Read by Cliff Chapman
“Jan. I just killed a man.”
Harry presses the phone hard to his ear. Jan’s voice is just audible over the noise of his own terror as it shouts inside him and the sounds of traffic outside the shop.
“What? What do you mean, you killed a man?” Jan is saying. “Love, what do you mean?”
She doesn’t sound scared or angry or confused. This makes him even more grateful for her, for their twenty years. That she can hear those words and know that it’s nothing to be scared or angry or confused about. She will trust whatever he says.
“You didn’t kill him. His heart killed him and nothing would have changed that. Not five minutes, not five hours.”
He is glad she says this although he doesn’t believe her. But he just wants to feel better that he didn’t pick up the phone earlier, much earlier, and dial 999, even though the man told him not to; the man told him he was all right, until he decided after all that he wasn’t.
*
“I hate this bit,” says Ben. “They always give it to me, if I’m on. Apparently I have a kind face. But this has got to be the worst bit.”
Kate looks at him. “Worse than being jumped on? Worse than getting glassed? Worse than the time that boy was set alight and you were the first of us to see him?” she asks, clutching at his arm as her feet take a slide on the ice. He steadies her, stops for a moment, steadies himself. He is thinking.
“Yeah, yeah, I think it is worse than that. Worse.”
He says nothing more, but Kate knows he is thinking it. He is thinking about having to knock on a door, a door that looks the same as every other door on this estate, on a house that looks the same as every other house. He doesn’t know who will open the door, but he does know that when the door opens he will have to speak, say some words that will change the lives of the people who live there forever. With the burns boy, well, that was bad, telling his parents, going with them to the hospital, but at least the boy was alive, and he stayed alive, for what his life was now worth. But this, this is the end of the story for this man they don’t even know; this will be Ben saying: your husband’s not coming home, your daddy’s not coming home; going to the hospital again, this time to see this man lying still and growing colder. He won’t ever be warm again. Ben will. Later he will be indoors by the electric bar fire and he will be warm again.
*
After Harry puts the phone down on his conversation with Jan he sits for a moment on the chair behind the counter, with the Daily Mirror folded on his lap. He thinks if he reads the cartoon strips, Andy Capp or one of the others, it will make him better, make him able to stand up, lock up the shop, find his way home. He looks around. The place needs painting, a good going over, he thinks. He’ll do that. Get onto it, next week. The phone rings and he knows before picking it up that it’s Jan.
“You still there, love? Why don’t you come back?”
He considers this. “Yeah, yeah, ok. I’ll take a slow walk I think.”
“You do that, love. But be careful on that ice. Watch how you walk.”
It’s the freezing cold air that did it, he thinks. Did it for that man he doesn’t even know. Squeezed his heart like an icy concertina.
Maybe on Sunday. Maybe he’ll start painting things over then.
*
There’s a knocker and a doorbell at number 39. Ben thinks the knocker is less intrusive. Kate thinks it’s more foreboding except she doesn’t use that word. She says ‘ominous’, only she pronounces it ‘onimous’ and Ben can’t help but correct her.
“We’re just about to break some bad news, Ben,” she says. “Not the time.” She smiles as she says this because she knows he’s scared. “Want me to tell them?” she asks.
“No, it’s ok, I’ll do it. Ok, I’m going to knock.”
He does so, as softly as he can whilst still being heard, twice so they don’t think it’s only the wind. But he knows that someone inside will have been waiting for it. Through the glass, he and Kate see a shadow race towards the door. Ben knows this move. It’s the speed of someone who’s been waiting for someone else, expecting them. He doesn’t need to rearrange his features; they already speak of solemnity. He glances at Kate. She has her sympathetic face on; he’s seen it before. But he knows his is kinder.
The door is opened by a girl, about ten years old. She has long dark hair, is wearing a skirt and jumper, and has on those woolly tights that kids wear in the winter. She doesn’t have slippers on, so Ben can see that the bits where her toes go are a little worn.
She doesn’t seem surprised to see them; maybe it’s usual on this estate. Ben smiles. “Is your mum in?” he asks. The girl steps back, shouting to let her mother know. Her tone of voice suggests that she has no idea why they are there. As Ben and Kate edge their way into the mud-coloured hallway with its blue and green swirly carpet, they are both aware of one thing: the mother will know. They always do.
*
Harry locks up, and pulls on his gloves against the still-freezing temperatures of this January evening. As he passes the other shops on the parade – the chippy, the newsagent, the off-licence – his right hand springs up to his chest. In sympathy he wonders, for the man he doesn’t know, but to whom he will always now be linked. It’s less icy in the town square but as he edges past the shops onto the side path, he slips a bit, on this ice that’s untouched by salt. He takes it slowly, breathing in and then catching his breath as his chest tightens against the cold air. This is how he must have felt, he thinks, the man he doesn’t even know. But worse, much worse.
He passes the church hall. There’s something going on, because there’s a line of people, each of them holding a chair, and it looks strange to him, like something from a film. Then he sees the vicar, beaming, oblivious, ushering them in, and the line of chairs starts to sway.
*
The girl has stayed out of the kitchen where her mother leans against a chair, crying. For once Ben doesn’t know what to say, he just wonders why there is one chair – a solitary chair – in the kitchen. Kate touches the mother’s arm. “Can I call someone for you?” she asks. Before anyone can speak, the little girl is there, facing her mum’s tears.
“It’s daddy,” the mother says. “They think they’ve found him dead. In the snow.”
Kate thinks, that isn’t how it happened and it’s not what we said but…. The mother reaches into the back of the cutlery drawer and when she pulls out her hand there’s a packet of cigarettes in it.
“Mum! Don’t!” the girl says, through her tears. A teenage boy has appeared behind them.
“Leave her,” he says. “Let her smoke.”
The little girl doesn’t know what everyone else in the kitchen knows: that her mum is really going to need those cigarettes.
*
His street is not well-lit, and Harry has to concentrate, especially as he passes the house of his neighbour from two doors along, because he knows what she’s like: she thinks you can melt the snow with boiling water – doesn’t think about it freezing up, its own little ice rink. He doesn’t want a broken leg. A broken anything. As he walks up the path to his own home he sees Jan at the door, waiting. She smiles and holds out her arms.
*
Ben opens the door to a bony woman, the next-door-neighbour apparently, who isn’t wearing a coat and whose red nose suggests she has been crying.
“She’s through there,” he says, indicating the dining room where the girl has gone. He follows the woman into the room where the girl is sitting on a chair, knees up against her chin, a still life. The woman takes a chair opposite and tries to make conversation, about the school day, about an upcoming birthday party for her own daughter. The girl amazes Ben by responding politely, in the way she has been brought up to do, although there is a distracted distance between her thoughts and the words that come out of her mouth. In the seconds it has taken her to walk from the kitchen, where she heard the news, to the dining room, where she will wait while her mum and brother are driven to the hospital to confirm what they all already know, she has grown up. Grown up and grown old.
Ben hangs in the doorway, at a loss while Kate gets the mum ready. He looks at the girl; she returns his gaze. Hers is a look that says, “I know this is hard for you. But you get to go home tonight, where everything will be normal. Things will never be normal for me again now you’ve stepped into my house with this news.” At least that’s what he imagines she is saying, this daughter of the man he doesn’t even know. But he has ‘A’ Levels/a degree and an overactive imagination, and both of these things have given him a tendency towards introspection, which he quite likes about himself, and hopes the job doesn’t bleed out of him.
*
While Harry is sitting in a warm kitchen with Jan, silent except for his breath blowing on a cup of tea, Ben and Kate are guiding the smoking mother and her teenage son to where their patrol car is parked at the edge of the estate. The boy is silent, his eyes shocked open. The mother speaks.
“I don’t think it’s him,” she says. “You said he was in his 40s. He’s not. He’s nearly 60. I don’t think it’s him.”
As he helps her into the car, Ben knows he has to say something that will prepare her.
“He had ID on him, love, with his name, you know, William…” he says softly, stopping short of the full name. “I’m sorry.”
She wants to wonder out loud if his wallet had been stolen, found on someone else, but closes her mouth as soon as she opens it. She knows it isn’t worth the words.
“Oh, yes. Of course. Of course he did. That sounds just like him.”
*
It’s late now. Harry is in bed; he’s found sleep. Jan is beside him, breathing softly, awake on his behalf.
Kate has another gulp of vodka, neat, because she doesn’t have any mixers in the house. She thought that this would stop her drinking but it just means everything is undiluted.
Ben sits on one of the hard-backed chairs at the dining table, his arms rigidly by his sides, shoulder blades pressed together, causing a pain in his back that he doesn’t want to alleviate. He’s got darts with the boys tomorrow, and now he thinks his arm will play him up. He’ll lose; and the boys will laugh and cheer, because Ben usually wins.
(c) Jacqueline Downs, 2016
Jacqueline Downs’ work has appeared in several anthologies, most recently Canongate's My Old Man: Tales of Our Fathers, where she is sandwiched between Shaun Ryder and Roger McGough's son. Her first screenplay is currently in the hands of two directors while the producer nags them to read it.
Cliff Chapman is an actor, writer, director and voiceover artist, and also teaches archery and interactive history workshops. He appears in audio dramas, Robin Hood: Knights of the Apocalypse and The Horus Heresy: The Heart of the Pharos. Engage him in political or geeky invective on Twitter: @cliffchapman or by all means offer him audio or screen work via his website, www.cliff-chapman.com.
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