Risk Street6

Helen Forsyth and Angela Tilby stood as if they were at their school dance wearing the same wrong coloured clothes, not looking at each other and shuffling their feet from side to side as if their shoes were too tight. Both sets of parents acted as chaperones. The adults smoked on the corner of Burns Street and Dumbarton Road and waited, ready to hide their fags behind their besuited backs and nip them out, when the hearse carrying John Summerville’s body passed, as a sign of respect. They exchanged pleasantries about the weather; how cold and wet and how it was such a tragedy: not just for John Summerville, but the boy’s mum and dad. They whispered, with their hands covering their mouths, underneath the fog of fag smoke, how it was also a shame about that other boy’s mum and dad. They didn’t name him, looked away from each other, towards their own daughters, as if that made it better.

The whole of the girl’s school seemed to be buzzing outside the dun coloured wrought iron gates of St Andrew’s. Teachers and pupils were mixed, one among the other, a hive of black clothing around the entrance to the church. Nobody took charge so that everybody tried to squeeze into the back pews, as far away from the casket as possible, as if the smell of death was contagious.

Angela filtered in behind Helen, her eyes still red-rimmed from crying and trying not to remember her dreams, in which everything was shuffled. Her eyes were black holes that spoke in a language she couldn’t understand, and her purple tongue seeped salt tears she could not swallow. When she woke up she tried to remember…something about salt. That was it. Then it was gone.

Someone had handed them hymnbooks, but there was nowhere to put them and nowhere to go, but into the standing room only, backflow of the aisles at the back of the church. Organ music signalled the funeral procession was coming into the nave and most people tried not to stare. Summerville’s mother and father shuffled, slower than their years, with their boy’s coffin in front.

Mrs Summerville’s legs buckled and her husband’s arm shot out instinctively to catch her. She nodded like a judge, but her brown eyes glittered with too many tears, when she caught sight of Angela.

‘You were his pretty, pretty friend.’ Each word was carefully enunciated so that no one could suggest that she had been drinking that morning. The funeral cortège halted as she patted her on the arm. ‘He always talked about you, you know.’ There were five verses to the hymn and only one voice, a rich baritone, carried the waiting crowd.

Angela choked on her tears. She only remembered the times that John Summerville tried to make her laugh by making chicken noises and strutting and pecking at her with his beaked nose. She felt stupid crying, but there was a gift of a smile on her lips.

Mrs Summerville’s freckled arms went around her in an embrace. ‘Come,’ she staggered towards her and pulling her away from her parents, ‘you could have been family.’

Angela hand instinctively reached out and yoked the soft warmth of Helen’s, pulling her into the loose knit procession. They sat in the front pews beside a fat woman, whose name they didn’t know. Her mouth was pursed, but there was something of John Summerville in her, perhaps she was an aunt, as she looked grimly at her hymnbook, at the Reverend, and at the coffin. She avoided looking at the girls, as if their presence was a reminder of better times. John Summerville would have been the very one that could have picked out her expression and played it back at them, to make them laugh.

The service finished and they filed out with the family. Helen nudged Angela. The baritone was the same man that Helen had helped make the salt lines in the house outside Risk Street. ‘We’ll wait for him when we get out,’ whispered Helen.

‘That’s the same man. The same man that I’ve seen in my dreams.’ Angela sharp nails bit into her friends arm.

‘Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming.’ Summerville’s mum and dad stood and shook hand after hand.

Angela tried to make herself invisible and blend in with the crowd. She swerved around Mrs Summerville, but was caught out. Mrs Summerville, momentarily stopped shaking hands, and saying the same thing again and again, and looked at her. Angela stopped too. And everything seemed to freeze around her, as if she were in a race and edged ahead of the other runners at the finish line. Mrs Summerville’s eyes were puffy and red, the same way that Helen’s had been before she had said those cruel and needless things; prophesises almost.

You’ll need to come back, back…’Mrs Summerville’s red hair had flecks of gold and silver, showing her age, but she moved quickly enough, closing the distance between them and grasping Angela’s hand and pumping it up and down, ‘back to The Goose.’

Angela waited. Mrs Summerville patted her on the back.

‘You will come. Won’t you?’

Angela yawned and nodded absentmindedly, couldn’t quite work it out, and time speeded up again and she was outside the church with Helen and their parents were lighting up.

‘Look.’ Helen’s eye’s followed the baritone.

He nodded at Provost Fraser and most of the other old worthies. His bald head and bobbling Adam’s apple fitting in like an old folk’s disguise so that it was difficult to tell one from the other. But the baritone’s square specs made him stand out, more than the loping way that he walked, away from the church and the main roads, out towards the quiet leafy lanes of Glendevon.

Helen and Angela kept a neophyte detective’s distance between them, crouching behind parked cars and peering from behind lampposts. They froze as he looked round at them once, but he didn’t seem to see them, his step growing more jaunty, picking up a stick and swishing the long grass, as they got away from the road and out into the greenbelt of the canal. He turned down by the overgrown football parks. The girls could no longer keep hidden. But there was no need. They could see from the slope as he made his way into old Jackson’s Paddock. There was an old-fashioned gypsy caravan, with an arch roof that a horse thinner and larger than Jackson’s nags might have once pulled. He whistled as he mounted the steps.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Helen sighed.

Wisteria and honeysuckle helped hide the caravan from sight. Roses and Daphne were planted so close they were almost holding hands. Nicotiana and the plain- fare of mint bubbled up hiding the wheels and there was something of the church smell of purple pelargonium.

Angela took a deep breath, as if allergic to the sweet smelling scents. ‘I’ve seen this place in my dreams.’ She bent over double and the puked up a watery paste.