That niggling feeling I’d had when watching scenes from Mum’s grotto just wouldn’t leave me alone and I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was wrong.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it may have been down to the fact there were all of those people in the hall at the time, which I’m just not used to during set-up. I normally indulge in a few moments of quiet reminiscing, and Izz and Patrick give me time by myself, but yesterday everyone was so excitable and there was all that dry ice and hydraulics dragging my attention away, not to mention all that stuff with Patrick and his brother and how awkward it all felt.
Maybe I feel like this because I didn’t get a chance to just enjoy seeing everything laid out and ready? Or to say goodbye to this part of my life?
So that’s why I’m up at five o’clock and in my warmest clobber, battling my way down the high street in the rain, just to be sure. If I can have a few quiet moments to look over everything by myself, I’ll make it back to bed by half past with this niggling feeling of dissatisfaction sent packing.
Whipping wind and rain lift my hair. Dodging puddles, I’m almost there. A car sloshes by, followed by a van with flashy orange lights, and then another. We don’t get much traffic through Wheaton overnight, so they don’t go unnoticed.
I must be sleep-deprived because it doesn’t hit me, not until I’m almost at the Wheaton Village Hall steps and there are suddenly voices and a man in a hard hat with a torch and he’s unrolling white tape across the pavement in front of me.
Roadworks? In the middle of the night? Right outside the hall? Not on the exhibit’s opening day, surely! Wait until I have a word with that bloody Scrimengor. This will be his doing. I pull the hall keys from my pocket and stoop to go under the tape.
‘Can’t go any further, love,’ a gruff voice says.
That’s when I really wake up.
I’m close to the foot of the hall steps, and the hall doors are wide open. Both sets of them are propped open, in fact, and I can see right inside through into my exhibition, and it’s only when the police car pulls up alongside me with its blues flashing, lighting up the interior, that I see what’s going on.
‘Roof’s down,’ the same man in the hard hat tells me. ‘Stay behind the tape, please.’
Then he’s motioning for me to get back, telling me the police need to get past. From where I’m standing, hair soaked, rain running down my face, staring inside where our folding tables lie under cracked plaster and fallen tiles and there’s slushy water streaming down from the ceiling into the middle of the hall, exactly where Patrick had rigged up my flying Father Christmas. The whole display is in ruins.
Izz arrives first, still in her nightie, with her winter coat and wellies on top. Then the early birds appear, dog walkers and workmen, even the milkman, and we all stop to gape.
I’d long since made the decision not to call and wake Patrick; he needs his sleep.
We stand behind the tape and listen to the surveyor (I know he’s the surveyor because that’s what’s written across the back of his high-vis, and he’s in a hastily thrown-on suit and not yellow council overalls like everyone else). He fills us in. Nobody was inside at the time of the collapse. He thinks it looks like an accumulation of water, possibly over many days’ duration, that’s brought the attics down, and we should all get out of the rain; there’s nothing to see and nobody’s getting inside.
Mr Scrimengor arrives, accompanied by Sully with sticky-up hair and a drawn look on his young face, and I watch through the sheeting rain from under Izz’s umbrella as the elder baker has a word with the surveyor and shakes his hand grimly. He takes a look inside the doors but doesn’t go in. One of the workmen hands a large object out the door. It’s the painting of the bug-eyed King.
‘Not worth a thing,’ I hear Scrimengor remark. ‘Frame’s worth saving, though. Good thinking,’ and he hands the picture to Sully, telling him to ‘stick it in the car before it gets wet’. Then I see him speaking closely to the surveyor while scanning the crowd, then pointing his finger towards me.
The surveyor approaches me with a hand outstretched. Weirdly, for a second, I think he’s going to shake my hand.
‘I hear you have a set of keys,’ he says, and I surrender them without protest.
Sully’s already taxiing Scrimengor away but I’m staying until someone tells me what exactly is going to happen to the hall.
There are more of them now, swarming in, a sea of neon yellow with the torch beams from their hard hats crisscrossing and dancing everywhere. Someone’s shouting about how they can’t get a person on the roof until the weather clears. ‘That’s the water turned off at the main, boss,’ someone else cries.
Finally, the doors of the hall are pulled shut upon us. I take one last look at the exhibit tables, crushed under piles of wet rubble.
The small crowd clears as the late winter dawn breaks. I stay put with Izz.
The surveyor is the last to leave the site, but not before he’s taped up the doors and attached a notice on the lamppost.
I already know what the laminated paper says before we approach it. Izz reads it aloud.
Building condemned by order of Wheaton and District Council. No entry other than authorised council personnel. Trespassers will be prosecuted.
That’s when Izz begins to cry after holding it together for so long, and I walk her home through the rain thinking howof coursethe roof has fallen in, andof coursethe exhibit’s ruined, andof coursethis was always how I was going to retire from Wheaton life. It all feels grimly inevitable and appropriate after everything else I’ve touched going so wrong lately.
Chapter Fourteen
Friday 15 December: Cronies
The hours that follow are bleak ones. I don’t know what to do first, so I don’t do anything other than lying on Izz’s sofa in front of her electric fire unable to stop shivering.
