Hilary Bonner: When the Dead Cry Out

The policeman smiled down on her. Normally Karen enjoyed the company of people who were good-humoured and seemed to take things calmly. It wasn’t what she was used to, after all. But on that day she had other things on her mind.

Abruptly she turned her back on the big affable policeman, flung open the wrought-iron gates to her house and ran as fast as she could up the driveway to the front door.

She needn’t have worried about being late for tea. Her mother was always unpredictable. For some weeks now a full high tea had been laid out for Karen’s return from school and Margaret Meadows had given her daughter a lecture on how hurt and offended she was should Karen have been even a few minutes late home. It was the kind of emotional pressure Karen was used to from her mother, and sometimes it had the diverse effect of making her be deliberately and rather perversely late.

But on this day Margaret Meadows had done nothing about tea. Karen’s heart sank. It seemed that her mother was bad with her nerves again. She was sitting morosely at the table in the kitchen, her head bowed, and did not look up as Karen entered the room.

“Are you all right?” Karen asked automatically, although seeing her mother like that really made the question redundant.

Mrs. Meadows made no attempt to respond.

She remained in exactly the same position as Karen walked quietly forward and sat down opposite her at the orange Formica-topped table — a legacy of the mid-sixties, the last time the old house had been decorated or changed in any way. Margaret Meadows still did not look up. Her wispy blonde hair was a mess and had fallen over her face hiding it from view. Karen dropped her shoulders slightly and bent her head to one side so that she could see her mother’s face, or at least most of it. As she had expected, Margaret Meadows’ eyes were red and puffy and her cheeks were damp with tears and smeared with mascara and eyeliner. Her mouth hung open and slack. Lipstick was smudged all around it. Karen knew well enough that her mother, who never rose before she left for school, also never emerged from her bedroom without make-up. Today she would have been considerably better off without it, as it happened, Karen thought.

Aware of her daughter’s scrutiny Margaret Meadows lowered her head even more until her upper body was bent right over and the top of her head was almost touching the table. She was wearing a vibrant pink cardigan over some kind of flimsy floating dress, clothes that seemed totally out of place. But she always dressed like that, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a Barbie doll, Karen had once heard Mr. Peabody remark in the newsagent’s. Mr. Peabody had a rather acerbic turn of phrase and was invariably as direct in everything he did and said as he was in his blatant appraisal of the police presence around Parkview.

Karen preferred to think about Mr. Peabody, or anyone or anything at all that might be a distraction, rather than thinking too much about the state her mother was in. It was one of her ways of coping. Nonetheless she accepted that, somehow or other, it was her job to deal with this. Her father never took any notice at all. He would return from work in an hour or so and if his wife was still crouched over the kitchen table in tears he would just walk away and leave Karen to it.

Still somewhat distracted, Karen noticed that Margaret Meadows had found a screwed-up paper hankie tucked somewhere into her clothing and, conscious at last perhaps both of her daughter’s presence and of the likelihood of smudged residual make-up, was now scrubbing ineffectively at her face with it. Karen reluctantly prepared to turn her full attention back to her mother. At that moment she would actually much rather have been with Mr. Peabody or the fat policeman or her teachers at school or almost anybody who wasn’t totally neurotic, as she had once also heard Mr. Peabody remark about her mother. It had been the first time Karen had ever heard the word, but she had somehow understood at once that it was just another way of describing her mother’s bad nerves. Although how Mr. Peabody knew anything about all that was a mystery to Karen, given that everything that happened within the somewhat crumbling walls of Laurel House remained a carefully guarded family secret.

Almost at once Karen felt terribly disloyal. Her mother wasn’t bad with her nerves all the time. Her mother could be lovely, the loveliest mother anybody could possibly have. It was just that Margaret Meadows couldn’t always cope, and increasingly often Karen wasn’t sure that she could either. She knew that too much was asked of her too often, but she didn’t know how to put this into words that her mother would understand, and she knew that even if she did it wouldn’t do any good.

Karen continued to study this person she loved who was capable of causing her so much distress without having any idea that she was doing so. A half-empty mug of tea was on the table in front of Margaret Meadows. It looked extremely unappetizing; a film had formed on the top of it so it had surely gone cold. The teapot, in its brown-and-orange-patterned cosy, was alongside.

“Do you want me to freshen that up for you?” asked Karen. She had a habit of repeating the exact expressions she heard uttered around her by people much older than her. Sometimes they sounded rather strange emitting from young teenage lips. But much about Karen belied her youth. She had grown up very fast indeed. She’d had to. That had just been the way things were.

Her mother shook her head, still not looking up. With one hand she began to make a gesture downwards which she then seemed to think better of. Karen sighed again and leaned further sideways so that she could peer beneath the table. It was as she expected. A whisky bottle stood on the floor by Margaret Meadows’ feet. There was just an inch or so of amber liquid left in it.

Karen straightened up and then stretched forward across the table so that her head was close to her mother’s bowed one. She could smell the whisky then, on her mother’s breath and from the mug too, she thought. She couldn’t understand why her mother even bothered to attempt to hide the bottle, but it was something she always did. Karen really had no idea why. She reached under the table, picked up the bottle and put it in her school bag. Out of sight out of mind , she thought to herself.

Aloud she said sternly: “I may be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but I think you’ve had more than enough of that.”

Her mother did not protest, she rarely did, neither did she respond. She was quite used to being treated like this by her daughter, quite used to her daughter’s rather quaint phraseology and use of old sayings. Not that her mother drank often, Karen reminded herself, well, not very often. And only when she was bad with her nerves. It was just that when she did she was inclined to empty the bottle.

“Look, Mum,” Karen continued. “Why don’t you go upstairs and have a nice lie-down?”

There was still no response. Wearily Karen leaned back in her chair and found her gaze wandering idly around the big kitchen, a huge cavernous room in a huge cavernous house, which had about it none of the coziness traditionally associated with kitchens. In spite of its size there was no big cooking range, just a small gas cooker. A line of orange Formica-finished units ran along one dark-brown painted wall, another unfortunate legacy of the mid-sixties which contrived to make the north-facing room seem particularly dark and drab. The orange-topped table also wasn’t big enough for the kitchen. It was, however, quite big enough for the three people who lived in the oversized Victorian villa.

Some houses have a warm feeling about them which hits you as soon as you enter. Some houses give you the feeling that nothing bad has ever happened in them, that they have by and large been happy houses. Laurel House was just the opposite. When Karen went to bed at night she always pulled the bedclothes right over her head. That way she could pretend she was somewhere else.