Respects (2009)
By the time Dorothy finished hobbling downstairs, somebody had rung three times and knocked several more. Charmaine Bullough and some of her children were blocking the short garden path under a nondescript November sky. “What did you see?” Charmaine demanded at once.
“Why, nothing to bother about.” Dorothy had glimpsed six-year-old Brad kicking the door, but tried to believe he’d simply wanted to help his mother. “Shouldn’t you be at school?” she asked him.
Brad jerked a thumb at eight-year-old J-Bu. “She’s not,” he shouted.
Perhaps his absent siblings were, but not barely teenage Angelina, who was brandishing a bunch of flowers. “Are those for me?” Dorothy suggested out of pleasantness rather than because it seemed remotely likely, then saw the extent of her mistake. “Sorry,” she murmured.
Half a dozen bouquets and as many wreaths were tied to the lamp-standard on the corner of the main road, beyond her gate. Charmaine’s scowl seemed to tug the roots of her black hair paler. “What do you mean, it’s not worth bothering about?”
“I didn’t realise you meant last week,” Dorothy said with the kind of patience she’d had to use on children and parents too when she was teaching.
“You saw the police drive our Keanu off the road, didn’t you?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say I did.”
At once, despite their assortment of fathers, the children resembled their mother more than ever. Their aggressive defensiveness turned resentful in a moment, accentuating their features, which were already as sharp as smashed glass. “Can’t or won’t?” Charmaine said.
“I only heard the crash.”
Dorothy had heard the cause as well – the wild screech of tyres as the fifteen-year-old had attempted to swerve the stolen Punto into her road apparently at eighty miles an hour, only to ram a van parked opposite her house - but she didn’t want to upset the children, although Brad’s attention seemed to have lapsed. “Wanna wee,” he announced and made to push past her, the soles of his trainers lighting up at every step.
As Dorothy raised a hand to detain him, J-Bu shook a fist that set bracelets clacking on her thin arm. “Don’t you touch my brother. We can get you put in prison.”
“You shouldn’t just walk into someone else’s house,” Dorothy said and did her best to smile. “You don’t want to end up—”
“Like who?” Angelina interrupted, her eyes and the studs in her nose glinting. “Like Keanu? You saying he was in your house?”
Dorothy might have. The day before the crash she’d come home to find him gazing out of her front room. He hadn’t moved until she managed to fumble her key into the lock, at which point he’d let himself out of the back door. Apart from her peace of mind he’d stolen only an old handbag that contained an empty purse, and so she hadn’t hurried to report him to the overworked police. If she had, might they have given him no chance to steal the car? As Dorothy refrained from saying any of this, Charmaine dragged Brad back. “Come out of there. We don’t want anyone else making trouble for us.”
“I’m sorry not to be more help,” Dorothy felt bound to say. “I do know how you feel.”
Angelina peered so closely at her that Dorothy smelled some kind of smoke on the girl’s breath. “How?”
“I lost my husband just about a year ago.”
“Was he as old as you?” J-Bu said.
“Even older,” said Dorothy, managing to laugh.
“Then it’s not the same,” Angelina objected. “It was time he went.”
“Old people take the money we could have,” said J-Bu.
“It’s ours for all the things we need,” Brad said.
“Never mind that now,” said Charmaine and fixed Dorothy with her scowl. “So you’re not going to be a witness.”
“To what, forgive me?”
“To how they killed my son. I’ll be taking them to court. The social worker says I’m entitled.”
“They’ll have to pay for Keanu,” said Brad.
Dorothy took time over drawing a breath. “I don’t think I’ve anything to offer except sympathy.”
“That won’t put shoes on their feet. Come on, all of you. Let’s see Keanu has some fresh flowers. He deserves the best,” Charmaine added louder still.
Brad ran to the streetlamp and snatched off a bouquet. About to throw them over Dorothy’s wall, he saw her watching and flung them in the road. As Angelina substituted her flowers, Dorothy seemed to hear a noise closer to the house. She might have thought a rose was scratching at the window, but the flower was inches distant. In any case, the noise had sounded muffled by the glass. She picked up a beer can and a hamburger’s polystyrene shell from her garden and carried them into the house.
When she and Harry had moved in she’d been able to run through it without pausing for breath. She could easily outdistance him to the bedroom, which had been part of their fun. Now she tried not to breathe, since the flimsy shell harboured the chewed remains of its contents. She hadn’t reached the kitchen when she had to gasp, but any unwelcome smell was blotted out by the scents of flowers in vases in every downstairs room.
She dumped the rubbish in the backyard bin and locked the back door. The putty was still soft around the pane Mr Thorpe had replaced. Though he’d assured her it was safe, she was testing the glass with her knuckles when something sprawled into the hall. It was the free weekly newspaper, and Keanu’s death occupied the front page. LOCAL TEENAGER DIES IN POLICE CHASE.
She still had to decide whether to remember Harry in the paper. She took it into the dining-room, where a vase full of chrysanthemums held up their dense yellow heads towards the false sun of a Chinese paper globe, and spread the obituary pages across the table. Keanu was in them too. Which of the remembrances were meant to be witty or even intended as a joke? “Kee brought excitement into everyone’s life”? “He was a rogue like children are supposed to be”? “There wasn’t a day he didn’t come up with some new trick”? “He raced through life like he knew he had to take it while he could”? “Even us that was his family couldn’t keep up with his speed”? Quite a few of them took it, Dorothy suspected, along with other drugs. “When he was little his feet lit up when he walked, now they do because he’s God’s new angel.” She dabbed at her eyes, which had grown so blurred that the shadows of stalks drooping out of the vase appeared to grope at the newsprint. She could do with a walk herself.
She buttoned up her winter overcoat, which felt heavier than last year, and collected her library books from the front room. Trying to read herself to sleep only reminded her that she was alone in bed, but even downstairs she hadn’t finished any of them – the deaths in the detective stories seemed insultingly trivial, and the comic novels left her cold now that she couldn’t share the jokes. She lingered for a sniff at the multicoloured polyanthuses in the vase on her mother’s old sideboard before loading her scruffiest handbag with the books. The sadder a bag looked, the less likely it was to be snatched.
The street was relatively quiet beneath the vague grey sky, with just a few houses pounding like nightclubs. The riots in Keanu’s memory – children smashing shop windows and pelting police cars with bricks – had petered out, and in any case they hadn’t started until nightfall. Most of the children weren’t home from school or wherever else they were. Stringy teenagers were loitering near the house with the reinforced front door, presumably waiting for the owner of the silver Jaguar to deal with them. At the far end of the street from Dorothy’s house the library was a long low blotchy concrete building, easily mistaken for a new church.