you were saying.”
It was getting late, the summer evening was fading, and the old bus shelter felt musty and damp after a recent thunderstorm. So I didn’t have the head to go into why it mattered so much. And though I did just drop it and carry on with the discussion we’d been having, the atmosphere had gone chilly, and could hardly have helped us get through the difficult matter in hand.
But to explain what we were talking about that evening, I’ll have to go back a little bit. In fact, I’ll have to go back several weeks, to the earlier part of the summer. I’d been having a relationship with one of the veterans, a boy called Lenny, which, to be honest, had been mainly about the sex. But then he’d suddenly opted to start his training and left. This unsettled me a little, and Ruth had been great about it, watching over me without seeming to make a fuss, always ready to cheer me up if I seemed gloomy. She also kept doing little favours for me, like making me sandwiches, or taking on parts of my cleaning rota.
Then about a fortnight after Lenny had gone, the two of us were sitting in my attic room some time after midnight chatting over mugs of tea, and Ruth got me really laughing about Lenny. He hadn’t been such a bad guy, but once I’d started telling Ruth some of the more intimate things about him, it did seem like everything to do with him was hilarious, and we just kept laughing and laughing. Then at one point Ruth was running a finger up and down the cassettes stacked in little piles along my skirting board. She was doing this in an absent-minded sort of way while she kept laughing, but afterwards, I went through a spell of suspecting it hadn’t been by chance at all; that she’d noticed it there maybe days before, perhaps even examined it to make sure, then had waited for the best time to “find” it. Years later, I gently hinted this to Ruth, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, so maybe I was wrong. Anyway, there we were, laughing and laughing each time I came out with another detail about poor Lenny, and then suddenly it was like a plug had been pulled out. There was Ruth, lying on her side across my rug, peering at the spines of the cassettes in the low light, and then the Judy Bridgewater tape was in her hands. After what seemed an eternity, she said:
“So how long have you had this again?”
I told her, as neutrally as I could, about how Tommy and I had come across it that day while she’d been gone with the others. She went on examining it, then said:
“So Tommy found it for you.”
“No. I found it. I saw it first.”
“Neither of you told me.” She shrugged. “At least, if you did, I never heard.”
“The Norfolk thing was true,” I said. “You know, about it being the lost corner of England.”
It did flash through my mind Ruth would pretend not to remember this reference, but she nodded thoughtfully.
“I should have remembered at the time,” she said. “I might have found my red scarf then.”
We both laughed and the uneasiness seemed to pass. But there was something about the way Ruth put the tape back without discussing it any further that made me think it wasn’t finished with yet.
I don’t know if the way the conversation went after that was something controlled by Ruth in the light of her discovery, or if we were headed that way anyway, and that it was only afterwards Ruth realised she could do with it what she did. We went back to discussing Lenny, in particular a lot of stuff about how he had sex, and we were laughing away again. At that point, I think I was just relieved she’d finally found the tape and not made a huge scene about it, and so maybe I wasn’t being as careful as I might have been. Because before long, we’d drifted from laughing about Lenny to laughing about Tommy. At first it had all felt good-natured enough, like we were just being affectionate towards him. But then we were laughing about his animals.
As I say, I’ve never been sure whether or not Ruth deliberately moved things round to this. To be fair, I can’t even say for certain she was the one who first mentioned the animals. And once we started, I was laughing just as much as she was—about how one of them looked like it was wearing underpants, how another had to have been inspired by a squashed hedgehog. I suppose I should have said in there somewhere that the animals were good, that he’d done really well to have got where he had with them. But I didn’t. That was partly because of the tape; and maybe, if I have to be honest, because I was pleased by the notion that Ruth wasn’t taking the animals seriously, and everything that implied. I think when we eventually broke up for the night, we felt as close as we’d ever done. She touched my cheek on her way out, saying: “It’s really good the way you always keep your spirits up, Kathy.”
So I wasn’t prepared at all for what happened at the churchyard several days later. Ruth had discovered that summer a lovely old church about half a mile from the Cottages, which had behind it rambling grounds with very old gravestones leaning in the grass. Everything was overgrown, but it was really peaceful and Ruth had taken to doing a lot of her reading there, near the back railings, on a bench under a big willow. I hadn’t at first been too keen on this development, remembering how the previous summer we’d all sat around together in the grass right outside the Cottages. All the same, if I was headed that way on one of my walks, and I knew Ruth was likely to be there, I’d find myself going through the low wooden gate and along the overgrown path past the gravestones. On that afternoon, it was warm and still, and I’d come down the path in a dreamy mood, reading off names on the stones, when I saw not only Ruth, but Tommy, on the bench under the willow.
Ruth was actually sitting on the bench, while Tommy was standing with one foot up on its rusty armrest, doing a kind of stretching exercise as they talked. It didn’t look like they were having any big conversation and I didn’t hesitate to go up to them. Maybe I should have picked up something in the way they greeted me, but I’m sure there wasn’t anything obvious. I had some gossip I was dying to tell them—something about one of the newcomers—and so for a while it was just me blabbing on while they nodded and asked the odd question. It was some time before it occurred to me something wasn’t right, and even then, when I paused and asked: “Did I interrupt something here?” it was in a jokey sort of way.
But then Ruth said: “Tommy’s been telling me about his big theory. He says he’s already told you. Ages ago. But now, very kindly, he’s allowing me to share in it too.”
Tommy gave a sigh and was about to say something, but Ruth said in a mock whisper: “Tommy’s big Gallery theory!”
Then they were both looking at me, like I was now in charge of everything and it was up to me what happened next.
“It’s not a bad theory,” I said. “It might be right, I don’t know. What do you think, Ruth?”
“I had to really dig it out of Sweet Boy here. Not very keen at all on letting me in on it, were you, sweety gums? It was only when I kept pressing him to tell me what was behind all this
“I’m not doing it just for that,” Tommy said sulkily. His foot was still up on the armrest and he kept on with his stretching. “All I said was, if it
“Tommy, sweety, don’t make a fool of yourself in front of our friend. Do it to me, that’s all right. But not in front of our dear Kathy.”
“I don’t see why it’s such a joke,” Tommy said. “It’s as good a theory as anyone else’s.”
“It’s not the
Tommy said nothing and continued with his stretching. I wanted to come to his defence and was trying to think of just the right thing that would make him feel better without making Ruth even more angry. But that was when Ruth said what she did. It felt bad enough at the time, but I had no idea in the churchyard that day how far- reaching the repercussions would be. What she said was:
“It’s not just me, sweety. Kathy here finds your animals a complete hoot.”
My first instinct was to deny it, then just to laugh. But there was a real authority about the way Ruth had spoken, and the three of us knew each other well enough to know there had to be something behind her words. So in the end I stayed silent, while my mind searched back frantically, and with a cold horror, settled on that night up in my room with our mugs of tea. Then Ruth said:
“As long as people think you’re doing those little creatures as a kind of joke, fine. But don’t give out you’re serious about it. Please.”
Tommy had stopped his stretching and was looking questioningly at me. Suddenly he was really child-like again, with no front whatsoever, and I could see too something dark and troubling gathering behind his eyes.
