Twelve Stories Read online

  And Marguerite flinches in fury at the homeless woman’s heckling. I’ve had to walk all day, too, she’s thinking. My legs are hurting as well. But Marguerite knows not to draw attention to herself or her plight. She’s discreet. I had long slim arms and legs, she thinks, back when he first knew me.

  And do I want to rub his nose in it? Do I want him to know about the life he could have had? Everything he’s missed?

  The waiter thinks: I could be their grandchild. Marguerite could know that. The ace she is holding up her sleeve. She’s waiting for the moment to tell the old man. Shock him out of his holiness, his truculence. He looks disgruntled she wasn’t impressed with his good works. But he’s in for a shock. Marguerite has tracked their grandson down. She will announce it with a flourish, with malice, when the waiter comes over to present their bill. You belong to us. You are ours. Meet your granddad. What’s your name? And that will be me, the waiter thinks and he searches their faces for any resemblance.

  ‘My legs are ruined,’ shouts the homeless woman. ‘It won’t abate. I’ve got nowhere and you’ve got everywhere.’

  Marrguerite snaps some kind of remark and the priest makes a moue of displeasure. He looks at her like she’s being cruel. This is how her spite comes out. It could be much worse. Marguerite thinks. The old priest doesn’t know how much worse. He’s sorry for that terrible shouting woman because she has no place in the world.

  Only here outside the cafe. But I’ve got no place either, thinks Marguerite. I used to stand by my father when he played the accordion. I used to collect the coins in a cup. I had a role. The waiter says the bellowing woman sits there every day. Even she has a role here. They are used to her being here.

  The waiter wonders if this is the last day he’ll see Marguerite and the old priest. When they arrived today they looked fond and easier at first. Now something’s soured without much being said. It must be that grandson business, going round in Marguerite’s head. She won’t tell him now. Too late. Too old. Too cruel. The waiter shakes his head and smiles at himself, brushes back his hair and has to remind himself that it wasn’t true. He’d made it all up.

  Perhaps they’ll never meet again. He’ll never see them again.

  Sometimes his regulars—tourists, visitors—ask if he can take their photo. With their food just arrived, holding up their drinks, instructing him on how to use their cameras. He’s popular. Here we are in the middle of Rome. And sometimes they ask if he wants to be in the picture as well. The special waiter, always there in the cafe bar we ended up going back to, day after day. The cafe that became our special one. So they ask a second waiter to take another picture with them all in, having a good time. He doesn’t mind. He gets in the spirit of it, standing by their table with them, knowing he’ll never get to see the actual picture.

  The young waiter knows there’ll be pictures of him, standing by those people, those groups, all over the world, probably. Perhaps some of them will be in frames.

  He doesn’t have many pictures of his own. Not family-type Pictures.

  Now the old priest is clicking his fingers and calling for the bill. He smiles but they’re ready to go.

  The Foster Parents

  He was a twitchy man who lived next door. He was all white. He’d glare at you from under these bushy eyebrows. His wife was plump and friendly-looking, but she seemed scared of everything and you’d get no more than a squeak out of her.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Foster,’ I’d say, if we passed on the street or if I saw her over the garden fence.

  Squeak, she’d say, and hurry on by.

  It was that man. It was as if he’d beaten her and made her like this. She was all quivering flesh and he was hard, hard bone.

  Robert and I like to be neighbourly. Not too much so. But just so’s you know people are there, in case of emergencies, or for a little drink at Christmas. The Fosters from next door had been round for precisely one sweet sherry one Boxing Day and their company hadn’t been exactly scintillating. ‘You’ve put an old-fashioned fireplace back,’ Mr Foster scowled. ‘We have a new gas fire. Wood-effect surround.’

  ‘Squeak,’ added Mrs Foster, and finished off her sherry in one go.

  They never came round again. Not the Christmas following, nor ever since. And, of course, we never received any such invite from them.

  We’d hear raised voices sometimes, through the walls. Not that we made a habit of listening. Oddly, we would hear her voice raised above the level of her husband’s. She would scream and squeak extremely loudly sometimes. Something about that noise made me shudder. But what can you do? You can’t interfere in the lives of others.

  Nobody else ever went into or came out of their house. At least, not until about a year ago. When all that business started, it came as a shock. Comings and goings at all hours. The front door banging. Children running down the front path. I don’t suppose anyone else noticed the changes. The Fosters live in the end-terrace house and we are their closest neighbours. Our little street and the surrounding streets are full of busy comings-and-goings. These new children and teenagers wouldn’t have stood out as very conspicuous.

  But they did to us.

  We had assumed the Fosters were as childless as we were. I think one of us had even asked them, on that uncomfortable Boxing Day occasion. I swear I can remember Mr Foster twisting up his face at the very idea of having children. And I think she, in turn, looked sad.

  So that was why it struck me as extremely odd, that day last August, when I saw the twins step out of the Fosters’ front door.

  We were setting off in the car for a few days in the Lake District. We find it very peaceful up there. Robert enjoys driving around those very steep and bendy roads in the mountains. We often go for a weekend and it can be quite reasonably priced. So we had loaded up the car and we had locked up the house and we were at the point where we were about to drive off. ‘Did you check the bathroom window locks?’ Robert asks. ‘Did you switch off the toaster? The television? Did you put the window alarms on at the back?’

  And I, who know very well I did all of those things, start to panic and say, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’

  So he sighs and growls and we have to go and unlock the front door and check everything again. I think most people are like this, aren’t they? In this more security-conscious era? It only makes sense.

  Well, then we are standing at our front door, having whizzed 1 round the house and checked everything again, when next door s front door opens and I’m expecting to see one of the Fosters stepping out. I brace myself to say a bright and breezy ‘good morning’, though I’m certain to be rebuffed. But the words freeze in my throat.

  Two young teenagers are stepping out into the front garden of Number 72. They are obviously twins. A boy and a girl. Pretty little things with blonde hair and stripey T-shirts. They aren't saying anything to each other. They don’t even notice me, gawping at them, over the hedge.

  I watch them move off, almost uncertainly, down the shale garden path. My heart goes out to the pair of them. Whether because they have the misfortune to be related to the Fosters, or whether it is because they seem so uncertain and timid, I don’t know. Certainly, they are going off down the street, holding hands, looking as if this place is a very strange and bewildering one. They also look like very old-fashioned children to me. Their clothes, for instance, are unlike any you’d see worn by the other kids round here.

  Robert doesn’t see them at all and is reliant on my inadequate description of their oddness, once we are in the car and heading towards the ring road and the motorway north.

  ‘I don’t see what’s so odd about it,’ he pronounces. They’ll be their nephew and niece, or something. Or, I don’t know, something like that. Look at this idiot! I’ll bet that does his ego some good, overtaking me like that.’

  I don’t like it when Robert begins his very aggressive talk. Especially in the car. He does it in supermarket checkouts too, and I try to move away.

  I didn’t
think those twins were nephew and niece to the Fosters. All weekend in Grasmere I think about it. I’m picturing their little, worried faces in my head as we visit the Woollens shops and the gingerbread shop and take a picnic lunch up to Tam How. Robert won’t pay cafe prices, but we enjoy our picnics anyway, though Tam How’s now spoiled by too many people knowing about its ‘scenic seclusion’, as Robert calls it. I ask if this makes us—me and him—Adam and Eve. He just starts taking photos of rocks and trees. I sigh because he never takes any with people in. ‘What people, eh?’ he always laughs. What people do we know we’d want pictures of?’

  If I’d been holding his camera when I was on our doorstep, and he was fiddling with the complicated alarm system, I’d have snapped a quick piccie of those twins. Then I could have shown him what I meant about them not being right somehow. It was something in their eyes. Like they were out of their element.

  For the next few weeks I think Robert was getting sick of me. Going on and on about it. I think I probably got obsessed with goings-on next door.

  ‘For god’s sake woman,’ he would say, when I grew distracted over dinner. We were eating in the kitchen and I could hear noises through the thin partition wall. ‘Leave them be. They’ve obviously got visitors again.’

  How could he look so unruffled by it? How come he wasn’t bothered?

  But he was going through a rough time at work just then. They had brought in new systems for everything and he was finding it difficult to deal with. A new spirit of openness and transparency had come in, he said, when he tried to explain it to me once. Of course I don’t really understand these things, but I try my best to be supportive.

  He was right that I was getting obsessed, though. I saw more children coming and going at Number 72, next door. More and more of them. All ages, all types. Fat and small, tall and ginger, black and Chinese. All dressed badly, like out of a charity shop. Some of them laughing and running, others lethargic and anxious. The Fosters’ home was overrun with them, it seemed.

  In our own, rather quiet home, we would hear the staircase next door thudding and thundering as kids ran up and down. The old floorboards would quake beneath all that boistrous energy. At night you could hear Mr Foster yelling at them, to make them quieten down. Once, I even heard Mrs Foster sing a lullabye. I was sitting on the toilet and I heard this whispering, wobbling voice on the other side of the wall. It gave me a turn.

  Another time I woke in the night, seized with fear. Cries had rung out. Really horrible screams and then sobbing. The heart-stopping sound of a child in distress. I sat bolt upright in our bed and found that Robert was already awake. I switched on my light. His expression was grim. ‘I hate to say it. But I think you’re right about something going on next door.’

  And even though I was scared for the kids still, my heart glowed at his words.

  Yet we didn’t do anything. Morning and clarity and sunlight came and, over his toast and his paper, Robert said, ‘I think they are probably fostering these children. I have thought it over and of course that’s what they’re doing. The Fosters are foster parents.’ He smiled and returned to the Daily Mail.

  I sank the plunger of the cafetiere with unusual force. I didn’t want to go on about it, but I knew he was wrong. I waved him off to his job, to face another day of openness and transparency and I tried to think about it logically. Surely the Fosters were too old for fostering or adopting. Social Services would never let them start up, this late in life, would they? They would never pass the checks. He looked like a wife-beater. But what did I know? I was tempted to phone Social Services myself. Ask some questions about all these kids, coming and going.

  You hear such things, don’t you? You read about terrible things. And it’s under the noses of ordinary people like us that they go on. And sometimes people turn a blind eye. That’s how kids get whisked away and abducted. Held underground for years and tortured. Or piled into lorries, hundreds at a time and dragged to foreign countries. That’s what goes on these days. That’s what they reckon.

  I was having my coffee, watching the Trisha show and letting my mind rove over the quandry. Was I looking for sinister things when there was nothing sinister to find?

  ‘You should get out more,’ Robert had started to tell me. ‘Get yourself a little job. On the tills at Marks and Spencers or something. See some life, Helen. This is no good. Stewing indoors and letting your ideas go mad.’

  I took myself off down the high street. I had to pop in the bank and pick up a few things. I was just on Albert road, before the railway bridge, and I saw Mr Foster coming towards me. I would have to pass him. It would look odd if I crossed the road now. And I was sure he would see all the suspicion plain on my face.

  He wasn’t alone, either. He had a little girl with him. She must have been about four. Eating a bag of sweets and wearing a knitted cardigan. As they approached Mr Foster reached down and took hold of her hand. For the first time ever, he addressed me directly: ‘Good morning, Mrs Booth.’

  I returned this greeting, smiling down at the little girl. ‘She’s lovely. What’s her name?’

  ‘Jemima. She’s staying with us for a short while. She’s my wife’s sister’s grandchild.’

  I was bending awkwardly, trying to say hello to the child. I’ve never been any use with them. I don’t think children take me at all seriously. When I spoke the child looked up and I gave a small gasp of fright, which I tried to stifle. One of Jemima’s eyes was half-closed and you could see there was only darkness behind it. The other eye was wide, bright and blue. Surely they could have her wear a patch or something?

  Mr Foster had obviously noticed my flinching attempt to cover up my reaction. He looked disgusted and swept away with the child, giving me a curt goodbye.

  I was left feeling miserable, like I had failed some test, or been purposefully cruel. I felt even more like that when I told Robert, that evening.

  ‘How could you recoil from a child? She’ll remember that. She’ll be traumatised.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said, knitting. In order to make myself feel better, I’d been to the wool shop on the high street. I was making a jumper for the little girl. It had been a long time since I’d knitted anything, and concentrating was making me cross.

  ‘They can’t all be great-nephews and nieces, though,’ Robert mused, as my needles clacked away. We were watching Question Time, which always gets him happily riled up, and shouting at the screen. I was glad that his mind was still running on the problem of next door.

  But he didn’t say anything more about it until the weekend.

  Saturday morning he was out digging the borders. He was happy in old cords and a favourite jumper, seeing to his garden. It was a beautiful morning. I was surprised the kids next door weren’t out playing yet. How many were there now, at this point? It gave me an odd feeling, just thinking about it and not knowing how many children were living next door. We had fallen asleep last night, listening to them running up and down the stairs and slamming doors. Mr Foster’s voice bellowing at them to quieten down. To settle for the night.

  I did the dishes, thinking back over this, enjoying the hot suds and the squeaky clean crockery, and the sunlight on my face. I was only half-aware of watching my husband, digging up the flower beds by the fence we shared with next door. I know the wooden boards there were loose and unsatisfactory. I know that he had been meaning to talk with the Fosters about clubbing together to buy a new fence. As I watched now, I saw him put his spade through the crumbling, mildewy wood. I heard him swear loudly. And then I saw him bend to look at what he’d dug up. And I saw him jump backwards in alarm.

  I had never seen him like that. He came into the kitchen shaking like a leaf. I tried to hold him, to offer him hot sweet tea, but he shook me off. ‘Come and see, Helen,’ he said, though, given his reaction, I wasn’t at all keen. I followed him out the back door, across the patio and onto the lawn and I’d have given anything to turn around and go back indoors.

  ‘There,’ he
said, prising back the boards and the heaped, black earth. ‘I thought it was an old tree root, or something. Caught underneath the fence. But look! Look at it, Helen!’

  It was a child’s arm. White and covered in crumbly black mud. Its hand and splayed fingers seemed curiously expressive to me. I looked at them, rather than at the bloody stump at the other end of the arm.

  We sat in the front room to wait for the police. I made that sugary tea at last and we sat huddled together, on dining room chairs, drinking it quickly. I gave myself hiccups, of course, and sat there, like a fool, hiccupping.

  ‘They’re killing them,’ Robert said, at last.

  I shushed him, and hiccupped.

  ‘They’re hacking them up and burying them in their garden. Why didn’t we know? How come we couldn’t tell?’

  I didn’t say anything. But I’d known something was wrong. I’d known something was going on, all that time. I didn’t point that out now.

  ‘They’re killers, Helen. Like Fred and Rose West. That’s what they are.’

  We sat waiting, feeling useless. Too scared to move or do anything else. All the while we knew that the Fosters were home next door, and they had kids in there with them. It was a normal Saturday morning, unseasonably sunny. They weren’t to know yet that their game was up. Their happy family business of child mutilation was over now. We were about to put a stop to it.

  The police came round much faster than they had for our burglary, back in March. They shot round like I don’t know what. ‘Body parts’ seem to be the magic words for emergency calls. ‘Child’s body parts’ even more so. Three cars came. The police came traipsing into our house looking very serious indeed and I could have died of relief at the sight of them. Something about the uniforms makes me feel instantly guilty, though. I wanted to shout and protest: ‘It wasn’t us! We’re the good people! It was them next door!’