“I don’t control what gets said.”
“ ’Course you bloody do!” He was leaning towards her again. “Look, Mrs. Mason, I’m going to say something that might surprise you — I don’t give a bugger where it comes from, you could be getting it all from the Devil for all I care, the point is: You can’t say it.”
She caught a flicker in his eye. “This frightens you, doesn’t it?”
“You frighten me. I think you’re a very stupid and very dangerous woman. And no, I don’t think you talk to the dead. I think you keep your ear to the ground, you ferret around for gossip and speculation and rumor and…Muck. And you spout it out without stopping to think about security or other people’s feelings or public morale or…or anything. Except money.”
“I tell the truth.”
“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you on the arse. Do you know, I’d have more respect for you if you stood on a street corner and peddled your fanny.”
She was up on her feet now. “I think you’ve stayed quite long enough.”
“Think about it.”
“What, peddling me fanny?”
“No, keeping the other hole shut.”
She couldn’t look at him. At the door he paused and looked back. “Because if you don’t, it mightn’t be fraud next time. It might be witchcraft.”
“What you gunna do, burn me?”
“No, I’m serious. You think about it now.”
After he’d left, she waited a few minutes then went out onto the landing to check he’d really gone, and wasn’t still there, in the darkness, hiding. She was trembling all over — back in the dock, back in prison. They could do it. But not witchcraft — that didn’t make any sense. And it was all true, what she’d told him. She didn’t control what was said. Once Albert took over, the most she ever heard was a kind of echo.
She switched the light off, pulled the blackout curtains back and lay on the bed. Awkward shape, that window. They’d had one just like it in Newcastle. The night the bailiffs come and took every last stick of furniture, she’d lain on the floor, on a borrowed mattress — Howard snoring beside her — and seen a hand pressed hard against the glass. Her mam’s hand. She recognized it straight away from the scars on the palm, scars she’d got in the herring-gutting sheds in Seahouses. And she’d known straight away her mam had passed.
And she’d known something else too: that the dead came to her, sought her out, and there wasn’t a bloody thing she could do about it.
She needed to think, but when she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, she was back in the dock. Every orifice, he’d said, smirking. “And the rolls of fat on her belly. You could hide a rat in there.” The faces in the courtroom had become a pink blur, she was back on the couch with her legs in stirrups, eyes shut, praying for Albert to come, but Albert didn’t come though she called and called for him. And when they let her sit up — take a breather, they said — she pushed them away and ran down into the street. Clinging to the railings, shouting and crying with the pins coming out of her hair and a woman in a fur coat come across to her and said, “What’s the matter, love? Are you all right?”
Of course, she had to go back in. Howard said it would look bad if she didn’t. So on it went: stomach, throat, nose, ears, fanny, arsehole, and yes, the rolls of fat on her belly. The least of her problems, that day…Howard sat outside in the waiting room. She went quiet towards the end, refusing to see the doctor’s face, the glint of glasses on his nose, refusing to feel the leather couch that made her back and thighs sweat, refusing to hear the chink of instruments in the bowl…And still Albert didn’t come.
But he was coming now. The room grew dim as she sank further and further into the hole that was opening up at the center of her being. At first she went slowly, but then faster and faster, swirling round, no longer able to see the window or feel the bed, down down down until at last the darkness covered her.
—
BERTHA CAME TO herself an hour later, with no sense of time having passed, though the square of sky in the window had faded from blue to white.
She was lying on the bed, though it seemed to have moved several feet across the floor. When she raised her head, she saw a chair lying on its side, plates and cups broken and a gray, sticky mess where the cod’s head had been stamped into the rug. Oh God. She didn’t blame Albert, not entirely, but didn’t he have a shred of common sense? Where was she going to find the money to buy new plates? And that rug was going to have to be thrown out. Of course he hated cod’s head, but so did she. Only, when Albert hated something, he went berserk. Always had done, probably always would. And of course, as per bloody usual, he left her to clear up the mess.
Tell you what, she wouldn’t be going to the shelter tonight, not with all this lot to clear up — no, not if it pissed bombs.
TWENTY-ONE
After the first few hours you lost track of time. He thought it was about three in the morning, but he couldn’t see his watch. In the doorway of a building opposite, a group of people, bombed out of a church basement, was waiting to be found space in other shelters. The usual purgatorial shadows. One of them, a woman, detached herself from the rest and gestured to him to come closer. He crunched towards her over broken glass. She pointed to a house farther down the street, the house she lived in — what was left of it. Her mouth was so caked with dust she had to moisten her lips several times before she could make herself understood. “There’s somebody still on the top floor.”
Brian Temple joined him and peered up at the house. “Well, whoever it is they’re a goner.” He was pointing to the side of the roof that had caved in. “If there is anybody.”
“She seems pretty definite.”
Charlie nodded. “Don’t see how we can ignore it.”
“I bloody do,” Brian said. “I’m sick to death of wild goose chases.”
“We’ll just have a look, right?”
They fetched a stretcher from the back of an ambulance and pushed the front door open. “Rescue-squad job, this,” Brian said. Charlie ignored him. He began creeping up the unlit stairs, testing every tread to make sure it would bear his weight. Brian was probably right, but then every available rescue squad had been called to Malet Street, where a bomb had fallen on a hostel. And the building seemed stable enough, nowhere near as bad as the houses on either side. At intervals, Charlie held up his hand and they stopped to listen. Creaks, an occasional louder crack, the grumbling of an injured building.
“I don’t think there’s anybody here,” Charlie said.
But then, on the third landing, they heard a groan and realized it was coming from a room above the attic stairs. These were narrow, room for only one person, and so steep it would be more like climbing a ladder. Charlie gestured to the others to stay back. Halfway up, there was a bend, and there he had to stop: a beam had fallen across the staircase, leaving only the narrowest of apertures. He shone his torch down onto their faces. “So who’s the thinnest?” This was a joke. He was grinning at Paul.
Right. Paul took off his coat and helmet, lay down, poked his head under the beam and started pushing with his heels, wriggling into the airless tunnel, inch by painful inch — a bit like being born but in reverse. Once, he got stuck and called back, “This isn’t going to work,” but then Charlie gave his backside a tremendous shove, his left shoulder broke through and he found extra space. Burrowing into the dusty darkness, mouth and nostrils choked with dust, eyes smarting, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on, but then, unexpectedly, he felt cool air on his face and neck and guessed the room beyond was open to the sky.