Near the edge of the village, a red light pulsed luridly through the gloom: a police car parked outside the MacShane house. The police were there every day, apparently, though what they hoped to achieve at this late stage was hard to imagine. Perhaps they thought David MacShane would come back to pick up his mail or feed the dog.
The rain was thrashing down absurdly now, as if in fury, almost deafeningly noisy against the fabric of the umbrella. Luckily there was no wind, so Frances was able to hold their protecting canopy still as spouts of water clattered off the edges all around them.
‘This is awful!’ shouted Harriet.
‘No it’s not!’ Frances called back. ‘We’re safe under here, and the rain won’t last!’
They passed the petrol station; Frances said nothing. She understood she was crossing a Rubicon of trust and would soon glimpse the farther shore of caravan-land.
‘This is where we live,’ said Harriet when the park was in view. The rain, softening now, shimmered like television static all over the dismal junkyard of permanently stalled mobile homes. Frances knew that to accompany the children any farther would be to push her luck.
Yet, as Harriet and her brother were leaving the canopy of their new teacher’s umbrella, Harriet made a little speech, spoken at a gabble as if escaping under pressure.
‘Mrs MacShane used to come here sometimes after school. To see a man who’s moved away now. They made loud noises together inside his caravan for hours, then she’d go home to the village. It was sex – everybody knows that. That’s why Mr MacShane got so angry. He must of found out.’
The secret relayed at last, Harriet grabbed her brother by the hand and hopped gingerly into the marshy filth of her home territory.
In Frances’s home – or rather, the house she would live in for the duration of this assignment – all was not well.
The wild weather (highest volume of rainfall in a single day since 1937, the radio would have told her if she’d known how to find the local station) had battered through the roof’s defences, and there was water dripping in everywhere.
Frances walked through the upstairs rooms, squinting up at the clammy ceilings. They seemed to be perspiring in terror or exertion. In the bedroom especially, the carpet sighed under her feet and the bed was drenched: Nick had brought the buckets in too late. Returning downstairs. Frances almost broke her neck on the slick fur of the carpeted steps; perversely, this somehow knocked the edge off the contempt she felt for the house – as well as shaking her up badly.
‘I did check all the windows were closed when the downpour started,’ Nick told her a little defensively. ‘I just didn’t expect the place to leak, that’s all.’
They looked up together at the droplets of rainwater gathering on the umbilicus of the light fitting. All the power in the house might blow any second.
‘I want a child with you, Nick,’ said Frances, hearing herself speak as if through the din of a rainstorm, though the brunt of it was actually over now, leaving the after-effects to carry on the harm.
Nick stared at her uncomprehendingly, as if her comment might decode itself into being about buckets or laundromats.
‘We’ve talked about this before,’ he said, warningly.
‘I want it.’
She wanted him to take her upstairs, smack her down on the sodden bedsheets, and start a little life that would grow up to walk under an umbrella with her one day.
‘I’ve told you,’ he reminded her. ‘You could maybe adopt one, as a single parent, and I could see how I feel. No guarantees.’
‘It’s not the shared responsibility I’m worried about, you bastard,’ she said. ‘I want your baby and mine. From the beginning. Nothing on the slate except our genetics. A clean start. Adopted children bring their damage with them from the womb, from the day they leave the womb. Already in the cradle they’re soaking up their parents’ fuck-ups.’
‘Oh! Well!’ he exclaimed, gesticulating aggressively. ‘What a pity the fucked-up human race has to keep bringing children into the world, instead of leaving it to experts like you!’
Mesmerised by his violent display, she followed the sweep of his big hands, longing for him to hit her, batter her to the floor. But even in anger he was hopelessly, infuriatingly safe.
‘Damn right!’ she screamed in a misery of triumph.
‘You know what you are?’ he accused her, shoving his face right up to hers so she could see his lips forming the words with exaggerated clarity. ‘A – control – freak.’
After they’d finished arguing, they stripped the bed, turned up the central heating and went out to Rotherey’s only restaurant, a combination hotel and snooker hall which also did Indian.
Inevitably, the mother of one of the children from Jenny MacShane’s class was there too, buying a carry-out, and she stumbled straight to Frances and Nick’s table.
‘I just want to thank you for what you’re doing,’ she told Frances blushingly. ‘Last night, for the first time since …you know … this terrible MacShane business … our Tommy slept right through without having nightmares or wetting the bed.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ smiled Frances.
‘I just want to say that I don’t care how much you’re getting paid, you’re worth every penny.’
‘Thank you,’ smiled Frances. Warmth came harder to her when it was parents or other teachers wanting it.
‘I just wanted to know … Is there any chance of you staying on? As Tommy’s permanent teacher?’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ smiled Frances. Her lamb korma, none too hot when it was served, had stopped steaming altogether. And she could tell that this woman was going to go away and tell the other mothers that Frances Strathairn wouldn’t stoop to work at a teacher’s wage.
‘Much as I’d love to,’ she sighed, making the effort. ‘The powers that be wouldn’t let me.’
The mother went away then, walking with a peculiar shambling gait and a posture which suggested congenital inferiority. Frances stared at the door she had gone through, and picked at her food irritably. God, how she disliked herself for pleading impotence when that had nothing to do with why she must move on! This pretence of being the passive slave of higher authority – it was a deplorable lapse in dignity, an act of prostitution.
And to top it all off, she was going to break up with her man.
‘I’ve seen you like this before,’ observed Nick quietly from the other side of the candles. ‘You always get like this just before the job’s over. Those kids that survived the bus crash in Exeter, remember? A few days before you finished up there, we had almost the same argument’ – he smirked – ‘almost the same restaurant. And that time in Belfast—’
‘Spare me the details,’ she groaned, tossing her fork into the mound of rice and taking a deep swig of wine. ‘Ask the proprietor if there are any rooms free for tonight. If so, book one.’
He stood up, then hesitated.
‘For how many people?’
‘Two,’ she chided. ‘Bastard.’
Next day, the children started breaking down at last, more or less as Frances had been anticipating, with one or two exceptions. Tommy Munro seemed to have sidestepped the process, behaving with unusual maturity and poise for a brain-damaged kid; maybe, because he was so used to being confused and mistaken all the time, he’d come to believe that the incident with his old teacher must have happened in one of his nightmares.
Greg Barre, however, blew his crewcut top just after lunchtime, starting with a misunderstanding about which times table he was supposed to have learned, and climaxing with a shrieking fit. Mrs MacShane’s name was thrown up in the ensuing hysteria and several children were soon weeping and accusing each other of causing what had happened or failing to stop it when they should have. Martin Duffy wailed his innocence with fists clenched against his day-glo sports shorts; Jacqui Cox wailed her guilt with arms wrapped tightly around her head. The teacher of the adjacent class rushed to the doorway, trembling with fear, her face twitching with a
ghastly nervous smile like the ones sometimes seen on people about to be executed.
Frances gave her the hand-signal for ‘I’ll handle this’, and a nod of permission to shut the door.
Then she moved forward and took control.
By the end of the day, she had them all quiet again, entranced by her own soothing murmur and the gentle patter of rain on the windows. She sat in the midst of them on a high stool, keeping the stories coming and the airwaves humming, hypnotising herself to ignore the fact that her rear end was numb under the weight of Jacqui’s body in her lap. Jacqui was going to be a big girl, at least physically. Emotionally, she was too small for life outside the womb, and she clung to her teacher’s waist with marsupial tenacity, pressing her face hard into Frances’s bosom. She had been weeping for hours, an infinitely sustainable whimper: nothing that half a lifetime of reassurance couldn’t fix.
Greg Barre was playing quoits with Harriet Fishlock and Katie Rusek, happy as a lamb, wearing the sackcloth trousers he’d worn as a shepherd in the Christmas play. His own were drying out on one of the radiators; he’d soiled them at the height of his frenzy. Frances had recognised she couldn’t afford to leave the group to attend to him alone, and had chosen Katie to bear him off to the toilets and help him get changed; a risky choice, given the rigid gender divisions in this little world of Rotherey, but Frances judged it was the right one: Katie was mature and self-assured, Greg was afraid of her and secretly infatuated too. Most importantly, Katie was smart enough to perceive that the situation – half the class weeping and throwing hysterics, a boy with shit in his pants – was beyond the control of just one adult, and she caught the devolution of responsibility as if it were a basketball. In her essay she had written:
My name is Katie Rusek and I am in Grade 7 of Rotherey Village School Something very bad happened here last week. Our teacher Mrs MacShane was giving us a Maths lesson when her husband came in to the class room with a shot gun. He swore at Mrs MacShane and hit her until she was on the floor. She kept saying please not in front of the children but it didn’t make any difference. Then her husband told her to put the end of his gun in to her mouth and suck on it. She did that for a few seconds and then he blew her head to bits. We were all so, so scared but he went away and now the police are looking for him. Every time I think about that day I feel sick. I ask myself will I ever get over it?
From her perch, Frances watched Katie Rusek watching Greg Barre prepare to throw another quoit. Desperation to impress his guardian angel was making him suddenly awkward, a faltering of confidence which both Katie and Frances, from their different angles, noticed instantly.
‘Let’s play something else,’ the girl whispered in his ear, before he’d even thrown.
Frances murmured on. She was telling the class about her squelchy house, her wet bed, how she’d spent the night in the Rotherey Hotel. She made up a story about how she and her husband had tried to sleep at home but the water had come up through the mattress and soaked their pyjamas. She described how she and her husband had balanced the mattress on its side near the heater and watched the steam begin to rise. She kept returning to the theme that her house was in chaos just now but that she could manage because she had people to help her, and soon everything would return to normal. All the while she pressed her cheek against Jacqui Cox’s wispy skull, stroking her gently at key phrases.
She talked on and on, effortlessly, the words coming from a reassurance engine idling deep within her; her words and the rain maintaining a susurrating spell over the children. Most listened in silence, some played games, completed word puzzles or drew pictures. No drawings of guns or exploding heads yet: Jacqui might do one of those for her next week sometime. In the days following that, she would smooth the new teacher in and then move on to God knows where.
Jacqui convulsed in her arms, jerked awake the instant after falling asleep, and repositioned her ear in the hollow of Frances’s breast, reconnecting with the heartbeat.
‘It’ll be all right, angel,’ Frances purred. ‘Everything will be all right.’
Fish
THESE DAYS, Janet let her daughter sleep in bed with her. It wasn’t what child psychologists would have said was best, but there weren’t any child psychologists anymore, and her daughter needed help just the same.
Janet had tried forcing Kif Kif to sleep alone, but the little girl would scream with nightmares about God knows what – sharks, probably. Now she was sleeping dreamlessly, cradled in the curve of Janet’s waist.
All around the bed, the flywire was stretched taut from floor to ceiling, the support struts and entrance zipper glowing in the candle-light. Janet shut her eyes against the tick-tick-ticking on the wire and tried to drift off, but it was no use; there was always the anxiety that something was eating through the wire, through the canvas of the zipper, and you would open your eyes to find …
She opened her eyes. Nothing had changed.
There were still the same thirty or forty little fish (newly spawned wrasse, perhaps? – it was hard to tell in the dark) hovering in the air, bumbling against the flywire, trying to get in. Individual fish bobbed off from the cluster, floating up to bump against the ceiling.
Janet drew another cigar from the box on her lap, wishing it were a cigarette, craving a cigarette. She struck a match: the fish scattered. The room was alive with shining little bodies, flitting against the furniture, knocking ornaments off shelves, disappearing into dark corners. Almost immediately, however, they began to swim back to the flywire, and the tick-tick-ticking began again. Kif Kif squirmed in her sleep, digging her hard little six-year-old’s shoulderblades into Janet’s side.
‘It’s all right darling,’ murmured Janet, stroking her through the blankets. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’
Next morning Janet and Kif Kif dressed up in their camouflage to leave the house. The fish, which now lay gaping and dead on the floors of every room, had got in through the narrow gap between front door and hall floor. The little plank of wood which Kif Kif put there nightly had been levered out of place from the outside while they slept.
An act of paltry sabotage like this might happen to them every week or so; the devotees of the Church of Armageddon (the ‘Army’ for short) didn’t like to pass a house by without attempting to advance their cause. As far as major attacks went, Janet and Kif Kif had been lucky. Only once in the last year had they returned to their house to find it smashed open, all the windows and doors unhinged, and all the food and clothing taken. Dripping, blood-like, down the bedroom wall had been one of the painted graffiti slogans of the Army: THE FIRST SHALL BECOME LAT!
On that awful day, Kif Kif had kept guard with her machete while Janet restored the defences. By late afternoon the five-year-old was splattered with fish blood and muck, although she hadn’t been attacked by anything too dangerous. Most of the fish she’d wounded had swum away, to die inside deserted buildings and gutted cars, but some had been hacked too severely to do anything but wobble slowly to the ground and die twitching on the crumbling asphalt. When Kif Kif had suggested that these fish should perhaps be taken to the Soup Kitchen for use as food, Janet had hugged her fear-shaken little girl and wept.
Today Janet and Kif Kif locked the door behind them, as quietly as possible, for sound was so much louder these days than it had sounded in the days when there were things like cars, factories and people running.
The million sea creatures moved noiselessly. Schools of barracuda swept without warning in and out of broken windows. Starfish wriggled on the bonnets of rusty cars. Octopi cartwheeled in slow motion through the air, their tentacles touching briefly on the tips of barbed-wire fences and the tops of awnings. Even the open-mouthed shriek of a shark attacking would be obscenely silent, so there was actually no point in keeping your ears cocked, though you always did.
At a cautious trot Janet and Kif Kif put a zig-zag of streets between them and their house, to confuse any Army members who might spot them. One day, of course, the Army might st
op being nomadic, and concentrate on each occupied house they chanced to find, taking advantage of every occasion when it was left unoccupied, until at last its inhabitants had been killed by what they preferred to call the Holy Reclamation Of Nature.
Then again, it was also possible that one day the Army would amend its religion to permit its devotees to do the killing themselves, rather than waiting for the Holy Reclamation Of Nature to do it.
‘Far enough now,’ said Janet, her breath clouding the dry, grey air.
Kif Kif threw the plastic bag of dead wrasse into the gutter, where it burst open on the sharp edge of a broken wheelchair. A large eel floated out of a sewer-hole and slid through the air towards the spillage.
‘Hungry?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Coming back from the Soup Kitchen, feeling warm and sprightly with the city’s only hot meal in their stomachs, Janet and Kif Kif leapt and skipped towards home. Small fish of all colours and shapes cluttered the air around them, frightened out of their foraging places by the commotion. Carp nibbled at the plankton nestled inside an exposed automobile engine. Barracuda circled a small dolphin which had become tangled in a shop awning and starved to death there. A manta ray of moderate size floated over their ducked heads and settled against the wall of a factory. Slowly it slid along a line of newly painted graffiti (ANY CRETURE THAT CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE DAYS ON EARTH ARE NUMBERD!), obscuring the words one by one. Janet repeated the slogan to her daughter on request.
‘He’s reading it,’ smirked Kif Kif, making Janet laugh. They both knew the ray had mistaken the moist paint for something edible, and would be lying maw-up on the ground by tomorrow morning, after which the Army would probably find it and eat it. Since the Church of Armageddon had no equivalent of the underground Soup Kitchen which kept Janet, Kif Kif and the other unbelievers alive with salvaged tinned goods, it subsisted by fishing; Army nets could be seen occasionally, spanned between buildings in intricate layers.