‘It might be worth getting in touch with social services. Whether or not the mother is found or returns of her own accord. You said yourself that you had to take the children off the father’s hands last night.’
‘He’s… well, not simple, exactly…’
‘But you wouldn’t trust him to look after two young children?’
‘He’s upset at the moment. He has other things to think about.’
‘Well, I’ll talk to this… Tony, when he comes back. For the moment I could do with a statement from you.’
She started to take down various particulars, writing in a cramped style in a tiny leather notebook. The radio in her top jacket pocket kept crackling and bursting into harsh messages, filling the rain-darkened room with alien chatter, bringing an outer world into Fran’s house. She found that she resented this. She stole a glance at the kitchen clock. Frank would be clumsily attempting to dress the baby. Jeff would be watching with horrified fascination, glad to be grown up.
‘And so when was the last time you yourself saw Nesta Dixon?’
‘I…’ The question caught her out. Fran had no idea. Yet when one of the kids lost something, hair clips, crayons, the first thing she would ask, without even thinking it, was always, ‘Where did you see it last? Where did you leave it?’ As if things were always put down with tags, mental notes attached, and Fran herself moved through life tugged by strings of association connected to all her accoutrements. But that was being a mother. Yet get tied down. Of course she couldn’t remember everything, and much of her daily grief stemmed from her apprehension that she needed to. There were only so many things that she could keep in mind and Nesta wasn’t one of them.
Then up rose a sense of guilt. At having shouted, recently, brutally, at poor, vanished Nesta. It hit Fran plainly and her shame was all too evident on her face. The last time Fran had seen Nesta Dixon was when she threw her out of her kitchen. Over the milk upset, the cigarette-burned jacket. Had the silly cow topped herself because they never asked her to come on the girls’ night out?
She had been going to the Riverside for depression. Who knows how badly she might have taken it?
‘I saw her two days ago… exactly. We… argued. Well, I’d given her some stick for scrounging. Not scrounging exactly. Just a few bottles of milk.’
‘They were badly off, as a family?
‘Who isn’t?’
‘You aren’t making it any easier by making these generalisations. I’m asking whether the Dixons specifically were hard up, whether they were a problem family.’
‘How can you tell? What does that mean?’
The walkie-talkie gave a shriek and the policewoman was forced to reply. As she spoke she kept her eyes on Fran. How can she understand that thing? Fran wondered. It sounded like static to her, with only odd words emerging: ‘vagrancy’, ‘station’, ‘ma’am’. The policewoman snapped the radio off.
‘Tony Dixon is down at the station. He was picked up last night for vagrancy, sleeping under the Burn Lane bridge.’ Collins stood up, sighing heavily. ‘Some family! Not what you would really call a nice one.’
Fran held her door open. ‘I wouldn’t call them what you called them, either. I don’t know, maybe families with problems aren’t very nice. Goodbye. Let me know what happens.’
‘We will.’
Rose had made them both a cup of tea. She brought it up to have in bed. They were having a lie-in. Old people should take it easy, she said, laughing. She patted Ethan’s stump fondly and listened to him talk. The rain drummed at the window, making the floral pattern of her drawn curtains shift.
‘I knew a poet once. A lad in Germany, just after the war.’
‘Did you, love?’ She slurped her tea, fingering the gnarled mauve flesh rounding off his knee. She was becoming quite attached to this truncated limb. Everything was just right. Even the tea was perfect. She wished she had brought the pot.
‘This lad’s poems were good. I wonder what he made of himself.’
‘I used to read poems.’
‘He used to tell me that a poet is there to keep things alive. Like I say, this was just after the war. Keeping things alive was something we used to talk about a lot.’ He had shown Rose the photo of him and the lads, holding up the worn Nazi flag in a cobbled street. They had torn it down, they were grinning, guns relaxed on their shoulders. One of them, Rose thought dreamily, had been a poet.
Ethan continued, ‘He said a poet lives in this world to experience things, not think things. Just take things in, like bombs going off, falling in love, bread baking and things getting born. His poems keep them alive, all them things. I never saw him after we were demobbed. But I remember what he said then and I agreed. I could never write a poem, but I could keep things alive.’
‘It’d be nice if you wrote me a nice love poem.’
‘I learned about taxidermy. I’d keep things in their real forms, before death hit them. It was my little bit.’
‘There’s someone at the door.’ Rose inched forward on the bed, listening hard. ‘The letterbox is rattling.’ She got up and pulled on her dressing gown, a startling red. ‘I’ll go. You finish your tea.’ Before leaving the room she bent to give his leg an affectionate peck. Ethan was far away.
Fran was puzzled. ‘What’s a dog man?’
‘God knows,’ said Jane. They were standing by the bus shelter, Fran holding the baby. ‘I thought I’d better mention it.’
‘I don’t know whether we should listen to anything that bairn says. Bless her deprived heart and all that, but —’
‘I’ve left her at playschool. She should have gone to her real school but we were late. She seems happy enough back with the young ‘uns.’
‘That copper was on about getting social services in.’
‘Might be for the best.’
‘How can you say that? You
