Maybe someone did find him in time and he survived. It might be. Spartan people used to put their new-born babies out on a hill so that the weaklings would die. Only those who were tough enough to survive were allowed to grow up to be Spartans. Maybe that baby was a tough one.
After some time the edges of the blanket lifted and let a little light in. I recovered enough to have baths and walk round the garden and then to go out, even though my legs were wobbly as new legs and the world was sharp enough to hurt my eyes. I started thinking about other people for a change and that was a relief. There had been no more letters from Sarah and that was good. I thought that she had given up. Maybe she had gone away. She once said she wanted to go to the States to think. Why is thinking easier in the States? Maybe she’d done that.
We had no money. I decided to go back to Mrs Banks. A tingling on the back of my hand was the memory of her tear. I wanted to be in her warm kitchen, sitting at her table with her, drinking coffee with Roy playing about around us. Maybe doing a bit of ironing, bringing a few pounds home. That seemed so long ago. But it wasn’t really long at all.
And one day the sun came out like something lost and found again. I put on my jacket and stood outside the back door with dazzles in my eyes. Doggo was out there, digging, the sun shining on his clean black hair. I stood watching but he didn’t see. The berries on the holly bush were stabs of red. A blackbird opened his yellow beak and did a thrill of song. I didn’t tell Doggo I was going, I just went.
Thirty-seven
It was dustbin day again and there were Christmas trees put out, trails of needles on the wet path and a golden scatter of empty chocolate money. Some of the trees still had wisps of tinsel on. I didn’t like to see the trees shoved out like that, like rubbish. Doggo had planted ours, though it didn’t look too good.
I stood outside Mrs Banks’ house for a while before I rang the bell. I didn’t know what to expect from her, having not turned up for ages. I could have been replaced for all I knew.
But she opened the door and said, ‘Lamb!’ as if she was glad to see me. ‘I’d given you up!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and started to stumble out some excuse but she wasn’t listening.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know, blow the cleaning, why don’t I take you out to lunch?’
I stared at her and she laughed. ‘I feel like going out, stuck in the house all over Christmas. Neville’s taken Roy to his granny’s for a day or two. I’m at a loose end. What about it?’
I shrugged. ‘K.’
She looked down at her pink track-suit. ‘I’ll just get ready.’
She ran up the stairs. I wasn’t ready. Luckily I was wearing my new jeans that weren’t too bad but my hair needed doing again and, when I looked in her mirror, I saw that my face was the colour of celery. I looked away and stood breathing in the smell of her house which I have always liked, coffee and washing-powder and child.
She came downstairs, wearing a short black dress as if she was going to a cocktail party and carrying her high-heeled shoes.
‘Like it?’ she said, pushing her feet into her shoes and twirling round in front of me. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d be seen dead in but it looked OK on her. ‘My New Year’s resolution is to wear nice things when I feel like it, not save them up for special occasions that never happen anyway. What’s yours?’ She squinted into the hall mirror and drew on some sugar lips.
I hadn’t even thought about resolutions so I said, ‘None.’
‘Then we’ll have to think of one for you.’ She fluffed her hair up, sprayed on some shocking perfume and off we went.
She took me to the Italian place with all the posers in the window. We stood there waiting for a table, sipping our mineral water and posing. Or I did. She was quite normal. And actually when you got in there everyone was normal. It was very kind of her but I wanted to say, Why me? I mean it’s pretty sad, having lunch with your cleaner. Where were her proper friends? But she was happy and bubbly and I didn’t want to burst her bubble.
Me, I was feeling … the way you feel when you’ve had flu and haven’t been out for ages and the outside world seems so full on you can hardly stand it. Like please, turn it all down. I was like a snail who’d lost its shell. Everything was frost and salt and stinging me.
She told me I’d like crostini misti and she was right. It was all sorts of different-coloured stuff on toast. She chose a neon salad thing and we had fizzy wine. I was so empty that it bypassed my stomach altogether and fizzed straight on up to my brain. I thought, well why not me? Why shouldn’t it be me in here?
She asked me about my Christmas. I didn’t say I spent it in bed with her son eating spoonfuls of flames and spewing up my memory. I just said, ‘K.’
‘Nice presents?’ she said.
‘Some ear-rings,’ I said with a straight face, picturing the plastic carrots.
‘I’ve got a little something for you,’ she said, bending down and fishing in her bag. ‘It is only little.’ She handed me a box wrapped in red foil.
Maybe it’s normal to buy your cleaner a present? And maybe it’s the thing to do to take her out to lunch? Then you can just happen to drop it in the conversation, Took the cleaner to Nonna’s for a perk. My cheeks went hot. I didn’t even want the present but I unwrapped it. It was a silver brooch shaped like a frisking lamb.
‘Ta,’ I said and stuffed it in my pocket.
‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she said.
‘I’ve not got you one,’ I said.
She waved her hand as if she didn’t expect anything. I looked down and saw I had shredded the label off the wine bottle. I sat on my hands.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. The waiter came and topped up our wine glasses. I crunched a bit of toast with some salty black stuff on but I couldn’t swallow.
‘Lamb … I hope you didn’t mind the way I went on the other week. I thought …’ She stopped and her eyes went bright.
‘What?’ I said through the mouthful of food. I didn’t need this. I had enough tears of my own thank you very much.
‘It’s just that I, well I find you easy to talk to,’ she said. ‘You’re a good listener. I don’t …’ She stopped and wrestled with her face until she won. ‘I don’t have that many friends,’ she said, ‘I’m not that type, but sometimes, well you meet someone and you feel a sort of link with them, a connection. Know what I mean?’
The anger puffed right out of me and left me smaller than before. I did know what she meant and I managed to swallow the food in my mouth. I know because that is just how I felt about Doggo. Because I don’t have that many friends believe it or not, hahaha. But when I met Doggo it was different. I recognised him. As if he was made of the same kind of stuff.
She swallowed some wine. ‘You strike me as rather brave,’ she said, ‘very prickly and private. To tell you the truth you remind me a bit of myself when I was younger.’ She stopped and summoned up a smile. ‘What my poor parents did to deserve me.’
The restaurant was clattering with so much noise my head was aching. Marion pushed away her plate and got out some fags. Consulate. I didn’t know she smoked.
I looked away while she struggled with her lighter. The people walking past outside had cold-weather skins and long plumes of private breath. Normally it would be me out there and someone else sitting where I was. I would be scurrying along with my face down, not sitting and gazing out with a glass of wine in my hand. I saw the sorry shadow of myself flit by.
Marion finally managed to light up. She smoked like someone who has only just learned, spitting the smoke out immediately before it could reach her tonsils but still choking.
‘I wanted to be a doctor once,’ I said. I don’t know what made me say that then.
‘Really?’ She held the cigarette as far away as possible. ‘Well you still could be. How old are you, eighteen, nineteen?’
‘Twenty. No qualifications.’
‘Well, you’re obviously bright. Start now and in less
than ten years you could be a doctor.’
‘Ten years!’ I said. I mean, that is a decade.
‘Ten years will go past anyway,’ she said. ‘You can either be a doctor at the end of it or not. You’d still be much younger than I am now.’
I stared at her. Maybe it was the wine that made that sound like sense. It would kill Doggo if I told him that. Me a doctor with a stethoscope and everything. Can you see it? Me.
‘That can be your resolution,’ she said. ‘Look into it.’
My mind was whirling. A waiter came and took away our plates. She ordered two cappuccinos. We sat there for a minute not saying anything. I wanted to ask her about Doggo but didn’t know how, and then we both tried to say something at once.
She laughed but only a whisk of a laugh before her face went bleak and she leant forward. ‘I really appreciated being able to talk to you the other day,’ she said. ‘It’s oh … leaving children it’s … you never really leave them … it’s –’
The waiter came with the cappuccinos. ‘All right, ladies?’ he said. ‘Enjoy.’ The coffees had smiley faces sprinkled in cocoa on top of the froth.
‘Like, like a bit of yourself has gone,’ she said. ‘You can leave them but you leave a bit of yourself too and it never stops hurting.’
My hand went to my ribs. Oh, so that is what it is.
We were quiet for a moment. She made a little gulping sound. I scooped the froth off my coffee and licked it off the spoon. There was a chocolate coffee bean on the saucer. I put it in my pocket to give to Doggo.
‘One of my sons is dead,’ she said, ‘the other was convicted of his murder.’
The window glass warped in and out.
‘No!’
‘What?’ She was shocked out of her wave of grief.
‘I mean … that is awful. God.’
It was almost impossible to sit still. My legs were jumping under the table as if they wanted to run. I wanted to lean across the table and slap her. Beat the truth out of her. It couldn’t be true. It was a lie.
She shut her eyes and a tear squeezed out. ‘They never, they never got on. They were you know chalk and cheese. David he was … he was like his dad, Martin more like oh what does it matter anyway. They were tooth and nail all their lives then there was a girl. Martin’s girl, all this is from the papers, Lamb, can you imagine learning about your children from the papers?’ She stopped and bit her lip. I shook my head. I couldn’t speak, my mouth gone so dry my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.
‘Apparently she’d been two-timing Martin with David for ages. That was more than it sounds. Because there’d always been this rivalry. Martin followed them back to David’s one night, after they’d been to some club or other. There was a fight. David shut Martin out. Martin came back later and fired up the house. It wasn’t just David he killed, it was the girl too. And she was pregnant though they don’t know whose …’
I so much wanted to run. I so much wanted to hurl the wine bottle at the window and hear it smash. To kick the table over, slam a chair down on her head. But I did nothing. Someone on another table was laughing, a ridiculous spasm of sound. She had not touched her coffee. The smiley face had gone. She saw me staring at it and took a sip. A thin brown moustache clung on her upper lip.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.
She knitted her jittering fingers together. ‘Martin was arrested and charged with arson and murder. Found guilty. Well he was guilty. No question. Life sentence.’
A shudder of chill went right through me. Arson. Doggo? A girl, pregnant. Arson. If I shut my eyes I could picture his face in the firelight, his gorgeous peachy skin. What lies he’d told. I thought I would vomit. I went to the toilet and stared at myself in the mirror and the pupils of my eyes were like bullet holes. The ash taste in my mouth. I rested my forehead against the cold glass till my heart stopped thumping and the sickness went away. I drank some water from the tap and went back and sat down.
Marion was puffing at another fag. There were blobs of mascara on her cheeks and a waiter was eyeing her warily.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She forced her lips into the most miserable smile I have ever seen. ‘But hang on, Lamb.’
I didn’t want to hang on another minute, or know another thing, but I forced my body to fold back on the chair.
‘I wanted to say … a few months ago Martin escaped from Rampton. Then a couple of weeks later my bag went missing and my keys, I thought maybe … I thought maybe he’d traced me and had come to me for … I don’t know. There were descriptions of him in the paper, maybe you saw? Height and everything, the scar and the LOVE-HATE on his knuckles.’
‘Love-hate?’ I said.
‘He’s got LOVE-HATE tattooed on his knuckles. “The LOVE-HATE Man” the papers called him, dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend and all that nonsense.’
She kept on talking but my mind had gone still like a pond, a stone sinking straight to the bottom. The LOVE-HATE Man. So the burning off was part of his disguise. I thought he burnt it off for me.
She was still going on while parts of me were falling away, like fragments of a shell. ‘And when my bag went missing I had this what you might call a gut feeling that it was him. I didn’t go to the police or tell Neville, I just waited. And this is daft, Lamb, forgive me, but for some reason I had an inkling that you knew something about it too.’ She looked at me with a brief flare of hope in her eyes.
‘And then the bag turned up with only the keys missing. I searched through it but there was no message, nothing. I know I should have changed the locks. But I don’t want to change the locks. Whatever he’s done. I don’t want to lock him out.’ She started to really blub then and two waiters scurried over and smoothed us out of there after smoothing payment out of her credit card first.
I walked with her back to her house. She wept as she walked along and people looked away quick. My mind was still and blank. He had lied to me. He had lied. He had lied and I had trusted him. All that story about the riot, the stabbing, revenge for his brother’s death. All lies and I had trusted him. Me.
We walked like two mad women. I left her at her door even though she wanted me to come in. I couldn’t spend any more time with her. Her heart was breaking in front of me and how could I stand that?
Thirty-eight
I walked about for ages, faster and faster. I could not go back. How could I go back? How could I bear to see him? The liar. How he had lied to me. How I’d believed him. And he’d called me a liar. God, it could nearly make you laugh.
I walked past the house again and again, the door shut smug behind the scraggy trees. But I didn’t go in. I went to the Botanics and sat on a wet bench among the dead sticks of the rose garden. It wasn’t all dead sticks, there was one straggly white rose browning at the edges, sagging under its own wet weight.
A man with a damp moustache sat down next to me. ‘Cheer up, might never happen,’ he said. ‘Spare a fag?’ I told him that I didn’t smoke. He said he’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro without any oxygen once. And who knows, maybe he did. Who cares. I gave him the chocolate coffee bean.
In the end there was nothing I could do except go back. I stepped through the door. There were a couple of envelopes on the mat, a brown one, bill, there had been lots of those. I left it. The other was a creamy square. I picked it up. I walked through into the back but no one was there, not even the dogs. The telly wasn’t on and Doggo wasn’t in his chair. A false flame flickered in the fire. A sinking in my gut said he’d gone. Just gone. Why wouldn’t he?
I went upstairs and stood in the lighthouse room looking at the phony storm. His stuff was still there. The real fire was hot. If he’d gone, he hadn’t been gone long, someone had tended it and lately. Anyway, he would have taken his stuff. He would only be outside, that’s all. Only in his stupid garden. I knelt down beside the fire. The tidy writing on the envelope was Sarah’s. I could hardly be bothered to open it but I did.
9th
Jan
Dear Doggo,
OK, I get the message. I feel exploited by you and by Lamb. You are living in my house but won’t even phone me. I’ve had flu but I’m better now. I’m coming back. While I was in bed with flu I had lots of time to think. Lamb said something crazy before I left that morning. She said you were a murderer. I just laughed. I was still high from … well you know. And after all her other terrible lies. But all those hours in bed alone, aching and coughing, I started to think. And I remembered something too, something about an escaped prisoner, someone dangerous, some connection with Sheffield. I’m sure this is crazy and I’m going to end up feeling incredibly stupid, but I don’t care. If you don’t ring me when you get this I’m phoning the police. Please ring and tell me how stupid this all is.
Love (believe it or not) Sarah.
I screwed it up and chucked it in the fire. How stupid. How hysterical. Get a grip, I would have said if I could see her. She would never do it. Call the police. Why would she? What a liar. Love. Believe it or not. If she loved him, she wouldn’t. What good would that do? Anyway she would wait a few days, give him a few days. What if the letter got delayed in the post? What if it got lost?
I went downstairs and into the room that was once Zita’s. I looked at the floor and the walls. A sunbeam jittered on the dusty floor. There really was no sign that anybody had ever burned to death in that room. No sign and no smell at all. It was just an empty room. It didn’t affect me one bit.
Of course he was in the garden with the dogs. He was smoking a fag, his back turned to me. I stood and watched him for a while. He was lost in thought. He looked just the same. I stared at him and thought, you lied to me. I refocused and tried to see him differently. As a liar, the murderer of his brother, a girl, an unborn child. A person who lived with that. A liar. But no matter how long I stared at him, I couldn’t. He was wearing an old sweater unravelling at the sleeves and all he looked was dear and familiar to me.
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