Sugar and Other Stories (22 page)

Wolfgang came out of the kitchen, with rattling nails and serpentining, butt-waving body. After the weather-call, the walk. Wolfgang knew that. He opened his mouth in his paradoxical
yawn of excitement, and a thin, tense creaking came out of his throat.

Mrs Sugden wondered whether this was good or bad weather for the man to come out in. His work — she thought of it as his work — must be much more pleasant in dry, clear weather. On the other hand, on that sort of day, there were more people about. The Common must be quite marshy after all the rain there’d been. Mrs Sugden had become a walking barometer. Her hip joints knew when the temperature or the pressure was about to drop. Her sinuses ached as the clouds closed, before the clouds closed. A kind of lightning-conductor ran down her thickened neck into the pads of her shoulders and down her upper arms. I have my health, that’s the main thing, she told people, James and Alison when they telephoned, the Boot’s pharmacist, the woman from the flat opposite, whom Mrs Sugden could not like, because she stank of tobacco, and, more shamingly, because she was London and raucous, which Mrs Sugden, though she had lived in London most of her sixty-three years, was not. But having one’s health didn’t mean that one didn’t daily notice one’s body more, as a nuisance, that was, as an impediment, not as the springing thing it had once been. There were things between it and the outer world, like the horny doors she had observed in childhood on hibernating snails. She didn’t see so far or focus so fast. She noticed her hips, on the Common, and had to make a real moral effort to see the hooded crow, or the hovering kestrel.

“What do you think he’ll do today?” she asked Wolfgang, who abased himself, grinning and pleading. “Where will he think is a good place?”

She reviewed the likely ones, as she did daily. The underpass smelled of recently stale urine and had dark puddles in it. A nasty place she’d keep out of, if she were him, but she wasn’t him, that was the point, he might like the dark, or even the smell. There was the little wood by the pond, where every bush had its spiked decorations of crisp packets and cola tins and fading pastel tissues. That was a place she was sure he would like. There were
also the earth works, and the rhododendrons round the pond.

Once, in the wood, someone who might have been the man had cycled very slowly past her. It might have been noon, on a good day: Wolfgang was foraging in brambles. He had cycled so slowly he had wobbled, and had looked straight at her, noticing, she thought, her fear. He was a huge man, in a singlet, and jeans, and working boots, with greying curly hair and a yellowish, yellow-clay skin. She had brought her whistle smartly out of her pocket and called Wolfgang. The whistle was a relic of playground duty: with it she had quelled gang-bashings and started netball matches. Its dried pea quavered tremulously in its throat and Wolfgang bounded up. The man went on, but was back, crossing her in the other direction, with a hard stare, before she was out of the wood. He knew she was afraid, and liked the knowledge. It went no further than that. She stumped slowly on in her zipped boots. The man did not acquire the features of the cyclist, but remained a shape-changer. He was black, he was white, he was brown, he was dirty grey, he was a thin youth with acne or an ageing bullet-headed stroller in leather jacket and trainers. He carried a briefcase, a plastic bag of junk from rubbish bins, a knife. He had all the time in the world, unlike Mrs Sugden, whose eventless days slipped into each other like nylon thread through a chain of enamelled television-beads. Every day she feared him a little more, every day the mental encounter took another step into the vividly realized. Mrs Sugden, a sensible woman, knew he was an obsession, but she did not know how to exorcize him. Yesterday’s local paper carried an account of a rugger-tackled, abused female jogger (48) in the Park, and a raped teenager (15) in the concrete waste land behind the local supermarket. Why should he not wait for, or at the least, accidentally notice her too?

She was afraid to go out. Wolfgang could not understand her delays. She went round the flat, dusting already spotless books and silver teapot, watering the rubber plant. It was a nice flat, but small — one-bedroomed, with one living room and a ship’s-galley-sized kitchen, in which were the washing machine and dryer
James and Alison had bought her as house-moving presents when the big house was sold up, when Brian died. The washing-machine was another source of wholly irrational shame. It was automatic, there was no work to it. She had always had one washday a week, sitting over her twin tub, lifting the clothes in and out of the steaming suds with wooden pincers, caring for them. She would rather have had visits from James and Alison, but James was in Saudi Arabia much of the time and Alison was busy teaching. And found her mother threatening, Mrs Sugden understood, for reasons neither of them had any control over, though they tried, at Christmas, sometimes at Easter, they tried for a day or two and then it broke down into fear and violent impatience over little things. Mrs Sugden hated her daughter for putting all the cutlery to drain streaky, and not drying it properly with a cloth. Alison hated Mrs Sugden coming in her kitchen, hated her offers of help with dishes or potatoes, saw them as criticism and threat. Both of them were schoolmistressy, used to having to appear to be unshakeably right.

Wolfgang whined. He was a standard or classic sheepdog, a working collie. He was black, white and tan, and very beautiful, with a deep glistening ruff, a curving white-tipped tail, intelligent amber eyes and an uncertain temper. He had bitten the postman’s sock, once, and had nipped the buttock of a visiting policeman, who had congratulated Mrs Sugden on his effectiveness, with stolid magnanimity. Alison had said he shouldn’t be cooped up in a flat, and so he shouldn’t, Mrs Sugden knew. For this reason, because Wolfgang made her safe in her flat, she had to expose herself to the Common, the underpass, the wood, the sandy hollows and springy heather.

She knew it was irrational, though there was logic in it, to feel better indoors. There were women who had found men waiting for them in the dark when they came home, women who had been followed and then pushed quickly in from behind, women whose windows or barred doors had been contemptuously shattered. Mrs Sugden still felt safer within walls. Partly because of Wolfgang,
who knew that this was his territory, who set up a whole orchestra of aggressive sound if anyone knocked, or stopped to stare, who howled and growled and pealed defiance and threat. In Brent — Mrs Sugden thought it was Brent, certainly somewhere like that — only two per cent of homes with dogs had been entered and seventy-five per cent of homes without. Inside her own walls she and Wolfgang had a chance. Outside was different. She knew other women might organize their fear differently, might be most afraid of being cornered, of having their own bed violated, their carpet smeared, their kitchen tools turned against them. In her own rooms, her heart ran evenly like her clocks, almost always, except when she was locking up, except when her hands were on cold glass with black night and whatever else just over the threshold. Fear seeped in through the warped lavatory window. But in general it was in open spaces that she expected the encounter. In open spaces her breath came short, her heart was larger and fleshier and beat in little spurts, she was webbed with dizziness. She could not have run for her life and knew it. This also was shaming. Fear and shame, these were what was left, were they? Mrs Sugden put on her coat, defying them as she defied them daily. Wolfgang circled and pranced in ecstasy. Mrs Sugden put on her woolly hat and gathered up his lead.

Her path took her along two roads of pleasant Victorian suburban houses, upwards towards the high ground. The roads debouched on a wide and whirling motorway junction which carved the common land, white and lethal. The underpass was the secret entry to the wild land beyond the concrete. Wolfgang rushed to and fro, lifting his leg on lampposts and parked cars, glistening with good health. A sudden car changed lanes as Mrs Sugden was looking over a hedge at some iris reticulata, and screeched to a halt beside her, facing the wrong way. Now? Out of a car, now? She looked at the driver’s face, which was square, oriental, and expressionless. He was simply parking, he lived there, he had simply failed to signal. Mrs Sugden dropped her eyes and proceeded towards the underpass. The arch over this
was adorned in shaky blood-red paint with the pacific slogan MEAT IS MURDER. The graffiti inside were mostly the work of a neat fanatic, with a spray-gun of white paint, who had surrounded the usual inscribed lists of names, pierced hearts, Julie, Lois, Sharon with tidy boxes and correctly spelled admonitions. “You are a whore.” “You are an exhibitionist tramp.” “You disgust me.” Mrs Sugden would have given this moralist nine out of ten for handwriting, and ten for spelling. She imagined him in a shiny white raincoat to match his paintwork, staring fixedly from inside metal-rimmed glasses above well-polished shoes. He was certainly a manifestation of the man she feared: his work showed that his hand was steady and his intention clear. It might be that he preferred the young and the pretty, with whom he seemed to have a quarrel. He might not notice a thickened person with grey frizz under a woolly hat, plodding quietly through the puddles?

That was not certain. She had watched a whole television film on the subject, sitting on the sofa with a reluctant Wolfgang panting beside her. There had been an interview with one young convicted rapist who, silhouetted black against a bland turquoise ground, had said that he always chose ugly or unattractive women. Incredibly, he put his hand to his mouth and added, oh, I hope none of them are watching, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. He explained. He did it out of a deep sense of inadequacy, a need to dominate. The civilized words tripped easily off his tongue, in this classroom discussion. He had been exposed to intensive group therapy. Pretty ones, he said, might have intimidated me, you know, I might have backed down. Hearing him say this, in his pleasant young voice, out of the black hole of his obscurity, Mrs Sugden had known that this voice was
his
voice, the man’s voice, that she was listening to him speak. He was like boys she had taught, coming back to show off how they had got on in the world. Boys had liked her, as a teacher, in those younger days. She had liked boys. The cheeky youngster, the workman with his wolf-whistle from scaffolding, the teaching
student grateful for being shown the ropes. It was the world that had changed and she with it.

At the further mouth of the underpass, on her way up into light, she encountered a solitary man, walking rapidly and frowning. He was tall, black-avised with a heavy growth of stubble on gaunt cheeks under a woollen cap pulled well down. Combat jacket, faded jeans, dirty trainers. Fear fogged Mrs Sugden’s gaze. She went on walking, past him. He held his eyes averted, rigidly, as alarmed by her, apparently, as she by him. Or perhaps just English. Once there had been a time when people passed the time of day, surely there had, even if their polite greetings had been a formal indication that they posed no threat? Now, no one dared. She, for fear of provoking him, he, for fear of misapprehension. Or perhaps he was just sour. Perhaps he had not really seen her at all.

In the earlier days of her fear Mrs Sugden had tried to make herself think about other things. She had promised herself little rewards. If I get as far as the first copse, on the way to the pond, without thinking about him, there will be a letter from James. Or, more reliably, I will allow myself to buy a chocolate eclair. She had long ago given up this childish self-bribery with things she didn’t really look forward to — she found it hard to look forward to anything much, except sleep. It had directly brought on the one mental battle which had caused her to turn tail before the copse, crying for Wolfgang in distress, battling her way home with bursting chest and wandering eyes. No, no, fear was better faced squarely. She could go out into his world if she was prepared for him, if she thought him out rationally, if she knew him and what might happen.

The question she asked herself, as she made her way along the track to the first copse, all silver birch and hazel catkins, quite like the country, if you ignored the solid background roar of motorway traffic on the other side of silence — the question was, was it always like this? Were little girls always violated and old women
struck down in their thin blood, or is it more now, is it really more, and different? We are asked to think about it more, anyway, she answered herself, and if there was not more already, the thinking
makes
it more, it must be so. It is civilized that we can discuss these things openly and comfort the damaged, and not blame or shame them, but it all increases my fear, and not only my fear, but whatever he feels. For she knew that both she and he were fascinated by the hooded head, the solitary terror, powerlessness, no one coming to help. She knew he watched videos of cruelties he might not quite have thought of, as she nightly contemplated fates she had not yet imagined, as well as those she had. It was in the air.

The thing she was clear about, and wanted someone to be clear about too, was that her imagination of his being, of their meeting, was fuelled by fear, by fear pure and simple. Not by any kind of misplaced desire. She was not sure if he knew that, though she thought it was probably her fear he desired, and that he would have found desire, if she could ever have felt it, disgusting, to be punished in her. She had to turn off a Carry On film in which all the fat middle-aged harridans had enquired eagerly, at the sack of Rome, or Jhaipur, or somewhere else unreal and lunatic, when the raping was going to start. No. Desire was another thing. Desire in her had died long before Brian, who had died in his sleep and in hers, flinging out an unaccustomed arm across her breast in a brief, last, involuntary paroxysm. She remembered wanting Brian and the earlier, lively impatience of wanting or needing a man, men. Now she was like cold pudding, stiff and set. The house was quieter without Brian, and this was good, as well as lonely. His retirement, so brief, had been clutter and potter and constant small collisions of will and table-space and living-space. She was appalled for Brian, that he was not there, that his hopes and history and pleasure in food and views on Mrs Thatcher and delight in dahlias were gone, but for herself she was partly — how to put it coolly — satisfied?