by Sarah May
‘No – she’s been fine,’ Anna responded ambivalently, too shocked by Laura’s tone to say anything else, and aware that Martha was watching her intently now.
‘She thinks I’m stupid,’ Laura carried on, ‘telling me she was going to Ellie’s house. I knew exactly where she was going, and she doesn’t have a friend called Ellie. In fact,’ she laughed again, ‘Martha doesn’t have any friends. She just sort of latches onto people until they get sick of her. There was a teacher at school last term she did the same thing to. She had to see the school counsellor after that. There’s something else you should know about Martha – she lies a lot. I mean, she lies compulsively.’
Martha was staring out the window again and had her back turned to Anna.
‘Laura –’
‘I want Martha home – okay? I don’t want you seeing her again and I don’t want you round here either. I want you to stay away from us.’
‘I needed to give a statement.’
‘But you didn’t need to do it here – in my home. You think I’m stupid as well, and you know what? That’s always been your problem, Anna – you underestimate people.’
Laura rang off and Anna placed the phone carefully on the arm of the sofa, staring at it without seeing it.
A few minutes later, still in shock, she said to Martha, ‘That was your mum – she wants you to go home.’
The intimacy of the past hour, which had taken her by surprise, had gone. All she saw was a child she wasn’t responsible for, standing in her apartment looking out of her window – and she didn’t want her there any more.
Martha kept her back turned to Anna. ‘It’s probably a maximum of ten degrees out there today – the sea temperature will be the same. When your deep body temperature drops to thirty-five degrees, you start to feel disorientated and confused. At thirty-four degrees, amnesia sets in. As your temperature drops from thirty-three down to thirty consciousness becomes cloudy until you lose consciousness altogether. If your deep body temperature gets down to twenty-five degrees then you’re probably dead. She hates me.’
‘Your mum? I’m sure she just –’
‘No!’ Martha shouted, adamant. ‘She hates me. This isn’t about her wanting me to go home it’s about control, that’s all. She needs to know she’s got control over me – and you as well. You don’t know her.’
She began hurriedly collecting her stuff, putting on her coat so roughly she ripped it.
‘Let me drive you – it’s pouring out there.’
‘I’m fine.’ Martha pulled the bike aggressively towards her, opening the door to the apartment before Anna had a chance to get there.
‘You’ll get soaked.’
‘It’s only rain.’ She paused at the top of the stairs for a moment, and they stared at each other then looked away.
‘Do you want to know what she was doing before I came over here today?’ Martha said. ‘She was sitting on one of the barstools in the kitchen reading a holiday brochure. I mean, she’s no great reader. That brochure – any brochure – is pretty much about her limit, and she’s working hard at it. When I see her this morning, reading her brochure, I say, “You’re not thinking of going on holiday are you?” and she says, “We’ll see.” And I say, “But, dad –” thinking, I really have got a point, and she just says, “Piss off.”’
Martha was as sullen again now as she’d been standing beside Bryan yesterday morning, in her riding clothes.
Anna was aware that she was waiting for her to say something, and at last said quietly, ‘I don’t think she’s all that keen on you coming over here.’
‘Fuck that. Fuck her.’
They carried the bike awkwardly down the stairs together.
‘You know what I think?’ Martha said, wheeling the bike out into the rain. ‘I think she pushed him over the edge, and that’s why he’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘He’s gone,’ Martha said again.
‘Which is different to disappearing?’
‘Completely.’
Anna stared out through the open front door at the Harbourmaster’s office – a nondescript brick building with woodwork painted a depressing shade of blue – thinking.
After Martha had gone, she went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, shutting her eyes, but a few minutes later was up again, looking for the running shoes she’d kicked off earlier. Then her phone started ringing.
‘Busy?’ It was the Inspector and Inspector Laviolette was the last person she felt like speaking to right then.
‘About to go out for a run – why are you phoning me?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I like running in the rain. Has something turned up?’
‘Not a sodding thing.’ He sounded tired. ‘Nothing . . . not a trace. Divers are going out tomorrow, then we’re launching an appeal.’ Before she could respond to this, he said, ‘Has Martha contacted you yet?’
‘No,’ she said, without hesitation, waiting. The silence was on the verge of becoming uncomfortable when he said, ‘Do you remember much about Bobby Deane?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You think Bryan’s still alive, don’t you?’
‘I’m not the only one.’
‘I remember Bobby when the Strike was on. I remember going up to the caravan they had outside the gates at Cambois power station when the pickets were trying to get lorry drivers not to deliver coal.’
‘Who did you go with?’
‘Bryan – probably.’
They were silent for a moment.
‘I was up at the power station during the Strike,’ he said after a while. ‘I’d just joined the Force.’
‘You picked a good time.’
Laviolette laughed. ‘It wasn’t so bad at the start – we were all local boys, with some extra cork lining in our hats, shin pads and cricket boxes over our valuables, but there wasn’t any trouble. Most of the drivers turned back. A few went through – there was abuse, but just verbal. Then there was this one driver who said he supported the cause, etc., turned his lorry round and drove off. Two minutes later, he was heading back up the road at well over seventy miles an hour, drove straight through the line and went crashing through the gates. One of the pickets went down and one of our boys went down as well.
‘When the next lorry came along, everybody was worked up and there’s no way we would have been able to hold our lines – there weren’t enough of us – if it hadn’t been for Bobby Deane, talking sense to his men, keeping them calm and telling them not to break through the line.’ There was the sound of scratching on the other end of the line. ‘I went to see Bobby Deane today – to ask whether he’d seen Bryan recently – only Bobby Deane’s got Alzheimer’s and should be in care.’
Anna thought about telling him she’d seen him parked on Armstrong Crescent, but kept quiet. Laviolette wasn’t the kind of man you offered more information to than was necessary, and anyway, her head was suddenly full of deer – something to do with Bobby Deane and deer. ‘Didn’t Bobby used to poach deer over the border during the Strike?’ she said out loud. She had a clear image of a slaughtered deer, hanging upside down, its dead eyes staring intently at her in the Deanes’ wash house.
‘We heard rumours that Christmas – venison pie at the free cafés. So that was Bobby, was it?’ Laviolette seemed to like the idea of Bobby as a poacher.
Anna was too shocked at the recollection to say anything. Now she realised it wasn’t Bobby Deane she associated with the slaughtered deer, it was Jamie.
‘I found out today that Jamie Deane’s about the only one who still visits his dad – although I’d call into question his motives. He’s using Bobby’s kitchen to cut his Methadrone in, and he’s probably picking up his dad’s pension and disability as well.’ The Inspector paused. ‘What d’you know about Jamie Deane?’
Anna thought about Jamie Deane, whose name she hadn’t heard in years. ‘Why are you asking me?’
‘
No reason.’
‘He was put away, wasn’t he? I don’t know how long for.’
‘Twenty years. He killed a man, but never confessed to it. At the time people thought it was Bobby who probably did it and that Jamie was covering up for his dad.’
‘Bobby?’
Ignoring this, Laviolette said, ‘Jamie’s been on probation for the past six months, and now his brother’s missing.’
‘You think Jamie Deane’s got something to do with Bryan’s disappearance?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. I just like talking to you – that’s all. You don’t trust me,’ he added.
‘I don’t need to. You’ve got your own Sergeant.’
‘Do you believe there’s such a thing as a law-abiding citizen?’
‘I believe there are six degrees of separation between a person who commits a crime and a person who thinks about committing a crime. I’ve got nothing to do with Bryan Deane’s disappearance, Inspector.’
‘I think we’ve all got something to do with it – just not in the way we think.’
Chapter 7
There were no lights on at number nineteen Parkview when Anna pulled up outside, and nobody answered the door when she rang so she let herself in, automatically turning on the hall light and calling out softly for Mary. But there was no reply, and the house was full of an overwhelming stillness.
She ran up to the bedroom.
Thinking Erwin was asleep, Anna crept round the foot of the bed and sat down in the green G-Plan chair she’d sat in earlier.
After a while, she felt his hand, cold, trying to take hold of her. ‘It’s me – Anna.’
Erwin nodded, and gave her hand a weak squeeze.
‘Are you in pain?’
‘Always,’ he smiled.
‘Do you want more morphine?’
‘In a bit. But not right now – just you stay sitting there,’ he trailed off, his mouth too dry to say anything else.
She sensed his fear, in the way he was watching her, and the way he held her hand, and at the same time how interminable his ending had become to him.
The house felt emptier each day as his presence in it receded in proportion to the collapse of his will, which had been so strong and which had seen him survive capture at the age of seventeen – after only six months in the Luftwaffe’s signal corps – and internment, first in Belgium then in England.
Now Erwin was barely there.
‘Where’s Nan?’
‘Out in the garden.’ Erwin shut his eyes. ‘They say Bryan Deane’s gone missing,’ he whispered, slowly. ‘I remember you two up at the club – how old were you, eleven? Twelve? – Saturday afternoons . . .’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘We’d go to the market in the morning then Nan would come home for some peace and quiet and I’d take you to the club with me, and Bobby Deane was usually there, and you and Bryan would play. You’d play for hours.’
‘We would?’
‘You got your first kiss at the club.’
She ran two fingers inadvertently over her lips as she remembered, suddenly, the smoky carpet smell of the club. All those Saturday afternoons spent among men talking, mumbling and drinking slowly until one of them said something funny, which everybody was obliged to at some point, and they’d all laugh – before falling silent again over their Federation Ale.
And Bryan . . . kissing Bryan under the table among all those legs and shoes, and how he’d tasted of sherbet and cigarette and childhood still.
Her first kiss.
She could taste sherbet now just thinking about it, and she must have been smiling too because Erwin’s mouth was attempting a smile in return.
‘You remember now, don’t you?’
‘How did you see?’ she said, laughing.
‘I wasn’t at the table. I was at the bar getting in a round.’
Pouring herself a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table, she made an effort to transfer the memory of sweetness from sherbet to the lime and lemonades Erwin would buy her – as many as she asked for until she was nearly sick on the bus home.
‘Joyce,’ she said, remembering the conductress who was always on the bus home – the thinnest woman she’d ever seen, with tight curls covering her head. ‘She liked you.’
‘Everybody liked me.’
‘That’s why she used to let us on the bus for free, and we always had to sit downstairs because you were too drunk to make the stairs.’
‘I was never drunk.’
‘You were. Every Saturday without fail.’
They sat in silence after this until Erwin said with dif ficulty, ‘I need to tell you about Bettina. I need to tell you about her before –’
‘Granddad, it doesn’t matter. Bettina doesn’t matter to me.’ She paused, slipping her hand out of Erwin’s still cold grasp. ‘And I want it to stay that way. I don’t want you to say something that’s going to make her matter to me.’
‘You don’t know what I’m going to say.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘But that might change.’
They were silent, Anna wanting to leave now.
‘There’s a photograph,’ Erwin persisted, his voice a croaking whisper, ‘in the cupboard behind the dresser where the wallpaper’s come away from the wall in the corner just under the coat rack.’
When Anna hesitated, he said suddenly, irritably, ‘Just get the bloody photo – it’s the only one I’ve got left.’
She went into the built-in cupboard behind the dresser and found the piece of loose wallpaper he was talking about.
‘It’s for you,’ he said weakly when he saw that she had the photograph in her hand. ‘Anna,’ he tried to call out after her as she left the room, crossing the small landing to the bedroom at the back of the house that used to be hers – and her mother, Bettina’s, before that. She’d avoided going in there since coming back because childhood bedrooms were dangerous places for adults to return to.
The curtains weren’t drawn and through the window she could just make out the dark mass of park and the signal lights on the Alcan railway tracks running along the top of the embankment.
She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed without turning on the lights, aware of the black cat with a pink ribbon round its neck – Erwin had found it on one of the buses he cleaned – on the pillow behind her next to a nightdress case she’d embroidered at school. Hanging from a hook in the wall, just to the left of the mirror above the chest of drawers, were the necklaces she’d worn to adorn her burgeoning teenage body in the hopeful, intact years between puberty and the loss of her virginity – to a boy on a campsite in the South of France, she remembered briefly.
Then she turned over the photograph, able to see enough in the orange light coming in through the open bedroom door.
She didn’t recognise the girl – Bettina at the age of twenty; fourteen years younger than she was now – but she recognised where the photograph had been taken. Bettina was standing down on the beach at the mouth of the estuary a mile north of the Hartford Estate, her head turned towards the photographer – Erwin, Anna guessed – who must have been standing on the bridge above; the bridge that carried the road over the estuary and ran up to Cambois power station. It was only possible to walk on this stretch of beach by the estuary at low tide and people looking for sea coal went picking further up the coast making this stretch a lonely place – ideal for someone wanting to take a walk without being seen. Erwin must have followed her that day – maybe followed her every day at a distance, keeping his eye on her. Anna could imagine him doing that; it was the sort of thing Erwin would do.
Bettina’s dress was ballooning around her – not because of the wind, but because of her pregnancy.
Bettina was pregnant with her, Anna, in the photograph and Anna was shocked at how protective she felt towards the heavily pregnant girl who had essentially abandoned her at birth and who
she’d never known – less than a stranger to her because she should have been so much more.
Erwin and Mary had loved Bettina with all the abandon of parents whose union the world around them had been slow to accept. They’d been carefree in their love because – up until the moment they found out she was pregnant – they’d thought love was enough for a child. It wasn’t.
Mary never got over her confusion – a confusion which manifested itself in the way she loved Anna.
While Erwin threw his heart to Anna with the same eager abandon as he had to Bettina, Mary – colder, wiser, afraid – loved sparingly; carefully. After Bettina’s pregnancy and sudden departure it was Mary who was left to soak up public opinion, and Anna who – ironically – offered her her only chance of social redemption.
Mary became watchful and ambitious (despite her grand-daughter’s speech impediment), hiring a tutor – a thin, precise man who objected to people like the Fausts, but who needed the money – to ensure that Anna passed the Eleven Plus. Anna would have passed the exam anyway, but it wasn’t in the tutor’s interest to point this out. He gave Mary muted progress reports throughout the ten months they paid him for – creating the impression that there was something lacking in Anna that only he, the indispensable Mr Dudley, could give her – and was happy to accept her tearful gratitude when the offer of a scholarship arrived in the post.
First time round, the only thing Mary had been interested in as a parent was her daughter’s happiness. Second time round happiness had lost its credence and appeal. The essential thing, she realised, was to arm her granddaughter against adversity. The downside to this was that she spent so much of Anna’s formative years aware of who she didn’t want her to become that by the time the danger was over and Anna was about to leave home for university – she had no idea who she had become.
While Mary had never stopped loving Anna, the prouder she became of her granddaughter the less she understood her.
There was nothing written on the back of the photograph and Anna was about to fold it up and push it in her jeans pocket when she stood up instead, opening the wardrobe door. Inside she saw a box for an electric kettle Erwin and Mary had had for at least twenty years.