Imperfect Strangers (17 page)

CHAPTER
24

It turns out that Sally was not a big fan of Leanne Rimes after all,
which was a little disappointing. I made the discovery after I purchased the entire back catalogue for her, as a thank you for taking me shopping. She is a fan now. Whilst dusting, I whistle, not tunefully, but happily, to the music I associate with Sally. At least she said she’s a fan now. She must be; Sally’s not the type to lie. She did say that she likes other artists too and loaned me a stack of compact disks to listen to. They were not what I expected. Not the sort of thing I thought Sally would listen to. Hard music, hard and harsh and too abrasive for a woman as delicate as her: Guns and Roses, and Scorpions, and Aerosmith, and Alice Cooper, and others of a similar vein who sing about the devil and drugs and sex and drink. I listened to each of them – once – studiously capturing the words as I pondered over a rather difficult jigsaw puzzle. A couple of tracks caught my attention.
Only women
bleed
was one. I ran the phrase over and over in my mind while picturing Kerry prostrate in a pool of blood. Another track I liked was called
angel.
The singer wailed ‘she’s my ay-ay-ay-ayngel’ and I thought of Sally. I listened to that one a couple of times before putting the harsh music to one side and returning Miss Rimes to the player, where she has sat ever since; the first connection to Sally; our song – if not truly so at the time, definitely so now.

In the cold
light of early winter, the new net-curtain gleams with an ice-crystal quality and captures little diamonds of blue-sky when I hang it in the window. Keep prying eyes out, mother would have said. I haven’t heard a peep from her in weeks, nor have I heard from little Keith with his horrid memories, not since that first date with Sally. The net hung, I step down from the chair and pause to inhale the new-carpet smell: another connection to Sally, which filters through the ever present, though subtle fragrance of leather and fresh-flower-perfume. A welcoming mix of homeliness: a smell reminiscent of a gentle cuddle rather than a painful squeeze: comforting with no hint of tightness. The rope burns on my wrists are almost invisible to the eye, but – even with the voices gone – I still feel them sometimes, on the inside. I cannot help but give them a soothing rub whenever it comes to mind.

I wonder if Sally will like the net curtain as I step back and adjust the spacing of ripples in the fabric. It’s gathered too heavily on the left. This disturbs me. As I even
out the spread of fabric, the outside world diffuses and then comes into sharp focus, as if being viewed through a mystical mist, a fairy-tale fog of a glimmer into an alternative reality. A quick glance at my new watch – the coolest one, according to Poppy when I bought it, replacing the wind-up, leather-strapped, scratched faced one of my youth – tells me I have not got long before Sukie will need her walk. I’m rather getting used to the dog. She will never be as pleasant company as Mrs Seaton of course, but nonetheless I’m glad I never fed her chicken bones.

The music comes to a stop and I’m swallowed in a void of silence. I stand a moment, the quietness seeming to worm into my ears, a hint of tightness on my wrists, a burning sensation that I smooth away with fingertips. My voices may be silenced but they’re waiting. The thought makes me anxious. I remove the feeling by breathing the fragrance of the room: the carpet, the leather couch and an undertone of Sally’s perfume diffused throughout the air. I slide a hand down to the rise in my trousers and closing my eyes, the light from the window casting red through my eye-lids, I imagine Sally st
anding before me, her breath on my face, her fingers massaging me. She kneels on the floor and draws down the zip–

I’m building a nice momentum, when a
rap on the window makes me gulp so suddenly I feel like I’ve swallowed a scream. I tuck my rapidly softening rudeness away but can’t so easily dismiss the guilt that floods through me, nor can I sooth the binding touch of fire biting into my wrists.

Boys who soil sheets
need their hands tied at night.

Zipping my trousers, I whip my hand away from the area of shame, open my eyes and see a shape in silhouette peering through the window, forehead against the glass, hands cupped on either side of the face. For a moment I am
twelve again. My breathing quickens with panic. I look to the kitchen half expecting mother to appear.

The comforting fragrance enters my consciousness and soothes the pain in my wrist like a salve. The aroma of Sally’s place
, that fragrance in my own house, eases my discomfort. For a moment Mother’s voice returned, and I thought the magic had weakened. Tomorrow the fire will be replaced. Gas, but designed to look like coal: like the one in Sally’s living room. Not a front room, but a room for living – for the living. Not just a room at the front of the house, but a room for actually living in, a room that feels alive because it is so welcoming. I’m looking forward to the gas-fire. All the comfort, all the warmth, all the embrace of a living flame, but with none of the mess – none of the tightness.

The dark
-wood sideboard will go next.

Mend and make do,
mother would say were she not stifled by the comfort of this room
.

I flinch as I glance into the kitchen, still dark
and dank and gloomy. Mother will not come into the living room. Not now. It is too cosy. Too soft. Too welcoming. She’s in there though, waiting, in the kitchen. The fitters can’t do the kitchen until January.
Always a rush leading up to Christmas
, the man had said.

Mend and make do
, mother grumbled. Fortunately the kitchen-man could not hear her, only me, and I silently told her to go away.

A knock on the door drags my thoughts from the kitchen, away from the smell of bleach and the burning sensation o
n my neck where it gnaws at flesh as well as grime, and the acrid smell of coffee on her breath as she leans in and scrubs, and scrubs, and scrubs until my flesh is raw to the point of almost weeping blood.

“Wonder who that is, Mrs Seaton?” My voice wavers
, and I try to calm it with steadying breaths. Mrs Seaton raises her head, swishes her tail from side to side. “Sally? You think? No? No, it can’t be, she doesn’t know the address yet. Silly cat.”

I open the door
, cautiously. As a young child, when left in the house alone, I wasn’t allowed to answer the door. It was one of the rules.
If it’s important they’ll come back
. “Oh! It’s you. It’s Mrs Sewell, Mrs Seaton.” I step back into the room. “Come in.” Stepping aside, my right hand resting on the new handle, I sweep an arc into the room with my left.

Mrs
Sewell places a hand on the doorframe and takes an age to summon the effort required to lift her stooped bones over the step. Her head bobs like a clockwork toy as her marsupial eyes take in the room through large-framed glasses.

“
Doing a spot of tidying Keith.”

“Yes.”

“It was more an observation than a question, Keith. No rising inflection on your name.” There’s an arid rasp in her voice, as if the years she spent teaching wore away her voice. “New nets,” she adds, glancing at the window with a gummy smile, taking the shiny white door from me and easing it shut behind her. “That’s good. Too few are the young in appreciation of a good net. And with so many prying eyes around too. Can’t be too careful. You never know who’s looking in and what they might witness, you know?”

My arms by my side
, I nod in agreement to her words.

“New settee, too,” she observes as she inhales. “And carpet as well. My, word. A proper little palace.” She points at the settee. “May I?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Please sit.” I rush forward and pull the glistening-glass coffee table away from the couch. The can of spray-polish topples over, rolls and then settles against the yellow duster with a whiff of jasmine. Mrs Seaton leaps up, narrowly rescuing her tail from the fall of my foot. She scampers around me, and as Mrs Sewell lowers her weight with a sigh of appreciation into the sumptuous leather, Mrs Seaton leaps onto her lap and stands tall, looking into Mrs Sewell’s eyes, purring loudly.

Mrs
Sewell chuckles like a naughty schoolgirl. Well, the kind of chuckle a schoolgirl would have if they had smoked twenty a day for the past fifty years. “She can smell the tail end,” she says, laughing heartily now, revealing her gums as her marsupial eyes fix knowingly on mine.

I feel heat in my
cheeks, the burn on my wrists.

Boys who soil sheets
need their hands tied at night.

I’m safe for the moment
; Mother won’t come into the front... the living room. I glance into the kitchen then back into Mrs Sewell’s marsupial gleam, her highlighted creases showing outlandish glee.

“W
-W What?” I stammer, rotating my right wrist through the grip of my left hand.

Boys who soil sheets need their hands tied at night. Boys who soil sheets need their hands tied at night.

“I– I–”

“Tail end, Keith. She can smell it.
They’ve a keen sense of smell, cats. It’s here look, in my bag.” Mrs Sewell pulls from the bag by her side a parcel of brown paper that is slightly damp on the bottom. Mrs Seaton’s nose is drawn to it like she’s caught on a hook. “Fanny haddock! Or is it finny? Never could remember. Funny Haddock, you used to call it, when you were a nipper.” She erupts into a peal of arid laughter that breaks into a phlegmy-cough as she proffers the parcel to me.

When I take the fish from her, she continues to cough into a fist of clenched papery-skin.

“Got too much for tea last night,” she finally manages to say, “and, well, I only eat fish on a Friday. I always have a sandwich of haslet on a Saturday. Never have eaten much on a Saturday.” She raises her voice as I carefully transport the fish into the kitchen – hoping the juices collecting at the bottom of the paper wrap won’t drip onto the carpet. Mrs Seaton follows, and mews loudly when I put it in the fridge.

“I’ve got a nice bit of boiled ham
for Sunday. Only a slice, mind. I’ll save the fat for Mrs Seaton. Don’t eat fat any more. It’s bad for your heart these days, so they say. Dear Dad used to tell us it’d be good for us. Get it down yer neck, he’d say. It’ll keep out cold: put flesh on yer bones. I didn’t want no flesh, mind. I wanted to be slim, you understand. Always have been. Made me eat it though, he did... Bastard…! Pardon my French. Ooo, he was a bully.”

Bit like your m
um
, I thought she might like to add, but she didn’t. Mrs Sewell knew more than most what Mother was like, but she never said anything. Mrs Seaton follows me back from the kitchen and immediately jumps into a coil on Mrs Sewell’s lap where she purrs into the massage of the woman’s bony fingers.

“Ooo, it’s very co
sy in here, Keith. You have got it looking nice.”

Standing between Mrs
Sewell and the fire-hole, noting her compliment, I feel my chest swell with pride. I glance at the kitchen wanting to say,
I-told-you-so
, then stride toward the window to pick up the stack of leaflets.

“I’m getting a new fire
place too,” I say with a flood of enthusiasm. “Gas! But it looks like real coal. There’s no mess to clean up. No ash or anything. That sideboard’s going as well.” I find the leaflet illustrating the gas-fire, and hand it to Mrs Sewell. “And the kitchen. I’m having a new kitchen fitted.” I glare openly into the dark room. “Fan oven,” I say with emphasis, “and a dishwasher, and a fridge-freezer that crushes ice.”

“Crushes ice, eh? Fancy.” Mrs
Sewell’s eyes sweep around to the dark kitchen, as if picturing the changes that are to come. Her marsupial eyes seem to grow to dinner-plate proportions as if a necessity in accommodating the imagined picture.

“Then I’m going to start upstairs. New bedroom. New bathroom. Bath that blows bubbles to massage away the stresses and strains of the day.”

“Bubbles, eh? Stresses and strains of the day, fancy that?” Mrs Sewell’s eyes fall on the dark stairwell in the corner of the room, as if fancying a walk up there and soaking in a bath full of massaging bubbles. “Fancy.”

“Then the spare room. Then I’ll do the spare room.” I can sense that my voice is racing and I take a breath to try and calm myself down, but it’s no use. I’m excited. When it’s all done I can invite Sally. She’ll feel comfortable here
then – maybe spend the night. “It’ll all be done then, all of it. And, central heating also. All of it will be sorted then, the whole house, all done. All new, and clean, and cosy, and no, and no.” I finish the sentence in my mind.
No uncomfortable tightness. No voices.
             

“Taking in lodgers
by any chance, Keith? I wouldn’t mind a bit of luxury like this.” She taps the leaflet that shows the whirlpool bath. “I could move in, eh? Look after you? Give you a bit of fanny on Fridays, eh?” Her marsupial eyes fix on mine, wide unblinking, her chin nodding, keeping the beat of her pulse.

Did I ought to offer
? She’s obviously waiting for an answer. I recall the times she soothed my upset away as a nipper, gave me food when I was hungry, praised my models and gave me somewhere to keep them, put salve on the burns on my wrists – the burns which I told her other children had done.