Shadow Play (11 page)

 

M
argaret Mellors sat in the doctor's waiting-room at twelve-thirty, wondering who would go in next. She knew her own turn in this never-ending queue had been delayed for an emergency: she had been asked if she minded, which was an unusual courtesy, and out of habit, she had said, ‘Of course I don't,' but she did. She had lost her faith in medical expertise when Jack had been dying, but she had never ceased to regard doctors as God. Even if they did not know what made a sick man sick, they surely had the last word over many things, police, fire engines and madness. They told you what to do and they gave orders to multitudes, and that was why she was here. Margaret never thought of her own long-delayed treatment, six weeks' wait for every appointment, the wilful continuation of her own disability while she waited one year, two years for a new hip; she still saw a doctor and smiled as if he or she could alter the world, and she still gave up her place in the queue, composing in her mind a series of apologies for being there at all.

‘I'm sorry to bother you, but …'

‘Yes, that's what I'm paid for. How can I help?' A strained smile from a young woman who had listened to her fill of winter casualties. Carmen something, her name was. Margaret preferred doctors to be middle-aged men, they were better fitted for their deity, but why oh why did she never ask, and why did she feel so wretchedly tongue-tied? As if her pension was charity and this white-coated waif a grand inquisitor.

‘Well, I wondered …'

‘Let's have a look.' She had a look, tutted, wrote on a pad.

‘It's been a long time, hasn't it? You'd better go back and see the consultant …'

‘Actually,' said Margaret, gathering courage in the panic-stricken knowledge that she would be out of the door in thirty seconds if she didn't, ‘I can live with the stick. It was something else.' The doctor smiled encouragingly, sat back, unoffended by this oblique approach.

‘It's my neighbour.' Having got this far, Margaret could only continue to blurt it out. ‘I'm worried about him. He hears voices. He sings a lot and he told me yesterday his favourite place was the graveyard. He's mad you know, well, he's always been a bit mad, but now he's madder. He frightens the children.' The patient smile of the doctor was fading and Margaret's message was fading too: she could not bring herself to say Logo was dangerous, correction, might be dangerous.

‘How does he frighten the children?' The doctor's voice was sharper.

‘I don't know. He chases them I think, he's always looking for his daughter … They keep taking him to court, but nobody ever asks me.'

‘Well, the police know all about it, then. Does he have a job?'

Margaret nodded. The white coat relaxed visibly. ‘They must know about it too, I suppose. Have you spoken to the police?'

Margaret leapt, as if the doctor had spoken an obscenity. ‘Oh, I couldn't do that. I wondered … I wondered if you could send someone round to him.'

‘Well, Mrs …' she looked hurriedly at the notes, ‘Mellors … I just don't think I can do that. He wouldn't come in and see me, would he? No? I didn't think so. Are you sure he's registered with this practice? Well, you try and persuade him to come in, will you? Only it has to be voluntary, or not at all. Look, I'll put you in touch with Social Services, see if they have any ideas.'

 

N
o, they did not, and yes, he was getting madder. Banging about in his own home these last three nights, weeping and wailing in his kitchen. For the first time, Margaret had hopes that he would get arrested again, and attract some attention. She met patience without comprehension whenever she complained, but then she was not quite telling the truth, and when invited to exaggerate the eccentricities she described, she could only minimise them. One thing she understood clearly was that there was no provision for those in the limbo land he occupied of the half mad, half dreadfully sane, and there she was, a second-class citizen, an elderly woman, part disabled but smelling sweet. They looked at her as if madness was contagious; until she began to think it was.

She did not, could not, tell anyone about the suitcase.

 

M
argaret Mellors trudged the dim route home on a grey afternoon, promising herself she would light a fire. Down the alleyway, the last light already fading, she wondered how anyone could endure the cold without a fire. The landlord had blocked up her own years ago: with Logo's help, she had unblocked it and the thought of that and all the firewood he brought her, made her feel guilty. When she opened the door, there was a letter on the mat. First-class post, such extravagance. The writing had a vague familiarity. She turned the envelope over in her hand, postponing the excitement until her hands began to tremble and she put it to one side while she lit the fire. When the kindling wood began to crackle, she tore open the letter and read the single sheet within, flushed with pleasure and the light of the flames. ‘Oh my dear,' she kept murmuring to herself, ‘oh my darling dear.' Four years without even a note, and her darling writing now, oh, my dear. She found it difficult to let go of the letter: it simply could not be consigned to the hidden boxes of other letters, it had to remain visible as a constant reminder of its tidings. With great reluctance, Margaret finally placed the letter along with the other in the drawer where she kept her kitchen knives.

That way she could look at it again and again.

 

A
t six o'clock on Friday moming, someone rang and rapped on the grim doors of the old hospital. The bell sounded in the night watchman's room where he locked himself in with his TV and the phone every evening and all day Saturday and Sunday, neglecting to patrol since he found the confusion of stairs, corridors and ludicrously insecure exits peculiarly eerie: there were rumours of a ghost. Nothing here but paper anyway. Nor did he obey the stricture to note in a book the names of members of staff who sought entry outside office hours. Sometimes they came late at night, especially the fraud teams on the first floor, forewarning him by telephone so he knew to be by the door as they sped in and out with armfuls of forgotten files required for the next day, but it was rare for anyone to arrive so early in the morning.

The person on the other side of the door, stamping feet in the cold, smiled, waved an office pass and disappeared upstairs with all the swift ease of total familiarity. The watchman shrugged and fell back to dreaming of breakfast.

 

T
hree floors up, a feminine, well-manicured hand turned on the computer. There was no code for entry into its realms of information introduced by the surge of power. The hand tapped out in quick succession the serial number of a file already retrieved. The fingers shifted the burden of paper, deleted the last line from the screen which described a date of trial and the necessity to warn witnesses, and added instead, ‘No Further Action: Withdraw summons … Defendant now deceased.' For the next file, the hands simply deleted the whole text. For the next, the finger paused and the hands massaged one another, still cold. A fastidious piece of destruction. Redwood was right: software made life easier. Then with equally neat footsteps, the person concerned went down the innumerable stairs to the basement to take an alternative exit, shoved up a sash-window down there, next to the boiler room, humming. There was less chance of being remembered if one did not pass the doorman twice.

 

H
elen West, trying to think of other things than the constant queasiness, dredged her memory for nicer times. Thinking of cases at 3 a.m. was reminiscent of counting sheep and often worked, but at the moment it hardly sufficed to blot out the other thoughts which had surfaced from nowhere with alarming speed. Such as where, among the clutter of her colourful possessions, she would house a baby, let alone a child? These reflections, passing through with dramatic speed, induced sensations of panic which nothing could cure, so she rose, showered and encased her hot body in cool clothes. Normality, the continuance of life as it was before, danced before her eyes like a tantalising vision.

Helen caught sight of her face in the newsagent's window as she waited for a bus, and that was normal, with the eyes and nose still in the same place. But she found herself standing back from the crowd, avoiding contact as if there really was something, for once, worth preserving from crush or contagion. She did not like herself much. Then she thought of Bailey as a father.

Squashing into the seat next to her was a young woman, pale and enormous, balancing her workday bag on the rock of her pregnant abdomen against which her coat strained. Helen made more room and stared ahead. Like a person counting sheep.

 

T
he graveyard was never closed. There was no need, despite the disturbing tendency in recent years to steal the stone angels. The late-Victorian church stood like a monument to disbelief, the small congregation rattling inside, but the graveyard took the corpses of faithful and faithless alike into soft earth which turned easily on the spade in summer. In the absence of a creed, interment in consecrated ground often appealed more than the queue at the distant crematorium. Logo could see benefits in both and did not much mind. He could clear the leaves as easily anywhere, but he found the graveyard rewarding and he liked the fact he knew so many of the recent names. There were dead flowers, souvenirs of the children from the junior school beyond the gates: and among the earliest, forgotten tombs, were Coca-Cola cans and empty cider bottles. He liked that. It added a little something to the place and confirmed his own usefulness.

Fifty-five years old, still young in comparison to these dead with their lead-etched names on stone. Logo felt healthy. He had loved this site as long as he had known it. By eleven that morning, there was a misty sun, glowing rather than shining behind the blanket of grey sky, giving a diffuse light which created no shadows but warmed the ground. Logo always marvelled at the gravediggers, stopped to watch them now. They dug in sequence along preordained lines with little space allowed in between each grave. Raw January, post Christmas, was the busiest time of year and their method was always the same. No measurements, rulers or spirit-levels, they dug out their troughs with automatic precision and no more modern conveniences than huge, sharp shovels, but they grumbled about the frost. The earth here had been turned, freed of rubble and thus softened, but the task was still hard.

The regular shovellers were unused to an audience: people tended to stay away, but there was the occasional macabre eccentric, Logo the least favourite. His interest bordered on the unhealthy, his jokes were vile and his habit of beginning the funeral service even while they dug was unnerving.

‘Asses to ashes, dust to dust. If the Lord won't save you the devil must,' he quipped, squatting on his haunches beside them.

‘Oh shut it, will you, Logo,' said the younger man.

‘All right,' said Logo. ‘I'll sing if you insist.' His voice passed over their heads, defeating the sound of distant traffic.

‘Spare oh God, thy suppliant groaning!

Through the sinful woman shriven

Through the dying thief forgiven,

Thou to me a hope has given …'

The older man turned round, raised a hand. Logo stopped his singing.

‘If you don't shut it, Logo, I shan't be able to give you a cigarette.' He was more diplomatic than his companion.

‘Who's dead this time?' Logo asked cheerfully, accepting the bribe.

‘I don't know. Why should I?' said the gravedigger. ‘I just get the message, dig one. A new one, I mean. Which means, don't dig up an old one to put someone in on top. Might be anyone. But I tell you, there're bound to be two or three more in the next fortnight.'

They never seemed to know for whom they dug, or care for whom the bell had tolled. They were as immutable as the graveyard itself where the gravestones were practically identical from one decade to the next, no innovations, no plastic, only stones the same shape as always with the same words and sentiments. The richer or the guiltier of the mourners had marble, but it all went grey in time.

‘Why do you say that?' Logo asked with his bird-like curiosity.

‘Say what?' The gravedigger had forgotten his prognostications about local death. ‘Oh, I just know. It's Christmas kills them. Their families, probably. Bugger off, will you!'

Logo obeyed, not in deference to commands, but because he so wished. His boots scuffed the edge of the soft earth the diggers had displaced and he left his footprints with satisfaction. Look where I've been, he told himself. Look where I've been.

 

H
e set off on the day's perambulations with his trolley, the cumbersome old brute, obscurely satisfied, pausing by another grave several rows back and saluting a headstone which commemorated the death of an Angela Jones four years ago. He had known Angela, nice woman from Legard Street, died of cancer you know, a shame, and her only ninety-four, the bane of her relatives who had moved to another city to get away. Logo chuckled, oh, he felt youthful today. From beyond the road at the left gate, he heard children going to school, the end of the Christmas holidays signalled by their shrieks and yells. Logo sat on the grave nearest the gate. He felt for the Bible in his pocket, but did not take it out, determined to stay still until they had all gone indoors. He quoted, out of context, the way he always did, those chunks of the Bible which stuck in his head without rhyme or reason. Logo took no lessons from the Bible, only told himself he did, but isolated verses were merged and burned into his mind.

‘“I will send wild beasts among you,”' he droned quietly, ‘“which will rob you of your children, and your highways shall be desolate. And the flesh of your daughters shall you eat. And the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase you, and you shall flee as fleeing from a sword, and you shall fall where none pursueth.”'