Owning Jacob (1998)

by Simon Beckett

  'You got something else on?' She squinted up at him.

  'I don't really feel like going out.'

  She nodded. 'So you're just going to stay in and get shit-faced by yourself?'

  'Zoe, it's nice of you to come round, but…'

  'But you're going to stay in and mope, yeah?'

  He felt too enervated to be angry. 'I'm not feeling very sociable.'

  'Who said anything about being sociable? You can get shit-faced in company.' She looked more serious. 'I just don't think you should stay in by yourself tonight.'

  That was exactly what he wanted, to stay in and surround himself with memories of Sarah and Jacob, to wallow in his lost family. It was easier than making the effort to drag himself out of the hole he was sliding into. All he wanted to do now was give up and enjoy the ride down.

  Except that Zoe was looking at him, waiting for an answer.

  He tried to produce one, but somehow couldn't get beyond shaking his head.

  'Come on,' she said, sensing blood. 'You'll feel better.'

  I don't want to feel better. But it was too much of an effort to argue. 'I can't go like this,' he said feebly, glancing down at the creased trousers and the shirt smudged with dirt from the garden wall. He realised when he saw the grin spread across Zoe's face that she'd won.

  'I'll tell the taxi to wait while you get changed.'

  The club was a sweat-box. It was small and dark and cramped, humid with the breath and perspiration of too many bodies. Anonymous buttocks, hips and crotches pressed up to their table, leaning on the edge, the sharp corners digging into denim and leather and satin and flesh.

  'They don't know what causes it,' Ben said. 'They say it's some kind of brain disorder, like epilepsy, but when it boils down to it they haven't a clue why some kids are autistic and some aren't. It might be hereditary, it might be linked with childhood illnesses or vaccinations, lack of oxygen at birth. You name it.'

  Zoe sat with her elbows propped on the table, chin resting on cupped hands as she listened, sitting close to him to hear above the thump of music. She took another drink from the neck of the beer bottle. Ben nursed his own, peeling off the corner of the label. Paper scraps were scattered around it.

  'It's not something like Down syndrome, where it's obvious if a kid has it or not. It isn't always easy to diagnose. Sometimes it's so mild kids can go to a normal school, and sometimes it's so bad they have to wear nappies all their lives. And it changes all the time—you get different symptoms as the kid grows up.'

  He took a drink from the bottle. The beer tasted warm and stale, although it was a new bottle. Or was it? His head was fuzzy. It was difficult to tell. He set it back down and carried on peeling the label.

  'Jacob's pretty mild compared to some of the poor little sods. With him it's more of a communication difficulty. He couldn't cope at an ordinary school yet, but there's always the chance he'll improve. Sometimes, he looks at you and you feel he's just on the edge, that one little nudge and he'd be a normal kid. And then he'll go away again, and it can be like he's from a different planet. It's really frustrating, you feel he's sort of stuck inside his own head, but if you could only get him to come out…' He broke off. 'Sorry, I'm talking bollocks.'

  'No, you're not.' Zoe shrugged. 'It's interesting bollocks, anyway. You don't normally talk much about him.'

  'There's nothing more boring than listening to people going on about their kids.' Especially when they're not really theirs. He raised his bottle to his mouth again but it was empty.

  'Did you ever think about adopting him?' She immediately grimaced. 'Sorry, that was tactless.'

  'It's okay, I don't mind. Sarah and I talked about it, and agreed that I should at some point. We'd talked about having kids of our own as well. But there didn't seem to be any rush.'

  That sank the conversation like the Titanic. Ben felt his mood going down with it. He knew he was on the way to being drunk and maudlin, that he should stop talking and stop drinking and go home, but the thought was whisked away from him almost as soon as it occurred. 'It wouldn't have made any difference,' he said. 'I'd probably still have let Kale have custody—sorry, I mean 'residence'—anyway.' He moved on to safer ground. 'I just can't believe they'll only let me see Jacob once a month. Once a fucking month.'

  'Can't you talk to his father? Explain, I mean. He might let you see him more often.'

  Ben thought about the way Kale looked at him. He shook his head slowly and deliberately from side to side. 'Not a chance.'

  'But that's so unreasonable.'

  'I don't think he's a reasonable man.'

  It struck him that he had put his finger on a simple truth. Whatever reasoning processes went on behind Kale's tan-coloured eyes were unfathomable. Perhaps he was like Jacob in more than just looks. Ben tried to pin the idea down so he could scrutinise it further, but it got away from him. Another thought replaced it. 'I hope Jacob's okay with him.'

  Zoe put her hand on his arm. 'I'm sure he will be. They wouldn't have let him have him if there was any doubt.'

  'God, I hope so.' But he remembered the house, and the junk piled up outside, and Sandra Kale's feral face that had only smiled for the cameras. Jacob seemed small and vulnerable amongst all that hardness and sharp edges.

  Someone nudged him. He looked up. Zoe was holding out a glass. He hadn't even noticed that she'd been to the bar.

  'Beer time's over,' she said. 'Time to get serious.'

  He sniffed at the drink. Vodka. Zoe anticipated the refusal before he could make it.

  'I thought you wanted to get shit-faced,' she said.

  There were windows of sobriety, when he would emerge from the alcohol like a drowning man coming up for air, just long enough to look around and see where the current had carried him before he sank under its pull again. The club became hotter and more crowded. The air was thick with body odours, perfume, cigarette smoke and spilt beer. The angry lights and screaming music pounded with migraine intensity. The only way they could hear themselves speak was to lean close and shout. He found himself at one point aware of the sensation of Zoe's mouth brushing his ear as she shouted into it. Her breath was hot on his skin. She smelled of sweat and a spicy perfume, and ever so faintly of garlic. She had her hand on his shoulder as she spoke. It was warm and damp through his shirt.

  He could feel the heat coming off her bare flesh. The halter top clung to her, exposing her midriff, arms, shoulders and chest. He closed his eyes. Everything was physical sensation, noise and touch without sense. He could hear her words but no longer understood them. He went away for a while and when he came back he was in the same place and nothing had changed. There was a pressure in his ear, small pushes of air that he finally associated with someone talking to him.

  He opened his eyes. Zoe's head filled his vision, too big to focus on. He drew back and watched her lips forming shapes.

  He made an effort not to drift off again.

  'What?' he asked. His voice sounded far away.

  'I said are you going to dance?'

  Ben shook his head. It felt heavy, unattached. 'You go.' She said something else, but he couldn't hear what. She stood up. Ben found himself looking at her stomach, pinkly suntanned and sweetly curved. When she turned and began to push through the crowd jammed up to the table, the waistband of her jeans moved away from her back, exposing a further inch of knuckled spine below the imprint it had left of itself.

  She vanished into the wall of bodies. Ben felt he had strands of tar pulling at him. Every movement had to fight their resistance, but every now and again they would snap and his limbs would move in uncoordinated lunges. He knocked over an empty beer bottle as he raised his arm, and two more as he tried to grab it. They chinked but the noise was lost in the larger cacophony. He was suddenly thirsty. There was beer left in some of the bottles on the table but the thought of it nauseated him. He picked up a glass that had liquefying ice cubes in the bottom and tipped them into his mouth. Then he drank the dregs of lukewarm ice-
melt from the other glasses on the table. It made him more thirsty than ever.

  He looked above the people bunched in front of him. The ceiling over the dance-floor was mirrored. He could see heads and shoulders suspended upside down, rhythmically bobbing and heaving, outflung hands waving like seaweed in the erratic blue and red lights. He felt sick.

  Zoe came back. He had no idea how long she'd been gone.

  Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her arms and torso were flushed and shiny with sweat. Her breasts rose and fell after the exertion. The halter top was dark in patches, sticking to her. She carried two glasses. She grinned as she gave one to Ben. He was aware that he had already had too much to drink but the glass was cold and had ice cubes in it.

  He emptied it while he was still wondering if it was a good idea.

  Then they were somehow outside and it was quiet and cool. Ben had a buzzing in his ears. His arm was around Zoe's shoulders and he felt hers around him. They were in a taxi and she was leaning against him. Her skin was burning hot and slick. The thought circled that he was going to fuck her. Somewhere miles away in his head was a protest but it was too distant to bother with. His hand stroked her bare back under the flimsy top. Her mouth was covering his. Her tongue and teeth seemed huge, covering him. The hard pebble of her nipple pressed into his palm through a thin layer of fabric.

  Cold air hit him as he climbed out of the cab. He looked up at the sky. There was a faint lightening towards the horizon.

  The stars wheeled above him. He stepped backwards to keep his balance, swaying as she unlocked a door. For a moment of clarity he saw Zoe again, the girl he worked with. Then he was going into an unlit hallway. A door creaked open and he was in a bedroom. She was pressed against him, cooling skin and hot, wet mouth. His hands were down the back of her jeans, inside her pants. His shirt was open. Her hands were on his chest, his stomach. The buzzing in his ears grew louder. It went away and he was looking down from a dizzying height at the top of a dark head. He felt a chill on his naked skin, but no sensation other than that. He didn't know where he was. The head wasn't Sarah's. He felt panic, and then it came back to him in a rush that she was dead, that he was at Zoe s, and he stumbled away from her.

  'I've got to go.' His voice sounded thick and unfamiliar.

  He began pulling on his clothes.

  'What's wrong?' He didn't answer, not knowing, not able to speak anyway.

  He began to dress, and the buzzing returned with the motion.

  He overbalanced and almost fell. His trousers were on now, and his shirt, and he was searching for his shoes. Zoe was a shadow kneeling on the floor, watching him. She didn't say a word as he went out but he knew without looking that she was crying.

  On the street he began walking without any idea of where he was or where he was going. He wanted only to get away, to put distance between him and the memory of what had happened. The sky was lighter now, the stars beginning to pale. A police car slowed. Two white faces watched him.

  He shivered without feeling the cold and walked past them.

  Unfamiliar streets stretched out ahead and behind. He took them at random until he came to a main road. The sodium lamps on the pavement had winked out before he flagged down a taxi.

  Chapter Nine

  Jessica's trial was held three weeks after Jacob's final handover to the Kales. It fanned fresh interest in the case, and as Ben walked into the court building on the day he had been called as a prosecution witness he was treated to a media phalanx barring his way.

  'Mr Murray, are you relieved not to be standing trial yourself?' one woman demanded, walking backwards to keep pace with him. She held out a microphone like a baton, as if she expected Ben to take it and run with the question. He brushed past without even giving her the benefit of a 'no comment'. When he was inside the court and safely out of camera shot he stopped and leaned against a corridor wall until he felt less like punching it, and the spasm that had gripped his stomach had passed.

  He had tried not to think about what the trial would be like. But even reminding himself that his first contact day with Jacob was soon afterwards didn't make the prospect any more palatable. He had done his best to move his life back to some sort of normal footing, or at least as normal as it could be now that two-thirds of it had been cut away. The only way he could think of to do that was to throw himself into his work. Ironically, he had never been so busy. The tame events that had wrecked his private life had brought a boom to his professional one. When the phone calls first started coming in he had thought it was a sign of support from editors and designers he'd known for years. That had been before he saw how his name had suddenly acquired a cachet that had nothing to do with his photography. One magazine editor had run a series of fashion shots that Ben had done months earlier completely out of context, hanging the piece entirely on his new notoriety. He had phoned her in the blazing heat of discovery and told her graphically what he thought, the result being one source of work he could cross off his Christmas card list.

  There were plenty of others to replace it. Once his initial indignation had died down, he stifled the self-destructive voice that urged him to tell them all to fuck off and accepted everything he could. It was all work, and anything that kept him occupied at the studio and away from the hollow bricks and mortar he'd once thought of as home was welcome.

  He contented himself instead with raising his fees.

  It meant he could pay Zoe more, which helped ease the guilt he felt after their night out together. He'd woken on the Saturday with a sense of curdling shame and a full-body hangover. He'd folded himself over the toilet and vomited until only dry heaves were left and the sweet stink of it blocked his nose. Even then he'd had to wait until the throbbing in his head had eased enough for him to pull himself feebly to his feet. Rinsing his mouth and splashing cold water on his face and neck made him feel cleaner but no better. He'd braced his arms on the washbasin and studied the palsied wreck of his reflection in the mirror. His face was pouchy and colourless, except for his lips, which were an unnatural red. There were lines under his eyes he'd never noticed before.

  He'd felt racked with self-hate as he'd looked at himself. His thirty-third birthday had been the month before. Christ had changed the world and been crucified by that age. Ben didn't give much for his chances of founding a religion, but the way things were going he felt that crucifixion wasn't out of the question.

  He'd taken a pint glass of water and a bottle of paracetamol and gone back to bed.

  The prospect of trying to apologise to Zoe over the phone was too daunting, so he'd waited until Monday morning. He hadn't been sure if she'd turn up at the studio, but she had, no later than usual but uncharacteristically subdued. They'd skirted around each other, quietly polite, until Ben had finally blurted, 'Look, I'm sorry for running out like that.'

  She stopped with her back to him. 'It's okay.'

  'It was just too soon.' He winced at the cliché.

  Zoe had turned but didn't look up. She ducked her head in agreement. 'Yeah. Bad idea all around, really.'

  There was a pause when they both found other things to look at.

  'Do you still think we can work together?' Ben asked.

  She was very still. 'Do you want me to leave?'

  'No, course not. I just didn't know if you wanted to.'

  'No. Unless you want me to.'

  'I don't.'

  Zoe nodded. She put her hands in her pockets, then took them out again. Ben picked up the camera and examined it.

  'So how did you feel on Saturday morning?' he asked.

  She pulled a face. 'Like death.'

  They had grinned at each other then, and although there was still some embarrassment, at least it had been faced. When he heard her swearing down the phone at someone later he knew things were back to normal.

  Yet not quite. Once, as Zoe crouched to adjust the hem of the model's dress, an image of her kneeling in front of him flashed into Ben's mind. He'd looked away, qu
ickly, but the memory had triggered something else that had been tugging at his subconscious. Reluctantly, he'd let himself acknowledge it.

  He couldn't remember having an erection.

  Specifically, he could remember not having one. He'd been drunk, anaesthetised with alcohol, and he was glad nothing more had happened, but he couldn't deny that he'd been up for it until the point when he'd pulled away.

  Except that one part of him obviously hadn't been.

  What was even more unsettling was the realisation that he hadn't had an erection since Sarah had died. Which might or might not be a natural reaction, but the fact remained that it had been over four months now. Not a long time in itself, and it wasn't as if he was ready to sleep with anyone else yet.

  But even the guilt he felt at thinking of such a thing couldn't stop him worrying about it.

  As he sat outside the courtroom in the roped-off waiting area, though, his lack of a hard-on wasn't foremost in his thoughts. There were other people waiting to be called as witnesses but he didn't recognise them. No one spoke to anyone else. There was a heavy-set, middle-aged woman whose bust filled her dress like a roll of carpet. She had red hair piled up into a bun and squinted with concentration at the paperback novel she held with the cover bent back against the spine. The hand that gripped it had thick sausage fingers, scrubbed pink as if they were used to being in water.

  Ben decided she was a nurse from the hospital Jacob had been taken from. The Asian man a few seats away he tagged as the doctor who'd attended Sarah after the 'birth'. There were two policemen, one in uniform, one in plain clothes but with a jacket, trousers and short haircut that identified him just as clearly. He kept scratching in one ear with a finger, giving it a surreptitious wipe afterwards on his trousers. There was another man, and two other women, but by then Ben had tired of the game. He'd probably guessed them all wrong anyway.

  His turn came in the afternoon. He felt something like stage fright as he went into the courtroom and took the stand.