. YOU NEED A FRIEND NOW! BXX
Janet managed a smile. She tapped in a reply. It would be good to see Bessie. And perhaps Jeremy wasn’t so awful after all.
To be continued.
Categories
Kiss Me Quick
‘Kiss me’, she said crying. Jesus Christ. Is that Maureen’s voice? I put the watering can down and lean over the stair banister to have a look. No, can’t be. Yes. No doubt about it. It’s Maureen. With, bloody hell, with Peter. Maureen and Peter, my two neighbours on the ground floor, locked in a grotesque embrace. Never mind social distancing, I’ve seen his pants on the line and they were practically crinoline.
‘I can’t’, Peter says. His arms are all the way around her waist. His fingers, stubbed off short at the best of times, are doing their level best on an intertwine. I gulp some air.
‘Why not?’
“I just can’t.’
I get up on my tiptoes and lean over further. I am four storeys up, and the light is not as good on the ground floor. Their faces are three or four inches apart. Even in the gloom, Peter’s neck is flushing deep pink. Maureen’s hands are trembling on his back, her long baby blue nails digging deep into his spine under his grey cotton mix cardigan. Her purple skirt has slipped out of kilter.
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t.’
I’m not ageist and I know it’s not kind to say this but you need to know that they’re both the wrong side of sixty and Maureen’s supposed to be in lockdown with her new fancy man on the other side of the high street with an adult-only tree house. And I know it’s not about what you’ve got but who you are but Peter’s only got a dumpy one-bed caravan with the curtains never washed to even get a chance of being shrunk on the boggy side of Glen Tarbert. I know where my loyalties would lie.
She pushes her lips to his. He tilts his head away.
‘I do want to,’ he says.
‘So why can’t you?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘Just for a second.’
‘No.’ She pushes her lips again. Again he tilts his head. I used to have a doll like that. Giggles her name was. She came with a plastic spoon with a heap of green on it. Every time I put the spoon to her mouth she shook her head. Her lips were permanently pursed. I raged at her obstinacy. If I had to eat spinach why shouldn’t she? Ah, Maureen’s speaking again.
‘No one’s looking.’ I sense her coquetry. I snigger and back away from the banister. The holes in my ears are doing the things pupils do when their owners have taken drugs.
‘It’s not about someone looking,’ he says.
‘What is it, love?’ Love? She called him love? What have I missed? Where have I been? Laughter is welling up my gut, about to spill all over the landing. Even the wilting petunias, waiting in growing exacerbation for their daily watering, perk up. ‘Is it me? My breath?’ she asks. Her purple skirt is skittish now. Frisky even. He coughs.
He says ‘it’s my teeth.’
‘What about your teeth?’ I see the shine of his bald crown shimmer. Then shake. He sounds like he might start crying. She pushes her groin into his. She rocks her hips. Where is my phone? I need to get this live. I pat my pockets down. Nothing. Damn thing must be inside. I lean forward again.
‘They’re not in,’ he says.
‘What’s not in?’
‘My upper dentures.’ The words are whispered. She leans back in his arms.
‘Let me see,’ she says. There’s a sound that could be a choked back chuckle.
‘No.’
‘Pretty please.’
‘It’s private.’ Her right arm has moved from his neck to somewhere deep around his front and a bit below his waist.
‘It wasn’t private last week.’ God Almighty, even I’m embarrassed now.
‘Please Maureen, don’t make me.’ He turns his head from side to side but he doesn’t look up. Must be checking to see if anyone’s about. Jesus Christ, is she for real? Can she not see his torment? But I want her to continue. Force him on. Fine tune her lustful torture. It’s the most fun I’ve had since lockdown started. A phone rings in one of the middle flats. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. Maybe I should nip in now for my phone. But what if I miss the best part?
‘No.’
‘We’ll go inside. So I can put them in. Then…’ She interrupts him.
‘Let me touch it.’
‘What?
‘Your gums.’ There’s an interminable and dreadful hiatus before he replies.
‘What on earth do you want to do that for?’
‘Because it’s sexy, Peter.’ His stubbed off fingers jump on her back. He just hangs on to his intertwine. His pink flush has turned deep cherry red. Her right hand reappears from somewhere down there and a multi-ringed finger lands on his lips.
‘Open up, honey.’ She is dentist talking to a wayward child. I am transfixed. My mouth opens in harmony with his. I lean further over, the wooden railing digging into my stomach. She’s poking around his mouth with the finger. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s really rather cute.’
‘Cute?’ He manages to get the word out despite the finger.
‘You know, innocent, adorable.’ I can’t watch. I mustn’t watch. I can’t stop watching. It is appalling. Arse-tightening. Erotic. Dreadful.
‘Really?’ His tone has changed.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You like it without my teeth?’
‘Like it? I love it.’ Their heads move together. There’s a long squelching sucking noise. The sound of suction. I kick a foot back and knock over the watering can. There’s a stifled scream. I can’t tell whether it’s male or female. I’m too late to move away. I stare down into the gloom. I am paralysed. Two pink cheeked faces look up. They are both open mouthed. They are hungry chicks desperate for a feed.
And, dear readers, as far as I can see, there’s not an upper tooth between them.
1966, Sydney
It’s not easy to sleep on your first night in an old house in a new country on the wrong side of the world on the back of the death of your brother.
When your living brother, snoring softly up the hallway, knows you’re a murderer.
When your parents, still whispering and snuffling on the pining wooden chairs in the kitchen, wouldn’t use the actual word murder but you’re sure they’re sure you had something to do with it.
When the cicadas outside are thrumming your brother’s name.
When the large spider on the naked white wall is scuttling out his initials P.O.W.
When the night scent of the garden flowers is bristling the bitter sweet of funeral laurels through the fly screen.
When there should have been five in the new old house and now there are four.
When one small brown leather suitcase remains conspicuously unopened and unpacked just outside your door.
When some bird has cocked up the dawn chorus and has ramped up a solo so euphoric, so ecstatic, that it could bring a whole congregation to its knees.
When it’s your first night on dry land in six weeks and your bed, with its pre-slumped mattress, pitches and shakes and fouls your stomach until you’re retching into your pillow.
When you ache for the night to keep on going but the moon is already sweeping into its dying arc and cold white light is readying itself to turn warm golden rose.
When the sweat is weeping down your back and across your buttocks and you’re so so thirsty but you don’t know if the water out of the tap is safe to drink.
When you plot escape plan after escape plan, each more outlandish than the last, until you remember you have no money.
When you want the water out of the tap to be mephitic and pestilential, and you see yourself standing in the dark in a long white nightdress, gulping down glassful after glassful.
When you draft the first family breakfast scene in your head and you try every which way to change the chronicle but there’s no way that you can stop your father throwing you out into the street before you’ve even had your toast.
When the mantel clock, brought by your mother on a whim in her hand luggage, is so upset by the epic nature of its journey, that it chimes four then three then two then one.
When every creak is the footstep of a passing ghoul.
When your sheets, too white and starched stiff, crab and scuttle with every toss and turn.
When the whine and buzz of a mosquito becomes a sharp angry welt on the side of your neck. And then again between your breasts. And then again on your cheek.
The night was long, and when Janet finally came to in the dim grim of the morning, Philip was still dead and nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.
To be continued.
2020. Portobello, Edinburgh
New Year’s Day in Edinburgh. Janet had nothing to do, at least nothing useful. Katherine had told her not to call, that she’d be hung over and that they’d touch base on the second on the third. Touch base? What did that even mean? Something to do with rounders? Or American football? And who was supposed to touch whose base? Was she to ring Katherine? Or would Katherine ring her?
She didn’t understand the rules and she didn’t want to. It irritated her, that sort of lazy English. Why couldn’t people just say what they meant and get on with it? She’d never say that to Katherine of course. But she’d frowned at the time and Katherine had arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow in response.
Of course, she could phone a friend, or family. But the author has been remiss in not setting this up. Episode 36 and we still don’t know whether Janet has any living relatives. Pop George is definitely up there somewhere, sat back on an armchair of lenticularis, having died of a shattered heart after the first inquest.
But where is Edward? And what about her parents? Bernadette would be 102 in a month’s time. And Eric, her father, 104. Are they still alive? If so, Janet has been a dreadful daughter. Negligent in her attention. Not even a mention in her innermost thoughts. Unless of course there’s been a family rift. Which wouldn’t be surprising given the circumstances of Philip’s death. And what about Bessie? There was mention of her way back, a childhood friend. Are they still in touch? Or has Bessie also met some unfortunate end that may or may not implicate Janet?
Janet threw the duvet to the other side of the bed and examined her naked legs. It was hard to remember now whether her legs had always been that boxy shape or whether gravity was just getting the better of her. A thin blue vein had appeared on her right shin a few months ago. It was a lovely graceful thing, winding its way down her leg the way a half decent skier would tackle a new mountain run with wide gracious arcs. It stopped somewhere just above a puffy area around her ankle bone.
She reached down and pushed a finger into the distended skin. It was flaccid and malleable. She gave the area a hard rub with two fingers, pushing the errant fluid up towards her calf. Two years ago, after a sudden and unexpected bout of cellulitis brought on by knocking her ankle on a dry-stone dyke in an old sheep fank, a doctor had told her to wear those long socks that kept the circulation going. The doctor had smiled and said she wore them herself when she worked long shifts at the hospital. Janet had tried to smile back at the tall woman in the casual white coat, and had taken a note of the brand the doctor recommended. The socks turned out to be tight, ugly and grasping.
Janet levered herself off the bed, picked her dressing gown off the floor, put it on, flicked the blind cord up, and opened the window a few inches. The beach, grey and dreamy in its lace curtain haar, was starting to fill with people. Janet shuffled through to the kitchen, put the kettle on, dropped an Earl Grey teabag into a mug, picked up the binoculars, went back into the bedroom and studied the beach.
The people looked odd. Not because of the way they moved, although even that was strange. No, it was what they were wearing, or what they weren’t wearing. Some men were simply in trunks. Short snug black or red affairs that cinched in tight around their hips. Some, men or women, she couldn’t tell, were dressed up in tiger costumes. Some cut a dash in sailor suits. Some were bears, football mascots, or something indeterminate with beehive wigs and long glittery frocks. The hardier of the women were stripped down to their swimming costumes, with pink frilled tutus, thick woolly hats and those funny shoe slipper things that Katherine wore into the sea.
One group had lit a fire and were huddled together around it, singing and beating small round drums. Two of the men fanned the young flames with pieces of cardboard, and a third was pouring whisky into small plastic tumblers. Everyone in that group had the same short bobbed blue hair. Janet chuckled at their wigs, and the ferret appeared from whereever it had slept the night, stood up on its hind legs and sank its claws into Janet’s graceful blue vein. Janet slapped down it down and it shot away between her legs, mewling.
The smell of smoke eked into the bedroom and she shut the window and sighed. No matter what was burning on the fires out there, it always smelt like smouldering tyres. Janet checked the time on her radio. Eleven-thirty. She’d slept late. All those people out there on the beach must be the loony dookers, gathering early, read for the gunshot sprint in and out of the freezing Forth.
Janet enjoyed the loony dook. She’d never done it herself of course. She had what others would call a healthy respect for the sea. Not that the Forth was the sea. Any fool knew that. But it was close enough. Sometimes, when she walked along the water line in the early morning as the dawn pinked across the smooth sand, she’d see a thick stump of driftwood and wonder, just for a moment, whether it was Philip. She’d see a pixie ear, or a bony shoulder, or the nape of a young neck, and her skin would goosebump and she’d hurry back to her flat for a mug of hot mint tea and another hour under her duvet.
Janet put the binoculars down, sat down on her bed, and fingered her phone. No messages. She checked her emails. Nothing. No one wishing her a happy new year. She ran a hand through her hair. First day of 2020 and not a single message. She picked up the phone, ran through the contact list, found Bessie, and tapped the dial button.
To be continued.
1966, Sydney
Janet sat in the back of the taxi squeezed between her mother and her brother. Bernadette had her knees tight together under her thin pale green cotton dress, presumably, Janet thought, to avoid having to touch her daughter. Bernadette dabbed at the bruised puff around her eyes with her white hanky. Would her mother never stop crying?
Edward had his head out of the open car window and was naming the make and model of each car that passed in the opposite direction. When he got it wrong, Eric, stretched out in the front passenger seat, corrected him. It wasn’t a friendly correction. Her father’s fingers were still drumming, now on the shiny wood-veneer of the dashboard. His nails clicked like the crickets that had sprung under Janet’s feet as she’d walked out of the police station to the waiting taxi. The naming the car thing had been Philip’s game. How stupid of Edward to play it. Janet tried elbowing him, a sharp bony jab jab under his ribs. He turned briefly, stared at her, curled his lip, and continued on with the game.
The taxi driver, recently arrived from Greece and what a journey that was, sick the whole way not like his wife and three daughters and even the baby okay and couldn’t eat a thing for three weeks and had lost weight and never felt better since, had already learnt nearly all of the street names in the city. Or so he said to them as he accelerated through a red light. He regaled them with the name of each street just before he drove into it to prove his point.
Janet wanted the driver brother car street naming duet to shut up. She was hot, tired, and angry. How dare they all blame her. The Inspector had clearly known she wasn’t guilty. The way he’d looked at her. Drawn her apart from the others. Why didn’t they believe him? A proper policeman. She fingered the card in her pocket. The Inspector’s phone number. Just in case she remembered something else. She was to phone anytime. He was here to help. Such a terrible tragedy to happen to a lovely new Australian family. He hadn’t had time to say anything else nice to her. Her father had pushed them all outside. He had wanted, he said, to get home. Janet wasn’t sure which home he’d meant.
Eventually the taxi slowed and the driver leant out of his window. We’re near, he said. Forty-eight, forty-six, forty-four, and then Edward was shouting, and her father was pointing and the taxi slid to a halt outside No.36. Number 36, Macaulay Road. Their home for the next six months. Or longer if Eric couldn’t find their own house to buy at the right price. Janet leant back on the sticky plastic car seat and stretched her neck. Four large flies was crawling across the ceiling of the taxi towards her father. A brown spider, as big as her finger nail, stood upside down in the corner above her head. Its tiny feet tap tapped on the cream plastic. She’d read somewhere there would be insects here. But she hadn’t realised how many.
Edward was already out of the car, pulling open the black metal gate which scraped across the concrete with an unwelcoming scour, and jumping up the steps to the house. He lifted up a pot with a cactus type plant, felt around underneath, then held up a key in triumph. Her father was fumbling in his wallet, checking the unfamiliar currency. Bernadette was murmuring something about a tip and poor Philip, poor Philip not even seeing the house. The tree in the garden next to theirs was swaying and squawking. As the taxi driver opened the boot to get their cases out, it exploded into a swirling mass of flashing blue and green. ‘Budgies,’ said Janet, to no one, ‘those are budgies.’
Janet was last into the house. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The house smelt of wood polish, lavender and something that was probably fly spray. She was confused at first by the lay-out. The house defied normal logic. It was long and thin, with the hall running down one side and all the rooms, apart from the kitchen at the end, off to the left. The floors were all wooden, apart from the kitchen with its smart black and white linoleum tiles. Each time someone spoke, the house spoke it back to them.
She followed her mother through the hall and into the kitchen. The same yellow spirals from the police station twirled from the ceiling in the light breeze from the screened off windows. Janet opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. It was small and boxy with a large tree that she didn’t recognise, a brick barbecue with a blackened wire grill, a small square of lawn, neat borders with pretty flowering shrubs that smelt tropical sweet, and a wooden deck with four metal fold-up chairs leant up against the wall of the house. The timber fences on each side of the garden were just high enough to hide them from the neighbours.
A pale cotton net hammock was tied from two of the branches. She sat down on it and it dropped, almost to the ground. She pushed herself back and forward on it. It was quiet in the garden, just the rustle of leaves and the sharp calls of a few early birds gathering in preparation for the late afternoon chorus. Something nipped at her foot under the leather of her sandal. Then again and again. And then the other foot. She bent over to have a look. Her feet were covered in tiny golden ants. She tried brushing them off, but the more she brushed, the more they came. She stamped her feet. Smacked at the pain.
‘Janet, in here now.’ Her father had come outside and was standing on the decking. ‘Your mother needs help to unpack.’ Janet stood up and nodded. She didn’t look her father in the eye. ‘And your room’s the small one at the back.’ The smallest room. The dreariest room. Her punishment presumably. She sighed and, stamping her feet again, followed her father into the house.
2020, Portobello, Edinburgh.
Janet sat in the dark on the tall stool at her kitchen window and stared out into the night. With the window wide open she could smell the smoke from the dancing line of bonfires that leapt skywards all the way along the coast to Musselburgh. Drummers drummed although where they came from nobody knew and nobody cared. Someone banged a tambourine and someone else rang a pair of hand bells.
Drunken renditions of Auld Lang Syne spilled along the Promenade as each raggedy taggle group threw their arms around the next. Barking dogs competed with the tears of weary children. A pale cat appeared on the garden wall in front of the sailing club, arched its back, bushed its tail, and disappeared. The neighbours projected a grainy black and white film onto the wall of the white flats. Charlie Chaplin danced over the brown stain of a leaking gutter. Someone, somewhere, was playing a piano in accompaniment although not quite in the right tempo or time.
Fireworks turned the pitch of the dark into momentary brilliance: kaleidoscopes of red and gold, green and silver, shot upwards, and, when rewarded with laughing screams, sideways. The ferret, standing on Janet’s lap with its front paws on the window ledge, cocked its head and shivered with each frantic explosion. Janet stroked its head. It was an absent-minded stroke, unconscious, perhaps driven by being alone when everyone else out there bringing in the new year had someone to wrap their arms around.
Auld Lang Syne. She’d always liked the tune. Even in Australia locals that had never set foot out of the state had sung it every year. Arm in arm in checked shirts and bright cotton skirts and flapping sandals, they’d charged forward and back, forward and back, until someone had stumbled and they’d all collapsed in on each other, a rubble pile of arms and legs and hands and heads all askew.
Janet murmured the words of the third verse. Or was it the fourth?
We too have paddled in the stream
From morning sun to night
But the seas between us broad have roared
From auld lang syne
Where was Cyril? Where was her cloud? Out beyond the Forth? On the other side of the sea? She pushed the ferret off her lap onto the floor and leant out the window. The sudden cold scraped at her cheeks and scrawled around her open collar.
The drummers had worked their magic. The sky was sharp black, the sort of black that fought off clouds for the sake of clarity, limpidity. Cyril would have been afraid of the fireworks. Perhaps that’s why was the sky was so clear. The clouds had scuttled off elsewhere. Sheltering in another time zone until the revelers had run out of booze and the stubs of smouldering pyrotechnics had fizzled their last.
She pondered Katherine’s plan. Infiltrating the group, the kidnappers, seemed reckless. Dangerous even. Amy and Dan wouldn’t be taken in by glossy words or a blond wig or emerald green nail varnish. But there was also something oddly exhilarating about it. Arousing even. Reminded her of the weird mix of fear and thrill she’d had in her gut through the whole Philip saga. Perhaps this was just what she needed to jolt her out of her aging reverie. A bit of subterfuge. She closed the window and swung around on her stool. The ferret was on the kitchen workbench, licking crumbs off the toaster. She laughed.
She’d ring Katherine the following afternoon. Tell her she wanted a bigger role in Cyril’s retrieval. She wasn’t quite sure what yet. She needed to think. But it would be big. And it would definitely be audacious.
1966, Sydney.
The police station was hot, dim, and riven with dead insects. Yellow papery coils, dotted with dead black, spun from the ceilings. Fly screens clung to the open windows keeping the hot air in and the hotter air out. Cockroaches scattered through the reception area, twice on the end of a passing policeman’s boot.
We don’t want to take up too much of your time, Inspector Connolly said to Janet’s father as he led the family through a series of beige corridors to a room with a fan and a dusty Venetian blind. The Inspector motioned to her parents to sit down opposite him at the wooden table in the centre of the room. Edward ignored the Inspector and leant against the wall by the window, cracking his knuckles and crushing something dark and crunchy between his fingers. Janet joined her parents at the table. She was on the Inspector’s right, so close that she could smell his sweat and the faint smell of carbolic soap.
The Inspector took a small notebook from a drawer in the desk, opened it up and laid it out on the table in front of him. Just a few details, he said. And then you can be on your way. You’ll be needing time to settle in. He took a pen from the pocket on his chest. Janet’s mother blew her nose into a small white cotton handkerchief. She hadn’t stopped snuffling since Philip had disappeared into the Indian Ocean. Janet’s father put his arm around her mother’s shoulders. She slumped into him. Her father’s eyes were rimmed red. His chin stubbed grey. He hadn’t shaved in days.
Janet watched the Inspector write down her parent’s words. He had round, child-like writing that wasn’t joined up. The blue ink smudged on the page from the Inspector’s sweating hand. He didn’t always get her parent’s words exactly right. She wondered if she ought to tell him. Correct him. Point out his errors. It might matter later. If this went further.
‘And you, Janet?’
‘Sorry?’ Janet said, suddenly flustered. She hadn’t understood that the Inspector had turned his attention to her.
‘Did you want to add anything?’
‘What?’
‘To your parent’s account. You were the last person to see your brother alive?’ Janet was sure Edward was looking at her. Staring as he crunched and crackled whatever was dead between his fingers.
She said, ‘I’ve said it so many times.’ The Inspector put his pen down and touched Janet’s arm.
‘I know, lass,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy. A tragedy like this. I need to go through the formalities, though. To help you,’ he paused, ‘your parents, you know…’ He stopped mid-sentence. Janet shook her feet out of her sandals and pressed her bare soles into the cool of the linoleum. She wanted to lie down. To rest her face on a cool white linen sheet. For Inspector Colin Connolly to stroke her back. For Colin Connolly to drape a damp towel over the back of her neck.
‘Janet,’ the Inspector is talking to you.’ Her father was irritated. He looked at Janet and frowned. ‘For Christ’s sake, Janet, stop bloody dreaming and just tell him so we can get out of here. Your mother’s exhausted.’ He took his arm from her mother’s shoulder and shook a finger in Janet’s face. ‘We’re all bloody exhausted. And you…’ His finger was trembling. blurring in front of Janet’s nose. Her mother interrupted.
‘No, Eric, we said we wouldn’t.’
‘Look at her, will you? Look at her!’ Her father, his cheeks red, stood up.
‘Not now, love. Please.’ Bernadette tried to pull her husband back into his chair. He shook her free. The Inspector frowned. Stretched his arms out, his palms up, in peace.
‘You’re all upset. Please, folks. Please sit down. We can finish this another time.’ Janet’s father sat down heavily on the chair. The legs scraped hard across the floor. Janet looked down to see whether they had left a mark. His hands, flat down on the table, were dancing. Fingers playing some wretched tune on a long-abandoned piano.
‘You speak to her again, Inspector. She knows more than she’s letting on.’
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh.
‘So,’ said Katherine, unwrapping two small gold packets of butter and spreading them both onto her white bread roll, ‘how have you been, Janet?’ Janet didn’t eat butter. At least, not like that. Not in full view of everyone else. Those poor wailing cows at Pop George’s cottage. Bawling night after night so that folk could spread fat on bread that didn’t even need it.
‘You know, doing away.’ Janet wasn’t good at small talk. She didn’t have anything of value to say. She couldn’t confess the ferret. And she wasn’t sure why Katherine was bothering to help her. Katherine seemed to be one of the busy young women that excelled at everything. They go to work, they go on fancy holidays with packs of friends, they swim in the sea on their own, they have their own mortgages. They probably even have sex toys. Although what they did with them she couldn’t be certain. She stirred her tomato soup with the spoon. It splashed up the bowl and onto the table. She didn’t like tomato soup, but she’d panicked when the waiter came to take their order. Katherine had known what she wanted straight away, so Janet needed to too. ‘You said something about news?’
Katherine put her knife and fork down on her plate and pushed it to one side. She took the salt and pepper shakers, one in each hand, and moved them across the table towards Janet. ‘See these?’ Janet nodded. Of course she could see them. ‘See how ordinary they are? How you only notice them when they’re not there and you want to add salt. Or pepper?’ Janet nodded again. What was she on about it? ‘Well, I’m going to be the pepper.’ Janet raised her eyebrows. Was her mind getting away from her? It wasn’t the first time she’d been confused by something that Katherine had said.
Katherine looked at Janet. Janet sensed by the tightness of the lips that she was exasperated, frustrated that Janet wasn’t as clever as she was. ‘Could you just explain it to me,’ she replied. ‘I’m not following.’ She wiped her mouth with the paper napkin. It came away streaked rusty orange. How long had her mouth been stained by that soup? She put her hand to her face and blushed. She should have worn the lipstick. Eaten more carefully. Ordered something without colour.
Katherine said ‘I’m going to infiltrate the group.’ She leant back in her chair and put a finger to her lips. ‘And when they realise they can’t do without me,’ she paused, ‘I’ll strike.’
Janet opened her mouth to reply just as the waiter returned to the table. Katherine waved him away. ‘What do you think, Janet?’
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’
‘Do you want the cloud back?’
‘Yes, of course. But…’ Katherine interrupted her. ‘It’s either this or the police. And you said you didn’t want the police.’
‘Yes. No.’
‘Although I wish you’d tell me why the police are a problem.’
‘Infiltration. Yes. You’ll be great at that.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Janet looked at Katherine’s fingernails. Neat, just the right length, polished in emerald green. Her thumbnails flashed. Two little silver stars on each one.
‘Will you need to be disguised?’ Katherine turned to look at the other customers. She was conspiratorial. Something out of a movie.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Were they disguised when they came to your flat?’ Janet blushed again. Of course they weren’t. Or were they? How would she know?
‘But I can wear a wig if you’d like,’ Katherine went on. I’ve got three at home. I’ll send you the pics and you can choose.’
‘For me?’ Janet asked, scrunching the napkin into a tight fist.
‘No, you idiot. For me.’ Janet managed a smile. How stupid she was. She hadn’t always been stupid, though. She’d got away with murder. Not everybody could say that.
SANDERLINGS 