Dark Sister (16 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

Alex
softened a little in the New Year. He let Maggie have the
children for an extra day
a week. It was always Saturdays he wanted her to have them, which was convenient
for him, but she was grateful for any contact. Sam's conjunctivitis had
returned, so she made a repeat preparation of the eye lotion that had cured him
before.

Maggie's savings were dwindling. She was going to have
to do something about money. Meanwhile Ash paid her to run Omega two days a
week. He said he was glad of the days off, but she didn't see how he could
afford it. Business was less than brisk. Maggie persuaded him to broaden his
stock. They started selling sets of tarot cards and handcrafted jewellery; she
got him to take a wider range of books. He grumbled something about turning his
herbal kiosk into an occult emporium, but let her have her head. Trade
improved, and she felt she had at least done something to earn his generosity.

Entertaining the children every
Saturday proved to be a drain on her scant resources. Previously it had been
something she hadn't had to think about. So she started taking them to see Liz,
which cost nothing.

"I
know'd
you
was
coming," Liz said, eyeing Amy, whom she'd
not met before. Amy stared in fascination

Liz's crablike hand scuttled down
the side of her chair and proffered a humbug.

"Take it," said Maggie.

"Thank you," said Amy
stepping forward. Liz clasped her tiny hand in arthritic fingers, but lightly, drawing
her close and planting a kiss on her cheek. Amy showed none of the fear of Liz
evinced by Sam.

"She's an angel," said
Liz. "A little dove, a little pigeon. Pretty, eh?" Amy blushed.

"Me!" shouted Sam.

"Yes, here's a suck for you. I'm not leaving you out."

"Say thank you!" said Maggie. He
wouldn't. Maggie put the kettle on to boil; she didn't have to ask. Liz had got
her stove burning. Maggie was relieved because it was cold outside.

Liz saw her looking. "I told you, I
know'd
you
was
a-coming. So I got
a good fire going."

"How did you know?" said Amy.

Liz leaned forward and tapped her nose.
Amy turned and smiled at her mother. She sat on a hard-backed chair and gazed
at Liz. Sam crawled under the table.

Maggie wanted to tell Liz about her flying
experiments, but in words the children wouldn't understand.

"A little too much belladonna, I think, Liz."

Liz's stick tapped involuntarily.
"Oh? Oh? When was this then? Now I
sees
it."

"Boxing Day."

"Boxing Day?
Boxing Day?
Where was the mistress on Boxing
Day?"

Maggie hadn't thought about the moon at all. "I didn't—"

"You've got to look out for- the mistress. She's
to be waxing when you're mixing, and in one of the air or earth signs. Where
did you do it?"

"In my room."

"
Psssshhhhtu
!!!!
That's not proper. You'll come to
grief, you will."

"Yes, well, it was a bit messy.
Still, I got what I wanted."

"You be grateful then."

"Liz, there was a face. It seemed like someone helping me."

"Oh, yes. How do you think we'd go on
if we didn't have someone helping us? Help and be helped. That's it. We're here
to help one another, mark that, Amy?" Amy nodded. The old woman seemed to
drift off into some reverie sparked by her own words.

"Did you give her anything?" Old Liz said at length.

Maggie was confused. "Give what?"

"Oh,
her'll
not be pleased with you if you didn't give
anything for her help.
Her
might not come to you
again. You've to give something to your dark sister if
her's
to help you." Liz fumbled in her sweet
packet and held out another humbug to Amy.

Amy took the humbug. Liz tossed another to
Sam, who was playing happily under the table.

"So that's my dark sister? But
what do you give? And how do you give it?"

"Any way you like. Give an offering.
Flowers, they like flowers. Or give her the next pleasure you gets off a
man!" Liz hooted with laughter and her stick slapped at the floor. "
Her
shall like that even better!
He-he!"

Maggie waited until Liz's laughing fit had subsided.

"Speaking of that, have you got
anything that can put the lead in a man's pencil?"

"Yes," Liz said, sharp, "and I know who you wants it
for!"

Poor Ash, thought Maggie, to be
spoken about like this. But she believed she could help, and Liz did have this
uncanny
intuition .
..

The talk of gifts reminded Maggie she'd brought a
bottle of sherry for Liz. She'd left it in the car, so she sent Amy off to
fetch it, while she herself went to use the lavatory, a cold, cobwebby brick
outhouse at the bottom of the garden.

Sam slipped unnoticed behind the
curtain into Liz's pantry. The dusty fabric of the curtain closed behind him,
with a silent jingling of the brass rings suspending it from the rail. Liz had
told him to keep out, he knew. But he wanted to take a look.

It was cool in the pantry. Cool and
quiet. He sat on the stone floor and looked up from floor to ceiling.
Layer after layer of shelves, groaning to capacity.
Bottles
and jars everywhere, innumerable, those nearest the ceiling gathering dust,
those resting on the cold stone floor collecting cobwebs. There were glass jars
and stone vessels; green bottles and brown; giant
Kilner
jars; enamel jugs and crock tubs; pots and
demi
-johns;
urns, flasks and vases and open-.topped cans; all jostling for position on the
shelves.

Some were unlabelled, some
hand-labelled, some with their original brand labels fading, peeling, sticky
from spillage. Those glass jars whose contents he could see were stuffed with
black and yellow beans, or jams or fruit preserves or exotic-coloured powders
and leaf branches.

Sam touched the stopper on a bottle
resting on the floor. The stopper fell off and went rolling between his feet
and along a phalanx of bottles standing at the back of the pantry. He moved to
fetch it, but was distracted by a sharp odour issuing from the unstopped
bottle. He put his nose to the bottle: it was like cherry pop, sweet, sugary,
but it stung his nose like the smell of disinfectant. He took a tiny swig, but
it tasted sour. It made his eyes water. He could see the scent streaming from
the bottle: a brown ribbon coiling in the air, passing under his nose and
moving slowly across the pantry.

And now the pantry was full of
smells. There were both familiar smells and smells he didn't know; rich,
pungent odours and sharp, spicy confections.
Garlic and
toffee.
Vinegar and vanilla.
Lemon
and malt.
Hundreds of smells, leaking from their glass
jars and bottles.
The air was full of dim-coloured thin ribbons of
scent, like party streamers travelling slowly through the air, looping,
tangling, drifting...

Suddenly a
movement, seen out of the corner of his eye.
A
scuffling in the back of the pantry.
Sam turned to look. Peering from
behind a stone bottle was a large grey rat.

It looked at him with shining black
eyes.
Deep black pools.
It lifted its fat head into
the air, vibrating its whiskers and baring cracked, yellow teeth for Sam to
see. Sam got a whiff of the animal, a hot, dirty stink of rodent. He tried to
turn his head away, but he was caught, mesmerized.

The rat moved forward from behind the
stone bottle, and Sam recognized, riding on its back and brandishing a match of
wood, a tiny lady he'd seen before. The one he'd seen in his garden riding the
rat.
The lady who'd stolen his doll.
The lady who had called him over the balcony in the shopping
arcade.

She had him. Sam wanted to call out, but
he was too afraid to move. Where was his mother? Where had Amy gone? He was
paralyzed. As soon as the lady appeared, there was a roaring in his ears, and a
quivering in the air stream. The ribbons of scent, still visible, shivered and
creased. The jars and the bottles on the shelves vibrated, thrumming with
energy, inching precariously toward the edge. The entire bottled contents set
up a din in his ears, until he looked up and saw shelf after shelf of trembling
jars and jugs and flasks and bottles threatening to topple.

And the contents of the jars had been changed. The
huge jar of black and yellow beans had become wedged full of live, angry,
buzzing wasps. The jar of leaf branches had become a tangle of black centipedes
waving their legs at him. A jar of fruit preserve had changed into a human
face, a boy's face, squashed into the jar, its nose and lips rammed up against
the glass like leeches, its eyes blinking slowly at him. They were all going to
fall.

And fall they did. First a glass jar
containing a white-hot star fell from the shelf and smashed on the stone floor,
sizzling caustically before it died. Bottles toppled, spilling pools of
bubbling, steaming blood. Then a jar smashed to the left of him, spreading
little boys' penises near his feet. The whole pantry was coming down around his
ears. The curtain behind him lashed open as the din got louder.

"Now then!
Now then!"

It was Old Liz, standing over him. She
sank her arthritic claws into Sam's shoulders. He looked up to see her above
him, her tongue thrust forward at astonishing length. Instantly she retracted
her tongue and spat something, a bean, with great velocity across the pantry.
The bean struck the rat. Its rider vanished instantly and the rat scuttled
away. The jars stopped vibrating, the coloured ribbons of scent disappeared.

Sam was white with fear. His face was
contorted in a scream he was too afraid to release. Liz pulled him to her and
he hugged her, burying his head in the folds of her old skirts, setting up a
wail and crying hysterically now.

"Hush then. Hush then. Now you
knows
. Now you
knows
what's in
Liz's pantry." She brushed his hair gently. "And now
we
knows
, don't we. We
knows
this
little one is
overlooked,
don't we? But we won't say anything, will we?
'
Cos
she's got enough to be reckoning, your mother,
now ain't she? Hush up now."

Sam pointed at the smashed jars of jam and
fruit on the stone floor. "I didn't do it," he blubbered, "I
didn't."

"We
knows
.
We
knows
who did it. Hush up afore your mammy comes
in."

Liz looked behind her and saw Amy staring
at them. She was holding the bottle of sherry she'd fetched from the car.

"You saw?" said Liz.

Amy nodded.

"Well, you saw it done. Now you keep
it hid, little miss. Keep it here," Liz tapped the side of her nose,
"and not here," she said, tapping her lips.

Amy nodded again.

"And when the time comes, you just
remember Old Liz, see?"

Maggie returned to find them standing over
the mess in the pantry. "What's been going on here?"

"Nothing to worry
on.
We've had a little accident."

"Oh, Sam!
Let me clear it up, Liz.
For God's sake, Sam."

"Don't blame the lad. There's a rat
in there as scared him."

She turned Maggie back with her hand.
Maggie made to insist, but the astonishing strength of Liz's grip prevented
her. "Any clearing up and I'll do it. You leave that alone."

Liz sat back in her chair under the clock,
and Maggie was surprised to see how Sam was clinging to her. Within moments
he'd fallen asleep in her arms and Amy was settled at her feet. Maggie had the
feeling that events beyond the breaking of a few jars had happened, but she
couldn't tell what.

"Where were we? I
knows
.
We were talking about Ash," Liz said in a low voice.
"And
about the lead in his pencil."

"Yes," said Maggie.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Alex collected Sam from De
Sang's
clinic one afternoon, to be
presented with an envelope which, De
Sang assured him, contained his final report on the boy. Sam was sitting in
the consulting room, drawing with wax crayons.

"Final?" said Alex.

"Sam doesn't need to spend
any more time here. You'd only be wasting your money."

"But I thought his behaviour had been improving lately."

De Sang looked sceptical. "Read the
report. At this stage, a good childminder will work out a lot cheaper."

"But what are we supposed to do?"

"It's all in the report." Alex
made to tear open the brown envelope. "I prefer you to discuss it with
your wife," De Sang told him. "Then if nothing's clear, come back to
me and I'll go through it with you. But you won't need to."

Alex was taken aback by the abruptness of
it all. He didn't know what to say. De Sang called Sam over. "Captain
Hook!" he said, and Sam happily waddled off to get his coat. "Of
course," De Sang went on, "if you're keen to spend your money, we'll
happily keep Sam—at the usual rates."

"No, no," said Alex, and within
a few minutes he was walking away from the clinic with Sam trotting happily at
his side, wondering whether De Sang had just abused him or done him a favour.
When he got home, he opened the envelope and pulled out the typed report. It
said:

Report on Samuel Sanders prepared
by
Dr James De Sang

Playing games.

After observing Sam on a
number of occasions I have ar
rived at the following understanding of his behaviour.

Sam is a healthy little
boy, who like all children enjoys play
ing games. Games are
very important. For children they are the
means by which they come
to understand social behaviour. Sam
has reached the stage of development at which
these social games come into being.

In this sense Sam is
learning the rules that govern life. These
rules and morality
are
actually the same thing. It's all about beh
aviour which is
acceptable, and behaviour which is not. Morality is a game. It's distinct from
play, but it's still a game.

Up
until about the age of three children do not adhere to the rules.
After this time, they might imitate rules without understand
ing them, and will
often change them to suit their own interpretation of the game. By the time
the child is seven, it will usually
begin
rigidly to adhere to the rules in a genuine social manner.

Sad, isn't it? Sad, I
mean, that we lose this capacity simul
taneously to interpret whatever's going on in
a number of different ways.

But that's life. Sam,
however, shows no sign of imitating the
rules (the second stage
I mentioned above). This is what his par
ents tell me.

Now, I find that when Sam is in my clinic, he
is very happy to imitate the rules. Not only that, I find him a very bright,
creative little boy willing to invent rules to be shared. These perfectly
healthy signs lead me to conclude that his environment may not be providing him
with the best model for behaviour.
Here in
the clinic we PLAY THE GAME. We try to say what we
mean and mean what we say to Sam. We find he
responds well.

His unwillingness at home to imitate the
rules and instead
to display defiance, aggression,
violence, and hysteria (again as
his
parents tell me) indicates to me that his model at home is of
someone
NOT PLAYING THE GAME.

Since it is important
for Sam to at least imitate the rules, I suggest that his behaviour at home
would be improved if all were
to PLAY THE GAME.

Hard,
isn't it? But again, that's life.

I'm being as direct as
I can here, because I know I'm ad
dressing intelligent people. To do otherwise
would, after all, be playing quite a different game.

De Sang had signed his name at the foot
of the report. Also enclosed was an invoice.

Alex dropped the report on the
table and ran a hand through his hair. He picked up the telephone and dialled.
A strange voice came on the line, and he asked for Maggie to be fetched from
her room. "Can you get over here?" he asked her.

Maggie read the report for a second
time before folding it and handing it back to Alex. He snatched it from her and
slung it across the room. "The man's a fucking lunatic! He's the one who
should be certified! Running around with his trousers down for three months to
come up with that! And do you see what he wants to charge? We're not paying,
that's for sure."

"No," said Maggie, "we must pay."

"You're joking! He won't get a
brass ring out of me. Who does the charlatan think he's trying to kid? He can
whistle for it!"

"It's as clear as a bell. And of course we have to pay him."

"Clear? What's clear? What do you mean clear?"

"The report is precise. De
Sang knows what he's talking about."

"I don't believe I'm hearing
this. The man is just taking the piss! He's laughing in his sleeve!"

Maggie looked into the fire. "The man is speaking
clearly and accurately from the heart," she said calmly. "He's
telling us there's nothing wrong with Sam. He's saying you and I are the ones
who have to grow up."

"Where are you going?"

"To the pub," said Maggie