The shadowing of combfoo.., p.21
The Shadowing of Combfoot Chase, page 21
However unappealing they may be, these strangers offer Jem his one and only chance to walk away from death. If he tells these two about the body he can slide off into the dark, once they’re busy doing everything you have to do to clear disasters up. The body won’t be left to rot, but he won’t have to deal with it. It’s not much of a plan, he thinks, but it’s the best he’s got. He stands up, shouts out, “Oi! Over here. I need a bit of help,” and feels the satisfying surge of influence as both heads snap in his direction.
Obic strides ahead of Arak.
She covers all the ground in what to Jem looks like a step or two. He’s never seen a woman like her. She’s nothing like his mother, who was soft and round and shapeless in a comfy sort of way and who could pacify him just by calling him a silly goose. Nor is she pert like girls are at his school, like Charlotte, who will only look at him with wrinkles of disgust drawn on the bridge of her repugnant nose. Charlotte is the sort of girl who flaunts herself on purpose. Her fingers toy along the string of beads she always wears, a ploy which makes you pay attention to her throat. It’s not his fault he can’t help noticing the smoothness of her skin.
This woman is another sort, is made of power and bone and sinew. Jem wishes now that he had paused and thought a little harder before he’d made her look. It’s not that he despises every woman. He likes his nan – his mother’s mother – who’s crabby but can make tremendous pies. He’d hoped for pie today when he had caught the bus out to her house beside the reservoir, had thought that if he were in luck she might have let him sit up on a stool and watch her make the pastry. He’d passed the journey looking at familiar townscapes passing by the window and all the while imagining her cutting fat into the flour, working quickly as she always does. Before you know it Nan has made a lump of dough! Remarkable, he thinks, how she can conjure something tasty out of almost nothing.
Jem respects his nan because she has no truck with any of his claptrap. She brushes off his grievances as the inevitable complaints of a fish which finds itself out of the water. “You’re like your mum in that respect,” she says. Her judgements might be tough, but they’re elastic, and he thinks she means that one day he’ll be bound to find the pond where he belongs.
He loves to watch his nan roll dough. She works and practised swells of muscle ripple through her shoulders, down her arms, as she makes sure the pastry submits to the pin. She lifts and drapes the new-made sheet over an oblong tin and presses with her knuckles till it looks as though she’s made a tiny coffin. Jem can love a woman who prioritises the preparation of a decent supper over everything. It’s only simperers like Charlotte that he hates.
“I’ve told you time and time again to stay out of her way, though, Jeremy,” Father had commanded him again today. He’d said it in a tone meant to be clear and undisputed, had betrayed a sheer frustration that his son had let him down. “Instead I hear you called her, and I quote, ‘a frigid bitch’ again.”
“She is, though,” Jem had muttered.
“What d’you say?”
“No, nothing… Sorry, Sir,” he’d sighed, and sunk his chin into his collar.
It’s not as though he hasn’t tried to follow Father’s orders, though he believes it’s unfair that he has to take the rap for simply stating what is true. Nor has his father been successful following his own advice. He’s never managed to shake off the women he finds troublesome, is only prone to lose the ones like Mother who are tender and are kind.
“I’ve had that wretched woman on the phone again,” he’ll shout and slam around the office. He’ll lift up papers, thunder over to his desk and dump the pile down on the top of several others. Bam! Boom! Bash! The stack will wobble, hold its shape a second, then will slide, subside, strew papers all across the desk. By the time he’s finished the whole lot’s been jumbled up and Father can’t lay hands on what he needs.
“And that’s my fault as well,” Jem knows.
When Father says ‘that wretched woman’ it’s in reference to Charlotte’s mother. He’s also heard his father call her spiteful and a bully. He complains of frequent phone calls, says she always threatens him with one thing or another. He does his best to palm her off and gets his secretary to send her toady messages, but Charlotte’s mother hasn’t gone away no matter how much Father tries to dodge her.
Although he’s never met her, Jem imagines Charlotte’s mother as an amplification of the daughter, a hefty figure with a wide stance and a pushed-in puggish nose. She’d probably wear too many bracelets, he decides, and jangle them to underline that she’s pissed off. In his mind he frames her with a box and writes the caption That Wretched Woman underneath. With a border and a title he can keep her under his control, but try hard as he might he’s never managed to put Charlotte in her place. She’s always breaking out to rile him, never lets him have a moment’s peace. It’s not fair that he has to take the blame for everything that happens when she pushes him until he will react.
Last week when they’d been arguing, he’d made a point of asking her to please stop talking, but she frankly wouldn’t. She’d refused point blank, had carried on and on, had touched those wretched beads of hers which poked out from her collar and they’d trembled to the tune of every word she spoke. He’s not sure what it is about those beads that makes him so demented. They’re like a speck of dust that gets lodged in his eye when all he wants is to get far away from her and all her madness. “You’re a frigid bitch,” he’d said, and had reached out and ripped the beads from off her neck. One tug was all it took. The thread had broken and he’d had one brief rewarding moment when he’d watched the wooden beads dance their way across the classroom floor. He’d even heard them bouncing on the tiles once girlish shrieks and chatter died away and utter silence fell.
And then he’d realised everyone was looking at him. He’d cringed and known that he’d be for it because he’d let so many people see exactly what he’d done. He’d happened to catch Charlotte’s eye and had been shocked to see her grinning.
“Oh, you little fucker,” was the only thing she’d said.
Of course she’d told on him and straight away. She’d shown the school nurse and her mother faint red marks around her neck, and had accused Jem of assault. Father made him crawl around the floor until he’d gathered every single dratted bead. “Apologise,” he’d snarled, and he’d let Charlotte watch Jem on his hands and knees, humiliated.
“You don’t let anybody else wear jewellery,” Jem had argued as he’d faced his father down a long expanse of empty dinner table that evening. “Why should different pupils follow different rules? Girls get away with everything. You only let her ’cos you fancy her…” He’d shut up when his father growled and slammed his hand down on the table so that all the china jumped.
Charlotte’s mother got the beads restrung, this time with the addition of a silver crucifix, which dangled teasingly between the clavicles. Charlotte showed it off in class, leant over Jem so he could not escape the hot smell of her skin, nor fail to see the shadow of the dip between her breasts under her blouse. “I got the one which has a little man on it,” she’d boasted, “as a token of my faith. So you can’t stop me, Onion-Boy.”
Charlotte’s taunts hang over Jem in a balloon as Obic strides towards him. He imagines Charlotte grown into a woman such as this and shivers, hopes she’ll meet someone one day who’ll take her confidence and smash it. He’s scared of her, of Obic, of the thought that any second she’ll come close to him and sniff the air. “What’s that disgusting smell?” she’ll say, and he’ll be too debased to answer her. You mustn’t trust a woman who knows she’s got some clout, he thinks. You can’t trust anyone who bleeds for days and still won’t die.
Obic looks down on the hunched-up boy and smirks. “What’s up?” she asks. “You lost?”
Jem shakes his head and nods towards the body.
Obic tracks his gesture, says, “Oh, right. Oh, shit.”
Jem’s shocked because the word is muddled with a chortle. “It isn’t funny,” he protests. He watches as she takes her phone out of her pocket and flicks on the torch. The white beam picks out every crumpled droop and fallen detail of the luckless man. Jem shuts his eyes. It’s what his mum had said he ought to do when he was still a little boy and still allowed to say that he was frightened. “Don’t look,” she’d always said when Father geared up for a row. “There’s no point tackling him head on.” Her palms had blocked his eyes and he had screwed his mouth tight so he couldn’t accidentally let a sound come out. Mum had always let him shove his fingers in his ears. He remembers how it felt to lean against her, how she’d been so firm and reassuring, one continuous curve uninterrupted by the jutting out of breasts or hips. He leans against the cliff but finds it cold and unforgiving. A ridge of rock digs right into his spine.
Obic makes a brief examination of the body. She whistles through her teeth. “Well, what a way to go…” she says. She squints up through the night to judge the length of fall. “Yeah, that’d do it,” she confirms.
Jem doesn’t want to think about the drop. He keeps his thoughts on Mum and concentrates as hard as possible, remembers how he’d liked to wind his fingers round her neck when she’d leant down to kiss him every night. “Sweet dreams,” she’d whispered because she said she always loved to dream. She’d said it came as a release, was like a sort of swimming. He imagines her suspended in the water of the reservoir. She’s dipping, diving just beyond his reach, her neck a gentle and dynamic arc between her head and shoulders. Jem had always loved the fact that it was hard to tell where one part of her body stopped before another started.
One night, about a year or two ago, when he’d just found the first coarse hairs grown out around the bottom of his penis, she’d come to tuck him up in bed and he had plucked up all his courage, told her that he thought that she was beautiful. She’d smiled the sort of smile that made her lips go absolutely flat. “Oh, don’t be such a silly,” she had said. “It’s sweet of you, but I’ve completely lost my figure.” He’d been shattered that she’d tried to make a joke of it. “Too much of Nana’s cooking, I expect,” she’d said, had stood and put her hands around her middle where her waist was meant to be. She’d waggled all her fingers so it emphasised how far they were apart. “You see!” she’d said. “I’m fusiform, like all those fish your nan puts in her pies.” Though Jem had laughed along, he’d thought it wasn’t possible that Mum could really find this funny. “Night-night, my Jem,” was all she’d said, and he’d not twigged until much later she was scared.
“How could I be so stupid?” he thinks now. “I thought that she’d be always here and life could not get worse.”
Breakfast, just a day or two before she’d left. He’d poured himself a cup of juice and noticed Mum had left her toast and egg uneaten on her plate. “Are you okay?” he’d whispered once he’d ascertained that Father’s nose was buried in The Chronicle.
“Hmmm? Yes, I’m fine,” she’d said.
“You look so tired,” he’d worried, “and your eyes are really puffy. They’re all pink around the edges.”
Father made a show of folding up the paper. Then he’d picked his knife up, held it poised above a slab of haddock smoking on his plate.
“Shush now. I didn’t sleep too well, that’s all,” his mum had said. “Too many dreams.”
His father’s knife had sunk into the yellow body of the fish which steamed and cooled as it was opened. One by one he’d separated off the flakes of flesh and forked them into pink.
Jem had watched the whole dissection in an awful silence.
Mum had kept her eyes well hidden in between the toast and eggs.
They both knew better than to interrupt a meal.
At last his father had put down his knife and fork, had wiped his mouth and folded up his napkin, followed all the ironed lines that made it smaller, kept it square. “I’ve made a dinner reservation for next week,” he’d said. “You’ll wear your green dress, won’t you.”
Not a question.
“All right,” Mum had said.
Jem had seethed because she always let his father get away with an assumption, never thought she might deserve an invitation. “Why d’you allow it?” he’d hissed when they’d passed each other later on the landing.
Mum had turned her face away towards the wall. “He says I have to wear his mother’s pearls,” she’d whispered, “and I can’t quite get them on. I tried them yesterday and no amount of tugging gets the two halves of the clasp to meet.”
Jem knows the pearls she means. They’re grey and form a three-strand choker, which is curled like eels inside a silk-lined chest, a trophy which his father likes her to display beside the mirror on her dressing table. Father likes to see reflections of possessions everywhere he looks. “I had to wear them on my wedding day,” Mum had told him once, “although they were too tight and felt like a garotte.”
“I don’t know why you married such a cunt,” Jem had said. She must have known that there was no chance of a happy home with someone so despicable.
“Oh, Jem…” she’d said, although it wasn’t the first time that she’d heard him use such language.
Jem knows the story of his parents’ meeting and their marriage, or at least he knows what Mum has told him, knows enough to know her life is nothing like her dreams. There’d been a ball to end the summer term at university and Mum had promised Father she would dance with him: “Because he’d asked and ’cos I thought it wouldn’t be polite if I said no… Though actually I was surprised that he remembered. I thought he’d only asked me out of courtesy because I thought he had a preference for my best friend, Grace,” she’d said. A pause and then, “In point of fact I think she’d have been better suited to him because she’s clever and high-powered, far more interesting than I am. But he came back and he told me that I had to keep my promise. I dunno, I think there’s something in him that reminds me of my mother because I feel as though with him I’m going back towards my place of birth…”
Jem understands that Mum believes she can’t live up to Father’s expectations but doesn’t understand this urge towards return. He vows that when he’s old enough he’ll quit the places of his youth, will go elsewhere, will find a better place, select it more for what it’s not than what it actually is.
“So when he stuck around, I married him and let him string his pearls around my neck.” Mum had paused again as though she’d dropped a stitch of story which now threatened to unravel all the fabric if she didn’t hurry back and pick it up. “Your nan said I was lucky,” she’d said sadly. “‘No one gets real pearls these days,’ she said, and told me I’d done well against the odds.”
Jem knows that Mum has left those pearls behind with lots of other precious things. He’s seen the casket standing open in his parents’ bedroom.
Arak catches up at last. “I’m not as fit as I once was, eh?” he pants, and he makes a clownish show of clutching at his sides. “So, lad, what seems to be the problem?”
“Just another suicide,” says Obic.
The man squats next to Jem. “Are you all right?” he says. “You found the body, did you? Tough luck, that, though why you’re out here on your own at night I can’t imagine.”
“I was on my way to meet my mum,” Jem lies. “I’m going to live with her, you see.” He puts his wishes into words and in an instant is excluded from them.
“That right? How come you’ve not got any stuff?”
“I do.” Jem nods in the direction of the bush. “I’ve got a bag. My board and things are over there.”
This afternoon he’d struggled over whether he should take his skateboard with him. When he’d broken free of school and crashed back home he’d wasted precious minutes in considering that very question. The board was cumbersome to carry, but could he truly be himself without it? Jem knows it’s always possible to buy another board – to use a deck at all is to destroy it – but it wouldn’t be the same. This board had been a gift from Mum. They’d chosen it together. He’d told himself it shouldn’t be a thing left in the past without a part to play in any of his future.
The minutes he had lost had meant he’d missed a bus, had had to wait an hour for the next to come along. There’d been a stupid woman at the stop who’d talked to him as though she knew him and had freaked him out. He’d scowled and wished she would fuck off, but he couldn’t bring himself to say rude things, not to a stranger. The orange wheels which so appealed when Mum had taken him to choose the board, had made him feel conspicuous. It hadn’t helped that he has painted bright green images of Onion-Man along the deck.
The character of Onion-Man is one that Jem devised in an attempt to regulate his hateful feelings for his father. Reinvented as a cartoon he’d based the role on classic baddies. Onion-Man has got a long and tube-like cape and rooty fronds of hair which sprout out of a bulbous head. Jem has tried to make sure anyone can recognise him as a caricature of Father, was proud enough to take the board to school last Mufti day. He’d wanted to show off, had thought that if the other students saw him poking fun at Father, then they’d know that he was on their side and not a teacher’s spy.
His plan had not been a success. Charlotte simply commandeered the board and had mistaken Onion-Man for Jem. “It’s not me, it’s supposed to be my dad,” he’d said, although he knew to protest would betray the fact that he felt powerless.
“It looks like you,” she’d tittered, which had drawn attention from the other girls. “And you are a stinking idiot.”
In spite of setbacks Jem still wants to work on Onion-Man. He hasn’t got him quite right yet. Although he’s captured other faces easily his father’s still eludes him. Today, whilst Father reeled through all the usual tactics of a telling-off, Jem had passed the time in the attempt to figure out where Onion-Man was going wrong and had thought he’d had a breakthrough. “Yeah, that’s it!” he’d thought. “I need to stretch the head a bit and shrink the nose, and then I need to make more of those wisps of hair that cling around the ears.”
