Whispers Through a Megaphone (19 page)

W
hile Miriam and Ralph are sleeping, the telephone rings. Usually it’s just Fenella, or someone wanting to know if Frances Delaney is at home. The people who ask for Frances are selling things, and Miriam knows this for certain because her mother only had one friend and his name was the headmaster.

It is not Fenella on the phone. It’s a man.

“Hi, is this Miriam Delaney?”

“It might be,” she whispers slowly, “or it might not. Are you aware that it’s one o’clock in the morning?”

“Is it? Oh God, I’m so sorry. I lost track of time. I—”

“Who is this please?”

“My name is Matthew Delaney.”

Now everyone’s a Delaney. Madness of a new kind. Does it ever stop?

“Are you about to tell me you’re my father?” Miriam says.

“Actually, I’m your brother.”

There is a long pause.

“Hello?” the man says.

Miriam takes a sharp intake of breath as though she is about to speak.

“Are you all right?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” she says.

“I think that’s a solid way to live,” he says.

“Why?”

“Better than being gullible.”

“You don’t know if I’m gullible or not.”

“That’s true.”

They sit there for a while, together and apart. She can hear noises in the background, like he’s moving his belongings from one place to another, books and magazines, that kind of thing. It’s a good guess, because he’s opening a sketchpad, putting it on his lap and letting the first few pages flop down over his knees. In his left hand, a phone; in his right, a stick of charcoal.

He’s more believable than Eric Delaney. Miriam couldn’t say why, he just is. Maybe this is a big scam and maybe it isn’t. She is curious and afraid. “Are you really my brother?”

“I’m your half-brother. You have another one too.”

“I have two brothers?”

“I’m twenty-one and Alfie is seven.”

Miriam tries to picture them, a man and a boy, connected to her in some way that has yet to be seen. She wonders which features they share, which characteristics, if any at all. “Do you have a mum?” she says.

“I do,” he says.

“Is she nice?”

“Most of the time.”

“Mine’s dead.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I thought both of my parents were dead. Now I’m supposed to believe one is alive.”

“It’s a mad world,” Matthew says.

Miriam remembers Fenella saying this once. She remembers her singing about finding it kind of funny, finding it kind of sad, then saying the whole of life was a bit like that, and she might put it on her gravestone.
Here lies Fenella Price. She found it all kind of funny, she found it all kind of sad
. Miriam takes the phone through to the living room, opens the curtains, sits on the sofa and puts a blanket over her legs. “Sometimes I think it’s too much,” she says.

“My dad’s a good man,” Matthew says, which seems like an ill-fitting response, but who is the judge of what fits and what doesn’t and what does a good fit look like?

“How do I know you’re who you say you are?” Miriam doesn’t really need to ask this question, because Matthew’s voice is unlike any voice she has ever heard. They are connected. She can feel it. There are some things you just know.

“Dad has your birth certificate.”

“Really?”

“He took it with him when you were a baby.”

A congested silence.

“What do you do?” she says.

“Do?”

“For money.”

“I work in a cinema.”

“You watch a lot of films?”

“Loads. I also draw sorrow and go on long bike rides.”

Miriam walks over to the window. She looks into the darkness, the bluish star-studded darkness. “I have a lot of sorrow,” she whispers.

“I’m sure,” he says, soft and deep.

“I used to work in a supermarket.”

“Did you like it?”

“I was on the deli counter.”

They talk about cheese, cold meats, what it’s like to work with the public. They discuss what his house is like (small) and what hers is like (dated but very clean). Miriam makes a hot chocolate, Matthew makes a Horlicks and they sit back down. The call goes deeper into the night until:

“I’d like to meet you,” he says.

“What about your dad?”

“
Our
dad.”

A pause. A sniff.

“Would you tell him?”

“Of course. Are you free today at all?”

Treacle strolls past the sofa. Miriam reaches down, makes a kissing sound, rubs her finger and thumb together, but Treacle ignores her. This cat is not a fan of Miriam Delaney, who looks at the cuckoo clock and imagines smashing it to pieces with her old hockey stick. This clock is partially to blame for everything that happened—it called time, hour after hour, without ever calling time. It was reliable and ineffectual, rather like her hockey stick, which lasted for years and never hit a ball.

“Today,” Miriam whispers.

“Why wait?”

“All right then. Where and when?”

Twelve miles away, a man is talking to his sister and she is right here, beside the window in the front room. She has been here all along.

I don’t know which is most terrifying, she thinks—believing you’re alone in the world, or discovering that you’re not.

T
he phone wakes him up and he lies in bed, listening. He looks at the alarm clock, it says 01.12 a.m., which can’t be good. Someone must have died, but who is there in Miriam’s life to die? Only Boo and Fenella, otherwise it’s all about the one who has returned: the
undead
.

Ralph remembers trying to play some silly zombie game on Sadie’s iPad, for which he showed zero aptitude. He was better at racing games, he said. He had never played a racing game, but how hard could it be?

He wonders how long it will take Julie Parsley to reply to his email. Was it even the
right
Julie Parsley? This anticipation feels good, like having something written on the calendar—an event, a plan, lurking in the future, inviting him to move towards it.

Julie Parsley, a lifelong insomniac wearing Moomin pyjamas, is staring at her laptop screen. She puts a Hotel Chocolat pistachio praline in her mouth. This email from Ralph Swoon came as a shock. Where did he find her email address? Can anyone find it? Is she a sitting duck, a target for stalkers and
crackpots, or is this just the way of the world?
Ralph Swoon, goodness me.
She saw him in B&Q at Easter but he didn’t see her. He was wandering around the shop with his wife, who looked more beautiful now than when Julie saw them ten years ago—
Much Ado about Nothing
, an outdoor performance in the park. Ralph has done well for himself, if one goes by appearances, which most people do.

Julie eats another chocolate and thinks for a long time. She doesn’t like meeting new people. All those questions going back and forth, not to mention all the inevitable answers. An information highway, most of it bullshit, let’s be honest, come on, we all know it. She finds it hard enough to relax with friends, let alone people she doesn’t know. Ralph is a stranger. His knowledge of her is out of date. They’re not teenagers any more. They’ve had shit to deal with. Piles and piles of shit.

She decides not to write about the piles of shit. Instead, she invites him to the Nordic Coffee House—her territory, her turf. A quick coffee and a pastry. It’ll be over in an hour. It’s the polite thing to do. It’s honouring a past that she can’t even remember.

He replies straight away, which unnerves her. She pictures him sitting in front of a screen in a dark room, which shouldn’t be unnerving, because this is precisely what she is doing. He says he’s off work, no commitments, any time is good,
as soon as possible?

Might as well get it out of the way, she thinks. It’ll be good to cross it off the list, even though it isn’t actually on the list yet. The list exists in her mind: Things I Have To Do That I Don’t Want To Do. Otherwise known as Daytime.

T
he taxi driver is
drunk
.

He is talking about St Ives again, saying he would buy every damn house, shop, gallery if he could, which would make him the
fucking King of St Ives
. He loves every inch of that place, but St Ives is a whore,
a filthy whore
, and when Alison asked why he was here instead of there she had no idea that she was pressing a button, flicking a switch. His disappointment, all over the dashboard. His despair, all over the passenger seat.

Now he is driving at fifty-seven miles per hour through a residential area. The front windows are open, and he can’t hear his passengers protesting behind him.

Sadie and Alison reach into their bags for their mobile phones but there’s no time to call the police. The car is swerving. The driver is shouting. They speed through four gardens and smash into a tree.

The driver jumps out, runs across the grass.

The surrounding houses begin to light up, windows and doors open, people rush outside. They were asleep, watching TV, arguing, making tomorrow’s packed lunch, having sex and,
in one case, reorganizing a knicker drawer by colour and style, and now they are standing in their porches and front gardens staring at a taxi, a bent tree, a man running away.

Alison opens the car door. Without thinking, she also starts to run.

Sadie doesn’t register this at first. She is looking under the passenger seat for her mobile phone, which flew from her lap when the car swerved and crashed. She hears the door open, hears footsteps, has a horrible sense that something precious has gone. She fumbles in the dark, reaching as far forward as she can until her fingers find something hard, something rectangular.

A man’s voice: “You all right, love?” He is peering in, looking at a woman with her head between her knees, assuming that she is badly hurt.

Sadie straightens up, puffs out air as if she were in labour, holds up her phone. “I’m okay,” she says, breathless, “but only just.” And this, she realizes at that moment, is the story of Sadie Swoon. She is always okay, but only just. And what happens when you are only just okay? People take no notice, no one rallies round, nothing happens. This is middle-of-the-road life, a life of moderation, checklists (
feed dog, pick Stanley up at six, buy padded bra
) and as many raw vegetables as possible to extend this life of moderation, to make the endurance test go on and on.

“I always thought of myself as subversive,” Sadie says. “What a
joke
.”

“Right,” the man says. He is wearing stripy pyjamas.

“I bought him flowers all the time. I was always in charge of the barbecue.”

“I see,” the man says. This woman is clearly concussed. She is babbling. He turns away for a second to beckon his wife with a frantic wave.

“I’m the most sociable person you’ll ever meet,” Sadie says, “and mostly I dislike other people.” She buries her face in her hands but the tears she is expecting don’t come. She is emotionally constipated, has been for as long as she can remember. She is
bunged up
. Must’ve been those bloody antidepressants. Do they make laxatives for the psyche? What’s the emotional equivalent of a prune? She looks up at the man, who has been joined by a woman in a burgundy dressing gown.

“I’ve called an ambulance, dear,” the woman says, leaning in to take a good look. She sees something in Sadie’s face, a kind of anguish, a desperation that makes those five words seem grotesquely inadequate. She tightens the belt of her dressing gown and gets in the car. “You’re not alone, dear,” she says, pulling the door shut.

Sadie examines the stranger’s expression—warm and full of pity. Where is Alison Grabowski, the one who was here first, just moments ago? She leans forward, trying to see past the stranger’s massive breasts, wide shoulders, enormous hair, but all she can see is the woman’s husband, who seems to be drawing circles in the air with a sparkler but there is no sparkler.

“He wants me to open the window,” the woman says, expelling warm breath that smells of brandy. “But I see no need.”

Sadie feels sick. The woman’s perfume, body and breath are filling up the car, eating the air. Soon they will both suffocate. This woman has the power to do that. She is the sort of person who would hold a pillow over someone’s face and then potter off to bleach some cups when the deed was done. Oh yes, Sadie is completely sure of this. She sneers and shakes her head. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says.

“You’re concussed, dear,” the woman replies, smiling. Her mouth seems to bulge as if she has too many teeth.

“No,” Sadie says. It’s the same
no
she uses on Harvey
when he pulls socks off the clothes horse and shakes them as if they were a rabbit. She opens the car door and gets out. An ambulance arrives, paramedics dive into the car and start assessing the woman in the burgundy dressing gown, and she goes along with it, she says I feel shell-shocked and strange, and her husband watches, knowing that his wife’s cumbersome tendency to snatch attention from anyone and everyone is gradually making him hate her—
really
hate her. She is the Pac-Man of middle-aged women, forever munching.
That’s
why her mouth seems to bulge—it’s full of what she has taken from other people and is incapable of digesting.

Sadie moves towards a small crowd on one of the front lawns. Huddled together in nighties, pyjamas, shorts and vests, they are watching Alison Grabowski, who is chasing the taxi driver from one immaculate lawn to the next. Someone says look at her go, she’s got balls that girl, but Sadie can’t tell where the voice is coming from.
Look at her go, she’s bloodywell got him, she’s on top of him. Give the girl a round of applause!

And she is. She is on top of him. It looks sexual but it isn’t (although one can never be sure).

“Quite a woman,” says the man in stripy pyjamas, whose Pac-Woman wife is now sitting in an ambulance with a blanket around her shoulders.

“Yes,” Sadie says, but the word breaks, splits in her mouth, tastes like metal.

The man hears it break. He checks his pockets for a tissue to give to this woman, but there are no pockets—just flappy pyjamas, big blue buttons, flannelette. He feels useless, underdressed.

A woman’s voice: “Are you crying?” It’s Alison. A word accidentally slips from her mouth: “Darling?” she says.

“I don’t cry,” Sadie says.