Trick or Treat (18 page)

Arthur stands on the boundary between his plot and Jim's. He's eased a few fine and creamy parsnips from the ground but there's nothing else he can do today, he hasn't the time. He can't leave Olive for long, and there's the cat to find, but he can stand and look. The full moon has worked its magic and the tiny furled heads of the bean shoots are just showing above the earth. He stands with his back to Jim's plot. He stands on the place where the boundary was changed. In his hand is the godstone, but he has the feeling he always has while standing on the boundary, that all is not well. It is not that Jim's plot has gone to rack and ruin, nor that his own is likely to follow suit as the years wear him down. It is not that. It is not as easy to put a finger on as that. It is simply an inkling that all is not well.

When the bombers flew low over the city on a brilliant moonlit night, they'd seen the glass from the greenhouses gleaming, and had rained their bombs down upon the allotments, splintering the glass, cracking the frosted winter earth and sending the parsnips and the Brussels sprouts flying. Jim had been away in Italy, fighting; Arthur had been in Norfolk, farming; and their plots had been smashed, churned, and had stayed like that until the spring when Jim, recovering from a wound, came home for a few weeks' respite. He had been the one who had picked the shards of glass from the earth, pulled the weeds which had so greedily rooted themselves in the good soil, levelled it all off again – and redefined the boundary. Arthur had never said a word because Jim had worked so long and hard on his allotment for him. Arthur had never asked Jim why he had moved the boundary – it must be nearly a yard – and widened the turf path too, so that Arthur had lost a good strip of his plot. He'd never said. How could he without sounding petty, ungrateful? When he returned his plot was dug and manured and planted, good as new. Jim was a friend. Not a comrade, no, but on the allotment he was a friend. There was that business with Olive that he took so seriously. Olive had taken Jim for a lover on a whim, that was all. It had soon been over, curiosity satisfied. It had been over as far as Olive was concerned. It was only Jim, Olive told him, who couldn't let the matter rest, talked about being ‘in love', wanted to divorce Nell and marry Olive! And Olive had had to send him packing back to Nell with his tail between his legs. Poor old sod.

Arthur picks up the tail of a rocket, flown from somewhere last night and landed amongst his seedlings. He stirs the toe of his boot in the moist soil and allows himself to imagine, just for a moment, his own son as a man. This is his indulgence. The lad had been dark with cloudy blue eyes; a wise and wizened face; tiny, perfect. If he had lived, what would he have become? A farmer? A craftsman? A politician? A doctor? He might have been here now, with his old dad, helping on the allotment, or driving the grandchildren over to see Olive. He would have been a help with Olive.

But this is useless. He is nothing.

Before he was six weeks old, he died. One morning they had slept late and woken to stillness and Olive had known. She had leapt from the bed, clutching her leaking breasts, and she had not cried out when she had found him cold and perfect in his cot. She had just looked, just stood and looked, the front of her nightdress darkening with wasted milk. She had just stood there and looked, and Arthur had had to move her gently aside to pick up his son and to be certain that the life had gone from him.

There are tears in Arthur's eyes as he gazes at the green sparks in the soil. Olive's grief had been a deep river in which they had both nearly drowned. It had taken all his strength to keep her up, save her from the swirling downcurrents of utter despair. He had had no energy for his own grieving. The death of his baby son left a space inside him, a dry space where a new kind of tenderness had been growing. No other child had come along to soften the memory of the tiny lad and now, anyway, now he has someone to care for. He has Olive, and to Olive he must return.

Nell draws back Rodney's curtains and flings open the window so that she can breathe. Rodney has finally gone for his interview, half an hour late, having failed to clean the windows first. Nell will restore order to his room, if it's the last thing she does.

And it is all right about the hat. It gave her a turn, all right, bobbing along like that, large as life, when she thought it was gone to ash and smoke, but it is not so strange really. Not when you stop to think for a minute. They didn't burn it, that is all, she must have been mistaken. In all the confusion of smoke and flames she thought she saw it burning, an understandable mistake. Petra must have taken a fancy to the hat and decided to keep it. That is all. Nothing to get in a state about. But what if Arthur sees it, what if Olive? She will just have to give it back, that's all. A mistake, she'll say; Don't know what got into me, she'll say. And they'll give it back, of course they will, why ever shouldn't they? And then she can decide what to do for the best with the wretched hat. She's beginning to wish she'd let it be, left it in the gutter, which was a fitting place for it after all. And she will keep herself under control. She will not get into a state over something as trivial as a hat. She will keep herself under control and get on with the matter in hand. Which is Rodney's room.

The balsa-wood aeroplanes sway in the breeze from the windows. Nell pauses for a moment, watching them, wondering where to start. She pulls on her rubber gloves before she picks up the foetid clothes, the socks stiff with dried sweat, and, holding her breath, she takes them out to the linen basket. She pulls back the candlewick bedspread which is crumpled now after years of smoothness, and the blankets, and shudders at the sight of the sheets, crumpled and dampish. There are unmentionable hairs too, and even biscuit crumbs, despite her rule about food in the bedroom. There is a cup of cold skinned-over coffee beside the bed, and hairs on the stained pillowslip. Her face is stony as she strips the bed and flaps and smooths the underblanket. The room needs a good vacuum and polish and what-have-you. Really and truly it needs fumigating.

If only Rodney would get a job so that he was out all day, things might be manageable. She might be able to get used to it. If only he was safely packed off every morning, then she could get in here first thing and then the dirt would not have time to gather, the dust to settle, the germs and the mites to breed. Before his return, the room had been a pleasure to enter, with all the toys in their places, even the books regularly taken out and dusted. She had kept the room like that just in case. Just in case what? Just in case it would all come right in the end, her boy come home to her again. But that was all codswallop, she can see that now, for her boy could never come home to her again. Her boy does not exist. How much more satisfactory the hope of Rodney's return had been than the fact of it. How much more satisfactory to see the smooth clean bed, the innocent toys and books waiting. And how terrible to have a middle-aged stranger besmirch her memories.

She pulls Mr Wog out from under the bed, and then she pulls out the magazines. She does not mean to look. She does not mean to do more than look at the price to see how much of his dole he's wasted on the filth. She does not mean to see. But somehow the pages turn. She does not wish to know that there are magazines like this. She thought it would be tarts. But it is worse than that. It is diabolical. It is obscene. It makes her skin crawl, her scalp prickle, a bitter gorge rise in her throat to think what has been going on while she slept clean in her bed only the thickness of a wall away. What has been going on in his head. She has to close her lips to keep herself from whimpering as the pages turn. When she has seen it all, seen every obscenity, when she knows it all, what it is that goes on in Rodney's head, she begins to rip them up. She tears the magazines into strips and then the strips into tiny scraps, into a pile of tiny scraps of skin-coloured confetti and she flushes them down the lavatory. She flushes and she flushes but they do not want to go, they float up, they will always float up, bob mockingly up through the bubbling water. When she's done what she can, she sits weakly on the edge of Rodney's bed, discovering that she's hardly breathed for minutes on end. Her eyes are contaminated with what she's seen. She is defiled. There is no way that she can clean her mind. Damn Rodney. Damn him to Hell. She tries to take a deep breath, but her diaphragm is stuck, inside she has turned to stone. Too many shocks in one day. Too many shocks. Rodney is a viper. He is an impostor. He is no longer her son. She will cast him out. She stands up. Fury roars through her arms and she takes every book and every toy from the shelves and hurls them out of the open window. She plucks the planes from the ceiling and sends them out too. She rips the curtains off their rails so that the hooks pop all over the room. And then with a bucket of water and a bottle of bleach she starts to scrub.

Petra is making a cake when Wolfe and Tom arrive home. ‘Mum!' Wolfe says, and flings his arms around her back, laying his face against her, stretching his arms around her enormous girth.

‘Goodness! What's all this in aid of?' Petra laughs. ‘Had a nice day?'

‘Great,' says Wolfe. ‘Tom's picture was brilliant. It was a fish. We got lots of money, didn't we, Tom …'

‘Well …' Tom wags his hand back and forth and grins at Petra.

‘By the way, Wolfe,' Petra says, ‘would you take the cat next door to Arthur's and see if it belongs to them? It's been terrorising Nothing all day. I shoved it out in the garden in the end, but it hasn't moved a muscle as far as I can see. I heard Olive out there earlier, calling, as if she was calling a cat. Would you go and see?'

Wolfe sticks his finger in the bowl of pale grainy cake mixture, and licks it.

‘Oi,' Petra complains.

‘All right then,' Wolfe says. ‘I'll take it now.' He has to go away from Petra anyway because his face feels as if it will burst with the need to smile, because he will burst with not knowing what Col said to Petra, and not being able to ask. Behind Petra's back Tom lifts his eyebrows and puts his finger to his lips and Wolfe nods.

He goes outside again to find the cat, crouched pale and bony in the ashes. He is a little afraid of the cat and its knowing human eyes, and so he hesitates and looks around – and notices that the cat isn't the only strange thing in the garden. There is a balsa-wood aeroplane, nosedived into the weeds; there are some books on the ground with their pages flapping in the breeze, and there is an old black rag doll. He picks up the doll and then sees that there are even more things in Nell's garden. There are more books, and toy cars and a wooden lighthouse and several aeroplanes with their wings all smashed on the paving stones. He looks up and sees that the upstairs window is wide open, and then he jumps as Nell's gate bursts open and Rodney appears.

‘What the hell?' Rodney shouts, and his face is red and bits of spit fly from his mouth with his voice. ‘What the hell's going off here? Mr Wog!' he points to the doll.

‘Is he yours?' Wolfe hastily passes him over the hedge and Rodney stuffs him under his arm. ‘He was in my garden,' he explains.

Rodney is looking round the garden, looking at all the toys and books. ‘Fucking mad,' he says, and his voice is a bit quieter, quite calm. ‘His mother is a fucking nutter.'

‘Whose mother?'

‘He always knew it. And the way she goes on at him! He's had her up to here.' He puts his hands against his forehead. He smiles at Wolfe, and his lips are red and wet.

‘Well, bye-bye,' Wolfe says nervously.

‘No, wait,' Rodney stretches out his hand to Wolfe. Wolfe edges away and then immediately feels sorry. He feels sorry for the man with grey in his hair and the doll under his arm. Wolfe sees that he is trembling. He steps forward and lets Rodney's big hand knead his shoulder. ‘You're a good lad, aren't you?' Rodney says. ‘You're not afraid of him, are you?' Rodney lets go of Wolfe and takes off his glasses to rub his eyes. ‘Are you?'

‘Afraid of who?' asks Wolfe. He cannot bear to look at Rodney's naked eyes. ‘No, course not,' he says.

‘Will you come to the Cutlers' Wheel?'

‘I can't today …'

‘But you're not at school.'

‘Eczema,' Wolfe says, holding out his hands.

Rodney puts his glasses back on and looks. ‘Poor little hands,' he says. ‘You'll come to the Cutlers' Wheel and see the water rushing? Then when you get back you can tell your mum, surprise your mum.'

‘Well, I don't know. I can't now, I've got to take the cat back … and it'll be getting dark soon.'

‘Not for a bit. He'll be waiting. Half an hour …'

‘But my mum …'

‘Half an hour.'

Wolfe wants to say no, would have said no, but Nell opens the back door at that moment.

‘Rodney,' she calls, ‘Rodney.'

‘Half an hour,' Rodney mutters once more, as he turns away.

‘Wolfe?' Petra opens their own door and looks out. ‘What are you doing? Aren't you taking the cat?'

‘Yes, but look …' Wolfe points to the toys and books strewn across the gardens and Petra comes carefully down the back steps, her hand under her belly as if she is holding it up.

‘How peculiar,' she says. ‘They must have been having a clear-out. Funny people,' she whispers, grimacing. She peers over the fence. ‘But some of those things must be quite valuable – those cars are in good nick. And that Meccano. My brother used to have some of that. Fancy chucking it all out!'

Wolfe picks up the broken plane. ‘What shall we do with them?'

‘Chuck them back over, I should think.' Petra shakes her head. ‘And they've got the window wide open too! They must be freezing in there. I'm going in.' She shivers. ‘Are you taking the cat back then?'

‘Yes …'

‘And stay and talk for a bit won't you? I expect they like to see a young face now and again.'