Cat Step, page 18
‘Yes.’ I smiled. ‘Does your brother still play?’
‘What?’
‘Does he still play?’ Was it my accent she couldn’t understand?
‘Aye, only amateur. He works in IT now.’
I heard the school bell ring. It must have been lunchtime. Or playtime.
‘You know Robbie died.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, anything you can tell me about him, I’d love to hear. To complete the picture.’ I sounded too formal as if he wasn’t mine. Emily tugged on my arm again but I wasn’t finished. Something about Georgia’s hardness made me feel hard too. ‘You don’t know why anybody would feel sorry for him?’ I said. They were her words.
Georgia looked at Paul who was looking at me and she must have caught kindness in his gaze. She turned to me sharply. ‘Paul’s done a lot of work for a lot of women. I can’t keep up.’ She paused. ‘You could feel sorry for Robbie Watt but there are other emotions you could feel too. You’d have to ask his victims. There are a lot of them in Campsie. This rain!’
Paul wiped rain from his cheek. ‘Let’s go.’
Georgia pulled an umbrella from her handbag and the rain cracked onto it. ‘We’ll be walking round Campsie, just like now, and suddenly I’ll be saying hello to some woman I’ve never met before and because it’s the polite thing to do I’ll talk away. But afterwards I’ll feel like a bit of an idiot.’
Her phone buzzed and she checked it. I glanced at Paul who made the tiniest of apologies with his eyes.
She put her phone away. ‘Have you got a boyfriend? Seeing anyone? Or are you just seeing my boyfriend? That’s what I’m going to ask you women from now on.’
‘Georgia, we better go.’
‘No, she’s asked me a question about Robbie.’ I noticed the freckles on her cheekbones, heard the tug in her voice. ‘But will she like what I tell her?’
‘What do you mean by victims?’ I said. ‘Emily, stand still.’ I took it out on Emily. I always did.
‘Cut it out, Georgia.’
‘Well, first there were the prescriptions they used to fill for the old people, he’ll have told you about that?’
‘No.’
‘The jellies.’
‘The what?’ My turn not to hear.
‘The jellies.’
‘No.’
‘Georgia, she doesn’t know anything.’
I looked at the Campsies and saw nothing but cloud. Paul said to me, ‘They worked together, Michael McDermott and your Robbie. Michael had a gardening business.’
I nodded.
‘My brother stopped hanging about with him then. They exploited Michael McDermott’s clients essentially. All the old folks,’ Georgia said. ‘They took their prescriptions to the chemist – their pills for this, that and the other. And the good tablets, the sleeping tablets, the diazepam, the jellies, they kept a few back for themselves.’
‘No they didn’t.’
‘I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Paul looked distressed now. ‘It’s hearsay.’
‘It’s not. It all came out in court. Maybe he really did have more to do with it than he let on if he didn’t tell you a thing.’
Emily stepped onto the road and splashed in water that poured towards a drain. I pulled her to the pavement.
‘Can I have a flip?’ she asked Paul.
‘You’re too muddy. No flips,’ I said.
‘I don’t mind.’
Almost in slow motion, with Georgia and me watching, Paul held Emily’s hands and she climbed her wet shoes up his legs and onto the edge of his jacket. She pushed her feet off his body and he helped her flip her legs through her hanging arms and land back on the ground.
‘Again!’ she said.
His jacket was muddied.
‘No, Emily.’ I should have gone away with her right then. ‘That’s enough.’
Georgia continued, rain hitting her umbrella and dripping from the silver ends of its spokes. ‘I won’t tell you about the high school. Somehow, kids at the high school ended up getting hold of all these prescription drugs. Someone sold them to them. There was a tragedy. I won’t tell you what happened. Robbie had nothing to do with it, so he said. They both left Lennoxtown after that. Michael McDermott ended up in the jail. My brother went to university. Come on Paul, we have to go.’
‘Can I have another flip?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t mind.’
Oh God, they did another flip with Emily struggling to walk her feet up Paul’s legs and then hanging upside down, her wet hair and her hood falling. I had to put my hand on her back and push her down so she could land. Of course she loved it.
‘We’re making another go of it, by the way,’ Georgia said to me. ‘So get rid of any notions you have about my partner.’
Paul’s horrified eyes told me otherwise but I realised I didn’t know him well enough to know what was truth and what wasn’t.
We stood in the hard rain and watched them walk through the school playground to the office door. Emily put her hand in mine. Back to a two.
‘Who were they talking about? Was it Daddy?’ she said.
‘No. Definitely not Daddy.’
That woman was lying. She was jealous and lying and I didn’t believe a word of what she’d said. Yet I did. And because of that, I felt sick. June. I had to speak with her. Oh, I have stories for all the boys and girls in Campsie. At what point did she realise that I was Robbie’s, that Robbie was mine? During which dance class? During which conversation? And why didn’t she tell me that Robbie worked with her son, the son she didn’t want to see, the son she needed an escort to meet?
I can’t remember what Emily and I did for the rest of that afternoon. It probably kept raining so I suppose I let her watch television. I honestly was as far away from my life with Emily as one of those big-bellied seagulls that soared above us, their wings white against the grey. Why the seagulls came so far inland and what they were doing in Lennoxtown I didn’t know.
12.
I should have cancelled the class when June didn’t come. Or they could have run it themselves. We did the same things each week, that’s what ballet was: repetition, repetition, repetition. But there they were, willing and waiting at their barres, feet in first position, hands soft at their thighs. I left them in the lounge as I’d done before and banged on June’s door. Her neighbour stood in his doorway watching me.
‘I couldn’t tell if it was me you were wanting,’ he said. His television sounded loud through his open door.
‘Have you seen her? Has she done your sheets?’
‘Not yet,’ he said. He wore slippers and checked pyjamas.
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘No idea. She takes herself off.’
‘Tell her I’m looking for her, will you?’
‘Are you the dancing girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll be a week before I see her because I only see her when she does my sheets.’
‘It’s time you did your own sheets.’
A burst of television laughter came from inside his flat. A woman in a uniform smiled down the corridor, told June’s neighbour it was nice to see him up and about, took him by the arm and escorted him inside.
‘She’s not home,’ I said to my dancers.
‘Up to her old tricks again,’ Eve said. ‘But she got our ballet shoes.’
I looked at their feet. Eve and Alice now as well as Senga and Agnes wore ballet shoes. Eve also wore a ballet cardigan, crossed at her chest and tied at the back.
‘No teasing,’ she said to John.
John pointed to his feet and said, ‘Same applies to you.’ He and Charlie stood in ballet shoes too.
‘Did she buy any for herself?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Eve. ‘And a cardigan.’
‘Where is she then?’
‘Up to her old tricks.’
‘Did she say anything about me?’ Perhaps she was avoiding me; she didn’t want me to ask about her son and Robbie. But she owed me that, surely? She owed me nothing.
‘I’ve only seen her in passing. Can we start this ballet class please?’ Eve stood in first position.
We got through the pliés in first and second. We did backbends and forward bends and side bends with accompanying port de bras and I felt a heat in my stomach that hadn’t been there before. A kind of hot grip which I ignored. We began John’s favourite, rond de jambe, and I told them they were improving.
‘My granddaughters came to visit on the weekend,’ Charlie said. ‘And I showed them a plié. They said my turnout was good.’
‘Your turnout is good.’
Eve passed comment on the women who came once to the class and never returned. Senga said Eve had reminded her: she and Agnes couldn’t attend the following week. They began their gentle chat, Charlie saying he missed his grandchildren’s wee voices, John saying they sounded like buffalo charging along the corridor above his. Only Alice was silent. But it didn’t matter. I was thinking of June.
I told them to turn to their chairs and stand in first position, holding on with both hands. I asked them to press through the soles of their feet, lifting their weight onto their toes, ending heads high, stomachs pulled in, in a relevé, just as I had done as a teenager, only I had gone onto the bleeding tips of my pointe shoes.
‘Tell me,’ I said to the sides of their concentrating faces. ‘Tell me about June. And her son, Michael McDermott. What’s the story there?’
‘She’s away to meet him… when is it? I can’t mind,’ John said.
Eve flicked a sharp look at him and then at me. Nobody said a word. I watched their heels rise and fall to the piano music I played: Swan Lake.
‘Chins up everyone. Don’t look down. She’s your friend, Eve. You must have talked about your children?’
‘Shush, I’m trying to dance,’ Eve said.
Dancing had never stopped her talking before.
‘Anyone else? Charlie? You’re from here. Do you remember June’s son?’
Up they rose and down they lowered.
‘I don’t like to talk about a person’s private life,’ Charlie said.
‘You talk about everyone else’s.’
Eve flicked me another look and I saw Charlie’s chin go down. ‘Heads up. Eyes up,’ I shouted. ‘John, when is she meeting him?’
‘I can’t mind,’ he shouted back.
They danced on. I tried again when they were in second position.
‘Let’s talk about my private life then. You must remember Robbie Watt. My partner. He’s from Campsie. He knew June’s son. Eve? Charlie? You’ve lived here all your lives. Who else has lived here all their life? What do you remember of Robbie?’
Silence. Just the piano’s ‘Pas de trois’. I noticed Agnes and Alice struggling with their balance. ‘Drop your shoulders and squeeze your tummies in,’ I told them. ‘Bring your feet closer together if you need to.’
I’d never known the room so quiet. All of them danced with a focus I hadn’t seen before. Guarded. Secretive. Protective.
‘When you’ve done a relevé sink into a plié but be careful of your balance, don’t lean forwards or backwards, keep that straight line from the crown of your head through your shoulder blades and down your back.’
‘A plumb line,’ John said.
They could talk when they wanted to. I gave up.
I asked them nothing at all when they danced their chassés in the centre of the room or at their barres if they weren’t steady. I watched them bend their knees and transfer their weight from one foot to another, in front, behind, second – en avant, en arrière, à la seconde. Ruth looked into the lounge just as they danced a chassé en avant and breathed their arms into a luxurious arabesque. Their focus was exquisite – because they were determined not to speak of June, that’s why.
‘Magic,’ Ruth said and gave me a thumbs up. ‘Catch me at the end. We need to talk about funding.’ She came back into the lounge with her camera and took a photograph. Just as well because that was our last class, not that any of us knew that then.
‘Do you have your feathers?’ Senga asked. ‘We love the feathers, don’t we, Mum?’
I passed them round but apart from Senga and her mother, nobody played with the abandon or the expression they’d had previously.
Charlie dropped his feather and I picked it up.
‘Please,’ I whispered near his ear. ‘June’s your old friend. What went on with June’s son and my Robbie?’
‘Don’t abuse Charlie’s good nature,’ Eve said to me. She waggled her feather.
‘Actually, I never discuss people’s private lives,’ Charlie said carefully as I stroked his feather on his forehead and nose. ‘I practise discretion.’
‘Someone then!’ I threw the feather pathetically then stooped to pick it up. ‘June’s not here. Tell me while she’s not here.’
‘That’s exactly why we’re not telling you. She’s not here to speak for herself,’ Eve said.
‘So you do know!’
‘I remember Robbie.’ Alice spoke and stunned us. ‘He was a lovely boy. One older brother. His parents died young. I knew his grandparents, Audrey and Donald.’ She looked at me, her mouth a smile, her feather flat in her hand.
‘You knew Robbie?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Did you?’
‘He was my partner. He’s my daughter’s dad. Remember, we met on the cruise ship.’
‘I went on a cruise with my husband. He’s not here anymore.’ The feather trembled in her hand.
‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
It was unethical to press a woman on the edge of dementia but I did, and as I walked her to one of the tables with the fabric flowers and told her to sit down next to me, she was already talking. Why would I stop her?
‘Robbie was a footballer wasn’t he? That’s right, he did all the trials. I think Falkirk were after him.’
‘Alice,’ Eve said. ‘Alice, watch what you say, hen.’ She collected in the feathers. The others came to our table and the music played on.
‘Robbie was a lovely boy, wasn’t he? He was the footballer,’ Alice said.
‘What about Michael McDermott, Alice? June’s son. Do you remember him? They worked together.’
‘Liz,’ Eve warned.
‘June’s boy worked over on the Carrick farm for years. Fifteen, twenty maybe. They took him on at sixteen which was a blessing for June because until then he’d smoked and drank and carried on and scared the life out of her.’
‘Were you her friend?’
‘Perhaps not her friend. Everyone knew everyone in Campsie though.’
‘Alice,’ Eve said gently as she sat down next to her. ‘I’m June’s friend.’
‘I know that, dear.’ Alice was lucid and fluent. ‘He worked on the farm for years. He lived with his mum. June’s husband, what was his name, he left her a long time ago.’
‘This is not your story to tell, Alice,’ Eve said.
‘Then he became a gardener, didn’t he? He did our garden. Him and Robbie Watt, the footballer. That was so nice of him to give the boy a job. His dad died so suddenly. I used to see them working in the gardens together. Or I would hear their lawnmowers and wait for the smell of the cut grass. It was nice. Did anybody make tea?’ Alice looked up.
Eve patted her hand. ‘It’s coming, pet. Senga, I can’t leave this. Can you?’
Senga stood and Agnes tried to stand too. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’
‘No, you won’t, Mum.’
‘I’m not incapable.’ The table rocked.
‘Sit down, Mum.’
Agnes sat and sighed.
Alice turned to smile at all the faces looking at her. She shrugged and asked again for tea.
John spoke now. ‘You’ll know all this though, won’t you? That your man was a good footballer.’ So he knew Robbie too.
‘I knew he was a good footballer, yes.’
‘Why don’t you leave it at that, eh? He was a good footballer.’
‘No.’
Alice continued to speak as if she hadn’t heard us. ‘Now, we had the police at our door one afternoon. They knocked on all the doors on our street. But we had nothing to tell them. We were healthy then. I think my husband had been to the doctor’s only twice in his adult life before he took ill.’
John shook his paper. ‘I have a crossword clue Alice that I need some help with.’
‘The police asked you about prescriptions? Because Michael McDermott was taking people’s medication was he?’ I said.
‘That’s right. He was filling their prescriptions at the chemist. And then he was opening the bottles and taking five, ten, I don’t know how many, but keeping some back for himself. But we didn’t have any tablets because we were healthy. We didn’t have anything to say to the police.’
‘She doesn’t need to know any more. It wasn’t Robbie that was doing it anyway,’ Eve said.
‘Keep going, Alice,’ I said.
Charlie shook his head.
‘Where was I?’
‘The prescription drugs,’ I said. ‘What happened next? He started selling them to the kids did he?’
‘Oh yes, so he did.’
‘That’s enough!’ Eve stood up and bumped in to Senga who was carrying a teapot and mugs.
Alice talked quietly on. ‘Robbie was just out of school, or maybe he was still in school, I can’t mind, but the police believed they were selling those pills to the schoolchildren up at the high school for months.’
‘Someone make her stop!’
‘Alice, dear,’ Agnes said. ‘Stop the memories, Alice, dear.’
‘Keep going, Alice, keep talking.’
‘John, make her stop.’
‘That’s enough, Liz, you’re upsetting everyone.’ John stood up.
