“Jack, Jack – are you okay? You’re gone very pale. Jack?” She is trying to get his attention but he is just staring into space. “Jack?” She jumps up and grabs a tea towel from where it hangs beside the sink. She runs it under cold water, squeezes it and holds it up against his forehead, which is clammy with sweat. “Are you feeling okay, pet?”
“I want you to go now.”
“Jack, love, I know this is hard for you and it’s a lot for you to take in but I’m going to be right here with you – I’ll help you through it as best I can, wee man –”
“I told you I don’t like it when you call me that.”
“I’m sorry Jack – I –”
“Please go now.” His voice is small. The fight has left him.
“Okay, Jack, if you want me to go, I’ll go. I just want to go up and tell your ma first though so she knows I’m gone. She has my number – if you ever want to talk about things some more give me a call and I’ll come right over, okay? And, Jack, I really am so, so, sorry.”
Rachel pulls out onto the road and she can feel the weight of tears building behind her eyes. Do not cry. Don’t you dare cry. She isn’t concentrating on where she is going, she is just driving on autopilot around the city-centre streets because she can’t think straight. She drives down a one-way street the wrong way and only realises when another driver flashes his lights at her. She pulls over and finally gives in to tears. They stream down her cheeks and she doesn’t even attempt to wipe them away.
“Stop being so stupid!” she tells herself, banging her palm against the steering wheel. “This is your job – you have to toughen up.” But that was one of the hardest things that she has ever had to do. It had been awful seeing Jack like that. Like his entire world had just ended, which in fairness it had.
She wonders yet again if she is mad doing this job? There were easier ways to make a living – she could get a job working in an office, maybe doing something with spreadsheets, data entry or answering phones. Every day as a social worker was a battle where you were often facing the most dysfunctional and saddest situations in society and sometimes it was overwhelming to think of how little one person could do. She’d had to accept a long time ago that she couldn't change the world. They had been taught in college that this was their job and just like any job. You have to leave your work behind you at the end of the day . . . but on a day like today it was very hard to do that.
She would ring Tina tonight to see how Jack was doing. The next few weeks were going to be very tough on him.
Chapter 41
Jack runs out of the kitchen, runs out the gate of 9 St Dominic’s Terrace and keeps on running – past the funeral parlour with its net curtains, past the butcher’s, past the street stalls with boxes of Daz washing powder stacked high. The swarm of bees are chasing him down the street, round the corner past the chemist’s, the butcher’s and Rafferty’s. He can’t lose them. They are so loud, like a vortex of yellow and black swirling through his head. He keeps going until he is outside Conor’s bookshop on Haymarket Street. His whole body is trembling when he comes in through the door.
“What is it, Jack, what’s happened to you? Here, sit down – you look like you’re about to collapse.” Conor sits Jack on to the chair and bends down on his hunkers in front of him. “What is it, Jack?”
“Ma is going to die. Rachel told me.”
“What do you mean, Jack?”
“Rachel told me that Ma is very sick and that she’s going to die soon because she has bad bugs inside in her body and the doctors have no more medicine left for her. I asked Ma if Rachel was lying because I don’t like her, but Ma said that it’s true and she’s very sick and that’s why she is in bed all the time and forgetting to pick me up from school and make my dinner.”
“Oh Jack, I’m so sorry, mate.” He puts his arms around him and Jack puts his forehead against his neck and he can feel the wetness of his tears. Suddenly Jack’s story all clicks into place.
“I don’t want Ma to die – who’s going to look after me?”
“Hey, you’ve got your da –”
“But I don’t want to live with him. He doesn’t know anything the way Ma does. His dinners are gross – he lets the beans touch off the sausages. And he’s always getting mad.”
“Look, Jack, I don’t know what to say but I’m sure Rachel and your ma have a plan.”
“I’m so scared! I love Ma – she’s the best ma in the world. I don’t want her to die.”
“It’s going to be okay, Jack, it’s all going to be okay.”
And Conor feels awful for lying to him. People said the same thing to him after Leni died but things are still awful. Just like he finds now, they just didn’t know what else to say.
Ella stares around the stone walls of her living room. The sea is crashing wildly outside. The winds have been so high for the last few days and she watches the spray from the waves as it rushes up into the air, clashes off the windows in a hiss before running down her circular windows. Everyone else is in bed – Dan and the children are all tucked up behind the bedroom walls but she is not. She wishes like them she could be cocooned in the safety of sleep but it doesn’t come so easily to her these days. Most nights she lies awake twisting and turning and getting in and out of bed to check on Maisie until the early hours before eventually falling asleep after six but then her alarm goes an hour later because it’s time to do the school run. And this is how her life has been, surviving on the bare skeleton of sleep that her body allows her to have and then living like an exhausted wreck all day.
She decides to text Conor. She punches out “Are you awake by any chance?”
Her phone rings almost instantly.
“Can’t sleep either, huh?” his voice says on the other end.
“I keep thinking that the house is going to blow out into the sea.”
“Well, I reckon, considering the fact that it’s survived two-hundred-odd years clinging onto the shoreline, you might just be okay. Here, I have one for you – what is the name given to the cold and dry wind in southern France that blows down from the north along the Rhône towards the Mediterranean Sea?”
“The Mistral. Come on, you’ll have to do better than that – you’re losing your edge – even Celeste would have got that one!”
“Really, too easy? I thought it was a good one.”
“Better luck next time. So what has you awake?”
“If I said everything would you accuse me of being melodramatic?”
“Not at all, go right ahead,” she says.
“Okay, well then, everything.”
“Sounds pretty much the same as me.”
“I don’t think I told you but there’s this boy who comes into the shop – Jack is his name – anyway he helps take my mind off things.”
“A boy? Who comes into your shop?”
“He’s a local kid – he just seems to have taken a shine to my shop for some reason and stops by after school every day.”
“So you’ve got this kid who comes in to hang out with you in your shop? That just sounds weird.”
“No, honestly, he’s great – he eats a sandwich, reads a few pages of a book and goes home for his tea.”
“Jesus, you’re like a home for waifs and strays.”
“Hardly. Well, anyway, it turns out that his mother is dying of cancer – she hasn’t got long left either.”
“Oh no, that’s awful. What age is he?”
“He’s just turned eight.”
“Well, that is fucking shit – excuse my language – but it is. The poor kid.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it – I know the whole thing is strange – this random child just turns up in my shop day after day but I’ve got to know him and he’s a good kid. His dad seems to be shady enough so I’m not sure what’s going to happen to him now . . .”
“God, that’s terrible. It really makes you think, doesn’t it?”
They are silent for a while, and then Conor says, “
So how’ve you been?”
“Okay, just trying to get on with things – take each day as it comes.”
“Are people still giving you a hard time?”
“Yeah, I thought it would have all died down by now but Radio 1 did a whole show on shoplifting today and of course rolled my case out. I listened to the whole thing and people who don’t know me and have never met me rang in to say what a horrible person I was and that they were glad they no longer had to look at my face on their screens every night. Everyone seems to have an opinion on me.”
“You should have just turned it off.”
“I know,” she sighs. “I guess I’m a sucker for torturing myself. Then in the paper today there was a report about the increase in crime this year and they used my photo beside it. They just keep turning the screw. I think I have to face the fact that this is never going to leave me – I’m stuck with this forever. I’m now the poster girl for theft – if you’ve got a story about shoplifting, stick a photo of Ella Wilde in beside it.”
“God, they’re really getting mileage out of it. It’s going to be rough for a while – you were the presenter of The Evening Review, for God’s sake – you broke stories of politicians and high-profile people who had been caught drink driving. I think that’s why they’re being so vicious now – because you were the last person they would have expected to do something like that.” He pauses for a minute. “So how’s Celeste getting on in school? Is it any better for her?”
“She’s still getting the cold shoulder. She hasn’t been invited on any play dates or birthday parties since it happened. I think she’s embarrassed. She won’t talk to me about it. I tried to talk to her teacher but she didn’t help at all – she more or less told me that I’m overreacting – I felt she wasn’t willing to try and help the situation.”
“Poor kid.”
“I know and the worst thing is that it’s all my fault.”
Chapter 42
“What colour is for sad?”
“How do you mean?”
“Rachel keeps trying to talk to me about Ma being sick and all, but I don’t want to talk. She wants me to draw a picture of my feelings and my family. She says I can put them in different colours like blue could be sad and red could be happy but I hate the colour red, so she said blue could be happy then and orange could be sad so I asked her what colour being afraid was and she said maybe purple and I said that that’s a girl colour so she said what about brown but I don’t like brown either so she said never mind, we could try it again another day.”
“I’m not really sure, to be honest, which colour is for sad. I think it can be whatever colour you want it to be.”
“Ma said my Auntie Libby is coming to live with us for a while.”
“And do you like her?”
“Yeah, she’s nice, she’s always making cakes. Ma calls her Delia Smith when she bakes but I don’t know who that is. She has three boys but they’re not coming because they have to go to school and they live far away in the country in a big huge house and they even have cows in their garden! And our house only has three bedrooms so they wouldn’t all fit unless Ma bought bunk beds for us all. That would be cool. I’d have to have the top one because it’s my bedroom.”
“Obviously.”
“What happens when we die, Conor – where do we go to?”
Conor stops what he is doing and looks up at Jack.
“How come you want to know?”
“I want to know where Ma is going to be.”
“Well, it’s a big question. No-one knows for sure but some people think we go to heaven.”
“Is heaven in the sky?”
“Well, some people think it is but some people believe that heaven is everywhere – that it is all around us.”
“What, like the dead people are walking beside us? That’s weird!”
“Kind of. You might not be able to see a person but they’ll always be there.”
“But how do you know they are?”
“Well, it’s hard to explain. I guess you just have to believe that they are.”
Jack is staring at him sceptically.
“Okay, let me show you what I mean,” says Conor. “Come out the back with me for a minute.”
Jack follows him behind the till and through the doorway leading out to the back. They walk past the exposed concrete block work and a network of copper-and-white plastic pipes that the builders had promised him they would paint but they never did. They walk past the small sink and the shelf with his paperwork files, into the stockroom.
“What are we doing in here?” Jack says, staring around at the wooden shelves full of cardboard boxes of books.
“I want to show you something. Okay. So you can see me now, can’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
He walks over and trips the light switch so the stockroom is instantly cloaked in darkness.
“Okay, can you see me now?”
“No.”
“But you know that I’m still here, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I think that’s what it’s like when we die – we can’t see the person or even talk to them but we know that they’re still there with us.”
Jack starts laughing. “I’m a zombie.” He puts his two arms out to try and feel where Conor is. “I’m going to get you!” He bumps into a cardboard box and starts to laugh.
Suddenly there is a female voice, calling Jack’s name. “Jack? Jack? Are you in here?”
“Oh no, it’s Rachel,” Jack says quickly.
Conor fumbles along the rough concrete wall in the darkness for the light switch but he can’t seem to find it. Finally his fingers come upon it and he flicks the switch to see Rachel standing at the stockroom door with her arms folded.
“What’s going on in here?” She is looking at him warily.
“Sorry, I was just trying to show Jack something –”
“But you were in complete darkness – you couldn’t possibly show him anything in the dark!”
“I know but I was trying to show him –”
“What? What were you trying to show him?”
He realises what she is thinking. “God no, I wasn’t – no way – I wasn’t doing anything like that – I would never do that – this isn’t what it looks like -”
“And what does it look like?” Rachel asks.
Shit. “Well . . . em . . . Jack told me about his mother and I was just trying to show him what happens, y’know, when people . . .” he lowers his voice to a whisper, “die.”
“I really don’t think that that is any of your business. I’m not sure what is going on here but come on, Jack, we have to go. Your ma is looking for you.”
Outside the shop, Rachel turns to Jack.
“You’re not to go back there, Jack, do you understand?”
“I don’t have to do what you tell me – you’re not me ma!”
“I know that but I’m asking you not to go there and I know your ma will be in agreement with me.”
“Why can’t I?” he protests. “I like Conor and I like reading his books.”
“You just can’t, okay? It’s not appropriate for an eight-year-old boy to be hanging around with a grown man.”
“Why?”
“Look, Jack pet, you just have to take my word for it. I don’t want to see you back there again – it’s for your own good.”
“I hate you! Ever since you came to our house things have been bad. It’s all your fault!”
“I know you are going through a difficult time right now, Jack, and you might not see it like this, but my job is to try to help you.”
“No, it’s not! You just ruin everything!” he screams at her and storms off ahead of her.
Rachel is running in her heels trying to keep up with his pace but, every time she gets near him, he takes off again. “Slow down, Jack.” She is just about level with him and he sprints off ahead of her again. “Jack, come back here! Jack!” She keeps going as fast as she
can in her heels.
“Where were you?” Tina asks when Jack comes through the door. “You’ve a face on you that would turn milk sour. Don’t tell me you were down in that bookshop again?”
“Uh-huh,” says Rachel breathlessly as she comes in the door behind him. “You were right – that’s where I found him.”
“What has you going into that place, Jack?”
Into the Night Sky Page 21