The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Make sure you drop Jade first,’ Vic said to Kieran.

  ‘Thanks for having us,’ Jade said, remembering her manners even when thwarted or embarrassed or whatever her primary emotion was. Had Vic been asked to come up with an adjective it would have been exhilarated – there was wild-fire in those hazel eyes.

  He said nothing of the incident to Lucas, but asked, in passing, ‘How’s it all going with Jade, mate?’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘Yeah, good.’

  ‘D’you think you’ll stick together when you all go off to uni?’

  ‘Might do. That’s ages away, Dad. We haven’t even sent off our applications yet.’

  ‘True. You might be on girlfriend number ten by then.’

  As Lucas protested Vic’s lazy sexism, Vic noticed a faint flush rise in his son’s cheeks. He really liked Jade.

  And so, evidently, did Kieran.

  But hey, perhaps what he’d seen had been a one-off. At seventeen and eighteen, they were old enough to sort things out for themselves and too young to be expected to observe the rules of fidelity his gen had been bound by.

  One thing was certain: this was one piece of evidence he was not about to share with the prosecution. Why make Kierangate even more of a scandal than it already was?

  * * *

  You’d have to have been insensitive to the point of being in a medically induced coma not to notice that tensions ran especially high as A-level season approached. There were a few times during the spring term when Vic seriously considered pressing the case for Lucas to come and live with him full-time – not that Ellen would ever have allowed it.

  He had a suspicion of how bad it had got at home one day in late April when he swung by to deliver a biology folder Lucas had left at his place. Tanglewood Road was almost achingly English in summer, with its beautiful old trees, their foliage buzzing with insects, and those blue mophead hydrangeas in every garden.

  No one was at home, so he left the folder on the doorstep (who would want to steal the notes of an underperforming student?) and was just returning to his car when a voice called out from the garden opposite the Saints’:

  ‘Excuse me, are you Lucas’s dad?’

  ‘I am,’ he said, approaching. ‘We’ve met before, I think. I’m Vic.’

  ‘Meg.’ She was a type typical of Ellen’s upscale neighbourhood, the thick-waisted figure of middle age counteracted by the ageless face of the cosmetically preserved. Strands of soft, stripy hair lifted in the breeze.

  ‘Look, I don’t mean to interfere,’ she began and Vic’s spirits sank. No one but people who meant to interfere ever said that. ‘But is everything okay with Ellen and Lucas?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she was really shouting at him the other day.’

  Frowning, Vic slipped his car key in his pocket. ‘You heard them from all the way over here?’ It was a wide road, with luxuriously deep front gardens and driveways.

  ‘No, they weren’t inside, it was in the street. Just a bit further down from here.’

  ‘What happened, exactly?’

  ‘Well, Lucas came out, he really banged the door after him – that’s what made me look up – and then she came running after him. “If you don’t take this seriously, then you can find somewhere else to live! Live on the street for all I care!” That kind of thing, with swearing,’ Meg added.

  ‘Sounds like a typical interaction with a teenager,’ Vic said, but his light-heartedness was feigned. He had never said anything like that to Lucas. There were rough sleepers in the area, many of them young, and Lucas himself was so concerned he’d chosen to do his geography coursework on the homeless problem. ‘Was Justin not around to referee?’

  ‘He was at work. It wasn’t that serious. No violence. Just the usual.’

  Violence? The usual? Vic was taken aback. ‘Lucas has got this friend Ellen doesn’t approve of, so I would guess it was about that. I don’t approve of him either, to be honest with you,’ he added, making a stab at presenting a united front.

  ‘They’re a pack at that age, aren’t they?’ she agreed. ‘They’d jump off a cliff if their mates were doing it.’

  ‘I suspect that’s what Ellen’s worried about,’ Vic agreed. ‘Thank you for keeping me in the loop. I’ll have a subtle word.’

  But, sitting in the car afterwards, he was aware of his mind scanning for ways to procrastinate. It would be more strategic, perhaps, to approach Lucas not Ellen.

  He phoned him that evening. ‘You and your mum getting on okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Lucas said and Vic could hear the sounds of his video game in the background.

  ‘Look, mate, if she’s a bit tough about A-levels it’s only because she wants you to fulfil your potential.’ God, he almost gagged on the cliché. ‘There must be some other way of saying that, eh?’

  But Lucas wasn’t in the mood to riff and Vic deserved the cliché that came back. ‘It’s my life,’ he said. ‘Not hers.’

  Not yours, either.

  Vic

  Now

  It is just as he expected: within half an hour, Ellen has hunted down Danny and demanded to see him. Thanks to Vic’s warning and an excuse involving a child’s football tournament, Danny has been able to delay her till Monday morning.

  ‘Well done,’ Vic says, though a twenty-four-hour delay is nothing to Ellen. Twenty-four years and she’d still be there.

  Throughout Sunday, nerves devour him from the inside out. He has a regular pitch at a posh farmers’ market in Chiswick and it’s just as well India is with him to win hearts and minds because he is about as animated as – God, he can’t even think of a simile. A three-toed sloth, maybe. Algae growing on its fur.

  Danny has arranged that Ellen should visit him at the house he’s working on in Crystal Palace. It’s on one of those streets where keeping up with the Joneses has been raised to an art form – you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Hampstead – but luckily these particular Joneses are away, which means Vic can also gain admission to the event. Arriving twenty minutes before Ellen is due, he finds plastic runners on the floors and dust sheets draped over the furniture, paint-smeared tools collected on a fold-out table. The living-room walls are a peculiar lacquered green, like something from a Gypsy caravan.

  He greets his cousin with a hug. ‘I can see why they’d want to paint over this.’

  Danny splutters with laughter. ‘This is the new colour.’

  They could be shit brown for all Vic cares. The only thing that matters is that the layout works, with the kitchen connected to the living room via glass doors he can wedge open and with a nook behind the fridge where he can conceal himself. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let her come in here,’ he briefs Danny. ‘She’s nosy about houses, it’s her work.’ But somehow, he doubts that inspecting a stranger’s light fittings will be on Ellen’s mind this morning. This business with Kieran must be playing havoc with her work schedule – God knows it’s disrupting his.

  ‘What if she wants a glass of water?’ Danny asks.

  ‘Get it for her. Or say the water’s turned off, I don’t know. The main thing is to play dumb, yeah? You know what she’s like.’ Vic turns off the ringer on his phone. ‘Right, I’m going in. See you on the other side.’

  Danny slaps his shoulder. ‘You’re a fucking loon.’

  A tense five minutes later, the doorbell rings. There’s an exchange of greetings Vic can’t quite make out and then their voices grow clearer as Danny leads his visitor into the living room.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me. I’m sorry to bother you at work, I’ll only be a couple of minutes.’ Ellen’s voice is gravelly, like she’s been crying, and Vic feels a plucking sensation deep inside him.

  ‘What’s this about, Ellen? You all right?’

  ‘Fine, yes. Well, no, actually. There’s stuff going on.’ She pauses. ‘Have you spoken to Vic recently?’

  ‘Yeah, I rang him last week on Lucas’s birthday.’

  Danny and Jo always rem
ember. It is sad how few people do.

  ‘But not since I rang on Saturday night?’

  ‘No. I mean, he’s left a couple of messages, yeah, but I haven’t had a chance to get back to him. I was gonna call him later. Why?’

  The line is rehearsed and Danny doesn’t sound altogether convincing to Vic, but he must look sincere enough because Ellen replies with relief. ‘Good. If he knows about this, he’ll try to contradict everything I say.’

  ‘Contradict what?’ Danny says. ‘I’m in the dark here.’

  There’s the sound of Ellen clearing her throat. ‘I want to get back in touch with your contact.’

  ‘What contact?’

  ‘I think you know who I mean. From 2017.’ Vic can hear the effort it takes for her to curb her impatience. ‘Vic says it’s too late, they’ll have moved on, but can you at least try? It’s a hell of a lot of money to just write off.’ Clearly, Danny is looking doubtful, because she rushes to reassure him. ‘I don’t mean I want you to put yourself in any danger, please don’t think that. But you must still have a mobile number I can try?’

  ‘Put me in danger?’ Danny repeats, and Vic pictures their expressions, Ellen’s rigid with determination, Danny’s slack with confusion. ‘Try who?’

  ‘The Albanians. The ones who walked off with our fifteen grand.’

  Vic holds his breath. Maybe it’s the setting, the suburban kitchen, his immediate view of a wine rack, a vintage tea caddy, a glossy-leaved cheese plant in a terracotta pot, but Ellen’s statement sounds about as preposterous as can be. Like someone having a delusional episode.

  Danny says, ‘Look, I don’t know what you and Vic’ve got yourselves into, but it’s nothing to do with me. I’m just making a living here.’ Then, with deeper concern: ‘You’re not in trouble, either of you? I mean, all the Albanians I’ve come across… You really don’t want to mess with them, El.’

  Bless him, Vic thinks.

  Ellen’s voice sharpens: ‘You don’t have to pretend anymore, Danny. Vic must have told you he’s not dead?’ There is an awful pause, then, ‘Oh, God, he hasn’t, has he?’

  ‘Who’s not dead?’

  ‘Kieran Watts, of course!’

  ‘That cunt,’ Danny says, with casual disgust. ‘Excuse my French. Where’s he popped up, then?’

  ‘Shad Thames, up near Tower Bridge. He lives in a very nice flat overlooking the dock.’

  Danny, now sounding as offended as he is puzzled, says, ‘Vic hasn’t said a word about this to me.’

  ‘Okay, well, I’m telling you. Take my word for it, I saw him with my own eyes.’

  There is a silence, broken a second later by a strimmer whining in a neighbouring garden, and Vic has to ease forward to continue to hear.

  ‘To be honest,’ Danny says, ‘I’m not sure why you needed to come here in person when—’

  ‘Please,’ Ellen interrupts, more urgent now. ‘All I need is the phone number. I’m begging you!’

  Danny isn’t good with needy women, Vic knows. They embarrass him, stress him out. And he’s always found Ellen unpredictable. He’ll be gawping at her, trying to think how to placate her before she starts screaming and crying and potentially breaking objects that don’t belong to him.

  But she doesn’t do those things. She just sighs – an exhalation of defeat that is audible even to Vic.

  ‘Fine, I can see you’re not going to help. I can’t force you.’ The same words she used with Vic, the same profound dismay that he should fall short. ‘But if you are able to find it in your heart to dig out the contact details, don’t text me on my normal number. Use this one, all right?’

  Next thing, the front door is closing with a flimsy little click. Vic emerges from his hiding place in time to peek down the length of the hall and catch a glimpse of Ellen through the ridged glass of the front door. She’s in black, as ever, but for a splash of scarlet, a collar or a scarf.

  Danny appears in the kitchen, his face flushed. ‘What the hell was that all about?’ He holds up the torn page of a notebook. ‘What’s this number, is it her old man’s? Maybe you ought to have a word with him, yeah? She can’t go around spouting conspiracy theories about Albanians.’

  Vic takes the paper from him, recognizes the number as the one for Ellen’s second phone. Her second second phone – is this really happening all over again? ‘Forget it,’ he tells Danny. ‘You did great. I wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to say.’

  ‘Is it true you’ve seen Kieran Watts?’

  ‘She has. I have no desire to. I don’t want anything to do with him.’

  Danny frowns, fiddles with his right earlobe. ‘I thought she was all right now? Getting on with her life?’

  ‘She’s had a shock, seeing him again. It will pass.’ Vic leans against the worktop, feels its sharp edge cutting into his spine. ‘But thanks for this. I needed to hear for myself what’s on her mind.’

  Danny looks dispirited. They’ve thrown his morning off kilter, he and Ellen, and Vic feels bad. He searches for something to redress the balance. ‘Since I’m here, I’ve got some news – for your ears only for now, okay? India’s pregnant.’

  Danny’s face lifts. ‘Oh, mate. That’s amazing. Boy or girl?’

  ‘Too early for that,’ Vic says. ‘Next scan, hopefully.’

  They say their goodbyes. As he lets himself out, Danny turns on the ancient transistor radio he takes to all his jobs. They’re playing ‘Live Forever’ by Oasis, a song that, every time Vic hears it, sends his insides into freefall, makes him think he’s about to collapse to the ground.

  Prisca’s Corsa was a decade old and wasn’t fitted with a digital sound system, so if Kieran and his mates wanted music in the car, they had only her stock of CDs to choose from. The classics of her heyday, Eighties and Nineties, mainly. The night Lucas died, Definitely Maybe was in the CD player, the volume turned up high. It wasn’t possible to determine after the event which track had been playing as the vehicle spun off the road, but Vic believes so ferociously it was ‘Live Forever’ it has come to feel like fact.

  He has to clutch the gatepost to steady himself, to wait for his nervous system to right itself, before he can put one foot in front of the other and walk to his van. He supposes it must look peculiar to a passer-by, but he is used to that.

  Vic

  Then

  When Lucas died, it was Justin who phoned Vic with the news. Ellen was incapacitated and sedatives had been prescribed as an emergency. By cruel coincidence, her father’s health was ailing and her mother tied to the south coast nursing him, so Justin’s family stepped in to take Freya for whatever passed as Christmas and New Year among the shell-shocked.

  It was Justin, too, who suggested Vic stay in the spare room at Tanglewood Road for a few days. He gave the impression he welcomed help with looking after Ellen, but Vic knew what he was really doing was making sure Vic got looked after, too. He’d somehow got wind of Vic having passed a manic afternoon hunting Kieran, rampaging through the hospital and Prisca’s street demanding to know where the little bastard was hiding, and thought it best to reel him in.

  For two weeks, Justin cooked meals for the three of them, removing the untouched plates without comment and dispensing glasses of brandy (it was the only time in his life Vic had drunk brandy and he would for ever associate its rich afterburn with loss). He answered the door, dealt with the deluge of messages to their various mobile phones, and handled their liaison with the police and the undertaker.

  Vic remembered little of it now, but he retained a general image of them passing one another in darkened rooms. At first, he had thought no one was bothering to turn on the lights, until one afternoon, when they were all in the living room, he noticed Justin get up to switch them on. Ellen, who had been dozing on the sofa next to him, woke suddenly as if she had been switched on, and got up from her seat to turn them off again. As she did so, she kept her eyes averted from Justin and Vic, as if seeing their faces would turn her to stone. Justin said nothing a
bout this bizarre behaviour and made no retaliatory move. When working on the forms and papers needed by the authorities, he’d retreat to his desk in the study, where he had a little anglepoise lamp he could use without interference. Vic realized this lights-on-and-off routine must have happened before, perhaps often. He grew to suspect that Ellen had banished light not because she couldn’t stand to see his and Justin’s faces, but because she couldn’t bear to not see Lucas’s.

  She hardly spoke on account of the tranquillizers, though Justin’s murmur was often in evidence, only growing animated when he spoke to his daughter on the phone. As for Vic, he could not risk words, not at first. Words were fearsome things, fogging his mind and crushing his chest. Instead, a recurring memory played of Lucas’s seventeenth birthday party, when, at Ellen’s behest, Vic had driven by the house to check on things. It had been a moonless night, that dense, granular darkness of late November, and the streetlamps streamed yellow. He’d rolled down the car window and heard first the bassline of the music and then, through an open upstairs window, the sweetest melody in the world, the laughter of young people who no longer laughed like that with their parents. Had he detected Lucas’s cackle in the mix? If not at the time, he did now. He did now.