The Hiding Place (25 page)

The noise is louder in the dark. I stare up at the ceiling as the grey light spreads, trying to ignore the smell coming from the pillow, the damp of the blanket, the ache of this house. The
lightbulb clicks as it cools, rain shudders on the window, footsteps clip along the street and suddenly stop. A sound at the front door, a scrabbling at the letterbox, a change of air. Someone is
inside.

Who’s there? a voice shouts up the stairs, Who is it? nearer and nearer until the woman is standing in the doorway and I’m holding out the lamp-base like a club, ready to fight. I
look at the woman and she grins at me. Her hair’s wet and curly round her face, her white puffa jacket is soaked, her leggings stained a deeper black on each knee. Behind her, a wiry lurcher
shivers on the landing.

Bloody hell, says the woman, Talk about Little Orphan Annie!

Her eyes squint away from the bare bulb,

Couldn’t you find a hotel then, Dol?

I know that tone; I know this woman now.

Rose, is all I can manage, Rose.

~

I sit up, rest my shoulders against the cold back wall. It’s like I’ve never been away. Rose’s sudden appearance doesn’t help. She searches in her
handbag for a tissue, then the pockets of her jacket where she finds a grey crumple of toilet paper. In the lamplight, the bruising on her cheek looks like dirt. She blows loudly into the paper,
balling it up and pressing it into the corner of each eye. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was moved.

Well I never, she says, dispelling my illusion, Little Crip’s come back.

Studying her face is like looking in a convex mirror. Rose is broader across the bridge of the nose, her skin a shade darker with a smooth thickness to her chin and neck. The
blueish stains beneath her eyes aren’t bruises: I’ve got them too. She has the same mouth, turned down at the edges. Our mother’s did that: she always said it was disappointment
that caused it. Rose helps herself to the chocolates while she tells me her history; about Terence and the Forces, where they travelled, and Brian and Melanie, her two grown-up children. She bites
into a hard centre, inspects it closely and then feeds it to the dog.

They bloody well hated their father, she says, running her tongue around her gums, An’ now, he can do no wrong, like? Iss all, ‘Aw, poor Dad! Give him a break’ – I ask
you! Anyway, that’s me. Not much to tell is there?

Her mouth settles into its u-shape. I begin to think my mother was right; disappointment is inherited.

Where’s Terence now? I ask.

Rose grins at me. She peers inside her bag and takes out the packet of peas full of money. At the sound of the rustle, the dog gets up off the floor and sits to attention in
front of her. He puts a determined paw on her knee.

I’ve left him to fend for himself for a bit. Get off, Pars! It’ll do him good – That’s the last time
anyone
hits me.

The phrase comes too easily; she’s used it before. There’s a lull where we stare at the dog. Rose has told me her life; she’s galloped over the years between
us as if they were matchstick fences. I can see she expect me to do the same; she folds her arms over her chest, her lips go tight.

And now you’ve turned up. Out of the blue!

I tell her about the letter I received from the social services. She shifts her weight to one side of the bed.

They never told
me
, she says, They never told me, but they told Celesta, didn’t they? So she rings when I’m at work and she gets Terence. ‘Tell Rose her mother’s
died and the funeral’s on Friday.’ Just like that – ‘her mother’ – not ‘our mother’.

You never came to see her? I ask.

Who? Mam? Oh aye, she says, I tried now and then. Reckoned she didn’t know me. She was in and out of Whitchurch like no one’s business. Not that
you’d
know anything
about it.

Whitchurch Hospital. The railway tracks running along the back; the rain; the gravel; the last time I saw my mother. Rose is trying to blame me.

I was sent away, I say. Even to me, it sounds like an excuse.

Yeah, Dol. But there’s no law against coming back, is there?

I have no answer for her. Everyone got sent away. Except my father – he simply ran. Rose is worrying at the squashed ball of toilet paper, tearing it into smaller and
smaller pieces. They fall from her lap on to the floor, where the dog licks at them as if they’re flakes of snow.

Dad?

No.

I ask about Fran and Luca. Rose shakes her head. She bends down to stroke the dog, notices the cup of water beneath the bed and stretches over to get it. She holds it out in
front of the dog’s muzzle and he laps obligingly, splashing blobs of moisture on her wrist.

All I know is Celesta’s doing alright. Family business, two sons to look after her. She’s rich now old Pippo’s gone to that big pop factory in the sky. Very posh, our Cel.

Rose breaks into a sudden, bitter laugh. Just like my mother’s.

She doesn’t want to know
me
, that’s for certain, she says, looking me up and down, So – no offence, Crip – I can’t imagine she’ll be glad to see
you
.

Celesta’s not in the mood for seeing anyone. Dinner is ruined.

Ungrateful sods, she says to the kitchen as she scrapes the potatoes, the meat, the congealed jelly of gravy into the bin. She hears the phone ring and ring, and the answering machine cutting in
just as she lifts it up.

There is a distant echo on the line, a faint Hello, and then nothing except her own recorded message booming in the empty hall. She untangles the coiled rope of the receiver. It wasn’t her
boys at all. It was a woman’s voice; it sounded like her mother. Celesta stares at the sweaty beads of her palm print on the handset.

~

At the other end of town, Louis and Jumbo Seguna stand outside their new restaurant. Once every minute, an arc of white beams sweeps across the room, falling out on to the
pavement and speckling them in a queasy rash. It’s supposed to look like moonlight on the ocean waves, but to Jumbo it looks cheap; it reminds him of Christmas tinsel and school discos. Louis
is rather proud of it; he likes things that glitter.

What’s the
matter
with it, he cries, It looks alright to me! Jumbo gazes up at the wide glass frontage; there’s so much he doesn’t like, he hardly knows where to begin.
He could start with the name; etched across the plate glass in bold lettering are two words: The Moonlight. Jumbo takes his father’s fob-watch out of the pocket of his waistcoat and holds it
up in the dance of dark and light,

We’re late, he says, Mamma’s going to kill us.

The two men face each other. There’s only five years to separate them, but Jumbo has the middle-aged look of his father; the round belly, a premature splash of baldness on
the top of his head, the rolling walk. In contrast, Louis is as smooth as a cat.

Tell me what you want changed, he says, And I’ll see what I can do.

All of it. The window, the lighting. That bloody name.

It’s Retro, says Louis, Historical! You should see the original place, Jum—

Jumbo stops him. He has no interest in Louis’s haunts, in hanging about street corners talking to the Old Boys about Old Times. This is not the clientele he wishes to
attract. He’s looking for smart money, Bay money. His mother’s feelings play only a small part in his objections, but he’ll use any means now.

It will really upset Mamma, he says.

She okay?

Why don’t you come and see for yourself? says Jumbo. But he knows by the way Louis is fidgeting that he won’t be facing their mother tonight. He doesn’t offer him a lift.

Give her my love, okay? Louis calls to Jumbo’s back.

Sure, Jumbo mutters, easing himself into the front seat of his car. He can feel the red burn of a migraine jabbing at his eye. Probably those lights, he thinks.

~

In the large double bedroom at Connaught Place, Celesta stands and thinks. Her ears are filled with white noise and the voice inside her head. You don’t have to go, it
says, taunting her. Celesta slides back the door of the wardrobe, chooses two black outfits from the rail and throws them onto the bed: she last wore the jacket and skirt at Pippo’s funeral.
She bends below the swinging clothes to the rank of shoeboxes lined up on the floor. They are labelled, each pair fitted with shiny wooden shoehorns to preserve the shape of the leather. Buried
among the skirts and dresses is a hanger with a neat row of co-ordinating belts, chiming in the draught. As Celesta reaches further in, one of the belts unwinds itself and slinks to the floor. She
glimpses the fall of it, uncurling like a fist. Suddenly she sees another thing: the coil of leather opening, flying through a deeper black, cutting the night in two to find the flesh and cry of a
child.

I don’t
have
to go, she says, crouching, No one can make me.

Celesta doesn’t want to face this funeral. She doesn’t want surprises.

~

Jumbo pulls into the kerb outside the house in Connaught Place and glances up at the windows. The ground floor is in darkness. Upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, a thin
sliver of light cuts between the heavy curtains. He points his key-fob at the car and climbs the scrubbed white steps to the door.

Celesta, lying on the bed, hears the beep-beep followed by the swish of the front door. She sits upright and listens hard, tracking the sound of Jumbo’s footsteps on the tiles, the silence
as they cross the carpeted dining room, a squeak as he opens the oven door. He’s on his own then – no Louis. Jumbo shouts from the kitchen.

Only me, Mamma! Anything for supper? Celesta lies back on the bed and stares at the ceiling.

It’s in the bin, she says to the room.

~  ~  ~

At the end of the concourse, a small woman in a sari and a pink flapping overall is sweeping the tiles with a wide broom. She is completely bent into her work and takes no
notice of anyone. She drags her broom and her black plastic bin-liner around the airport, past the flight information desk, past the Bureau de Change and the rows of chrome seating, between
people’s legs, brushing the edges of the sleeping bodies snuggled like grubs in every corner. She can’t possibly like all that never-ending space. There is so much floor at airports
it’s nearly all floor, as if to echo the vast amount of sky there is to fly across.

Luca presses the telephone tight to her ear. She’s shouting something, staring at anyone who stares at her. They don’t see the look she gives them; her eyes are invisible behind her
sunglasses. The tannoy echoes above her head, telling her in three languages of delayed outgoing flights and of the planes which can’t land. There’s fog, thick as a cough, in Amsterdam.
Luca is grounded.

For Christ’s Sake! she shouts to everyone, Shut up!

On the back of her novel Luca has written the three numbers given to her by directory enquiries. She gets Jumbo on the second attempt, then gets cut off. There could be fifty
Segunas in the book, she thinks, I could be ringing strangers all night.

~  ~  ~

Jumbo peeps round his mother’s bedroom door. Celesta is curled diagonally on the bed, a black jacket bunched up under her head. He sees her hand covering her eyes and the
straight closed line of her mouth. Jumbo can’t tell if she’s asleep or simply lying there.

Mamma, he says, Mam, there’s someone on the phone – I think they want you.

Celesta rises to vertical. Her left arm is numb. A row of button marks are vivid on her cheek.

God. What time is it? she asks. She picks up the telephone on the other side of the bed, hears a distant echo and the sound of the television downstairs.

Hello? she says. Her mouth feels thick with sleep. She gives Jumbo a look.

There’s no one there, she says, holding out the handset. The tone of disconnection buzzes between them.

~  ~  ~

Luca has travelled – is still travelling – all the way from Vancouver. She has left her girls in the care of the new Korean housekeeper, at their new house in the
suburbs. Luca’s husband is in Montreal at a razor-blade convention. Last month he became her ex. There are lots of new things in Luca’s life.

She finds a seat opposite a snoring man on the bank of chairs next to a burger bar. He appears lifeless, except for the sound of air trapped in his throat, in, out, in, out. She shuts her eyes
and imagines the snores as colours; green brown, green brown, and as the noise grows dimmer it changes, becomes the grating of a handsaw, up down, up down, searing its way through wood.

~

Dadda!

Luca stands in the yard and watches her father sawing through the old back door. The fire was over a month ago, but there are still cinders, blowing in the corner against the
wall, twirling on a web hanging between two charred stumps of wood. Luca’s feet are bare. Her mother is upstairs in the Box Room. She can’t find her baby sister, but she can hear her
crying. Luca picks her way carefully across the mud, putting her own tiny footprints into the massive indentations left by her father.

What you doing?

Go inside.

Da-ad . . .

Go inside! Go!

He raises the handsaw above his head as if to carve her down the middle. Luca is only two; she hasn’t learned to fear him yet. He lifts her by the scruff of the neck,
catching hair and the soft skin at the nape and pulling it into a scream. Lifts her with one hand and throws her through the back door where she skids on her arm and face across the concrete floor.
Luca lies stunned and silent, looking at a scorched fray of linoleum curling against the skirting board. Her mother comes downstairs, steps over Luca as if she is invisible, leans against the
kitchen sink. She bends her head sideways under the tap so that her eyes see but do not register her child on the floor. She takes a long drink. She lets the water run straight out of her mouth and
down her cheek and into her hair. She steps over Luca a second time and climbs back up the stairs to her room.

~

Luca opens her eyes. She will not allow herself to be haunted.

Bad dreams, she says quietly, That’s all they are.