The Little Red Chairs (24 page)

‘It is as though they have never taken the crowbar out,’ she said and looked for the first time into the eyes of the woman, soft, befriending and with immeasurable hurt.

‘I hate him, I want to inflict every punishment on him, including taking his voice, his voice box out, and strangling it syllable by syllable. I want the three men pulped, I hate myself and my own body, I think only violence will end the violence. This hate fills my heart, my soul and my being. When I menstruate I want to wipe my face in it, to add to the defilement. You see, I have lost all connection between what is natural and what is unnatural. I hear the stories of the other women in that room, fates far harder than mine, excruciating, and I am moved, but I am not moved enough to stamp out the hate that is strangling me.’

She looked at Varya, shook her head and looked away. It was late. A train was still running and in that ghastly light, the carriages were a bleached white, like a convoy of hearses, following one upon another to a doomed destination.

Kennels

Fidelma has met Violet and Elvis and Beth and Toby and Cher and Holly and Pearl and Benjy. She has seen them not in darkness but in the sombre light of the kennels, as the only window is in the outer hall and elsewhere it is gloomy.

Lara, a young girl, is walking her along a corridor, to familiarise her with the place. In her cotton dress and her wellington boots, she looks like a milkmaid, chatting as she goes, saying who is jumpy, who is a pretty boy, who loves company, who is a loner and so forth and with the sound of her voice the hounds come leaping forward, to sniff and have a lick of her hand. She praises them, extols their silken coats like young calves, their soft ears and their hearts beating like a human’s.

Outside each kennel, the names of the dogs are chalked in pink on little blackboards and soon the multiple lash of their tails on the wire mesh is like a summons to riot. A couple have remained on their raised beds, half concealed on thrones of shredded paper, staring out with such sad eyes, such sad stories in those pensive eyes.

All of a sudden one starts to growl, thrusts itself forward, frothing and barking in an attempt to break out. This is Bella, who suffers from epilepsy and hence has a kennel to herself. At the mere tread of a stranger, she is sent into a frenzy and soon others have joined in the fray, hurling themselves against their confines, a swell of savage and discordant barking, so that
Lara’s soft words of appeasement are of no avail. The place is bedlam.

This consternation is what Fidelma will remember and howl back to, in the night, in whatever lodgings they aim to find for her.

It happened like this.

*

She is in a snack bar in a London side street, near where the hospitals and nursing homes are, with ambulances parked all around and nurses with blue capes over their white uniforms, hurrying from one address to another. The place is crammed with workmen, all standing as they down their coffee, sharing the one free newspaper and discussing favourites for the afternoon race. Written on a board, in a neat, cryptic hand, are the specialities of the house –
Panini, Ciabatta, Bagel, Tuna Melt, Jacket Potato, Mixed Fillings
. The two men behind the counter look like twins, in identical Breton caps, and despite the crush, manage a few friendly words with each customer. There he stands, the same Bluey, the same shiftiness, the same smile, the gold earring and the broken teeth.

‘May God strike me dead if I am to blame,’ he is saying, hands raised in contrition, insisting he wasn’t even there the day her pass was refused. Medusa wanted the job for her niece and sent many negative reports to the person at the very top.

‘What kind of negative?’ Fidelma asks.

‘Oh … stuff …’

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Look, forget it … As a night cleaner you are supposed to be
invisible. You do not exist as a person. You are there to work and not to blab.’

‘But I didn’t cry,’ she says, the colour rising in her cheeks, a knot in the gut, because she knows full well that at work, she held herself together and it was only on the walk home in the early morning that she sometimes shed a few tears. At that moment she pictures Medusa, diminutive, the skin brown and taut like the canvas of a ship, eyes darting and mistrustful, the whites a wounded yellow gristle, and plaits arranged symmetrically on the crown of her head, avid for confrontation.

Bluey hushes her, says not to dwell on the past, as her ship has come in. He has work for her. Her heart leapt at the news. It was not in the bank, but out in the countryside and he knew that she loved nature, birds, trees, rivers, though how he knew remained a mystery to her. It was a centre for greyhounds, not too far from London. Lovely lovely animals, who, when they had to retire from either age or injury, had a tough time of it. A greyhound who did not come first, second or third in the first five races was scrapped and then it was either a bullet through the head, a brick or a retirement home. His friend Tracy ran a centre and as it happened, needed temporary help, as Cressida was unexpectedly pregnant. He’d been there himself, gobsmacked at how devoted the staff were, walkers from all over coming every day and Tracy praying that some of her hounds would be adopted, as there was a big queue of those wanting to be let in.

‘I’m not sure,’ Fidelma said.

‘Trainers and owners often slaughter them for cash,’ he said. The word
cash
sprang at her. She had almost nothing left, and though no harsh words had been uttered, she felt she was becoming a liability to Jasmeen.

‘Why don’t we go and have a look,’ and he paid for the coffee and picked up a clean coffee coaster as a souvenir.

They drove through streets with tall blocks of flats, all an identical mustard colour, then into the financial district, towers of steel and glass, stacked almost against each other, higher and higher in the bid for supremacy. He named them for her. She has her first sight of the Tower of London, a fawn sprawling building that with its turrets and its lesser towers appeared to be a city in itself. He’d taken his kids on a guided tour, and what they loved was hearing the ghoulish bits, little Princes getting the chop.

In the long tunnels, the trapped wind whined and it was a relief at last to come out into the open, by some more buildings and then low-lying land and a great expanse of sky that stretched from end to end, with dawdling clouds piling softly over it. She had not seen such a vast sky since she left home. Pylons, though fixed, seemed to be marching across the landscape and in between there were windmills, thrashing ceaselessly. Bluey was talkative. It was to keep her from brooding. When they entered the Thames estuary, he said what a famous shipping route it had been, tankers and carriers from all over the world and how Francis Drake in 1577, with his guns and his one hundred and sixty-four men, set out for South America, at the behest of the Queen, to do maximum damage to Spanish galleons on which she wished to be avenged. When he returned, three years later, with far fewer men on board, the gold and ducats he had brought for the Queen exceeded the country’s national debt. It was from that to nature. The marshes and the wetlands, more than three thousand acres, brimming with wildlife. He reeled off the names of birds, Brent geese, red warblers, skylarks, godwits,
flocks of curlews and various species of gulls. Yet when she looked, Fidelma saw neither sky nor wetland.

They were on a dual carriageway, with a glimpse of busy lane-ways underneath, cars and lorries whizzing by at a terrific speed and the grass within the steel barrier that divided the motorway limp and grimed. It was not countryside as she had known it.

Car factories, small warehouses with signs for coach parts, camper vans, garage doors and free buggies along the way. On a large poster, a warning read
Hands Off Our Sports Club
. At intervals, there were the competing prices of Sunday roasts in different carveries. There was even an enticement to try Twilight Golf. More and more she questioned the common sense of this expedition. He kept going astray. These signs and a clump of hollyhocks returned faithfully, as did a double white gate that was the entrance to an equestrian centre. His sympathies for the unwanted greyhounds magnified, as they went round and round and she hoped that soon he would be impelled to turn back and once again they would be in the tunnels, the financial district, seeing the blue and white girders that supported the might of London Bridge.

The van was borrowed and the satnav, he said, had lost its navigating marbles. A woman with a cultivated accent kept telling them to turn left after fifteen metres, which they did, only to return to the exact same settlement of houses, and the white gate to the equestrian centre. When he rang the kennels to get directions, Fidelma could hear incessant barking and Bluey was told to hurry up, as they were about to start preparing the dinners.

It was in a builder’s yard, with various working sheds, some roofless, some not, and to one side, small buildings were marked Units and all numbered. There were workmen everywhere and
a pile of rubble was stacked at one end that opened onto a flat field and horizon beyond.

It was down three steps to another ramshackle building, with duvets drying on a railing and window boxes planted with gaily coloured flowers. On a length of wire, between two poles, there was a row of wagtails, eerily silent.

The aluminium door, though drawn, was unlocked and Bluey called out as they went in. Soon she was introduced to Tracy, a hearty woman in wellington boots and a big smile, saying to Bluey that she knew he wouldn’t let her down. The smell of urine was nauseating, even though the place had been scrubbed and was now being hosed down. On the wall there were collars and leads and muzzles and brushes and toys and fleeces and coloured photographs of star greyhounds with clean pink tongues, massive white molars and rapturous eyes.

*

Lara suggests they take a pair of dogs, a him and a her, who share a kennel and are yelping happily at the surprise of a second walk. Fidelma has her first lesson in gripping the long mouth for the muzzle to be slipped on, her nervousness imparting itself to the jittery dog. ‘Not too loose, not too tight.’

Out in the field and to her surprise, the dog doesn’t thrash or strain at the leash, happy to be away from the dark and the enclosure. The short grass is hummocky, with clods of earth thrown up by horses, who stand at the far end, restless.

Other walkers, on their way back, call out to them gaily, dangling their pooh bags, which were of a ruby colour, dangling them with an insouciance, as if they were evening bags. Lara’s
dog then shat and Lara demonstrated how to pick it up. With a deftness, she turned the bag inside out, then, pinching her fingers, drew in the contents before she tied the two ends of the bag in a knot. Soon it was Fidelma’s turn and she was barely able to keep herself from retching. She needed a second bag and even with that, she messed things, and in the end had to dry her hands on the short, trodden grass.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Lara said as they walked on and she talked of the excitement of a new dog that she and her partner had got a few days previous. It was a collie. They saw it on the Battersea Dogs Home website and immediately knew that that dog needed them. It would mean having eleven dogs in all, including the hounds. She had to go alone to London as her partner was working and when she got there, there was a second collie, as the one she had seen had been taken the day before. The two dogs were obviously from the same family and had been found abandoned outside a vet’s clinic. So it had to be this one. The dog was called Prudence, but Lara decided that was not the right name and there and then she named her Rosie. That was the easy part. Getting her back to Essex was not. For a start, she was hysterical at being among people and not answering to her new name and scared on the escalator, even though she was being carried, so much so that when they got into the Underground, she hid under a seat and would not come out and they missed a stop and had to go back again. As the train was not full, she decided to be brave and put her on a seat and opposite was a nice gentleman, who didn’t object.

Outside the kennels, Fidelma stood alone for a few moments, to take stock. One big tree and then on the horizon, a line of trees squeezed together and bordering a bit of sky that was a
pewter colour. That great brimming of nature that Bluey had predicted was nowhere to be seen. She clutched at her throat so that no sound of dismay might escape from it. It was this or nothing.

A fugue of barking had started up inside, but without the hysteria and venom of earlier; it was dinnertime and the dogs knew it. She watched as Lara prepared their feeds – dried biscuits, tinned meat, brown bread, iron, seaweed and cod liver oil, all mixed with warm water and pounded into a sort of stirabout, the dogs all the while crazed with excitement.

Since it was her first day, Tracy said Fidelma could sit and watch the routine, as the dogs were brought singly or in pairs to the paddock. The paddock, without a blade of grass, was a cement floor, with blue tarpaulin and sheets overhead, to keep off rain or sunshine. As each bowl was laid into a tripod, that dinner was wolfed and then the dogs licked whatever might have got spattered onto the wire meshing. It was all done briskly, as there were forty-four dogs to be fed. Tracy sat with her, discussing the dogs’ characters, their personalities, the ones that still carried scars and the ones with carefree dispositions, adding of course that one never gets the back story. When her dog Mr Fitzpatrick had downed his grub, he was brought to be held in her arms, while she recited his history. Ever so nervous when he was brought in, terrified of everyone, but especially men. Full of scars and cuts, one ear bitten, covered in lice, his teeth rotten, too dangerous to be put with any other dogs, a tearaway. Threw his plate around, and his food and the toys she got him. He had been found up in Yorkshire, half wild and hunting rabbits and from his tattoo she was able to trace that he had been an Irish dog and had run races there, but was dumped, when he could race no longer.