“That’s when he phoned?”
“I took Stan and Shar to the video shop so they could each have a film for when Jimmy left with their dad. So they wouldn’t feel bad they weren’t going as well.”
“This was after school, then.”
“When we got home, the trip was off. Round half four.”
“Jimmy told you?”
“He didn’t need to tell me. He’d unpacked. All his gear was slung about his room.”
“What did he say?”
“That he wasn’t going to Greece.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he knew. Jimmy knew.”
She lifted the tea and drank. She said, “I expect some cricket business came up and Kenny had to see to it. He was hoping to be chosen for England again.”
“But Jimmy didn’t say?”
“He was cut up. He didn’t want to talk.”
“Still, he felt let down by his dad?”
“He’d been dead keen on going and then it was off. Yeah. He was let down.”
“Angry?” When Jean glanced her way sharply, Barbara said in easy explanation, “You mentioned that he hadn’t unpacked so much as thrown his clothes about the room. That sounds like temper to me. Was he angry?”
“Like any kid would be. No different from that.”
Barbara stubbed out her cigarette and took her time about considering whether to light another. She rejected the idea. “Does Jimmy have a means of transportation?”
“Why’d you need to know that?”
“Did he stay home Wednesday night? Stan and Shar had their videos. He had his disappointment. Did he stay home with you or go out and do something to cheer himself up? He was cut up, you said. He’d have probably wanted something to lift his spirits.”
“He was in and out. He’s always in and out. He likes to mess about with his mates.”
“And Wednesday night? He was with his mates then? What time did he come home?”
Jean placed her mug of tea on the coffee table. She pushed her left hand into the pocket of her housedress and seemed to find something to grasp inside. Out on the street, a woman’s voice shrilled, “Sandy, Paulie, teatime! Come inside before it gets cold.”
“Did he come home at all, Ms. Cooper?” Barbara asked.
“Course he did,” she said. “I just don’t know the time, do I? I was asleep. The boy has his own key. He comes and he goes.”
“And he was here in the morning when you got up?”
“Where else would he be? In the dust bin?”
“And today? Where is he? With his mates again? Who are they, by the way? I’ll need their names. Especially the ones he was with on Wednesday.”
“He’s taken Stan and Shar off somewhere.” She indicated the rubbish bags with a dip of her head. “So they wouldn’t have to see their dad’s things packed.”
“I’m going to need to talk to him eventually,” Barbara said. “It would be easier if I could see him now. Can you tell me where he’s gone?”
She shook her head.
“Or when he’ll return?”
“What could he say that I can’t?”
“He could tell me where he was Wednesday night, and what time he got home.”
“I don’t see what help that would be to you.”
“He could tell me what his conversation with his father was all about.”
“I’ve said already. The trip was off.”
“But you haven’t said why.”
“What does why matter?”
“Why tells us who might have known Kenneth Fleming was going to Kent.” Barbara watched for Jean Cooper’s reaction to the statement. It was subtle enough, a mottling of skin where her floral housedress exposed a pale triangle of chest. The colour climbed no higher. Barbara said, “I understand you spent weekends out there when your husband first played on the county side. You and the children.”
“What if we did?”
“Would you drive out yourself to the cottage? Or would your husband come to fetch you?”
“We’d drive out.”
“And if he wasn’t there when you arrived? Had you your own set of keys to let yourself in?”
Jean’s back straightened. She crushed her cigarette out. “I see,” she said. “I know what you’re saying. Where was Jimmy on Wednesday night? Did he ever come home? Was he in a temper over his holiday being spoiled? And if you don’t mind my asking, could he have pinched a set of keys to the cottage, popped out to Kent, and killed his own dad?”
“It’s an interesting question,” Barbara noted. “I wouldn’t mind in the least if you commented on it.”
“He was home, home.”
“But you can’t say what time.”
“And there isn’t any bloody keys for anyone to pinch. There never was.”
“So how did you get into the cottage when your husband wasn’t there?”
Jean was caught up short. She said, “What? When?”
“When you used to go to Kent at the weekends. How did you get in if your husband wasn’t there?”
Jean gave an agitated pull at the collar of her dress. The action seemed to calm her because she raised her head and said, “There was a key always kept in a shed, back of the garage. We used that to get in.”
“Who knew about that key?”
“Who knew? What difference does it make? We all bloody knew. All right?”
“Not quite. The key’s gone missing.”
“And you think Jimmy took it.”
“Not necessarily.” Barbara lifted her bag from the floor and slung it to her shoulder. “Tell me, Ms. Cooper,” she said in conclusion, knowing the answer without having to hear it, “is there anyone who can verify where you were on Wednesday night?”
Jimmy paid for the crisps, the Cadbury bars, the Hob Nobs, and the Custard Cremes. Earlier, at the bottom of the stairs where the fruit vendor had his stall at Island Gardens Station, he’d pinched two bananas, a peach, and a nectarine while some old cow with too much pink scalp and too little blue hair kept whining about the price of sprouts. As if anyone with sense would eat those filthy green gobs in the first place.
He had plenty of money to pay for the fruit. Mum had passed him ten quid that morning and said to give Stan and Shar a treat somewhere nice. But bananas, peaches, and nectarines didn’t qualify as treats and even if that hadn’t been the case, his act of petty theft had been a matter of principle. The fruit vendor was a first-class toe-rag, always had been, always would be. “Flipping yobs,” he’d mutter whenever some of the blokes from school would pass too close to his naffing tomatoes. “Stop poncing round here. Get some decent employment, you miserable louts.” So it was a matter of honour among the blokes from George Green Comprehensive to nick as much fruit and veg as possible from the freaking jack.
But Jimmy had no grudge against the old bugger who ran the Island Gardens refreshment caff. So when they trotted over to the squat building at the edge of the green, when Shar asked for crisps and a chocolate bar, and when Stan pointed silently to the Hob Nobs and the Custard Cremes, Jimmy shoved a five-quid note across the counter willingly, not knowing at first how to respond when the old boy said, “Nicest sort of a day for an outing, dearie, isn’t it?” and patted his hand. At first Jimmy thought the old bloke was a fairy trying to pull him with the hope of doing a brown behind the counter when no one was looking. But then he looked at him closer when the old man handed him the change from his purchases and he realised from the goopy screen of white across his eyes that the poor sod was nearly blind. He’d seen Jimmy’s hair, but he’d heard Sharon’s voice. He thought he was flirting with a local bird.
They’d already had two egg sandwiches and a sausage roll riding on the docklands train from Crossharbour down to the river. It wasn’t a long trip—two stations was all—but they’d had enough time to wolf down their food and wash it back with two Cokes and a Fanta orange. Shar had said, “I don’t think we’re s’pose to eat on the trai
n, Jimmy.” Jimmy said, “So don’t if you’re scared,” and bit off a hunk of sandwich that he chewed with an open mouth right next to her ear. “Munch, munch, munch,” he’d said with his mouth full of bread and his teeth coated yellow with egg. “Eat too slow and end up in Borstal. Here they come to get us. Shar, here they come!” She’d giggled and unwrapped her sandwich. She’d eaten half and saved the rest.
He squinted at her now from one of the tables at the Island Gardens caff. Dimly he could see that she’d taken the two slices of bread apart, carefully wiped the egg off with a paper napkin, and at the moment she appeared to be making a line of crumbles along the embankment wall some thirty yards from where he sat. When the bread was in place, she scurried back across the lawn and took her binoculars from their leather case.
“Too many people,” Jimmy said. “You won’t see nothing but pigeons, Shar.”
“There’s gulls on the river. Plenty of gulls.”
“So what? Gull’s a gull.”
“No. There’s gulls, and then there’s gulls,” she said obscurely. “You got to be patient.”
She took a small, prettily bound notebook from her knapsack. She opened it and neatly printed the date on the top of a new page. Jimmy looked away. Dad had given the notebook to her at Christmas, with three more bird books and a smaller but more powerful pair of binoculars. “These are for some serious watching,” he’d said. “Shall we try them out, Shar? We can take them to Hampstead and see what’s flying round the heath one day. Want to do that?”
She’d said, “Oh yes, Dad,” with a shining face and she’d waited serenely as first the days then the weeks went by, always confident that Dad would do what he said.
But something last October had changed him, making his word worth nothing, turning him edgy whenever they saw him, filling him with the need to pop his knuckles, to walk to windows, and to jump for the telephone whenever it rang. One day he acted like a single wrong word was enough to put him into a lather. The next he was completely buzzed up, like he’d scored a century without even trying. It had taken Jimmy a few weeks and some detective work to sort out what had happened to change his father so much. But once he knew what that “what happened” was, he also knew that nothing in their unconventional family life was ever going to be the same.
He shut his eyes for a moment. He concentrated on the sounds. The gulls screaming, the tapping of footsteps on the path behind the caff, the chatter of trippers come to ride the lift down to the Greenwich foot tunnel, the scrape of metal as someone tried to crank open one of the grimy umbrellas that stood among the outdoor tables.
“See, there’s black-headed gulls and herring gulls and glaucous gulls and all sorts of gulls,” his sister was saying companionably. She was polishing her spectacles on the hem of her jumper. “But I’ve been looking for a kittiwake lately.”
“Yeah? What’s that? Don’t sound like a bird to me.” Jimmy opened the packet of Stan’s Hob Nobs and popped one into his mouth. On the lawn at the far side of a circular flower bed abloom with reds, yellows, and pinks, Stan was attempting to be both bowler and batsman in a single-man cricket match, tossing the ball up, swinging at it wildly, generally missing, and yelling when he hit it, “That’s a four, that’s a four. You saw it, didn’t you?”
“A kittiwake is almost exclusively sea-going,” Shar informed Jimmy. She returned her spectacles to her nose. “They rarely come inshore except to scavenge from fishing boats. In summer—like it almost is now, right?—they nest on cliffs. They make these sweet little nest cups out of mud and bits of string and weeds and they attach them to rocks.”
“Yeah? So why’re you looking for a kitti-whatever here?”
“Kittiwake,” she said patiently. “Because of how unusual it would be to see one. It’d be a real coup.” She lifted her binoculars and scanned the embankment wall where several gulls—unintimidated by the passersby and the afternoon loungers who sat on the benches—were attending to the crumbs she’d left them.
“Kittiwakes have blackish brown legs,” she said. “They have yellow beaks and dark eyes.”
“That sounds like every gull in the world.”
“And when they fly, they bank quite wildly and cut the waves with their wing tips. That’s especially how you tell what they are.”
“Ain’t no waves here, Shar, in case you didn’t notice.”
“Well, of course, I know that. So we won’t see them bank. We’ll have to rely on other visual stimuli.”
Jimmy went for another Hob Nob. He reached into the pocket of his windcheater and brought out his cigarettes. Without looking away from her binoculars, Sharon said, “You oughtn’t to smoke. You know it’s bad. It gives you cancer.”
“What if I want cancer?”
“Why would you want cancer?”
“Quicker way out of this place.”
“But it gives other people cancer as well. It’s called passive smoking. Did you know? The way it works is if you keep smoking, we could die from breathing it, me and Stan. If we’re round you enough.”
“So maybe you don’t want to be round me. No big loss to either of us, is it?”
She lowered the binoculars and set them on the table. The lenses of her spectacles magnified her eyes. “Dad wouldn’t of wanted you to smoke,” she said. “He was always after Mummy to stop.”
Jimmy’s fingers closed round his packet of JPS. He heard the paper crinkle as he crushed it.
“D’you think if she’d stopped smoking…” Sharon gave a delicate cough like she was clearing her throat. “I mean, he asked so many times. He said, ‘Jean, you got to quit it with the fags. You’re killing yourself. You’re killing us all.’ And I used to wonder—”
“Don’t be daft, all right?” Jimmy said harshly. “Blokes don’t leave their wives cos they smoke fags. Jesus, Shar. What a dimwit.”
Sharon gave her attention to the notebook open on the table. Gently, she flipped back a few pages to earlier in the year. She ran her finger over the sketch of a brown bird with subtle orange markings. Jimmy saw the neat label nightjar written beneath it.
“Was it because of us, then?” she said. “Because he didn’t want us? D’you think that’s it?”
Jimmy felt a circle of cold growing round him. He ate another Hob Nob. He took the purloined fruit from his windcheater and laid it on the table in front of them. His stomach felt like it was filled with stones, but he took the nectarine and bit into it with a kind of fury.
“Then why?” Sharon asked. “Did Mummy do something bad? Did she find another bloke? Did Dad stop loving—”
“Shut up about it!” Jimmy pushed himself to his feet. He strode towards the embankment, calling over his shoulder, “What difference does it make? He’s dead. Just shut up.”
Her face crumpled but he turned away. He heard Shar call after him, “And you ought to wear your specs, Jimmy. Dad would of wanted you to wear your specs.” He kicked savagely at the grass. Stan ran to join him. He dragged his cricket bat behind him like a rudder.
“Did you see how I hit it?” Stan asked. “Jimmy, did you see?”
Jimmy nodded numbly. He hurled his nectarine into the flower bed and reached for his cigarettes only to realise he’d left them on the table. He walked to the wall where the pigeons and gulls picked among the crumbs that Sharon had left them. He leaned against it. He looked down at the river.
“Will you bowl for me, Jimmy?” Stan asked eagerly. “Please? I can’t bat proper unless someone bowls.”
“Sure,” Jimmy told him. “A minute. Okay?”
“Okay. Sure.” Stan ran back to the lawn, calling, “Shar, watch us. Jimmy’s goin’ to bowl.”
Which is, of course, what Dad wanted him to do. You’ve got a fine arm, Jim. You’ve got a Bedser arm on you. Let’s go down to the pitch. You bowl. I bat.
Jimmy stopped himself from shrieking into the air. He grasped the wrought-iron railing that ran along the top of the embankment wall. He leaned his forehead against it and closed his eyes. It hu
rt too much. To think, to talk, to try to understand…
Did Mummy do something bad? Did she find another bloke? Did Dad stop loving her?
Jimmy hit his forehead against the wrought-iron balusters. He clenched them so hard that they felt like they were melting through his flesh and becoming his bones. He forced his eyes open and looked at the river. The tide was turning. The water was turbid. The current was swift. He thought about the rowing club on Saundersness Road, about the boat launch where the coarse pebbles giving onto the Thames were always strewn with Evian bottles, Cadbury wrappers, cigarette ends, used condoms, and rotting fruit. You could walk right into the river there. No wall to climb over, no fence to scale. Danger! Deep Water! No Swimming! were the warnings mounted on the lamppost that stood at the entrance to the launch. But that’s what he wanted: danger and deep water.
Across the river, if he squinted hard, he could just make out the classical domes of the Royal Naval College, and he could use his imagination to fill in the rest: the pediments and columns, the noble facade. Just to the west of these buildings, the Cutty Sark stood in dry dock and although they weren’t massive enough for him to make out from the north bank of the river, he could visualise the clipper’s three proud masts and the ten miles of ropes that made up her rigging. On the Australian wool run, she’d never been beaten by another ship. She’d been built as a tea-clipper to sail from China, but when the Suez Canal opened, she’d had to adapt.
That’s what life was about, right? Adapting. That’s what Dad would have called matching one’s bowling to the pitch.
Dad. Dad. Jimmy felt like glass was cutting his chest. He felt on fire. He wanted to be gone from this place, but more than that he wanted to be gone from this life. Not Jimmy any longer, not Ken Fleming’s son, not an older brother who was supposed to do something to make things easier for Sharon and Stan, but a rock sitting in somebody’s garden, a fallen tree in the country, a footpath through the woods. A chair, a cooker, a picture frame. Anything but who and what he was.
“Jimmy?”
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