The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Read online

  ‘My parents,’ said Mrs Roper, when she saw me looking, ‘and my brother and sisters.’ She unwrapped a Toffee Penny.

  I smiled.

  ‘All dead now, of course.’

  I stopped smiling.

  ‘Heart attacks,’ said Brian, from the edge of his fringe.

  Mrs Roper’s chewing slowed down temporarily, as she looked over at Brian. ‘It’s true,’ she said, looking back and picking up speed again. ‘My mother dropped down dead in the middle of Miss World 1961. I couldn’t ever look Michael Aspel straight in the eye after that.’

  I took another triangle. ‘Is that what happened to Mr Roper?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘He caught the ferry to Yarmouth twelve years ago and was never seen again.’

  ‘He drowned?’ said Tilly.

  ‘No, he ran off with one of the girls from the typing pool,’ said Brian.

  Mrs Roper shot him a stare. Then she shrugged her shoulders and a smile folded up her face and wrinkled her nose. ‘Still. Nothing’s forever, is it?’ she said, and passed over another Quality Street. ‘It’s all God’s will.’

  ‘So, you do believe in God, Mrs Roper?’ I said.

  ‘Oh God, well, yes, God.’ She spoke as though I had brought up the subject of an old and dear friend. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’

  ‘Do you think the Lord taketh away Mrs Creasy?’

  I saw Tilly move towards the edge of her seat.

  ‘Oh she’s been taken away all right.’ Mrs Roper leaned forward and fanned herself with a copy of The People’s Friend. ‘But I don’t think God had anything much to do with it.’

  ‘Mam, don’t start.’ Brian shifted his position, and I could hear the springs in the armchair wake up and yawn.

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’ said Mrs Roper.

  Brian shifted again. ‘Why don’t we have a brew? I’ve been hoovering all afternoon.’

  ‘What a good idea, Brian.’ Mrs Roper lifted her legs on to the crochet. ‘Put the kettle on. There’s a good boy. Funerals always make me so thirsty.’

  *

  I offered to help Brian with the tea, and we waited in the strip of kitchen which stretched along the back of the house. The cupboard doors were an unhappy walnut, and it was so dark and quiet I felt as though I was sitting inside a box.

  ‘Don’t take no notice of my mam,’ Brian said. He spooned tea leaves into a bright orange pot. ‘She gets carried away. Spends too much time on that settee, shuffling her own thoughts.’

  ‘Doesn’t she get out very much?’

  ‘Not since my dad went.’ He opened one of the cupboards, and I could see a tangle of plates and bowls, waiting to overbalance. ‘Sat herself down in the front room when he left, waiting for him to come back and apologize, and she hasn’t really moved much since.’

  The kettle began to boil. It was shy at first, clicking against the spout, a soft tap on the metal. Then it became louder, rattling its impatience and spreading an angry whistle of steam across the tiles.

  ‘You must have been upset when he went. It must have been a shock.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I could smell it coming. Like rain.’

  He lifted a tray down from the top of the fridge. It looked worn and tired, rings of teacups past circling out the days.

  ‘Do you think that’s what happened with Mrs Creasy?’ I said. ‘Do you think she planned to leave?’

  Brian didn’t answer for a while. Instead, he arranged the milk jug and the teapot and the sugar bowl on the tray, and then he began lifting cups from one of the cupboards. The patterns on the cups were all different, and foxgloves and daisies and hydrangeas all argued with each other about who wanted to be the loudest.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, after a while. ‘I don’t think so.’

  I waited. I had discovered that, sometimes, if you held on to the silence, people couldn’t stop themselves from filling it up.

  ‘She’d made an appointment for the next day.’ He reached towards a biscuit barrel next to the kettle. It was made in the shape of a bloodhound, and he had to remove the top of its skull in order to retrieve a packet of ginger nuts. ‘She wouldn’t have let them down. She wasn’t that kind of lady.’

  ‘Who was the appointment with?’

  Brian pulled a pink and green tea cosy over the teapot, tugging at the knitting to fit around the spout. He turned to look at me, and was about to speak when Mrs Roper’s voice reached out along the hall from the sitting room.

  ‘Have you gone to China for that tea, Brian?’

  The packet of biscuits rolled towards the edge as he lifted the tray. He looked into my eyes for just a moment, and then looked away. ‘It was with me,’ he said.

  *

  ‘In the middle of Sunday dinner,’ Mrs Roper was saying, as we walked in. ‘One minute she was dishing up the roast potatoes, and the next, she was face down in a plate of Paxo.’

  ‘Mrs Roper was just telling me all about heart attacks,’ said Tilly. She looked slightly pale. ‘Although I think we might have covered everything there is to say.’

  ‘I was explaining to Tilly how important it is to live for the moment,’ said Mrs Roper. ‘You never know what’s going to happen next. Look at Ernest Morton, look at Margaret Creasy.’

  Brian set the tray down on the coffee table. There were squares of a chessboard blocked into the wood, but no sign of any chess pieces. He leaned the packet of ginger nuts against the milk jug.

  ‘Plate, Brian. Fetch a plate for the biscuits. We’ve got company.’ Mrs Roper waved her arms around and clicked her tongue across her front teeth.

  ‘He’s a nice boy,’ she said, as Brian left the room, ‘harmless enough, but a bit simple. Like his father.’

  ‘You spent a lot of time with Mrs Creasy, then?’ I said.

  Brian returned and spread the ginger nuts out on a plate, and they were sent to live with Mrs Roper on the settee.

  ‘We spent hours playing cards,’ said Mrs Roper. ‘I knew her better than anyone.’

  ‘But you don’t know why she disappeared?’ I worked out that it was still possible to reach a ginger nut if I moved to the very edge of my seat. ‘She didn’t say anything to you?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’ Mrs Roper looked deeply disappointed in herself. ‘She never said a word.’

  Brian poured the tea. I could see him glance at his mother in between cups.

  ‘Although she might not have had much choice in the matter.’ She spoke very quickly, whilst Brian was occupied with the sugar bowl.

  ‘Don’t fill their heads with that nonsense, Mam.’

  ‘I’m only speaking my mind, Brian. That’s why your grandfather fought in the war, so I can speak my mind.’ She sank one of the biscuits into her tea and tiny crumbs of ginger floated around in the milky waves. ‘There’s plenty of people on this avenue who know a lot more than they’re letting on.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mrs Roper?’ I said.

  She sucked at the ginger nut before it disappeared into her mouth, and then she stirred more sugar into her tea. I could hear her spoon clicking against the hydrangeas as it drifted around the cup. Brian stood in front of her. He tried to rest his arm on the mantelpiece, but it was a fraction too low.

  ‘What I mean’, she said, looking at Brian before she spoke, ‘is that the world is made up of all sorts of people.’

  Brian still hadn’t moved.

  ‘There are decent people,’ said Mrs Roper, ‘and then there are the weird ones, the ones who don’t belong. The ones who cause the rest of us problems.’

  ‘Goats and sheep,’ said Tilly from across the room.

  Mrs Roper frowned. ‘Well, I suppose so, if that’s the way you want to look at it.’

  ‘It’s the way God looks at it,’ said Tilly, and folded her arms beneath her poncho.

  ‘The point is, these people don’t think like the rest of us. They’re misfits, oddballs. They’re the ones the police should be talking to, not
people like us. Normal people.’

  ‘Have the police been to see you as well, Mrs Roper?’

  She drowned another biscuit. ‘Oh yes, they’ve been. PC something. What was his name, Brian?’

  ‘Green.’ Brian went back to sit by the window, under the fringing.

  ‘That’s it. PC Green. He doesn’t know any more than the rest of us about where Margaret’s gone. Although I didn’t see him knocking at number eleven, did you, Brian?’

  Brian shook his head. I had a feeling he might have been asked this question before.

  ‘How do you know which people they are,’ said Tilly, ‘the people who don’t fit in?’

  Mrs Roper sucked more tea out of her ginger nut. ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face. They have strange little habits, odd behaviour. They never mix with anyone else. They even look different.’

  ‘They do?’ I said.

  ‘You’ll understand as you get older. You can spot them a mile off. You’ll learn to cross the street.’ She pointed to the footstool. ‘Pass us that ashtray, Brian, my legs are killing me, I can barely move.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why they don’t mix,’ said Tilly, ‘because everyone else is on the other side of the street?’

  But Mrs Roper was concentrating on lighting her cigarette, and within a few seconds a blanket of Park Drive began to drift across the room.

  Out in the avenue, the sound of an engine stammered to a halt, and there was a thud of car door closing.

  Brian caught his head on the shade as he peered around the standard lamp. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Mrs Roper looked up from the tin of Quality Street with the instinct of a wild animal.

  ‘It’s the police again.’

  She sprang from the settee like a jack-in-a-box. We all moved towards the window, and Tilly managed to squeeze under Mrs Roper’s armpit. We watched PC Green replace his hat and straighten his jacket, and begin walking towards the top of the road.

  ‘Is he going to number eleven?’ said Mrs Roper.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it.’ The policeman crossed the street, and Brian moved the curtain slightly to improve the view.

  We looked, as PC Green walked past each of the houses, until he came to a stop outside number four.

  ‘It looks like he’s going into your house, Grace.’ Brian let the curtain fall back across the glass.

  Mrs Roper took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘Well I never,’ she said.

  Number Four, The Avenue

  5 July 1976

  Tilly and I sat exactly halfway up the stairs.

  I had worked out, through a series of experiments, that this was the most useful step. Any higher and you couldn’t hear the words; any lower and you risked being discovered and sent to your room, and repeatedly told proverbs about people who listen in doorways.

  ‘Have we missed anything?’ said Tilly.

  My mother had pushed the sitting-room door to, but there was just enough of a gap to see PC Green’s jacket and my father’s left shoulder.

  ‘I think they’re just offering him a cup of tea,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t think they’d do that if he’d arrested them.’

  I could hear my mother. Her voice was brittle. Like an egg. ‘I’d rather stay, if that’s all right with you,’ she said.

  My father’s left shoulder was shrugging, presumably along with his right one. He said, ‘There’s nothing I would say to you that I wouldn’t say in front of my wife.’

  My father never described my mother as my wife.

  I could tell from PC Green’s back that he was taking his notebook out of his pocket. Through the doorway, I could hear the pages turning over, and the sound of my father tapping his fingers against the back of a chair.

  ‘Mr Bennett, you are the owner of Bennett Property and Management Services?’ said PC Green, ‘based at number 54 St John’s Street?’

  My father said that he was. His voice was small and insignificant. It didn’t even sound like my father any more, it sounded like someone who was trying to remember how to be valuable.

  ‘We’ve had a witness come forward,’ said PC Green, ‘who saw Mrs Creasy entering your office building at …’ – there was the sound of another page turning – ‘… approximately two o’clock on the afternoon of the 20th of June.’

  The tapping stopped and a band of silence took its place. As though no one knew who was supposed to speak next.

  In the end, it was my mother. ‘That was the day before she disappeared,’ she said.

  ‘It was,’ said PC Green. ‘It was also a Sunday.’

  I heard a breath leave my mother’s mouth. It sounded as though she had been holding on to it for some time. ‘Well, I don’t know what she’d be doing there, but it wouldn’t be anything to do with Derek. He goes to his Round Table meeting on a Sunday afternoon, don’t you, Derek?’

  ‘Mr Bennett? Could you confirm where you were on the afternoon of Sunday, the 20th of June?’

  My father didn’t confirm anything. Instead, he shuffled his feet on the carpet and we all listened to the sound of my mother’s breathing.

  ‘Mr Bennett?’

  ‘I may have talked to her briefly that day,’ said my father, eventually. ‘In passing.’

  The policeman’s notebook turned again. ‘Yet when I spoke to you last week, Mr Bennett, and I asked you when you last saw Mrs Creasy, you distinctly said that it could have been Thursday, or possibly Friday,’ said PC Green.

  Tilly turned to me on the staircase and made her eyes very wide. I made mine very small back again.

  ‘It must have slipped my mind,’ said my father. ‘But now you come to mention it, yes. Yes, I did see her on the Sunday.’

  ‘Is your office open on a Sunday, Mr Bennett?’ said PC Green.

  ‘No.’ My mother’s voice answered the question. ‘His office isn’t open on a Sunday.’

  ‘Then perhaps you could explain to me why Mrs Creasy would be visiting your premises?’

  ‘Derek?’ I couldn’t see my mother’s face, but I could imagine it, stretched over the question like a drum.

  I had never seen my father like this. He was always the one asking questions, waiting for explanations. It felt strange, as though the light had shifted, and I realized that I had only ever read one chapter of a story. When my father eventually spoke, Tilly and I had to lean through the banisters to hear his reply.

  ‘She wanted some advice,’ he said. ‘It was the only day she could make it.’

  ‘Some advice?’ said PC Green.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘On …’ I heard the pages turn again. I didn’t like the pages. ‘… property and management services?’

  I could see my father’s left arm. It was crossing over to join his right. For a while, the only sound was the kitchen clock, eating away at the seconds.

  ‘She was thinking of making an investment,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I see, Mr Bennett, only her husband hasn’t mentioned any of this to us.’

  ‘I don’t believe she’d discussed it with her husband, PC Green. This is the 1970s. Women can make decisions all by themselves these days.’

  His voice had expanded. He was almost back to being my father again.

  I could see the policeman adjust his jacket and replace his notebook, and I heard him suggest to my father that he have a think about whether anything else might have slipped his mind. He said ‘slipped his mind’ as though he was learning to speak a foreign language. My father said that he would, in his brand new, expanded voice. The sitting-room door was pulled open and everyone moved towards the hall. Tilly and I had to run up to the landing and be soundless all at the same time.

  ‘What do you think that was all about, then?’ Tilly said when we got to my bedroom. Her breath was stolen by stairs and excitement.

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Not sure,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s strange that your dad never mentioned it before?’

  ‘M
aybe.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s really strange.’ She stretched out really as she lifted the poncho over her head. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

  We sat on the bed. The eiderdown felt slippery cool against the back of my legs. Below our feet, I could hear the swell of my mother’s voice, ebbing and flowing against the ceiling.

  Tilly picked up one of the bushbabies and held it to her face. ‘I don’t think your mum’s very happy,’ she said.

  I brushed my hands across the material and a wave of static fizzed through my fingers. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘She’s probably upset that the policeman had to come back. They’re very busy, aren’t they? That’s probably all it is.’

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,’ she said, with a face full of worrying.

  My mother’s voice continued to cut through the floorboards. The words were splintered and incomplete, which somehow made it worse. If I could hear what was being said, I might be able to find a pocket of reassurance, because I knew my mother was sometimes perfectly capable of embroidering a whole evening of arguing out of absolutely nothing at all. I wanted this to be one of those times, and so I held my breath and tried to make sense of the pieces, but they struck the ceiling like gravel.

  Beyond my mother’s voice was the low, grumbling apology of my father, and in between handfuls of my mother, I heard him say ‘There isn’t anything else to tell’ and ‘Why would I lie about it?’ And then he was lost again in a wave of shouting.

  Tilly put the Whimsy back on the shelf. ‘It’s strange, though, isn’t it, why he didn’t mention seeing Mrs Creasy before?’

  I moved the bushbaby very slightly to the left. ‘It must have just slipped his mind,’ I said.

  The words sounded like a foreign language.

  6 July 1976

  We followed Mrs Morton down the High Street. She sailed, like a vessel, along the pavement, skirting around pushchairs and small dogs, and people who had stopped to wipe ice cream from their chins.

  July had found its fiercest day yet. The sky was ironed into an acid blue, and even the clouds had fallen from the edges, leaving a faultless page of summer above our heads. Even so, there were those who still nurtured mistrust. We walked past cardigans draped across elbows and raincoats bundled into shopping bags, and one woman who carried an umbrella wedged into her armpit, like artillery. It seemed that people couldn’t quite let go of the weather, and felt the need to carry every form of it around with them, at all times, for safekeeping.