Somebody's Voice Page 10

  “You need to be clearer, my child.”

  “With his, with his—” It felt like a hurdle too high for me to clamber over, and the eventual product of my efforts was “With his man piece.”

  “That is the gravest charge you could make.” Father Brendan leaned towards the mesh, and I saw his frowning face within his silhouette. “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “He said I mustn’t. He stopped me.”

  “You understand I am bound by the seal of confession.” He translated this by adding “I can’t tell anybody anything I’m told.”

  I had an awful sense that he was as muzzled as I’d been till I overcame it – that I’d fought to speak for no purpose at all – and then I had an inspiration. “You can say to him.”

  “My child, you haven’t understood.”

  “You can talk to him about it when he comes to confession,” I said and was overtaken by another thought that needed to be spoken. “Hasn’t he been saying what he does to me?”

  “I have just told you I cannot discuss anyone’s confession.”

  “But it’s about me and I don’t mind.”

  “You’re confessing you were complicit.”

  “No,” I whispered, close to panic. “I mean you can tell me what he said about me. Hasn’t he got to confess?”

  “I have made the situation absolutely clear to you. I am not prepared to discuss it any further.”

  “You could tell him he has to.” More desperately still I said “He’s here now. He’s waiting for me.”

  I heard the door creak as Father Brendan peered out of the box. I was afraid that would alert Mr Randal, and was holding my breath by the time the priest said “I shall ask God how I must proceed. Now for your penance say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys, and I shall hear your act of contrition.”

  “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins.…” I detested Mr Randal more, and felt he ought to be bruising his knees where I was. Father Brendan absolved me, and I stumbled out of the booth. He had time to watch me trudge to Mr Randal before the next sinner went into the box. I knelt more than an arm’s length from Mr Randal, but all the way through praying I sensed his nearness like the threat of a soft hot intrusion. When I’d finished I risked asking “Are you going to confession too?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve any need just now,” he said and stood up. “Let’s get home to your mother.”

  He said nothing on the way there. His silence felt like waiting to reveal he’d overheard me in the box or to let my mother know what I’d accused him of. If he did, wouldn’t she have to intervene at last? As soon as I was home she beckoned me into the front room from her armchair. “Did you tell the priest everything you had to?”

  I couldn’t look at Mr Randal while I said “Yes.”

  “We knew she was a good girl who wouldn’t let her parents down,” Mr Randal said and looked like all the innocence he’d robbed me of.

  I could hardly keep my mind on my household tasks that day for wondering what Father Brendan might do. I could only pray he would help me somehow, and I was so intent on praying that I knocked a leg of the Scandinavian dresser with the vacuum cleaner and nearly toppled all the china plates my mother had propped up on metal stands. “Don’t smash the happy home up, child,” she cried.

  I couldn’t eat much dinner. Every time I heard a car in the road I thought it might be Father Brendan. The longer I waited for him, the more I didn’t know what I wanted him to do or what he could. He hadn’t shown up by the time I had to go to bed, and I was on my knees beseeching God to send him when the bedroom door opened. But if my prayers had brought anyone because I hadn’t kept them quiet enough, it was only Mr Randal.

  As he came into my room the doorknob chafed against the headboard of the bed. Months of him bumping against me on the bed had shifted it towards the door, and by now every time he visited me at night the headboard and the handle scraped together. I felt as if each of his visits rubbed me a little smaller, just as he was damaging the doorknob. I thought the noise might bring my mother upstairs, however painful an effort she would have to make, but it never did – she didn’t even call out to him. He waited till he thought I’d finished praying and said “Usual place, Carla,” which meant I had to lie on the bed. I prayed harder than ever while he thrust at me and wiped up, and I remember thinking in between my prayers that this was just about the only cleaning I saw him do, his token household chore. I prayed that Father Brendan might arrive and catch him in the act, but there was no sign of help, just a police siren mocking my plight. I was still praying when Mr Randal left me alone and I crawled into bed, and when at last I fell asleep.

  I wondered if the priest might come to find me at school, where Mr Randal would be out of the way, but praying all day for Father Brendan to show up didn’t bring him. When Bridie’s mother took us home he wasn’t there, and Mr Randal wasn’t. He’d rung my mother to say he was dealing with a client, apparently too prestigious to be named. His absence gave me back my appetite, but when I asked for a second helping of Irish stew my mother said “Leave it for your father, child. He’s the one who does all the hard work.” I could have argued, but I felt sinful enough without offending God that way. I’d begun to feel the priest had abandoned me because everything was my fault after all.

  He hadn’t appeared by the time my mother sent me up to bed, but at least Mr Randal hadn’t either. “You can recite your catechism,” she said, “even if your father isn’t there to help.” Instead I spent time feeling safe in the bathroom and then in my room. Once I’d prayed on my knees I crept into bed to continue praying, and I was whispering to God when I heard the front door open. It let in Mr Randal’s voice and another man’s. It was Father Brendan.

  I wriggled out of bed and tried to make no noise as I padded to the door. The carpet felt rough as concrete under my bare feet. “Father,” I heard my mother say as if she didn’t know how to sound.

  “Father Brendan came to see me at the office, Elaine. He’d like a private word with Carla.”

  I wondered if there had been any client after all. If not, Mr Randal had told her a lie. “What about, father?” she pleaded. “What’s the child done, for pity’s sake?”

  “I believe she may be spiritually troubled, Mrs Randal. Let me reassure you I can put her mind at rest and do what needs to be done.”

  I thought I was hearing two promises – to save me while managing not to upset my mother. I couldn’t have prayed for better, and I retreated into bed to pretend I hadn’t been listening. I heard measured footsteps mount the stairs, less ponderously ominous than Mr Randal’s, and then knuckles rapped on the door. “Carla, it’s Father Brendan. May I come in?”

  “Yes, father,” I said and had to raise my voice. “Yes, father.”

  I felt pleased he’d asked permission. When he eased the door open he didn’t push it far enough to nudge the bed with the doorknob. He closed it without a sound and paced over to me. He smelled of dry black cloth and a hint of the spicy aftershave he must recently have dabbed on his long smooth grey-cheeked face. “We must be very quiet now, Carla,” he murmured.

  “I will, father.” I did my best while asking “What did Mr Randal say?”

  “You know full well you must not ask me that.”

  I hadn’t realised that confessions had to be kept secret wherever they were made, unless he’d taken Mr Randal to the church for it. “I’m sorry, father.”

  “You are forgiven, my child. All is going to be well. Now let me see you.”

  I thought he could, since my head was above the bedclothes. When he beckoned them away from me with a hand, I folded them back. “Show me what he does to you,” he said.

  I assumed he needed to be sure what I’d meant in confession, and I inched my pyjama bottoms down, but only as far as my navel. “Show me properly,” the priest sa
id. “You would for the doctor, wouldn’t you? No need to be coy. Only God can see you, and He always can.”

  I told myself I mustn’t hesitate when the priest was going to protect me from Mr Randal. I heard Mr Randal talking to my mother downstairs, far enough away that he was no threat to me. I pulled my pyjamas all the way down and kicked them off. “That’s the spirit, my child,” Father Brendan said. “Now just move yourself over and keep in mind how quiet we have to be.” When I made space he lay down beside me, and I thought this might be his way of praying. Then he groped under his cassock and reached for me, and all I could do was find a prayer to hide in.

  ALEXANDER

  “You can make it, Alex,” Lee says, glancing back with a wry but sympathetic grin.

  “I’m right behind you,” Alex tells her, though he isn’t quite. He’s toiling up yet another street in Hilly Fields, the London district determined to earn the name, though most of the fields are buried under roads and houses now. Several screeching fox cubs chase one another through back gardens as if they’re searching for the vanished countryside, and a piping flock of parakeets like the vanguard of an altered landscape perch among the squat suburban chimneys and vintage television aerials. Above the park at the summit of the slopes, planes leaving Heathrow or bound for the airport over the horizon have chalked the pale blue sky with the lopsided grid of an obscure game. The scurries of a sitar and a tabla in an upstairs room urge Alex to tramp faster, fading behind him as Lee leads the way into the lofty street where his parents have their house.

  It’s one half of a linked pair, and painted brick red to set it apart from its pallid pebbledashed twin. An obese bay window bulges under a flattened version of itself. Much of the concrete that has covered the front garden is occupied by a gleaming silver Volvo estate. Potted plants like tokens of the suppressed garden are ranked on shelves within the shallow porch. A March chill penetrates his fingertip as Alex pokes the impeccably polished brass button next to the austerely panelled pine door. The bell trills not unlike a bird restricted to a solitary note, and he hears a voice. “Ring ring,” his father is pronouncing. “Ring ring.”

  Alex assumes this is a species of joke, which the petulant tone is meant to render funnier – at least, he hopes all this. A sound of footsteps falls some way short of eagerness, and then his father opens the door an inch and by stages several. “Alexander,” he calls, more an announcement than a celebration, and a frown together with a grimace appear resolved to concentrate his already compact features as he peers at Lee. “You’ve escaped me for the moment.”

  She sounds forgiving. “It’s Lee, Gordon.”

  “Ah, I knew it could be anyone.” He steps back to welcome them, unless he’s regaining his balance. “Accompanied by Lee,” he calls towards the kitchen.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Lee says.

  “Aren’t you my son’s partner in crime?”

  “If you like to put it that way.” With a laugh she plainly hopes he sought to prompt Lee says “I meant about being anyone.”

  “It could be a man’s name or a woman’s. Would that have been your aim?”

  “No, my parents gave it to me.”

  “It’s refreshing to meet someone who respects their parents.”

  Alex’s mother appears from the kitchen, which saves Alex from responding to his father. Her diminutive front is largely covered by a plastic apron printed with a stream of words out of the midst of a sentence by Joyce. It goes with the decorations in the hall, a framed terse play autographed by Beckett, a series of prints depicting writers – Austen, Forster, Woolf – asleep at their desks. Her face, which looks cramped by her small head, does its best to widen with a smile. “Alexander, Lee,” she says, and somewhat less heartily “Is everything as it should be?”

  “We’re discussing the significance of names,” Alex’s father says, “and how little they appear to mean to some.”

  Despite keeping up her smile she looks as wary as Alex has begun to feel. “Come and have a drink before dinner,” she suggests.

  “Just aid my memory. Is it wine for both?”

  “White is fine,” Lee says, and Alex feels no need except to nod.

  “Are we still allowed to say that?” his father says, which Alex wouldn’t have expected him to ask even as the joke it has to be.

  While his father fetches a bottle from the kitchen, Alex joins Lee on the podgy white leather couch, the arms of which resemble rolls of paper. On the floor between a pair of armchairs he sees a copy of When I Was Carla. The dust jacket is crumpled and torn, as if the book has been flung down if not thrown across the room. When his mother meets his eyes he says “So somebody’s reading Carla.”

  “We both have been, Alexander.”

  His father reappears so precipitately that he might be anxious to involve himself in the conversation, but devotes himself to opening a bottle of pinot gris, stuffing a wad of foil into his trousers pocket and muttering over his efforts to crank forth the cork. He hands out glasses and takes a swig from his before planting it on top of the book while he gazes at Alex. “You were never who you said you were.”

  The rebuke reaches deeper into Alex than he understands or likes. However he has disappointed his father, he can only say “I did my best.”

  “Then I should very much prefer not to see your worst, unless we already have.”

  With more politeness than Alex senses she feels, Lee says “What are you saying Alex did?”

  “I’m surprised you need to ask, since presumably you were involved.”

  “I’m with Lee,” Alex says and takes her hand, which stirs uncertainly. “We’ve no idea what you mean.”

  His father’s stare contains enough disfavour for them both. “I’m saying you were never Carla.”

  “Nobody said he was,” Lee says on the way to a laugh.

  The old man gropes for the book beside him, toppling the glass of wine. Only his wife’s swift grab saves it from spilling across the carpet, and he glowers at her. “What are you doing with my drink?”

  “You were going to upset it, Gordon.”

  “I doubt I’m quite so incompetent yet, and I’m not the author of the upset.” He wrenches the book wide at the title page. “Read that,” he says.

  “We have,” Lee reminds him.

  “More than once,” Alex adds.

  Like a tutor wearied almost beyond bearing his father says “Aloud.”

  “When I was Carla. Agreed, I never was.”

  “And the rest of it.”

  “Carl Batchelor with Alex Grand. Dad, you surely can’t think—”

  “It scarcely matters what I think. It certainly seems not to matter to you. What in the name of anything that’s holy did you have in your head?”

  “You’ve lost me again.”

  “I fear we lost you when you started putting out these books of yours, but this one is a different matter and a worse one. You’ve lent your name to all this filth that has not the slightest thing to do with you.”

  “I think it has, you know. With all of us.”

  His father’s grimace draws his lips inwards as though he has been punched in the mouth. “Precisely what do you want to be thought about me?”

  “It’s not about you, dad. How could it be? I’m saying we all need to be concerned about Carla’s kind of situation, because it still goes on.”

  “I’m not concerned with that. I’m referring to the situation you’ve brought into our home.”

  “Which is that, Gordon?” Lee says with an attempt at gentleness.

  “This house and all it represents. The life Amy and I thought we’d earned. If you don’t know what a home is, young lady, something is very amiss with your life.”

  “No,” Lee says forcefully enough to be denying a good deal. “Which situation?”

  Alex’s father slams the book shut and bra
ndishes it so furiously he looks close to hurling it at Alex. “Claiming this past for his own.”

  “You can’t seriously think he’s done that. You’ll know what a ghostwriter does.”

  “Stays a damn sight more invisible than he has, I should hope, and it isn’t a question of what I think.” He drops the book and thrusts out a hand for his glass, taking a gulp that sets off a cough. Before he has finished spluttering and waving away his wife’s attempts to help, he struggles to pronounce “How many of his readers will he have led to believe his childhood was like that?”

  “None at all, I’m sure.”

  “They’d have no reason,” Alex says.

  “Meet someone who was made to feel it was,” his father says, thumping his heart so hard his wife winces. “This deplorable appalling parent.”

  “Honestly, you shouldn’t. People can’t miss the fact that the book’s about Carl.”

  “If I did, the innocent reader assuredly could. You’ve soiled your memory and mine, and I don’t doubt your mother’s too.”

  “Mine hasn’t altered, Gordon.”

  “I’m touched there’s someone here who’s staying loyal.”

  “It was never your story,” Lee is provoked to retort, “and it needed to be told.”

  “It bears our name, which means our name is associated with that, that—” His search for a satisfactorily hostile word entails waving the wineglass over the book, spattering the cover. “That,” he says with sufficient rage to be deploring the inadequacy of the word as well.

  “Maybe you should make a statement that it isn’t about you,” Lee suggests. “You could online.”

  “I won’t be undermining my mind with any electronics, I’m afraid, and I shouldn’t have to defend our name.”

  “Perhaps Alex might put it out,” Alex’s mother says.

  “I’ve no wish to have even more attention drawn to me, thank you.”

  She turns to Lee and Alex, not quite concealing desperation. “Have the people in your book been brought to justice?”

  “Carl’s stepfather died years ago,” Alex tells her.