That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Any survivors?’ Frannie says drily.

  ‘All.’ Joe smiles. He’s a great vet. He always, always wanted to be one. Cathy remembers him very seriously pressing a fake stethoscope to his cat Peanut one afternoon after school and listening intently.

  ‘Do we want the wine you got too?’ Joe says. He wordlessly carries his Coke across Frannie’s kitchen and joins Cathy, sitting cross-legged at the open door. ‘It’s been a wine kind of week.’ He turns to look at his two sisters. Frannie grabs a bottle from the fridge and pulls out the cork with a pop. ‘The Wards wouldn’t pay their bill this evening. Almost went full Woolworths.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Joe,’ Frannie snaps, looking at him. ‘It was twenty years ago.’

  Cathy hides a smile, though she understands where her youngest sister is coming from. The Woolworths tantrum when she was ten has become folklore in their family.

  ‘Now you really do need wine,’ Cathy says.

  ‘Cheers to that,’ Frannie says grimly.

  ‘I’m going to get a pizza,’ Joe says, bringing up an app on his phone.

  ‘No – I’m making homemade healthy chips.’

  ‘Healthy chips is an oxymoron,’ Joe says.

  And suddenly it’s the same as it is most nights. All three siblings. Food, drink, banter, but Cathy is stifled by it, tonight.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ Frannie says with a laugh. She leans over him, adding mushrooms to it, which he protests at. She puts the potatoes in water and places them in the fridge.

  Cathy rubs at her forehead. What is happening? It’s a completely normal scene between them, and that’s what’s wrong.

  Her sister seems absolutely fine, having killed somebody last week. There is something uneasy about it that she can’t untangle. Usually, she feels so comfortable sitting here by Frannie’s open doors. Whether it’s raining or snowing or sunny. But not tonight.

  ‘What do you want?’ Joe says to Cathy, holding up his phone. ‘Anything?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ Cathy says, knowing she sounds uptight.

  ‘Oh, honestly,’ Frannie says, looking over her shoulder at Cathy. ‘Just have a pizza. Will’s still dead whether you have one or not.’

  ‘Is that how it is for you?’ Cathy says. ‘We just – get on with it?’

  ‘Cath,’ Joe says softly. ‘It’s just a fucking pizza.’

  ‘Fine,’ Cathy says, sipping her wine, wondering why she’s the only one with a guilty conscience.

  They talk of other things while they wait, sitting overlooking Frannie’s garden. The business, the various ongoing cases – Joe and Cathy do a deep dive on a Labrador with recurrent giardia until Frannie tells them to stop. They don’t talk about the holiday, or the body. Two glasses of wine down, Cathy has to admit, she finds it better. Maybe Frannie’s right. Maybe dwelling on it does just make it worse.

  Their pizza arrives, and Frannie heads to the door. Cathy hears Evan’s voice before she can really consider if that’s right.

  She looks at Joe, opening another bottle of wine. He inclines his head. ‘He delivers,’ Joe says.

  ‘Does he? Why?’

  ‘Money,’ Joe says flatly.

  ‘For what?’

  Joe fiddles with the cork. ‘He pays loads of child maintenance.’

  ‘Wow. God. Now I feel bad.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Joe says tensely. Cathy’s eyes track across his fingers, still fiddling with the top of the wine bottle, and she can’t help but wonder if he knew Evan was on shift tonight.

  ‘Maybe we should pay him more,’ she says.

  ‘He earns a fine salary. Up to him if he wants to leave his marriage and kid.’

  ‘Joe. You’re so mean sometimes.’

  ‘I’m not mean. I just say what we’re all thinking,’ Joe says. Cathy can’t resist going into the hallway to help Frannie. And to see Evan.

  ‘… if you wanted to,’ Evan says. ‘After this?’

  ‘Not really,’ Frannie says lightly, imbuing her voice with laughter.

  ‘Right,’ Evan says, holding out the pizza boxes to her. ‘Well, then. You paid on the app, right?’

  ‘For the pizzas, or the proposition?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Evan says, while Frannie takes the boxes, still laughing.

  ‘Did he just ask you out?’ Cathy says, as Frannie closes the door.

  ‘Yeah, again,’ she says dismissively, in that way that only beautiful people can afford to. Cathy feels a stab of jealousy. How does she do it? Frannie would never go on a singular date. She would never be ghosted: they would always want more.

  ‘Evan?’ Joe says, as they walk into the kitchen and start arranging the pizzas boxes on Frannie’s giant table. ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘Just asked me out, over a fucking pizza delivery,’ Frannie says. ‘Here are the pizzas, also, are you down to fuck?’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ Joe says, but he’s laughing as he roots in Frannie’s fridge for mayonnaise. Cathy knows that is what he is looking for without his having to say. ‘Should have ordered a hot dog,’ he adds, his voice muffled as he searches.

  ‘I can’t believe he has a second job,’ Cathy says.

  ‘I might complain that the pizzas are cold.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Cathy says, reaching for Joe’s arm. ‘He’s obviously – I don’t know. Going through some stuff.’

  ‘He’s a tosser,’ Joe says. ‘Who chats up women in their own homes when delivering pizzas?’

  ‘Lonely people,’ Cathy says.

  They eat in companionable silence, Cathy feeling more relaxed as each minute goes by. Maybe they can learn to forget. Maybe they can eat pizzas and drink wine just the way they used to. Maybe they can take the piss out of their colleague, behind closed doors, be the worst versions of themselves together. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  It’s the same mood as Rosie’s funeral, that volatile mix of panic and gallows humour. Cathy remembers it well. The wake. All their friends and family. Their mother in a stiff nineties skirt suit, their father in a black jacket so dark and old it was a kind of bottle-green. After everybody had left, Cathy, Joe and Frannie had been washing up in the farmhouse kitchen, as they often did. Cathy washed, Joe dried, and Frannie put away, which actually involved Joe putting most of the stuff away because she couldn’t reach. Cathy had glanced towards the ceiling. Their parents were speaking. ‘They said a ten per cent discount,’ their mother was saying.

  Joe looked at Cathy in alarm. Their mother continued: ‘And they haven’t applied it. Look – we paid in full for everything, the pizza slices, the cheese and pineapple sticks –’

  ‘Wow,’ Joe had said, evidently unable to help himself.

  Frannie was looking smilingly from Cathy to Joe. ‘What?’ she’d said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Cathy said quickly. She’d glanced at Joe. ‘Do not,’ she’d said, holding up a hand, her mouth quivering.

  ‘It’s funeral food,’ Joe said. ‘A discount for … for funeral food.’

  ‘We’ll go to hell if we laugh,’ Cathy had said. But Joe had already been doubled over with laughter, and Cathy and Frannie soon joined him. ‘God, they’re becoming tight,’ Cathy had said. Over the following years, their mother’s small but sharp traits – frugality, a kind of anxious fussiness – loomed large, while their father seemed to fade away entirely into nothing, repression, quietness, tears on Christmas Day and Rosie’s birthday that he explained away as just feeling a bit under the weather.

  Joe, Cathy and Frannie eventually responded the only way adult children can: by withdrawal.

  Thinking of their closeness, of how much they have vested in each other, Cathy says, spontaneously to Frannie: ‘Have you told Joe about Jason?’

  Frannie’s gaze turns shocked, pizza crust suspended over Joe’s mayo.

  ‘The lawyer?’ Joe says. Cathy stares and stares at him. ‘We thought it would be good to have someone in case we ever need him,’ he says. Too much explanation. His tone too earnest.

  ‘S
o you know who he is.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joe says.

  ‘The two of you – but not me,’ she says. She’s burning with it. With the ancient sibling rivalry, the feeling of being left out, but with something else too, something she’s been trying to keep a lid on: resentment. Bitterness. That Frannie did this to her. That she’s in so deep she can’t get out.

  Frannie and Joe don’t answer her.

  37.

  Joe

  Saturday night at their parents’ house. Joe looks forward to it each week, but always returns home in a bad mood. Lydia didn’t want to come tonight, has been strange with him all week, each night asking him what Evan did, each night being moody when he refused to tell her.

  Cathy has left Macca at home this time. ‘He’ll just beg for cheese,’ she’d said glumly, evidently feeling tense too.

  Their parents live in an old farmhouse on the edge of Warwickshire – far enough away from their cottages that they have to call before swinging by, which suits them just fine. It’s an L-shaped house with two annexes – one they use as a bar and one for storing wood. They’re sitting in the bar now with two old yellow Labradors, the door flung open on to the July rain, which drips in, fat splashes ricocheting off the wooden floor. It’s a tiny room, six stools around a little island, a few bottles of wine and beer, a dartboard in one corner. Not an actual bar, as Joe often points out. More of a shed.

  Paul has gone up to bed, and the atmosphere has soured somewhat since he left. There is no conduit through which they can channel their love for each other. No hilarious dinosaur outbursts – Stegosaurus! – shouted with a lisp at dinner-time – or the word ‘yes’, said over and over – recently learnt, but in an American accent. Joe heard his father imitate it, earlier – yayus – and had been so surprised by the lightness in his tone.

  ‘Glad Italy was good anyway,’ their father says stiffly to them. Joe looks steadfastly down into his half-drunk pint so that he won’t exchange any glances with his sisters.

  ‘It was,’ Joe says into his lap. He looks at his father, smiling benignly, and Joe feels ten years old again, wanting so badly to impress him, wanting to confide and to confess. Wishing he were still that age, that Peanut was still alive, waiting to curl up on his pillow. That Frannie and Cathy were still his father’s responsibility and not – somehow – Joe’s.

  ‘Is Verona safe?’ Maria says.

  ‘Honestly,’ Joe says. The question irritates him more than usual, because Verona, evidently, isn’t safe: or it wasn’t for Will anyway. ‘It’s fine,’ he adds tightly. ‘Honestly. It’s Italy. We didn’t go to Iraq.’

  Maria doesn’t smile. Their father ignores the exchange, gets the darts out of the cabinet and sets up the dartboard. ‘One game?’ he says hopefully to Joe, ever the stifled diplomat, ever the peacemaker.

  As they play, their mother asks about the outcome of a terrier with a luxating patella, and Joe thinks of the limping Jack Russell he saw back in Verona the day he used Will’s card in the cashpoint. Yesterday, a nurse asked him to cannulate a tricky chihuahua and he wanted to hide under the desk rather than open a vein and smell the blood. Surgery is meditative for him usually. Cathy prefers medicine, figuring out the Rubix cube. She knows every single drug interaction off by heart, can give you a differential on protein in the urine in five seconds flat. It’s why they’ve always made such a good pairing. But now he’s lost, and he suspects she is too.

  ‘We operated. He’s fine – on cage rest,’ Joe says.

  ‘The owners won’t adhere to that,’ she says. ‘They’re – you know.’

  ‘We had to do it,’ Cathy says.

  ‘I’m not sure I –’

  ‘Are you retired or still micro-managing?’ Joe says, then immediately regrets it as his mother’s face falls.

  ‘You all look thoroughly depressed,’ she remarks, instead of answering. ‘Post-holiday blues?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t be grumpy,’ she says, while he shifts uncomfortably underneath her gaze.

  ‘It’s just – we have to explain all our decisions to you. Because you don’t want to work, which I understand. But you still want to be involved,’ Joe says.

  ‘Sorry,’ his mother says, her voice higher pitched than usual. ‘Forgive me for wanting to know what’s going on in my own business.’ She spreads her arms wide, then drops them. Joe shakes his head in irritation. So totally unreasonable.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Tell us more about Verona,’ Maria says. ‘You hear about the man – the missing English guy – while you were there?’

  The atmosphere tenses like a muscle. It’s hard to imagine she doesn’t know, or won’t work it out, Joe thinks, as he finishes his beer. She’s their mother.

  But what is atmosphere, really? It’s only body language. Nothing more or less specific than that. The molecules of the air don’t change because they know something their parents don’t.

  ‘Yeah,’ Joe says. ‘You already texted.’

  ‘I know. Nobody replied to me.’

  ‘There were a few police around, they did ask us some stuff.’ He darts a look at Frannie. ‘It wasn’t a big thing.’

  He sees Cathy shift across the bar from him. She’s looking downwards, at the Labradors, but he knows she heard him. She reaches a hand to grab her Coke. It’s steady.

  ‘Were they scary?’ Maria says. This is how her mind works: always, always, always to the worst-case scenario. Joe’s had enough, even though on this occasion, her maternal instinct is bang on. Look where they’ve ended up. Solving problems themselves, instead of asking for help.

  ‘No,’ Joe says testily.

  ‘Poor bloke,’ Owen says, and the atmosphere immediately descends into sadness. Their parents are thinking about Rosie, but his siblings – Joe is sure – are thinking about William.

  Frannie’s gaze is watery as she looks across the room at him and Joe wills her to hold it together.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says thickly, once the grieving sister, now the perpetrator of another family’s grief. They lapse into what their parents must think is a companionable silence as Joe, Frannie and Cathy sit there, feeling like ghouls, like villains.

  Joe feels a buzzing in his pocket and brings his phone out. It’ll be Lydia.

  It’s a +39 area code. His whole body goes cold. He stares at it, then holds it up to Cathy to show her. ‘Italy calling,’ he says, his voice strange and hoarse.

  ‘Do you want me to take it?’ she says immediately.

  ‘No, I can,’ Joe says. He can feel his parents’ eyes on him.

  ‘Why don’t you want to take it?’ Maria asks shrilly.

  He ignores her and ducks outside, the dew and rain on the grass soaking through his trainers. ‘Hello?’ he says into the phone.

  ‘Joe,’ an Italian woman’s voice says.

  ‘Speaking,’ he says. His heart feels like it’s pumping electricity through his body.

  ‘It’s Carina, sorry – new number,’ she says. Carina lives a few villas down from them. They know each other to pass the time of day with, to take post in for, but he’s not sure she’s ever called him.

  ‘How are you fixed for September?’ she asks him.

  ‘We’re fully booked,’ he says. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh – it’s nothing. We have a couple here who wanted to check if their family could join them – spill over into your villa.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, thinking he could do without all bookings, that he wants to fence off his villa forever, and certainly never stay in it again himself. ‘Sorry,’ he adds again, just wanting to get off the phone. Cathy and Frannie will be concerned, sitting inside, pretending everything’s fine when it’s anything but.

  ‘No worries. You hear about the development?’ Carina says lightly. ‘While I am speaking to you.’

  ‘What development?’ Joe pulls the hair back from his forehead.

  ‘The woods behind your villa, at the side of mine,’ she says. ‘They’re finally dev
eloping. They got planning permission last week.’

  Joe thinks he’s going to faint. ‘Nobody told me,’ he says, like that will undo it, this news that’s landed in his lap from nowhere. ‘Aren’t they supposed to say?’

  ‘I’m sure the ancient Italian planning system has written you a letter you won’t understand,’ Carina laughs, then rings off. Joe stands there in his parents’ garden, wishing, for just a second, that he didn’t have a mother and a father who had already experienced too much tragedy. He might otherwise reach out to them. He extends an arm into the darkness, imagining somebody could grasp it, somebody who could help him. He stands there for a second, arm outstretched, listening to the rain.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Cathy says, emerging in the lit-up doorway, her face concerned. Her eyes travel to his extended arm and her frown deepens.

  ‘They’re digging up the woods. Development,’ Joe says, aware he isn’t making any sense.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re going to find it,’ he says, just as Frannie emerges.

  A thick silence descends between them.

  ‘We need to go,’ Joe says.

  ‘Do you know,’ Cathy says, walking back into the bar, ‘we have to deal with something back at our cottages, sorry,’ she says quickly to their parents, her tone so firm it’s impossible to argue with. ‘We have to … The neighbours have said Macca is barking.’ It’s a thin lie, but it seems to pass, because Cathy never lies. She gets her coat and ushers out Joe and Frannie. Their parents might be speaking, might be saying goodbye, or wondering what’s going on, but Joe is on another planet, reliving and reliving the phone call, wishing he had appreciated last week, yesterday, when things were bad but not this bad.

  Like a parent in a crisis, Cathy ushers them all out into the rain and into her cold car.

  She turns on the old heater and drives them half a mile down the road in silence, then pulls over. She reaches up to turn on the interior light. Joe watches her movements, deliberate and slow. He can’t cope. He can’t cope. He’s panicking.

  ‘Shit,’ she says. She kills the engine. ‘What did she say, exactly?’