Cat step, p.1
Cat Step, page 1
CAT STEP
Alison Irvine
dead ink
Copyright © Alison Irvine November 2020
All rights reserved.
The right of Alison Irvine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Dead Ink, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.
ISBN 978-1-911585-62-6
Cover design by Luke Bird
lukebird.co.uk
Cover photgraphy by Tal Heres at Unsplash
www.deadinkbooks.com
CAT STEP
Alison Irvine
dead ink
For Jan and Vic
Part One
1.
Emily will ask me one day about Lennoxtown. She may discover that she and I lived there briefly when she was on the cusp of four and five and I’ll need to have answers when she asks me why we didn’t stay. I’ll tell her something of the story. She’ll believe me because I’m her mum. By then I may have made sense of her dad.
The truth is Emily and I danced a demi-detourné. We stepped up to Lennoxtown then turned away from it, a half turn, even changing feet so that a new foot was in front. Yet there was no ballerina’s precision or elegance; it was ugly.
Lennoxtown is hard to turn away from, I’ll give it that. Those hills. You catch them as you come round a bend, half submerged in cloud or crossed with sun and shadow or shining with the gold that comes off the grass you get up there. I imagined us climbing them, the Campsie Fells, picnicking, exploring, lying out in good air. But we came in March and winter wasn’t over and it rained and rained and my plans didn’t work out.
There was one thing I could have done differently. My mum said I should leave Emily with her and go alone – have a break, live a little, earn some money if there was any to be earned – and I nearly accepted, I nearly thought it the most sensible of all the options I had. I paused – en l’air – extension – and then took her with me.
I use ballet terms but I was never a ballerina. I did the training and I almost had the technique, but not the physique or that extra porcelain quality. I was a dancer, a very good dancer: a tapper, a hoofer, a high-kicker. I wore feathers and sequins and American Tan tights and travelled the world on cruise ships. I will tell Emily that.
This is what I won’t tell her: she had been awake between the hours of two and three the night before, crying and thrashing with a temperature and a sore head. I gave her paracetamol and put a cold flannel on her forehead and thought if we ever got back to sleep it would do us good to lie long into the morning. But she woke at six and although she was calmer she was weak and didn’t want anything other than television. In the end she didn’t even want that. I tried to curl up with her on my bed and help her get back to sleep but she wouldn’t settle.
We had nothing in. The bread was gone, the milk was off. She liked fish fingers, and I knew if we drove to the Co-op I could buy some fish fingers and more milk and bread and she would fall asleep on the way home. I knew it would work for her. It always had.
I told her she could wear her dressing gown over her nightie and I’d buy her a treat. I brushed her hair but I didn’t wash her face or clean her teeth. I found her wellies because they were easy to put on and I tied her dressing gown. See how I’m telling it? I had to tell it in this detail many times to many people.
I’d forgotten about the roadworks and the temporary traffic lights and of course by the time the lights turned green Emily was asleep. I wondered if I should drive straight home but I had a queue of cars behind me so I had to go on and once I was through the roadworks I was two minutes from the Co-op and we did need fish fingers and milk and bread and other things I’d remembered like toilet roll and toothpaste. So I made the decision to go on.
I couldn’t get a space close to the entrance so we parked at the back of the car park under the fir trees where the crows had their nests. When I cut the engine I thought the sudden lack of noise might wake her as it often did, but it didn’t. I turned in my seat and checked her. Her lips were parted. Her cheeks were red. She’d kicked off her wellies and peeled her socks from her feet and I could see black hairs on her shins. I thought about carrying her in, but it would have woken her and, God, to wake a sleeping child – an ill child at that – and then drive for hours afterwards trying to get her back to sleep was not an option. I have driven around with her fighting sleep as if it was death closing down on her.
I opened a window to give her an inch of air. I locked the car. I ran to the Co-op. Perhaps I was longer than the few minutes I thought I’d taken. How long does it take to pick up milk, bread, fish fingers and toilet roll? And a slab of chocolate. And cheese and toothpaste. And a Freddo for her treat. I told the woman at the checkout that I didn’t need a bag – and then I changed my mind, so I watched her pack my bag, gave her my Co-op card, paid for my shopping and ran from the shop.
When I came out of the Co-op I saw there were people standing by my car looking towards a running boy. Cap, jeans, red top, that’s all I saw: the sprinting back of him and the flailing soles of his trainers. Something had happened.
‘There was a thief,’ a woman said. ‘He’s run off. We know who he is. Greg’s talking to the police.’ She pointed to a man who was on his phone, pacing. The man looked at me as he spoke and then turned away towards the traffic on Main Street.
I needed to check Emily.
‘He’s a menace,’ the man said, off his phone and making me listen. He pushed his hair back with both hands, shoved his phone into his pocket, adrenalin, urgency all over him.
‘But the car’s not even fancy,’ I said.
‘You left something on your front seat.’
I’d left my phone. I’d put it on the passenger seat to save me carrying it in. The window was smashed but not shattered. Emily was asleep. Fast asleep. She’d slept through it.
‘You can’t leave anything in your car round here,’ the man said. ‘There’s a ring of them. They’ll steal it and sell it on.’
‘At this time of the morning?’ I said, which struck me as an odd thing to say but it was too early to have my car broken into, surely? The sky was weak, the crows were barely awake and the clock on the sandstone church behind us showed only half past eight.
I looked at the people around me. The man and two women, one with a dog on a lead. I checked on Emily again. She was unhurt. My phone was still on the seat, the window could be fixed. These people had stepped in to help me.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Nothing. They looked at Emily and then at me.
‘You left her in the car by herself,’ one of the women said. Her dog pulled on its lead and barked at another dog across the car park. She told it to sit and in the same tone of voice said to me, ‘Anything could have happened.’
‘She was asleep,’ I said.
‘That’s even worse.’
I sensed the fullness of her judgement, in increments, like the gradual lightening of the morning.
The other woman spoke. ‘My niece is a social worker. She tells me this is a problem with some parents. You know it’s against the law?’
I unlocked the car and opened the boot and put my shopping down.
‘Please don’t make me feel guilty. She’s not well. She’s been up all night. I know my daughter.’
‘And look at her legs. Look at what you can see. Does she even have underwear on?’ The woman peered through the window at Emily.
I got angry then and when I turned my head I felt the shooting stars I’d been having for days. I told them to get away from the window and of course she had underwear on but when I checked at home, she didn’t. She wasn’t indecent, she was covered, even though her dressing gown had ridden up to her thighs, but they will have used that against me too, that her legs were exposed.
‘I’m taking my daughter home now,’ I said and went to open my door. ‘She’s ill. I know what’s best.’
‘Don’t touch the door!’ the man shouted. ‘That’s the police here now.’ He raised a hand and beckoned the police car to where we stood. ‘You’ll have to stay. They’ll want statements from us. They might be able to get the little shite if they have enough evidence.’
The woman with the dog nodded and told her dog to stay.
The police, one man and one woman, asked whose car it was. I said it was mine which was almost true. They didn’t need to know it was my mum’s. They must have seen Emily asleep but they made no comment. The policewoman took a notebook and pen from her pocket and wrote. Voices crackled through their radios.
The man gave a description of a kid aged eighteen or nineteen. ‘I know who he is, I know his name.’ He seemed desperate to get him arrested.
‘Did anyone else see him?’
They nodded.
‘You?’ the policewoman asked me.
‘The back of him.’
She made me describe what I saw then asked if anything was stolen.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I got to him before he could take anything,’ the man said.
They asked for our names and addresses, they took phone numbers. I told the police more than I’d told anyone in the whole time we’d been in Lennoxtown; that I was living in one of the houses at the foot of the Campsies, Audrey Watt’s old flat; that I was there for a month or two
Emily slept on. I noticed people in the car park looking at us. I put my hand in my pocket and felt for my keys.
‘I’d like to go now,’ I said.
‘We’re just finishing up,’ the policeman said.
The policewoman pressed her fingers to the crack in the glass. ‘She can’t drive with the window like that.’
‘I’ll get it fixed.’
‘It’s not safe to drive.’
‘But I need to go. She’s not well.’
The police looked at Emily asleep in the car.
‘I’ll get it fixed. I won’t touch it.’
The woman’s dog barked again and strained against its lead.
‘She could wind the window all the way down,’ the policeman said to his colleague.
They looked at Emily.
‘Do that,’ the policewoman said. ‘And get it seen to right away.’
I was climbing into the car when one of the women said, ‘I want to report something else.’ She looked at me and then turned her body away from me.
I sat down and listened for the sound of Emily’s breath. I heard her soft snores. I heard a bus coming down Main Street and crows cawing from high branches. I felt the tingling stars in my head again. And then I knew I was being looked at so I stepped out of the car and faced them.
‘Is this true?’ the policewoman said.
‘That I left Emily in the car? Yes,’ I said.
‘I’m not saying this to get her in trouble but anything could have happened, it was a dangerous situation.’ The woman was agitated and tears were in her eyes. She squeezed her fingers as she told the police that they had watched the car for five, ten minutes, with Emily alone in it. It wasn’t ten minutes.
‘Is this true?’ the policewoman said again.
‘It wasn’t ten minutes.’
The policewoman turned to a fresh page in her notebook.
‘I’ll pop in and get the paper,’ the man said to the woman with the dog. He said goodbye to the police and walked backwards a few steps, pointing his finger at me. ‘They’ll catch him. Mind you don’t leave anything in your car.’ I think he was talking about my phone.
Emily was still asleep.
‘She was sick,’ I said to the policewoman. I hated how feeble my voice sounded.
‘It is an offence to leave a child unattended in a car.’
‘I’ve never done it before.’ That was a lie. A straight lie.
‘What if he’d stolen the car?’ said the woman.
‘Why are you still here?’ I said and I hated her. I hated Lennoxtown, the rain that accompanied the blustery wind, the stupid kid in trainers who’d tried to steal my phone so early in the morning, and I hated my stupid self. I watched the policewoman’s pen as she made notes. I watched her eyes, saw her turn to her colleague to talk privately.
The woman’s dog yapped.
‘Give us a few minutes please,’ the policewoman said to the two women. ‘Then we’ll take your statements.’
She turned to me and I was no longer the victim of a crime, I was the perpetrator. I saw the cold switch in her eyes and no matter what I said – she needed to stay asleep, I was gone for all of three minutes – I felt loathed by her.
‘We could prosecute you,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve committed an offence.’
‘But there was no harm done. Look at her.’
‘You committed an offence all the same.’
She studied me, then consulted with her colleague, then studied me again. It was quiet in the car park with the crows in the tree tops and the church looming on the high hill and the bystanders waiting their turn to talk.
‘Expect a call from social services,’ she said. ‘And we’ll be in touch about the attempted theft. You can go.’
It felt like a punch. I closed the car door and wished for consolation from someone who knew me – my mum, Robbie, someone, anybody – but there was only Emily and she was asleep. As soon as I started the engine Emily woke and said in her straightforward way, as if she’d never slept, ‘Mummy, there’s a taxi.’ She was right. Driving along Main Street was a Glasgow taxi, a black cab, like they have in London, and I thought someone must have paid a fortune to come all the way from the city to Lennoxtown in that.
While I waited to turn out of the car park, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw the police talking to the two women. The man was standing next to them holding a newspaper. I stretched my left hand behind me, felt for Emily’s leg and gave it a squeeze.
‘You didn’t see any of that did you? You didn’t hear anything in the car park?’ I noticed the hardness in my voice.
‘Any of what?’ she said. ‘I’m hungry, Mummy, is there something for me to eat?’
2.
The doctor checked Emily’s ears, her lungs and her heart and as soon as she checked her throat she diagnosed tonsillitis and gave her penicillin. I was pleased her heart was okay. We had to register as new patients in the surgery above the library. From the waiting room I saw the Co-op and the parking bay where the bystanders and police had surrounded my car. I saw the steep sides of the Campsies and the main road that lay like a line drawn from east to west at the foot of the hills. Our flat was off this main road, on one of a cluster of streets that curled into dead ends or abutted fences and farmland. Ours was a street of cream coloured houses and flats on whose external walls the windows seemed strangely small, as if built intentionally to shut out the glare of the sweeping sky. From our living room window, because we were a floor up, we had a good view of all that sky and looked down on hedges and paved driveways.
Later that day I let Emily lie on the sofa with the television on and I stood outside, cold without a jacket, while a glazier fixed my car window. Was it wise of me to leave Emily in the flat while I was on the pavement below – I don’t know – but there was only one of me and I didn’t leave her long anyway. I left the front door open. She could have come down the stairs and found me.
‘It’s a safe area, really. You were unlucky,’ the man said. Then he turned to look at the Campsies. ‘You can almost feel them breathe from here.’ The cloud was high and grey and the muted burgundies and browns of the hillside gave the afternoon a peaceful feel. I told him of Emily’s frustration at the fenced-off field at the end of a cul de sac around the corner.
‘Take the Crow Road out of Lennoxtown,’ he said. ‘You’ll get a good run up there.’
I said I would.
He told me his office would call to take payment from my card. I tried not to think about money.
After he drove away I stood on Audrey’s doorstep, our temporary home, and looked into the windows of surrounding houses. I saw no one, only curtains or blinds or reflections of clouds. I liked living this close to the Campsies. I liked the way the hills reared up from the backs of gardens and almost smothered us with green, so unlike the bricks and cluttered rooftops of our old street in London. I liked the fir trees that lined the foot of the fells too, and thought the cool air under their branches would be good to smell.
I didn’t expect the utter isolation. Not a person spoke to me. People must have known Audrey. She’d lived in the same flat for decades, yet her neighbours didn’t seem curious about us, not even the man who lived below. I thought someone would want to poke around the rooms, asking to keep items of hers that perhaps she’d promised them or taken loan of and never returned. But no. This is what we came for – it’s what I wanted, I reminded myself and climbed the stairs from the front door to Emily.
She was sleeping. Strands of her hair were caught in the corner of her mouth so I picked them free and put the backs of my fingers to her hot cheeks. I squeezed myself next to her on the sofa and pulled her towards me so her head lay in my lap. Her fringe needed a cut. I wished I had scissors – I knew where they were, they were in the kitchen drawer – but I didn’t have them or a pen or a book or anything useful so I watched CBeebies, the sound from the television so low I could barely catch the words. It was a rest.
