Hermit

by S. R. White

  ‘Look, I wanted to apologise.’

  Dana was perplexed. ‘What for?’

  ‘For bailing on you, just near the end. I felt like I left the team to finish the job. Sorry ’bout that.’

  There was something beyond her apology, but Dana couldn’t work out what it was. ‘No need, Luce. I know you’re, uh, pretty prompt. No need to be sorry about it.’

  Another clatter and the ping of a microwave. Dana strained to imagine the setting: maybe a one-bed apartment with clean, straight lines, or perhaps a cottage with sloping ceilings and wide floorboards. She had no source material to work with.

  ‘It’s just’ – Lucy paused – ‘that I could see you were getting pretty anxious. Not about Whittler – you were always going to get your man there. I mean generally. What it took from you today. I mean. Ah, crap. I mean specifically today.’

  ‘Don’t get you, Luce.’ Dana had grabbed the arm of the chair with her free hand, her knuckles white.

  ‘It’s probably nothing, but . . . I’m one of those sad sacks that keeps a diary. Well, a journal, really. I flick back to what I was doing the same day last year, and so on. Trying to spot some progress in my life. Anyway, I’d noticed that the last two years you’ve been very adamant about having this day off. This exact day. So I thought maybe you found it tough working on this day. And then when we spoke – in the bathroom? I could tell you didn’t want to talk about it much, but . . .’

  A silence caused by Dana fighting back a tear.

  ‘Ah, sorry,’ Lucy continued above the clack of spoon on saucepan. ‘None of my business, I know. I dunno. Thought that’s what it was.’

  ‘No, no, you’re right.’ Dana had her hand raised in placation, irrespective of Lucy’s ability to see it. ‘Yes, it’s a weird kind of commemoration.’

  There was no more extraneous noise from Lucy’s end. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d stopped.

  ‘You don’t have to—’

  ‘No, let me, Luce. I have to. Want to.’

  ‘Okay.’

  This time Dana did sink back in the chair, felt it settle about her shoulders. She focused on the strips of light spearing through a louvre blind on to the carpet.

  ‘Most of today, one way or another, I’ve been talking with Nathan about family. It kept coming up. I mean, each time I thought I was talking about something else we ended up mentioning our mother or father, or his brother. Always, back to family.’

  ‘Yeah, sometimes it feels like the world is going to fixate on a topic, no matter what you do.’

  ‘Exactly. And it was a quandary. Because, as I kept telling Nathan, everything I said in those interviews goes to defence counsel. They can discuss it in open court, they can quiz me on it. It was deeply personal. Deeply. I don’t want that sort of stuff in the public domain. And it might undermine the case – if I’m that sympathetic, did I really believe he’d done it? Did I con him into confessing by being his pal? Don’t I think it’s manslaughter, a mistake in the dark? I ended up saying that at the end, as it turns out. But all day, I kept trying to steer him away from my family.’

  Dana switched off the table lamp. The only light was the muted orange shards spearing in through the louvres.

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I needed to have a rapport with him. It would be what undid him, convince him to tell. And it did. But there was this quid pro quo all day: I had to give, to get. He knew it; I knew it. So I spent half the time talking about things that I normally keep stuffed away in a safe place.’

  A safe place so buried that skilled professionals could get nowhere near it; but which held its own weight, its own gravity, within her.

  ‘And today, of all days,’ asked Lucy, ‘it was especially raw? That’s a heap of bad luck at once.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Bloody kid of Mikey’s – if not for him, I might have been secondary and not lead.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘Yeah, little bugger had eaten two tubs of ice cream in the night. Not appendicitis after all, just gluttony.’

  ‘Is that what it was? Crap. And God, I didn’t even ask Mikey about it. Bill nagged me and I still wiped it. Bad Dana.’

  Lucy was silent. Then:

  ‘So today’s date is special because . . . ?’

  Her gentle way of pulling Dana back on track. Dana liked being led this way, by this person. Her grip on the arm of the chair relaxed without her realising.

  ‘Like I said before, it’s an anniversary. Two, in fact. They’re twenty years apart but totally connected. I struggle to deal with . . . ah, not explaining myself very well. Sorry, Luce. I need to— Jesus. I’ve explained this to I don’t know how many shrinks and counsellors: I should be word perfect by now.’

  There was a moment before Lucy replied.

  ‘No need to be word perfect. Take the pressure off. Just say how it started.’

  ‘You’re right. Okay.’ Deep breath. ‘So, we lived near Carlton when I was a little kid. My mother worked at the church – St Vincent’s, a short way down the road from here. Dad was a road engineer for the council. My mother’ – another deep breath – ‘didn’t like that I was an only child. She had this vision of . . . I don’t know, of a brood. Of a clutch of little kids trailing after her like ducklings, raised on her religion and absorbing her version of wisdom. I spoiled it – came out being strangled by the umbilical. The damage . . . well, she couldn’t have any more, and that was my fault.’

  ‘She sounds charming,’ said Lucy drily.

  ‘You haven’t heard the half of it. I’ll spare you years of detail. So we lived out of Carlton, on the Gazette road. Near the abattoir – you could smell the stench in a westerly. I don’t think Dad liked it, but my mother seemed to think it reminded us all of mortality. Which was apparently a good thing.’

  Dana could hear the edge in her voice and tried to rein it in.

  ‘My dad had heart problems all his life. From before I was born, in fact.’ She gave a watery smile to the darkness as she recalled his face. ‘Anyway, as far back as I could remember, he had to have his heart pills nearby. He used to tap his pocket without even thinking, to double-check. It was a reflex. Like me with those nebulisers, I suppose.’

  She wondered if Lucy had even noticed that. The silence suggested she had.

  ‘So, one day my mother had gone to the church for organ practice – a new hymn the preacher wanted to introduce.’ Dana could still feel the way her shoulder blades eased when she heard her mother’s car backing out on to the road. The clunk-scrape as it cleared the gutter; the slight squeal as it pulled away. She could recall that day now; rippling shadows as she ran around the tree, blowing soap bubbles that nestled on her arm.

  ‘She and Dad had been arguing about making me a treehouse. I was only eight. We had an old poinciana at the bottom of the garden: must have been twenty years old, even then. Wizened, crooked; a pair of sagging branches that looked like helping hands, cupping you into the foliage – it looked like the trees in children’s books, the ones that kick-started an adventure. It was deep summer – that explosion of crimson that poincianas do: delicate shade, fallen blossom on the grass like a field of poppies. Dad wanted to build a small treehouse for me, but Mother said it was an indulgence – I’d grow out of it soon enough and I wasn’t to be encouraged. Those were her exact words.’

  The resentment billowed again, like smoke from a petrol fire. The rising fear in her throat made her stop for a second. Dana looked around anxiously for a nebuliser, fearing another attack exactly when she needed to be composed. Gulps of air somehow helped.

  ‘Sorry. Bit panicky.’

  ‘I can tell. All good. Take whatever time you need.’

  ‘With Mother out for a while, Dad winked at me and pulled some wood out from behind the shed. He must have reckoned on getting so far into it before she returned, she’d have to go along with it. So he started sawing, and hammering, and measuring. I was the little girl holding the nails and clapping occasionally.’

  Dana could no longer tell
for sure what was memory and what was reading reports, listening to neighbours, and her own dreaming. Decades of overthinking had melted ideas, memories, notions; second-hand views and second-rate psychiatry. But she sensed once again the sun on her skin, the muscles in her face as she smiled, the buzz of insects and a distant harvester.

  ‘It’s hellish hot. I know that now, but I didn’t really notice at the time, because I’m sitting in the shade and not working. There’s no air, no breeze. Suddenly, Dad drops to his knees and on to his side. He’s lying on those scarlet blossoms, clutching his shoulder. I think he’s hurt his arm, because that’s what he’s looking at. Except he isn’t: he’s looking for his pills. The heart pills. He croaks at me to get his pills. By his bed, in the brown bottle.

  ‘I run. I probably wasn’t quick but it felt like I ran like the wind. Up the stairs, into their room. I know which side of the bed is his and I grab the bottle. I’m on my way down the stairs, daring to take them two at a time, when it hits me.

  Dad needs some water.

  ‘I stop at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe I can – but no, he always takes them with a glass of water. I’ve come to believe that the water is part of the pills; that they can’t work without it. He’ll be angry if I only take out the pills. He’s hurting; he needs his little girl to bring the water so the pills will work.

  ‘I go to the kitchen and drag a chair to the bench. Up on to the bench, on my knees. I swing open the cupboard and take a tumbler. Crawl across to the tap and fill the glass, pretty full. I climb down on to the chair and then to the floor. Put the tablets into the pocket on the front of my dress. I need both hands for the water. Can’t drop it.

  ‘When I come outside again the sunlight hurts my eyes. The heat smacks me. I start down the path, as fast as I can without dropping any. He needs the pills and the water. I know this.

  ‘As I get near him I can see Mother bent over him. She’s screaming his name, over and over. I’m right next to her before she notices. Her hair is over her face, her eyes are wet. She’s . . . angry. Angry and desperate.

  ‘ “His pills!” she shouts. “His pills!” I’m shaking now. I hold out the water to her and she gets this strange look. She knocks the glass away into the bushes. “Where are the pills?” she screams.

  ‘I take them out of my pocket. She snatches them off me. She pours some of them straight into his throat. I don’t understand. That won’t work, I want to say. But something about her makes me shut up. Now she’s shaking him. Slapping him. Screaming again.

  ‘When she lets go of him he falls back, hard, on to the patio. His head bounces. I can still hear it – the big thud, and the little secondary one. She looks at me and, eight as I am, it feels . . . terrifying. I take a step back, wanting to run but scared she’ll catch me. She’s a monster now. I can’t stop shaking. She wants to know why I didn’t bring the pills quicker, why I didn’t run.

  ‘I whisper: Because he has to take them with water.

  ‘She looks down, and everything is very, very quiet. When she looks up, Mother’s eyes are narrow, like a cat’s.

  ‘ “You killed him,” she says to me. “You scheming, evil little bitch.” She dropped her voice, I could barely hear it. “You . . . Jezebel. Child of the devil. Murderer.” ’

  There was silence at the other end. Dana snapped herself back from twenty-five years ago and wondered if the phone was dead, if Lucy had run, if . . . she had no idea what.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Dana. I’m so sorry. That’s . . . I don’t even know what that is. You’ve carried that for so long.’

  Lucy struck a nerve with the one word. Carried. It was exactly that; a burden Dana could never shake, a perpetual weight permeating everything she said, or did, or thought. Everything, poisoned by her mother’s words. All that came after was caused by that moment. Everything she did or didn’t do, tried or failed, was or could never be: rooted in those few seconds of summer.

  Her hand was shaking, her vision beginning to swim.

  ‘Carried? Yes, yes, that’s . . . that’s part of the battle, Luce. That’s how my life changed. When you’re eight and your father dies, you think your life’s over. But everything was just beginning. My mother went from anger to cold brutality – like that switch was always there, within her. It all got . . . it got really dark, brutal.

  ‘I could never doubt that she blamed me. She wanted a reason for Dad’s death, and she wanted that reason to be me. She needed it to be me. And she needed me to have something wrong. Something hideous inside me, but somehow fixable if she pushed her own warped faith far enough. That way, she would have some control of consequence: as if she couldn’t be a victim herself, if she created one in me. The physical abuse, the mental torture, the emotional iciness: she kept trying to exorcise a demon in me that wasn’t there.

  ‘It took me years to escape it; to physically get out of there. Because the people I should have been able to run to; they turned away, or gave up, or – incredible to me – indulged her and helped her. That thing they say to kids in trouble – tell someone. Well, I did, and it just got worse. Because young kids don’t always know who they can trust, so they guess. I guessed wrong: oh, so wrong.

  ‘The Day just brings it all screaming back. I bluff through every Day: have done for years. I kid myself I’m managing it, but really I’m hanging by my fingertips. Working a murder on this Day? It’s too much, it’s a tidal wave. Turns out, I should have stood down.

  ‘The second anniversary I mentioned? That was twenty years later. Twenty, to the day. That was . . . Jesus, I can’t talk about it, Luce. Not now. It was worse. Much worse than the first anniversary. Much worse. Terrible. Sorry.’

  Dana was about to choke; to howl like Nathan.

  ‘I . . . I have to go, Luce. Thanks. For calling. Listening. Thanks.’ She wanted to throw the phone down, but couldn’t.

  ‘Thank you for telling me. I, uh, I feel very close to you tonight, Dana. Sleep tight.’

  It was so intimate, so quietly powerful, it cut through Dana totally.

  ‘G’night, Luce.’

  ‘Night.’

  The phone found its cradle at the third attempt. She hadn’t talked about it all for maybe four years – Father Timms had been the last to hear it. She understood saying it out loud gave it a new resonance, an echo bouncing back and shimmering through her.

  She’d told Nathan, effectively, that he should confess because it was good for his conscience, and because it gave him some semblance of control over his future. It had worked; Nathan had seen the sense in it.

  Dana didn’t. It was a monstrous lie.

  She glanced at the clock. Six hours and twelve minutes of the Day to go.

  Dana didn’t think she was going to make it.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing a novel seems like a solo task, right until the point where it isn’t. At that stage, you become hugely grateful for the passion, experience and support of many others.

  I’d like to thank everyone at Nottingham Trent University, especially the School of Amy, for their help. I’m eternally grateful to my agent, Hattie Grunewald of The Blair Partnership, who pulled me from the slush pile. And everyone at Headline, especially Toby Jones, who has achieved that great balance of fine-tuning a novel without losing its essence.

  Finally, I’m grateful for the support and love of my family.

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