The whittled-down hag had a name, reflected Kevin as he watched the robotic movements of the gossip dispensers behind the post office counter. He was growing bored and tetchy and knew his features would be contorting into a teenage pout despite the work he’d put into his aloof look. Occasionally pausing for tea and breath, the dispensers unravelled coupons, bills, complex questions of size and weight and the muddled lives of all who appeared before them. Kevin now knew that Sissy was in her eighties, a widow, half-crippled by some bone-wasting disease and working herself to death to look after a son who had some affliction that none dared name.
Not that Kevin had ever asked about Sissy; but there was nothing wrong with his ears apart from the fact that they were five sizes too big for his head. His mum sent him to the post office almost daily and there was always a queue of gossips waiting to pay all their household bills with small change and postal orders. He’d once mumbled into his collar that it might be a good idea to buy more than one book of stamps or pint of milk at a time, but his mum’s hurt silence had been worse than the argument he’d expected.
Sissy was so familiar he’d barely looked at her. She was as much a part of the landscape as the railway sidings or bus shelter that he passed every day. Yet there were always small changes: ‘EGY IS A PEDO,’ proclaimed the wall of the shelter barely a week after the latest municipal sand-blasting.
That morning, clambering on the boulders fractured and heaved aside by Victorian navvies to make a railway that barely outlived them, Kevin had seen her trudging up the pot-holed road that climbed out of the village. Already bored in the second week of the holidays, he’d frozen at the sight of a passing stranger, embarrassed that he’d thought of nothing more adult to do at sixteen years of age than play on the rocks.
Yet she’d remained consumed by her labour. Swaddled in anorak, ankle-length skirt, tights and boots, she defied the July sun. She walked with a drunken rhythm, her left hip dipping with every other step and her jaw and shoulders bunched as if against a gale. A basset hound scuttled panting behind her on the end of a taut lead, belly scraping the ground and neck bulging in front of its collar. With her other hand, she drew a trolley-bag crammed with milk, bread and potatoes, all threatening to escape through a burst zip.
Kevin had winced and slumped into a shady hollow as the words ‘EGY IS A PEDO’ connected themselves to the woman. She was the mother of the weirdo he and his mates had known as ‘Egbert’, ‘Egghead’ or just ‘Eggie’. Years before, he’d been a haunting presence in the village, with his sheer forehead, goggling spectacles, half-mast trousers and disintegrating slippers. Some days he’d stare through the kids to another world so blissful that his smile leaked spit into his patchy stubble. On other days, he’d buy booze and cigs for the older kids and tell the rest about the enemy shock troops he’d killed hand to hand when he worked for the SAS or whatever elite organisation he’d been reading about in the mobile library that week.
Kevin hadn’t known Eggie that well. By the time he was old enough to hang around with the smokers and boozers, the police had been seen at Eggie’s house and he’d stopped coming out. Some of the older girls had been interviewed by soft-spoken police women in t-shirts and jeans about times when Eggie had paid for hugs and kisses with cigs, chocolate and cider.
After a few months of quarantine, the girls had been released to share with their mates the mysteries of the Sexual Offences Act. Eggie had apparently been put on a special register. To some he was a pervert, to others a harmless moron. Kevin’s mum, making a dozen phone calls, had called him “that nonce”.
One summer night, six of them had lingered on the bowling-green, needled by the heat and midges and aglow with cider and the scent of cut grass. James McCluskey’s older brother had been inside for GBH. Nonces were lower than other criminals, who could do what they liked to them. They needed special protection from the screws. Kevin almost asked how much harm a bloodthirsty convict could do with a screw.
His big idea had made Kevin splutter into shrill laughter, which he stifled with a cough when he remembered that everyone else had a deeper laugh. The others had enjoyed the joke too much to notice. ‘Egging Eggie’ had passed for high wit in that circle.
His blood had surged with an excitement that throbbed at his temples and made his palms prickle. Squatting in the bushes outside Eggie’s house, he’d handed out the eggs pilfered from his mum’s fridge, fumbling and dropping the odd one into the dry mulch. The terraced cottage had seemed to exhale decay with its peeling paintwork and luminous smears of moss from fractured guttering.
“He deserves it,” James McCluskey had said, flashing a grin from the shadows.
“Let him who is not a nonce cast the first chucky egg,” Kevin had added, grimacing at a vague memory of Sunday school as the others sputtered laughter like a firing squad.
They’d all leapt into the street and lobbed their eggs. Shell and strands of yolk crawled down the glass and rotting wood. They’d shouted “spas” and “paedo” and “nonce” as they ran. Kevin’s lungs had jolted laughter out of him that didn’t feel like his. He’d seen Sissy; hobbling lop-sided out of the door, gripping the wall, shaking her stick, slipping in the slick of yolk.
“Let us alone, we do you no harm,” she’d screamed, her mill-worker’s accent frozen in time. Behind her, Eggie stood in a dressing gown, spectacles fizzing yellow from the streetlights and jaw churning.
That was the only time Kevin’s mum had ever slapped him, right after he’d pointed out that she’d called Eggie a nonce too. He hadn’t expected to cry for Eggie, nor for the tears to burn like the imprint of her palm. The lecture had lasted a week, with day long pauses for breath. Kevin “shouldn’t earwig”, nor, “take things out of context”. “Taking the law into your own hands,” was worse. His gravest sin had been “judging others”, when nobody knew “what that poor woman had been through.”
Scraping moss with a chewed thumbnail, he watched Sissy dwindle into distance to leave her memory itching behind his eyes. He imagined the braver version of himself he’d like to be. That Kevin would run after Sissy and find just the words to make things right. That Kevin would know what he wanted to do at college and might even have a girlfriend who didn’t find him cute, nice or funny.
Standing, he dusted off his jeans and squared his shoulders. A fresh scar in the rock caught his eye, a love heart bearing the words ‘JAMIE M SHAGD TRACY D’. He laughed like a punctured balloon and felt better about seeing less of his old friends. Even in their shade, he’d begun to sweat.
Lacking any other impulse, he dragged himself up the hill to the cottage he’d walked past a hundred times but hadn’t looked at since the egging. A coat of white emulsion had been daubed onto the door and lower window frame, but the first floor windows were rotting without disguise. The decision had nearly slipped his grasp when he noticed that the door was ajar and a muted cacophony of thrash metal leaking out.
Shuffling forward, he found himself consumed by how much his trainers pinched his feet. The music stopped, then resumed as thumping techno; his pulse matching the new rhythm. As he clenched and raised a fist, the door swung open.
Eggy stood there, looking no older and no younger. His hair was as knotted as a bird’s nest, his beard thickening and speckled with crumbs. He wore only a threadbare football shirt above his boxers. He beamed and nodded.
“Hello,” Kevin stammered. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. Do you remember me?”
“Alfred, is someone there?” said a faltering, female voice from within. Eggy’s smile stretched even further and his nodding picked up its tempo.
“Hello,” Kevin said, looking for a deep and forthright voice and finding only a falsetto. He tried to peer around Eggy’s thick chest and belly. “Is that Sissy?”
The front room of the cottage was lit only by the flickering glare of the TV and whatever sunlight penetrated the curtains. His nostrils twitched at the odour; just cooked baked beans mingling with stale sweat, ageing dog and the firework tang of electrics left on for days.
“Clear off,” she shouted. “I’ll have no teenage louts in my house.”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to talk about….”
“I don’t care what you want. Leave us alone.”
Shadows twisted into human form as she raised her head and spat out her words. She sagged on a sofa, face waxy and shrunken in a mass of clothes, blankets and cushions. Plates, mugs and magazines were stacked on every surface, leaving only a space on the coffee table beside her where half a dozen pill bottles stood back to back like besieged soldiers. Still bobbing and grinning, Eggy pushed the door closed.
The letter took him all afternoon and a dozen attempts:
'Dear Social Services,
I’m sorry to trouble you Sir or Madam but I am bothered about a lady up my road who has a psychiatric son.
I think he has been in trouble with the law but that is years ago now. What I am worried about is that she is not well and very old and shouldn’t have to look after them both.
She has a bad hip and when she is not fetching and carrying and cooking she is lying on the sofa not looking after herself. The house is very dirty and I am not judging when I say that.
I feel very bad that people don’t look after their neighbours as well as they should.
Hoping you can help.
Kevin Anders'
He folded the letter using a ruler, printed the address neatly on the envelope and ensured the first class stamp was flush with the edges. Dropping it into the post-box, he breathed deeply and allowed himself to imagine that he’d set flame to a beacon that would bring official help galloping over the hills. His work done, he retreated into the summer.
The bus shelter was demolished and replaced with an open-sided assembly of plexiglas and steel less suited to skulking and spray-paint. Kevin waited there most mornings for the bus that delivered him to his summer job in the warehouse where he broadened his shoulders and thickened his skin. In what seemed like a heartbeat, he abandoned the kid who’d kicked around the village running empty errands for his mum and fretting about the past. Only from the passenger seat of a friend’s banger did he notice the workmen redecorating Sissy’s cottage. His mum was insistent she hadn’t seen Sissy dragging herself up or down the hill for weeks and couldn’t imagine why he kept asking.
On the last day of the holidays, an empty hearse was labouring up the hill as he walked to the post office for the first time in weeks to pay in his wages. The queue was long enough for him to hear the latest instalment in full. Then he stood for what felt like hours, staring unblinking at an advert for premium bonds and motioning others to move past him.
“I know, I know,” said the cashier to her next customer. “Poor old thing. Some young copper found her on the sofa. Had to put the door in when next door complained about the smell. She’d been there a while. I reckon she had nothing to go on for when they took the son away. Maybe they should have just left them alone.”
