Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (9 page)

‘There are these drawings.' Mrs Purvis didn't want to look at the pictures again as she handed them around: the waxy crayon, the stick people, the twisted furniture, smudged and preserved inside an acetate folder. The orange curtains she'd recognised instantly as those in Clare's bedroom. Next to her the sour breath, the sniffing and fumbling­: Mrs Thomas made it so difficult. More difficult.

‘In the interviews?' asked the Chair.

‘Nothing. Clare doesn't talk at all at the moment. She still tries to please, by smiling and doing what she's told. But she won't speak at all.'

‘Not a happy child,' confirmed the WPC who'd sat through the interviews and recorded them.

‘Does she seem happy to see her parents—both?' Mrs Purvis willed the hiss of breath next to her to come to nothing.

‘Yes.'

‘So the silence is ambiguous?'

‘Like the drawing,' said Inspector David Hunt.

Mrs Purvis pointed to one of the pictures. ‘That is an erect penis,' she said. Someone had to.

‘Could be anything,' said Inspector Hunt, passing the picture along. ‘With the greatest respect, and—'

‘How could he!' Mrs Thomas's voice rang out and she searched the faces around the table, pleading with each by turn. Yet, thought Mrs Purvis, it was you who thought of it first.

‘Mrs Thomas,' the Chair said smoothly, ‘it is very distressing to contemplate. We all feel the same. What we have to do now is to determine the best course of action.'

Mrs Thomas looked at the police inspector, who stared back at her with eyes like stones. The Chair continued, ‘There are two points: one is that it is not clear whether abuse has taken place, nor who has done it if it has. The second is that even if it has there will be choices to be made. It's not always best, Mrs Thomas, to remove a child from her home.'

‘With that monster living there?'

The Chair managed to smile and look grave at the same time.

‘No one is a monster,' she said. ‘If he is abusive, and Jackie accepts that, it might be possible to move him instead of Clare. That would save her from having to lose her entire family through no fault of her own. It is even possible, sometimes, to work with the entire family without anyone having to leave . . .'

‘Perhaps the reason you're feeling like this,' Mandy had said to Mrs Purvis yesterday, ‘is that you don't have enough information to feel sure. At this stage, you must see him.' Using the word
perhaps
was one of the skills that had earned her seniority. She had meant, as well, that Annie should have insisted before, which Annie knew.

‘I spoke to Jackie on the telephone last night,' she said now, trying not to look at Mandy like a child seeking approval. ‘The first thing she told me was that she and Brian are engaged to be married.' Her voice was neutral, but several people smiled and the atmosphere lifted perceptibly. It was what Jackie wanted. It was a good sign. Irrationally, she too felt happier. ‘Brian wouldn't come to the phone. But he agreed, in the end, via Jackie, to visit me with her at the office later in the week.' Then, Mrs Purvis knew, she would have to tell him in so many words why he was there. She had done it before. But everything seemed even more difficult these days.

She'd seen Brian's striped and checked shirts, hanging on the balcony to dry. She could imagine the way he might sit, and the small signs of his anger. She could imagine the woman and the girl creeping around him, trying to keep him calm. She could imagine Jackie after a blow to her face, eyes shut, hands over ears, partly from the hurt and insult, partly from the fear that he would—if not then, sometime—tell them to go. Replace them. He had once threatened to do this, Jackie had said. Where could they go? She imagined Jackie watching what he wanted and working out how to please him; Jackie telling Clare to be good, please, so Daddy didn't make them go. Jackie wanted a family, a man.

Unless Brian told her, or Clare did, how would she know for sure? Only in the guts, and on the balance of probability. And inside she hated and feared him, unprofessionally, the as yet unseen Brian, for all the choices he was forcing on her, this versus that, all the uncertainty, the terrible responsibility, the nightmare of it; she hated him for not being obviously impossible to suspect, for being, she already guessed, the type who would not be straight; for being her job, both a monster and a man.

‘Has anyone got any other observations?' asked the Chair. No one looked at Mrs Thomas. The hands on the big blue clock with its cloud and sun had moved almost to the hour and the silence around the multicoloured table had twisted itself tight, pluckable because the nine people around the table—six women and three men—and even those among them who hadn't said a word, had now to decide what best to do with the nightmare raised, as in a seance: concentrating, setting up currents between their fingers, turning the issue over without touch so that it slowly spelled out a message that spoke itself through Mandy's lips.

‘There does seem to be cause for concern . . .' Mrs Thomas was the medium, enthralled. And other bad dreams, as yet unraised, lurked behind each chair back, waiting to be taken home.

‘But I think we're all agreed that this must be handled with sensitivity, and without confrontation if possible . . . Do you think,' the Chair asked, ‘that Jackie and Brian will agree to extending the stay in hospital? We prefer,' she explained to Mrs Thomas, ‘to do that in preference to anything more drastic. At this stage.'

‘Yes,' Mrs Purvis said, ‘I'm pretty sure.' Mrs Thomas looked blank, spent. She had passed it on, now she could go home and forget. Make herself a cup of tea.

‘I take it we are agreed that Clare should go in the register. As keyworker, Annie, you'll inform Jackie of that?' No one disagreed.

The chairs scraped back; the meeting finished exactly to time.

Annie Purvis's husband Simon, the name often shortened to Sim, taught Geography at Cambrook Secondary School. He was going bald, a thick fringe of grey hair clinging around the central pate; the hair on his chest had thickened, his stomach grown soft—she quite liked the feel of that, though not so much the look. They had known each other nine years, been married eight, but she hadn't changed. Something had fortified her against time. She was thirty-two, he only forty, but they were growing to look like a father and his eldest daughter.

He was always losing things, and often she'd find them for him. ‘Please,' he'd say. ‘I've been looking for my scarf for days.' She'd find the lost thing without asking any irritating questions, by simply using her memory and imagination. On the whole the marriage worked well, though it could scarcely be called lust, she thought, the way they made love nowadays. They were both often tired. They would lie on their sides, her back curled against his stomach and chest, his hand on her abdomen, her legs bent and his fitting into them; joined at the genitals they'd rock gently back and forth. If one of them heard a noise, or had a sudden thought, they'd pause:

‘What's that?' one would ask. ‘Don't know,' the other would reply. If it was a loud noise, they stopped, and Sim went to look. Occasionally, if it was a trivial noise, or one that could be explained, they'd resume, but most often by the time he returned, goose-pimpled, soft, she would have almost fallen asleep.

Once someone had tried to break in. A gloved hand had slipped through the glass panel on the door, reaching for the catch. Now the panels were plywood. The streets around their flat, the stairs and passageway that led to it, were often loud with the sound of breaking glass, laughter and screams.

Sim hated it and wanted to emigrate. He dreamed of shedding his belly in the clean wastes of a new country. Of buying several acres of virgin land, converting his own trees to timber and building a wooden house. Of catching fish through holes in the ice, chopping wood and shooting occasional bears; trudging through snow to bring back what he had caught to Annie and the kids they might have by then, out there . . . He taught Geography, but had only ever been to Germany and France. Kids in his classes had travelled halfway around the world, taking time off school to do it. He was jealous of them, the way they took things for granted, ranked what they'd seen lower than last night's television, didn't think. It was possible, he believed, to start another life. He had heard of people no different from himself who had managed to do it.

Although it was pleasant making love their way, Annie thought, it was also odd, as if their minds and bodies were disconnected; as if they were going out for a drive on a sunny day in a well-kept vintage car. It looked good, but driving was not the point any more. Sometimes a foot slipped unnoticed off the accelerator and they forgot about arriving anywhere.

‘What are you thinking about?' she had asked last night as he stroked her stomach in forgetful circles. She'd twisted her head a little, but couldn't see him and abandoned the effort. But she knew. He wanted children, and was saying so more and more frequently.

‘You have got the flying saucer in?' he'd joked hopefully when they began. ‘Only I'm pretty sure I'd have to get permission to breed from the DOE.' He'd squeezed her to him. ‘Well?' he said, falling completely still.

‘So much can happen to them,' she said, squeezing her eyes shut. She had seen far too many children in trouble—had at present almost twenty on her list. You could fill a book with the terrible things that happened to children, and anyone reading it would weep and want to make it better. Almost anyone. There were, after all, perpetrators, and she knew a fair bit about them, too. There was abuse in her background, too, though she'd never told Sim. Even so, that was not why she didn't want children, or not all of it.

‘Not the best time to discuss it,' she had said. He kissed her on the neck.

‘Shall we go to sleep?' he had said, and she was there almost before he'd finished saying it.

Sex with Other People

Frank told them, at the lunch, that he wouldn't do any publicity—none, not even an interview with a nice lady journalist, and certainly not TV.

‘What exactly is your problem with it?' Katie Rumbold asked, smiling hard. She was wearing a skirt and jacket in brown linen, nothing discernible underneath, and her lipstick left faint prints on her glass.

‘It's never been necessary before,' Frank answered, evasively. His shirt was sticking to his back. He felt himself colouring and wiped his face with a napkin. The place they ate in was expensive—‘Give the man a good feed,' Pete Magee had said, as if he were a pet dog. ‘Deserves it,'—but it was all show. The tables were marble, the air was cool, the lights small and bright, the food tasted dead. Fortunately the portions were small. There was champagne, and he took a glass to wash the taste away.

‘It won't stop people saying things about you, you know. You might as well try and steer them in the right direction at least.' She'd rested her hand briefly on his wrist. It was blindingly obvious, he thought. Their desire to make him articulate it, could only be malice.

‘Maybe it won't do so much harm,' said Pete Magee, good-naturedly, his mouth full, his lips glistening. ‘Not to start with. Call you a recluse, can't we? Add a bit of mystery.' He spluttered into his napkin.

‘You're going to be on that shortlist tonight, John,' Katie Rumbold rejoined. Frank supposed people would call her beautiful with her soft dark curls, her stern green eyes and creamy skin. He felt himself hating her. That hate was a steel cable and everything she said or did twisted it tighter. She had such power, and seemed so unaware of it.

Suppose, he'd thought, the necessary thing was money? Compensation. You paid for it, formally and informally. No doubt money in quantity blurred her vision a great deal, could give the beast the benefit of the doubt. But even so—what would Katie Rumbold do if he so much as put his hand on her thigh? ‘Don't be silly, John,' she'd titter as she removed it. Or suppose he were to ask her, for instance, to kiss him (the word vanishing and screaming itself out at the same time) just once—on the lips, or even the cheek, but just for once not in the air next to his face? Even if he were to win the Hanslett prize. Even if he were stinking rich, she'd say no.

Helplessly drunk, she might, once—given that he could get it up—given the impossible—even sleep with him. But she'd regret it in the morning; she would never listen to his secrets, rub her cheek against his. She would wake up and look at him and something would rise in her throat and stick. The worst part of it was that he wouldn't really blame her.

And suppose, as people said, that it was not your face they—women—were interested in; not your brain or your conversation, not the muscles on your chest and legs, nor even the streamlining and size of your cock: it was simply what you did to them? Suppose, then, even a monster could please? Or suppose that the woman kept her eyes shut (but that would remind him) and imagined it was someone else anyway? Reasonable, even sensible from their point of view, but it would hurt—and what, anyway, did you do to—

‘You
will
be on that list. I can feel it in my bones,' Katie said as if she meant it literally and it was nice—a warm feeling, like whisky as it went down—and she looked around the table, smiling at everyone, who all smiled back. ‘And of course, you'll win.
When
you win, you'll talk to them then, won't you John?'

‘Of course he will,' said Pete Magee. ‘It's in his contract as a matter of fact . . .'

‘Do you know how to find your way back to the station, John?' Kate asked solicitously as they left. ‘Or shall I get you a taxi?'

The neighbours' car wasn't there. It was no guarantee, though, of Alice being out. So Liz stood quietly in the front room, her back to the party wall, listening. Sometimes, Alice had explained, Tom drove to work, and sometimes she took him so that she could use the car during the day.

There was never any noise from the other side, where the blotch-man lived, but she could hear every single thing that happened in 129. The soft moan of the vacuum cleaner, the slow scrape and bump of it on the skirting boards as it made its daily journey from top to bottom of the house, or out on an extra excursion if Tom had made a mess with his DIY; the careful clink of stacked plates, the gurgling of water in the drain, the churn of the washing machine; Alice, briskly climbing the stairs, sliding open her wardrobe doors—sometimes three or four times a day—and riffling through the hangers and drawers inside; the soft splatter of the shower, then the whirr of the hairdrier; the whoosh of the cistern emptying; the insistent ringing of the telephone; the sudden roar of the coffee grinder, the slam of the oven door and the rattling of the trays inside.

It was uncanny how clearly the inside of their house could appear to Liz. Against her will, pictures would grow in her head: Alice blowing her nose, or mixing the hot and cold in the bath; smoothing her tights up her legs after she'd used the toilet. She wished she could switch it off. She hoped that when the television came it would bring with it the added bonus of blotting Alice and Tom right out.

She'd selected the biggest screen Bettahire could offer, with remote control and a wheeled stand, signed her name and sealed the envelope, which didn't require a stamp. She was going to post it now, on her way to the park. It would get there tomorrow, and in a week or two, she and Silly would watch together. She hoped he'd enjoy it, somehow or another. All his senses did work. He could feel when she touched him; dressing him she would stroke his arms, hold his feet in her hands a moment before sliding them into his socks. She'd slip her finger in his mouth and let him suck it, smooth his hair, silvery white like the dried pods called honesty. He could hear. And there was no doubt either that he could
see.
When his eyes focused she could tell, not just from the way the pupils shrank, but also from the set of his face.

‘What do you do with what you see, Silly?' she asked in her customary whisper. Did it just vanish, each new piece of information taking the place of the one before? (If only that was what happened to the things Alice told her when she caught her on the step.) If not, where did it go and did it just stay there forever? What, exactly, was missing . . .? The pictures would go wherever they went in Jim's head, and stay or not, as the case might be. She unstrapped him from the bouncer and stood, checking again.

There were noises in the street: the measured tread of elderly feet, the whirr of a bicycle, the sudden cough of a car reluctant to start, a distant siren—but the silence inside both houses was absolute. Even when it was quiet like this, she wondered what Alice was doing; thought perhaps she was doing exactly what she herself was: listening. To see if
she—
Liz—was in. Perhaps Alice had an armchair positioned by the wall in her front room, and sat in it with her coat on and her keys in her hand, ready to emerge at the exact same time Liz did, as if by coincidence. Perhaps Tom had drilled a spy-hole for her in the party wall . . .

She gathered Jim up and arranged the sling, ran her hand over the top of his head. She pulled the latch across and eased open the door. It stuck at the bottom, shuddering painfully so that she had to still its vibration with her hand. She strode down the path, turned smartly left—so as not to pass in front of 129—and almost bumped into the blotch-man coming the other way.

‘Sorry,' Frank said, grasping her quickly by the shoulders then letting go and bending over to pick up the bag he dropped, and her letter to Bettahire which he'd knocked out of her grip. ‘My fault.' He held out his hand; hers stayed deep in her pockets.

‘Nice to meet you,' Frank said, ‘both. Here.' Liz watched as the clear part of his face flushed to the roots of his scanty hair. I hope he's not going to be like Alice, she thought. He looked the quiet type, but he smelled of drink. She watched stonily as he reached into a carrier bag and removed a paperback book.

‘Have one on me,' he said. ‘Out today.' Fumbling, he slipped her letter to Bettahire inside the book and handed it over. The jacket illustration showed a narrow eye sunk in folds of skin. It was called
To the Slaughter.
She glanced at it before slipping it into her pocket and walking straight off.

‘On this other planet,' she began—she was glad to be able, outside, to talk at proper volume—‘there are people who have different ideas about what's beautiful. For instance, they'd find you hideous, with your skin all smooth and white like this.' She walked briskly, enjoying their successful escape. The letter to Bettahire was posted. It would arrive there tomorrow. Now and then passersby stared at them, but they didn't say or do anything, so she didn't mind.

‘They'd be sorry for you, and maybe try and get you surgery, in case the way you were made you neurotic when you grew up.

‘What they like is scars, spots, scabs, wrinkles, hairy patches and birthmarks like the blotch-man's got. They sell creams that we'd think were
bad
for the skin. They have salons where you can have scars made, or your nose broken, or injections that give you diseases. Kids are encouraged to catch chicken pox and scratch . . .

‘Best of all they like people with bits missing, or very short legs, things like that . . . And that's the same with everything they make or build—they model it on what they find beautiful in each other, so that if you or I went there, we'd be horrified by the ugliness of it all, the people, the buildings, the landscape, and if they came here, the same for them . . .' It was almost dusk by the time they reached the park. The air in the surrounding streets smelled of cooking. There were still a few other mothers and babies about. She watched them; how they walked very slowly, stopped to talk, bent over their own prams and each other's, continued together for a while.

‘Those babies cry more than you,' she observed. She was going so much faster than the other mothers were. She was different, too, could walk for miles, twenty, thirty in a day. Not that there was much scope for it any more.

‘One of the ugly people and one of us ends up stranded, just the two of them, on a small planet somewhere in between . . .' She strode the circumference of the park, past the churned football fields and the abandoned tennis courts; she skirted the large rectangular pond, then took the path to the circular garden at the centre.

‘Perhaps they'd grow more like each other—neither of them being able to get to their beauty salons . . . There'd be no mirrors, but they'd each know something had changed, because of the way the other one behaved . . .' The garden was designed like a wheel, with a mound of daffodils and tulips at the hub and roses between the spokes, though none of them were out. The rim of the circular garden was a huge mixed border of hollyhocks, giant daisies, lupins, foxgloves and marigolds, mostly just the dry sticks of last year's growth with new green spears and here and there a sudden blaze of forget-me-not blue. She walked around it more slowly, several times, then stopped at a bench. She sat Jim on her lap, facing outwards, and slipped her hand around his belly to keep him there. He was warm.

‘Most likely one of them would kill the other,' she concluded, bored. What she wanted to say next was private, so she lowered her voice. ‘I've been thinking,' she began. ‘We two could get on very well, now we're properly on our own. We've got a lot in common, despite the difference in size, which'll pass in any case . . .' There was a marked difference in size between Alice and Tom . . . Even when she wasn't calculating how to escape the house unaccosted, even when she wasn't creeping barefoot over the floorboards or washing up her knife and fork separately so that they didn't clink against each other; even when she wasn't whispering and making sure to anticipate Jim's every wish so that he didn't cry, they'd slip into her thoughts like this and she'd find it hard to get rid of them. It's possible, she thought, that they'd infiltrated her brain, just like the tiny aliens she once saw swimming in a man's bloodstream in a film.

‘There's a lot I have to do for you, but it's simple stuff. I don't mind. And, on the other hand, in lots of ways you've got the edge on me. I could learn from you, Silly, I think so. How to get to the Zone and so on. Yes. Even just how to cope with being here and now . . . About talking: I'm going to cut it right down, except for to you—that's safe. And other things too . . .' She jogged her knees gently up and down as she spoke. Something jabbed her in the thigh. She extracted the man's book from her pocket. ‘Reading can go,' she said, tossing it into the wire bin next to the bench. ‘Never did it much anyway. See—perhaps the way for you and me to get on best is for me to be as like you as I can?' She wrapped her other hand around him and lowered her head so that her nose just brushed the top of his head. She stayed like that, feeling the light fade.

There, at the dead centre of the park, the air smelled fresh. Everyone else had gone home to their dinners. A whistle blew, announcing the closure of the park. Liz wanted to stay there, sitting on the bench. She felt very calm and warm. ‘I might have to do it in stages. But I think we'll go far,' she said.

Jim made a noise, like someone much older clearing their throat.

‘Don't try,' she said. ‘I want to be like you.' The whistle blew again, louder this time.

At dusk, when the men came home from work, Onley Street's curtains were drawn again. Everyone was watching television, except of course, Alice, who had to be unloading her shopping. She left the bags on the pavement and hurried over, holding a frozen chicken and calling as she approached, ‘Want one of these?' Her voice and the beat of her heels on the pavement seemed very loud. ‘On offer! Got five, there's not room in the freezer. Only £1.99—take it! I'm still in profit . . . Come with me next time. I keep seeing you walking back with shopping bag and the baby: much simpler in the car. Or you make up a list for me to get for you. . . Here!'