The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. Joanna Cannon

      *

      Brian stood in the doorway and looked into the sitting room. The giant cave of his mother’s sleeping mouth looked back at him, and it made the rest of her face seem strangely trivial. The Milk Tray was disembowelled on the footstool, and the debris of her evening decorated the carpet – knitting needles and crossword puzzles and television pages torn from a newspaper.

      ‘Mam?’ he said. Not loud enough to wake her, but loud enough to reassure himself that he’d tried.

      She snored back to him. Not the violent, churning snore that you would expect, but something softer. A thoughtful snore. His father once said that his mother was delicate and graceful when they first met, and Brian wondered if her snoring was all that was left of that narrow, fragile woman.

      He stared at his mother’s mouth. He wondered how many words had fallen out of it and into Margaret Creasy’s ears. She couldn’t help herself. It was as though she used hearsay as a web to trap people’s attention, that she didn’t believe she was interesting enough to hold on to them any other way.

      His mother’s mouth widened a little more, her eyes squeezed a little more tightly, and from somewhere deep in her chest came the faint rasp of unconsciousness.

      Brian wondered if she’d told Margaret Creasy about the night of the fire. About what she saw, or thought she saw, in the shadowed corners of the avenue.

      And he wondered if these had been the magic words that had made Margaret Creasy disappear.

      20 December 1967

      Brian draws the flame of the match into his roll-up, and watches the tobacco spark and flicker in the darkness.

      He can smoke indoors if he wants to. The rooms are painted with the yellow skin of his mother’s cigarettes, but he prefers to stand outside, to feel a bite of winter against his face and stare into the blackness undisturbed.

      The avenue is held in a frosted quiet. All the houses are buttoned up against the cold, three bars on the fire, condensation climbing high in the windows. There are Christmas trees peeping through gaps in the curtains, but Brian doesn’t feel very much like Christmas. He doubts anyone does, in all honesty, after everything that’s happened.

      The roll-up is thin and quick. It scratches the back of his throat and tightens his chest. He decides to take one last drag and go back into the carpet warmth of the kitchen, when he sees a movement at the top of the road. Somewhere at the edge of number eleven, there is a shift in the darkness, a brief change of light which catches the corner of his attention as he’s about to turn.

      He shields the cigarette in his palm to cover its glow, and tries to pull the view into the eyes, but beyond the orange pool of the streetlight, the shapes die away into an inked black.

      But there was definitely a movement.

      And as he closes the back door, he’s sure he hears the sound of disappearing footsteps.

      *

      ‘You can smoke in here, Brian.’ His mother nods at a bloated ashtray. ‘You could help me string these Christmas cards.’

      She is pushing the cards into tiny red and green pegs, like bunting, and coming to the end of a packet of custard creams.

      ‘I fancied a bit of fresh air, Mam.’

      ‘As long as you don’t forget your kidneys,’ she says.

      He walks over to the window and pulls the curtain a fraction, just enough to stare through an inch of glass.

      ‘What are you looking at?’ Her voice twitches with interest, and she rests the cards on her lap.

      ‘Number eleven.’

      ‘I thought you said he’d gone away with his mother. I thought we’d all agreed there was no point watching the house until he gets back.’

      ‘There’s someone in his garden.’

      She is on her feet. A pile of Christmas cards somersault into the air, and three lowly mangers and a donkey fall to the carpet.

      ‘Well, if you’re going to do it, do it properly,’ she says. ‘Switch the big light off and pull the curtains back.’

      He does as he’s told, and they both stare out into the darkness.

      ‘Do you see anything?’ she says.

      He doesn’t. They watch in silence.

      Sheila Dakin visits her dustbin, and the avenue fills with the sound of glass drumming against metal. Sylvia Bennett draws the curtains back in one of the upstairs rooms and stares into the road. It feels as though she is looking straight at them, and Brian ducks below the windowsill.

      ‘She can’t see you, you daft bugger,’ his mother says. ‘The light’s off.’

      Brian resurfaces, and when he looks up, Sylvia has disappeared.

      ‘Perhaps it was those lads from the estate again,’ says his mother. ‘Perhaps they came back.’

      Brian leans into the window. His legs are going dead and the back of the settee is pushing into his ribcage. ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ he says. ‘Not after what happened.’

      His mother sniffs. ‘Well, I can’t see anything. You must have imagined it, there’s no one out there.’

      As she speaks, Brian sees it again. Movement behind the thin, leafless trees which stand in Walter Bishop’s garden.

      ‘There.’ He taps on the glass. ‘Do you see them now?’

      His mother presses her face against the window and breaths of fascination travel across the view.

      ‘Well I never,’ says his mother. ‘What on earth is he doing?’

      ‘Who?’ Brian joins her at the glass. ‘Who is it?’

      ‘Move your head, Brian. You always get it in the way.’

      ‘Who is it?’ he says again, moving his head.

      His mother folds a pair of satisfied arms across her chest. ‘Harold Forbes,’ she says. ‘That’s definitely Harold Forbes.’

      ‘Is it?’ Brian risks putting his head near the glass again. ‘How can you tell?’

      ‘I’d know that hump anywhere. Very poor posture, that man.’

      They both stare into the dark, and their reflections stare back at them from the glass, ghostly white and open-mouthed, and painted with curiosity.

      ‘There are some very odd people about,’ says his mother.

      Brian’s eyes adjust to the night, and after a moment he sees the figure, slightly bent and occupied with something he’s holding in his hands. He is moving between the trees, making his way around the front of number eleven. It’s definitely a man, but Brian has no idea how his mother can be so certain it’s Harold Forbes.

      ‘What is he carrying?’ Brian wipes breath from the glass. ‘Can you tell?’

      ‘I’m not sure,’ says his mother, ‘but that’s not what interests me the most.’

      Brian turns to her and frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘What interests me the most,’ says his mother, ‘is who has he got there with him?’

      She’s right. Beyond the stooped, wandering figure in the trees, there is a second person. They’re slightly taller than the first, and straighter, and they are pointing to something at the back of the house. He tries to press his face further into the glass, but the image just blurs and distorts and becomes an untidiness of shapes and shadows.

      Brian puts forward a number of possibilities, all dismissed by