A Short Story: Glass  

(Published by New Writing North alongside the work of other writers who live and work in the Durham Region.)

You can download this story here - Glass.pdf

PC - Right click "Save Target As"
Mac - CTRL-Click, "Save Target As"
(Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader - download from here)

Bettina sat very still, disturbed by a movement somewhere above her, on the roof. Then she heard another, more muffled, persistent sound. She closed her eyes and saw a soft, padded body that rolled from the apex of the roof then stopped, lodged against one of the big vicarage chimneys. 

Her hand went towards the telephone then pulled away. Thomas would not exactly say she was an over-imaginative fool, but his voice would be drenched in its usual purring kindness, its characteristic moderation. These days telephoning Thomas was a velvet-lined dead end. He lived in fear of her dark feelings and would rather drown in his good works than come home and find himself threshing about in her despair.

Phoning her doctor would be another dead end. He would come all right! He’d fill her full of pills, make her sleep for two days and forget everything. Including her name. And Orlando’s name. And the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. They’d get out their clip-boards then, all right. Didn’t that happen the other time?
Bettina made her way through the charity sacks in the hall to the kitchen where she cleared a small space in the clutter on the kitchen table so she could settle down there with her cup of tea. Now she could hear the man overhead properly. A shadow loomed across the skylight. Shoes scraped and crunched on the flat roof . 
She took a deep breath, reached up to the top shelf of the dresser and took down her glass egg. She rolled it between her hands to warm it then held it up to catch the light from the skylight. The white spiral embedded within it started to shimmer; she could feel it pulsing against her palm.

The egg was a present from Orlando’s godmother, who always bought gifts made in Sunderland. Local support was her watchword. Thomas had always been full of praise for her. Despite this, the egg was Bettina’s favourite thing. It had certainly helped her to survive. Now, warmed by her hand, it started to buzz and hum. Then her body began to vibrate in tune with the egg and a bubble of light started in her solar plexus and started to radiate outwards. Floating.

The floating feeling gave her the courage to look upwards and through the skylight she saw the shadowy outline of a body. She held the egg up towards the shadow: a temple offering. At that point the air was rent with a great cracking sound. A body, bundled in a hooded parka, hurtled past her in an eruption of glass, wood and dust, and dropped fair and square on the kitchen table. The boy lay very still, measuring his length on the six foot table. Shards of glass sat in the folds of his thick parka and a gash on his cheek was dripping blood. He was young - fifteen perhaps - and his sandy hair tumbled about his shoulders like the rays of the sun. His eyes were closed and he was out to the world. 

Bettina reached out and eased his fingers away from the heavy screwdriver that he still clasped in his hand. Then, putting the egg in her mouth for safety, she rooted in a cupboard for some bits of old clothesline to tie his hands and his feet to the table legs. 

Just as she – an ex-Guide who had always Been Prepared - finished tying her very effective reef knots, the boy’s eyes fluttered open and he came to and started struggling against the ropes. His eyes widened with fear as he saw her looming above him, egg in mouth. ‘Jesus!’ he said.

‘Jesus?’ She removed the egg from her mouth. ‘This is just the house to be saying that,’ she said. The egg was warm and wet now. It had stopped vibrating.

‘How’s that?’ he said, relieved that her face, without the bulging egg, looked relatively normal.

‘Didn’t you see the sign at the front gate? This is a vicarage?’

He whistled. ‘Front gate? Never went down the front. I hitched down here from Gateshead, hopped across the dual carriageway and came across the gardens and in the back. This is the biggest house in this row. Good pickin’s in big houses. Me, I like Sunderland. Big houses, middle sized houses, small streets and the sea, always the sea. It’s got a canny buzz about it, Sunderland. But a vicarage? Looks like I’m wasting me time..’ He pulled hard against his bonds. ‘No need for these missis. Never hurt a soul in my life. I’m tellen yer.’ He opened his sapphire blue eyes really wide.

‘How would I know that?’

‘Teck my word for it.’

She laughed then. The laugh radiated round her head and suffused her body, making her feel lighter again. She looked down at her egg, rolling it from one hand to the other.

‘What’s that then? That thing in yehr hand?’

‘An egg, idiot! Don’t you know an egg when you see one?’

‘I thought yeh wor incubating it when I saw yeh with it in yehr mouth. Don’t some animals do that with their young?’ His face imploded in a combined nod-and-wink and lost it’s built in beauty. 

‘Yeh dinnet seem like any vicar’s wife to me, missis.’

She laughed again and pushed back her thick unkempt hair. Perhaps she should untie the boy. He hardly seemed dangerous.

‘Let’s loose, missis,’ he said softly. 

She nearly did as he said, but instead, she drew up a chair close to the table. ‘Perhaps I should tend to that cut first,’ she said placidly. 

‘Don’t want you to bleed to death do we?’

‘That’d be a start. Yeh got a plaster or something?’

She looked vaguely round the kitchen. ‘I’m not sure.’

He lifted up his head and looked round with some difficulty. ‘This place is a fucken mess, missis,’ he said, glaring at her. She noticed again the blueness of those eyes, the thick fair lashes fanning upwards. ‘Doesn’t it bother, yeh?’

She shrugged. ‘There seems so little time. Little time to do things.’ She yawned very widely.

‘Yeh’re on sommat’ missis, en’t yeh?’ His voice was sharp.

‘On something?’

‘Drugs, pills, downers. That kind of thing.’

She shrugged. ‘They push them on me.’

‘Don’t you take them, that’s my advice. Never touch’m meself. Where I’ve been there’s loads of people pushing stuff on yeh, legal and illegal. They wanter dumb yeh down, friends and foes alike.’
She stared at him. ‘And what are these places where’ve you been?’

‘Homes, then schools with bars and fat lads with janglin’ keys …’ He lifted his head again so he could look her in the eye. ‘Come on, Missis. Undo me hands at least. It’s fucken murder tied up like this.. My leg’s in cramp. Can’t yeh see it shivering of its own accord?’

‘Did you really never take any of that stuff?’ Bettina did occasionally read a paragraph in Thomas’s Guardian. Drugs were rife in those places. ‘The stuff they pushed on you?’

A shake of the head. ‘Nah. Never. Hard going not to, but.’

She leaned across and undid the offending foot and rubbed his leg absently. ‘So how did you end up those places? And why did you rain in on me like manna from Heaven?’

‘Misspent youth Missis. Bunked off school early days. Mam and Dad had other things on their minds. Dad always on the pop. Then Mam went off her lid and they took her away. Me, I did a bit of grafting. Why, man, the fucken things were laid there for yeh, asking to be taken. But then the mate I was grafting with grasses on us, doesn’t he? So I end up in Acklington with the bad lads.’

‘And now you end up here,’ she said, primmer than she felt. ‘Plunging in on me like this. Why the roof? Why not a door or window?’

‘They don’t spot it, missis, if you get in on the roof. Not for days.’

‘Well, I spotted it didn’t I?’

He groaned. ‘Don’t do it missis!. Don’t tell on us.. Me sister-in-law’s thrown us out and me brother’s putty in her painted hands. And with no address I get no fucken dole, see?’ He flexed his free knee up to his chest. ‘And if yeh lay us in now, Missis, they’ll have us away for a long time. I’m supposed to be good, or else! I just thought a little light grafting’d would get us the money for the fare to Edinburgh. I’ve a mate there who’s promised us a job. He sells kites on the Royal Mile and needs another pair of hands.’

‘Kites…?…’

‘So, what’s yehr name?’ he interrupted.

She was surprised into an answer. ‘Bettina,’ she said.

‘Bettina? Funny old name, that.’

‘After a fashion model.’

‘Like that Naomi, yeh mean?’

‘Well, more old style, really. High heels and New Look.’

‘I know that. Retro. The painted sister-in-law has magazines. Retro’s right back in now.’ He grinned up at her appealingly. ‘Now, Bettina. What about the other foot?’

She shook her head. ‘I might be retro, dear, but I’m not out of the ark.’

He lay back. The blood on his cheek was congealing. He changed tack. ‘If you untie me I’ll clear all this mess up for yeh. It’s like a fucken packin’ can in here.’

She threw the egg from hand to hand. ‘It’s all too hard. I can’t even start.’

He nodded, straining his head up from the table to catch her eye properly. ‘My Mam was just like that before they carted her away. And so was I when I was thirteen. I bunked off school and lay around the house all day. Couldn’t stop yawning. Then, when I started a bit of graftin’ I was all right again. Didn’t feel so bad at all. Not so tired, like.’

‘Are you suggesting I try a bit of gentle grafting?’
He raised his head again and laughed at this, his golden hair lifting and settling in the light from the broken window. ‘Nah. It worked for me, like. One time I had this counsellor called Gretchen. Posh lass. She said it my trouble was adrenaline. Too intelligent. Not enough to do. The adrenaline kind of goes bad. At least I think that’s what she said. She had great legs, that one. Right up to her armpits.’
Bettina put the egg back in her mouth and started to root in a drawer. 

His eyes followed her. ‘Yeh look fucken weird with that in your mouth, Bettina. If yeh dinnet mind us saying so.’

She took it out of her mouth and placed it carefully in a pink egg-cup on the second shelf of the kitchen unit. ‘It’s a kind of comforting,’ she said. She pulled out a drawer, tipped the contents onto the floor and fished a tin of plasters out of the mess. Then she took a baking bowl and filled it with warm water, found an only slightly-soiled towel and set about cleaning the cut on the boy’s face.

He lay back on the table and relaxed as she dabbed his cheek. ‘So, what family d’you have, Bettina?’

‘Well, I don’t know what counts. I did have a son, Orlando. He’s fifteen. But he’s not here now.’

‘Orlando? I thought that was a cat.’ He whistled. ‘But your Orlando, he’s not here now?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Did he, is he … er …? He isn’t dead is he?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s at school in Durham. He lives there. Then for holidays he goes to his aunt, my husband’s sister in Barnard Castle.’

‘Special Needs? A lad in my class had Special Needs. Couldn’t read a letter, couldn’t hold a pencil. Had to go off to a living-in school too.’
‘No. No. Orlando’s very clever. He doesn’t have Special Needs.’ She peeled the backing off the plaster and covered the cleaned wound. 

‘Unless his Special Need is to be away from me.’

‘Why’s that? Why’d he need to be away from you?’

She was silent for a moment. Her glance strayed to the egg but she resisted the impulse to pick it up. ‘They said I tried to smother him when he was little. He was nearly dead when they found him. I didn’t do it, but there was no telling them. They were very kind, of course. Thomas – my husband - says I was lucky. That anyone else would have ended up behind bars. Even so I was angry with them all because they were wrong. I tried to tell them, him, the doctors and the police. They didn’t like me protesting. Hysteria. It’s in my notes.’

‘That’s why they push all the junk into you? To stop you squarking?.’
She tore her glance from the egg and turned quickly to stare at him. 

‘Yes, I suppose they do.’

‘Tell them no. Keep telling them. Dinnet take it.’ 

‘Trying to say no to Thomas is like saying no to a billow of blancmange.’

He laughed at this. ‘Yeh’re fucken sound, Bettina. I tell yeh that.’ He peered up at her. ‘Go on, Bettina. Let us loose and I’ll help yeh clear all this up. Promise.’ He smiled. The light streaming through the shattered skylight glinted again on the fine bloom of hair on his cheek.

He was irresistible. She took a deep breath and started to untie him. In minutes he was sitting up on the table rubbing his wrists. Then he jumped down and loomed up before her. For the first time she realised just how tall he was. They stared at each other for a long time. Then he clapped his hands together hard and she jumped. ‘Just to get the blood runnin’, like, ‘ he grinned. He looked round, shrugged himself out of his parka and draped it over the back of a chair.. 

‘Now then where’s your bin, Bettina? You got plastic bags? Dustpan and brush?’

So together they swept and brushed, bagged and heaved the detritus into the back yard. Then, at the boy’s insistence, they tackled the kitchen surfaces and the mountains of dirty dishes and pans. In three hours, order reigned in the sprawling vicarage kitchen. 

‘Now then,’ the boy fished in his pocket and pulled out a battered notebook and scribbled in it with a stubby pencil. He tore off the page and gave it to Bettina. ’ Me Uncle Ted. Lives down Hendon. Them low houses. You ring him, Bettina. He’ll board up the skylight for now and then rebuild it for yeh later. Yeh’ll have to pay, like. But he’s cheap. Cash only, like.’

Bettina hesitated. She had not telephoned anyone except Thomas and her doctor for many years.

He stared at her, nodded, and picked up the phone. ‘Here, I’ll do it for yeh.’ 

She clicked on the kettle and went out to the hall to rummage in an old handbag under the stairs and came back with a leather wallet in her hand. She counted out four twenty -pound notes onto the table. ‘For services rendered. Should get you to Edinburgh so you can sell those kites.’ she said, smoothing them out in a row. ‘I only hope they’re still legal tender.’

He was pouring boiling water over bags in a brown tea-pot. ‘Why’s that?’ he said.

‘They’re old. I was going out to buy myself a new spring coat when that business happened, when it all blew up. When they took Orlando. I’ve never been out of the house since.’

He handed her a beaker of tea. ‘Time yeh got yourself out a bit, Bettina. Remember the adrenaline! Goes fucken bad if you lie around too much. Don’t I know it?’ He gulped his tea. ‘Yeh should teck it steady but mebbe you should go and see him. That Orlando.’

‘They won’t let me. He …’

‘He’ll be dying to see yeh. I know it.’

‘You can’t say that.’

He scowled at her. ‘I can. Me, I’m dying to see me own mother at this very minute. But I have to go through all those locked doors at Cherry Knowle to do that.’

She knew the hospital. Thomas made pastoral visits there. ‘Well, I …’ her glance wandered away from him and alighted again on the egg in the pink egg-cup.

The boy took her face in his large hands and turned it towards him, away from the egg. ‘Yeh should take your time, like I said, Bettina. Give yourself time but just say yeh’re gunna see him. For definite.’
When he moved his hands away her cheeks felt very cold. It was years since Thomas had even borne to touch her, flesh on flesh.

The boy picked up the money and tucked it into the pocket of his parka. ‘Ta for this, ’ he said. He looked round. ‘Now then, what about dinner?’

‘I don’t usually…’

‘You sit there, drink your tea and I’ll rustle something up.’

For the next twenty minutes he rustled round the kitchen like a whirlwind. He found two tins of corned beef, some potatoes and dusty carrots and assembled them, decanted and scraped, into a casserole dish. He put the casserole in the top oven of the Aga. ‘Fifty minutes’, he said. ‘I’ve set yehr timer.’ He stood grinning down at her.

At last she started to feel uneasy. She tucked the stray hair back again under its clip. ‘Thomas will be back by then,’ she lied. ‘Perhaps you’d join us?’

‘That’s nice but no thanks, Bettina..’ He stood up. ‘I’d better be off. I got a train to catch. Fucken kites to fly.’ He put on his parka and zipped it up. ‘I’ll call on me uncle down Hendon and tell him about this, then hitch a lift back to Gateshead.’

She stood, reached across and took the egg from its pink cup. She thrust it into his hand. ‘You take this. Treasure it,’ she said. ‘P’raps you could give it to your mother.’

He looked at the egg, nodded and thrust it into his pocket beside the money. Then she saw him off, waving at him from the door as though he were any routine caller at the vicarage.

It was only as she turned round that she realised the boy had not volunteered his name.

‘Oh, Bettina!’ When Thomas answered the phone his voice was threaded with its usual pleading, gentle panic. 

‘Thomas?’ she said, pleased at her own brisk tone. ‘I’m afraid the kitchen ceiling’s collapsed… no, no. That won’t be necessary. I have arranged for someone to come and make a temporary mend. No … he’s coming round as I speak. He’ll mend it properly as soon as possible … no, no I’m quite all right. Quite … Thomas? Thomas?’

My Aunt Milly’s house never changes. Like a doll’s house is a row of dolls houses. Just one storey high; a door, two windows and a steep roof. Some of the houses in the row have windows cut into the roofs these days, but they look like scars to me. My aunt’s house has a flat skylight. My uncle keeps his fish tanks up there.

‘Your Uncle Ted’s gone off to do a job. You rang about her…’ Auntie Millie makes an arc in the air with her cigarette as she lets me in. 

‘Who is this woman…’

‘Bettina,’ I say. It’s a nice name, canny. ‘Cash job…’

‘Bettina? Funny name that.’ She leads me into her small downstairs room and parks herself in the chair that still has the imprint of her bottom on the battered cushion. She holds out a battered packet of Marlboros and frowns when I turn her offer down. Then she lights a new one herself from the stub of the old one. She takes a deep drag and speaks through the streaming smoke. ‘You know this woman?’

‘You could say that. I do now, anyway.’

‘You’re a funny’n, you. I always said that. I told our Anne-Marie. You’ve bred a funny’n there. Always cleaning.’

I look round. Aunt Millie’d room is neat enough. It smells like our own first house: pot-pourri, burnt gas and cigarette smoke. When I was little I loved to come in to that smell and watch my mother put her cigarette to smoulder in a saucer to smoulder while she made me my tea. She hugged me a lot in those days and could really make me laugh. 

Then there was the incident and Mam took to her couch. She began to see things that weren’t there and the room became a war zone around her. Everything dissolved into something different. My brother and I tried to clean up around her and make her cups of tea to keep her calm. My Dad finally lit off and only came back when she was sectioned and the police tracked him down. That was it for us. The end of the beginning.

Auntie Millie’s my mother’s younger sister, though you would think she was older. The last time I saw my mother she was full-faced, smooth skinned and young- looking, even though her glance was vacant and her shuffling way of walking made her seem older. That’s down to the drugs, like. 

Millie’s sharp eyes rake over me. ‘What brings you down Sunderland? In bother are yeh, son?’

‘No such thing, Auntie. Just down here for a visit.’

‘Workin’ are yeh?’

‘Yer jokin’!’

She waves her cigarette in an arc, leaving a trail of smoke. ‘You should stay on down here. We’d find you a space. Teddy’d find you some work.’

I’m already shaking my head. ‘Wouldn’t suit, Auntie. Ted can’t stand the sight of me.’ There have been various incidents down the years, mostly when he has bad-mouthed my Mam or my Dad. My Uncle Ted’s your upright, hard-working kind of feller. Collects fish. Need I say more?

‘So, you’re down to see our Anne Marie?’ Millie peers up at me through the smoke that is sitting in the air. ‘Gunna visit that place?’

I stare at her, wanting to deny it. Out of the blue, I’m back in our old house, on the night it all really started. I’ve got the kettle on ready to make my Mam a cup of tea when she gets in from the Bingo. We’ve had two days of snow and the night’s dark and freezing, but the gas fire’s on, my Dad’s safely out at the pub and my brother’s at Scouts. I hear the click of the gate as Mam comes in the back yard, then there is this awful racket. Nine cats leap out at her, meowing and howling to get past her through the gate. They’ve been sheltering the igloo I’ve just built between the wash house and the wheelie bin. I’ve played out there all day, building the igloo and making a dry seat from two piles of bricks and a wooden pallet.

Mam’s screams pull me out pronto into the narrow yard and there she is, lying in the snow beside my igloo, shuddering and retching. I touch her shoulder but she’s leapt through the night skies onto another planet where I can’t reach her. 

When I think about it, that was probably the beginning of the end of the beginning. It was after that night that she took to her couch. 

‘Will you go and see her?’ Millie persists here and now.

My hand, thrust hard in the pocket of my parka, encounters the egg. 

‘Aye. I think so.’ I turn to go.

‘Mebbe you’d like a cup of tea?’ Millie ventures.

‘Nah. I’ll get off,’ I say.

The day room smells of piss, Shake’nVac and cheap shampoo. It reminds me of like the reception area at Newcastle Airport. Artificial flowers, too many seats and not much else. The people wandering through the day room are a bit like travellers. They have no luggage but are clearly in transit. A girl in a green overall who looks like someone from 5c takes me across to my mother who is sitting with her back to the room, looking out of the window. ‘Look Anne Marie. You’ve got a visitor.’ She looks at me her eyebrows raised.

‘She’s my mother,’ I say.

‘Here’s your son come to see you, Anne Marie.’

Mam’s head turns and she looks at me, smiling slightly. Someone’s done her hair up in thick black coils. Her clothes are immaculate. She is wearing powder and pink lipstick. This is a relief. The last time I came she was walking around with her dress tucked in her knickers, all very innocent.

The girl in the green overall is still standing there. ‘We’re all in our best today, aren’t we Anne Marie? The Minister came this afternoon. From the Government.’

Mam looks up at her. ‘Get away, will you. lass. This is me son. Isn’t that what you said? Leave us alone.’

The girl stalks away and I sit down on a hard chair by the window. 

‘Hello Mam,’ I say.

She frowns at me. ‘Who d’she say you were?’

I look into her dark eyes, my flesh standing out in pimples. Here we go. She frightens me. Every time I see her I feel this fear that makes my hair stand on end.

She’s not happy with my silence. ‘Why d’you come?’ she says sharply.
I dip in my pocket and hold out the egg. ‘I brought you this egg. It’s made of glass.’

She holds it up in a beam of sunlight and the spiral shimmers. ‘I sold these, years ago when I worked in Binns. Very popular. They flew off the shelves.’ She turns it this way and that, staring at it with her head on one side. I think of Bettina with the egg in her mouth. ‘Thank you, son.’ Mam looks me straight in the eye. ‘What’s that plaster? Have you hurt yourself? Shouldn’t you be at school? I have two sons, you know. Two sons of my own. They go to school.’

I stand up quickly and the chair tips up behind me. ‘I have to go.’
‘You’re going. Why are you going?’ Her voice is young, high-toned like a bird.

‘I have to go and fly some kites.’ I start to walk quickly down the long room. 

Her voice travels after me. ‘Kites? Kites? Lovely, that. Kites!’

At the door I turn round again but she is concentrating on the egg, turning it this way and that in the light from the window.

I am nearly at the gates when the girl in the green overall catches up with me. She thrusts the egg into my hand. ‘She can’t have this,’ she says.

‘Why not?’ I say. ‘It’s a gift.’

‘It’s glass,’ she says. ‘Glass is not allowed. You won’t believe what they get up to, with glass. It’s very dangerous. You should think on.’ She pauses. ‘We had to take it off her. She got quite excited. They had to sedate her.’

‘Right,’ I say, pushing it deep into the pocket of my parka. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

Then, her still standing there, I turn and set off again for the dual carriageway, thumb at the ready.

© Wendy Robertson 2004