Dark Dance (30 page)

Rachaela looked at her. This had been on the cards from the very beginning. She was only surprised Isis had lasted so long.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Yeah. It’s a shame. But there’s never been much interest around here. Dozy hole. I’ve got a chance to go in with a women’s group up Manchester way. So I’m all right. But it means curtains for Denise and you. Will you be OK?’

‘Oh, I’ll find something else.’

‘Some skivvy’s job. Or running round after some bloody male in an office.’

‘Probably.’

‘I wish I could do something.’

‘How long?’ said Rachaela.

‘End of this month. It’s rotten timing. It’ll be Christmas next. But it will give you a bit more time with the kid.’

‘Yes.’

Relieved by unloading her bombshell, Jonquil began to move about the forlorn little shop, examining books.

The hot water pipes gurgled as they had done for ten years.

It was not the end of the world. Thanks to Emma’s years of extreme beneficence, Rachaela had managed to save a little, and now there was some interest which would tide her over, perhaps until the new year. The child was an expense, of course, but she seemed up to date with her garments, her school trips.

Lyle and Robbins were advertising for staff again. Perhaps that would do. Or there was the antique shop in Beaumont Street, only one flummoxed woman who was always shutting for ‘ten minutes’.

Not a problem.

Rachaela remembered how Mr Gerard had fired her, and how relevant and ominous it had been.

Things were different now. Or she was.

On Thursday, her half-day off from the shop, as Rachaela was sitting in her chair listening to Tchaikovsky ballet music, the door sounded.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh Mrs Day. It’s Miss Barrett. Perhaps you remember me?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘From Ruth’s school.’

‘Yes?’

‘I need to see you about something.’

Rachaela recalled Miss Barrett, just over a year ago, the scrubbed clean face and essential glasses. Terry Porter and his knee.

‘You’d better come up.’

Miss Barrett entered the flat in a strawberry-red coat with a white fur collar, a yellow wool hat and brown fur gloves without fingers. She carried a pink umbrella.

‘Oh, Mrs Day. So glad to catch you in.’

‘Please sit down.’

Miss Barrett sat in the chair, and Rachaela sat down on one of the hard chairs by the table.

Miss Barrett shed her gloves and hat.

‘What a nasty day. I shouldn’t be surprised if we were in for some more snow.’

‘What has Ruth done now?’ said Rachaela.

‘Oh dear. It’s always such a worry, this sort of thing,’ said Miss Barrett. ‘Mr Walker thought, as I’d come to see you before, it would be best if I came again. We don’t like to make too much of it. Unless it goes on, of course.’

‘What has Ruth done?’

‘It’s really what she hasn’t done. She hasn’t been coming to school, Mrs Day. I take it you haven’t been keeping her at home and just not sent a note? We must always have a note, you see. There’s a lot of colds about, I know.’

‘Ruth never gets colds.’

‘No. Well then I take it she isn’t here.’

‘She isn’t.’

‘Mrs Walker thinks that she saw Ruth in Woolworth’s.’

What a mundane place for the escapee to be. Why Woolworth’s? Sometimes when Rachaela shopped in the Saturday lunch-hour, Ruth went with her, and into Woolworth’s too, never showing a symptom of interest in the toys, sweets or loudly drumming music section.

‘Mrs Walker thinks that Ruth was trying on makeup,’ said powderless Miss Barrett, her unpainted eyes and lips wide with shock.

‘Perhaps she was,’ said Rachaela, for a moment almost intrigued. She herself had done something similar when she had played truant, but then she was thirteen or fourteen.

‘The thing is, Mrs Day, this is very serious. You must speak to Ruth and impress upon her that she has to come to school. She’s been absent several days this month. She has an important test next year, and she needs to pay attention. She’s very much a dreamer. A lot of talent in art, though some of her paintings, well. But she needs to pull her socks up. She must attend.’

‘I’ll speak to her.’

‘Ruth must come to school. If she doesn’t, Mr Walker will have to take further steps.’

‘I see.’

Miss Barrett was rouged after all by indignation.

Throwing her chances away,’ she said. School was very important, a life jacket in chaos. She looked actually frightened.

Rachaela had not offered her anything to drink, and let her go to the door unaided, pulling on her ridiculous gloves, until she looked like a parody of a bear.

‘And if she has to stay away,’ said Miss Barrett, ‘we really must have a note.’

Rachaela ate tomatoes on toast for lunch, and pictured Ruth eating her sandwiches on some wall or in a park.

She must finally have become bored with school. Rachaela knew she could read well but was virtually innumerate. This had been so in Emma’s day, and was so still, for once or twice Ruth had asked Rachaela some arithmetical question which Rachaela also found impossible to answer. Ruth had trouble even in adding up. ‘How many apples are there left?’ Rachaela had recently asked her. Ruth studied the bowl. ‘I don’t know, Mummy.’ There were seven. The child paid for things in shops by giving always a large coin, or a note. She would bring her loose change to Rachaela for translation into fifty-pence pieces and pounds.

Perhaps it was wrong to feel empathy with Ruth simply because she too had played truant.

Yet Rachaela saw the brief daylight ebb with a slight amusement, waiting for Ruth to appear punctually, as if just coming home from school.

The child manifested in the cold street. Rachaela thought of the day she had seen her in the snow, the day Emma had bowed out from their lives with urgent smiles. Poor useful Emma.

How different, now, was Ruth.

Her hair was no longer confined in plaits, but hung down her back to the base of her spine. It was thick and almost crudely black, with a shine on it like molasses. No hat any more, or gloves, the white long-fingered pianist’s hands playing with the buttons of her dark-blue coat. The satchel still there, incongruous. Despite this school bag of deceit, the white knee socks and little-girl shoes, Ruth was like a tiny woman on the street: a midget, quick rather than graceful, and with that strange white face of an elf.

When the flat door opened, Rachaela was sitting at the table.

‘Hallo, Ruth.’

‘Hallo, Mummy.’

‘Put your bag down, take off your coat, and come and sit here.’

‘What’s for tea?’

‘I haven’t thought about it.’

‘Can I have chips?’

‘You had chips yesterday.’

Ruth came to the table in her charcoal skirt, blue jumper and scarlet blouse. Rachaela allowed her to choose her own colours. She had, certainly, better dress-sense than Miss Barrett.

‘You haven’t been to school,’ said Rachaela.

Ruth looked at her, assessingly. She did not attempt to lie.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘Did you like it before?’

‘It was all right.’

‘And now it isn’t.’

Ruth said nothing.

‘Are the other children,’ said Rachaela, ‘bothering you?’

‘No.’

‘A woman came here today from the school. A Miss Barrett.’

‘Batty Barrett,’ said Ruth.

‘You were seen in Woolworth’s.’

‘Oh,’ said Ruth, ‘Why Woolworth’s?’

‘It was raining.’

‘What do you do when it doesn’t rain?’

‘I walk about,’ said Ruth. She paused, then said, ‘I go in the big graveyard and look at the stones.’ She added, ‘Sometimes I take a bus. I get lost. I always make sure I get back in time for tea.’

‘Yes I know.’

‘Are you going to say I have to go?’ said Ruth. She looked blank. She did not suspect Rachaela of complicity with the authorities, recognizing her as a fellow, though alien, outsider.

‘It depends what you want,’ said Rachaela.

‘I don’t want anything,’ said Ruth.

‘You’ll never get a smart job,’ said Rachaela. ‘I expect they’ve already told you about those.’

‘They said what did we want to be.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said a library lady.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘No.’

‘If you really don’t care,’ said Rachaela, ‘I’m not going to force you.’ She recollected her mother’s furious wobbling face:
‘You’ve got to pull yourself together. You’ll end up in the gutter. You go to school, do you hear me? I won’t be disgraced like that again, you bloody little beast.’

‘But we have to work something out,’ Rachaela said. ‘You’ll have to go in some of the time. When you want a day off tell me, I’ll write you a note.’

Ruth considered. Her privacy had been penetrated, but she seemed to accept the inevitability of this.

‘Will you?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right,’ said Ruth. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Rachaela sat looking at her eldritch elfin child. Was Ruth also like her?

‘Will spaghetti on toast do for tea?’

‘With cheese.’

‘With cheese.’

Rachaela got up and went to set out tins on the work-top in the kitchen. Ruth followed her and stood in the doorway.

‘What would my dad say about me not going to school?’

Rachaela checked. ‘I don’t think he’d give a damn.’

Ruth said, ‘Will I ever see him?’

Rachaela made herself look back at the white face of her child.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘He wouldn’t be interested, Ruth. I’m sorry.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I knew him. He wasn’t interested in me, either.’

‘But the grandfather and granny,’ said Ruth.

Your grandfather is also your father.

‘There isn’t any grandfather or granny. It’s just a big shapeless family of old people. You wouldn’t like them.’

But how could she be sure?

Ruth was in their image. Ruth had done what they did.

She must not try to picture Ruth in that house. The house which had faded to a ghost with the years, but still lingered there, a lump of fog, on the edge of her mind. The mirrors, the windows.

Ruth said, ‘I might like them. I don’t mind old people.’

‘They’re very far away.’

‘Couldn’t I go?’

‘No, Ruth.’

‘But I want to.’

How had the conversation veered into this? Rachaela put down the can opener and emptied the spaghetti into the saucepan.

‘No, Ruth.’

‘I dream about them,’ said Ruth.

Rachaela stopped what she was doing.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I dream of them in a big house. And I walk down a corridor and I go in a door, and they’re there.’

Obviously, through the years, Rachaela had let things slip. She must have done. The child had her fantasies, like any child.

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Ruth. I don’t want you anywhere near them, and that’s that.’

Keep away from the Scarabae.

Rachaela saw again her mother’s congested face.

Ruth said, ‘Why can’t I? Why not?’

Rachaela said, ‘They’re mad. They’re mad people. And they’re a sort of vampire. Or they think they are.’
Don’t say any more.

‘Vampire,’ said Ruth. ‘Like Dracula?’

‘Not like Dracula. They’re bad people.’

She stirred the saucepan, waiting for the next assault, which did not come. When she looked back, Ruth had retreated again, behind the screen.

I shouldn’t have said that.

Too late.

She had a vision of Adamus walking up the wall of the house in the black of the moon, his pale face lifted and a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. A sexual pang shot through her core, amazing her. After so long, after so much that was base and stupid, after
Ruth.

She put the bread under the grill, and her hands shook. From a decade of cobwebs and dyed glass she felt old leaf-like hands reach out and brush her.

The shop was bare, the books packed in boxes or sent away.

Denise was crying softly and fuzzily.

‘Come on, come on,’ said Jonquil. ‘Have some more wine.’

They sat drinking, perched on the wonky stools, as outside the non-customers, now excluded for ever, stalked past on the wet, dark pavement.

‘Do you remember that old lady who kept coming in for Roald Dahl, saying he was a woman?’ sobbed Denise.

‘What about that man who kept buying copies of
Fight the Good Fight
by Angela Truebridge?’

‘And the Angela Carter fiend?’

‘And that girl who never knew the author?’

They nodded reminiscently.

‘It’s been a funny old job,’ said Denise, and blew her nose. ‘I start at the Co-op next Monday, just till Christmas. Keith’s furious. He’ll have to get his own breakfast.’

‘Lazy sod,’ said Jonquil, ‘do him good.’

‘But he’ll make such a mess,’ wailed Denise. ‘And he never washes up.’

‘You want to get shot of him.’

‘Well, I met this really lovely bloke on the bus last week. I see him every night.’

‘Out of the frying pan,’ said Jonquil. ‘You never learn.’

‘What are you going to do, Rachaela?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘If you want to come up to Manchester,’ said Jonquil, ‘just drop me a line. You can doss on one of the girls’ floors till you find somewhere.’

Outside two young men peered in at the lighted women with their bottles and Jonquil’s cans of Carlsberg. They leered and made signs until Jonquil strode towards the door.

‘Rubbish,’ said Jonquil, as they fled. ‘There ought to be some sort of dustbin for them.’

‘I’ll have to go,’ said Rachaela, slipping down from her stool. ‘I have to get Ruth’s meal. I told her I’d be late but it’s already seven.’

‘Yes, OK, Raech. You whizz off.’

Denise embraced Rachaela, wetting her with fresh tears. ‘Drop in at the Co-op. I’ll get you a discount.’

Jonquil shook Rachaela’s hand. Her pale grey eyes were resigned. ‘If ever you’re Manchester way, look us up.’

They saw her off into the splashed black and rainy yellow night.

Spears of light, long aprons of neon reflected in the pavements. Beyond the block of shops the street-lamps spread like broken egg in the puddles.