Leather Wings (10 page)

I
NEVER THOUGHT
I’d want to switch off her little voice, but I did. We hadn’t been driving more than fifteen minutes when that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I was trying to work something out, I had things to think about, serious things, and she wouldn’t stop talking, it was like they never allowed her to talk at home, kept her muzzled like a dog. And now I had to muzzle her myself if there was to be any chance of sorting things out.

The car. The car was my problem, poor rusty thing, shiny with Rawleigh’s wax, but wearing my numberplates; I knew they’d come nosing after us. As soon as I realised we had to get out of the flat all these other worries had come crowding at me, telling me to plan, plan, think ahead, get it right this time. I can’t have it coming undone, unravelling like some of my plans have done in the past. I have to sew this one up tight, and because this time it’s so important, I really think I can do it. If she stops talking.

“Jania, could you just be quiet for a bit? I’m thinking, I’m trying to remember something.”

She shut up quick, so quick I spent the next few minutes feeling bad about it, but then the problems came back louder than ever. In movies the villains will have spare numberplates in the boot, but I’m not a villain and I don’t have spare plates. At least I’m not customised — WALWEL — which I was tempted to be but it was too expensive. The alternative to swapping plates is swapping cars. I know how to open a car door with a wire coathanger, the problem was finding a likely car, unattended — nothing flashy, old enough in fact not to have a wheel lock — and out of sight of the nosy public. The coathanger was no problem, I always carry a dry-cleaner’s hanger for my fawn suede jacket.

“Have you remembered?”

“Eh?” She had kept quiet so long I’d nearly forgotten she was there.

“What you wanted to remember?”

“Oh — yes. I’m trying to remember where my uncle said he’d leave his car for me. We’re going to take my uncle’s car to Auckland because this one’s a bit tired. It might break down.”

“What sort of a car does your uncle have? Is it red?”

While I’m trying not to answer her questions I’m keeping my eyes peeled, driving slowly down the back streets, and I see it, parked at the rear of a loading zone, nicely masked by the back of buildings. My heart starts to race like one of my father’s clocks when you spin the hands. I drive right on past this car and round the corner. There’s nothing like pure devotion to concentrate the mind.

“Now,” I say to Jania when I’ve parked the Marina. “You stay here — do you promise? Don’t go wandering. I have to see someone, I shan’t be more than a few moments. Here.” I hand her a packet of Maltesers from the glove box. “Don’t eat all of them or you’ll make yourself sick.”

I check that she’s sitting comfortably, dipping into the packet, before I dive across and through the alleyway with the coathanger half up my jumper, against my thumping heartbeat. After all, I couldn’t very well break into a car with that innocent looking on, could I? I’m so pleased with myself I don’t notice I’m making this funny humming noise at the back of my throat. That won’t do, I stop it. Next thing I have to control is my tongue, which nearly pokes the side right out of my cheek while I’m working the coathanger under the window rubber. I know how to hot wire a car, I’ve lost my keys before today, it was something my father taught me to do, he’d be proud of me now. Just the same, I’m shaking like a jellyfish when I drive back to my old Marina and Jania, waiting for me good as gold. This isn’t a new car, but it’s newer than mine and a hatchback what’s more, so it’s easy to load up with the boxes and bags. Jania helps me.

“You said it was a red car — I like red cars.”

“No, I didn’t.” And just as well. Red’s too gory, this is a nice dull blue, and the tank’s fairly full, I was going to have to fill up soon and I don’t have that much cash on me. I give my poor abandoned Marina the once over inside, I don’t want to be leaving any clues, then I climb in beside Jania and
we’re away. The budgie twitters as we take off, telling tales on me perhaps but Jania can’t hear these. She trusts me. Well, she has no reason not to. I’ve never hurt a child, I only want to give her a holiday, a bit of happiness.

There’s one question left. Where are we going?

T
HE AMBULANCE DOESN’T
use a siren when it slides importantly up to the front gate. Jania has an “ambulance” on her bedroom city street. It isn’t white, it is pale green, a truck in fact, but she has painted a fat red cross on the roof with her felt pen; it was the best she could do in the absence of the real thing. This ambulance is the real thing — “Touch your collar, never holler, never go in there” — and it disgorges real paramedics who stride urgently to poor old Rex. Felled by jealousy, felled indeed by Esther one might as well say. At first it had been difficult to distinguish one kind of pain from the other, but then his heart — his physical heart — won out.

Esther stands shuddering alongside him. He is pale, clammy of face, of balding head and hand, clutching at his wife’s fingers as if she isn’t the cause of this.

“This is it,” he had gasped. “Is this it, Esther?” His eyes are starting from under his narrow forehead like golfballs.

“Hang on.”

“I’m hanging.” By a thread.

In the ambulance she holds his yellow hand and her mouth quivers interestingly. She is detached enough to notice and stroke this quiver and yet her brain is in a turmoil. As if Jania missing isn’t enough! Who is it, what kind of God is doing this to them? It can’t be all Esther’s fault, if it were and there were a judgmental God it would be Esther struck down by disease, by heart failure — or perhaps the vehicle they are travelling in will crash? She nearly wishes it would — but that wouldn’t be fair to the driver and the other ambulance man. Nor to Jania. Jania doesn’t need another car crash in her life, her too short life, she doesn’t need another desertion. What does Jania need? Right now?

The policewoman is at home, installed to attend to telephone calls or whatever might arrive in Esther’s absence. Esther doesn’t much like leaving strangers alone in her home, even the babysitter had bothered her the first time, the thought of Sharon of the glinting spectacles prying through
her things, but then Sharon hadn’t been alone in the house, she had been with Jania.

Inside the hospital doors Rex seems to recover some of his spirit. He has been here before, it is almost familiar territory and the last time the medics had made him well enough to go home. Once he has been seen by the doctor and is connected up to the machinery, Esther sees some colour creeping back under his skin.

“Don’t think about anything,” she says. “Except getting better. And don’t look at me like that. You’re within your rights to hate me.”

He sighs, watching the machine instead of her face. “Right now I just want to stay alive, if that’s all right with you.”

She begins to cry. “Please, of course you’ll be all right. Please be all right.”

“I will be,” he nods grimly. “I’ll be all right, but not just to please you, to please myself.”

“Don’t talk like … Rex, please say you forgive me, I do love you!” She can feel wet tears greasy against the palms of her hands. “I thought … I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Don’t do that.”

The nurse arrives behind her — or perhaps she has been there all the time, listening?

Esther feels herself blush.

“We’d like your husband to get some sleep now. He’s stable, there’s nothing to be concerned about. I suggest you go home and phone in the morning to see how he’s going on.”

Going on. So long as he keeps going on. Is he right when he supposes she wants him to live to make herself feel better? Of course she doesn’t want his death on her conscience, but she wants him to recover for a larger reason than this. He is a good man, he deserves to live, he deserves to be happier than she has made him, and yes, she would miss him. She believes she would miss him more than she will Donald. Why? What would she miss about Rex? The daily sparring, the hairless warmth of his large flanks in the bed? Something about the shared knowing of thirty-six years’ mutual imprisonment: mutual dinners, mutual bills, mutual battles, mutual affection even. It can’t be about love, can it? She has quoted love, but
was she lying? Or was she telling more truth than she knew? Love can be sneaky: like the common cold it can hold on when you think you’ve let it go.

Having returned home by taxi she is nearly grateful to have someone waiting in the house for her, even if this is a policewoman and the reason for her being there less than comforting. There is tea in the teapot — usually she and Rex make tea in mugs, but this woman has put the teabags in the old teapot — and there is some news.

“The Marina. They picked it up down near the quay, abandoned it appears. There’s nowhere in the vicinity where this Mr Wells could be staying, nothing residential, a warehouse but we’ve had that checked out. We’re going over the area with a toothcomb.”

“What for? Are they looking for a body now, or what?”

“Please, I know this is stressful, but … They don’t know what they’re looking for. A clue, an item of clothing, anything at all. You’ve given us a good list of what she could be wearing. I have to tell you the inspector wants us to open it up to the public tomorrow, see what that brings in.”

“But you said he might panic!”

“He’s ditched the car, that tells us he’s aware we’re on to him, there’s not a lot to lose at this point.”

“So what happens? Put it on ‘Crimewatch’?”

“The ‘News’ first. And we’ll circulate the photo, internally to start with. We’ll need you to come down to the station in the morning. All right?”

“If it’s all right with Rex.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Mrs Ackersley, I’m sure your husband’s going to be fine.” The young woman’s glibness about this — what can she know of Rex’s health? — fills Esther with suspicious cynicism. The woman is young and ignorant, a public servant, mechanical as a computer but less well programmed. How will this document end: “Your changes have not been saved?” Or, “You are about to erase this disk?”

She checks to discover if the teapot is empty — it is — then takes herself to a cold bed.

I
KNOW, OF
course, where we’re heading, where we have to go. It’s scary. But where else is there? There’s Mother’s, that’s almost as bad and no kind of hiding place, she’s in the telephone book. Besides, I’m not letting Mother get her hands, her gloves, on Jania, what would she do with her? Hand her back like a good woman — I’m truly sorry for my son’s sins? Or make her meringues and choke her with sugar? No. So it has to be
his
old hideout, which is empty enough although she claims it isn’t, she claims he is still there, on his mezzanine throne, repelling callers.

The wizard is dead now, and yet he isn’t dead, she talks to him and pokes bits of him at me to keep me in my place: “Your father says …”, “Your father asked me to remind you …” At least that’s the sort of loony stuff I used to get before I left home to make my fortune. Home! Some home. She wasn’t yet sixty I suppose but the place already smelt of old lady, old widow lady, so I went off like Aladdin, looking for my lamp. Rubadub. And now I’ve got my wonderful lamp, haven’t I, shining on the car seat alongside me? Except it’s gone out for the moment, Jania’s fallen asleep, which isn’t surprising, it’s late. It’s dark.

We’ve been travelling through the darkness for hours now, so I’ve been able to think all these thoughts to myself. My thoughts get weirder as I get nearer to his shop, this always happens to me, especially if it’s dark — dark thoughts, but this time I have to make a special effort to keep my head clear. I have a responsibility to Jania. Every time a shadow whangs against my brain I take a quick peep sideways at her sleeping like a soft doll and that fixes the shadow. She’s lovely. I hope she isn’t sick.

When he died he hadn’t been home for years, not to live that is. Of course, he’d called in to deliver his lectures to both of us, especially me, and give her the odd cuff, nothing like the bruises I’d seen on her before that. I used to take myself off while that was going on and sit in the car outside and read a
book, by torchlight if necessary. Once he saw me sitting there and I turned to custard thinking what he’d do, but he just stopped in his tracks for a moment and said, “Huh!” That was all.

Those last years he built this mezzanine floor above the shop with very steep steps so as not to waste any of the shop space — it wasn’t a big shop, just big enough to store the clocks and watches and then the workroom through in the back. The workroom was bigger than you’d expect because he worked on his other inventions there as well, not just “timepieces” as he called them, but downstairs was really not a big space and so of course it wasn’t big upstairs either. The ceiling was low, just high enough to clear his head, not a high head. When the mezzanine was ready he left us and moved in. In a way I hated him for that upstairs “studio” because it was so clever, like the cabin of a ship or maybe the flight deck of a plane, there were so many control switches — microwave, toaster, grill, gas ring and bottle, television, video, radio CD cassette, a bed that folded up into the wall, everything that opens and shuts as they say — and even a square bath in the wee bathroom. I wanted that place for myself, why should he have this dream cabin when he should have been at home with his wife, he’d chosen marriage not a bachelor life, it was me that needed a cave. Except that I didn’t know how to mend clocks and watches, did I? But soon enough he wasn’t mending them either. There was no call for clock and watch mending, well, not enough. He gave up and just worked on his wizardry, God knows what, and then he died.

Yes, that was the time. I don’t like to think about that time. But I do think about it. The smell, kind of sweet and sticky, like burst bubble gum. Days it must have been. She hadn’t gone near him and he hadn’t been to us with our money, so she sent me to get it. I bet she knew he might have checked out, his heart was queer, but she sent me. Cow. Women are cows.

That isn’t what I’m driving towards now, the smell. There’s no smell. That was dealt with, the place was fumigated, I don’t know what happened to the electrical stuff, I’m fairly sure she got the video. It’s funny to think she’s in the same building, under the same roof, one of the big downstairs flats at the
back, stucco with concrete steps. She wasn’t far away from him, just as well a smell can’t tunnel through concrete, but it’s quite a walk actually, right around the block to the shop front. She doesn’t go there now, scared of the old bugger like I am, she won’t come bothering us. But will he? Will he bother us?

It’s scary. We have to go there, there isn’t anywhere else, it’s the only safe place, it’s like the Bermuda triangle that bit of street; people pass through it like it isn’t really there. And I still have a key, I stole it, I never thought I’d be using it. I never thought … Jania wakes up now because I’m laughing out aloud.

“Are we nearly there?”

“Nearly there.”

“Good. I want to go to bed.”

“You must be hungry.” All we’ve had is chocolate and chippies.

“Not hungry. I want to go to bed. Will I sleep with … What’s her name? — your girl?”

It isn’t easy deceiving her, I wish I hadn’t lied but I had to, and now it’s so complicated. “I don’t know. Probably not. It’s a bit late, I expect they’re all in bed already.”

Jania yawns, she trusts me.

“Janice and her mummy are staying outside Auckland actually, at our beach house. I think we’ll stop at my uncle’s flat in town over night, it’s closer.”

“Can I ring up Esther?”

“It’s too late, darling — nearly midnight.”

She gives me a look at this “darling”. I don’t know where this came from. But perhaps I imagined the look because then she yawns again and says, “I’ve been up this late before — later — at New Year’s.”

We’re turning into the street now, the lighting isn’t too good, council economising, I’d forgotten how seedy it looks on this side, I pray she won’t notice. Then I think of the damned car. Complications. I can’t leave it parked here, we’ll have to unpack everything and take it all inside and then I’ll have to drive the car off somewhere. Somehow. Jania’s yawning but I’m tired as well, my arms and legs feel as if they’re in plaster, but I can’t give in to it yet, there’s a job to be done.

The key works — for a second I thought the lock had been changed — phew! But the lights don’t. Oh dear.

“Never mind,” I say to Jania, “I’ve got a nice big torch.” And I have, when I can lay my hands on it. My heart’s going whump, whump now, because it’s bad enough coming here in daylight or with the electric but without light … And what else is going to be missing? Will the sofa have gone? Will there be bedding on the fold-up bed? Will the old bugger do his best to ruin it all?

“This is an adventure, isn’t it?” I say, fighting my teeth that want to chatter, as well as my tongue, which doesn’t want to talk at all. My torch is a good strong one and straight away I see another torch, his great red rubber thing, sitting on the counter, does this mean the wizard’s been here? Is he in the darkness watching us? I press the rubbery button but the battery’s gone flat.

“Isn’t he here?” Jania pipes, she sounds as scared as I am.

“What? Who? Oh, my uncle. No, it’s his place but he doesn’t live here, that’s why the power’s off, he must have forgotten his bill.”

“It’s a shop!”

“Yes, but it’s not a real shop any more, it’s closed down. It’s a proper little flat upstairs, you’ll like it, it’s just the right size for a little girl. You sit down here —” I push my father’s high stool at her — “While I go upstairs and check it’s ready for us.”

Then I realise I can’t leave her in the dark, I have to give her the torch and use my lighter.

Only true devotion can make you as brave as this, feeling my way up the cold steps with my lighter flame wobbling shadows all over and then standing very still at the top until the lighter settles shapes into place and I collect some of the moonlight from the long strip of window above the sink bench. The sofa is still there, back to the wall, facing the TV except that’s gone, there’s a stand but no television. I feel about in the wall alongside the sofa and punch the panel until the bed swings free and creaks down hitting me on the shoulder. There’s bedding. It smells a bit musty but not too bad. It’s all right, he didn’t die in this bed, he died downstairs in that space where Jania’s sitting on his stool. I feel a shock of guilt
thinking of this, I can’t leave her alone down there with him and I turn myself round to leap down and fetch her. But she’s on her way up — unless it’s him — the torchlight comes waving towards me, closer and closer. Oh, she’s behind it! A little shadowy red riding hood.

She says, “I want to go to the bathroom.” And, “I’m cold.”

“Of course, you do.” It’s all right for me, I’ve had a piss on the road while she was sleeping. “Look here.” I tug at the bathroom door and shine the torch in. “All right?”

She pushes past me with the torch and shuts herself and the light inside the little room so that I’m outside in the dark again and I burn my fingers on my lighter flame — ouch. Serve me right the thoughts I’ve been having, and I can hear her little gush in the lavatory bowl.

I put my nose in the blankets on the bed; they pong a bit, but they’re all we’ve got apart from the car blanket and the sheepskin on the floor.

“I want to go to the beach,” Jania says when she gets back. “You said we’d go. Is there a fire-place at the beach? I want a hottie!”

“It’s too far” I tell her. “We’ll go there tomorrow. Here, you curl up in the bed and shut your eyes. It’s time little girls were asleep.”

“I haven’t got my jarmies.”

“You don’t need pyjamas here, just take your coat off.”

“Did Esther say it was all right?”

“Yes. We’ll get pyjamas at the beach. Give me the torch.”

I need the torch to have a proper look around the kitchen side of the room. The microwave has gone but the gas ring’s still there and the gas bottle, probably empty. I try the gas lever and give the jets a taste of my lighter. Amazing! The gas ring lights up and strongly, there’s still gas in the bottle although I can’t tell how much. Jania sits up in bed and looks at the bluish ring of light.

“There,” I say, pleased with myself. “At least we’ve got gas to make our tea.”

“I don’t drink tea,” she says, quite prim, then she lies down again. “I want a hottie.”

“There isn’t a hottie, I’m sorry.”

“Will you rub my feet? Daddy rubs my feet.”

“Does he now?” I don’t know whether to believe her. I’ve remembered that the box of kitchen stuff is still in the car and that I have to move the car pretty quick, but now I have to rub Jania’s feet. I can’t go and leave her anyway, not until she goes to sleep, she’d be frightened. I scrub my hands together to make them warm and then I feel under the covers for her feet. She giggles when I find them. Oh, Christ, I can’t have Claude coming into this, I hold one foot quite tight, trying to send Claude packing. Then I start to rub this one little foot between two hands, but she wriggles too much, liking it, and I can’t stand this.

“You need warm socks,” I say, but I can’t put my hand on the case where I’ve got my clothes, it’s still in the car perhaps. I tug at my shoes and peel off my own socks, I’ve already warmed these for her. I ask her to poke her feet out and I pull the socks on, fifty per cent wool, and give them a bit of a pat. “There. Now get to sleep.”

She stops giggling and lies down with her cushion and her thumb. I sit for a bit on the sofa alongside the bed and put my own head down in my hands; I’m done in. Before I know it, I’m falling asleep as well, pitching forward into my hands, and I have to save myself. Oops.

N
OTHING
. N
O NEWS
. She has vanished. The Rawleigh’s man has vanished with his lotions and potions. Esther was washing her hair in the shower this morning when she noticed she was using a Rawleigh’s product, the warm suds slid seductively down over her shoulders like a cape entrapping her. At breakfast she had come across the glow-in-the-dark rubber ball nestled in the fruit bowl beside a rotting lemon. She had picked up the clammy orb and handled it, squeezed it. It reminded her in a horrid way of the first time she had touched a boy’s penis, accidentally — she hadn’t known what he was offering her. Innocence. Esther innocent at eighteen; Jania innocent at six. She has noted Jania’s toothbrush missing; only a well brought up child takes her toothbrush when she runs away from home. Well brought up — the words sink into her brain like fish hooks. But the well brought up child hasn’t taken her pyjamas, they are under the pillow where she has been taught to fold them. It seems no matter how much house tidying Esther does — and she is guiltily doing more than is necessary, having taken this time off work — she will still find echoes of Jania all over the house. Who would have thought it? In this way children distribute themselves, insinuate themselves into the fabric of adult life, become adult life one day if they are lucky — but Jania isn’t lucky.

Rex is recovering, he isn’t going to die. Relief is tempered with a dusting of dread. There has to be a reckoning when he comes home, death hasn’t occurred but a post mortem will. Meanwhile Jania. It is easier to talk about Jania than to think about Jania, about the possibilities, about where blame can be attributed. She has an unwelcome flash of the child’s big eyes, puzzled then widening with horror, her mouth … Perhaps she will call out for her mother? Esther gulps, swallows the thought down and feels sick. Shouldn’t she have noticed what was going on? What the man
was?
She needs to talk, who can Esther talk to? She has talked to the police, they have talked to Esther. They want her to talk on television, to make a public appeal.

“What! I can’t. I can’t do that!”

“Why not? It doesn’t matter if you get a bit emotional — it’s natural, and the public respond to emotion.”

Esther can’t very well tell the policewoman she has got this wrong. Far from being afraid of showing emotion, Esther is afraid of showing none. She is expected to cry or at least tremble at the lip, what if she doesn’t? Can’t? She sees herself on the screen, stony faced, talking in flat tones, a bad actor. Her friends — correct that, acquaintances, workmates — will watch her self-contained coolness with the same distaste she herself felt when Jania failed to cry for her mother, for Prue. Only Donald will approve.