Somebody's Voice Read online

  “This is his house, child. He’s bought it, and we couldn’t have afforded to before.”

  I thought she was belittling my real father again. “It was ours, though.”

  “When you’re older maybe you’ll understand. It’s secure at last. Our family is. Our life.”

  This sounded like a gibe at my real father too. With a frown that made not just her forehead but her entire face look old my mother said “Now what are you trying to say about your dad?”

  I wanted to say far more than I could. “I don’t like him seeing me in the bath.”

  “What do you mean by having such ideas at your age? You shouldn’t even know about such things. He’ll just be seeing you’re clean. You should be grateful he cares.”

  I tried to edge closer to the truth. “He doesn’t just look.”

  “If he gives you a scrub I’m sure you need it. Maybe you’ll remember Mr Batchelor did.”

  Presumably the name was meant to distinguish him from Mr Randal, but it felt as if she was denying he had ever been her husband. Before I could protest she said “I’d like to know where you’re getting these ideas. Have you fallen in with someone nasty at school?”

  I yearned to tell her the ideas were Mr Randal’s doing, but all I could say was “No, mummy.”

  “Then they must be coming from yourself or else the devil. They’re called impure thoughts, and you’ll need to confess them to the priest, and then I pray you’ll never have them again.”

  She made a sign of the cross as though she was keeping it for herself, warding off my thoughts and maybe me as well. There was no use telling her that Mr Randal sometimes used the toilet while I was in the bath, another opportunity for him to produce what he liked me to hold in the bedroom. She’d left me feeling these occasions were my fault somehow, and guiltier than I could put into words. My secret was growing harder to keep, but she’d made me unable not to do so. I could only pray that Mr Randal would betray it himself.

  One night I thought my prayers had been answered. When he flushed the toilet it wakened my mother, because I heard her say downstairs “Have you been with the child since I fell asleep?”

  “How long are you thinking that is, my pet?”

  He meant to persuade her she’d made a mistake, but she said “I can see the clock, Malcolm. What took you so long?”

  I held my breath, because I thought his hesitation would at least make her suspicious, and then he said “I was instructing her.”

  “Instructing her in what?”

  “In our faith. Helping her get ready for her confirmation.”

  “I’m sorry for doubting you, Malcolm. I didn’t have my wits about me for a moment, that’s all.”

  His answer must have inspired him, because he made it into the truth. He started questioning me about the catechism in my room, loud enough to be heard downstairs. No doubt she thought I got some questions wrong and needed him to coach me, since he had some favourites he kept asking. “If you have injured your neighbour by speaking ill of him, what are you bound to do?”

  “If I’ve injured my neighbour by speaking ill of him,” I mumbled, “I’m bound to make him satisfaction by restoring his good name as far as I can.”

  The first time he put that question in my room he said “Who do you think neighbour means?”

  “Don’t know,” I said, because I could tell I wouldn’t want to.

  “It’s everyone who isn’t you, and don’t you think God means you to take the most care what you say about your own family?”

  “Spect so,” I had to mutter.

  “Then what do you think you’re doing to my name by talking about me?”

  I didn’t think I had, or I’d forgotten. “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’ve been complaining to your mother about me bathing you. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? I know everything about you, just like God.” He stared at me so hard I could imagine his watchfulness lingering even when he wasn’t there. “You upset her, so I hope you’re satisfied,” he said. “You’ve made her feel she’s not doing enough for you. Do you want her breaking her back on the stairs? She’s not supposed to be at your beck and call.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” I said and managed to suppress my tears, because I didn’t want him ever seeing them.

  “This once you’re forgiven. Just remember that commandment forbids talebearing and words that injure anybody’s character.”

  After that he frequently reminded me of the eighth commandment when he was in my room, but the catechism question he liked asking most of all was “Does Jesus Christ also command us to love one another?”

  He said it so loud he might have been preaching in the street. I imagined the Sheas and the neighbours in the other terraced house that boxed us in could hear him. Sometimes he shouted it because the way he was having me deal with his firework made him. “Jesus Christ also commands us to love one another,” I would have to respond, feeling trapped by his words. “That is, all persons without exception for his sake.”

  He would lower his voice before reminding me “Love means doing what they like. You’ll learn more of that as you get older.”

  All too soon I did. His behaviour and his comments had begun to confuse me so much that I could hardly put my feelings into words. If Jesus wanted what I had to do to Mr Randal in my bedroom, why did it need to be kept secret? I might have asked Mr Randal, except I wasn’t sure I would want to hear the answer. I came near to concluding it was one of those mysteries only grownups understood or kept to themselves as if they did – and then Mr Randal gave me another secret to hide from the world.

  I was nine, and he’d begun to watch me as if I’d turned the age he most liked. One night he took me through his choice of questions about the commandments and then gazed at me even harder. “You’re a big girl now, aren’t you?” he told me nowhere near as loud as he’d questioned me. “Just lie on your bed for me. You don’t need to do anything else.” When I made to slip between the sheets he muttered “I told you on the bed.”

  I lay on my side with some of my face in the pillow, but he eased me onto my back and reached for the waistband of my pyjamas. He pulled the bow apart as if he was opening a present – that was how his face looked – and began to pull my trousers down. I didn’t like that, but when I grabbed the waist he thrust his face at me, squeezing it smaller with a scowl. I thought that was squeezing his voice higher too, and tinier. “You were told not to do anything,” he said. “You wouldn’t stop a doctor seeing you. I’m your father and I’ve seen you in the bath.”

  He frowned at my hands till I let go, and then he hauled my pyjama bottoms down so fast that one leg caught on a toenail, which made me bite my lip. It hadn’t stopped stinging by the time he finished gazing at me from the end of the bed and let himself out of his trousers. He climbed on the bed, murmuring “No more babies” as if he meant to reassure at least one of us. I remember thinking his tip looked like an extra eye that was helping him watch me. He pushed my legs apart and planted it between them and started repeating “Love, love,” but he’d barely set about bucking up and down – I thought of a horse on the roundabout my father used to take me on, or at any rate I did my best to fill my mind with it – when he erupted more violently than my hands had ever made him. As I cried out with the shock and the cold slimy sensation, I felt as if I was imitating my mother. Mr Randal was still spouting when she called up the stairs “What’s wrong with Carla?”

  I’d never seen him caught out before. His face clenched as if he was trying to squash it too small to be seen. He twitched the last drop onto me with one hand and shoved himself off the bed. “Stay there,” he warned me and stowed himself away, zipping up his trousers while he hurried to the door. “She’s perfectly all right, Elaine,” he shouted as he opened it. “Just a nightmare she was having. No need to come up.”

  “I’m mor
e than halfway. I can tell her goodnight in bed for a change.”

  “Let me help, my pet. I can see you’re wearing yourself out,” Mr Randal said, having left me a cautionary look on his way out of my room. I heard his headlong footsteps on the stairs, and then both he and my mother cried out. They’d never done that together before, and they sounded more shocked than I had a minute ago. Then came a disorganised series of rapid clatters followed by a heavy thud. “Elaine,” Mr Randal shouted loud enough to be sharing it with an audience, and hurried downstairs, though not as fast as his voice had seemed to mean he would. My mother didn’t make a sound, and I was afraid how alone I might be. I pulled on my pyjama bottoms and ran out of the room.

  My mother lay on her back in the hall. Her face looked as if a hook had dug into one corner of her mouth, dragging it sideways. One leg was trapped beneath her, and the other was stretched out on three stairs. I was sure she couldn’t have borne that position if she’d been conscious, though she was breathing. Mr Randal had his back to her, and I thought he was showing how little he cared till I saw he was twirling the dial of the phone on the wall, not as urgently as I would have liked. “Ambulance,” he said as though he was giving an order. “My wife has had a fall. I think she may have broken her back.”

  I must have made a sound at that, because he turned to peer at me. He gave the address and hung up the phone before saying “See what you’ve done now, Carla.” He looked ready to say more, but the doorbell rang. Perhaps that took him off guard, because he opened the front door at once.

  Mrs Shea was on the doorstep. “I thought I heard—” she said and then “Oh dear Lord, what’s happened?”

  “Elaine tripped on the stairs. I’ve called emergency and they told me not to move her.”

  Mrs Shea stepped into the hall and saw me. “Oh, you poor poppet,” she said the same way she’d greeted the sight of my mother. “Did you see your mummy fall?”

  As I shook my head Mr Randal remarked “No, but I’m afraid the child has soiled herself.”

  He meant the stain on my pyjamas. “Never mind, Carla,” Mrs Shea said as if she was offering me a treat. “You go and get cleaned up and we’ll get you out of your daddy’s way. Shall I send James round to wait with you, Malcolm?”

  “No need, but thank you for the thought. I’ll be praying over her.”

  “Your daddy’s a good man and a brave one, Carla. You get ready now and we’ll give Bridie a surprise.”

  However dismayed my mother’s injury made me, I couldn’t help feeling relieved to escape from her husband. I cleaned up in the bathroom and got dressed, and went downstairs to find him and Mrs Shea saying prayers for my mother. As we left him behind Mrs Shea said “God bless you, Malcolm.”

  Mr Shea didn’t act entirely pleased to see me, but rearranged his expression and made his voice sympathetic once Mrs Shea explained why I was going to stay with them, just as the ambulance raced into our road. Bridie wasn’t too happy to be woken up, and complained that the bed wasn’t big enough for us both any more. “You make room for your guest, Bridie,” her mother said, but once we were alone Bridie used her elbows to fend me off the middle of the bed. While I was staying with the Sheas this time I felt less invited than tolerated, and sometimes hardly even that, though Bridie’s parents seemed to want to keep their feelings unadmitted. I was glad when my mother came home from hospital, even though she cried “Don’t go hugging me, child” when I ran to her. This left me feeling blamed for her condition, which had her walking with a pair of sticks. At least she was home again, but then I saw that she might never climb the stairs without help, which meant Mr Randal could strand her downstairs whenever he wanted me. “Good heavens, child, you look as if you didn’t want me home,” she said. “Just you thank Almighty God I haven’t gone for good.”

  ALEX

  “And now before we take some questions from the audience, will you read to us from your book?”

  “One day we stopped at a petrol station for Mr Randal to check the tyre pressures and fill up the tank. ‘Come and feel this, Carla,’ he said as he pumped the tyres up.…”

  Alex senses how Kirsty has relaxed beside him. Some writers read their work aloud as if they’re struggling to grasp material someone else wrote, but that isn’t happening now. The only disconcerting element is Randal’s dialogue, which comes out close to falsetto. The nervous laughter this incites dies away as Randal directs Carla to feel the hose throb. Unease spreads through the audience when Randal starts handling her, and perhaps the reaction is exacerbated by the sight of the decidedly masculine victim recounting how the man’s hands wandered under his skirt. “I wasn’t to know that the nightmare had hardly begun,” he reads and shuts the book, and Alex has the odd impression that words he wrote have been plagiarised for a performance.

  Carl’s partner on the podium in the bookshop – Amelie, a tall close-cropped blonde in denim overalls and a T-shirt of the kind all the Texts employees wear, which turns them into advertisements for the shop – sets off applause and follows it by saying “Who has a question? Yes.”

  The man she’s prompted behind Alex says “You sound like you want to go back to being a girl, Mr Batchelor.”

  “That’s not a question,” Amelie objects, but Carl sits forward to demand “How do you mean?”

  “The voice you put on when you were being your father.”

  “I said at the start he was never my father.”

  “He took the role on, though. I know what that’s like.” With equal peevishness the man says “You didn’t make your mother sound like that.”

  “I just want everyone to know all about him. He didn’t have much more of a dick than me.”

  As this revives a scattering of nervous mirth the man says “Not such a threat as you made it out to be, then.” This provokes a groan and muttered protests. “Just one man’s view,” he says. “I thought places like this stood up for freedom of speech.”

  “Like I said, there’s different kinds of dicks.”

  Several listeners reward Carl’s response with titters, but Alex wonders whether the event is escaping control. He’s about to raise a hand while he thinks how to change the subject when Amelie says “Yes, the lady there.”

  “I read some of your book, as much as I could stand. Why did you have to go into all those details to sell it?”

  “I didn’t, did I, Kirsty? I just told you a few.” To the audience Carl explains “She’s my editor.”

  “One of them,” Lee murmurs on the other side of Alex.

  Kirsty is whispering as well. “Carl’s making this his own, isn’t he? He’s a natural.”

  Once again Alex feels set aside. Though he’s only at the reading because this part of Carl’s tour is in London, he wouldn’t mind the odd acknowledgment. Meanwhile the questioner is saying “I don’t mean selling to your publisher. I’m asking you how much you put in to make people buy your book.”

  “I didn’t put anything in. I’m just telling everyone what happened to me.”

  “If I’d been abused as a child,” a man says, “I think I’d be keeping it to myself.”

  Perhaps he’s praising Carl’s willingness to expose the truth, but Carl retorts “You would if you’d done the abusing.”

  A woman joins in without indicating she wants to. “You aren’t asking us to believe none of your book was contrived.”

  This silences Carl, and Kirsty intervenes. “What are you suggesting might have been?”

  “The way it starts. You can see that’s just there to make people read on. It’s like a story, not a biography,” the woman says and reads the opening sentence. “My stepfather nearly killed my mother, and I used to wish he’d killed me.”

  Hearing his prose in yet another voice makes Alex desperate to recapture it. “Carl wanted everyone to know that from the outset,” he says. “It wasn’t a commercial ploy.”

  “Wh
at do you think you know about it?”

  “He’s Alex Grand,” Carl says. “He wrote my story down.”

  “He’s like my secretary, you mean. You dictated it to him.”

  “He’s a good deal more than that,” Lee wants it to be known.

  “He’s a ghost,” Carl says. “That’s what they call them.”

  This leaves Alex feeling less present than ever, even when the woman says “He should be up there with you, then.”

  “I’m just one of the audience,” Alex feels bound to say. “I don’t want to muscle in on your show, Carl. I shouldn’t even call it a show.”

  “Alex Grand,” a man pronounces. “Don’t you write crime fiction? That’s how that book sounds to me.”

  “As Alex says, it’s Carl’s event,” Kirsty says. “Amelie?”

  “Yes, the gentleman with your hand up at the back.”

  “How does it feel to have someone take over your life?”

  “Like he’s got inside you and you don’t matter any more,” Carl says. “Like you don’t exist any longer.”

  “You’ll be grateful to him, though.”

  Carl sends a scowl across the room. “Why am I going to be that?”

  “For your book.”

  “There wouldn’t be a book without him, is that what you’re getting at? Doesn’t mean I didn’t loathe every inch of him and wish him dead and me as well.”

  The questioner lets out a laugh almost indistinguishable from a gasp. “You’re nothing if not honest.”

  “That’s what my book’s supposed to be.”

  “Particularly when he can hear.”

  “He can’t. I got my wish. Just not soon enough.”

  “He sounded pretty much alive to me.”

  “Thanks for that,” Carl says and stares at the man who criticised the voice he gave Randal. “See, someone thought he sounded real.”

  This time the laugh from the back of the audience is ampler. “Who do you think we’re discussing?”

  “My stepfather,” Carl says and brandishes the copy of When I Was Carla. “Here’s the only way he’s going to live.”