A Dry Spell Read online

  Jane tutted out loud. Right under our noses, she thought, taking her place at the front of the queue.

  ‘How much to put a card in the window?’ she asked the man behind the counter, raising her voice to compete with the roar of the chip fryer.

  He flashed his fingers at her a few times. ‘Fifty pence for one week.’

  She slid her card and coin across the counter towards him. It read: FOR SALE: pair of china alsatians, perfect condition, 110cms high. Any offers? She and Guy had spent an enjoyable half-hour the previous night debating the wording of such an advertisement. Guy had originally been dubious about getting rid of the things altogether, fearing the inevitable parental inquisition, though he was as adamant as Jane that they were not having them on display. Even in a self-mocking, post-modern, ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ capacity it was unthinkable. His natural inclination had been to stow them out of sight somewhere so that they could be retrieved in an emergency. Jane had demanded to know what sort of emergency he had in mind – the sudden arrival of the risen Auntie Muriel, perhaps?

  ‘You could take them to school,’ she had suggested, mischievously. ‘They could go in the Smokers’ Room.’

  ‘As a deterrent, you mean?’ said Guy. Only two members of his staff of twenty smoked. The other eighteen had voted to make the main common room a smoke-free zone, but still somewhere had to be provided for the pariahs to indulge their craving. It was thought to be undignified, and moreover a bad example to the children, for them to skulk outside, so a dingy cell of a storeroom had been given over for the purpose. Even this compromise didn’t satisfy some of the eighteen, who resented yielding up valuable cupboard space for the pursuit of a vice. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Guy said to Jane. ‘It’s cramped enough in there as it is.’ But at home as at school storage was at a premium, especially since the loft had become Guy’s observatory.

  Jane had finally swung things her way on ecological grounds. It was irresponsible to hoard something they didn’t use and waste the planet’s precious resources: tat should be circulated – that way, less of it would be produced.

  The man in the kiosk took Jane’s coin and shunted the card back to her and indicated that she should find a space on the board. She chose a slot in the FOR SALE section, noting the insalubrious character of the surrounding company. Really, she had never seen such creative spelling. Would anyone conceivably want their CV typed by someone who thought professional had two fs? And who on earth would trust a childminder capable of producing such a deranged script?

  Moses basket, car-seat (0–6 months) and pram for sale. Never been used, ran one advertisement which caught Jane’s eye. What tragedy lay concealed behind those few words? she was wondering, when her attention was drawn to a neatly written card – quite different in style from the desperate petitions for work or money alongside. A blush rose up into her cheeks as she read: Would the red-haired woman who kindly looked after my baby here last Thursday when my son ran off please call me as a matter of urgency. Many thanks. Erica. This was followed by a local telephone number.

  Jane’s first reaction was to step back sharply and guiltily from the noticeboard. What can she possibly want? Jane thought, casting her mind back to the previous Thursday and immediately assuming the worst. The baby had gone on to fall into a coma or develop brain damage, that was it. Harriet had clonked him on the head. She remembered it clearly now. Oh God.

  She reread the message and began to calm down. Surely the woman wouldn’t have used the word ‘kindly’ in such circumstances. Unless it was a trap: after all, who would respond to an appeal that said, Will the redhead who injured my baby last week please get in touch? Don’t be ridiculous, Jane told herself. It was just a tiny bump. It hadn’t even left a mark. I don’t have to ring. I could quite easily not have come back to the park today, or ever, she thought, knowing all along that she would ring, and soon. Both her curiosity and her conscience were troubled – a formidable combination.

  She allowed Harriet a scant half-hour on the swings and then lured her home with the promise of television in the afternoon. As soon as the child was settled in front of a School Science programme on magnetism, for eleven-to fourteen-year-olds, Jane shut herself in the kitchen and dialled the number that she had scribbled down on the palm of her hand. The click of an answering machine coming to life took Jane by surprise. She hadn’t planned what to say and hated the thought of her improvised burblings being caught on tape. She was about to hang up when a voice said ‘Hold on’, over the top of the recorded message, and then ‘Damn this bastard thing’; there was some more mechanical whirring and the high-pitched whistle of feedback, before the machine was finally disabled. ‘Sorry,’ said the voice. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane, recognizing the woman’s Scottish accent. ‘I saw your card in the café window. It was me who looked after your baby.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve rung,’ came the reply. ‘You’ve no idea.’

  ‘Is he all right?’ stammered Jane.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘Yes, fine. Why?’ The woman sounded puzzled.

  ‘No reason,’ said Jane, almost laughing with relief.

  ‘No. What I’m after is my newspaper.’

  ‘Oh!’ In her anxiety about the boy’s health Jane had completely forgotten that business with the crossword.

  ‘You took my newspaper. Or at least the front cover. I’m sure you had your reasons, but I need it back. Have you still got it?’

  ‘I . . .’ Jane had only a split second to decide whether to own up and explain or carry off a strenuous denial. Either way she was doomed: this Erica would think her a lunatic or a liar. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jane, coming down marginally on the side of lunacy, ‘you’re going to think I’m a bit odd. I did take the cover, and it’ll be in a bin somewhere here. I could probably fish it out if you need it, but it might be a bit gooey.’

  ‘I don’t care how gooey it is,’ said Erica briskly. ‘I wrote a telephone number in the margin and forgot to transfer it to my diary. And when I came back from the park and went to make the call the page was gone. So if you wouldn’t mind going through your bins . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jane, meekly. ‘I’ll do it now.’ She laid the receiver down and hurried out to the back of the house where the dustbins stood, their lids balanced on top of bags of compressed rubbish. It was the day before they were due to be emptied, and an additional heap of plastic sacks had accumulated beside them, bloated and waterlogged from last night’s rain. She couldn’t understand how the four of them managed to generate so much trash. One day, she promised herself, she would investigate recycling. She selected a bag, estimating it to date from approximately the previous Thursday and pulled it open at the neck, reeling back from the smell of rotten food. There was the folded piece of newspaper, a corner of it just visible beneath a pile of old teabags, half a mouldy cucumber, a chicken carcase, and a layer of rice.

  Jane was just about to put her hand into the bag to try and tweak the page free, when she noticed to her horror that what she had taken to be rice – which, come to think of it, they hadn’t had for months – was in fact a mound of maggots. She dropped the edge of the bag in disgust; the contents duly subsided and resettled, burying the newspaper even further in the heaving, maggoty sludge. Jane dashed back into the kitchen, casting around for a suitable implement, all the while imagining the woman on the other end of the line, drumming her fingers in impatience. Finally, in her haste, she tipped the contents of the knife drawer out on to the draining board and seized from among the tangled metal a pair of barbecue tongs. With these she managed to extract several fragments of paper from the pulp but they had disintegrated too far for any text to be legible. Nevertheless she carried them at tongs’ length into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said into the receiver. ‘It’s all dissolved. It would take a forensic pathologist to get anything off here.’

  ‘Bugger,’ said Erica. ‘It w
as a number to ring for cheap standby flights. Oh well.’

  ‘I’m not a habitual thief,’ said Jane, feeling that some plea of mitigation was necessary. ‘I only took it because I’d pretty much finished your crossword while you were away, and I suddenly thought it would look a bit callous, if you really had lost your little boy. So I took the outside pages and stuffed them in my bag. It was totally out of character.’

  ‘Ha.’ Jane could hear her grin. ‘That’s the most pathetic excuse I’ve ever heard: it must be true.’

  ‘I can only apologize,’ Jane said.

  ‘Ah well. Never mind. It can’t be helped. No real harm done.’

  ‘No,’ said Jane, thinking of her barbecue tongs, which were going straight in the bin the minute she put the phone down.

  ‘I’ve given up smoking, by the way,’ said the woman, suddenly. ‘After your sarcastic remarks.’

  What’s that to me? thought Jane, who couldn’t remember having made any sarcastic remarks on that or any other subject. Instead she said, ‘I’m glad I’ve done something useful. Goodbye.’ As soon as she had hung up, Jane resealed the maggoty bag and then washed her hands under scalding water, scrubbing and scrubbing them until they felt raw and clean.

  When Guy came home from his school open evening, with a pounding headache, his face stiff from two hours of smiling, he found the ground floor of the house in a state of confusion.

  Having fed and bathed the girls, read them a story and put them to bed on her own Jane had set about tidying away their clutter from the living room so that the space could be reclaimed for an hour or so of civilized relaxation. Once this was done she had hit upon the idea of rearranging the furniture to make the room look bigger, but whichever way she tried it one of the armchairs always ended up adjacent to the television, and effectively redundant. She had then tried removing the spare chair altogether, putting it in a corner of the dining room, which was seldom used except on Sundays, or for entertaining of which they did little.

  It was while standing by the French windows looking out at the twilit garden which was beginning to show patches of spring colour, that Jane was struck with the idea that this really was much the nicer of the two rooms and was wasted in its current role. It would make altogether better sense to swap the contents over so that the general living area overlooked the garden rather than the street and the row of Victorian semis opposite. Gripped by sudden enthusiasm for change, Jane had dragged the dining table into the hallway, scoring some deep grooves into its legs as she negotiated the door frame, and effectively blocked the progress of any further traffic. Realizing that she would have to create some space in the former sitting room, she had begun to shift some of the bulkier items – the couch, the bureau, out into the hall where they ran up against the table creating a gridlock.

  By the time Guy put his key in the door, tired and tense and longing to sit down, both rooms had been evacuated and the contents stacked in two pyramids at the bottom of the stairs, each one blocking the other from its destination. Indeed the front door itself would only open a foot or so before coming to rest against the video cabinet, so Guy had been forced to insinuate himself through the gap sideways, briefcase first.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked in dismay, looking across to the empty sitting room where Jane stood, imprisoned. She had just been thinking how easy it would all have been if only their hall had one of those revolving floors like the stage at the National Theatre.

  ‘Oh, you’re back,’ she said. ‘I’ve got myself into a bit of a pickle.’ On occasions like this when she required deliverance from a predicament of her own making she tended to revert to the language of childhood. In normal circumstances Guy was happy to collude with this pretence of female helplessness, but tonight he was exhausted, and the modest fantasy he had been entertaining on the way home, of unwinding in front of the TV, wine glass in one hand, wife in the other, now lay in smithereens.

  ‘I was just swapping the rooms over,’ Jane explained.

  ‘Any particular reason?’ asked Guy, taking off his jacket and hanging it over a standard lamp, which now stood between him and the coat hooks. He could just see the television, there at the bottom of the heap. There were ten minutes until the News.

  ‘I thought it would be better. But it was a two-man job, really.’

  Now suddenly I’m to blame for not having been here! thought Guy. ‘Well, in that case why didn’t you wait until there were two men available to do it?’ he said patiently. He didn’t want to get into an argument. He just wanted the television and a chair within range of a plug socket, soon.

  ‘It was the inspiration of the moment,’ said Jane. ‘I think we just need to pass things across to each other,’ she went on, as if they were discussing a bag of groceries rather than a three-piece suite.

  It took eight minutes, under Guy’s management, to restore order to the ground floor. The furniture was returned to its original positions and the changeover deferred to another day. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, as the last chair was shunted back into place. He was hoping that the answer would be No and that there might be something tasty simmering on the stove, although this wasn’t their usual arrangement if he was late.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘I had a Chicken Dinosaur with the girls.’

  A chicken dinosaur? thought Guy, wondering what Mr Sharpearrow would think of this.

  ‘I could make you something,’ Jane added, without much conviction.

  ‘No, it’s all right.’ On those evenings when he wasn’t back in time to eat with the whole family he was supposed to take care of himself. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes until the News. ‘I’ll grab something,’ he said, forgetting that it was the day before Jane shopped and that provisions would be low. In any case she had become so parsimonious lately that there was never much in the cupboards in the way of slack. Every item seemed to have its designated place in the week’s menu, so that it was impossible to knock up, say, a poached egg, without compromising some future meal. Miraculously there was a wedge of cheddar in the door of the fridge. Guy took it, an apple and a couple of paracetamol back into the sitting room. He would have to encourage Jane to be less thrifty with the groceries. Not now, though, because there was only one minute to the News and he didn’t want to get into a discussion about money or anything else until it was over. As usual the remote control gadget was missing. In a state of mounting frustration, Guy located it down the side of the couch, pulling out a handful of Lego in the process. As the dying notes of the theme tune gave way to the first chime of Big Ben, Jane came in with her cup of tea and sat down.

  ‘New wave of terror closes down city,’ read the announcer in a melodramatic voice.

  ‘Harriet hates me,’ said Jane.

  Guy sagged in his chair. They had had this conversation, or variations of it, a thousand times and he had no wish to rehearse it now. ‘No she doesn’t. She’s just a three-year-old. They’re like that.’ He tried to keep the tone light and sympathetic. With any luck he could head this one off before it developed into a full counselling session.

  ‘She slapped me round the face today.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Guy, keeping one eye on the television. The cameras roved across a deserted station concourse. Another bomb hoax. His finger hovered over the volume switch as he considered whether he might get away with turning the sound up a fraction.

  ‘Because I smacked her. It’s a long story.’ She started to tell it, nevertheless, with her usual gabbled delivery. Guy nodded occasionally to signify interest, at the same time as trying to tune in to the news report which had moved on to cover the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. There on their doorstep a country was tearing itself apart, neighbour against neighbour. The village from which the war correspondent was sending his report of a massacre of Muslim families looked much like those he and Jane had driven through on a touring holiday before the children were born.

  He looked sharply back to Jane whose mouth was still opening and shutting. It was ha
rder than he’d imagined, listening to two conversations at once. Those people who did simultaneous translations at the UN and other international summits really earned their money, he was thinking, as he caught up with Jane. She seemed to have moved on from Harriet and was relating some incident concerning the theft of a newspaper, a woman with a missing baby, and some maggots.

  ‘She must have thought I was mad,’ she finished. ‘Anyway, I’ve chucked out the barbecue tongs.’

  Guy let the remark pass. There was no way he was going to untangle that one without admitting he hadn’t been paying attention.

  ‘She’s so aggressive?’ Jane went on.

  ‘Who?’ said Guy, still trying to picture the maggot woman.

  ‘Harriet,’ said Jane, impatiently. ‘And she never shows me any affection. Even when she’s hurt herself she doesn’t want a cuddle.’

  ‘Not everyone likes physical contact,’ said Guy, without taking his eyes off the screen. His finger came to rest on the volume switch and he eased the sound up infinitesimally. There was an item on about rising crime and delinquency among under-twelves. Another excuse to bash primary schools; he could see it coming. Sure enough some member of the Right was wheeled on to deliver the usual lecture about family values and the evil of sixties-style trendy teaching methods, while a representative of the Left blamed unemployment and government cuts in services. The headmaster of an inner-city junior school, an excessively nervous, twitching individual, was invited to add his comments. It was hard to imagine him as the victorious candidate in any interview line-up. Where do they find them? Guy wondered. Fortunately Jane seemed to have gone quiet. He looked over at her and saw that she was resting her chin on one hand, and that her eyes had that foggy, pre-tears expression.

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

  She shook her head and a tear rolled off her eyelashes on to her cheek. She knocked it away with a flat hand. ‘Nothing. You’re not listening.’