Somebody's Voice Read online

  “Not that kind of ghost. I was asking you about Mr Grand.”

  “Don’t worry, Alex, I haven’t been wishing you dead.” With less of a grin Carl says “It did feel a bit like you got inside me, though.”

  “He gave you a voice,” says the man at the back.

  “I’ve got one of my own, maybe you noticed.”

  “More than one, but I’m saying he helped you bear witness. He let you speak.”

  “I don’t need any letting. Kirsty there can tell you I was speaking before he came into it.”

  “If the book was all yours you wouldn’t have needed him.”

  Alex feels bound to speak up. “Some of the words are mine, but not the memories.”

  “Whose idea was the business with your stepfather and the petrol pump?”

  “His.” As Alex makes to deny it Carl adds “Malcolm Randal.”

  “Only it sounded like the kind of thing a novelist might have made up.”

  “Well, it wasn’t. I remember it like it was yesterday.” Fiercely enough to be confronting disagreement Carl says “Once you’ve been through stuff like that it doesn’t go away.”

  He could almost be speaking for Alex, who feels as if he experienced the memory by shaping the prose. He’s tempted to say so, but he would be stealing it from Carl. Amelie is inviting any further questions, though she hardly waits. “Then thank you, Carl, for sharing so much with us.”

  Neither this nor the applause silences the man at the back. “Will Mr Grand be signing your book?”

  “I don’t think I should. It’s Carl’s story and I shouldn’t intrude any more.”

  “I expect Alex will be here again signing books soon,” Kirsty says.

  Surely this means she’ll consider his next novel. He and Lee take the escalator to the ground floor and are emerging into Oxford Street when his phone rings, wakening a man encased in a sleeping-bag from the neck down beneath the bookshop window. As Alex takes out the phone it says “Kirsty Palmer.”

  Is she calling to rescind her implied promise? “Kirsty,” he says without having found a tone of voice.

  “I didn’t realise Maggie Rotheram was here. She’s the presenter of Literary Natters on London Calling Radio. She wants to do a show about the book.”

  “I expect Carl will be just as natural on radio.”

  “She wants you as well. Can you make tomorrow?” Kirsty gives him the time he’ll need to be at London Calling, and as she rings off she says “We must see about getting you on television.”

  She’s talking to Carl. “Good news?” says the man in the sleeping-bag, and Alex feels prompted to drop a pound in the plastic cup beside the supine head. Surely the answer to the question will be yes, though not having been recalled to the shop to meet Maggie Rotheram leaves him feeling like an afterthought rather than a collaborator on the book. “At least I’m being trusted to do publicity again,” he says and takes Lee’s hand as they make for the Underground.

  CARLA

  My mother came upstairs at night, but only once I was in bed. She always needed help to climb the stairs. At first I offered, but she just wanted Mr Randal. “Let me alone, child,” she said. “You don’t want to make me worse.” Now I realise she didn’t think I would be capable because I was a girl, but then I thought she was blaming me for her fall. I’d already left her weak by praying for her to come home too soon after her miscarriage, and I’d been warned against making her break her back on the stairs, which I had.

  Mr Randal followed me upstairs every night and did what he did to me twice a week. It was a ritual like prayers followed by catechism – his face shrinking with a kind of secret concentration as it loomed closer while he propped himself over me, and the tip of him doggedly butting between my legs as if he was hoping this time he would find a way in, and eventually the inevitable result, after which he would wipe us both and flush the wad on his way to joining my mother. I often heard her thank him for doing so much for me, if she wasn’t asleep and taking a break from the pain I knew she was in. I felt as if she was taking how he used me for granted, even though she was unaware of it. Whenever I heard the stairs creak as he made his way up to me I had to stop myself praying they’d collapse under his weight, which always felt like a threat of breaking my back as I lay beneath him on the bed, or asking God to make him fall downstairs and be hurt worse than he’d crippled my mother. I couldn’t say such prayers, because they would be unforgivably sinful. I felt forbidden to discuss my plight with anyone, even God, and I grew desperate enough to think of telling my grandmother. I wanted to know if any of it was a sin I was bound to mention in confession.

  She might as well have been my only grandmother. My father’s parents didn’t come to see us any longer – Mr Randal hadn’t made them anything like welcome – and his parents lived hours south. I didn’t see her very often, because my mother found her visits quite a chore, especially since the old lady insisted on helping her daughter. She seemed determined to tidy items away into places my mother never kept them and couldn’t find them. “Just leave that, mother,” mine would say, but my grandmother would assure her “It’s no trouble, Elaine” or insist “You sit there and let me be some use.” My mother never managed to persuade her not to bring us dinners she’d made, stews in which she’d somehow overcooked the vegetables till they were hardly recognisable and yet left the meat tough. To make sure they hadn’t picked up any germs in transit she would microwave them so fiercely that they came out dry as well.

  Her large hands looked scrubbed raw, which I thought was why she smelled harshly of soap. I had a fancy that she’d rubbed her face thin as tissue and crumpled it too, since it was full of wrinkles so whitish I imagined soap had lodged in them. She had a look of constant disappointment, which I was afraid she thought I was, and I’d always found it hard to talk to her. “I hope you’re helping your father care for your mother,” she kept saying now that my mother was injured, and “Children are supposed to be a blessing, Elaine. You always were.”

  “She does her best, mother.”

  “Well,” my grandmother said and turned her dissatisfied look on me, “I hope that’s better than I’ve been seeing.”

  I was scared that nothing I could say to her would find favour, and that included talking about Mr Randal. I tried more than once, but my tongue wouldn’t work – it felt as if he’d got into my mouth and cut the connection to my brain. I started hoping he would use me in my room while she was at the house, so that she could catch him at it, though I didn’t dare to foresee what would happen then. He never did, and it took me a while to see he was taking care not to be found out, he’d gained so much control over how I thought about him.

  One night he gave me a different kind of chance. He had to drive some businessmen to a dinner at the town hall, which meant my grandmother saw me to bed. She watched me wash my face and brush my teeth, and then she waited outside the bathroom while I used the toilet. She crossed herself and shut her eyes when I knelt at the end of my bed. Once I’d finished praying she tucked the sheets in so hard I felt pinned to the mattress. She planted a kiss that felt as light and dry as a communion wafer on my forehead and stood up at once, and I still hadn’t managed to speak to her. To keep her there I said the first thing that came into my mind. “I’m glad you’re putting me to bed, grandma.”

  I hoped this might win her over, but her face didn’t change. “Why wouldn’t you want your mother?”

  “I would. I wish she did.”

  “Then stop wishing and try praying.”

  This struck me as worse than unfair. “I do. You heard me asking God to make her better.”

  “So long as you’re asking for her and not for yourself.” As I wondered if this was just a rebuke, not a warning that prayers didn’t work if they were selfish, she said “Pray harder.”

  My most heartfelt prayers were the ones I did my best to hide from Mr Randa
l in. As if my thought of him had prompted her, my grandmother said “I should have done what your father does.”

  At first this left me too dismayed to speak. “What?” I pleaded.

  “Your mother says he helps you pray.”

  He did, but not in a sense anyone but me could know. Some of my feelings must have shown, because my grandmother demanded “And what could be wrong with that?”

  “I don’t like him being in my room.”

  “I’m sure I can’t imagine why.” Before I could let this prompt me to speak she said “For a start he’s saving your poor mother the trouble.”

  As I tried to think she was saying the stairs were the trouble, not me, she said “You should be just as grateful to him.”

  “What for? He’s not my dad.”

  “He’s more. Your birth father didn’t choose you, but he did. He’s made you his.” While I struggled not to think she meant my father hadn’t really wanted me, my grandmother said “Just you remember he had no children of his own. Don’t make it any harder for him.”

  “I don’t do anything.”

  “Then it’s about time you did, a big girl like you.”

  I felt more accused than I could define, and my tongue was starting to censor my speech. “He does,” I barely managed to pronounce.

  “What are you trying to say, child? No use mumbling like that if you want anyone to know what you’re talking about.”

  My tongue obstructed telling her the secret he’d made me feel I had to keep, but I was able to blurt “He comes into the bathroom.”

  “Nothing wrong with that at your age, and you’ve no business thinking there is.”

  “He doesn’t just come in, he baths me.”

  “So your mother doesn’t have to.” This provoked her to declare “You should be doing it yourself at your age. You don’t want your poor mother thinking you can’t look after yourself.”

  My grandmother had left me more confused than ever, not least about the meaning of my own age. In a desperate bid to put across some of the truth I said “He doesn’t go out when you do, gran.”

  “I’ve not the slightest idea what that’s supposed to mean.”

  “You went out before.” In the hope that using words I’d never spoken to her would make her see the help I needed, I said “When I was having a wee.”

  “If your father thinks there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m sure there can’t be.” In the tone of someone talking to a toddler she said “Don’t tell me a big girl like you needs helping with the toilet.”

  “Never said I did.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Carla, and I’ve not the least idea what you have to complain about. Try feeling thankful instead for everything you’ve got, and that includes your mother and your father.”

  All that I was frantic to tell someone seemed to be receding deep into my brain, out of reach of being spoken. “Won’t I have to tell the priest?” I pleaded.

  “Tell him what, child?”

  “What I said.”

  “You certainly should if you’re having grubby thoughts about it, and I’m afraid I see you are. Just don’t tell any of your friends or they’ll think you’re a nasty little girl nobody wants to play with, and their parents won’t want them being friends with you.” She turned as she took hold of the doorknob. “And don’t you dare tell your mother,” she said, “or your father either.”

  I felt she’d left me nobody to tell. I thought of the teachers at school, but wouldn’t anything I said about my home life be bound to get back to my mother or Mr Randal? There was Bridie, but I was afraid she would stop being my friend, and in any case what could she do when she was only my age? I was feeling as though lockjaw had trapped the secret in my head when the police came to our school.

  The policeman who talked to our class was about as old as Mr Randal. He reminded me of an uncle at a children’s party, where he wasn’t quite at ease. When he warned us to remember that parts of our bodies were private I thought he was talking to me and about me, and watching my reaction. I pressed my legs together so hard my thighs grew sore, and stared at the blackboard behind him and the teacher, as if not meeting anybody’s eyes would let me hide. The letters that hadn’t quite been rubbed out on the board looked like a message I needed to read. The policeman explained that a man had been showing his private parts to children in school playgrounds, and I thought he could be Mr Randal – in fact, I prayed he was so that he would be caught without involving me. But the man the policeman described was too tall, and Mr Randal would never wear an anorak. “If you see anyone doing anything like that,” the policeman said, “tell a grownup as soon as you can.”

  The soonest was that moment, and before I knew it I’d put up my hand. “Yes, Carla,” the teacher said.

  Not just Mr Randal’s warnings but my grandmother’s clamped my mouth shut, and then I had a different but equally urgent reason to speak. “Please may I go to the toilet?”

  “You should have gone before we came in,” the teacher said as she always did to anyone who asked. “Go on if the gentleman’s talk has upset you, but remember what he said you have to do.”

  Being urged to tell didn’t help. It simply made my mouth feel more unworkable. For the rest of the school day I kept putting up my hand so that I’d be made to answer questions, in the hope this would dislodge the things I had to say. Did I honestly believe I could have done that while the entire class would have heard? I hadn’t by the time the final bell rang, but I might have lingered in case I could speak to the teacher alone if Bridie hadn’t told me to hurry up, because her mother needed to go out once we were home. As we walked three abreast along the road, her mother asked how the day had been. “A policeman came to talk to us,” Bridie said.

  Her mother made it sound as if every child was suspect. “What’s somebody done now?”

  “A man’s been showing kids what he shouldn’t show them, and the policeman says we have to tell if we see him.”

  “Just make sure you do, then.”

  Before my mouth could stop me I blurted “I think I know someone like the man.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  This sounded even more accusing than her previous question had. “I couldn’t,” I confessed.

  “Then don’t go trying to tell me, or Bridie either.”

  I felt as if she was reinforcing Mr Randal’s prohibitions and my grandmother’s. “Why not?” I pleaded.

  “If you can’t say it to the police there must be something wrong with it, and I don’t mean wrong the way you mean. It wouldn’t be the first time you nearly damaged someone’s reputation.”

  “Whose, mummy?” Bridie said.

  “Your father’s, if you must know. Your friend’s a bit too ready to start rumours and not care about the consequences.”

  “I never,” I protested, but the accusation wouldn’t go away. “When?”

  “The very first day you were at school. When Bridie’s father picked you both up and you had people thinking he was up to no good.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was little then.”

  “I know it was the day your father died. We’ll say no more about it.” I thought she’d given way till she said “And don’t you about anyone.”

  “If you’re going to say mean things about my dad,” Bridie said, “I won’t play with you any more.”

  “There you are, Carla. That’s what will happen if you keep on spreading rumours.”

  Nobody said anything more as we tramped rapidly home. I ran into my house and would have taken refuge in my room while Mr Randal was at work if my mother hadn’t said “There you are at last, Carla” as if I was hours late. “Put the oven on so your father’s dinner’s ready and just run the hoover for me,” she went on, and I felt as though my only hiding place was in my head, where there was nothing except emptiness. If onl
y I could think how to do what the policeman said we should – and then I wondered if he’d told me after all. If we let anybody see the parts of us they shouldn’t, wasn’t that a sin we were bound to tell the priest? I’d given in to letting Mr Randal see, and it was past time I confessed. While I was doing that, surely God would help me tell Father Brendan the rest too.

  ALEX

  London Calling is an elongated single-storey concrete block on Bethnal Green Road. Above a pair of glass doors a metal statue of a woman as grey as indecision cups a hand beside her mouth and extends the other, upturned. A young black woman sits in a wheelchair behind the whitish horseshoe of the reception desk, and raises a face like the rest of the question her eyebrows are posing. “Alex Grand,” she says.

  “Are you here for someone?”

  “Maggie Rotheram.”

  “She’s with some people just now.”

  “I’m meant to be one of them.”

  Without relinquishing her expression, the receptionist depresses a key and speaks to a microphone like an undernourished snake. “I’ve got a Mr Grand for Maggie,” she says as though it’s rather less than a statement of belief.

  Alex hears no response by the time she releases the key and lifts her face, though not her eyes, towards him. “There’ll be somebody out in a minute.”

  A speaker lodged in one corner of the ceiling brings Alex the present transmission, a review of a production of The Magic Flute that deals with the Queen of the Night’s problems as a single mother. A table on stumpy legs in front of a drooping white plastic couch is scattered with brochures about the radio station. As Alex sees its slogan is INSPIRED BY INCLUSIVENESS, a tall woman with metallically grey eyes and a shock of red hair inches high appears from behind the scenes. Her skin is as pale as her ankle-length kaftan is black, and the defiant lump of an Adam’s apple betrays her original gender. “Alex Grand,” she says as if he needs to be informed, and thrusts out a large hand. “Maggie Rotheram.”