SCOUT Read online

  SCOUT

  Sanjiv Lingard

  Copyright © 2019 Sanjiv Lingard

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador®

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 9781838599614

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To L & R

  Contents

  Preface

  OCTOBER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  NOVEMBER

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  DECEMBER

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  MARCH

  Chapter 42

  Notes

  Preface

  My name is Scout. I find things.

  When I was younger, and Mom was starting to have trouble with her memory, I would be the one to discover whatever she’d mislaid. I have a knack for it. The keys to the minivan, her driving licence - I would be the one to retrieve any number of things that she put down and forgot.

  She would hold me then, and call me her ‘best-best daughter’, though in fact I was her only child. She would hug me and kiss me, and we would rub noses like Inuit. And that’s how I got my nickname. She called me Scout.

  “My little Scout.”

  Unfortunately, not long after that, Mom lost her mind.

  And that is the one thing that I can’t find.

  OCTOBER

  Chapter 1

  None of this would have happened if it hadn’t rained.

  Six months without a drop, and late in the afternoon the skies darkened, and it was like someone had turned on a faucet. Rain fell without mercy.

  Walking home, my waterproof lasted all of ten seconds, proving that you can’t buy anything useful for $5.99. My sneakers didn’t last much longer, so by the time I reached Brighton Avenue I couldn’t have got any wetter if I had jumped into a swimming pool.

  The front door gaped open to the deluge.

  Oh shit!

  Mom had escaped.

  I ran up the path. Rain blew into the hallway, puddling on the vinyl. I called for her, expecting to hear a reply, or at least the tinny beat of her stereo. But the house was silent.

  I kicked off the dead weight of my sneakers. Searching the house didn’t take long.

  There’s a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom downstairs, with a utility out back. I half-hoped that we had been robbed, though the insurance had long since lapsed. To tell the truth, there was very little that a thief could take. All the important stuff had been sold long ago. We had a square box of a TV, the old-fashioned kind with a tube, and a beige computer that took minutes to wheeze into life. It used to connect to the internet by making clicks onto the phone line, back when we had a phone line.

  Mom was gone, and I didn’t suppose for one minute that she had been kidnapped.

  I stood on the front porch and called forlornly through a curtain of rain.

  “Eileen!”

  The thin uniform clung to my skin. At least the water had washed away the stink of coffee beans. I could have gone inside, peeled off the soaking clothes and changed into dry. Maybe run a towel through my hair. But there was no time. I couldn’t let Mom get too far.

  I looked down at the ruined shells of my sneakers. The linings had swollen. It was a no-brainer – I wasn’t going to squeeze back into them.

  So I ran out into the avenue - barefoot. I thought, She’ll be nearby. If I go now, I’ll find her in minutes.

  I have that knack.

  Let me explain: as my mom’s illness progressed, I had developed the ability to follow her. It was something I needed to do because sometimes she plain forgot that I was with her. It’s no fun being abandoned in the middle of a shopping mall.

  What I did was this: I looked around and spotted the signs. Until third grade I thought everyone could do the same thing. Now I kept quiet about my ability because I knew that it marked me out as a freak. I could tell where my mom had left a disturbance in her wake. It wasn’t so hard, because in recent years she had put on a lot of weight. I picked up her physical trail, and it would lead me to her.

  Water rushed along the gullies on either side of the avenue, propelling leaf boats from the autumn fall. The drains were already clogged, and a shallow lake flooded the asphalt. Rain fell with a ceaseless roar.

  But the sheen was broken where someone had passed not long before.

  Mom had been wearing carpet slippers. Probably the pink mules.

  Her tracks headed north, and my feet slapped with a pleasing rhythm as I jogged in pursuit.

  *

  A shape moved in the rain. I could barely make it out amidst the shadows of parked trucks. Brighton Avenue was what you’d call blue-collar suburban. It was wide and tree-lined, and guys came back from work and parked their rigs right outside their houses.

  I put on speed, rain cutting my face. My feet weren’t cold – if anything I was enjoying the extra grip of bare skin on paving block.

  I ran for the dark figure.

  “Eileen!” I shouted.

  But it wasn’t Mom.

  Shit!

  It was Mr Missouri, getting down from the cab of his truck. He worked for the library, and sometimes parked a bookmobile on the road. ‘Mr Missouri’ wasn’t his real name, but he was always whistling that tune they play at football games – ‘Straighten Up, Missouri!’ – and so the name stuck.

  It makes life easier to hav
e a nickname for everything and everyone.

  A few strands of hair were plastered to the dome of Mr Missouri’s bald head, and he was about to run for shelter when he caught sight of me careering through the rain.

  “Have you seen my mom?!” I shouted.

  His eyes flared behind his John Lennon glasses, flicking down the beige uniform which stuck to my chest (nothing of interest there, I can tell you), to my bare feet.

  I didn’t know his real name, and he didn’t know mine. He didn’t need to – I was the kid who lived with the mad woman. Let him call me what he wanted. The pair of us were called ‘crazy’ or ‘loopy’, or much worse. There was a proper word for what Mom was suffering, but no one wanted to know.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked again. There was no need to explain what Eileen looked like. She always wore the same thing – a towelling robe, in pink to match her slippers.

  Mr Missouri, never one for conversation, glared at me.

  “Nope,” he barked.

  Then he hunched his shoulders against the downpour and ran into his neat house, with the mowed lawn and the path cleared of leaves. Like all the other houses, a jack-o’-lantern sat on his freshly painted porch. It was that time of year.

  Tealights flickered through the mist, the gaping mouths of a hundred carved pumpkins drawing me onward up the avenue. They sat on porches, on stoops and in front windows. Some houses had several, ranged like a headhunter’s trophies along the balustrade.

  I couldn’t imagine what had possessed Mom to take off on this dark afternoon. She hated Halloween. No pumpkins were carved in our house, as the toothsome grin terrified her. There was no apple dipping, no fireworks. The kids in the neighbourhood knew better than to come trick-or-treating, for if Mom answered the door a real-life monster would shriek at them.

  But Mom hadn’t been scared.

  She had skipped through the rain as if she hadn’t a care in the world. My bare feet followed her leisurely trail along the wet sidewalk, reading the signs. A crushed leaf here, a dry patch there.

  She had been dancing, splashing in and out of puddles like a child.

  She’d been happy.

  The impression of that emotion hit me like a hammer. I stopped dead, the breath knocked from my lungs. The transfer of feeling from my mom was so strong that I had to lean against a tree to stop myself from collapsing.

  Fat droplets of water fell from the leaves, but I didn’t care.

  I could actually feel what emotions had been coursing through my mom’s veins!

  I had always been able to follow my mom’s physical trail, but this was something new. For the first time I could understand Mom’s purpose.

  If you lived with a parent who was unable to express any feelings apart from frustration and anger, you too would understand the tears that sprung to my eyes. I never knew what was going on in my mom’s head. I had stopped wondering. I had enough to do just to make sure that she was fed, took her meds, and that her diaper was changed. I did not imagine that she could feel anything, but just that she was a sort of animal who looked a bit like my mom.

  And yet on that sidewalk I was overwhelmed with the emotions of a six-year-old girl. It was the child that Mom sometimes thought that she was.

  I stood and gazed in wonder at my naked feet. I had discovered something new. In leaving my sneakers at home, the weak signal of my mom’s trail had become the full five bars. My bare feet channelled her emotions like a lightning rod.

  If it hadn’t been for the rain, none of this would have happened. And it never rains, not anymore.

  I stood under the tree as if under a shower, and felt what my mom had felt. She had, for this moment, been as carefree as a leaf floating on water.

  *

  A doctor told me that my mother’s brain was like a field of wheat. Slowly, inexorably, the disease was collecting its deadly harvest. Row upon row of brain cells were falling into the churning blades of the machine. It would not stop until every stalk was gone.

  He probably picked on that metaphor because I was a country girl. On the bus back from the hospital, I looked out at the fields that surround our town, and imagined Death towering above with a giant scythe in his hand. With a ‘swoosh’ his blade would mow a thousand stalks. Death strode the land, the shadow of his robe falling over the wheat, chortling through the permanent grin on his white skull-face.

  You must remember the ‘Doughy-Doughy Roll’? With the fat cartoon guy who sang the ‘Doughy-Doughy’ song? Well, that breakfast delight was made right here in Vermillion City!

  When I was a child, the rail yards at the southern end of the town were never silent. Grain would come in, and ‘Doughy-Doughies’ would go out. The whole place smelt of yeast, and steam from the ovens billowed into the blue prairie sky.

  The ‘Doughy-Doughy Roll’ fell out of fashion when the government made it a requirement to print the calorie count on the foil wrapper. At one time it was an attractive thing to boast that ‘Doughy-Doughies’ had an infinite shelf life – it seemed very space-age, and just the thing should Russia attack with a nuclear bomb. Nowadays, a product without an expiration date just looked creepy.

  When the ‘Doughy-Doughy’ factory closed, half the town died with it. They tell me that the rolls are still made in the Far East. The machinery was dismantled and shipped to Yokohama. The gates were chained with a padlock the size of your head, and the ‘Doughy-Doughy’ fat guy went off to cartoon heaven.

  Mom’s disease pretty much proceeded at the same pace as the retreat of confectionary from our town. Weeds poked out from lots where trucks used to growl, and the skeletons of warehouses lined the southern perimeter like decaying teeth. Poetic justice, I suppose, for a town that had contributed so much to the dental health of our nation.

  *

  The rain had stopped by the time I reached City Park, an unlit patch of green past the courthouse. I should have been cold, or worried about following her trail into the thicket of rhododendron bushes, but I was neither.

  I skipped along like a six-year-old.

  My connection to the ground somehow channelled my mom’s pleasure. The emotions she felt on her journey rippled all around me.

  I soon discovered there was a downside to that.

  In the midst of the park, Mom had suddenly become scared. That six-year-old mind could feel terror as well as joy. Fear stabbed at her like a knife.

  Mom had forgotten where she was.

  In blind panic she looked around for something familiar. All around her was alien.

  Mom blundered through the greenery, forcing a path with wild frenzy. Gnarled branches of the rhododendrons snatched at her like an enchanted creature. The terror of a six-year-old knows no bounds. Mom was in the dark forest of imagination, surrounded by goblins and witches.

  Her robe caught here, on this broken branch.

  You wouldn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to follow her trail. In the daylight you could have seen the imprints of her mules as they dug into the mulch.

  She reached the far end of the park, crashed through a gate and onto the sidewalk. Surrounding her was the impression of other people, and of a car that had come to rest by her side. They had talked for a while, and then Mom’s trail was gone. All that remained was a faint whiff of exhaust and old rubber.

  Game over. I can’t follow the trail of a car.

  I was on Main Street. There were bars opposite, crowded at happy hour. Cops were always cruising along the strip, waiting to stop fights before they happened, mopping up the guys who stayed a little too long.

  I took a guess and headed for the police department.

  *

  “You’re her daughter, right?”

  They asked for ID, and rang my boss at The Bean Counter for a reference because I was so young.

  “Just seventeen?” asked the sergeant. He raised an eyebrow as he looked me o
ver, the steam rising from my wet clothes, and me smelling a bit like a wet dog. Thankfully he couldn’t see my naked feet beneath the counter.

  “You graduated high school already?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded.

  “Bright kid. You got a college in mind?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Saving up.”

  “And your dad?”

  I shook my head. The sergeant wasn’t going to get the whole story, because I don’t like telling it.

  Once they were convinced that I wasn’t a fruitcake like my mom, they let me see her. She had been kept in a back room. A unit on the wall kicked out heat, and her robe was open, revealing the thin nightdress underneath. To keep her quiet, they had given her cookies and turned on Nickelodeon.

  “Scout!” she shouted, leaping from her chair. For a moment I thought she was going to give me a hug. I get suckered every so often, dreaming of the moment that she will clasp me in her arms.

  Instead, she pointed to her muddy foot.

  “Someone stole my shoe.”

  “No one stole it, Eileen,” I said. “You just lost it.”

  “One of those men took it.”

  “No, Eileen. You lost it, in the park.”

  She looked down at the mud between her toes as if it were a clue to a puzzle.

  “And can you find it again for me, Scout?”

  “You know I can,” I said, taking her arm and leading her out. She rested against me, her fleshy warmth as comforting to me as my arm was to her. She hates the unusual, the strange.

  The sergeant stopped us at the door.

  “I thought you said she was your mom?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So why do you call her Eileen?”

  Of all the things that have happened since Mom became ill, this is the worst.

  I call her ‘Eileen’, because when I call her ‘Mom’ she squints at me with incomprehension. I could not live with that rejection every time I spoke to her. Far easier to pretend I was her nurse and she my patient. It is easier to change the soiled diaper for a grown woman called ‘Eileen’ than it is for a person called ‘Mom’.