Killing a Stranger

by Jane A. Adams

  Uncle Adam would have found her something special, Jenny thought and the idea brought fresh tears flooding to her eyes. He always did, managing to find something unusual or beautiful or just plain weird. One year it had been an antique bracelet decorated with blue enamel flowers. Another, a music box with a marquetry lid. Last year a locket, large and silver, heavily engraved and inside pictures of a Victorian couple and a lock of hair.

  Her mother had found it macabre not to say unsuitable, but Jennifer had been enchanted. Who were they? What happened to them? Was this to commemorate their wedding day?

  This year there would be no special gift, no stolen moments sitting on the stairs to chat, no laughing Christmas kiss beneath the mistletoe in the hall – no mistletoe anyway this year – no Uncle Adam.

  She tried to smile, to thank everyone, to nod gratefully at the advice and the demonstrations – look, I’ve put these little bow buttons on the cardi … the seat lifts off like this so it goes straight into the car … the little train makes five different noises when you press the different buttons. Very educational, but it was hard. Suddenly, she was being treated as an almost adult. A not very intelligent one, having to be given loads of support, special needs kind of adult, but an adult of sorts just the same. Jen found herself thinking she would have given anything just to be five years old again. Just, even, to have set the clock back five months or so and to know how not to be so stupid this time around.

  Grandfather Ernst saved his gift until last and then slipped a small box into her hand. She was puzzled. Granddad always gave her money, telling her he never knew what to buy and the card, with its usual cash gift had already been supplied. She opened the box. ‘Oh. But this was Grammer’s.’

  Ernst nodded. ‘She always wanted that it should be yours.’

  Her mother came over to see. Jen saw her expression change from one of mild interest to one of pain. ‘Dad, this was mother’s ring. Her wedding ring.’

  ‘And I gave you the engagement ring, Beth. She intended always that this should go to Jennifer.’

  ‘Yes, sure, but for when she …’

  Married, Jennifer supplied. For when she got married. Not for now. It was a very simple ring, narrow and plain and worn but with three tiny chips of diamond set at equal distance round the band. Jennifer had always loved it. ‘Thank you,’ she told Ernst, but she didn’t know what felt worse, receiving the ring now, at such a wrong and disappointing time or seeing in her mother’s eyes just how much she felt that Jennifer had let them down.

  Clara had never spent this day alone but she was surprised by how little she minded after all. It was as though Christmas, normally a time of such over the top celebration, as she tried to make up to Rob for the lack of family and lack of other people’s gifts, had simply failed to happen this year.

  She watched the television, she reminded herself to eat and even cooked a proper meal – pasta rather than turkey and all the trimmings, but it was still better than she had been doing. She dozed in the chair and ignored the world. Charlie’s promised phone call, closely followed by Becky’s, took her by surprise. Both were brief, but genuinely caring and some part of her that she allowed to feel was grateful. ‘Patrick probably won’t call until later,’ Charlie told her. ‘He has to keep the line clear for his mam to phone from Florida.’

  ‘Florida?’

  ‘Yeah, she got married again, lives over there.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Thanks, Charlie.’ She finished the call and put down the phone, suddenly surprised at how little she actually knew about these three youngsters who had taken her under their collective wing.

  Rob, she thought, had chosen his friends well. Or, at least some of them. Her thoughts drifted to Ernst Hensel and she wondered what he was doing today and if he was allowing himself, as she was not, to miss his son.

  Sixteen

  New Year’s day. It always felt like you should make a special effort to do something different, Naomi thought. She wasn’t one for resolutions – the longest she’d ever kept one was about a week – but she did like using the day to make plans.

  She and Alec had been to a party the night before. He’d been lucky this year, not on the rota for either Christmas day or New Year’s Eve. She couldn’t recall the last time that had happened. Both were now feeling the effects of the night before and Alec suggested a walk by the sea to clear their collective heads and give Napoleon a proper run. The dog loved the shingle beach. They’d left his harness at home, putting him on the lead so he knew this was time off. Once she felt the stones crunching beneath her boots, Naomi bent to unhook the lead. She laughed, as with an excited yip, Napoleon raced off to snap at the breaking waves.

  ‘He’s trying to eat the foam,’ Alec said. ‘Do you think it will do him any harm?’

  ‘If he can survive eating the bits of bacon you’ve carried around in your pocket all day, I’m sure he’ll be OK with a bit of salt water.’ Naomi said.

  ‘Left-overs,’ Alec said. ‘Always seems such a waste to throw them away.’

  ‘And, of course, you don’t order a bit extra just so you have some left-overs.’

  ‘I might. I also accept donations. Napoleon’s a popular fellow.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to know.’ She clasped Alec’s arm securely, still a little wary of the uneven surface and turned her face into the blustery, salt tanged wind. She could feel it roughening her cheeks and blowing her shoulder length hair into utter disarray. She imagined that it blew as hard through her thoughts, taking away all the dead and dried and empty stuff like so many decaying leaves, sweeping her mind clean.

  ‘We should set a date,’ Alec said, interrupting her spring cleaning.

  ‘A date? For what?’

  ‘For the wedding, of course. You don’t think I’m going to let you go through another year as a single woman, do you?’

  Naomi laughed. ‘And why not?’

  ‘Because,’ he said seriously, turning her to face him. ‘Because I have this horrible fear that you might still get away.’

  Even before they had a grave to visit, Mari and Harry Jones had made the New Year pilgrimage to lay flowers for Helen. Patrick had accompanied them the past three years and he came this year too, laden with flowers as Mari linked her arm through her son’s and walked a little ahead. They chatted softly and they walked slowly, pausing now and then to admire a pile of tributes or acknowledge the grave of someone they knew. Or Mari knew. Mari, Patrick thought ruefully, seemed to have something to say about just about everyone laid to rest here. Patrick, arms filled with roses and lilies, didn’t join the conversation. This, he had always sensed, was their time and, though he was welcome, this visit represented a shared past he knew only in the most storylike of ways. Aunt Helen as she would have been was, for Patrick, a ghost at every feast, though a benign one. For his father and Nan, she was solid flesh and blood with all the sensory reminders that brought. She laughed, she talked, she argued, she hugged and played with toys. She had opinions and cried when her hamster died.

  Rob, Patrick reminded himself had been flesh and blood too. He thought about his friend, the sudden burst of laughter, the rages, swiftly kindled and as swiftly damped. The love of cars – which Patrick didn’t share – and graphic novels – which Patrick did. The trip to the cinema to see the Frank Miller film, Patrick sneaking in with the others, horribly aware that he couldn’t really pass for eighteen. Rob, who had looked older than that forever, buying the tickets and hoping no one asked for identification.

  Rob and Becky. Becky loved him far more than he loved her, Patrick knew that. He knew it because he cared more for Rob than Rob was capable of giving back and he recognized the signs. It wasn’t, he thought, that Rob was shallow or uncaring, simply that Rob was one of those people who always seemed to glide upon the surface of life whereas he, Patrick, spent all his time struggling to learn how to doggy paddle. Surface tension both supported his friend and prevented him from glimpsing life below.

  Or it had done.


  It must, Patrick thought, be like being vaccinated and building an immunity to illness. Having to struggle and fight meant you were used to the shock of reality. Until recently, Patrick sensed, Rob had been able to hold out against reality by skimming lightly like a pond skater. Then, when something beneath had grabbed a leg and he had been forced to fight to stay on top, he had, inevitably, been dragged down and down; unpractised at the skills which might have kept him floating. Patrick still didn’t know what it was that had grabbed him but it had drowned him both figuratively and literally.

  Patrick had spent some time drawing last night. A surprise gift from Harry had been the ultra expensive marker pens Patrick had been buying one at a time as he could afford them. Harry had bought him a pack of twelve in the grey scale range and, better still, the refill ink for the shades he used most often. Patrick saw Naomi’s hand in this. She’d probably guided Harry through the internet ordering – the sets weren’t available anywhere locally – and also told him what paper Patrick required. Last night, Patrick had started to draw and inevitably, his drawings had featured Rob. In graphic tones, he had depicted his friend standing on the bridge, falling into the still, dark water that flowed beneath, visualized him, caught up in the weeds and dragged down by the debris that choked the canal. The life ebbing from him as he gave up the fight to skate upon the surface.

  Patrick had poured his emotions into the work, turning it, at the same time, into a story at one remove from himself and as a cathartic exercise.

  He wondered what Harry would make of the pictures. What his counsellor would say. Patrick allowed himself an inner laugh at that. She’d be so busy rationalizing it, she’d probably miss the point.

  What point was that?

  The point that he missed his friend. That he felt as though a part of him had drowned alongside Rob and that this was the only way he could even start to think about letting go.

  Patrick looked down at the path, blinking back tears. The tarmac had been roughly embedded with gravel, intended to aid drainage, but the job had been badly done and it chipped and shredded at the surface. Patrick scuffed his feet at the loosened stones, watching the way the runnels from the recent shower of rain trailed away like a miniature river in a landscape of mountainous gravel.

  One thing he had learnt from his drawings last night: he wanted someone to blame for all the stuff that had happened, but there was no one to whom blame seemed to apply. The other thing was that he was mad as hell at his friend. Rob, Patrick felt, had gone away, run away, left them all high and dry like the gravel on the path, stranded on their stony little islands and all they could do was shout across at one another, separated from the rest of the world and even from each other because they didn’t know the reason why.

  ‘We’re here Patrick,’ Mari said, taking the flowers from his arms. She smiled, then looked into his flushed face and asked softly, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. No really. I’m fine.’

  Harry seemed about to add his voice to the questions, but Mari drew him away and Patrick was grateful for her understanding. He watched as they bent to arrange flowers on the grave and wondered if they were ever angry with Helen, as unreasonably angry as he was with Rob, that she had never even said goodbye.

  It was only because of Ernst that Clara was able to go to the place where her son had died. He arrived, unannounced mid morning and told her to get her coat, they were going out. He had flowers in the car. Flowers for her and for himself.

  ‘It seemed right,’ he said when she asked him why.

  They drove first to the site of his own child’s murder. Clara sat beside him, conscious of the surreal, the impossibly bizarre aspect to all this.

  ‘What do your family think?’ she asked. She didn’t need to elucidate.

  ‘They don’t know, yet, that I am seeing you. I will tell, but not today. Today, my daughter sleeps late and Denny, her husband, will have taken himself fishing. Jennifer … I do not know what Jennifer will do.’

  ‘Your granddaughter? How old is she?’

  ‘Seventeen, the same age as your boy. She is pregnant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, oh. But what is done … She upsets her mother because she will not name the father. For myself, I think she feels shame. He was someone she would rather not have known. We do not always make love wisely when we are seventeen.’

  Clara laughed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No we certainly do not. Though, I never regretted Rob. He was … loving, funny, clever, everything I could have wanted in a son.’ She bit her lip, wondering if she had hurt this man’s feelings. She looked for distraction. ‘When is she due?’

  ‘April. Early April. I hope it will be a girl.’

  They fell silent then and Clara looked out of the window at unfamiliar streets. Her home town, but a part she did not know well. Big houses, some turned into expensive flats, some still family homes, lined a broad tree-lined road. Ernst pulled into one of the side streets and parked.

  ‘It was here?’

  ‘It was here.’

  He came round and opened the door. Clara got out. The houses, she thought, must be Edwardian. They were only a ten minute walk from the promenade. A privet hedge surrounded the corner house, almost hiding the wide, square windows and, glimpsed through the wrought iron gate, what she recognized by the spreading shape as a magnolia tree, stretched protectively across the front lawn.

  ‘The people in that building, they heard him shout and looked out. At first, they could see nothing. Then they heard steps running and came to look. Adam was already good as dead.

  ‘The man gave chase, but he did not see which way the attacker had gone. I think he must have recognized that Adam had been stabbed and was afraid of a man with a knife. I do not imagine he ran too fast. I would not have run too fast.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Somehow, she thought Ernst would have done, he would have pursued no matter what the threat. She had noted the way he turned his story into just that; a story. Not mentioning Rob by name.

  ‘You are an unusual man,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t think I understand you.’

  ‘Madam,’ he said with sudden odd formality. ‘I do not think I understand myself.’

  He laid his flowers beside the road sign and stepped back, head bowed, his lips moving as though he prayed. Clara fancied that instead of prayer, he talked to the dead, head tilted as though waiting for a reply.

  ‘Do you hate me still?’ Clara asked him as they moved back towards the car.

  He nodded. ‘A little part of me, yes. But mostly, I pity you.’ He paused mid step and turned towards her, laying a hand gently on her arm. ‘But I still hate your son. Can you forgive me for that?’

  Numbly, slipping back into that surreal land she had been moving through since she got into his car, Clara nodded. ‘I can understand that. Can you understand that I feel that way too, no matter how irrational and cruel that may sound? I hate your son for whatever he did to make mine … do what he did. I know Rob, Rob was gentle, kind, yes, he had a temper, but when he lost it … it was because he believed he was righteously angry. Ernst, your son must have done something to precipitate this.’

  He did not reply. Instead, he moved back to the car and opened the door. Unthinking, Clara slid into the seat. It was only as they drove away that two things occurred to her that struck her as odd. One, easily dismissed, was that it was strange he should come here and not go to Adam’s grave. The second, stranger still the more she pondered on it was that, despite Clara describing her son, defending him and Ernst telling her about his family, he had said nothing about Adam. No description; no defence. No fatherly comments beyond the expression of his love and even that had been tacit.

  ‘Were you close to him?’ The question had to be asked.

  Ernst glanced at her then fixed his gaze back on to the road. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. ‘I thought we were,’ he said. ‘Then, I realized that we had grown lazy over time. We said only the expected thi
ngs; discussed only those topics about which we could guess the other’s opinion. I knew what my son was, years ago, before he moved on to live his own life and I took back mine. After that, I think we both forgot that the other might change and grow.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ Clara said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ernst agreed. ‘As sad as you not knowing what your son might have come to be.’

  Jennifer had printed out a street map from the internet but even so it was hard to find the bridge. She’d walked from the middle of town, buses being sparse on the holiday and her feet ached. So did her back. The baby seemed to have caught her mood. It was restless and fidgety. She still couldn’t get used to feeling it move. It was at the one time wonderful and horrifying. An alien thing growing inside her. Occasionally she felt a jolt of euphoric love; more often just a rising panic.

  She hadn’t bothered with a bag, just stuffed some money and the map into the pocket of her coat. In the other pocket was a clipping from the evening paper. She slipped it out, furtive and half ashamed, looked at the picture. Rob Beresford stared back at her with embarrassed eyes, the prize he’d won – and the cause of his embarrassment – clutched between his hands.

  The bridge had once been for traffic but more recently had been closed to all but bikes and walkers. Cast iron bollards keeping the traffic away. Jen paused on the opposite side of the road. There was someone already there, at her intended destination. A boy with red hair and a girl about her own age. They stood close together, hunched against the cold. The girl had red roses clutched between her hands. As Jennifer watched, she dropped the roses over the balustrade.

  Jennifer looked away. It seemed suddenly stupid to be here. Turning on her heel, Jennifer walked angrily, back the way she’d come.

  Seventeen

  Ernst stayed over at his daughter’s house two or three times a month. This was a hangover from the time he had been the main babysitter for Jennifer and the guest room was often referred to as Grandpa’s room.