‘Please, Rose. I am really sorry. I just can’t—’
‘What?’ I put my hands up to ward him off although he had not touched me yet. ‘What, Danny? Sorry that you slept with a married woman? Sorry that you threatened my kids? Sorry that you just disappeared?’
‘I would never have hurt them, you must know that.’
‘How do I know that? I don’t know you at all, that much is clear.’
‘I can’t explain, not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘I shouldn’t even be here.’
‘Why shouldn’t you?’
‘Because. I can’t explain. Not now.’
‘Right. Well, don’t then.’ I slipped out of his shadow and moved to step into the house. But before I could, he pulled me back.
‘Don’t,’ I croaked, but found I couldn’t stop him. I just wanted to not think, to lose myself for a while.
‘Rose,’ he whispered, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and then he picked me up and I let him; he carried me into the house and I was crying tears of sorrow, anger and frustration, and I wanted to pummel him with my clenched fists but instead I wrapped my legs around him and kissed him back until my mouth hurt. I felt his warm skin beneath my splayed fingers and he held me so tight I felt he could crush me and at that moment it would have been all right, because I sought oblivion.
Afterwards we lay on the floor beside each other and listened to the sounds of the night outside. I looked over at him. He had a scar on his face that somehow I had never noticed before, a small white nick below his left cheekbone. He looked back and then he stroked my face, my sore cheek where James had hit me, only now the bruises had faded.
‘God, Rose,’ he muttered.
‘What?’
‘Just …’ He ran his hand through his hair distractedly. ‘You.’
My heart caught on itself, but somewhere deep down I didn’t believe him any more.
He felt for his tobacco. ‘Want one?’
‘I don’t smoke. Don’t you remember?’ I rolled away from his warm arms. I lay on the bare floorboards and I felt like an island floating alone, and then I thought, I must get up and put some clothes on before one of the children wake up. Only I couldn’t move, not yet.
‘I do remember, aye. I was just being polite.’
‘Well, don’t be polite. You’ve never bothered before.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said equably. ‘Sweet then?’
‘I don’t want a sweet.’ I was being petulant, I knew. ‘Why do you always eat them?’
‘Trying to give up smoking. I got hooked on both instead.’ He ran a hand over the floor. ‘Home improvements?’
‘I tore the carpet up.’
I hadn’t been able to bear the bloodstains any more, so I’d hacked at it last night. The only time I had cried since James’s arrest; I’d sat amidst underlay and tacks and wool pile and sobbed.
I looked back at Danny. ‘Why are you here? I still don’t understand.’
‘Because I wanted to see you.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Here and there.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to have to go, Rose. I’m sorry.’
I felt numb, like my soul was being sucked out, like I’d finally lost all sense of levity and joy. I knew we did not belong together. That much had become clear.
‘Danny?’
‘Aye.’
‘Did you know James has been arrested?’
He sat up and felt in his discarded jacket for a light. ‘I had heard, aye.’
‘Ash Kattan was here.’
‘When?’
‘The night James got arrested. Do you know why?’
‘Nope.’
I wanted to touch him and yet I couldn’t.
‘Can I ask you something else?’ I said quietly.
‘Go on.’
‘Was it because of the children?’
He lit the roll-up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you vanish, did you hate the – the idea of me in the end because of the children?’
‘I don’t understand.’ He ran a hand through his hair; he looked tired. He rubbed his face as if to rouse himself.
‘Because I was not just me?’
‘Rose, it was nothing to do with your weans, I swear. Or you. Not in the way you think.’
‘What then?’
‘One day you’ll understand, pet.’ Danny inhaled deeply. He stared at the ceiling. Car headlights moved across it, two white discs sliding down the shadowed wall. ‘I promise you that.’
‘So why did you come back?’ I whispered. I would not cry again.
‘I came to find you – to tell you.’ He reached out and ran a hand down my ribcage. My stomach contracted. ‘I came to tell you that I was sorry.’
‘You came to find me, to say sorry,’ I was parroting again. ‘And that’s it?’
‘I’m good at finding things.’ The end of the roll-up was a tiny firefly in the darkness. ‘That’s what I do.’
I rolled back to him and stared down into his face. ‘Just not so good at keeping them.’
‘That may be true, Rose Miller. It may well be true.’ He looked up at me, the blue of his eyes doused by the dim light; and then he ran one finger down my cheek. I could feel the heat of the cigarette on my skin. ‘I wish I could stay.’
‘But you can’t.’
‘It’s not something I’m glad about.’
I moved my head away. ‘What are you glad about?’
‘Right now,’ Danny stood up fluidly and walked to the window, buttoning up his jeans, ‘not much.’
I watched him wordlessly.
‘I’m flying out to join Kattan tomorrow.’ He looked down the drive. ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.’ He drew the blinds.
‘Where is he? Kattan?’ I stared at Danny’s naked back. He was lean in the moonlight, the well-defined muscles, the dip in the small of his back, the black dragon on his shoulder shadowed and smooth, another smaller tattoo on the other bicep, some kind of flag I didn’t recognise. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Abroad. On his way home, I think.’
‘And you’re not here any more either, are you? In spirit, you’re not here?’
‘Not in the way you want me to be, no, I suppose not.’
I wanted to scream ‘Don’t go!’ but I couldn’t speak. I took a deep breath.
‘I think you should leave now, Danny.’
He swung round. ‘I can’t be here, Rose. It’s not that I don’t want to be. It’s just – I can’t.’
‘Whatever. It’s fine.’ I stood quickly and pulled my old sweatshirt back over my head, scraping my hair angrily back from my face. ‘Please, just go.’
How easy it is to say in love the opposite of what is actually meant.
‘If that’s what you want,’ Danny shrugged. ‘I guess you’re right.’
How hard it is to confess what we really feel. To lay ourselves open, on the line.
I stared at him. ‘Could you not even argue?’
He didn’t answer, just got dressed silently. When he left he leaned to kiss me on the mouth, but I moved my head so that his cool lips landed awkwardly on my cheek. He stared down at me and in the half-light I could see the piercing blue of his eyes again, and I felt despair.
And when he left, slipping out of the back door like a furtive lover from some bad farce, I felt so much worse than I had before. I stared out into the dark.
When I went back into the living room, I saw he’d left his old jumper on the sofa, and a stupid lemon sherbet sweet had fallen from his pocket. I picked them up and carried them into the kitchen; I held them above the bin.
I despised myself for wanting him. I despised myself for wishing he had stayed. I hadn’t meant to let him in but he’d got in anyway, like a fine layer of sand beneath my skin, he was there, hurting me because I couldn’t have him and couldn’t rid my head of him. And perhaps I had been greedy and bad, perhaps I deserved the pain. Whichever, I was sure as hell paying for it now.
I felt dead inside; I had lost any vestige of hope I had left. He might have said I was beautiful but still, he left. And I was a bad, bad woman who had cheated on her husband; who yearned to run away, who had, at one mad moment, forgotten she was a mother and only remembered that she was full of lust and longing and – love.
I carried his jumper upstairs and I breathed in its smell, just once. Then I tucked it into my bottom drawer, beneath my old pyjamas.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE TIMES, MAY 2008
Record producer James Miller has reportedly been granted bail. He is at home in Gloucestershire awaiting the outcome of an investigation conducted by the Met, apparently in conjunction with drug trafficking. As yet no charges have been brought. Thirty-nine-year-old Miller declined to comment, although friends say he is fully intending to prove his innocence, should there be any need to.
They sent James home the next day. He was exhausted; hadn’t slept at all, he said, and he looked thinner already, though he surely couldn’t be.
‘I’ve been fucking set up, Rose,’ he kept saying. He sat at the kitchen table and drank a bottle of heavy burgundy, glass after glass of it. ‘He set me up.’
‘Who?’ I couldn’t bear it. ‘Do you mean Liam?’
James stared at me, his mouth stained red. ‘No, not bloody Liam. Of course not Liam. The bastard who did the deal on the importation. He set me up.’
‘Who was he, though? Who was it?’
‘He never told me his full name. Saquib something.’
‘You must have had an idea, though, James, of who you were dealing with?’ I was nonplussed by his apparent denseness. He must be lying again, he had to be. ‘Surely?’
‘I met him in London before I went,’ was all he would say before he drank himself to sleep.
And I watched him and I thought perhaps I should feel real guilt about Danny, but I knew that I didn’t. Not really. I had lost James long, long ago.
In the morning over breakfast, I asked James why the police had said that he had never left the country.
‘Because they’re out to fucking get me.’ He slammed the chair against the kitchen wall so hard it dented the paintwork, his plate of toast flying to the ground. ‘They’re all out to get me. Don’t you understand?’
He yelled so loudly that Effie began to cry.
‘It’s OK, darling,’ I crooned, cradling her to me as if she was still a baby. She looked up at me with woeful eyes.
‘I want Daddy to go away again.’
All morning James rampaged through the house shouting and cursing until he wore himself out, just like his three-year-old son on a bad day. He yelled at me about the torn-up carpet for ten minutes until I quietly explained why I’d done it. Then he slunk off to the studio and slammed the door.
After school I took the children to the playground behind the church and then to The Copper Kettle for cheese-on-toast and lemonade for tea. I watched the little bubbles crowd round the glass that Effie held, and I craved peace for them; for their innocence. I listened to the women behind the counter moan about the Poles in Witney taking over their clientele.
‘Bloody foreign muck,’ one said, and I looked at her thinning crown, her baby-pink scalp, as she wiped the table next to her and I tried not to despise her fear.
I was sure people were staring at us as I watched the children laugh on the climbing-frame, screeching down the slides. People who didn’t know us were busy making judgements, and I thought that I wanted to leave this place now, this place that had never welcomed me. All I wanted – as was my habit, my oldest trick – all I wanted was to fly.
Later James was calmer. He’d spoken to his solicitor; Liam was coming up tomorrow.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised. ‘I’m just under a lot of stress.’
I said of course I knew how hideous it must be, and I understood – but actually I didn’t. I concentrated on the children because I didn’t know what else to do.
As darkness fell, Helen Kelsey arrived on the doorstep with a basket full of charity, but I didn’t let her in. I watched her from the upstairs window; I knew she had only come to delve and then impart the gossip to the village. I was quite simply done with being nice for the sake of it.
‘Rose,’ I could hear James calling me as I turned away from the window and drew the curtains, ‘have you got a number for Hadi Kattan?’
My heart thumped painfully. ‘Why?’
‘I need to speak to him now.’
‘Why?’
‘Have you got a number or not? The one I’ve got doesn’t seem to work.’
‘Somewhere, I think. But why do you need him?’ I said carefully, coming down the stairs.
‘Because the furniture guy, I’ve just remembered. He was recommended through the Kattans.’
James went through to the studio and I followed. I was shocked at the tip it had become; he had pulled every file and box and folder from the shelves. There was paper, CDs, album artwork everywhere, the floor was covered. He was never usually the tidiest man, but James was extremely house-proud when it came to the studio.
‘What do you mean you’ve just remembered?’ I said, stepping over Mick Jagger dressed as a wizard. ‘How could you possibly not remember before?’
His eyes were blazing with something. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘But you were banged up for three days and you didn’t remember—’
‘Shut up, Rose. I’ve remembered now.’
‘Remembered what, though?’
‘When I spoke to Kattan at his house, at that party he had. He offered to put some money into Revolver.’
‘Yes, I know that. But what has it to do with – to do with—’
‘And then we were talking about decking it out, the new club. I was admiring some of his furniture. All that gold-inlaid marble. I thought it would be classy in the new VIP. He said he would put me in touch with someone who imported it.’
‘James, please. Be straight with me about everything now.’ I sat heavily.
‘I am.’
‘You’re not. You went back there, to Albion Manor, and I saw you, and you lied about it.’
‘When?’
‘You know when. What else are you lying about?’
‘Nothing.’
‘James! Were you really in Vietnam? Come on, J. Be honest.’ He was about to argue – and then suddenly he shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘About what?’
‘Stuff?’
‘What kind of stuff?’ God, he was infuriating.
‘I had so much to sort out here and I – I was going to go, really, only then—’
‘But I dropped you at the airport and everything.’
‘Yeah. Well, I was going to go and then – they rang me, asked me to meet in London before I went away.’
‘And what did you talk about?’
‘When?’
‘At this meeting when you were meant to be in Saigon?’ How could I have been so slow? Marble wasn’t even a Vietnamese product. ‘Was it – was it heroin, J?’
He stared at me and I waited, hand outstretched to him, frozen. Finally he was going to tell the truth, I could tell. The computer pinged suddenly, announcing an email, and the spell was broken. He turned away.
‘That bloke sorted it. The meeting in London.’
‘What bloke?’ I said carefully.
‘You know, that Scottish geezer. The tall quiet one. Callendar. He arranged the meeting – about the furniture. I didn’t trust him then. Never trust the quiet ones. I think – Christ’s sake – careful, Rose.’
‘Ouch.’ I sliced my finger on the silver knife he used to open his post. ‘Sorry. You think what?’ I fumbled for a tissue to stem the blood; it dripped down onto the snowy paper I’d been assembling.
‘I think he’s fucking set me up.’ He pulled another in-tray of stuff from the desk; it swirled through the air. ‘Where are their fucking numbers? Why does everyone move my fucking stuff?�
��
My blood flowered onto the white tissue; a deep deep red.
That night James had another nightmare, the worst since we’d left university. He kept screaming a name over and over, a name I couldn’t make out; he kept screaming it and moaning, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry …’ When I eventually managed to wake him, his eyes were wide with fear. He said he couldn’t remember anything, but his distress was tangible.
* * *
The next morning I drove to Albion Manor but it was boarded and shuttered – no cars, no horses in the field. I took a deep breath and rang Danny, but his voicemail was always on. I tried to call Hadi Kattan, as James already had, but his number was unobtainable. I tried Maya too, several times, but although it rang, she never answered her phone or returned my calls.
At night James paced the house, too frightened to close his eyes in case the nightmares came again; in the day he dozed on the sofa. Liam came and went, they spoke to endless lawyers, they muttered to one another – but they never really told me what was going on. However hard I tried to get it out of James, he was constantly vague. ‘Set up’ became his mantra; deep down I was terrified he was guilty.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Liam knew more than he was admitting, but he was at great pains to avoid being on his own with me at any time. I’d still never understood why he’d collected my children that day, and I’d lost my trust in him. My paranoia was growing, I was aware of that, but our world was falling apart and my reason was following close behind.
At the end of that week, one morning around dawn, the police came and took James away again – and this time he looked broken. Fred woke up crying with all the noise and confusion, and I scooped him out of bed and carried him downstairs. He was too heavy for me these days to hold for long, but now I held him tight in my arms, his head heavy on my shoulder, blinking and bewildered, tears like dewdrops on his lashes. We stood on the doorstep in the early morning mist, the distant hills wreathed as if in dragon’s breath, shivering in our pyjamas.
I watched DS Montford escort my husband into the back of an unmarked car: I thanked God at least two of my children were still sleeping. James stared out at me, and he looked just like his son, like a little boy – and my heart went out to him. He looked like someone who had lost his fight. I held Fred’s hand up to wave to his father.
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