Tell it to the Bees (34 page)

‘Don't turn any of them off before we're back,' she'd said. ‘I want it lit up like Blackpool pier.'

The two women faced each other off in the narrow hall.

‘Where's Robert and where's my son?' Lydia said.

‘He's holding on to Charlie now. I knew it years ago. You don't deserve to be a mother.'

The words cut a thin line through Lydia, a wound made but not yet properly felt.

‘No.'

‘Yes. His girlfriend, and she'll be his wife soon enough, she's getting him his tea tonight.'

Lydia shook her head. ‘His supper's ready and he's been out long enough. I want him home now.'

‘She's a nice girl,' Pam said, as though Lydia hadn't spoken. ‘A secretary. I expect they're getting on like a house on fire.'

‘His supper's ready at home,' Lydia said. ‘I need to get him before it's spoilt.'

‘Supper is it now?' Pam said. ‘Too good for tea, are we? You always did have your airs.'

Turning her head away in frustration, Lydia looked down at the tiled floor, its simple geometry a moment's relief. She looked up at Pam.

‘But Robert doesn't even like him,' she said. ‘He left, he walked out. On Charlie, too.'

Pam leaned in at Lydia, her mouth distorted. ‘Now we know why, don't we?' she said, her eyes chasing up and down.

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' Lydia said. ‘And I need Charlie back. I need him home.'

‘It was him that told us. Him that let on what you get up to with that doctor. We should have guessed, her inviting you in to her home, giving you your cosy job.'

‘Charlie?'

‘It's disgusting.'

‘What did he tell you?'

‘So Robert's taken him now and don't you dare go near him.'

‘Tell me where he lives. I need to know where Charlie is.'

‘He'll get lawyers if you go near. Stand up in court for all the world to hear. Then you'll never clap eyes on Charlie again.'

Lydia didn't know what to do with her hands, so they held each other in front of her. Or her voice, so it stayed inside her mouth, a small sound coming out that didn't sound like her. Didn't know what to do with her eyes, which kept on looking at things. Through the doorway the table laid for two people, knives and forks and cups and
saucers, Pam's work pinafore hanging on a chair. The basket with knitting, needles spiking up like a V for victory.

But the objects didn't make sense. She saw the clock on the mantelpiece and the mirror above, and in the mirror there was a face looking back, bleached under the yellowed light, a face that was staring at something she couldn't begin to fit in with tables and chairs and tea laid out.

‘Pam, please,' Lydia said, but Pam set her lips hard and she pinched her eyes till they were pebbles in her face. Then something broke inside Lydia and such an ache rose in her chest, such a heat beneath her skin that she cried out in fury, in grief. She cried out of a pain that was new and raw, the edges still torn and ragged, and yet such a near familiar, as if it had been there all the time, just not felt till now.

‘I need my son. Tell me where he is. I'm his mother.' And in the mirror she saw the bleached face crack.

Pam waited till Lydia turned to her. Then shook her head, slowly and carefully, and pointed back to the front door.

‘Our tea's ready,' she said. ‘Go back to your doctor. You're lucky it's not worse for you. But I shouldn't try anything. There's enough of us know about you now. We'd only have to call in the authorities and it would be horrid, that, for Charlie. Who knows what would happen to you.'

Lydia walked fast away from the house, everything in her held tight because she would not, must not cry. Not here, not in this street, not before other people's doors and windows. Jean was waiting for her a street away. She must get there, to the car. She was nearly to the top of the street when she heard the footsteps, running, coming nearer.

‘Charlie!' She shouted his name as she turned, even as she heard, even as she knew already that it was not him.

But the figure that came to her and took her hand and held it was Annie, muffled up in a big coat and a scarf and a hat.

‘I couldn't come downstairs,' she said. ‘I couldn't see you there. But I heard. I heard what she said.'

‘Do you know where he is?' Lydia said, but Annie shook her head.

‘They don't trust me. They've told Irene – that's Robert's, you know – they've told her not to tell either.'

‘She'll punish you, Annie. If she finds out you've come after me.'

‘I don't care. There's more to worry about in the world than my mother.' Annie stepped back as if she'd said too much. ‘I'll come and tell you, soon as I find anything out,' she said, and they stayed standing like that at the top of the street, till the sound of other voices coming towards them broke in.

‘You'd better go back,' Lydia said, putting her hand on Annie's darkened cheek, and they held each other tight. Something broke through the thick of Lydia's mind and she remembered about Annie and what Dot had said. She wondered what Pam knew of her own daughter right now and would have asked her then, before grief pushed the thought away. But, as if guessing at it, Annie slipped from her arms and was gone into the night.

‘Careful, love,' Lydia whispered after her, before turning back into her own, hard darkness.

The woman called Irene was still kneeling by Charlie's chair when his dad closed the door. After she got up, she had to brush off bits from the floor where they had stuck into her knees.

‘Nice tune,' she said.

He didn't want to speak to her, so he went on humming, and she started cooking his tea in the kitchen.

His mum would be making his tea now. She would be asking him to do things, not letting him sit here and hum. He wondered if she was worried, or if she knew where he was. He wondered if she was missing him. He hummed harder.

‘Charlie?' Irene said his name like a question. She was standing in the doorway, but he didn't turn his head, or stop humming. ‘Do you like ketchup?'

Why did his dad have to go out? He'd come to get him at the school railings. He'd brought him here.

Irene gave him her handkerchief. She put it down on the table and she didn't ask him anything.

Charlie ate the sausages, the mashed potato and peas. Irene sat nearly opposite him and read a book. It was called
Appointment with Romance
.

She took his plate when he had finished and brought in a bowl of yellow jelly. Pineapple. It had a cherry on top and she made a noise as she put it down like
dah-dum
.
Then she went and lit the fire, kicked off her shoes and sat with her back against the settee. Charlie sat on at the table with the jelly before him and he hummed again in his head.

He liked jelly. He liked red best, but he liked yellow too. His mother had a mould like a rabbit and, when he was little, his dad would cut the nose off and laugh.

‘You don't have to eat it,' Irene said. She was watching him.

‘I only like it as a rabbit,' he said, which they both knew wasn't true.

She shrugged. ‘Weren't any rabbits about this morning.'

He could see her out the corner of his eye. She sat doing nothing. She wasn't like his mother.

She'd left her book on the table. He looked at the picture on the cover. A woman with blond hair stood outside a big house. She had her hands behind her head. She looked a bit surprised. Behind her was a man in a dark suit with ripply hair. He was smoking a pipe and he didn't look surprised at all.

Charlie could smell the jelly. It smelled the same as the pineapple cubes from the sweet shop that left your tongue rough. He lifted the cherry off and ate it slowly. The sweetness made his mouth water. He didn't think about his mother, or the Christmas tree with its real candles. He didn't think at all.

‘You must be getting freezing over there.' Her voice surprised him; he didn't know where he had been. ‘You could come here, nearer the fire,' she said.

He sat at one corner of the settee. The fire had settled in and he wondered that she wasn't too hot. Her feet at least. She had her legs stretched out in front.

‘When will my dad be back?'

‘Look,' she said. ‘Do you see these?'

He could see the coloured varnish on her stockinged toes.

‘Wages of sin,' she said.

‘My mum does that too. But only in the summer,' he said, like an accusation.

‘No. These,' she said, pointing, and then he saw that she had lumps on each of her feet, like big knuckles grown on below her big toe. He looked at her face for an answer.

‘It's the pointy toes,' she said. ‘My shoes.'

‘Does it hurt?'

She nodded.

‘Why don't you wear different shoes?'

She shook her head.

‘I wouldn't have the job without the shoes. You'll understand when you're older.'

But he understood already. The lumps on her feet and her pointy bosom. He bet his dad didn't mind about her feet.

When she got up, he eased down and sat as she had done, back against the settee, feet towards the fire. She came back with a bar of chocolate and a pack of cards.

‘Don't tell your dad. We're going to eat the whole lot.'

Charlie knew what she was doing, and he ate the chocolate.

Irene could shuffle cards. Not like his mum or his dad did, but in a hard flick and then a long sweep.

‘I'll teach you blackjack,' she said. ‘It's a card game they play in the casinos.'

So she taught him and he counted numbers, filling his head till he had won a pile of matches. Then he lit them, end to end, nearly half a box, till the air was dense with phosphorous.

Charlie was asleep when the door handle turned, the flutter in his eyelids the only sign of his flailing dreams.

It was late. Robert stepped with the exaggerated steps of a drunken man.

‘Bloody dark,' he muttered. ‘Black bloody dark.'

Drawing close to the bed, he sank to his knees, patting the shadow of his son, murmuring densely.

Awake suddenly, Charlie lay still as stone in the vinegary dark. He felt hands on his hair, a heavy palm on his brow. He froze. Then he remembered where he was and he waited.

‘Charlie,' Robert said. And again. ‘Charlie. You listening?' His breath was rich with beer. Charlie moved his head. ‘You listening?' Charlie waited.

‘Good thing you're a boy. No trouble like the girls. Like Annie. Bloody trouble.'

Charlie felt his father's hand on his cheek, smelled it.

‘You do as I say then.' Robert tapped a finger, bored it into the sleep-sodden boy. ‘You do exactly as I say and we'll all be happy families.'

In the morning it was Irene's knock on the door that woke him. He dressed and went downstairs. Irene was in the kitchen.

‘Where's my dad?' he said.

‘Gone already. To work.'

‘But he wasn't here last night either.'

‘No, he wasn't, was he.' Her voice was snappy. ‘Quick now, because I have to go to work soon.'

So he sat and ate his breakfast and thought how in an hour he would be at his desk. He wondered what his mother was thinking, and what to tell Bobby. He wondered why she hadn't come to find him, and if he could go back home today, because he didn't want to make his father angry, especially not with his mother.

Irene sat down at the table. He could smell her perfume. He looked at her. She was like the woman on the book, all the lines – her lips, her hair, her blouse – drawn just so.

‘Your father left a message for you,' she said.

He waited. She looked at her nails, ran her fingertip round the curve of one. He felt his heart beat in his chest.

‘He's got something to say to you, but he's left me to say it.'

She paused and looked back at him and he saw that she didn't want to.

‘You have to go to work,' he said at last, and she nodded, as if there were an agreement then between them.

‘He says that you'll live here now and that you're not to speak to your mother.'

He didn't understand. She was his mother. Why would he not speak to her, or be with her?

‘Do you understand, Charlie?'

He couldn't answer.

‘Charlie. Listen. You have to understand, or he'll call in the police and you'll go to court and a judge will stop you then. I know. He told me. If she comes to the school, you're not to speak to her. Or to the doctor.'

The words were like darkness. He didn't understand. They were too heavy. They hurt him. When he spoke, his voice sounded small and thin.

‘Is he going to be at the school again?' he said. It wasn't the question he wanted to ask, but he couldn't ask that.

When he turned to look at Irene, she turned away from him and spoke to the wall.

‘You're to come back here on your own today,' she said.

It was Saturday; it was four days. She stood, as if waiting for a third person to join them, or for something to happen; something to change what was. Then she sat, touching her fingers to her forehead, like a summons to herself.

‘Each day I think it mustn't be true. All through the day I have that thought,' she said.

‘Tell me,' Jim said. ‘Did you see this coming? Any of it?'

Beyond their closed door, the little girls argued about something.

‘Does it matter now?' Jean looked at the ceiling and the floor. ‘Are you asking this as a friend or as a lawyer?'

Jim was still in his chair, waiting.

‘No. I didn't,' Jean said finally.

Children's voices rose, pipsqueaky, imperative and then faded again.

‘It's so quiet in the house. But differently. God knows, I was used to quiet. I lived alone for long enough. But Charlie.'