Road Ends (15 page)

“Hi there, Tom,” she’d say, teasingly, cutely, nauseatingly, every time she saw him. “I saw you out’n the snowplough this morning. I waved but you din’t even see me.”

Or, “What’s so interestin’ in that old paper, Tom? Every time I see you you’re readin’ that old paper!
Every single time
!”

Did she know it wasn’t the same paper
every single time
? Quite possibly not.

Now he stood in the entrance hall hanging up his coat and prising off his boots as quietly as he could. He could tell it was Sherry rather than his mother in the kitchen by the sounds she made. His mother sounded as she looked, vague and forgetful. Her footsteps paused a lot. Retraced themselves. Paused again. Sherry crashed about in a way that reminded Tom of Megan in a bad mood, but at least in Megan’s case there had been something to show for it at the end of the day. Sherry did nothing, as far as he could see. The noise was just for show. He would have fired her after one day.

He stood in the entrance hall in his socks, undecided and annoyed. He could go up to his room, but it was freezing up there. She must be nearly finished—maybe if he moved the armchair around so that it was out of the direct line of sight from the kitchen door she would leave without noticing that he was home.
He crept into the living room and started to move the chair, then saw that Adam was crouched around the side of it, looking up at him with startled eyes. Since the day of their father’s outburst, Adam had claimed the two square feet of floor between Tom’s chair and the wall as his refuge whenever their father was home, but until now Tom hadn’t seen him there at any other time. Did it mean he was afraid of Sherry? The thought came to him in a violent rush that if he ever had reason to think Sherry was being unkind to Adam
in any way
, he would grab her by the hair and throw her out the door. The savagery of the thought took his breath away. It was as if it had been lying in wait in some dark cave inside him and had suddenly burst out.

“What are you doing?” he whispered to Adam.

Adam looked at him, eyes wide. “Nothing,” he whispered back.

“Has she been mean to you?” Tom jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen.

Adam shook his head.

“Why are you hiding in there, then?”

“I don’t like her,” Adam said. Then looked anxious, as if such an answer might not be allowed.

Tom suppressed a snort of laughter. “Neither do I. Why don’t you go up to Mum’s room?”

She would be in bed—she always lay down in the afternoon even if there wasn’t a new baby—but probably not asleep.

“She’s with the baby.”

“That doesn’t matter. You can be in there too. Mum won’t mind.”

Adam looked down. He rolled a blue and yellow dump truck back and forth along the edge of the rug. Tom felt frustration rising. Did his mother simply not
see
Adam? Could she not see that he was feeling displaced? Wouldn’t any normal mother be aware of that possibility, with the coming of a new baby?

He thought back over the arrival of his various brothers, trying to remember how his mother had behaved, but it had all been
different because Megan was there. He had a memory—many memories—of his mother drifting around with a baby curled between her breasts in a sling contraption she had devised in order to have her hands free. Probably she had been just as preoccupied then as she was now, but no one was aware of it because Megan, in her fearsomely efficient way, provided for all their needs. It came to Tom suddenly that his mother didn’t actually care for her children very much once they passed the baby stage. It was just babies she liked. Maybe that was why she kept having more.

Now he looked at his youngest-brother-but-one and reluctantly took pity on him.

“You can come up to my room with me until she goes,” he said, deciding not to risk staying downstairs. If Sherry spotted him she’d start talking to him, and the thought of it made his stomach turn. “Just this once. Understand?”

Adam nodded. He stood up quickly and gathered a few cars from his Matchbox fleet in his arms and the two of them crept up the stairs.

They sat on the bed. Adam ran his cars up and over the mountain ranges of the bedclothes. Tom stared at the wall, loathing Sherry Rutledge. He’d left his paper downstairs and didn’t have anything to read. The safe, smooth pattern of his day had been reduced to rubble. This is ridiculous, he thought. In his mind’s eye he saw himself and Adam, sitting side by side on a bed in a freezing cold room. Hiding from the hired help. How absurd could you get? He should go downstairs, tell her to get out and from now on to come in the mornings like she was supposed to. But that would mean talking to her.

Something was gnawing at the edges of his mind, demanding attention. It was a smell. A bad smell. He looked around the room trying to trace the source and found it right beside him. Adam.

Tom looked at him properly, saw that his hair was matted, glued down with something or other, possibly snot. There was
food encrusted around his mouth, his ears were disgusting, and he was wearing pyjamas with a sweater on top, socks that didn’t match and no shoes. Plus he stank. There was no other word for it.

“How long is it since you had a bath?” Tom demanded, still keeping his voice low.

Adam looked up at him guiltily.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Tom said impatiently. “I just want to know when you last had a bath. Have you had one since the baby was born?”

Adam thought about it. Shook his head.

How long ago was that? Three weeks, more or less. Apprehension joined the frustration washing around in his guts.

“Has Mum been up today? Did she come downstairs this morning?”

Adam nodded.

“Did she get you lunch?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“Soup.”

Well, that was something, Tom thought. And at breakfast there had been cornflakes and milk and bread. So the basics were under control, which meant he didn’t have to worry about it. He wouldn’t worry about it. He refused to. So what if Adam smelled like a cesspit; he had his own bedroom—Megan’s old room—so no one had to sleep with him. No one ever died of needing a bath.

There was a sound from downstairs—the kitchen door opening. Tom found himself holding his breath. What if she came upstairs and saw the two of them sitting there? Who gives a shit? he told himself furiously. Who gives a shit what Sherry Rutledge sees or doesn’t see?

He could hear her walking about in the living room. Her footsteps crossed to the foot of the stairs. Adam was holding his breath too.

Abruptly, a door slammed—the outside door, and then the inner door—and Corey’s voice said, “—blood all over the snow! Go look if you don’t believe me!”

The boys, coming home from school.

“Blood doesn’t prove anything,
moron
.” (Peter’s voice, curdled with contempt.) “Someone could have had a nosebleed, or run over a dog or something, and anyway if she broke his
jaw
it wouldn’t
bleed
, jaws don’t
bleed
.”

Sherry’s voice, shrill and angry: “What’re you two doin’ comin’ in here in your boots? Now you’ve tracked snow and muck all over the floor!”

There was a brief pause during which Tom imagined Peter and Corey giving Sherry their dead-fish stares and then Peter said, “And anyway she wouldn’t be strong enough to break anybody’s jaw. She’s a
girl
, in case you didn’t know. She’s got
tits
.”

And Corey said, “I know she’s got
tits, stupid
, that’s why she hit him—he tried to grab her tits, right there in the
street
! And it
bled
’cause she knocked out some of his
teeth
. Teeth
bleed
, in case you didn’t know. She didn’t just slap him, she hauled off and
punched
him. She punched him right in the
face
and knocked him down and somebody had to go get Dr. Christopherson and everything. And she just
stood
there, looking down at him, and then her brother came and she got into his car and drove off. It was
fantastic
!”

A crow of delight from Peter: “You’re in
love
with her! I’m going to tell
everybody
, I’m going to tell the whole
world
!”

There was a crash and a yell and a violent thump and then Sherry’s voice shrieked, “You are the stupidest kids I ever seen in my
life
. I’m
goin’
, and if this house isn’t clean it’s you two’s fault!”

And there was the sound of her stomping across the room and into the entrance hall and a minute later the inner door slammed and then the outer door and she was gone.

Tom looked down at Adam, who was looking up at him, hope in his eyes.

“Saved!” Tom said, and Adam grinned at him and the two of them got up and went downstairs.

CHAPTER SEVEN

London, February 1966

Megan’s first job was selling cosmetics at Dickins & Jones on Regent Street but she only lasted a week. It wasn’t the makeup that got her down—she’d had a lipstick herself until it got stolen along with her suitcase—it was the day creams and night creams and the promises of eternal youth. She went back to Mrs. Jamison in Personnel and asked if there might be a job in some other department.

“What’s wrong with cosmetics, Megan?” Mrs. Jamison asked. “It is Megan, isn’t it?” She was in her late thirties, Megan guessed, and very smart in both senses of the word. She wore a crisp black trouser suit just like a man’s but it looked better on her.

“It’s the face creams,” Megan said. “They’re just …” She was on the point of saying “ridiculous”—why not call a spade a spade—when it occurred to her that Mrs. Jamison might use them herself. “… So expensive,” she finished lamely.

Mrs. Jamison nodded gravely. “Some of them are,” she agreed. “But you don’t need to buy them, Megan, you just need to sell them. If women want to spend their money on such things, it’s their choice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but …,” Megan said. She liked Mrs. Jamison and didn’t want to appear difficult. “… Sometimes they ask if the creams actually work, if they really keep you looking young. It doesn’t feel … it just seems …”

Mrs. Jamison looked as if she was trying to hide a smile. “You don’t have to say they work,” she said. “If you like, you can say you haven’t tried them yourself so you can’t say for certain. You don’t know they
don’t
work, now do you? Not everybody is lucky enough to have lovely skin like yours, Megan. Some women feel they need a little help with their appearance, especially as they get older. And if it makes them feel better, what’s wrong with that?”

It seemed to Megan there
was
something wrong with that, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what. “I think I’d rather sell something people actually need,” she said decidedly.

Mrs. Jamison studied her for a moment, the smile still lurking at the corners of her mouth. “How about clothes?” she said. “There’s a vacancy in women’s fashions. You’d agree that people need clothes?”

“Absolutely,” Megan said gratefully. “Especially in this weather.” It was still raining—it hadn’t stopped since she arrived—and it felt colder outside than she remembered ever being in Struan, despite the fact that the puddles she negotiated on her way to and from work weren’t even close to freezing.

Mrs. Jamison laughed, though Megan hadn’t meant to be funny. “Go and see Mrs. Timms,” she said. “First floor. Tell her I sent you.”

Women’s fashions got Megan down too, but she stuck it out for Mrs. Jamison’s sake and because she knew there wouldn’t be anything better. She had no objection to the clothes—not all of them were absurd and some of them, mostly the sweaters (“jumpers”
or “jerseys” they called them), she liked very much and wished she could afford. It was because a lot of the time there was nothing to do and doing nothing nearly killed her. On Saturdays and on Thursday evenings (Thursday was late-night shopping) the store was frantic but during the week there were sometimes more sales assistants than customers.

The other assistants, most of them her own age or younger, seemed quite happy chatting with each other for hours on end. They talked exclusively about clothes and boys and wore miniskirts and skimpy dresses with bright circles or squares all over them. When one of them bought something new the others got so excited they screamed.