The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

My mother said I was at an awkward age. I didn’t feel especially awkward, so I presumed she meant it was awkward for them.

There was nowhere to escape the heat. It was there every day when we awoke, persistent and unbroken, and hanging in the air like an unfinished argument. It leaked people’s days onto pavements and patios and, no longer able to contain ourselves within brick and cement, we melted into the outside, bringing our lives along with us. Meals, conversations, arguments were all woken and untethered and allowed outdoors.

It felt as though the whole avenue was shifting and stretching, and trying to escape itself.

The graves here were so old, lichen had eaten into who they used to be, and rows of forgotten people stared back at me from headstones that stooped and stumbled like drunks in the earth.

banged it on the church door to get rid of the grass cuttings. I didn’t realize something like that would be allowed.

It was a rubbish answer.

Faith had been trapped within the folds of his clothes, and the air was filled with the scent of tapestry and candles.

and we stared into an engine of cooked flesh and people’s feet. Mr. Forbes stood in front of

I knew them all. I had watched for so long from the margin of their lives, their faces were as familiar as my own. I looked over for a thread of acknowledgment, 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. I 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. I tried to make it enough.

“She was going into number eleven.”

It was before everything happened, but she was sure it was the same table—the table where the decision had been made. Harold sat next to her, and they both stared into the lens with troubled eyes. The photographer had caught them by surprise, she remembered that, someone from the town paper wanting pictures for an article on local color. Of course, they never used it. John Creasy stood behind them, his hands pushed into his pockets, looking out from under a Beatles fringe. Sitting in front of John was that daft clown Thin Brian, with a pint glass in his hand, and Eric Lamb was opposite Harold. Sheila Dakin was on the end—all eyelashes and Babycham.

“You’ll understand when you get older,” I said. Tilly looked up from her socks. “Your birthday’s only a month before mine.”

“She never asked about my mum,” Tilly whispered.

I sometimes wondered if there was ever a time when she wasn’t there.

A horrifying thought came over me that maybe possibly Tilly is Grace’s imaginary friend? But that literally cannot be. Right?

“The baby turned up safe, though, Sheila.” Eric took the glass from her hand. “That’s all that matters.”

???

In the dusk, the houses looked different, exposed somehow, as though they had been stripped of their disguises. They faced each other, like adversaries, and, right at the top, set back from the rest, was number eleven.

I can’t get over this writing.

A library ticket. He stood underneath the streetlamp, and the name on the ticket was caught in liquid, orange light. Mrs. Margaret Creasy.

“How does God know which people are goats and which people are sheep?”

“I think that’s the trouble,” I said, “it’s not always that easy to tell the difference.”

Eye roll

“She was friendly with all the neighbors. Too friendly, really.”

“I mean, she spent a lot of time helping people. Trying to sort out their problems.” The policeman looked down at his notebook. “I see,” he said. “Neighborly.”

It made her happy to see things repaired, and the repairing made John feel safe. Now she was gone, he could imagine the threads beginning to loosen and the edges beginning to lift, and all the holes that would form for his life to fall into.

“What kind of a person harms a child? What kind of evil is that?” says Derek.

“A man like that shouldn’t be allowed to have a camera,”

??

“The only way you’ll get him off the avenue,” she says, “is if he hasn’t got a house to live in.”

“Oh, she’s been taken away all right.” Mrs. Roper leaned forward and fanned herself with a copy of The People’s Friend. “But I don’t think God had anything much to do with it.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” said Mrs. Roper.

“Although she might not have had much choice in the matter.”

“Perhaps that’s why they don’t mix,” said Tilly, “because everyone else is on the other side of the street?”

I freaking love her.

I had never heard my father like this. He was always the one asking questions, waiting for explanations. It felt strange, as though the light had shifted, and I realized that I had only ever read one chapter of a story.

Didn’t have her library card.

“What kind of a man lives with his mother until he’s forty-five?”

lol

“Oh, don’t touch that!” Walter reaches out. “If you open that it will ruin—” The policeman flips open the catch. “Oh dear,” he says. “Look what I just went and did.” “It might be salvageable. If you just give it back to me.” Walter tries to take the camera, but the policeman tips it upside down, and its contents spill onto the concrete. “Me and my clumsy fingers.” He grinds into the film with the edge of his boot. “It looks like we’ll never be able to see that evidence now, doesn’t it, Mr. Bishop?” Walter stares at the concrete. “What do you suggest I do?” he says. The policeman brings his mouth so close, clouds of his breath drift into Walter Bishop’s face. “What I suggest you do, is pay a little less attention to other people’s children.” His eyes work from the ground up. The tired shoes, meal-stained jacket, the threads of yellowed hair. “And pay a little more attention to yourself.”

I’m actually kind of mad that I feel bad for him. I wouldn’t if I didn’t already suspect that he’s innocent. I don’t want to be expecting him to be innocent the whole time. I like to be surprised! Some of this prose is so subtly melodic and metaphoric and other times it’s very METAPHOR IN YOUR FACE, SUBTLE PLOT TWIST THAT ISN’T SUBTLE AT ALL. I don’t like to see plot twists barreling down the pike from miles away. So I hope I’m wrong. Omg he reminds me of that dude from Trial By Journal. The one they try to blame Perry’s disappearance on. Bob. He didn’t talk well and he smelled and looked unkempt. He is the same as Walter.

“It doesn’t always catch the witch.”

I was thinking of my father as well, but I didn’t say so, because that would have made it something which could live on its own outside my head.

tucked my legs into my body and pushed my hair onto my shoulder, and tried to find a way to make us two chapters of the same story.

She’s a sweet girl, give her a bit of time, Lisa, and It wouldn’t kill you just to be nice and You can see how much she looks up to you. I turned to Tilly. “Don’t be embarrassed,” I said, “they don’t know you can hear them.”

But when she left, his secret left too. It walked back with her across the avenue and went through a different front door, and wandered into a different life. He had given the secret its freedom, and a whole new set of thinking had moved into his head—thinking

“But what if I pull it up and it isn’t? What if I make it die, and it was a flower after all?” she said. “What if I make a mistake?”

Eye roll

“I don’t think that’s the point, Gracie. I think the point is, everyone’s allowed to think different things.” Sometimes, you just had to humor Tilly. “You still don’t get it, do you?” I said. She stamped her frown out into the doormat.

I still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owners of you.

Whenever I did have a quarrel with someone, I always felt quite pleased if I was the one who won, but as I walked back into Mrs. Morton’s kitchen that day and listened to Tilly walking very slowly behind me, even though I’d persuaded her to do what I wanted, I really didn’t feel like a winner at all.

I hate that I’m Grace.

“People tend to believe things just because everyone else does.”

“They don’t search for proof, they just search for approval from everyone else.”

And this time the brandy stayed where it was. It wrapped itself around her thoughts and stopped them from pacing the inside of her head, and it sent her misery to sleep, even if it was only for a few hours.

I wondered where this sense of community was. Perhaps it was waiting at the back of Sheila Dakin’s pantry or hidden in the loneliness of Eric Lamb’s shed. I wondered if it sat with May Roper on her crocheted settee, or had scratched itself into the paintwork of Walter Bishop’s rotten windows. Or perhaps it was in all of those places, but I had yet to find it.

“Every day since you were a little baby.”

DUN. DUN. DUNNN.

It was strange how often the past broke into the present like an intruder, dangerous and unwanted. Yet whenever the past was invited in, whenever its presence was requested, it seemed to fade into nothing, and made you wonder if it had ever really existed in the first place.

Everyone was so certain of what had happened, but maybe the present crawled into our memories and disturbed them as well, and perhaps the past wasn’t quite as certain as we would like it to be.