Glitches Read online

  She was about to take a step away, when she heard the letterbox opening. Instinctively her pelvis shot backwards and away. Pushing their way through the letterbox were the fingers of his hand. Groping their way towards her. Even in this light she could see the fingers were red, the skin broken and dry, the nails thick and dirty. Rachel could imagine the scratch of their touch.

  ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff...’ he said, looking through the spy-hole again.

  She should call the police. This was harassment. She should tell him she was going to call the police. She should tell him to go away, but for the first time in god knows how long in Rachel’s life, she couldn’t speak; she could barely breathe let alone move. Her body had just shut up shop, deciding on its own that Rachel wasn’t fit to manage it any longer. Terror had moved in and opted for fright rather than flight or fight. She could never have guessed. Even in the middle of her horror, she felt disgust at her own helplessness. She should just pull herself together. He was on the other side of the door for goodness’ sake. She was fine where she was.

  His fingers wiggled and he panted at the door, steaming up the spy-hole with his stench. ‘Pokey, pokey,’ he cooed.

  Rachel closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, holding the air inside her lungs before counting out her exhale for eight beats. She did it again, in for two, out for eight.

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll call the police.’ Yes! Her heart was punching high fives at her chest. She’d done it.

  The man smiled. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Do your worst.’ And he began to pull his fingers back through the letterbox.

  Rachel waited. She knew it would hurt to get his fingers out. The metal flap of the letterbox was really tight. Her kids had trapped their fingers in there numerous times. She felt vindicated, as if suddenly someone and not just something was on her side, fighting back.

  He did have to yank back his hand, but he seemed annoyingly unhurt. He smiled again, more of a leer really, and opened his coat.

  Somehow Rachel knew, well, it was inevitable, of course, but instead of looking away or just going away, finding her phone and actually calling the police, she remained where she was and watched him as he undid his belt, unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis.

  ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll stuff,’ he was mumbling now, focused on aiming his flaccid penis, his voice grainy, muffled by heavy breathing.

  ‘I’m calling the police now,’ Rachel said.

  She’d thought he was just trying to intimidate her, waggling his penis at her, but then he leant back slightly, his chin tipping towards the ceiling, and started to urinate. He was pissing on her door. The sound was like a garden hose and it just kept on coming. Wee was hissing into the carpet, pattering against the gloss finish and pooling underneath the door. She stood, mouth open, eyebrows bent in an incredulous frown, as the urine seeped towards her, warming her cold toes.

  She’ll Do Anything For You

  ‘She’s ever so nice, Lorraine. She’ll do anything for you.’

  George has one eye that is permanently shut. If you approach him from his right hand side you can’t tell if he is dozing or simply sitting quietly. Lorraine is the cleaning lady. She visits twice a week.

  ‘She’s not everybody’s cup of tea -’ George’s wife, Jean, continues. She sits on the blind side of George. Between them, two cups of tea, a teapot and some biscuits rest on a tray on a small coffee table. ‘ - but I get on with her. You like her, don’t you, George?’

  They are sitting in the front room, their backs to the window. Behind them, I can see the hills, their contours filled with the dark and muted greens of unflowering heather, rising above the garden and the houses across the street.

  ‘Do have a biscuit,’ Jean says.

  The doorbell rings.

  ‘That’ll be Lorraine,’ George says.

  ‘Hello-oh.’ It’s Lorraine.

  ‘I’ll go and let her in,” George says, the colour rising in his cheeks.

  ‘Don’t get up. She can come in here. Lorraine, we’re in the front room.’

  George gets up and walks towards the door ignoring his stick. He balances himself on the sofa. He likes to kiss Lorraine on both cheeks. I can picture her dyed blonde hair, its copper highlights shimmering in the light of the conservatory that is always open, providing a welcome porch for callers and postmen alike.

  Jean and I wait quietly in the front room, listening. Even though he has left the room, something of George lingers. My silenced memories refuse to lie dormant. He might be half blind and stumbling, but I remember being told to stroke through stiff yellow corduroy behind a locked door and still he frightens me. I only came because I promised Mum.

  ‘You alright, George?’ Lorraine says loudly.

  ‘Hello, Lorraine. Let me get a look at you. You’re a sight for sore eyes.’ There is a soft patting sound. The two of them make their way into the front room. As they walk, Lorraine asks, ‘How was it yesterday with the optician?’

  ‘Oh, fine,’ George says. I can see his hands feeling their way along the wall. ‘He says there’s nothing he can do short of an operation. But if I do this, I can see just fine.’ George demonstrates. It involves opening his left eye very wide. Then he dabs at the right eyelid with his finger, propping it open briefly. As he goes back to his chair, it drifts shut. Watching it stirs goose bumps all along my forearms.

  ‘Sit down a minute, Lorraine. You remember Anne, my sister’s grand-daughter?’ Jean gestures towards me and I smile politely, lifting one hand up gingerly from my knee. ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ Lorraine says.

  ‘Would you like a cup, Lorraine?’ Jean asks.

  ‘No, I’m fine. Thanks, Mrs Freeman.’

  ‘Well, just sit down for five minutes. How’ve you been?’

  Lorraine sits. George leans forward in his armchair.

  ‘Good, thank you, Mrs Freeman. Oh, you won’t believe what happened yesterday.’ Lorraine shuffles to the edge of the sofa cushion, her hands on her knees.

  George and Jean wait for her to speak.

  ‘I’d just come in from the shops when Mrs Godfrey calls me up on the telephone.’

  ‘Mrs Godfrey?’ Jean asks.

  ‘Yes, down Mary Walk.’

  Jean nods.

  ‘Well, she said she’d found some stolen goods in her dustbin.’

  ‘Stolen goods?’ George says.

  ‘Yes. There was a broken radio, a cheap plastic light - just a battery thing - and other bits and pieces. She was looking for her vegetable peeler. She couldn’t find it and went out to the dustbin to see if she’d thrown it out with the peelings. She found this bag of stolen goods dumped in her bin.’

  ‘Terrible the things that happen today,’ George says closing his working eyelid sagely.

  ‘So,’ Lorraine continues, ‘she only goes and rings the police. It quite put me out. I tell you, I felt quite angry.’

  Jean frowns slightly over her cup of tea.

  ‘The joke is, they were my things. After I’d finished cleaning for her, I saw all this rubbish in my car and I thought, well, I’ll just get rid of it here before I forget about it. No sense driving all that rubbish backwards and forwards. I dread to think what else I threw in there. I’ve been trying to work it out. There were a couple of cans the kids had in the car. I don’t know what else. I couldn’t believe it. I told her to ring them back and say the cleaner did it.’ She laughs and rubs a patch of plaster on her arm. She’s giving up smoking. The action pushes her cleavage above her t-shirt. George’s one working eye is wide open.

  ‘Did they ring you?’ Jean asks.

  ‘Oh no. I shouldn’t think they’ve done anything.’ Lorraine rubs the patch on her arm again. ‘I suppose she thought she was doing the right thing. All she cares about is go
ing to heaven. She goes to church in Amberly in the morning and Whistleton in the evening. If she can’t go, she gets the priest to come to her. That’s all she wants: to go to heaven. She doesn’t care about anything else.’ Lorraine shakes her head.

  ‘What a story,’ Jean says.

  They sit without speaking for roughly five seconds, enough time for the ticking of the clock to mark their silence - though they don’t notice it because it has become too familiar - and the blackbirds’ song to sound from the trees outside - though George and Jean have their backs to the trees and Lorraine doesn’t like birds. I gaze out of the window wondering if Mrs Godfrey ever found her vegetable peeler. Then Jean lowers her teacup and saucer onto the tray on the coffee table.

  ‘I thought you could help me with George’s bed,’ she says. ‘You can give the bathroom a once over while I finish my tea.’

  Lorraine gets up. ‘Don’t be silly, Jean. You enjoy your tea with Anne. I can manage the bed on my own.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Jean says. ‘What a rum tale.’ She refills her teacup.

  Lorraine leaves the room.

  George takes a biscuit from the tray. ‘She’s ever so nice, Lorraine. She’ll do anything for you.’

  When the tea is all finished, I carry it through to the kitchen. From somewhere in the house comes the sound of the Hoover.

  ‘Let’s take a look in the garden, shall we?’ Jean says. ‘George is off to his study for a while.’

  So Jean and I walk out into their garden with beautifully sculpted bushes and trees, hues of green, brown, red and yellow carefully blended to soothe the eye. There are no flowers. George doesn’t like flowers.

  Jean’s eyes are not as good as they were and when we walk around the house to the front garden, she doesn’t see into George’s study. Their windows are double-glazed, but I feel sure the Hoover would still sound if I were to walk in the front door.

  As we walk past George’s study window, I see him standing, both eyes closed, smiling. Beneath him, just visible behind his desk, is the moving curve of Lorraine’s back.

  ‘I’d really like a rose bush here,’ Jean says. ‘Maybe one day.’

  We follow the small gravel path to the pond.

  ‘I’ll get George to put the fountain on for you later. It looks lovely.’ She sighs and looks up at the hills. The seconds pass. ‘Let’s go and see how Lorraine’s getting on, shall we?’

  Lorraine only stays an hour. After she is gone, George needs some help getting something down from on top of the cupboard in the bedroom. I don’t want to be alone in a room with him, but I’m worried it will look strange to refuse. Anyway, what could he do now? Old, doddering man, peering at me with one eye?

  Jean helps me to find the ladder in the garage and I carry it carefully through the back bedroom. The back room, where I had slept as a child, is Jean’s bedroom now. George’s condition means they no longer share a room. In one unguarded moment, when Jean had given me a lift from the station and we’d pulled into a lay-by to speak alone, Jean had told me she’d had to ask the doctor to have words with George. He kept at her for intercourse, that was the word she used. He was well over eighty but sex was what made him a man, her prolapse be damned. She said she’d been tempted to hit him with a frying pan. I wish she had. Silence is the only friendship our family has offered George, but it is one that has saved him from fates worse than old age. Jean must be pleased to have her own room.

  Despite the weakness of his legs, George holds the ladder steady as I step up the rungs to reach the top of the cupboard. Amongst the railroad magazines he’s asked me to fetch are several porn magazines. I let my outward breath sigh down my raised shoulders and pass him the railroad ones. As I turn, I see the angle of his head, tilting perfectly to allow his good eye a view of my behind.

  He smiles as I hand him the magazines. ‘So kind,’ he says, ‘thank you, Anne. You’ve always been such a good girl.’

  A year later, and I’m back in Jean’s house with the rest of the family for the funeral. Lorraine is helping to hand out rather dry sandwiches and defrosted sponge cake as everyone does their best to say as little as possible about George. As third generation I hold no seniority. I stand in the hallway, turning my gaze from the barometer, quietly measuring atmospheric change, to the spider plant thriving untended on a shelf in the conservatory.

  I’m wondering how a plant can grow so well in neglect, when I overhear my uncles. Their voices are rasping, pinched and reedy, full of quiet dissent.

  ‘Ten thousand pounds he left her. I didn’t even know he had that much to leave, tight bastard. Who’d have thought it? Ten thousand pounds to the cleaner.’

  Just then Lorraine bustles into the hall. ‘Cake?’ she says, holding out a tray. I hear two distinct ticks of the living room clock as conversation across the house seems to pause.

  ‘Lovely,’ my uncle says, ‘thank you.’

  ‘She’s been ever so helpful,’ Great Aunt Jean says, somehow having found the stiff backed chair beside the telephone without my even noticing her arrival.

  My uncles’ eyes shift, both sets flicking about in search of some other topic and I wonder if all this tight-lipped decorum is necessary. Lorraine was doing Jean a favour, wasn’t she? I wonder what else everyone knows but doesn’t say. I wonder if I should have said more than I did about that time so long ago; the secret George and I shared that there is now no point in ever bringing to light.

  ‘This your cake, Aunty Jean?’ my uncle asks. ‘Always loved a bit of your cake.’

  ‘Not this one, no dear. Lorraine made that one,’ Jean replies. I smile as my uncle turns an ugly puce.

  ‘The cleaner did it,’ my other uncle says and snorts as if no ever said anything funnier. I feel my eyes widening, not knowing quite what to say, and at the same time remembering that day a year ago when Lorraine recounted her rum tale.

  ‘She’s more than a cleaner, aren’t you Lorraine? She’ll do anything for you,’ my Great Aunt says.

  Two more ticks of the clock mark out a further social silence and finally I know just what to say. ‘I’d love a slice of cake, Lorraine, thanks.’

  I take my cake and wander into the conservatory. Hidden beneath the trails of the spider plant, on a lower shelf, is a garden centre brochure open at a double spread on rose bushes.

  The Last Button

  Ron’s parents called him, Ronald. It was one of those things that, though obvious, seemed hilariously funny. The way they rolled the ‘r’ around their throats turned him into quite a different man.

  Since my parents were living abroad, I was visiting the Brennans as the family representative. Ron and my sister had been engaged for over six months but it was the first time any of us had met his family. It was also my first visit to Glasgow.

  Ron and my sister had picked me up at the station and driven through the city. I was surprised by its Georgian charm. Alongside the usual shopping centre and the long drag out to the suburbs, there were pretty crescents, islands of green and elegant architecture.

  Ron’s parents’ house was red brick, probably Victorian, with a large bay window overlooking the front garden. The whole street was set at a slight angle, sloping down to the left, away from the town.

  ‘First visit to Glasgow, Liz?’ Ron’s father, Alan, said. ‘You’re in for a treat.’

  Alan was neat with a short frame, a careful comb-over and a fierce, immutable energy. He was a school inspector, once teacher, and showered me with opinions about the education system, bemoaning paperwork and the loss of corporal punishment. The last did not surprise me. Ron had told me about his father’s liking for the belt and I had turned this predilection into the basis of my theory on Ron’s misspent youth.

  On arrival I was ushered into the front room. Rather unnervingly, nearly every one of Ron’s family was there to greet me: his grandmother,
his sister, her husband, Andrew, and his cousins, Warren and Craig. Ron’s Mother bustled in the background, brewing tea for everyone.

  It was soon clear that I wasn’t the only attraction that afternoon: there was a football match on. All of Ron’s family, apart from Andrew, were Celtic supporters. Poor Andrew, whose face quickly turned the bright orange colour of his hair, had to suffer constant jibes because he supported Rangers. I admitted I didn’t know anything about Celtic or Rangers and Warren - whose hair was also red, but of a more murky, biscuit colour - was happy to explain that the football teams’ supporters were divided along sectarian lines: Celtic for Catholics, Rangers for Protestants. They were a tolerant family - he raised a mocking fist in Andrew’s direction - but football was serious business in Glasgow. The son of a cousin of theirs, only eleven, had been knifed to death when he got off at the wrong bus stop wearing a Celtic cap.

  His words conjured an image of one of the long, grey roads we had driven down to reach Ron’s parents’ street. I could see a small boy lying slumped beneath the bus shelter, his body curled protectively around the knife-wound, left to die alone after enduring sharp kicks to his head and kidneys.

  Alan, sensing my unease, changed the subject.

  ‘Ron tells us you went to Oxford. What did you read?’

  He proceeded to flatter my ego, asking my opinion on the changing nature of academic standards, until the pre-match discussion was over and the game was about to start. I thought Alan really didn’t seem that bad.

  I sat back in my armchair and pretended to watch the game. But football has never interested me. Even though the atmosphere in the Brennans’ front room was electric, I couldn’t get involved, not even when Craig yelled at the referee, calling him a ‘fucking cunt’. I couldn’t stop thinking about the little boy and somehow it affected my feelings for Ron.