The Collected Short Fiction

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.

She was greeted by the clacking of computer keyboards. Some of the users had piled books on the tables, but only to hide the screens from the library staff. As she headed for the shelves Dorothy glimpsed instructions for making a bomb and caught sight of a film that might have shown an equestrian busy with the tackle of her horse if it had been wearing any. On an impulse Dorothy selected guides to various Mediterranean holiday resorts. Perhaps one or more of her widowed friends might like to join her next year. She couldn’t imagine travelling by herself.

She had to slow before she reached her gate. A low glare of sunlight cast the shadow of a rosebush on the front window before being extinguished by clouds, leaving her the impression that a thin silhouette had reared up and then crouched out of sight beyond the glass. She rummaged nervously in her handbag and unlocked the door. It had moved just a few inches when it encountered an obstruction that scraped across the carpet. Someone had strewn Michaelmas daisies along the hall.

Were they from her garden? So far the vandals had left her flowers alone, no doubt from indifference. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness she saw that the plants were scattered the length of the hall, beyond which she could hear a succession of dull impacts as sluggish as a faltering heart. Water was dripping off the kitchen table from the overturned vase, where the trail of flowers ended. She flustered to the back door, but it was locked and intact, and there was no other sign of intrusion. She had to conclude that she’d knocked the vase over and, still without noticing unless she’d forgotten, tracked the flowers through the house.

The idea made her feel more alone and, in a new way, more nervous. She was also disconcerted by how dead the flowers were, though she’d picked them yesterday; the stalks were close to crumbling in her hands, and she had to sweep the withered petals into a dustpan. She binned it all and replenished the vase with Harry’s cyclamen before sitting on the worn stairs while she rang Helena to confirm Wednesday lunch. They always met midweek, but she wanted to talk to someone. Once she realised that Helena’s grandchildren were visiting she brought the call to an end.

The house was big enough for children, except that she and Harry couldn’t have any, and now it kept feeling too big. Perhaps they should have moved, but she couldn’t face doing so on her own. She cooked vegetables to accompany the rest of yesterday’s casserole, and ate in the dining-room to the sound of superannuated pop songs on the radio, and leafed through her library books in the front room before watching a musical that would have made Harry restless. She could hear gangs roving the streets, and was afraid her lit window might attract them. Once she’d checked the doors and downstairs windows she plodded up to bed.

Girls were awaiting customers on the main road. As Dorothy left the curtains open a finger’s width she saw Winona Bullough negotiate with a driver and climb into his car. Was the girl even sixteen? Dorothy was close to asking Harry, but it felt too much like talking to herself, not a habit she was anxious to acquire. She climbed into her side of the bed and hugged Harry’s pillow as she reached with her free hand for the light-cord.

The night was a medley of shouts, some of which were merely conversations, and smashed glass. Eventually she slept, to be wakened by light in the room. As she blinked, the thin shaft coasted along the bedroom wall. She heard the taxi turn out of the road, leaving her unsure whether she had glimpsed a silhouette that reminded her of stalks. Perhaps the headlamps had sent a shadow from her garden, though wasn’t the angle wrong? She stared at the dark and tried not to imagine that it was staring back at her. “There’s nobody,” she whispered, hugging the pillow.

She needed to be more active, that was all. She had to occupy her mind and tire her body out to woo a night’s unbroken sleep. She spent as much of Saturday in weeding the front garden as the pangs of her spine would allow. By late afternoon she wasn’t even half finished, and almost forgot to buy a wreath. She might have taken Harry some of his own flowers, but she liked to support the florist’s on the main road, especially since it had been damaged by the riots. At least the window had been replaced. Though the florist was about to close, he offered Dorothy a cup of tea while his assistant plaited flowers in a ring. Some good folk hadn’t been driven out yet, Dorothy told them both, sounding her age.

She draped the wreath over the phone in her hall and felt as if she were saying goodbye to any calls, an idea too silly to consider. After dinner she read about far places that might have changed since she and Harry had visited them, and watched a love story in tears that would have embarrassed him. She was in bed by the time the Saturday-night uproar began. Once she was wakened by a metallic clack that sounded closer than outside, but when she stumbled to the landing the hall was empty. Perhaps a wind had snapped the letterbox. As she huddled under the quilt she wondered if she ought to have noticed something about the hall, but the impression was too faint to keep her awake. It was on her mind when church bells roused her, and as soon as she reached the stairs she saw what was troubling her. There was no sign of the wreath.

She grabbed the banister so as not to fall. She was hastening to reassure herself that the flowers were under the hall table, but they weren’t. Had she forgotten taking them somewhere? They were in none of the ground-floor rooms, nor the bathroom, her bedroom, the other one that could have been a nursery but had all too seldom even done duty as a guest room. She was returning downstairs when she saw a single flower on the carpet inches from the front door.

Could a thief have dragged the wreath through the letterbox? She’d heard that criminals used rods to fish property from inside houses. She heaved the bolts out of their sockets and flung the door open, but there was no evidence on the path. It didn’t seem worth reporting the theft to the police. She would have to take Harry flowers from the garden. She dressed in her oldest clothes and brought tools from the shed, and was stooping to uproot a weed that appeared to have sprouted overnight when she happened to glance over the wall. She straightened up and gasped, not only with the twinge in her back. One of the tributes to Keanu looked far too familiar.

She clutched at her back as she hobbled to the streetlamp. There was the wreath she’d seen made up at the florist’s. It was the only item to lack a written tag. “Earned yourself some wings, Kee” and “Give them hell up there” and “Get the angels singing along with your iPod” were among the messages. The wreath was hung on the corner of a bouquet’s wrapping. Dorothy glared about as she retrieved it, daring anyone to object. As she slammed the front door she thought she heard small feet running away.

She had no reason to feel guilty, and was furious to find she did. She locked away the tools and changed into the dark suit that Harry used to like her to wear whenever they dined out. A bus from the shattered shelter on the main road took her to the churchyard, past houses twice the size of hers. All the trees in their gardens were bare now. She and Harry had been fond of telling each other that they would see them blossom next year. The trees in the graveyard were monotonously evergreen, but she never knew what that was meant to imply. She cleared last week’s flowers away from Harry’s stone and replaced them with the wreath, murmuring a few sentences that were starting to feel formulaic. She dropped the stale flowers in the wire bin outside the concrete wedge of a church on her way to the bus.

As it passed her road she saw the Bulloughs on her path. Charmaine and her offspring strode to meet her at the lamp. “Brad says you lifted our Keanu’s flowers.”

“Then I’m afraid he’s mistaken. I’m afraid—”

“You should be,” said Arnie, the biggest and presumably the eldest of the brood. “Don’t talk to my mam like that, you old twat.”

Dorothy had begun to shake – not visibly, she hoped – but stood her ground. “I don’t think I’m being offensive.”

“You’re doing it now,” Arnie said, and his face twisted with loathing. “Talking like a teacher.”

“Leave it, Arn,” his mother said more indulgently than reprovingly, and stared harder at Dorothy. “What were you doing touching Keanu’s things?”

“As I was trying to explain, they weren’t his. I’m not accusing anybody, but someone took a wreath I’d bought and put it here.”

“Why didn’t you?” demanded Angelina.

“Because they were for my husband.”

“When are you going to get Kee some?” J-Bu said at once.

“She’s not,” Charmaine said, saving Dorothy the task of being more polite. “Where were these ones you took supposed to be?”

“They were in my house.”

“Someone broke in, did they? Show us where.”

“There’s no sign of how they did it, but—”

“Know what I think? You’re mad.”

“Should be locked up,” said Angelina.

“And never mind expecting us to pay for it,” Arnie said.

“I’m warning you in front of witnesses,” said their mother. “Don’t you ever touch anything that belongs to this family again.”

“You keep your dirty hands off,” J-Bu translated.

“Mad old bitch,” added Brad.

Dorothy still had her dignity, which she bore into the house without responding further. Once the door was closed she gave in to shivering. She stood in the hall until the bout was over, then peeked around the doorway of the front room. She didn’t know how long she had to loiter before an angry glance showed that the pavement was deserted. “Go on, say I’m a coward,” she murmured. “Maybe it isn’t wise to be too brave when you’re on your own.”

Who was she talking to? She’d always found the notion that Harry might have stayed with her too delicate to put to any test. Perhaps she felt a little less alone for having spoken; certainly while weeding the garden she felt watched. She had an intermittent sense of it during her meal, not that she had much appetite, and as she tried to read and to quell her thoughts with television. It followed her to bed, where she wakened in the middle of the night to see a gliding strip of light display part of a skinny silhouette. Or had the crouching shape as thin as twigs scuttled across the band of light? Blinking showed her only the light on the wall, and she let the scent of flowers lull her to sleep.

It took daylight to remind her there were no flowers in the room. There seemed to be more of a scent around her bed than the flowers in the house accounted for. Were her senses letting her down? She was glad of an excuse to go out. Now that they’d closed the post office around the corner the nearest was over a mile away, and she meant to enjoy the walk.

She had to step into the road to avoid vehicles parked on the pavement, which was also perilous with cyclists taking time off school. Before she reached the post office her aching skull felt brittle with the sirens of police cars and ambulances in a hurry to be elsewhere, not to mention the battering clatter of road drills. As she shuffled to the counter she was disconcerted by how much pleasure she took in complaining about all this to her fellow pensioners. Was she turning into just another old curmudgeon weighed down by weary grievances? Once she’d thanked the postmaster several times for her pension she headed for the bus stop. One walk was enough after all.

Although nobody was waiting outside her house, something was amiss. She stepped gingerly down from the bus and limped through gaps in the traffic. What had changed about her garden? She was at the corner of the road when she realised she couldn’t see a single flower.

Every one had been trampled flat. Most of the stalks were snapped and the blossoms trodden into the earth, which displayed the prints of small trainers. Dorothy held onto the gatepost while she told herself that the flowers would grow again and she would live to see them, and then she walked stiff as a puppet into the house to call the police.

While it wasn’t an emergency, she didn’t expect to wait nearly four unsettled hours for a constable less than half her age to show up. By this time a downpour had practically erased the footprints, which he regarded as too common to be traceable. “Have you any idea who’s responsible?” he hoped if not the opposite, and pushed his cap higher on his prematurely furrowed forehead.

“The family of the boy you were trying to catch last week.”

“Did you see them?”

“I’m certain someone must have. Mrs Thorpe opposite hardly ever leaves the house. Too worried that clan or someone like them will break in.”

“I’ll make enquiries.” As Dorothy started to follow him he said “I’ll let you know the outcome.”

He was gone long enough to have visited several of her neighbours. She hurried to admit him when the doorbell rang, but he looked embarrassed, perhaps by her eagerness. “Unfortunately I haven’t been able to take any statements.”

“You mean nobody will say what they saw,” Dorothy protested in disbelief.

“I’m not at liberty to report their comments.”

As soon as he drove away she crossed the road. Mrs Thorpe saw her coming and made to retreat from the window, then adopted a sympathetic wistful smile and spread her arms in a generalised embrace while shaking her head. Dorothy tried the next house, where the less elderly but equally frail of the unmarried sisters answered the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, and Dorothy saw that she shouldn’t expect any witness to risk more on her behalf. She was trudging home when she caught sight of an intruder in her front room.

Or was it a distorted reflection of Keanu’s memorial, thinned by the glare of sunlight on the window? At first she thought she was seeing worse than unkempt hair above an erased face, and then she realised it was a tangle of flowers perched like a makeshift crown or halo on the head, even if they looked as though they were sprouting from a dismayingly misshapen cranium. As she ventured a faltering step the silhouette crouched before sidling out of view. She didn’t think a reflection could do that, and she shook her keys at the house on her way to the door.

A scent of flowers greeted her in the hall. Perhaps her senses were on edge, but the smell was overpowering – sickly and thick. It reminded her how much perfume someone significantly older might wear to disguise the staleness of their flesh. Shadows hunched behind the furniture as she searched the rooms, clothes stirred in her wardrobe when she flung it open, hangers jangled at her pounce in the guest room, but she had already established that the back door and windows were locked. She halted on the stairs, waving her hands to waft away the relentless scent. “I saw you,” she panted.

But had she? Dorothy kept having to glance around while she cooked her dinner and did her best to eat it, though the taste seemed to have been invaded by a floral scent, and later as she tried to read and then to watch television. She was distracted by fancying there was an extra shadow in the room, impossible to locate unless it was behind her. She almost said “Stay out of here” as she took refuge in bed. She mouthed the words at the dark and immediately regretted advertising her nervousness.

She had to imagine Harry would protect her before she was able to sleep. She dreamed he was stroking her face, and in the depths of the night she thought he was. Certainly something like a caress was tracing her upturned face. As she groped for the cord, the sensation slipped down her cheek. The light gave her time to glimpse the insect that had crawled off her face, waving its mocking antennae. It might have been a centipede or millipede – she had no chance to count its many legs as it scurried under the bed.

She spent the rest of the interminable night sitting against the headboard, the bedclothes wrapped tight around her drawn-up legs. She felt surrounded, not only by an oppressive blend of perfume that suggested somebody had brought her flowers – on what occasion, she preferred not to think. As soon as daylight paled Keanu’s streetlamp she grabbed clothes and shook them above the stairs on her way to the bathroom.

She found a can of insect spray in the kitchen. When she made herself kneel, stiff with apprehension as much as with rheumatism, she saw dozens of flowers under her bed. They were from the garden – trampled, every one of them. Which was worse: that an intruder had hidden them in her room or that she’d unknowingly done so? She fetched a brush and dustpan and shuddered as she swept the debris up, but no insects were lurking. Once she’d emptied the dustpan and vacuumed the carpet she dressed for gardening. She wanted to clear up the mess out there, and not to think.

She was loading a second bin-liner with crushed muddy flowers when she heard Charmaine Bullough and her youngest children outdoing the traffic for noise on the main road. Dorothy managed not to speak while they lingered by the memorial, but Brad came to her gate to smirk at her labours. “I wonder who could have done this,” she said.

“Don’t you go saying it was them,” Charmaine shouted. “That’s defamation. We’ll have you in court.”

“I was simply wondering who would have had a motive.”

“Never mind sounding like the police either. Why’d anybody need one?”

“Shouldn’t have touched our Kee’s flowers,” J-Bu said.

Her mother aimed a vicious backhand swipe at her head, but a sojourn in the pub had diminished her skills. As Charmaine regained her balance Dorothy blurted “I don’t think he would mind.”

“Who says?” demanded Brad.

“Maybe he would if he could.” Dorothy almost left it at that, but she’d been alone with the idea long enough. “I think he was in my house.”

“You say one more word about him and you won’t like what you get,” Charmaine deafened her by promising. “He never went anywhere he wasn’t wanted.”

Then that should be Charmaine’s house, Dorothy reflected, and at once she saw how to be rid of him. She didn’t speak while the Bulloughs stared at her, although it looked as if she was heeding Charmaine’s warning. When they straggled towards their house she packed away her tools and headed for the florist’s. “Visiting again?” the assistant said, and it was easiest to tell her yes, though Dorothy had learned to stay clear of the churchyard during the week, when it tended to be occupied by drunks and other addicts. She wouldn’t be sending a remembrance to the paper either. She didn’t want to put Harry in the same place as Keanu, even if she wished she’d had the boy to teach.

Waiting for nightfall made her feel uncomfortably like a criminal. Of course that was silly, and tomorrow she could discuss next year’s holiday with Helena over lunch. She could have imagined that her unjustified guilt was raising the scents of the wreath. It must be the smell of the house, though she had the notion that it masked some less welcome odour. At last the dwindling day released her, but witnesses were loitering on both sides of the road.

She would be committing no crime – more like the opposite. As she tried to believe they were too preoccupied with their needs to notice or at least to identify her, a police car cruised into the road. In seconds the pavements were deserted, and Dorothy followed the car, hoping for once that it wouldn’t stop at the Bullough house.

It didn’t, but she did. She limped up the garden path as swiftly as her legs would work, past a motor bicycle that the younger Bulloughs had tired of riding up and down the street, and posted the wreath through the massively brass-hinged mahogany door of the pebbledashed terrace house. She heard Charmaine and an indeterminate number of her children screaming at one another, and wondered whether they would sound any different if they had a more than unexpected visitor. “Go home to your mother,” she murmured.

The police were out of sight. Customers were reappearing from the alleys between the houses. She did her best not to hurry, though she wasn’t anxious to be nearby when any of the Bulloughs found the wreath. She was several houses distant from her own when she glimpsed movement outside her gate.

The flowers tied to the lamp-standard were soaked in orange light. Most of them were blackened by it, looking rotten. Though the concrete post was no wider than her hand, a shape was using it for cover. As she took a not entirely willing step a bunch of flowers nodded around the post and dodged back. She thought the skulker was using them to hide whatever was left of its face. She wouldn’t be scared away from her own house. She stamped towards it, making all the noise she could, and the remnant of a body sidled around the post, keeping it between them. She avoided it as much as she was able on the way to her gate. As she unlocked the door she heard a scuttling of less than feet behind her. It was receding, and she managed not to look while it grew inaudible somewhere across the road.

The house still smelled rather too intensely floral. In the morning she could tone that down before she went for lunch. She made up for the dinner she’d found unappetising last night, and bookmarked pages in the travel guide to show Helena, and even found reasons to giggle at a comedy on television. After all that and the rest of the day she felt ready for bed.

She stooped to peer under it, but the carpet was bare, though a faint scent lingered in the room. It seemed unthreatening as she lay in bed. Could the flowers have been intended as some kind of peace offering? In a way she’d been the last person to speak to Keanu. The idea fell short of keeping her awake, but the smell of flowers roused her. It was stronger and more suggestive of rot, and most of all it was closer. The flowers were in bed with her. There were insects as well, which didn’t entirely explain the jerky movements of the mass of stalks that nestled against her. She was able to believe they were only stalks until their head, decorated or masked or overgrown with shrivelled flowers, lolled against her face.