Twelve Stories Read online

  But the police were impartial, professional. They asked to be led to this grisly find in the flower bed. ‘Yes, of course,’ said my husband, much cooler and calmer than I knew he felt.

  I watched from the back door. Robert and five uniformed coppers clustered round the overturned earth. They stood there for some moments, staring at the ground.

  Something was wrong.

  ‘It was there! We both saw it!’ Robert sounded desperate, even to me. ‘It was an arm! A severed child’s arm!’

  They talked to him in low, warning voices for some minutes. Then they came marching back through our house, muttering threatening things about our wasting police time.

  Then the police were gone.

  ‘A dog must have had it,’ Robert said, ashen-faced. ‘Or… Or…’ I think I knew what he was about to say. Or, next door had somehow whizzed out and removed the evidence before the police got here. That’s what they had done. They had watched us out there. They had seen us staring at the arm. And, when our backs were turned, one of them had dashed out and grabbed it. Leaving just an innocent hole in the ground. And making the two of us look sick in the head.

  Bang. Bang bang. It was our front door again, shattering the tense quiet of our post mortem. I went to answer it.

  There was a little boy there, in grey shorts and a white T-shirt. Funny-looking little thing. ‘I’ve been sent round to ask what the coppers were out for,’ he said, in a gruff voice. ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘Erm,’ I said. ‘No, there isn’t. False alarm.’

  He rubbed his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Ok, then.’

  I stopped him. ‘Do you live next door?’

  He nodded. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Where did you come from? Are you related to the Fosters?’ He stared at me like I was talking nonsense. He shrugged. Then he thrust a scrappy piece of paper into my hand, turned abruptly and ran off, back down our path, and up next door’s. He slammed their door behind him, as if it was the world outside that wasn’t safe.

  ‘What did he give you?’ Robert asked over my shoulder.

  I unfolded the note. It was from Mrs Foster. Requesting the pleasure of our company. Drinks this evening, round theirs. Oh God.

  Mrs Foster was a different person at home.

  The rooms were busy and crowded with chintz and vulgar ornamentation. Robert tried to catch my eye a number of times as we gazed around at her horrendous collection of unicorns, gonks, china baby dolls. But I feel guilty for looking down on other people’s taste, even at the best of times. An old Charlotte Church cd was playing. Back from when she had the voice of an angel. And there was Mrs Foster, tipsy and welcoming in a spangly top, offering us drinks and saying: ‘We’ve meant to have you round so many times. We never got round to it, we’ve been so remiss, and you were so good to us that Christmas. You haven’t met any of our children, have you? Not properly?’

  And there they all were. The house seemed to be filled with them. There was no sign of Mr Foster yet, and his wife was like the old woman who lived in a shoe. There were pre-teens sprawled on the armchairs and settee in the living room, quietly watching cartoons. Leggy, ungainly teenagers—the twins I had seen first of all, the day we went to the Lakes—were laying out a buffet on the dining table sideboard. There was a grapefruit with sausage and pineapple cocktail things stuck in it. ‘They’re all very keen to meet the neighbours,’ Mrs Foster beamed at us. ‘And it was the kids who did all the eats. They insisted on doing it all themselves.’

  That made me shiver, the way she said ‘eats’. There was such relish to everything she said. It turned my stomach, as did the sight of the devilled eggs and the stuffed tomatoes. Everything in that place was slightly too colourful. And moist. Everything was glistening.

  Robert was polite and inscrutable. ‘We had no idea you and Mr Foster had such a large family.’

  She smiled. ‘Ah yes. None of our very own. But our relatives always seem to need us for baby-sitting and so on.’ She was hugging the little boy who had brought our invitation. He was squirming playfully in her grasp.

  We knew this couldn’t be right. There was never any sign of other adults pulling up in their cars, dropping children off. Didn’t she have any better explanation?

  The teenaged children were looking at us, and waiting for us to serve ourselves from their buffet. As we shuffled along, inspecting all the dishes and dutifully loading up our paper plates, they were acting like waiting staff. They passed us napkins and smiled at our choices. I could sense Robert growing more and more perturbed.

  Mr Foster was in the kitchen, wiping his large hands on a tea towel. He, at least, was his usual self: unwelcoming and gruff. He stared at us. He looked us up and down. ‘It’s very good of you to invite us,’ I said.

  ‘Unexploded bomb was it?’ he said sharply. ‘Is that what hubby found? Is that why you had the police out?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ Robert said.

  I looked at him, and he was flushing with colour. I dreaded him telling this man what he had seen.

  ‘It was nothing like that.’ But he didn’t explain himself any further.

  Then, a very pretty girl of about nineteen came swishing past in a nylon blouse, to fetch a vast bottle of Tizer from the fridge. The mood in the kitchen dissipated and I returned to the sitting room, where Mrs Foster breathlessly introduced me to the children.

  I was glad to see Jemima again, the girl with the dark hole where her eye should be. This time I made a point of smiling, and not flinching when she looked up at me. As Mrs Foster called out the rest of the names I had a crazy, fleeting moment of feeling like I was in The Sound of Music.

  We sat there for about half an hour. Small talk. Smiling and sipping. Mrs Foster telling me bits and pieces about the kids in her care. She loved them, I decided. Now I could see how much she cared for them.

  ‘Would you like one, Mrs Booth?’ Mrs Foster asked at last, with such a shy, sidelong smile. ‘Wouldn’t you just love to pick one up and take it home?’

  And, without thinking, I said: ‘Yes. Yes, of course I would.’ Then we were interrupted.

  Robert was telling me: ‘Helen. Helen. Time for home.’

  At the door Mr Foster himself waved us off. Out of hearing of his wife, and under the pretense of explaining to Robert how he’d repaired their garden gate, he hissed: ‘Keep well out of it. You and your wife. We don’t like it, the way you look at us. You’re looking at our kids. They’ve noticed you doing it. You want to watch out. You don’t want to worry kiddies like that with your inappropriate attention. Do you?’

  Robert stiffened and I caught my breath. Neither of us said anything. We were too shocked to say anything back to him. What did he think he was accusing us of? We couldn’t believe it. He snorted at us and turned away, and went back up his pathway, crunching the blue slate chippings under his carpet slippers. Some of the kids were in the doorway, watching us, and Mrs Foster was already back indoors. Their door slammed abruptly and me and Robert were left out in the street, quite stunned.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ he said.

  ‘The kids seem happy, well cared for,’ I said.

  ‘Hm.’ He unlocked our door. Three locks at the front, we’ve got.

  ‘Did we hallucinate it?’ I said as I switched on the lamp in the hall, and he grappled with the alarm system. ‘The arm, I mean. Did we really see it?’

  ‘Of course we saw it, Helen. It was a human arm. A child’s arm.’

  By now I wasn’t sure anymore. I was still thinking about Mrs Foster perched next to me, telling me all about the kids in her charge. She had been so close in that sitting room, as I picked at the chicken satay, I could smell the brandy on her breath, all sickly. I had braved myself to ask about Jemima.

  ‘What happened to her eye?’

  ‘Her eye? Oh. She came to us in that state. Bless her little heart.’

  That sentence kept coming back into my head as I lay awake in our bedroom at the back of the house. I lay awake all nigh
t with the full moonlight glaring down on us. Robert tends to sleep easily, deeply, like a flat fish sunk at the bottom of the sea. I’m roving over everything, my eyes frantic and staring at the ceiling. That’s how I spend my nights, with fears and fretfulness mounting up in my brain. And that night I was thinking about Mrs Foster going: ‘She came to us in that state.’ Like Jemima was faulty goods.

  I also kept thinking of the other thing she said. ‘Would you like one, Mrs Booth? Wouldn’t you just love to pick one up and take it home?’ I had said: ‘Yes, of course I would.’ It was as if she had caught me out, unawares.

  I drifted off to sleep for maybe twenty minutes. These days, since our break-in, I’ve found it quite hard. I’m awake at every little squeak and groan from outside. What wakes me up this time is noise out in the gardens. And it’s not that sinister, almost noiseless-noise of burglars creeping about and trying so hard to be silent. It’s not that. I can hear squeals and whoops. I can hear children’s voices, inarticulate with excitement. Lots of them.

  It’s like Christmas out there in the stark moonlight. What’s going on? My heart hammers so hard I can’t think rationally. I elbow Robert hard and he shifts and doesn’t wake. Are they laughing out there? Are they screaming? I have this vision of them all running out of the house, escaping from the Fosters’ clutches. I struggle to the window and get tangled in the endless net curtains. I squint and I struggle to see.

  There, down below, neatly plotted and hemmed with hedges, trees and fences, our gardens are laid out and still. All except for the Fosters’ garden, where there’s something like fifteen children, of all ages, hopping about on the lawn. They are shouting and jostling and some of them are dashing around for what looks like the sheer fun of it. Even though I’m scared and confused, the sight of them makes me want to laugh. ‘Robert!’ I hiss. ‘Wake up! Come here!’

  And then I see that Mr and Mrs Foster are out there as well. I look at the digital clock and it’s past four a.m. All of the Foster children, and the Fosters themselves are still dressed for the day. Mrs Foster is just as silly and excited as the kids. She joins hands with some of the younger ones. They’re dancing ring-a-rosy on the wet lawn.

  Mr Foster has fetched a garden fork.

  ‘You’re missing it, Robert! Come and see!’

  From the depths of the duvet, which he has wound about him, as per usual, like giant human kitchen roll, Robert groans and swears at me. I don’t call him again. I can’t. I’m watching Mr Foster as he carries his garden fork across the lawn. He moves through the milling children and the moonlight glints off the sharp fork tines.

  How could we have thought anything was amiss? They all look so happy. They all look glad to be alive. They are jumping about and flexing their fresh young limbs. They’re springing about on the damp lawn. Suddenly I realise I would do anything to be with them. To be part of that family party. That atmosphere they somehow live in. And yet I feel so distant. Peering round my net curtains, up here. Left out of it all.

  And here is Mr Foster, digging in his cabbage patch. Gardening at weird times in the night. Well, they’re eccentric, aren’t they? We know that by now.

  ‘Wouldn’t you love to pick one up and just take it home?’ That’s what Mrs Foster asked me. And she knew she was striking some deep-rooted chord within me. It chimed out loud inside my chest and it was chiming now, as I watched them all dancing and playing. Of course I would. Of course I would love one of my own. If they had one to spare.

  Weird thoughts to have in the middle of the night. Weird thoughts to have, any time of day. No matter how muddled you are, or jarred, or scared.

  I’m watching Mr Foster in his vegetable garden as he loosens the roots beneath his cabbages. Delicate, so delicate, the way he works. Some of the children gather to watch. They coo and applaud. And over comes Mrs Foster, swaying on her tiny feet and kicking up the shining dew. She bends to kneel before one particular cabbage. She brushes the damp soil from its outer leaves. Mr Foster has cut it free and he steps back, looking satisfied. The children whoop and cry and he shushes them quickly. This is all supposed to be secret. What would happen if they woke some nosey parker, eh? This is a special treat, their being let out here tonight. Never again, though. They are far too noisy. They are naughty children and they will never be asked again to come outside and witness this. The children fall silent and morose at Mr Foster’s stem words. Perhaps he doesn’t really mean it.

  For now, though, their attention is fixed on Mrs Foster. So is Mr Foster’s, and he looks proud. My attention, too, is taken up by the beaming face of Mrs Foster, as she bends to heft the fat cabbage out of its mucky bed. First she pushes her face gently into its leaves and kisses it on the nose.

  And then she pulls it free.

  The children all cheer and Mr Foster tries to stop them. Then it’s a free-for-all, as he gives in and lets them rootle through the leafy rows, searching out hands, feet, ears and whatever else might be growing there.

  Sunseeker

  My Gran was a sunseeker. That’s how she died.

  I mean, she never tanned herself to death, like some of these people do. Flying back home the colour and texture of a cheap handbag and blind with sun spots. That wasn’t how she sailed into the hereafter. It was, however, down to the fact that she liked to go abroad.

  In later life my respectable, rational, scientific Gran turned into a proper gadabout. More than that: a globe-trotter.

  Bless her heart. She never went abroad till she was fifty. She saved up all that time. Early retirement. She decided to see the world.

  Or rather, to see some swanky hotels, some plush resorts. She decided she was going to have a beano.

  My Gran became a sunseeker. And so did her best friend Beryl, who was always chiming in.

  My Gran and Beryl were scientists. They worked in a laboratory together. They never discovered anything or invented anything, but they quite liked the work. It was clean and the hours were good. They liked the white coats and the clunky goggles—they really did. They had a funny sense of glamour. Fifties-style, Quatermass chic. Pointy bosoms, frosted hair, bunsen burners at the ready. And the laws of physics, they found, were satisfyingly static, unchanging, dependable. They worked together all those years, happy in the knowledge that the universe under their feet was firm and secure like no man ever was.

  They tended not to bring their work home with them.

  Beryl was with her right to the end. Mum and I couldn’t get rid of Beryl. She kept coming round. Being mawkish. It was harder for Beryl than it was—even for us—to let go of Gran.

  The day of the funeral—small, baptist church, not much fuss, crematorium afterwards and ham sandwiches—Beryl seemed to think she was the star of the show.

  She kept saying horrible things. Even after the coffin and the body had been flown home all the way from Spain and there’d been autopsies and lying in state and heaven knows what. Beryl claimed she could still smell the chlorine from the swimming pool that poor old Gran had drowned in.

  ‘But then,’ Beiyl added, sotto voce and with an heroic, tragic expression—‘I’ll always smell chlorine when I think of your Gran now.’ It was Beryl who’d administered the kiss of life to Gran—after Gran had been fished, lifeless, out of the deep end.

  I can’t bare to think of the kerfuffle of the scene that must have ensued. All those pensioners—drunk, dismayed, horror-struck. The chaos as Gran lay sopping, already dead, in her holiday finery. Galumphing Beryl poised over her, pummelling at her chest and—an unlikely seducer—pressing her magenta lips to Gran’s blue lips and puffing away like mad.

  Both Gran and Beryl were 40-a-day women. Even more on trips where ciggies were cheap. That kiss of life must have been pretty feeble; pretty toxic. No matter. Gran stayed dead. There was no miraculous resurrection.

  Not that either would have hoped for miracles. They were both women of science. They didn’t hold with mumbo-jumbo.

  And all I could taste was chlorine, Beryl kept telling us. Th
at clean, chemical smell. No matter what I’ve eaten since, whatever I’ve drunk and no matter how many ciggies I’ve gone through. I’ve been burping chlorine all the time. And I could smell it there, in the church, just sitting by the coffin.

  Mum kept scowling at Beryl. She never had much time for the woman. And now Beryl kept going into lurid, horrible detail about her adventure. She seemed compelled to do it, and relate all the detail to us. And she treated it just like an adventure, too —a strange adventure of being left alone, abroad, with the lifeless body and abandoned belongings of your very best friend.

  But, oh, the Spanish police and authorities had been marvellous. Oh, hadn’t they just. They had been wonderful and they couldn’t do enough for you. Beryl had to take back everything she’d said about the Spanish, she admitted that.

  The worst thing Beryl described was that moment during the conga when Gran got completely carried away. Her new, shiny-soled shoes slid on the wet tiles. She broke the chain. She lost her footing; her place in the joggling, jostling, high-kicking rank… and she fell. Those she’d lost grip on laughed at first, startled, thinking she would hit the ground softly—maybe she’d bounce —the way you think when you’re completely drunk. She did sort of bounce. Beryl said. She hit the tiles at the edge of the pool and slid into the water with very little disturbance. She slithered like a sea serpent into that soft blue, undulating water water so thick with warm chemicals it looked like jelly. Like you could cut a neat slice of it—and lift it out onto the poolside—and rescue Gran from the depths…

  Except you couldn’t. And they couldn’t. By the time that the broken ranks of the conga had realised what had happened and they’d all stopped jostling and tooting their hooters and come back to see what Beryl was yelling about… to see what on earth was this large, distorted, lilac shape, as it rested gently at the bottom of the pool… by then it was too late. Gran’s lungs had filled easily with water. She hadn’t struggled at all—the coroner had told Beryl and Beryl took great pleasure in relating to us. They’d been filled easily as a hot water bottle at the tap.