The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [129]
It was Cabbage I saw in the day centre, his skin all loose and folding now like wet cheesecloth, but no mistaking that stocky barrel chest and whiny, sneering Liverpool voice. He was clutching his cards like someone was going to snatch them off him, and his glasses were held together with a piece of grubby sticking plaster. But it was Cabbage all right, Cabbage who could maybe take a guess at what those buggerin’ lights are looking for on the hill, if he put his confused old mind to it.
He was always kind to me, but still I’m blowed if I want him to see me, here, now, and start reminiscing about what’s past and done. Never know but what he might turn poison, writing letters like that old bitch from Berwick Bassett that used to be the housemaid at the Manor, spying on me the night Mr Cromley made me go masked into the garden. I backs out of the room slow and careful, like. Then I’m standing in the corridor with its shiny green lino, and the smell of gravy floating down it from the dining room, and I think, Was it Cabbage, really? Or is it only the smell makes me think of him?
That makes me feel all panicky and sick, because suddenly I’m in that place where I don’t know any longer when it is, where all the pathways of time meet and cross and twist round on each other, like the moonlit gravel paths between the box hedges in the Manor garden, and I think of Mr Keiller holding the chalky white thing aloft, and the Barber Surgeon’s bones smashed to smithereens in the Blitz but somehow whole again, and my torn drawing of him uncrumpling itself, and his eyeless sockets looking up at me from where he’d been hidden all them centuries under the big stone. I thinks, The truth will out in the end. What lies under stone don’t lie there for ever.
And then I realize my hands are over my eyes and my mouth is wide open and my throat hurts, and that gay-boy social worker is trying to shush me. I in’t having none of it. Maybe if I shout loud enough, nobody’ll hear what Cabbage has to say. Because it’s rubbish, in’t it? It’s all old rubbish. Rubbish that has to be hid away where no one can see it. La la la. I can’t hear you, no one can hear you. None of it happened, after all. If I go far enough back I’ll lose meself and none of it will happen. La la la. Someone grabs my shoulders and starts to shake me, la la la, so my teeth clash together and I’m afraid my plate will fall out, then there’s footsteps down the corridor and Adele, the one thinks I don’t remember her name but I do, is saying:
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bob?’
CHAPTER 33
‘I can’t do this,’ I tell John. ‘I’m not capable–or qualified, for God’s sake. I don’t understand what’s happening to her…’
‘I’ll come over,’ he says. ‘I’ll get rid of my client–’
‘Oh, sorry, I’d forgotten. Shouldn’t have rung you. Why didn’t you let it go to answering machine?’
‘Call it shaman’s instinct.’
‘Don’t cancel your client. Frannie’s back in bed, anyway.’ The bedroom door is firmly closed. I feel like putting a bolt on the outside of it, but I know that’s not the answer.
‘You’re filming again tomorrow, aren’t you? I’ll be over first thing. Leave it to me to ring Adele and sort this.’
‘I can manage, really…’
‘No, Indy, you can’t. Not on your own–’ He breaks off. There’s a silence.
‘Oh, bollocks,’ I say. ‘I can’t let her be put into a home, John. She’d turn her face to the wall and die.’
In the night it rains again. I hear it lashing the windows, imagine it running in hissing