The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

The vicar replaced his shoe and walked over to me. He was taller than he had been in church and very earnest. The lines on his forehead were carved and heavy, as though his face had spent its entire time trying to sort out a really big problem. He didn’t look at me, but stared out over the gravestones instead.

‘Many reasons,’ he said eventually.

It was a rubbish answer. I’d found that answer all by myself and I didn’t even have God to ask.

‘Such as?’

‘They wander from the path. They drift off-course.’ He looked at me and I squinted up at him through the sunshine. ‘They become lost.’

I thought about the Ernests and the Mauds and the Mabels. ‘Or they die,’ I said.

He frowned and repeated my words. ‘Or they die,’ he said.

The vicar smelt exactly the same as the church. Faith had been trapped within the folds of his clothes, and my lungs were filled with the scent of tapestry and candles.

‘How do you stop people from disappearing?’ I said.

‘You help them to find God.’ He shifted his weight and gravel crunched around his shoes. ‘If God exists in a community, no one will be lost.’

I thought about our estate. The unwashed children who spilled from houses and the drunken arguments that tumbled through windows. I couldn’t imagine God spent very much time there at all.

‘How do you find God?’ I said, ‘where is He?’

‘He’s everywhere. Everywhere.’ He waved his arms around to show me. ‘You just have to look.’

‘And if we find God, everyone will be safe?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

‘Even Mrs Creasy?’

‘Naturally.’

A crow unfolded itself from the roof of the church, and a murderous cry filled the silence.

‘I don’t know how God can do that,’ I said. ‘How can He keep us from disappearing?’

‘You know that the Lord is our shepherd, Grace. We are just sheep. Only sheep. If we wander off the path, we need God to find us and bring us home.’

I looked down at my feet whilst I thought about it. Grass had buried itself in the weave of my socks and dug sharp, red lines into my flesh.

‘Why do people have to die?’ I said, but when I looked up, the vicar was back at the chancel door.

‘Are you coming for tea at the church hall?’ he shouted.

I didn’t really want to. I would rather have gone back to Tilly. Her mother didn’t believe in organized religion and was worried we’d all be brainwashed by the vicar, but I had to agree, or it would have been a bit like turning down Jesus.

‘Okay,’ I said, and picked the blades of grass from my knees.

*

I walked behind Mrs Morton, along the lane between the church and the hall. The verge was thick with summer: stitchwort and buttercups, and towering foxgloves which blew clouds of pollen from rich, purple bells. The breeze had dropped, leaving us in a razor of heat which cut into the skin at the tops of my arms and made speaking too much of an effort. We trudged in a single line; silent pilgrims drawn towards a shrine of tea and digestives, all strapped into Sunday clothes and decorated with sweat.

When we reached the car park, Tilly was sitting on the wall. She was basted in sun cream and wore a sou’wester.

‘It was the only hat I could find,’ she said.

‘I thought your mother didn’t want you to be religious?’ I held out my hand.

‘She’s gone to stack shelves in the Co-op,’ Tilly said, and heaved herself down from the bricks.

The church hall was a low, white building, which squatted at the end of the lane and looked as though it had been put there whilst someone made their mind up about what to do with it. Inside, it rattled with teacups and efficiency. Sunday heels clicked on a parquet floor and giant, stainless-steel urns spat and hissed to us from the corner.

‘I’m going to have Bovril,’ said Tilly.

I studied Mrs Morton, as she ordered our drinks on the other side of the room. Early widowhood had forced her to weave a life from other people’s remnants, and she had baked and minded and knitted herself into a glow of indispensability. I wondered who Mrs Morton would be if she still had a husband – if Mr Morton hadn’t been searching for The New Seekers in the footwell of his car and driven himself head-first into the central reservation of the M4. There had been a female passenger (people whispered), who appeared at the funeral in ankle-length black and crimson lipstick, and who sobbed with such violence she had to be escorted from the church by an anxious sexton. I remembered none of this. I was too young. I had only ever known Mrs Morton as she was now; tweeded and scrubbed, and rattling like a pebble in a life made for two.

‘Bovril.’ Mrs Morton handed a cup to Tilly. We all knew she wouldn’t drink it, but we kept up the pretence, even Tilly, who held it to her face until steam crept over her glasses.

‘Do you believe in God, Mrs Morton?’ I looked up at her.

Tilly and I both waited.

She didn’t reply immediately, but her eyes searched for an answer in the beams of the ceiling. ‘I believe in not asking people daft questions on a Sunday morning,’ she said eventually, and went to find the toilet.

The hall filled with people. It was far more crowded than the church had been, and pairs of jeans mixed with Sunday best. It appeared that Jesus pulled a much bigger crowd if He provided garibaldis. There were people from our avenue – the Forbeses and the man who was always mowing his lawn, and the woman from the corner house, who was surrounded by a clutter of children. They clung to her hips and her legs, and I watched as she slipped biscuits into her pocket. Everyone stood with newspapers in their armpits and sunglasses on their foreheads and, in the corner, someone’s Pomeranian was having an argument with a Border Collie. People were talking about the water shortage and James Callaghan, and whether Mrs Creasy had turned up yet. She hadn’t.

No one mentioned Jesus.

In fact, I didn’t think anyone would have noticed if Jesus had walked into the room, unless He happened to be accompanied by an Arctic roll.

*

‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked Tilly.

We sat in a corner of the hall, on blue plastic chairs which pulled the sweat from our skin, Tilly sniffing her Bovril and me drawing my knees to my chest, like a shield. I could see Mrs Morton in the distance, trapped by a trestle table and two large women in flowered aprons.

‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I think God saved me when I was in hospital.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘My mum asked Him to every day.’ She frowned into her cup. ‘She went off Him after I got better.’

‘You’ve never told me. You always said you were too young to remember.’

‘I remember that,’ she said, ‘and I remember it was Christmas and the nurses wore tinsel in their hair. I don’t remember anything else.’

She didn’t. I had asked – many times. It was better for children if they didn’t know all the facts, she’d said, and the words always left her mouth in italics.

When she first told me, it was thrown into the conversation with complete indifference, like a playing card. I had never met anyone who had nearly died, and in the beginning the subject was attacked with violent curiosity. Then it became more than fascination. I needed to know everything, so that all the details might be stitched together for protection. As if hearing the truth would somehow save us from it. If I had almost died, I would have an entire speech to use at a moment’s notice, but Tilly only remembered the tinsel and something being wrong with her blood. It wasn’t enough – even when I connected all the words together, like a prayer.

After she told me, I had joined her mother in a silent conspiracy of watchfulness. Tilly was watched as we ran under a seamless August sky; a breathless look over my shoulder, waiting for her legs to catch up with mine. She was protected from a baked summer by my father’s golfing umbrella, a life lived far from the edges of kerbs and the cracks in pavements, and when September carried in mist and rain, she was placed so close to the gas fire, her legs became tartanned in red.

I watched her without end, inspecting her life for the slightest vibration of change, and yet she knew none of this. My worries were noiseless; a silent obsession that the only friend I had ever made would be taken from me, just because I hadn’t concentrated hard enough.

*

The noise in the hall drifted into a slur of voices. It was a machine, ticking over in the heat, fuelled by rumour and judgement, and we stared into an engine of cooked flesh and other people’s feet. Mr Forbes stood in front of us, sailing a cherry Bakewell through the air and giving out his opinion, as warmth crept into the material of his shirt.

‘He woke up on Monday morning and she’d gone. Vanished.’

‘Beggars belief,’ said Eric Lamb, who still had grass cuttings on the bottom of his trousers.

‘Live for the moment, that’s what I say.’ I watched Mr Forbes sail another cherry Bakewell around, as if to demonstrate his point.

Mrs Forbes didn’t speak. Instead, she shuffled her sandals on the herringbone floor, and twisted a teacup around in its saucer. Her face had worried itself into a pinch.

Mr Forbes studied her, as he disappeared his cherry Bakewell. ‘Stop whittling about it, Dorothy. It’s got nothing to do with that.’

‘It’s got everything to do with that,’ she said, ‘I just know it.’

Mr Forbes shook his head. ‘Tell her, Eric,’ he said, ‘she won’t listen to me.’

‘That’s all in the past. This will be about something else. A bit of a tiff, that’s what it’ll be,’ said Eric Lamb. I thought his voice was softer, and edged with comfort, but Mrs Forbes continued to shuffle, and she trapped her thoughts behind a frown.

‘Or the heat,’ said Mr Forbes, patting his belly to ensure the cherry Bakewells had safely arrived at their destination. ‘People do strange things in this kind of weather.’

‘That’s it,’ said Eric Lamb, ‘it’ll be the heat.’

Mrs Forbes looked up from her twisting teacup. Her smile was very thin. ‘We’re a bit buggered if it isn’t, though, aren’t we?’ she said.

The three stood in silence. I saw a stare pass between them, and Mr Forbes dragged the crumbs from his mouth with the back of a hand. Eric Lamb didn’t speak. When the stare reached his eyes, he looked at the floor to avoid taking it.

After a while, Mrs Forbes said, ‘this tea needs more milk,’ and she disappeared into a wall of sunburned flesh.

I tapped Tilly on the arm, and a spill of Bovril escaped on to blue plastic.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘Mrs Forbes said they’re all buggered.’

‘That’s not very church hall-ey, is it?’ said Tilly, who still wore her sou’wester. She wiped the Bovril with the edge of her jumper. ‘Mrs Forbes has been a little unusual lately.’

This was true. Only the day before, I’d seen her wandering around the front garden in a nightdress, having a long conversation with the flower beds.

It’s the heat, Mr Forbes had said, as he took her back inside with a cup of tea and the Radio Times.

‘Why do people blame everything on the heat?’ said Tilly.

‘It’s easier,’ I said.

‘Easier than what?’

‘Easier than telling everyone the real reasons.’

*

The vicar appeared.

We knew he had arrived even before we saw him, because all around the room, conversations began to cough and falter. He cut through the crowd, leaving it to re-form behind him, like the surface of the Red Sea. He appeared to glide beneath his cassock, and there was an air of stillness about him, which made everyone he approached seem overactive and slightly hysterical. People stood a little straighter as they shook his hand, and I saw Mrs Forbes do what appeared to be a small curtsy.

‘What did he say in church then?’ said Tilly, as we watched him edge around the room.

‘He said that God runs after people with knives if they don’t listen to Him properly.’

Tilly sniffed her Bovril again. ‘I never knew He did that,’ she said eventually.

Sometimes I struggled to take my gaze from her. She was almost transparent, as fragile as glass. ‘He said that if we find God, He’ll keep us all safe.’

Tilly looked up. There was a streak of sun cream on the very tip of her nose. ‘Do you think someone else is going to disappear, Gracie?’

I thought about the gravestones and Mrs Creasy, and the fractured, yellow lawns.

‘Do we need God to keep us safe? Are we not safe just as we are?’ she said.

‘I’m not sure that I know any more.’

I watched her, and threaded my worries like beads.

*

The vicar completed his circuit of the room and disappeared, as if he were a magician’s assistant, behind a curtain next to the stage. The engine of conversation started again, small at first, and uncertain, then powering up to its previous level, as the air filled with hosepipe bans and stories of vanishing neighbours.

It probably would have stayed that way. It probably would have run its course, and continued until people wandered home to fill themselves with Brussels sprouts, had Mr Creasy not burst through the double doors and marched the length of the hall past a startled audience. Silence followed him around the room, leaving only the click of a cup on a saucer, and the sound of elbows nudging each other.

He stopped in front of Mr Forbes and Eric Lamb, his face stretched with anger. Tilly said afterwards that she thought he was going to hit someone, but to me he looked as though all the hitting had been frightened out of him.

The words stayed in his eyes for a few seconds, then he said, ‘You told her, didn’t you?’

It was a whisper that wanted to be a shout, and it left his mouth wrapped in spit and fury.

Mr Forbes turned from their audience, and guided Mr Creasy towards a wall. I heard him say Christ and calm down and for heaven’s sake, and then I heard him say, ‘We haven’t told her anything.’

‘Why else would she up and leave?’ said Mr Creasy. The rage seemed to immobilize him, and he became a furious effigy, fixed and motionless, except for the flush which crept from beneath his shirt and into his neck.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘but if she’s found out, it’s not come from us.’

‘We’re not that stupid,’ said Eric Lamb. He looked over his shoulder at a sea of teacups and curiosity. ‘Let’s get you out of here, let’s get you a drink.’

‘I don’t want a bloody drink.’ Mr Creasy hissed at them, like a snake. ‘I want my wife back.’

He had no choice. They escorted him out of the hall, like prison guards.

I watched Mrs Forbes.

She stared at the door long after it had closed behind them.

Number Four, The Avenue

27 June 1976

The roads on our estate were all named after trees, and Tilly and I walked home from the church hall along an alley which separated Sycamore from Cedar. On either side of us, lines of washing stretched like bunting across deserted gardens, waiting for the whisper of a breeze, and as we walked, drips of water smacked a tune on to concrete paths.

No one realized then that, in many years to come, people would still speak of this summer; that every other heatwave would be compared to this one, and those who lived through it would shake their heads and smile whenever anyone complained of the temperature. It was a summer of deliverance. A summer of Space Hoppers and dancing queens, when Dolly Parton begged Jolene not to take her man, and we all stared at the surface of Mars and felt small. We had to share bathwater and half-fill the kettle, and we were only allowed to flush the toilet after what Mrs Morton described as a special occasion. The only problem was, it meant that everyone knew when you’d had a special occasion, which was a bit awkward. Mrs Morton said we’d end up with buckets and standpipes if we weren’t careful, and she was part of a vigilante group, who reported anyone for watering their gardens in the dark (Mrs Morton used washing-up water, which was allowed). It will only work if we all pull together, she said. I knew this wasn’t true, mind you, because, unlike the brittle yellow of everyone else’s, Mr Forbes’ lawn remained a strangely suspicious shade of green.

*

I could hear Tilly’s voice behind me. It drummed on the parched, wooden slats of the fences either side, which were beaten into white by the heat.

What do you think? she was saying.

She had been turning Mr Creasy’s words over since Pine Crescent, trying to fit them into an opinion.

‘I think Mr and Mrs Forbes are in on it,’ I shouted back.

She caught up with me, her legs fighting with the sentence. ‘Do you think they were the ones who murdered her?’

‘I think they all murdered her together.’

‘I’m not sure they look the type,’ she said. ‘My mum thinks the Forbeses are old-fashioned.’

‘No, they’re very modern.’ I found a stick and drew it along the fence. ‘They have a SodaStream.’

Tilly’s mum thought everyone was old-fashioned. Tilly’s mum owned long earrings and drank Campari, and only ever wore cheesecloth. In cold weather, she just wore more cheesecloth, layering it around herself like a shroud.

‘My mum says Mr and Mrs Forbes are curious people.’

‘Well, she’d know,’ I said.

Back doors were propped open in the heat, and the smell of batter and roasting tins escaped from other people’s lives. Even in ninety degrees, Brussels sprouts still simmered on stoves, and gravy still dripped and pooled on heavy plates.

‘I hate Sundays,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Tilly found another stick and dragged it alongside mine.

Tilly didn’t hate anything.

‘It’s just the day before Monday,’ I said. ‘It’s always too empty.’

‘We break up soon. We’ll have six weeks of nothing but Sundays.’

‘I know.’ The stick hammered my boredom into the wood.

‘What shall we do with our holidays?’

We reached the end of the fence, and the alley became silent.

‘I haven’t quite decided yet,’ I said, and let the stick fall from my hand.

*

We walked on to Lime Crescent , our sandals sending loose chippings dancing along the road. I looked up, but sunlight shot back from cars and windows and punished my eyes. I squinted and tried again.

Tilly didn’t notice, but I saw them straight away. A tribe of girls, a uniform of Quatro flicks and lip gloss, with hands stuffed into pockets, making denim wings. They stood on the opposite corner, doing nothing except being older than me. I saw them weigh out our presence, as they measured the pavement with scuffed market boots and chewed gum. They were a bookmark, a page I had yet to read, and I wanted to stretch myself out to get there.

I knew them all. I had watched for so long from the margins of their lives, their faces were as familiar as my own. I looked over for a thread of acknowledgement, but there was none. Even when I willed it with my eyes. Even when I slowed my steps to almost nothing. Tilly walked ahead, and I grew the distance between us, as stares filled with opinion reflected back at me. I couldn’t find anything to do with my arms, and so I folded them around my waist and tried to make my sandals sound more rebellious.

Tilly waited for me around the corner.

‘What shall we do now?’ she said.

‘Dunno.’

‘Shall we go to your house?’

‘S’pose.’

‘Why are you talking like that?’

I unfolded my arms. ‘I don’t know.’

She smiled, and I smiled back, even though the smiling felt unquiet.

‘Here,’ I said, and took the sou’wester from her head and put it on my own.

Her laughter was instant, and she reached for it back. ‘Some people just can’t wear hats, Gracie,’ she said. ‘It should stay where it belongs.’

My arm linked through hers and we walked towards home. Past matched lawns and carbon-papered lives, and rows of terraced houses, which handcuffed families together through chance and coincidence.

And I tried to make it enough.

*

When we got home, my mother was peeling potatoes and talking to Jimmy Young. He sat on the shelf above her head, and she nodded and smiled at him as she filled the sink with soil.

‘You’ve been gone a while.’

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to Jimmy.

‘We were at church,’ I said.

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Not really.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said, and fished another potato from the mud.

Tilly’s laughter hid inside her jumper.

‘Where’s Dad?’ I took two cheese triangles from the fridge and emptied a packet of Quavers on to a plate.

‘He’s gone to get a paper,’ said my mother, and she drowned the potatoes with a little more certainty. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

Pub, I mouthed at Tilly.

I unwrapped a triangle and Tilly took off her sou’wester, and we listened to Brotherhood of Man and watched my mother fashion potatoes.

Save all your kisses for me, said the radio, and Tilly and I did the dance with our arms.

‘Do you believe in God?’ I said to my mother, when the record had finished.

‘Now, do I believe in God?’ Her peeling slowed, and she stared at the ceiling.

I couldn’t understand why everyone looked towards the sky when I asked the question. As though they were expecting God to appear in the clouds and give them the right answer. If so, God let my mother down, and we were still waiting for her reply when my father appeared at the back door with no newspaper, and the British Legion still smeared in his eyes.

He draped himself around my mother, like a sheet. ‘How is my beautiful wife?’ he said.

‘There’s no time for that nonsense, Derek.’ She drowned another potato.

‘And my two favourite girls.’ He ruffled our hair, which was a bit of a mistake, as neither Tilly nor I had the kind of hair that could be ruffled very successfully. Mine was too blonde and opinionated, and Tilly’s refused to be separated from its bobbles.

‘Are you staying for some lunch, Tilly?’ my father said.

He leaned over to speak and ruffled her hair again. Whenever Tilly was there, he became a cartoon parent, a surrogate father. He swooped down to fill a gap in Tilly’s life that she never realized existed, until he highlighted it so exquisitely.

She started to answer, but he had his head in the fridge.

‘I saw Thin Brian in the Legion,’ he was saying to my mother. ‘Guess what he told me.’

My mother remained silent.

‘That old woman who lives at the end of Mulberry Drive, you know the one?’

My mother nodded into the peelings.

‘They found her dead last Monday.’

‘She was quite old, Derek.’

‘The point is,’ he said, unwrapping a cheese triangle of his own, ‘they reckon she’d been dead for a week and no one noticed.’

My mother looked over, and Tilly and I stared at the plate of Quavers in an effort to be unremembered.

‘They wouldn’t have discovered her even then,’ my father said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the sme—’

‘Why don’t you girls go outside?’ my mother said. ‘I’ll shout when your dinner’s ready.’

*

We sat on the patio, our backs pressed into the bricks to keep us in a ribbon of shade.

‘Fancy dying and no one misses you,’ Tilly said. ‘That’s not very Godly, is it?’

‘The vicar says God is everywhere,’ I said.

Tilly frowned at me.

‘Everywhere.’ I waved my arms around to show her.

‘So why wasn’t He on Mulberry Drive?’

I stared at the row of sunflowers on the far side of the garden. My mother had planted them last spring, and now they stretched above the wall and peered into the Forbes’ garden, like floral spies.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps He was somewhere else.’

‘I hope someone misses me when I die,’ she said.

‘You’re not going to die. Neither of us are. Not until we’re old. Not until people expect it of us. God will keep us safe until then.’