On the Sunday he had taken her a speculation of chocolates and a business plan that filled one and three quarter pages of his jotter. Lucy’s mother and father were both impressed with his ideas but in a way that made him think they didn’t take them seriously. Fraser thought Lucy would be his ideal partner in business, as beyond the supply of cakes she wanted nothing to do with it, nervous even with the notion of marketing, sales and profit (words her parents had used in a jokey manner). But somebody had taken him seriously. At school, Heavy Bevy had snatched the pages of his proposal from Lucy’s hands and studied them, refusing to give them back until he fully understood.
This morning Fraser made it his business to shelter alongside Lucy, laughing with her and the rest of the class as they watched Mr Corrigan’s erratic progress towards the school, his car skating across road and track, headlights almost swallowed by the snow.
11
Down in the hole that used to be the Evans’ house, the iron bulk of the range cooker still hissed with every raindrop. It was one of the few things big enough for John Cutter to recognise as household furniture. He spat through the steam and smoke: tssssssss.
He drove away.
Parking at the rear of his house, Cutter left the engine running as he went to the garage. Leaving the keys in the padlock body, he hung the shackle from the hasp it usually secured. The wooden door swung easily on well-greased hinges. The lights of the car flooded the garage and cast his shadow large. The aluminium ladder hung from beam hooks down the right. Hooked down the left were three bicycles and at the far end a scooter, hula hoops, skipping ropes, roller skates, kneepads and elbow pads and a helmet. Overcome by the strength of feeling these playthings evoked, he turned away from them, accidentally knocking the canoe on the floor with his heel. It rocked as if afloat, the orange child seat in the middle bright against the green of the craft. He noticed something he’d never seen before. On the side, where Jenny would have held on, were the prints of her four fingers, made by the suncream she’d coated herself in. John Cutter closed his eyes and found the ladder by touch.
He locked the garage without seeing her fingerprints again.
The ladder safely strapped to the roof rack, he went into the house. He found the old address book. On the inside page was a number in red ink. He lifted the receiver and dialled.
‘Shep? It’s John Cutter.’ He took a steadying breath, kept a level tone. No malice, just information. ‘Your house burned down. He’s dead. Thought you should know. I’ll expect you.’
The receiver bounced as he dropped it in the cradle.
He drove back.
Blocking the path with his car, Cutter turned the heating up, reclined his seat and went to sleep while what was left of the Evans’ house cooled down.
Waking to a cold, watery blue sky, he shivered as he walked amongst the ruins.
He stood over the buckled bedstead and the melted springs of the mattress. Amongst the springs was the suggestion of a human form. Like those from war-zone photographs of soldiers having failed to escape their burning vehicles, captured as charred remains, teeth white amongst the blackness of it all. The extremities were gone. Most of the torso and the gourd of the head remained. The contents of the cranial cavity were still slow cooking. Cutter noticed that some of the teeth were not white.
Warm between his fingers, the fused gold came loose.
He pocketed the gold and thought he knew who had started the fire.
Seven years earlier
Lucy Livingstone took great care wrapping two slices of cloutie dumpling in greaseproof paper: one for each of her prospective business partners. She wanted both to try it. This morning she was entertaining the notion that baking might be her future. Her favourite moments at school were the fund-raising days of the summer and winter fairs. The treats presented by her and her mother were always the first to go and the last to be talked about. Bannocks and crumpets, shortbreads and scones, gingerbreads and dumplings, tablets and cakes, their fare as traditional and nostalgic as their way of life.
Her family was in many ways similar to the Struans, clinging to some imagined bygone age of heather and tweed. The Livingstones didn’t question their place in society and knew they were not the kind of people who brought about its change. Lucy already had her mother’s loose figure and, meek and expecting to inherit nothing, believed she was destined for a life of increasingly heavy body and shallow breathing, at the service of the mannie she loved.
This mannie might turn out to be Fraser, whose recent attention had flattered and scared her. His ideas were so far beyond the realms of childhood that they made her light-headed from notions of a future. What she took from his proposal was a promise of security. Her job would be to support him. She knew her place. At least she had until she had been handed a counter-proposal that Monday, this one typed and professional when compared to Fraser’s pages from his jotter, neat as they were.
12
Deborah dreamt of barking and the skitter of frantic paws back and forth on the upper landing looking for a way out. Yelping down a staircase at the rising heat and choking fumes was reduced to a plaintive whimper for help that never came as a bedroom door was pawed. A long-abandoned whine stretched into the night as the dog spirit of the boy was purged. One final howl from high within the place the dog had called home since its body cheated death, forced out by its destruction. The smell of burning fur.
Her topcoat was on fire when she awoke. Men held her down. She kicked and tried to get free as they slapped her head, shouted, doused her with beer. She took it for another dose of abuse. Such was the power in her struggle, one only managed to hold her down by pinning her to the ground with his whole upper body weight. It finally filtered through: they were helping, telling her it was okay and that she was safe. They pointed to the burning house, fifty yards from where they’d dragged her and too far gone to save. She stopped fighting.
They lifted her up, hugged her, danced her up and down, whooped with her, shared beers and for a moment forgot what they had done to her in some recent past. She laughed and screamed and gripped tight to anybody close enough to hold, which caused them to tense, turned their smiles rigid and mouth-bound as their eyes were troubled by memories of the last time they’d held her and how little respect it had involved. Reminded of things they had no desire to recall, they left her alone. Patting her on the back, they forced a beer into her hand and went to mingle with the others of the village who had started arriving, keen to witness the end.
She overheard her name every so often but nobody came down to where she danced alone unless it was to give her another bottle, which would keep her away. It got so that everybody was between her and the burning and they were all together. Her moment was taken away. Her world was small again.
Deborah stopped her dancing when it no longer made her happy; when she was no longer happy enough to dance.
‘Sabbath.’ She searched for the white dress in the night. Sabbath was nowhere to be seen. ‘Sabbath? Sabbath.’
She straightened her back and steadied herself, turning her head like a dazed owl, scouring the night for John Cutter. A man reached for her. She put her arms out for him. He wrapped himself around her and passed no judgement.
Seven years earlier
James Beverage wrapped a warm pie in a tea towel and placed it at the top of his school bag. He was the only son of the butcher, Alan Beverage, and his wife, Una. Puppy fat, gradually replaced by the combined fats of pork, beef, mutton and lamb, along with that from puddings, blood and suet, had conspired to hide his frame from view. He appeared to be constructed from circles, like a snowman, though he shone, moist and red, betraying the unchecked gluttony, the blame of which could not be pinned on him alone. The idea of pinning anything on Heavy Bevy brought to mind the singular image of bodily explosion. He hadn’t seen his penis since he was seven years old and only knew he had hair growing down there becau
se he had checked using a mirror and his sausage-fingered hands; frequently these last few weeks.
Spoiled from the day he was squeezed from between the folds of his mother’s thighs, he was unused to doing without. And what Heavy Bevy didn’t want to do without was Lucy Livingstone. His ire had risen the moment he’d heard of Fraser’s proposal. He knew it was financially motivated and emotionally insincere. In that instant, Lucy had become the girl for him. Acknowledging that Alice Corggie was beyond him and beauty such as hers would remain so forever, Heavy also conceded that pretty girls like Jenny Cutter and Jean Ritt would only scorn him if he approached them. They would never be impressed with or see the potential in the roly-poly son of the butcher.
‘No mind to all that,’ his father had said when Heavy had skirted around the subject. He told his son he had ‘foresight’, which was much more important than looks. Thus reassured, Heavy had folded the typed business proposal in half and slid it into his jotter until delivery. He was pleased with her reaction when he handed it to her and was sure Fraser and his false intentions would be swept away by the persuasive logic of his father’s argument. Heavy Bevy, like his father, was utterly convinced of the superiority of the pie over the cake. It was, like himself and Lucy, solid and substantial, not a frippery. A cake was a thing to be had after your dinner, if you still had space. A pie was your dinner. With a good pie there would often be no space. Heavy was going to get Lucy to say aye to a pie, because together they would be, as the masthead to his proposal declared, a perfect blend of savoury and sweet.
13
Since Mary Magnal’s visit, Father Wittin had sat in the confessional all evening, behind the green velvet curtains, the overhead light turned off, wrapped in sensory deprivation. A small convector heater fought against the church’s chill. He yawned as he looked at his watch. He was surprised to see it was after ten. He wasn’t sure if he’d dozed off. If so, nobody had come to wake him. Nobody was coming.
He stepped out and shivered as his muscles contracted against the colder air of the nave. The cable snaked across the floor and disappeared behind the baptismal font to the nearest socket. The heater turned off and unplugged, he made his way back to the confessional, coiling the cable around hand and elbow. He left the coil on his seat. Genuflecting before the altar, he began to cross himself to pray as he raised his eyes to the stained-glass crucifixion that soared above the tabernacle. ‘In the name of the …’ He stopped, his fingertips barely touching his forehead.
‘God in heaven, what have they done now?’
Christ was burning. All about him panes of glass were alive with a fiery radiance that rose up the cross and lit his body, giving him more the look of Joan of Arc than the son of God, mankind’s saviour.
Wittin had to bear witness.
Running down the church path, his leather soles slipped on the thickening ground frost and his arms stretched and windmilled as he bore left at the bottom before heading through the village. As he ran, he noticed the open doors of some of the houses, the escaping heat hazing up through the cones of security lights. Abandoned radios and televisions played in empty rooms. A stovetop kettle whistled. A telephone rang. A running car faced an open garage, ready to be parked up for the night. The concertina door of the fire station was pulled aside, yet the fire engine sat strangely squat and immobile on a floor that shone like quicksilver. From an open window somewhere a forgotten baby wailed. He forgot the baby himself as he took a left onto Marsh Lane and saw the house of the murdered boy entirely consumed by a roaring inferno.
The burning had drawn many more than had been at the school. The mood was celebratory, verging on delirium. He saw bottles being passed around. Whatever the parents hadn’t released since they buried their children, they were releasing it now. But the other villagers: what were they here for? It dawned on him that those that hadn’t been at the killing must believe the boy to be in the house and that this was a good thing.
Between them and him he recognised Deborah, outcast, staggering as though she was about to faint. He ran, clumsy and flapping in his cassock. He caught her, held her. She called him John. She nuzzled and kissed him, her mouth hot on his neck. It was only when her lips brushed the thin line of beard that she realised he wasn’t John. She scratched and screamed and he had no choice but to push her away. The crowd cheered as she fell.
He was humiliated and strove to get her back up, floundering, his feet skating off the flattened grass. He realised that the cheering wasn’t for them when it continued, rising in waves of intensity at each separate sound of splintering wood and snapping frame. The house was imploding. The cellar became a fire pit into which everything fell. As if by design, the exterior walls folded, one after the other, into the centre, blasting out squalls of smoke and heat that caused people to recoil or instinctively drop to the ground, protecting their heads with their arms or the hoods of their coats. When it was judged safe, arms dropped and heads lifted to look again. The villagers were awed. The flames roared into the heavens as if screaming from the very soul of the earth. Those whose impish silhouettes had moments before danced around the rim in echo of some medieval tableau, tossing in empty cans and beer bottles as the fire feasted on the boy’s home, were humbled and subdued. There was no return to revelry.
As he watched them, black-backed and golden-fronted, their faces tearful, open-mouthed, childlike and guilty, Wittin wondered if, at last and at some level, they were undertaking a degree of internal examination.
Before long, the empty wooden house was gone.
Once again these people turned their backs. A line of sooty figures traipsed back to the village, wordless as soldiers returning from the Front.
The only one who remained was Deborah. She drained the single malt that was wasted on her and dropped the bottle to the floor. Wittin held her arm around his neck and put his around her, close to his side. Taking her weight, he guided her away. His hand slipped beneath her jacket. Her tummy was warm and smooth.
The guidance of Deborah aside, Wittin’s return journey through the village was uneventful. Doors were closed, cars were garaged and babies slept.
Wittin knocked on John Cutter’s door. When it opened, Cutter looked at Deborah but spoke to him.
‘Go to hell and take her with you.’
‘She’s been, damn you. Look at her.’
‘Then she’ll know the way back.’
Cutter closed the door. Wittin looked at Deborah and sighed. He looked up to the sky.
‘I fucking tried.’
Fat raindrops began to fall.
By the time he’d half dragged, half carried her to his church, they were drenched. Wittin closed the door behind them, slamming back against it as he recovered. The pair of them dripped onto the porch matting. He led her down the aisle and lowered her on to the front pew, using the armrest to support her.
Passing through the cloakroom, he turned the full heating system on for the first time that winter. Beneath his feet in the crypt the boiler grumbled to life and he could feel the vibrations up his legs. The pipes and joints that emerged from below pinged and creaked as warmth was forced through them.
When he returned from his quarters with towels, having removed his wet coat and cassock, he thought she was gone. He stopped, the towels suddenly heavy in his hands. Then he heard snoring.
She had slumped, her head falling back, her throat tight, airway occluded. After making her more comfortable, he pulled her boots off, unbuttoned her jeans and slid them off, along with her pants. Her pubic hair had the same brass sheen as his tabernacle. Her milky skin was marbled bluey-purple from the cold. He righted her, eased her arms out of her jacket and lifted her wet top, pausing to stare at her when her face was hidden and her arms held in the air. She was pallid and thin. Her stiffened nipples were raspberry pink. She shivered. He pulled the top over her head, wrapped a towel around her. He used another towel to take most of the wet from
her hair as she slumped against his stomach. When she was dry, he draped the damp towel over the back of the pew.
‘Right now, you come with me,’ he said, lifting her to her feet. He all but carried her through the gate in the altar rails and laid her on the thick red carpet of the chancel, using one of the embroidered wedding hassocks for a pillow. He hurried to the vestry, returning with a selection of robes and vestments.
He stood above her. She looked like she’d dropped from the sky and was waiting for him. He knelt alongside her, placing the robes on the floor. He shaped his hand around her breast, lifting it up, barely squeezing, rubbing his thumb against her nipple. With the slightest pressure on the inside of her knees he was able to ease open her legs. He moved between them.
The moment his erection hit the cold of the nave, it drooped, limp and useless. He caught it before it receded back into his trousers, yanking it, slapping it, desperate to stimulate it. He seized her nipple again, tweaking it, teasing it up and letting it drop, watching it relax as if uninterested. Frantic, he touched her between the legs, amazed at how soft the hair was, rubbing with one hand, pulling with the other, forgetting she was there.
‘If you’re a man of God, he has low standards.’
Wittin was nailed by Deborah’s gaze. He felt his cock shrink further, flaccid and pathetic. He didn’t know what to do with it now he had nothing to do with it.
The Wrong Child Page 8