his side, as if asleep, his head buried in his arms.
Oddly enough, we all had the exact same thought: that it must be one of the Luducos, gone out last night for a stroll, forgetting his keys. Ah, well, he’d have thought considerately, I won’t get anyone out of bed, I’ll just catch some winks out here. The man was of the same height as Lucy’s lodgers, with the same thinning hair.
It wasn’t until we got closer that we realized who it really was, and what was wrong with him. We jumped back in horror. From a safe distance we peered to see if there was any blood, but we couldn’t spot any. Even so, it was fairly obvious that Thomas’s father was as dead as a doornail.
-
E is for Evil
The next Monday morning we started on a new chapter in our reader, all about a mouse called Koos, but we couldn’t concentrate. We kept having to peek at Thomas’s empty desk. Halfway through the lesson, Miss Joyce sighed that there was no point pretending it was a day like any other. We’d better take out our crayons and make a lovely picture for Thomas to show him how bad we felt for him.
With a loud clatter, we got out our crayons. But then the classroom went very quiet. The idea that granddads died and then never took you fishing again was hard enough to fathom, but … your dad? Dads weren’t supposed to die, were they?
With clammy hands we drew a sou’wester lying abandoned on the ground in a stand of tall stinging nettles. Down in a corner we drew Thomas with tears rolling down his fat cheeks, with his mom next to him. Out of respect we went back and erased her broom.
After a little while, Vanessa asked in a small voice, ‘Did he have cancer, Miss?’
Our teacher sat down, facing us on the bench where Thomas and Lucy normally sat fondly bashing each other’s brains out. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said.
Lucy wasn’t at school that day, either. That was as it should be, naturally, if your fiancé’s father had died. You were supposed to stay home and weep, with a black veil over your face. The tears you shed beneath that black veil turned into crystals, which you were supposed to store under your bed in a special little box, so you could take them out every so often and, smiling wistfully, watch them sparkle in the light.
Miss Joyce sighed again. She said, ‘I’m afraid I know just as little about it as you. But I don’t think he was ill. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been able to hold down such a demanding physical job, landscaping in all kinds of weather, rain or shine.’ She pulled the sleeves of her cardigan down over her hands. ‘Luckily, it hardly ever happens, but it is possible, my pets, for someone’s heart just to stop, or for something to suddenly go wrong in the brain.’
We, too, pulled down our sleeves. We swayed just as sadly from side to side as our teacher. It did help a little. Then we just sat for a while, saying nothing.
She said, ‘If he’d been found earlier, who knows, he might still be … It was unfortunate that it happened during the storm, when no one else would venture outside.’
It was another reason Lucy had to be shedding bitter tears right now. If only she had run away from home as she’d said she would! Because in that case she’d have crossed the field on her way to Shepherd’s Close. She’d have bumped into Thomas’s father, out for a stroll or smoking a fag he wasn’t allowed to light up at home. She would have seen him suddenly clutching his chest, and she’d have called for an ambulance. She’d probably even have been allowed to ride along in the ambulance, with the sirens going and all.
‘Where is he now?’
‘In the ground, isn’t he?’
‘No, silly, he’s in heaven!’
Miss Joyce said, ‘His body is being examined by a special kind of doctor to find out why he died. It’s the law.’
We perked up. Right at this very moment, he was being sliced into little pieces and examined under a microscope. Then, as soon as those doctors found out what had malfunctioned, they’d fix it. Then they’d stuff everything back inside and sew him up again neatly. And then they’d give him a huge electric shock, and then he’d open his eyes and get up from the operating table.
‘And after that,’ said Miss Joyce sadly, ‘they’ll take him home in a coffin, and then anyone who wants to can go there to say goodbye.’
At lunchtime, nearly all of our mothers showed up in the schoolyard. As soon as they saw Miss Joyce, they thronged around her, arms waving in the air. As if it wasn’t horrible enough, they cried, they’d just heard a piece of even more appalling news, first from Mr De Vries, who had a son who was a policeman, and then again at the baker’s, whose middle daughter was married to Mr De Vries’s son.
They had immediately decided that the children could no longer be allowed to walk to school and back by themselves. They had already worked out a carpool. They made our teacher swear she’d watch us like a hawk at recess, and be extra careful herself, for that matter. ‘Because he didn’t die from natural causes,’ they whispered behind their hands. ‘It was foul play!’ They couldn’t bring themselves to say any more; the very thought of it made them gag. With grim faces they grabbed us, lifted us onto the back of their bikes, and raced home. We didn’t know what had hit us.
Wherever you looked, you saw mothers with their kids on the backs of their bikes, or mothers dragging their progeny along on the pavement. On every street corner people stood in little huddles, whispering. The streets were buzzing with the shocking word that nobody had ever expected to use with regard to an acquaintance or a neighbour, even if he was only a superficial acquaintance or a relatively new neighbour: murder. Murder on home turf! Murder in the pioneer housing estate the prime minister had inaugurated in person, before the cameras of The Evening News, brandishing a great big symbolic key made of gold-painted plywood! He had spoken of a new way of life. A new, safer era for our country.
The newspaper cuttings were still pinned to our kitchen cabinets. If we climbed on a stool we could touch them; by now they were as dry and wrinkly as an oak leaf pressed between the pages of a book and then forgotten. The cuttings drew a lovely picture of the picturesque new housing enclave, a place that avoided the urban blight of slums, poverty and decay. Here there were no homeless people, no crazies with matted beards (whether borderline or completely insane) sleeping in your doorway because the shelters had run out of room, no junkies or dealers on every bridge, underage prostitutes with laddered black stockings, pickpockets, preachers of the apocalypse, alcoholics, bicycle thieves, foreigners with hungry eyes, foreigners with vacant eyes, foreigners out to steal your car radio, foreigners out to rape your daughter, pimps walking around with a menacing swagger, or apartment dwellers who are so upset at the infernal racket their neighbours make that they resort to smearing the communal stairs with green soap.
Here everything would be different, the newspapers promised. No dark, dangerous alleys in our neighbourhood. No riff-raff in our streets. No risk of the menace that elsewhere could ambush you in your own home. And now? Now that promise of a safe life was smashed to smithereens. But where could our shocked mothers turn to recoup their loss? If only reality came with an on-and-off switch, like the TV, which they always hastily turned off when something unpleasant came on, like the recent news report about those kids who had been lured into the woods by some man.
Instead of making us lunch, our mothers gathered in one another’s living rooms with unkempt hair that would soon reek of smoke and cigarettes. They talked in low voices. Out in the corridor, we pressed our ears to the wall.
What, they asked one another, could possibly
