The Changeover Page 3

  Laura was glad to be out of the little shop, but wished she had escaped because of some splendid act of her own.

  "Take it off!" Jacko was saying, wiping at his hand. "Take it off! This hand doesn't like it."

  Standing in the centre of the Gardendale Shopping Complex Laura frisked her own pockets and the sleeves of her cardigan for concealed handkerchiefs. Standing in the everyday streets of Gardendale she began to scrub at the back of Jacko's hand. There, clearly outlined, even shaded in, was the very face of Carmody Braque himself, smiling back at her from Jacko's hand. The long teeth and the round eyes, the rubbery, stretched lips, were plainly seen. Not only that, the stamp showed no signs of coming off. It seemed to be under his skin, not on top of it, smiling, smiling, knowing it could not be touched by a mere handkerchief and the application of human spit. Laura had never seen such a detailed stamp before. It was almost like a real face in three dimensions, peering out through a window of human skin.

  "I don't like it, Lolly," Jacko said, sniffing and leaning against her.

  "He can damn well rub it off himself," Laura declared, swearing slightly because she was suddenly really frightened, but when she looked back at the door of the tiny shop it was closed. Mr Carmody Braque had sneaked out while they were not looking and had hung a notice from the door handle, 'Back in ten minutes'.

  "What a weirdo!" Laura said. "It needs soap, Jacko - soap and hot water," and Jacko cheered up, though he was less than his smiling self as they went along the footpath and down the arcaded Mall. Laura herself was silent, for deep in her heart she feared it would take more than soap and hot water to remove the smile of Carmody Braque from under the skin of her little brother's hand.

  3 A Guest for Supper

  After Laura's father had left them Kate had taken a job as assistant in a bookshop and when the new Garden- dale branch opened she had been promoted to shop manager, though she was not paid any extra for the privilege of being called by a grander title.

  "We'll just give it a whirl, dear, and see how you go," her boss, Mr Bradley, had said, and they were still whirling and seeing how it went a year later.

  "Not to worry," Kate declared. "Wait until I've passed my bookseller's course. He'll have to give me a rise in pay then or I'll speak out in no uncertain terms!"

  Kate did her course on one side of the table at home while Laura frowned over her homework on the other. Kate had a calculator to work out mysterious discounts and Laura was sometimes allowed to borrow it, although she was good at maths and could make figures behave themselves and give up their hidden secrets. It was cheerful to have someone to work with, and to have time alone with Kate when Jacko was washed and read to and tucked up in bed. Sometimes, late at night, Kate looked tired and rather old. But she was still pretty in her own special way, her fair hair shining and her long lips curved in a smile so that Laura found it hard to believe her father could have wanted to live with someone else — a younger woman, quite nice, but not nearly as nice as Kate.

  "You're too kind to me," Kate said when Laura mentioned this. "It's best the way it is. We liked too many different things and I thought I'd change him to my way of thinking and he thought he'd change me to his. Well, we worked on one another for years and years and we both stuck half way. I miss him, but a lot of the time when we were together I just wished he'd go away." These were true things, Laura knew, but they were only part of the truth which was something less orderly than Kate made it sound. Some parts of the full, disorderly truth were lodged in Kate and Laura like splinters of corroding steel. Their feelings had grown around the sharp, wounding edges which didn't hurt any more but were still there, fossils of pain laid down in the mixed-up strata of memory.

  "He was a better housekeeper than I was," Kate once recalled, smiling across the table at Laura. "That was mean of him. He used to polish your shoes each night— you always had polished shoes in those days— and he'd help with cleaning without being asked, but then he had a miserable, long-suffering way of pushing the vacuum cleaner around our sitting room that really got to me after a while. It's funny to think that fifteen years of marriage— for that's what it was, you know— could come to grief because your father vacuumed the carpet as if he were St Peter being crucified upside down. Not just that, of course, but things like that. However, I must say he always loved you, Lolly. Write him a letter, or go and stay with him in the school holidays. I'd miss you, but I wouldn't mind."

  "You sound all reasonable, like a children's book on divorce," Laura complained. She had been given such books to read and despised them, because they tried to be kind and sensible and Laura thought it was like being kind and sensible to a sacrificed Aztec whose living heart was being held up for all to see.

  In the bookshop, wearing her round glasses (her intellectual glasses, as she called them) Kate managed to look quite dashing, even though her clothes were not very new. She took people by surprise because a lot of them did not expect her to be a keen and clever reader, as if reading were only something people went in for when they were particularly plain. Kate enjoyed talking about books to anyone who asked and spent quite a lot of time listening to other people describing books that they had enjoyed. Every evening Laura would ask about the day's takings, and they were compared with the same day last week or last month. Increased sales were always celebrated, but if they had fallen off in any way Kate would worry and start wondering if she shouldn't change the display, or run a little advertisement in the local paper.

  The shop was between a window full of handbags and suitcases for people who wanted to travel elegantly and a shop full of dresses 'for the fuller figure' which showed large, tactful dresses all in wine-red and grey this week. Laura and Jacko ignored them and burst into the bookshop, Jacko already holding his hand out and shouting anxiously to Kate. There was only one customer, a tall man who made up for being a little bald in front by wearing his hair rather long at the back. He was reading a book, but gloomily, and not at all as if he intended to buy it.

  "Look, Mum!" Laura cried imperiously, holding Jacko's hand out to her mother as if it were a vital clue in a mystery. "The little shop next to the Video Parlour has opened for business again. There's a really horrible man in it and he frightened Jacko." As she spoke she knew her words were reducing the experience to a childish complaint, not revealing its true quality.

  "This hand wants to be washed," Jacko begged. "It doesn't like it." Jacko and Laura talked together, their words winding in and out of each other in a ragged part-song of explanation and complaint.

  "Dear me!" said Kate in a nervous, but fairly motherly, voice. "That is clever, isn't it? What will they come up with next? However, I can see why it scares you, Jacko. Sweetie, I can't do anything about it now, but I'll get on to it with the scrubbing brush a little bit later— or rather Lolly will— and we'll soon have you pink and plain again."

  At work Kate was always nervous about being motherly, as if it had suddenly become a little illegal to be openly fond of her children. Even now, when there was only one customer, probably not wanting to buy, Kate knew she belonged to the shop until 8.30 pm and was not free to wash evil stamps off Jacko's hand.

  "Have you got bus money?" she asked.

  "Could we have just one game of Space Invaders?" Laura asked back, answering Kate's question by rattling the bus money in her pocket. She had once got into trouble for spending the bus money on Space Invaders and then walking home. "It might cheer Jacko up."

  "You know I don't like you going in there," Kate said, "and certainly not with Jacko. For one thing it always looks foggy with cigarette smoke, probably worse. No — you go home, and I'll follow as soon as I can. How was Mrs Fangboner tonight?"

  "Fanging around!" Laura said. "Nice to Jacko and threatening me with spots from fish and chips."

  "She's good-hearted really," Kate said, looking around in case some friend of Mrs Fangboner had come into the shop.

  "Why doesn't she show it more, then?" Laura asked. "It's nothing to be asham
ed of. Doesn't she realize that? She should embroider 'Be good-hearted!' on her tea towels, and then take the advanced course in it, and like me, too."

  "Don't let's push our luck!" Kate said, grinning, and Laura grinned back, comforted by seeing that Kate was really there, even if she was being more of a bookshop manager than a mother at that moment.

  "All right! We're off and away!" she said. "Don't forget the fish and chips."

  "When have I ever forgotten the fish and chips?" Kate replied. "It's worth a few spots not to have any dishes to wash."

  The fish and chips were always bought at Soper's fish shop, and sometimes they were lovely and sometimes disappointing, but the uncertainty of which it was going to be was almost adventurous, and the possible loveliness something to be looked forward to. As they waited for the bus Laura could smell the fish and chips cooking and patted Jacko, who was leaning against her leg like a tired dog. Laura was glad it was summer and that they would be getting out of the bus in broad daylight, for though the bus stopped almost exactly behind the telephone box that stood outside their gate, the few moments that separated them from their door often felt dangerous, and tonight such danger might also be depressing.

  "I couldn't do anything about it," she said to Jacko, who was peering at the stamp on his hand again, rubbing it anxiously. She wanted people to think she was talking to him, but actually it was with herself that she was holding a discussion.

  "I did have the warning," she admitted aloud, "but it did me no good. I just stood there and let it happen. I knew it was set down to happen as soon as I went in at the school gate this morning."

  Laura usually enjoyed the bus ride up Kingsford Drive. It was slower and easier than the anxious morning rush. Often she felt a little of herself running out into houses and telegraph poles along the way, as if she were a blob of bright paint put down on wet paper, spreading out and dyeing the world with faint traces of her own colour, even as she took colour back from the world. This is what it feels like to be this shape, this size! Greenness feels like this! Every telegraph pole stood centred on a single leg gathering wires up, looping them over little stunted arms, and Laura felt her way into being a telegraph pole, or a roof rising to a ridge and butting against itself. The Baptist church squared its concrete shoulders, its doorway touching its own toes, carrying a great weight of square, white blocks on its bent back.

  "Don't rub it! You'll make it sore," she said to Jacko. "Soap and water will get it off," but he went on pushing at the back of his hand as if he would like to rub the very flesh from the bones. "Pretend it's a mosquito bite and leave it alone."

  The dreadful stamp seemed deeper than ever as if it were slowly sinking down into him, visible, but subsiding beyond recall — like a coin dropped into deep water, reflecting light while vanishing for ever. Jacko sighed deeply and rolled his head against Laura's shoulder, and she felt a restless heat creep through her, almost like a little blush of horror, for she thought she detected the faintest touch of stale peppermint, as if Carmody Braque's breath was somehow coming out through Jacko.

  "There's Brown," she said with relief, pointing as much to distract herself as Jacko. Brown was a thoughtful dog, a familiar, rust-coloured acquaintance, wandering along, frowning and disappointed by the contents of the summer gutter — icecream wrappers and soft-drink cans. Jacko looked at Brown for a moment and then he turned his head away.

  "He wasn't nice," he said. "That man wasn't nice, was he, Lolly?"

  "Don't think about him!" Laura said, though she herself could not stop thinking about Carmody Braque.

  They arrived home reasonably cheerful. Laura scrambled an egg for Jacko and went to extra trouble, dividing his orange into segments for him and cutting his sandwich into four little triangles like those sold in the teashop three places away from Kate's work.

  After the scrambled egg and sandwich Jacko went willingly to bed — quite to Laura's surprise for it was often difficult to persuade him to go. Usually he wanted to stay awake until Kate came home and played a lot of energetic games, running and hiding under the bed and having to be pulled out by one leg, his pajamas wrinkling and going grey with the sort of dust that likes a good bed to hide under. Space under beds was always dusty, filling itself greedily with coffee mugs, plates, and books. But tonight Jacko went quietly to bed and listened to his tiger book and a story read from one of the new library books, watching Laura trustfully, his stamped hand hidden under the pillow. Laura had, of course, tried to wash it clean again but the stamp was part of him now, more than a tattoo— a sort of parasite picture tunnelling its way deeper and deeper, feeding itself as it went.

  "Ugh! What a thought!" Laura said. "Grow up! Be mature!"

  At half-past eight she heard footsteps on the path.

  That was quick, she thought with relief and surprise, for Kate never closed the shop five minutes early even when the Mall was quite empty in case Mr Bradley should call in and find her gone. But it was not Kate. It was Sally, rather impatient at having to leave her television program, with a message from Kate for Laura saying that Kate would be home a little late. Once the message was delivered, Sally added an invitation to Laura to come and watch television, pointing out that if Jacko woke up and cried they would probably hear him from next door, but Laura was not even tempted by this, for she was worried, and also rather hurt by Kate's delay. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the car, she thought.

  Kate was about three-quarters of an hour late that night and when she did come home she did not come alone. The long-haired man, the single customer who had been in the shop — reading and not buying— was with her.

  "We've got a guest," Kate said unnecessarily. Laura stared at her for she looked mischievous and much more lively and lighthearted than she usually was after a Thursday night. She didn't kick off her shoes and collapse into a chair, resting her elbows on the table while she ate her fish and chips. She unfolded them from their shawls of newspaper with the flourish of a waiter uncovering the specialty of the house.

  "Isn't that classy!" she cried. "Laura, I think it's going to be delicious tonight."

  The man's name was Chris Holly.

  "Short for Christmas?" Laura asked, but apparently his full name was Christopher. He had an American accent which sounded strange in their New Zealand living room.

  "This is just fine," he said. "It shows you can't afford to take any day for granted. I was feeling very remote, far away from almost everything, and then I heard that name. I could scarcely believe it."

  "What name?" Laura asked Kate.

  "Fangboner!" Kate said. "Chris asked me if he had overheard correctly and I had to admit that we did have a baby-sitter called Mrs Fangboner."

  "She just has to be Dracula's aunt," Chris said, "or even his sister."

  "I think Dracula was an only child," Laura said. "He doesn't sound to me like a man who had brothers and sisters. I think he drank blood because he thought

  everything in the world was his to begin with."

  "How could you leave your baby with a baby-sitter called 'Fangboner'?" Chris asked.

  "Desperation at the time," Kate replied, "but actually she's very kind."

  "She tortures her garden," said Laura in a sinister voice. "That uses all her energy. And somewhere there's a husband Fangboner who's had the name even longer. We never ever see him though. She might have his skeleton hanging up with one of those plastic covers that keeps the dust off velvet coats."

  "The mystery of Mr Fangboner!" Chris said. "Anyway, Laura, we got talking about books, and on the strength of all that I took your mother out to have a drink with me and since I couldn't talk her into having dinner with me, I cunningly talked myself into having dinner with her. I professed an abiding love for fish and chips and I have to admit these are very good fish and chips."

  "It's not always as good as this, though," Kate said. "It's a lucky night."

  "Lucky for me, anyway," Chris Holly said. "I hope you don't mind a dinner guest, Laura?"


  "No!" said Laura, but she minded dreadfully. Just after her father had left them Kate had gone out with several men, but part of the happiness of the last year was that she had stopped doing this and had seemed content to spend her time with Laura and Jacko.

  The thought that a fish and chips night (a night of successful fish and chips into the bargain) had to be shared with a stranger who was trying— Laura recognized the signs — to be particularly nice to her, not because he was interested in her, but because he was interested in Kate, filled her with anxious discontent. Chris's was an understandable niceness, but was still something she was compelled to suspect.

  "How's Jacko?" Kate asked suddenly. "I knew there was something I had forgotten to ask."

  "He's asleep," Laura said. "Mum, there's something wrong with him. I don't think he's well."

  "We don't get sick," Kate said firmly. "None of us can afford to be anything but healthy. Jacko's tough."

  She gave Laura a glance that was faintly defiant but which seemed at the same time to be asking a favour, although quite what the favour might be Laura had no idea. She sat listening to her mother and Chris play the book-lover's game of finding which books of all the books in the world they had both read and enjoyed. They agreed about many of them — an ominous sign, and when they did not agree they argued like old friends, criticizing one another's taste with complete ease and confidence. Laura thought Mrs Fangboner had a lot to answer for. After a while she got up and tucked her own library book under her arm and said she was going to bed.