The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Read online

The words stayed in his eyes for a few seconds, then he said, ‘You told her, didn’t you?’

  It was a whisper that wanted to be a shout, and it left his mouth wrapped in spit and fury.

  Mr Forbes turned from their audience, and guided Mr Creasy towards a wall. I heard him say Christ and calm down and for heaven’s sake, and then I heard him say, ‘We haven’t told her anything.’

  ‘Why else would she up and leave?’ said Mr Creasy. The rage seemed to immobilize him, and he became a furious effigy, fixed and motionless, except for the flush which crept from beneath his shirt and into his neck.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘but if she’s found out, it’s not come from us.’

  ‘We’re not that stupid,’ said Eric Lamb. He looked over his shoulder at a sea of teacups and curiosity. ‘Let’s get you out of here, let’s get you a drink.’

  ‘I don’t want a bloody drink.’ Mr Creasy hissed at them, like a snake. ‘I want my wife back.’

  He had no choice. They escorted him out of the hall, like prison guards.

  I watched Mrs Forbes.

  She stared at the door long after it had closed behind them.

  Number Four, The Avenue

  27 June 1976

  The roads on our estate were all named after trees, and Tilly and I walked home from the church hall along an alley which separated Sycamore from Cedar. On either side of us, lines of washing stretched like bunting across deserted gardens, waiting for the whisper of a breeze, and as we walked, drips of water smacked a tune on to concrete paths.

  No one realized then that, in many years to come, people would still speak of this summer; that every other heatwave would be compared to this one, and those who lived through it would shake their heads and smile whenever anyone complained of the temperature. It was a summer of deliverance. A summer of Space Hoppers and dancing queens, when Dolly Parton begged Jolene not to take her man, and we all stared at the surface of Mars and felt small. We had to share bathwater and half-fill the kettle, and we were only allowed to flush the toilet after what Mrs Morton described as a special occasion. The only problem was, it meant that everyone knew when you’d had a special occasion, which was a bit awkward. Mrs Morton said we’d end up with buckets and standpipes if we weren’t careful, and she was part of a vigilante group, who reported anyone for watering their gardens in the dark (Mrs Morton used washing-up water, which was allowed). It will only work if we all pull together, she said. I knew this wasn’t true, mind you, because, unlike the brittle yellow of everyone else’s, Mr Forbes’ lawn remained a strangely suspicious shade of green.

  *

  I could hear Tilly’s voice behind me. It drummed on the parched, wooden slats of the fences either side, which were beaten into white by the heat.

  What do you think? she was saying.

  She had been turning Mr Creasy’s words over since Pine Crescent, trying to fit them into an opinion.

  ‘I think Mr and Mrs Forbes are in on it,’ I shouted back.

  She caught up with me, her legs fighting with the sentence. ‘Do you think they were the ones who murdered her?’

  ‘I think they all murdered her together.’

  ‘I’m not sure they look the type,’ she said. ‘My mum thinks the Forbeses are old-fashioned.’

  ‘No, they’re very modern.’ I found a stick and drew it along the fence. ‘They have a SodaStream.’

  Tilly’s mum thought everyone was old-fashioned. Tilly’s mum owned long earrings and drank Campari, and only ever wore cheesecloth. In cold weather, she just wore more cheesecloth, layering it around herself like a shroud.

  ‘My mum says Mr and Mrs Forbes are curious people.’

  ‘Well, she’d know,’ I said.

  Back doors were propped open in the heat, and the smell of batter and roasting tins escaped from other people’s lives. Even in ninety degrees, Brussels sprouts still simmered on stoves, and gravy still dripped and pooled on heavy plates.

  ‘I hate Sundays,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ Tilly found another stick and dragged it alongside mine.

  Tilly didn’t hate anything.

  ‘It’s just the day before Monday,’ I said. ‘It’s always too empty.’

  ‘We break up soon. We’ll have six weeks of nothing but Sundays.’

  ‘I know.’ The stick hammered my boredom into the wood.

  ‘What shall we do with our holidays?’

  We reached the end of the fence, and the alley became silent.

  ‘I haven’t quite decided yet,’ I said, and let the stick fall from my hand.

  *

  We walked on to Lime Crescent , our sandals sending loose chippings dancing along the road. I looked up, but sunlight shot back from cars and windows and punished my eyes. I squinted and tried again.

  Tilly didn’t notice, but I saw them straight away. A tribe of girls, a uniform of Quatro flicks and lip gloss, with hands stuffed into pockets, making denim wings. They stood on the opposite corner, doing nothing except being older than me. I saw them weigh out our presence, as they measured the pavement with scuffed market boots and chewed gum. They were a bookmark, a page I had yet to read, and I wanted to stretch myself out to get there.

  I knew them all. I had watched for so long from the margins of their lives, their faces were as familiar as my own. I looked over for a thread of acknowledgement, but there was none. Even when I willed it with my eyes. Even when I slowed my steps to almost nothing. Tilly walked ahead, and I grew the distance between us, as stares filled with opinion reflected back at me. I couldn’t find anything to do with my arms, and so I folded them around my waist and tried to make my sandals sound more rebellious.

  Tilly waited for me around the corner.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ she said.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Shall we go to your house?’

  ‘S’pose.’

  ‘Why are you talking like that?’

  I unfolded my arms. ‘I don’t know.’

  She smiled, and I smiled back, even though the smiling felt unquiet.

  ‘Here,’ I said, and took the sou’wester from her head and put it on my own.

  Her laughter was instant, and she reached for it back. ‘Some people just can’t wear hats, Gracie,’ she said. ‘It should stay where it belongs.’

  My arm linked through hers and we walked towards home. Past matched lawns and carbon-papered lives, and rows of terraced houses, which handcuffed families together through chance and coincidence.

  And I tried to make it enough.

  *

  When we got home, my mother was peeling potatoes and talking to Jimmy Young. He sat on the shelf above her head, and she nodded and smiled at him as she filled the sink with soil.

  ‘You’ve been gone a while.’

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to Jimmy.

  ‘We were at church,’ I said.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said, and fished another potato from the mud.

  Tilly’s laughter hid inside her jumper.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I took two cheese triangles from the fridge and emptied a packet of Quavers on to a plate.

  ‘He’s gone to get a paper,’ said my mother, and she drowned the potatoes with a little more certainty. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

  Pub, I mouthed at Tilly.

  I unwrapped a triangle and Tilly took off her sou’wester, and we listened to Brotherhood of Man and watched my mother fashion potatoes.

  Save all your kisses for me, said the radio, and Tilly and I did the dance with our arms.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ I said to my mother, when the record had finished.

  ‘Now, do I believe in God?’ Her peeling slowed, and she stared at the ceiling.

  I couldn’t understand why everyone looked towards the sky when I asked the question. As though they were expecting God to appear in the clouds and give them the right answer. If so, God let my
mother down, and we were still waiting for her reply when my father appeared at the back door with no newspaper, and the British Legion still smeared in his eyes.

  He draped himself around my mother, like a sheet. ‘How is my beautiful wife?’ he said.

  ‘There’s no time for that nonsense, Derek.’ She drowned another potato.

  ‘And my two favourite girls.’ He ruffled our hair, which was a bit of a mistake, as neither Tilly nor I had the kind of hair that could be ruffled very successfully. Mine was too blonde and opinionated, and Tilly’s refused to be separated from its bobbles.

  ‘Are you staying for some lunch, Tilly?’ my father said.

  He leaned over to speak and ruffled her hair again. Whenever Tilly was there, he became a cartoon parent, a surrogate father. He swooped down to fill a gap in Tilly’s life that she never realized existed, until he highlighted it so exquisitely.

  She started to answer, but he had his head in the fridge.

  ‘I saw Thin Brian in the Legion,’ he was saying to my mother. ‘Guess what he told me.’

  My mother remained silent.

  ‘That old woman who lives at the end of Mulberry Drive, you know the one?’

  My mother nodded into the peelings.

  ‘They found her dead last Monday.’

  ‘She was quite old, Derek.’

  ‘The point is,’ he said, unwrapping a cheese triangle of his own, ‘they reckon she’d been dead for a week and no one noticed.’

  My mother looked over, and Tilly and I stared at the plate of Quavers in an effort to be unremembered.

  ‘They wouldn’t have discovered her even then,’ my father said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the sme—’

  ‘Why don’t you girls go outside?’ my mother said. ‘I’ll shout when your dinner’s ready.’

  *

  We sat on the patio, our backs pressed into the bricks to keep us in a ribbon of shade.

  ‘Fancy dying and no one misses you,’ Tilly said. ‘That’s not very Godly, is it?’

  ‘The vicar says God is everywhere,’ I said.

  Tilly frowned at me.

  ‘Everywhere.’ I waved my arms around to show her.

  ‘So why wasn’t He on Mulberry Drive?’

  I stared at the row of sunflowers on the far side of the garden. My mother had planted them last spring, and now they stretched above the wall and peered into the Forbes’ garden, like floral spies.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps He was somewhere else.’

  ‘I hope someone misses me when I die,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to die. Neither of us are. Not until we’re old. Not until people expect it of us. God will keep us safe until then.’

  ‘He didn’t keep Mrs Creasy safe, though, did he?’

  I watched bumble bees drift between the sunflowers. They explored each one, dipping into the centre, searching and inspecting, until they reappeared in the daylight, dusted in yellow and drunk with achievement.

  And it all became so obvious. ‘I know what we’re going to do with the summer holidays,’ I said, and got to my feet.

  Tilly looked up. She squinted at me and shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘What?’

  ‘We’re going to make sure everyone is safe. We’re going to bring Mrs Creasy back.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’

  ‘We’re going to look for God,’ I said.

  ‘We are?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we are. Right here on this avenue. And I’m not giving up until we find Him.’

  I held out my hand. She took it and I pulled her up next to me.

  ‘Okay, Gracie,’ she said.

  And she put her sou’wester back on and smiled.

  Number Six, The Avenue

  27 June 1976

  It was Are You Being Served? on a Monday, The Good Life on a Tuesday, and The Generation Game on a Saturday. Although for the life of her, Dorothy couldn’t see what people found funny about Bruce Forsyth.

  She tried to remember them, like a test, as she did the washing-up. It took her mind off the church hall, and the look on John Creasy’s face, and the spidery feeling in her chest.

  Monday, Tuesday, Saturday. She usually liked washing up. She liked to watch the garden and idle her mind, but today the weight of the heat pressed against the glass and made her feel as though she were looking out from a giant oven.

  Monday, Tuesday, Saturday.

  She could still remember, although she wasn’t taking any chances. They were all circled in the Radio Times.

  Harold became very irritable if she asked him something more than once.

  Try to keep it in your head, Dorothy, he told her.

  When Harold became angry, he could fill a room with his own annoyance. He could fill their sitting room, and the doctor’s surgery. He could even fill an entire supermarket.

  She tried very hard to keep things in her head.

  Sometimes, though, the words escaped her. They hid behind other words, or they showed a little of themselves, and then disappeared back into her mind before she had a chance to catch them.

  I can’t find my … she would say, and Harold would throw choices at her like bullets. Keys? Gloves? Purse? Glasses? and it would make the word she wanted disappear even more.

  Cuddly toy, she said one day, to make him laugh.

  But Harold didn’t laugh. Instead, he stared at her as though she had walked into the conversation uninvited, and then he had closed the back door very quietly and started mowing the lawn. And somehow the quietness filled a room even more than the anger.

  She folded the tea towel and put it on the edge of the draining board.

  Harold had been quiet since they’d got back from church. He and Eric had deposited John Creasy somewhere, although Lord knows where, she hadn’t even dared ask, and he had sat down and read his newspaper in silence. He had eaten his dinner in silence, and dropped gravy down his shirt front in silence, and when she asked him if he wanted mandarin segments with Ideal milk for afterwards, he had only nodded at her.

  When she put it down in front of him, he said the only sentence to come out of his mouth all afternoon. These are peaches, Dorothy.

  It was happening all over again. It ran in families, she’d read it somewhere. Her mother ended up the same way, kept being found wandering the streets at six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, breadbin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind, although Dorothy always thought losing your mind was such a strange phrase. As if your mind could be misplaced, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier, as if it was more than likely your own fault for being so bloody careless.

  They’d put her mother in a home within weeks. It was all very quick.

  It’s for the best, Harold had said.

  He’d said it each time they went to visit.

  After he’d eaten his peaches, Harold had settled himself on the settee and fallen asleep, although how anyone could sleep in this heat was beyond her. He was still there now, his stomach rising and falling as he shifted in between dreams, his snoring keeping time with the kitchen clock, and plotting out the afternoon for them both.

  Dorothy took the remains of their silent meal and emptied it into the pedal bin. The only problem with losing your mind was that you never lost the memories you wanted to lose. The memories you really needed left first. Her foot rested on the pedal, and she looked into the waste. No matter how many lists you wrote, and how many circles you made in the Radio Times, and no matter how much you practised the words over and over again, and tried to fool people, the only memories that didn’t leave were the ones you wish you’d never made in the first place.

  She reached into the rubbish and lifted a tin out of the potato peelings. She stared at it.

  ‘These are peaches, Dorothy,’ she said to an empty kitchen. ‘Peaches.’

  She felt the tears before
she even knew they had happened.

  *

  ‘The problem, Dorothy, is that you think too much.’ Harold’s gaze never left the television screen. ‘It’s not healthy.’

  Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.

  Dorothy picked imaginary fluff from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘It’s difficult not to think about it, Harold, under the circumstances.’

  ‘This is completely different. She’s a grown woman. Her and John have probably just had some kind of tiff and she’s cleared off for a bit to teach him a lesson.’

  She looked over at her husband. The light from the window gave his face a faint blush of marzipan. ‘I only hope you’re right,’ she said.

  ‘Of course I’m right.’ His stare was still fastened to the television screen, and she watched his eyes flicker as the images changed.

  It was Sale of the Century. She should have known better than to speak to Harold whilst he was occupied with Nicholas Parsons. It might have been best to try and fit the conversation into an advert break, but there were too many words and she couldn’t stop them climbing into her mouth.

  ‘The only thing is, I saw her. A few days before she disappeared.’ Dorothy cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to clear. ‘She was going into number eleven.’

  Harold looked at her for the first time. ‘You never told me.’

  ‘You never asked,’ she said.

  ‘What was she doing going in there?’ He turned towards her, and his glasses fell from the arm of his chair. ‘What could they possibly have to say to each other?’

  ‘I have no idea, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it? She speaks to him, and then a few days later, she vanishes. He must have said something.’

  Harold stared at the floor, and she waited for his fear to catch up with hers. In the corner, the television churned the laughter of strangers out into their living room.

  ‘What I don’t understand’, he said, ‘is how he could stay on the avenue, after everything that happened. He should have moved on.’

  ‘You can’t dictate to people where they live, Harold.’