“They’d have to be mad.” Josephine was very keen on that word. “Don’t worry. I may decide to stick it out a few more years. Till I fall for a baby, anyway.”
Minty ran her hand down the length of the new knife she still wore strapped to her right leg. She’d have felt half-dressed without it now, though she sometimes wondered what she was going to use it for. Mary would have been a good candidate, only Minty had only seen her shadow, a thin woman with long hair and long legs. But she no more appeared in the shape of a real human being than the aunts did or the uncles. They just chattered away among themselves, the best of friends, when they weren’t talking to her. Except for Mary, who was always rowing with Kathleen.
She didn’t know which was better, seeing them and hearing them or just hearing them. She tried to find things to do that they’d hate, walking the streets, getting in a jam-packed tube train, going down to Oxford Street, where there was always such a dense crowd strolling aimlessly along the pavements that you could lose yourself among the people. For a while their voices would go away but they always came back to persecute her. The evening she went out with Sonovia and Laf the cinema was full of people; it was a good job Laf had booked, there wasn’t an empty seat that she could see. The ghost voices who talked to her when she went alone to the pictures in the afternoon had disappeared. Every time this happened she couldn’t cure herself of hoping they were gone forever. She sat listening for them, savoring the quiet, oblivious to what was coming out of the screen, until Sonovia asked her in a whispered hiss if she was in a trance.
When Josephine was in the shop and when Ken dropped in, when one customer after another came in, her head was mostly silent. That was why she’d stopped going home at lunchtime. She knew they’d be there and it would be like walking in among a mass of chattering people, all expectant, all waiting for something, like the theater audience before the curtain went up on An Inspector Calls. She didn’t want to be their play, their show, but over that she had no control.
Food was the reason she went home that Thursday lunchtime. She’d forgotten her sandwiches, though she’d made them, chicken and lettuce and tomato on white bread, wrapped them in greaseproof paper and polyethylene, and put them in the fridge. Left them in the fridge. It was something she’d never have done normally but that morning she’d rushed out of the house to escape Mary’s voice and Uncle Wilfred’s. She walked, though she’d gone to Immacue on the 18 bus. It was a nice, sunny day, autumnal though and with a nip in the air. A year ago she’d have been looking forward to going out with Jock in the evening, not dreaming that the train he was coming on from Gloucester would crash and kill him. He’d be saying his funny things to her. I went into the garden to fetch a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie and there I met a great she-bear who said, What, no soap? And promptly married the barber. There, she’d remembered it word for word.
It was a long walk and being used to it made it no shorter. Past the Flora pub and the Church of the Redeemer of God, past the eastern entrance to the cemetery, Kensal Green tube station, the garage, the boarded-up shops, the seat and flower bed where she’d got rid of Mrs. Lewis. She turned off Harrow Road before the western gate of the cemetery was reached and into Syringa Road. Her key went into the lock and she turned it, knowing what she’d find inside, voices and the sounds as of a crowd jostling each other.
The hall was still and, for a moment, she thought the whole place was silent. She closed her eyes, enjoying the peace. Then the voices began as whispers, Mary and Edna arguing, as they always did, Kathleen muttering about Jock’s ashes being in Brompton Cemetery. Just because Laf told her that story about Fortune Green didn’t mean they weren’t in Brompton. They were up in the far northeast corner and she could see the gravestone, Kathleen said, she could see his name on it and the dates of his birth and death. Edna broke in and said it was morbid living by a cemetery, she knew the effect it had had on her. If she had her time over again she’d move somewhere else.
Minty took a few steps toward the kitchen. Then she stopped, listening. A terrible thing had happened, the thing she knew couldn’t happen. She heard Jock singing upstairs. Just walk on by. Wait on the corner…
His voice had lightened and risen a little. Perhaps that was what happened when ghosts sang. Their voices thinned and blurred as their bodies did. This time, she was sure, she’d see him. Maybe he’d come walking down the stairs, the way he had before. It hadn’t worked, the giving him flowers, he hadn’t liked them or it was the wrong place. She’d chosen the wrong place, armfuls of flowers should have been scattered everywhere on the grass, on the earth, on the paths, it wasn’t like a grave. She began touching wood, the banisters, the doors, the door frames, white wood and pink wood and brown wood. Her hands were shaking and she sobbed.
The singing stopped. He called out, “Are you there?”
His voice had changed. It was lighter and quicker, not chocolate mousse any more, but it was his voice. And at last he was talking to her. While he was alive she thought she’d never want him to stop talking, she couldn’t get enough of his voice, but now she could. Not for the world, not for rest from all the other voices, could she have brought herself to answer him. How could you love someone so much and then hate him if it was the same person? She’d die if she answered him or the house would fall down or the world end. Perhaps this was the beginning of his moving back with her, speaking to her, taking shape when he chose or being a shadow on the wall when the sun shone.
She held on to brown woodwork with both hands. The flowers hadn’t worked; only one thing really worked, at least for a time. Slowly she took her hands away, they were icy cold against the bare skin of her waist. She lifted up her T-shirt, undid the waistband of her trousers, and withdrew the knife from its wrappings, holding it daggerwise. Her whole body was trembling now.
Perhaps because she hadn’t answered him, he called again. The same words: “Are you there?”
She turned round and stepped back to stand at the foot of the stairs, holding the knife behind her. This time she’d do the job properly, even if she had to do it every few months… When he appeared at the top, the shock, though she expected it, was almost too much for her. Her vision blurred and she stared upward into a dark fog through which he came walking down the stairs. And then, with a shaking hand, she stabbed haphazardly at his body, again and again, wild thrusts and glancing blows. At his first scream the doorbell rang, a long, imperious, shattering ring.
Minty dropped the knife and gave a whimpering cry. Very quickly it came to her what she’d done. The man was real. He wore jeans and a black leather jacket but he wasn’t Jock. Real blood was coming from his body, seeping bright scarlet through his blue shirt. He lay half on the floor, half on the two lowest stairs, groaning and holding with a cut hand a wound just below his waist and exposing another on his upper arm. She’d tried to kill a real man. No voice had told her to do it; she’d told herself.
The bell rang and rang, and someone was kicking at the door panels. If Minty waited a moment before opening the door it was because she couldn’t move, she couldn’t walk. But she did walk, she staggered and fell against it, she fumbled at the doorknob and at last it came open.
“What’s happening here? What’s going on?”
And then Sonovia saw the wounded man and the knife which had fallen across his thighs. She let out a series of short sharp screams, her hands up as if warding off blows. Laf came running out from next door. Minty was too afraid to think of anything but escape. Her strength came back, running through her like some fiery drink, she jumped over the little low fence between her garden and the Wilsons’ and ran down the road just as Laf turned in through her gate.