The At Least Game

By Caroline Wood

A family. A secret. An unlikely reappearance from the past. And a killing. Who would shatter the dullness of a quiet cul-de-sac like this? And why?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caroline Wood
• Release date: Aug 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370098507

Caroline Wood

Writing has always come to me more easily than other ways of communicating. Not always helpful or convenient in real life...I still make up stories in my head, as I've done since childhood.Overheard snippets of conversation, or a random word can trigger a story. My brain seems to do this automatically.I like to explore the dark, strange or the unexpected behind apparently ordinary life.The nice curtains hiding a corpse on a rocking horse. That sort of thing.But I'm less drawn to blatant horror. Instead, I like to look into the unsettling sense of things being askew, unreliable. A little bit twisted.

Book preview

PRESENT

Items from local newspaper

Ex-pupil of special school found dead in respectable residential area.

Neighbourhood in shock after the body of a local man described as a ‘stalker’ found. Police offer reassurance to residents following gruesome discovery in quiet cul-de-sac. Case treated as suspicious. History of problem past begins to emerge.

Missing woman lived in same area.

Police appeal to the public for information on Mrs Dorothy Leonard, 63. Reported missing from her home in the Hugheswood district last month. Family describe Mrs Leonard as vulnerable. Concern grows as no sightings reported.

Kim

So many times we had to listen to that bloody story about what life was like when she was a little girl. All the stuff about how poor they were. How rotten granddad was to them. How they had no toys, no fun, ragged clothes and ice inside the windows in the winter. It got on my nerves. All except for the bits about The At Least Game, the chicken toy, and the baby. Not that we knew about the baby until much later. But when we did, it made all the other stuff fall into place.

It made us all sit up and listen. Not like when she went on and on about coats on the bed to keep warm, and cutting mould off the bread. That was all in the background, like music in a lift. You don’t hear it even though you’ve had it played to you while you're trapped in a box. Then, once you get out and walk away, you’ve got no idea what the music was. Mum’s endless stories were like that. Didn’t even reach your brain. They were so overdone that you had no idea what she’d said. Blah, blah, blah. And then, out of the middle of all that, she goes and says that she’d had a baby. They took it away and she never saw it again and she’d never got over it and now she wanted to die. And that was all while we were having our Sunday tea.

Dad almost choked on his boiled egg. Little yellow crumbs flew across the table. Made me laugh until I saw his face. He'd gone white and had that serious look, except he had to cough because of the egg. So he couldn’t clench his teeth like he did when he was angry. Mum ignored him and carried on talking. She’d finally got our attention. But it looked like she didn’t care. She would of kept on anyway; she was in a sort of trance. Not blinking much, staring at her salad. Her fingers were rolling a bit of bread into a ball, which she pressed flat every now and then. It looked like the plasticine we used to have at school, for making little models. I used to eat most of mine, but I liked rolling it over the desk first, to make it nice and soft. Like mum did with her bread.

What do you want to bring that up for? Dad swiped the sprayed egg yolk off the table, leaving little skid marks on the surface. Any other time, Mum would of leapt up and got the dishcloth. Would of nudged us with her elbows while we tried to carry on eating, as she rushed to remove any spillage. She’d make weary tutting noises while she scrubbed and scoured. It would be a major domestic incident. But she went on talking.

He’s to blame for all this, she said. Your granddad was the one who made me give my baby away.

For Christ sake, Connie, dad said. Leave it.

Mum pressed the bread ball flat again. She kept her middle finger on it. You could see that she was pressing down hard because her nail went white and her knuckle was stiff.

And now he’s back, she said. After all these years. I’ve got my boy back.

Got her boy back? What bloody boy? That’s what I wanted to know.

Pack it in, dad said. He stood up. I mean it, Connie. That’s enough. He gestured at me and Eebe with the back of his hand. Go on, you two. Go to your rooms. I don’t know what’s got into your mother but she’s talking rubbish.

But we didn’t go. And mum didn’t stop talking. Dad gave up straight away. He did a big sigh and sat down, like he knew there was nothing he could do. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes. Mum didn’t look at him. Didn’t look at any of us. Her eyes were on the slices of cucumber and limp lettuce on her plate. It was our regular Sunday tea, even though none of us liked it much. Straight from the fridge, it was. No flavour and all waterlogged from mum running it under the tap. We ate in the gloomy quiet that always settled on us as the weekend came to an end. But this time, mum’s cucumber was going to dry out and get scraped into the bin. Even her favourite - sliced beetroot – was going leathery.

Went and got myself pregnant, she said. That’s shocked you, hasn’t it? We didn’t say anything. Dad still had his eyes closed. I looked at Eebe but she wouldn’t look at me. Only eighteen, I was. But I could have looked after him. Your granddad had other plans, though. She pinched the bread into a ball again and squeezed it between her thumb and forefinger. Oh yes, he made his mind up. And that was that. There was no talking him out of it. No reasoning with him. Nothing I could do.

Is it one of your stories, mum? I kicked her foot under the table, tried to cheer her up, tried to make her snap out of all this rubbish she was saying. Dad shook his head for ages. I knew then that it wasn’t a story and my stomach went tight. It made big churning gurgles, like when you’ve got wind. But I didn’t want to trump, for a change.

Of course, Eebe had to chip in. I could tell she was as shocked as me but she pretended to be all calm as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

You do know it’s not possible, don’t you? she said. She didn’t look pleased with herself or anything like that but she did have that way of seeming as if she was right. Nobody said anything so Eebe carried on. You can’t get yourself pregnant. It's a physical and biological impossibility.

What? Dad said it without looking up.

Eebe took a deep breath – more like a sigh. It was how she did her clever voice. Half annoyed because other people are stupid and half pleased that she knew more than them.

Well, she said, it’s obvious. Nobody can get themselves pregnant. Why do people say such stupid things? Some people anyway -

And that was it. Bang. Dad hit the table with his fist. Made all the remaining egg crumbs jiggle about.

Don’t you dare start making smart-arse remarks, he said. He looked so cross and pent up. I wanted to cuddle him, but I was too scared to move. Just for once, keep your thoughts to yourself, Elizabeth.

I turned my head and had a quick look at Eebe. She’d got words stacked up in a pile behind her teeth. Her mouth was clenched together so hard, though, it looked like nothing would ever get out again.

Mum didn’t seem to notice. Any other time, she’d snap Eebe’s head off for something like that. She’d say something nasty. Eebe would come back with sarcastic things that I didn’t understand, and me and dad would keep out of it. Or try and make a joke so they’d stop having a go at each other. That didn’t work often so it was best to leave them to it. It never lasted long anyway because they were both so horrible to each other that they had to end it by going silent. Otherwise, they’d say worse and worse things. But the silence could go on for ages. Especially from mum. She sealed her mouth up and didn’t ever forget that she wasn’t supposed to be talking to Elizabeth. Or dad. Or me. Even Bill had the silent treatment sometimes. I don’t know how she managed to keep it up. I tried to do it once or twice. But the minute you want something, or think of something funny, or you do a big thunderclap of a trump, you forget and start talking again. Looking at Eebe’s face at the tea table that Sunday, it seemed like she'd stay silent for the rest of her life. I didn’t like the idea of that and it made me feel even more upset and funny inside. Dad was angry, mum was in a world of her own and Eebe had gone in her shell and put a barbed wire fence up in front of her. The only thing I could think of to make things better was to burp. A big, loud one, to make them all laugh. And then everything would be all right. I could make myself burp by swallowing air, then making it come up again like un-popped bubbles. It hurt my chest sometimes but it was a good trick. It wasn't funny this time, though. Even I didn’t laugh. One of my best belches and it went to waste. Nobody seemed to notice.

Well, go on then, dad said to mum. You’ve started. God knows why. But you have. So, you might as well carry on. Tell them. Go on. Tell them the whole thing. Let’s get this over and done with.

I wanted to help, so I tapped mum’s foot with mine again.

Come on mum, tell us. You might as well now you’ve told us the main thing. About the baby. Now tell us the rest. We won’t think worse of you. Will we, Eebe? Eebe didn’t say anything to that. She thought worse of mum all the time so this wasn’t going to make any difference to her. But she could of gone along with me and acted as if she was trying to encourage mum. She could at least of done that. Mum coughed and it shook her out of her dream.

Nothing much else to say, she said. Talk about disappointing. I wanted to kick her again, hard. I hate it when people do that. They tell you the beginning of something and then go all bloody mysterious and won't say the rest.

There must be more to it than that, mum, I said. You can’t say you had a baby and not tell us all the details. What happened to the baby? Why did granddad make you give it away? Can we see pictures? Did it look like you? Did it look like me? Can I meet him? He is my brother after all.

And that's when mum told us. This wasn’t just another one of her stories. It felt real. Like she didn’t need to make anything up or add bits in or tell outright lies, as Eebe sometimes said she did. I don’t think mum told lies but I do think she sometimes made things up, because the stories changed. But perhaps she forgot things or remembered them in different ways. This one, though, was all set in her mind. You could tell she hadn’t forgotten anything and that she had been over it lots of times. And you would, wouldn’t you? If you’d had a baby and your dad had made you give it away. I kept thinking of mum standing in a corridor with a tiny new-born baby in her arms. Mum's got a green coat on in my mind, and the baby's wrapped in a thin, lacy shawl. It hangs over mum’s arm and down the front of her coat and it’s shaking because mum is crying so much. And the baby is crying as well. Granddad is standing next to mum and he’s got this stern look on his face. His cheeks, red and shiny like always, make him look scary instead of a nice old man. All that went through my head as mum was telling us.

As she went on with her story, I saw it all happen in my head. And I kept seeing it afterwards. And hearing it as well. I could hear the baby cry and see the drips falling off the end of mum's nose. But it was an old story. It all happened such a long time ago. And that was the hardest thing to understand because it made things seem different. All the time me and Eebe had been little girls there had always been this other child. This