stone wishing well and oak barrel planter where a relatively robust looking dwarf conifer was growing, circled by primroses – but she knew what it said: No leaflets or junk mail.
Her breath was quick and hissing. She could hear it – a sound close by – as she clicked up the latch and opened the gate. Out on the pavement there were other sounds – sounds that didn’t belong here on the edges of the Hartford Estate where families wanting to stay afloat above the tide of social debris put in for transfers to; where vegetables were grown, laundry dried outside, and windows cleaned. The sounds came from the centre of the estate – a primitive black hole with severed amenities, boarded-up windows and bonfires burning day and night – where things had gone bad.
Feeling suddenly fretful, Doreen felt out the gate to the house next door, number nineteen, where the Fausts lived. The Fausts and the Hamiltons had been among the estate’s first residents in 1954, and so proud of their new council homes that they threw parties for less fortunate friends and family still consigned to the damp, crowded miners’ rows.
There was a nail on the left hand post she remembered not to snag the sleeve of her dressing gown on; she also remembered that the Fausts’ gate had sunk on its hinges and needed lifting slightly. She remembered all this despite the succession of low-strung whimpering sounds she was making as she shuffled blindly – the orange streetlight was behind her now – up the garden path to number nineteen Parkview, her hands moving in slow nervous arcs.
She had no idea how long the journey between houses had taken her. Since losing her sight, things needed to be sought out, felt out . . . translated. Things took time.
She rang on the bell to number nineteen, her right palm flat against the door, overcome by the physical reverberations of relief at reaching her destination. She listened – and thought she heard the sounds of a bed giving up its sleeper; uncertain footsteps. Crouching down awkwardly, she opened the letterbox and shouted hoarsely through it – ‘Mary, it’s me – Doreen!’
She could smell the new gloss on the front door; she could even smell the green in it as she straightened up slowly, her left hand pulling on the collar of her dressing gown. The last time she’d knocked on Mary Faust’s door at midnight – on anyone’s door at midnight – was the night Laura was born. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, then in 1974 – unexpectedly at the age of forty-two – she became pregnant. She never did make it to the hospital. Laura was born on the bathroom floor at number nineteen – delivered by a shaking, incredulous Mary.
The door to number nineteen opened then and the quality of light changed.
Mary Faust, in a dressing gown not dissimilar to Doreen’s – the small tight curls on her head flattened by the hair net she was wearing – peered with concern, and just a shiver of hostility, at her virtually blind neighbour.
Doreen was clutching the collar of her dressing gown. Her mouth looked like broken knicker elastic and the hair on the right-hand side of her head – hair tinted with just a suggestion of purple – was flat with sleep still. Mary wanted to ask her why she wasn’t wearing a hair net, but it was midnight and Doreen didn’t look like she was up to having an opinion on hair nets right then.
‘Doreen?’ Mary patted her own hair, satisfied. Doreen was staring straight through her, panting strangely. ‘Doreen, pet?’ Mary prompted her. The ‘pet’ was condescending, but she felt that Doreen’s frailty, virtual blindness and possible dementia warranted it.
‘It’s Bryan –’ Doreen said at last.
Mary stared at her, trying to work out whether she was sleepwalking. It was difficult to tell with a blind person. ‘Bryan?’
‘Laura’s Bryan. He’s gone missing. She’s just phoned. The police are there now.’
‘Bryan?’ Mary said again. It seemed impossible to her, given all the Deanes had achieved – Laura Hamilton had become Laura Deane when she married Bryan. Achievements such as theirs – they owned and lived in a four-bedroom detached house, and ran two cars – were meant to safeguard against tragedy. ‘Missing how?’
‘I don’t know. Laura said he never came home.’
‘From where?’
‘I don’t know. Something to do with a kayak. He was in the sea, and – I can’t help thinking –.’
‘Don’t think,’ Mary commanded. ‘It’ll give you vertigo, and you’ll feel it in your joints. Where’s Don?’ Mary couldn’t see the car where it was usually parked beneath the street light.
‘He’s driven over there. He took Martha with him.’
Martha was Laura and Bryan’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She stayed with her grandparents most weekends.
‘You’d better come in,’ Mary said, taking hold of Doreen’s arm and pulling her into the house.
‘I didn’t mean to bother you. Not with Erwin ill . . .’
‘He’s out cold. Morphine.’
Mary was almost cheerful now as she pushed Doreen gently into the living room, guiding her to the sofa beneath the copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle.
Doreen poised rigidly on the edge, her left hand curled in her lap, her right hand gripping the armrest as if anticipating motion. She could smell carpet and the wood of the sideboard – as well as Lily of the Valley vapours from a bath Mary had taken earlier. She was breathless with disbelief still – even after telling Mary, who she could hear now making tea in the kitchenette.
There were other sounds – a man and woman making love – coming through the wall behind her from next door where a young family lived; a nice family, just trying to make their way in the world. Doreen felt briefly glad for them, then the panic set in again as she thought about Laura, who used to be such a happy little girl. Shocked, Doreen realised that subconsciously she must have noticed that lately Laura hadn’t been happy; Laura hadn’t been happy at all, but this wasn’t something they ever talked about because they didn’t talk about much these days.
She felt a sudden, inexplicable resentment towards Laura then, which had something to do with the dressing gown she was wearing and how much she’d always disliked it. She’d disliked it for being exactly what it was – an ugly, synthetic body bag she was meant to express senile thanks for because she was at the end of her life. It had been chosen carelessly and at the last minute – from the racks of a shop Laura would never have bought anything for herself in. When had she, Doreen, ever given the impression that silk had lost its meaning now she was over seventy? Doreen started to cry.
Mary stood in the kitchenette – her hand on the teapot; about to pour – on the phone to her granddaughter, Anna. Not only because Anna was police, but because she, Laura and Bryan had all grown up together here on the Hartford Estate.
Laura and Anna had lived next door to each other since birth, and as both of them remained only children a friendship would have been natural enough, but it had been more than friendship. They sought each other out intentionally and, growing up, they were inseparable – their own world – until the summer after the eleven plus, which Anna passed and Laura didn’t.
Mary had been telling herself for the past twenty-three years that it was the eleven plus that came between Laura and Anna, but it wasn’t – that same summer, the summer of ’85, the Deanes moved onto the Hartford Estate. They moved into number fifteen Parkview, next door to the Hamiltons.
