2003 - A Jarful of Angels Page 15

Iffy pretended she hadn’t heard. She didn’t want to take Eirwen into the pantry. She didn’t like the look of Cousin Eirwen any more than she did her mam.

  “Nan, Fatty Bevan’s going to get a puppy.”

  “Use his proper name, Iffy! It’s not nice to call him Fatty all the time. A puppy? It’ll never survive in that house.”

  “He is though. Can I have one?”

  “Not on your nelly! I’ve got enough to be doing without clearing up after a puppy!”

  “Who’s Fatty?” said Auntie Blod.

  “Lawrence Bevan. You won’t know him, but you’ll remember his mam, she was the midwife round here.”

  “Which midwife?”

  Nan didn’t reply, but coughed a sharp little cough.

  “Oh. Ellen Bevan. Is she still living round here?”

  “Ay, but she hasn’t worked for some years. She had trouble with her nerves. Too much of the old pop and being married to that hopeless article. She should have left him years ago. Don’t stand there gawping with your mouth open, Iffy. Go and get some biscuits.”

  “There was talk she had a fancy man years ago. She fell for him hook, line and sinker.”

  “Iffy! Move!”

  Iffy moved reluctantly. She beckoned Eirwen to follow her, but across the kitchen Eirwen stood rooted to the floor, staring at Iffy with her small, queer eyes. Iffy smiled, a weak smile of half-hearted encouragement. Eirwen made no sign of moving. Iffy stared back. Iffy guessed Eirwen was about thirteen. She was a big beefy girl with skin the colour of old chip fat. She grunted through her open mouth, like Bessie did when she was constipated.

  Iffy sighed, turned on her heel and lifted the latch to the pantry. All of a sudden Iffy felt Eirwen’s hot breath on the back of her neck, large as she was, Eirwen had made no noise crossing the kitchen floor. Iffy shuddered. Feeling Eirwen that close without being able to see her made Iffy feel unsafe.

  It was dark and cool in the pantry, only a little light came in through the high small gauze-covered window. Iffy loved the smell of the pantry. Sometimes she hung around in there for ages soaking up the smells: Fairy soap and Reckitts blue; block salt and pickled onions; cooking apples and mud-crusted potatoes; runner beans and peas in the pod waiting to be shelled. When Nan was well out of the way Iffy took sly nibbles from cold cuts of lamb or beef, snaffled pork crackling, or slipped her hand quietly into the biscuit jar and picked the currants from rock buns and the icing from cakes.

  She turned round to face Eirwen. Eirwen stared back at her. Iffy thought her eyes were the oddest she’d ever seen: pink-rimmed with white lashes that blinked too fast, stared too hard and too long.

  On the other side of the door Mrs Meredith and Auntie Blod were whispering together.

  “When did she come back?”

  “November. Out of the blue…Never thought she’d set foot in that house not after…”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “No. She keeps to the house. She’s not even been to Mass, though God knows she needs to go to confession if anybody does. She must have known what he was up to.”

  “Who’d have thought she’d ever come back?”

  “I’ve told our Iffy to keep away.”

  “She must have known what he was doing with those young girls. And what sort of girl was she anyway, giving her own flesh and blood away. Dear God, if the child hadn’t been the spit – ”

  “What if she realised?”

  “The old doctor said she didn’t want to know. Took one look at the baby and said, take it away.”

  Snippets of conversation like all adult conversation – completely unintelligible. Sounds of cups and spoons clattering.

  Suddenly Eirwen smiled. The pantry grew cooler with that smile. It was a twisted, sly smile that didn’t join up with her eyes.

  Iffy stretched up and took down the biscuit tin from the top shelf. She pulled off the lid and took out three biscuits and gingerly held them out to Eirwen. One broken custard cream, two fig rolls.

  Eirwen held her hands behind her back and shook her big lollopy head slowly from side to side.

  Neither of them spoke.

  Iffy ate the custard cream and put the fig rolls back in the tin.

  Then, quick as a wink, Eirwen pushed past her and grabbed hold of a bar of Fairy soap that was kept on the scrubbing board next to the tin bath. She held the soap in her fat, dimpled hand and began to tear at the wrapper. She peeled back the paper until half the bar of green soap was uncovered. Then she lifted it to her mouth and began to bite greedily into it. Lumps of green soap disappeared into her mouth as she chomped away with her pointy teeth. Iffy gawped in disbelief. Eirwen ate soap as if it was chocolate! She munched and crunched until foam billowed out of the sides of her mouth.

  She was nuts.

  Then Eirwen poked out her tongue at Iffy, threw down the half-eaten bar of soap and snatched a bottle of dandelion and burdock pop from under the table and drank half the bottle without coming up for air.

  She burped loudly and glared at Iffy. Then she yanked the biscuit tin from the shelf, drew out a fistful of biscuits and stuffed them all into her mouth at once.

  Iffy sidled past her, breathing in so as not to touch her, but Eirwen followed, her feet padding on the stone floor. Too close for comfort. Iffy felt the hairs on her neck shoot out warnings.

  She sat back up at the kitchen table as close to Nan as she could get, as far away from Eirwen as possible.

  “Nan, that girl’s just ate the soap,” she whispered from behind her hand.

  Nan ignored her.

  “Go and play in the parlour,” said Auntie Blod. “Eirwen’s got a nice new doctor’s set and your nan and I have got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Auntie Blod pulled a paper bag out of her basket and thrust it at Eirwen.

  Eirwen took the doctor’s set out. It was a little white case with a red cross painted on the side.

  “Go on,” said Nan. “You don’t want to sit here listening to women’s talk.”

  Iffy did, though. She didn’t want to go in the spooky room with the soap-eating Eirwen.

  They stood in silence facing each other in the back parlour. Outside, sunflowers nodded by the grey garden wall. A bee fizzed against the window trying to get in. Iffy was dying to get out.

  Granny Gallivan looked down from her picture frame and gave Iffy a knowing look, as if to say, “Look out behind you!” On the stiff-backed settle the invisible bones of the ghosts creaked and their movement sent up the smell of moth balls. Iffy kept one eye on the wooden biscuit barrel half hoping the hand would come out and grab Eirwen by the rude bits and drag her screaming and wriggling into its magic depths.

  Eirwen spoke first, “That’s my mammy,” she said to Iffy pointing at a painting of the Virgin Mary that hung on the wall. She spoke as though she were pushing the words out through her nose, more a snuffle than speech.

  “That’s Our Lady,” Iffy said.

  “My mammy,” said Eirwen glaring.

  Iffy went back into the kitchen.

  “Nan, that girl said the Virgin Mary is her mam.”

  “That girl’s got a name, Iffy.”

  “Eirwen says that the Virgin Mary is her mam, but she’s not, is she, Nan?”

  “Sometimes she says daft things. Take no notice. She’s not all there, poor dab. Go and play, there’s a good girl,” said Auntie Blod.

  Back in the parlour, Eirwen was looking at the picture of Napoleon.

  “That’s my daddy,” she said.

  Iffy smiled and bit her lips so as not to laugh. She didn’t feel brave enough to argue.

  “I know a good game,” said Eirwen.

  So they played Eirwen’s game. Iffy was too afraid not to. Eirwen gave the orders. Iffy had to be the doctor first. Eirwen was the patient. She sat on the high-backed settle between the moth-ball ghosts. Iffy took invisible splinters out of her chubby white arm with the pretend tweezers and listened to her chest with the stethoscope that didn’t work. But she could only he
ar the sound of the bleeding heart pumping away behind her as it dripped blood over the chair backs.

  When it was Eirwen’s turn to be the doctor she ordered Iffy to lie down on the couch. The black, cracked leather was cool against her legs. Horsehair, escaping from a rip, tickled her neck. She giggled.

  “Shut your eyes,” said Eirwen very solemnly.

  Iffy shut her eyes.

  “Tighter,” said Dr Eirwen.

  Behind Iffy’s tightly squeezed eyelids the world went black and red. She could hear Eirwen’s heavy breathing somewhere in the blackness.

  “It won’t hurt a bit,” said Eirwen.

  She took ages. She must have taken a run up from the back door at least.

  “Aaaargh!”

  Suffering doughnuts!

  The plastic syringe quivered in Iffy’s arm like a Red Indian’s arrow.

  “Now I’m going to take that baby out of your bum.”

  But Iffy was up and off the settee like a shot. She flew into the kitchen roaring.

  Her nan had to pick out the plastic with a pair of tweezers, and dab her arm with iodine in case it went septic. Iffy was going to have a bruise for weeks after.

  When Auntie Blod and Eirwen had gone Iffy showed Nan the bar of soap with the teethmarks in it. Nan said Eirwen couldn’t help it, she wasn’t normal.

  Iffy showed Fatty the bruise and the hole where the needle had gone in.

  “Bloody hell,” he said. “Good job she didn’t give you the injection in your bum!”

  She told him about Eirwen eating the soap.

  He laughed and said, “Next time she farts bubbles will come out of her bum hole. Ha ha ha!”

  They rolled about laughing and called her Eirwen Fairy Hole after that but not to her face because she only came the once.

  Will walked on past the walls of the Big House, following the curve of the river away past the recreation ground. The recreation ground was a euphemism for a barren wasteland where a solitary rusted roundabout turned slowly in the wind. He climbed over the rotten stile. It was over this stile that the child had leapt and almost been run over by the bus driven by David Gittins. He had always wondered why the child had been running so fast, like a ghost had been on its heels, David Gittins had said. What had the kid been so afraid of? Had someone been chasing the child? Had that someone caught up with the child down by the hump-backed bridge? And then what had happened?

  Will walked past a withered tree that overhung the path, casting its stark shadow over the ground. The wind grew cooler and rain began to fall. It was eerie standing there in the darkening day, knowing that the child had raced past this very spot only minutes before disappearing off the face of the earth.

  He turned round, climbed back over the stile and headed towards town thinking as he went about the third witness. She’d been a really comical old girl. A true eccentric. In his notebooks he’d written her down as the Woman with No Name. Even Sergeant Rodwell, a fellow who’d been born and bred in the town, had been unable to enlighten him. He said no one in the town knew her name. She’d told Will that names were just a feckin’ irrelevance. Just call me Old Missus she’d told him, like the rest of the world did. She’d spoken with a southern Irish accent but she had been unwilling to give anything away about herself or her past.

  Rodwell had told Will that all kinds of myths had grown up around her: she was from an aristocratic family but had got herself pregnant; that she was a nun who’d escaped over the convent wall; a child murderess on the run.

  She’d had a foul tongue on her and Rodwell had blushed deeply at her colourful use of the language, but beneath the rough exterior Will had realised he was talking to a well-educated woman. Everywhere she went she dragged an old cart full of rubbish behind her. She swore, hand on her heart and may the Lord strike her feckin’ dead if she told a lie, that she’d caught a peep of the child hiding in the long grass down by the river. At about four o’clock she’d said. And she’d said that the child had been talking to someone, someone hidden in the grass. That someone had been the last person to see the child and they had never discovered who that someone was.

  Fatty kept the head in a box. It rested on a piece of cotton wool that he’d found in the ash tip. He carried the box everywhere with him for fear of his old man going through his room and finding it. It wasn’t valuable, he didn’t think, but that wouldn’t matter to the old man. He’d seen the head in Carty Annie’s cart the night Bessie’d had the frog explode on her. He’d seen it there many times before, but hadn’t realised what it was or where it had come from. It just looked like an old stone covered in moss but when he’d looked more closely at it as they’d lifted Bessie into the cart, he’d seen the shape of a nose, the indent of an eye socket.

  That night he’d lain in bed thinking about how he could get his hands on the head and have a proper look at it. He wouldn’t steal it because that would have been wrong. He wondered why Carty Annie had bothered to carry it around for so long, it must have been dead heavy.

  The next morning he’d had just the stroke of luck he’d hoped for.

  He’d seen Bessie and Iffy coming down the rutted road alongside the Three Rows and was going to run and join them, but he’d spotted a water rat swimming below the bridge and stopped to watch it for a moment. By the time he reached the Dentist’s Stone, Iffy and Bessie were further down the road and going into Morrissey’s shop. He would not set foot in there. He’d told Iffy not to go in, only she wouldn’t listen. He hated Morrissey. He was a filthy old pig. He’d done some dreadful things, and if mad Bridgie Thomas was right then he’d be due for a lightning bolt, boils or a plague of locusts in his shop. Fatty had hung about waiting for the girls and while he’d waited he’d seen Carty Annie come up the lane towards the bridge. He walked towards her and called out, “Mornin’, Old Missus.”

  “Morning to yourself, handsome fella!”

  Fatty grinned, and Carty Annie looking up at him thought that he truly was the most beautiful child she had ever clapped eyes on. Gorgeous enough to eat, he was.

  “Where you going?” he asked, his hands in his pockets.

  “Away off home to me bed. I been out half the night looking for them little bastards.”

  Fatty looked down. He didn’t want his eyes to give him away. He knew what she was talking about; he knew what she had in her house.

  “Want some company?”

  “Sure, to the stile though and no further.”

  They walked along together, an odd-looking couple, towards the Big House. As they came alongside the gates Carty Annie took a detour, a wide arc out into the road.

  “Why d’you always do that?” he asked.

  “Just because,” she said tapping her nose with her finger.

  “Because what?”

  “That nose of yours will get you into trouble.”

  “Just wondered, that’s all.”

  “Master Bevan, it seems to me you wants to know the ins and outs of a duck’s arse.”

  Fatty laughed out loud.

  “I keeps me distance, that’s all, and you should too.”

  “What’s that?” he said innocently, and pointed into the cart.

  Carty Annie stopped and looked down to where he was pointing.

  “What’s what?”

  He pointed to the head.

  “Ah, that now is a missing piece of a jigsaw.”

  He scratched his head.

  “Doesn’t look like a piece of a jigsaw.”

  “Well now, that all depends on the types of jigsaws you’re used to. Are you good at jigsaws?”

  “Yep,” he lied. He’d never had a jigsaw, but he knew what they were.

  “Well, if you can put together the rest of it, if you find all the other pieces, this head will complete it.”

  “Have you ever tried to finish the jigsaw?”

  Carty Annie looked him in the eyes. He had quite unfathomable eyes. Deep, deep blue eyes that reminded her of a restless sea. He was a very special boy this one. />
  “No,” she said with a sigh. “I think I was waiting for someone else to come along. I’m tired of jigsaws. Here.” She bent over and prised the head out from the tangle of piss pot and tinselled Pope. “It’s yours.”

  She handed him the head as though she were a headmistress handing out cups at speech day.

  Fatty swelled with pleasure. He cradled the head with both arms as he looked up at her in admiration. He didn’t care what people thought about Carty Annie, he liked her. She was a bit like him really, people took the mick because she wasn’t like everyone else, because her clothes were ragged. They didn’t know what went on inside other people’s heads, just looked at the outside and made their minds up. Carty Annie had a lovely face, it was darkened with age and weather, but her eyes were young and alive, deep greeny-blue eyes, eyes that looked right into him as though they might winkle out his deepest secrets.

  The moss covering on the head was soft to the touch, but he could feel the hardness of stone beneath.

  “Thanks, Old Missus.”

  He held the head to one side, leant towards Carty Annie and, swift as a wink, he kissed her on her wrinkled cheek.

  Carty Annie smiled. A wide arc of a smile that lifted her face, a radiant smile Fatty would remember for a long time.

  “Now feck off out the way, I’ve things to mind to.”

  And she was away, trundling the cart on up the road.

  Fatty stood quite still for a few minutes and then turned away, unaware of the eyes that watched him from an upstairs window of the Big House.

  Iffy sat beside Fatty on the river bank, idly running slivers of shale through her fingers.

  Fatty knelt down, leant over the edge of the bank and held the stone head under the water with both hands. He’d carefully peeled away all the moss from the face but it was still stained green with mould. Air bubbles rose up from the nostrils and ears.

  He lifted the head carefully out of the water, dried it on his T-shirt and laid it gently on the river bank. It was still hard to tell what it looked like beneath all the green.

  The slender neck was jagged as if it had been knocked off with violence when it had been parted from the rest of its body.