Winter: from the passenger seat Al turns her face towards the lighted windows of a school. Children’s drawings are pinned up, facing away from her: she sees the backs of triangular angels, with pointing frosted wings. Weeks after Christmas, into the new year, the cardboard stars still hang against the glass, and polyester snowflakes fall dryly, harmlessly down the inside of the panes. Winter and another spring: on the A12 towards Ipswich the lamps overhead burst into flower, their capsules splitting; they snap open like seedpods, and from their metal cups the rays of light burst out against the sky.
One day in early spring Alison looked out over the garden, and saw Morris squatting in the far corner, crying—or pretending to. Morris’s complaint about the garden was that, when you looked out the window, all you could see was turf, and fence, and him.
They had paid extra for a plot backing south. But that first summer the light beat in through the French windows, and they were forced to hang voile panels to protect themselves. Morris spent his time sequestered in these drapes, swathed in them; he did not care for the light of the sun or the unshaded moon. After the idiot from the gardening service, they had bought their own mower, and Colette, complaining, had trimmed the lawn; but I’m not grubbing about in flower beds, she said, I’m not planting things. Al was embarrassed at first, when the neighbours stopped her and offered her magazine articles about garden planning, and recommended certain television programmes with celebrity horticulturalists, that they felt sure she would enjoy. They think we’re letting the side down, she thought; as well as being sexual deviants, we don’t have a pond or even decking. Morris complained there was no cover for his nefarious activities. His mates, he said, were jeering at him, crying “Hup! Hup! Hup! Morris on parade! By the left, quick march; by the right, quick march … . Fall out! Morrr-iisss, report for special fucking kitchen duties and licking ladies’ shoes.”
Al sneered at him. “I don’t want you in my kitchen.” No chance, she thought; not amongst our hygienic granite- look worktops. There is no crack or corner and there is no place to hide in our stainless-steel double oven, not without the risk of being cooked. At her mum’s house in Aldershot the sink had an old-style wooden draining board, reeking, mouldy, sodden to the touch. For Morris, after he passed, it had been his natural home. He insinuated himself through the spongy fibres and lay there breathing wetly, puffing through his mouth and snorting through his nose. When this first happened she couldn’t bear to do the washing up. After she had left it for three days in a row her mother had said, “I’ll have you, young lady,” and came after her with a plastic clothesline. Emmie couldn’t decide whether to lash her, or tie her up, or hang her: and while she was deciding, she wobbled and fell over. Alison sighed and stepped over her. She took one end of the clothesline and drew it through her mother’s half-closed hand until Emmie yielded the last foot, the last inch. Then she took it outside and hung it back, between the hook driven into the brickwork and the sloping post that was sunk into the grass.
It was twilight, a moon rising over Aldershot. The line was not taut, and her amateurish, womanly knots slipped away from their anchors. Some spirits fluttered down onto the line, and fluttered away again, squawking, when it dipped and swayed under their feet. She threw a stone after them, jeering. She was only a girl then.
At first, Morris had mocked the new house. “This is posh, innit? You’re doing very well out of me, ducks.” Then he threatened her. “I can take you over, you cheeky bitch. I can have you away airside. I can chew you up and spit you out. I’ll come for you one night and the next day all they’ll find is your torn knickers. Don’t think I’ve not done it before.”
“Who?” she said, “Who have you taken over?”
“Gloria, for one. Remember her? Tart with red hair.”
“But you were earthside then, Morris. Anybody can do it with knives and hatchets but what can you do with your spirit hands? Your memory’s going. You’re forgetting what’s what. You’ve been kicking around too long.” She spoke to him roughly, man to man, as Aitkenside might: “You’re fading, mate. Fading fast.”
Then he began to coax her. “We want to go back to Wexham. It was a nice area in Wexham. We liked going down Slough, we liked it there because we could go down the dog track, where the dog track used to be. We liked it because you could go out fighting, but here there ain’t the possibility of fighting. There ain’t a bit of land where you can set up a cockfight. Young Dean enjoys nicking cars, but here you can’t nick ’em, these buggers have all got alarms and Dean don’t do alarms, he’s only a kid and he ain’t got trained on alarms yet. Donnie Aitkenside, he says we’ll never meet up with MacArthur if we stay around these parts. He says, we’ll never get Keef Capstick to stick around, Keef he likes a bit of a roughhouse and the chance of a ruckus.” Morris’s voice rose, he began to wheedle and whine. “Suppose I got a parcel? Where’m I going to keep me parcel?”
“What kind of parcel?” Al asked him.
“Suppose I got a consignment? Supposing I got a package? Supposing I had to keep guard on a few packing cases or a few crates. To help out me mates. You never know when your mate is going to come to you and say, Morris, Morris old son, can you keep an eye on these for me, ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies?”
“You? You don’t know anything but lies.”
“And if that happens, where am I going to keep ’em? Answer me that, girl.”
Alison told him, “You’ll just have to say no, won’t you?,” and Morris said, “Say no, say no? Is that a way to treat a mate of yours? If old stringbean asked you, keep this package for me, would you refuse her, would you say, Colette, me old mate, no can do?”
“I might.”
“But what if Nick asked you? What if old Nick himself was to come to you with a proposition, what if he was to say, cut you in on this my friend, trust me and I’ll see you right, what if he was to say, least said soonest mended; what if he was to say, I’d regard it as a special favour?”
“What’s Nick to me? I wouldn’t cross the road for him.”
“Because Nick, he don’t ask you, he tells you. Because Nick, he hangs you from a tree and shoots off your kneecaps, I’ve seen it done. Because you don’t say no to Nick or if you do you’re bloody crippled. I seen him personally poke out a man’s eye with a pencil. Where ’is eye would be.”
“Is that what happened to MacArthur? You said he only had one eye.”
A jeering, incredulous look spread over Morris’s face. “Don’t play the innocent wiv me,” he said. “You evil baggage. You know bloody fine how his eye got took out.” He headed, grumbling, for the French windows and wrapped his head in the curtain. “Tries it on wiv me, plays the innocent, fucking ’ell it won’t wash. Tell it to Dean, try it on some kid and see if it will wash wiv him, it won’t wash wiv me. I was there, girl. You claim my memory’s gone. Nothing wrong with mine, I’m telling you. Could be something wrong with yours. I don’t bloody forget his eye springing out. You don’t forget a thing like that.”
He looked frightened, she thought. Going up to bed, she hesitated outside Colette’s room, Bed Two with en- suite shower. She would have liked to say, I am lonely sometimes, and—the brute fact is—I want human company. Was Colette human? Just about. She felt a yawning inside her, an unfilled space of loss, as if a door in her solar plexus were opening on an empty room, or a stage waiting for a play to begin.
The day Morris said he was going, she could hardly wait to tell people the news. “He’s been called away,”
