think her shoes were the problem, but he offered her his arm anyway. It was almost ten. Eric Lamb had gone on ahead, and they’d left Harold at the Legion, helping Clive to close up. It was the best part of the day, Brian thought. The heat had faded into a heavy silence, and there was even a pale breeze, pushing into the quietness and tracing a path through the highest leaves.
As they reached the garages at the end of the avenue, Sheila stopped to pull at the strap on her shoe, and she wavered and swayed, and leaned into Brian to keep her balance. ‘Bloody things,’ she said.
He stared at the road. Light escaped from the sky and pressed against the horizon, taking the familiar and the safe along with it. In the dusk, the houses looked different, exposed somehow, as though they had been stripped of their disguise. They faced each other, like adversaries, and right at the top, set back from the rest, was number eleven.
Still, silent, waiting.
Sheila looked up and followed his gaze. ‘Makes no sense, does it?’ she said. ‘Why would you stay when you know you’re not wanted?’
Brian shrugged. ‘Perhaps he feels the same about us. Perhaps he’s waiting for an apology.’
Sheila laughed. It was thin and angry. ‘He’ll wait a bloody long time for mine.’
‘But do you really think he did it? Do you really think he took the baby?’
She stared at him. Her whole face seemed to narrow and tighten, until the whites of her eyes were lost to hatred. ‘He’s the type, isn’t he? You’ve only got to look at him. You’re not that thick, Brian.’
He felt colour wash across his face. He was glad she wouldn’t notice.
‘Strange Walter,’ he said.
‘Exactly. Even the kids can see it.’
He glanced at the lights in Sheila’s window. ‘Who’s sitting with yours?’ he said.
She smiled. ‘They don’t need no sitter. Our Lisa’s old enough now. She’s sharp, just like her mother. I trained her well.’
He looked over at number eleven again. It was becoming lost to the light, the edge of the roof slipping into an inky black. ‘It’s what kids do, though, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘Copy their mams and dads?’
Sheila’s shoes dragged on the pavement, pulling at the concrete with their heels. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And don’t you go feeling sorry for Walter Bishop. People like that don’t deserve sympathy. They’re not like us.’
The rattle of the latch reached across an empty road.
‘Do you really think the police will be interested in the fire?’ he said. ‘After all this time?’
She turned in the half-light. He couldn’t see her face, just an outline. A shadow slipping and shifting against the darkening bricks. When she answered, it was a whisper, but he heard it creep across the silence.
‘We’d better bloody hope not,’ she said.
And her shoes scraped against the step, and a key twisted in a lock, and Brian watched as the last piece of daylight was stolen from the sky.
He crossed over, towards home, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He thought he’d imagined it at first, but then he felt it again, cardboard rubbing against his knuckles. He stopped and pulled at the ripped lining until it broke free.
A library ticket.
He stood underneath the street lamp, and the name on the ticket was caught in liquid, orange light.
Mrs Margaret Creasy.
He frowned and folded it in half, and he pushed it back against the lining, until it finally disappeared.
*
Brian stood in the doorway and looked into the sitting room. The giant cave of his mother’s sleeping mouth looked back at him, and it made the rest of her face seem strangely trivial. The Milk Tray was disembowelled on the footstool, and the debris of her evening decorated the carpet – knitting needles and crossword puzzles and television pages torn from a newspaper.
‘Mam?’ he said. Not loud enough to wake her, but loud enough to reassure himself that he’d tried.
She snored back to him. Not the violent, churning snore that you would expect, but something softer. A thoughtful snore. His father once said that his mother was delicate and graceful when they first met, and Brian wondered if her snoring was all that was left of that narrow, fragile woman.
He stared at his mother’s mouth. He wondered how many words had fallen out of it and into Margaret Creasy’s ears. She couldn’t help herself. It was as though she used hearsay as a web to trap people’s attention, that she didn’t believe she was interesting enough to hold on to them any other way.
His mother’s mouth widened a little more, her eyes squeezed a little more tightly, and from somewhere deep in her chest came the faint rasp of unconsciousness.
Brian wondered if she’d told Margaret Creasy about the night of the fire. About what she saw, or thought she saw, in the shadowed corners of the avenue.
And he wondered if these had been the magic words that had made Margaret Creasy disappear.
20 December 1967
Brian draws the flame of the match into his roll-up, and watches the tobacco spark and flicker in the darkness.
He can smoke indoors if he wants to. The rooms are painted with the yellow skin of his mother’s cigarettes, but he prefers to stand outside, to feel a bite of winter against his face and stare into the blackness undisturbed.
The avenue is held in a frosted quiet. All the houses are buttoned up against the cold, three bars on the fire, condensation climbing high in the windows. There are Christmas trees peeping through gaps in the curtains, but Brian doesn’t feel very much like Christmas. He doubts anyone does, in all honesty, after everything that’s happened.
The roll-up is thin and quick. It scratches the back of his throat and tightens his chest. He decides to take one last drag and go back into the carpet warmth of the kitchen, when he sees a movement at the top of the road. Somewhere at the edge of number eleven, there is a shift in the darkness, a brief change of light which catches the corner of his attention as he’s about to turn.
He shields the cigarette in his palm to cover its glow, and tries to pull the view into the eyes, but beyond the orange pool of the streetlight, the shapes die away into an inked black.
But there was definitely a movement.
And as he closes the back door, he’s sure he hears the sound of disappearing footsteps.
*
‘You can smoke in here, Brian.’ His mother nods at a bloated ashtray. ‘You could help me string these Christmas cards.’
She is pushing the cards into tiny red and green pegs, like
