Owning Jacob (1998)

by Simon Beckett

  Ben felt his anger mount at this further proof of Kale's irresponsibility. Ragged and razor-sharp edges protruded like traps, waiting to stab, crush and slash. He couldn't believe anyone could entrust a child to such a lethal playground, and wondered again how Kale had got away with it. Surely somebody, for Christ's sake, should have made him clear the garden before Jacob was all owed to live with him.

  Unless it hadn't been there then.

  Ben began taking photographs of the junk, making sure that at least part of the house was also clearly in view in each frame. He shot three rolls of film before he felt he'd done enough for a dry run. He took his eye from the viewfinder.

  It was odd returning to an unmagnified perspective, like coming out of a cinema into a mundane world. The Kales' house looked shrunken and insignificant. There was still no sign of life. Ben felt disappointed, but only mildly. As he looked down the hill, it was another feeling altogether that gripped him. It was a moment or two before he recognised it as anticipation.

  Not sure why that made him uncomfortable, he packed his gear away and went home.

  He'd planned to finish work early and go the woods again the next afternoon, but by lunchtime the rain had started coming down with the steady determination of a long-distance runner.

  It continued over the next few days, a sullen downpour from a dour sky that didn't permit a glimmer of sun. If it left him frustrated, he could at least console himself that Kale and Jacob were unlikely to be out in it either.

  The bad weather was doubly annoying because he had a location shoot scheduled for the end of the week. It should have been carried out during the summer, but penny-pinching by the fashion designer meant that now they had to try and juggle it into what sunny days the autumn grudgingly provided.

  The designer, spurning the idea of going abroad, had booked Ben for two days on the basis of the long-range weather forecast. Ben, Zoe, the make-up woman and two models had huddled around the cars on a deserted and windswept beach since first light, waiting for the low cloud to lift while the designer fretted and snapped at his assistant, chain-smoked black cigarettes and got on everybody's nerves. After lunch the sun had begun to break through. They had hurriedly set up and Ben had gone as far as taking final light readings when the first fat spots of rain splattered down.

  They waited it out for another hour before Ben announced that he'd had enough. To the accompaniment of the designer's tantrum, they packed everything away, helped by the male model, who had obviously taken a shine to Zoe. As Ben was sitting with his feet out of the car, kicking the sand off his boots, she came over to him.

  'Do you need me for anything else?' she asked, overly casual. 'Daniel's asked me out for a drink, so I'll go back with him if that's okay.'

  'No problem.' He winked at her. 'See you tomorrow.'

  She smiled, blushing, and went over to the model's black 1960s BMW. Ben watched her slim hips push from side to side as she waded across a patch of soft sand, self-consciously aware of being observed. But not by him, he realised. The studied insouciance was for the hunk waiting in the car, and Ben was wryly amused to find that his ego was pricking him. It was one thing to turn someone down. It was another to see how quickly they'd recovered from it.

  The other model, a girl, had travelled down with the designer, and Ben felt obliged to offer her a lift rather than abandon her to the man's spleen. She was young, twenty or twenty-one, with short, curly auburn hair and a long upper lip that could look either sulky or sensuous.

  'Thank God for that,' she said, as they set off. 'I thought I'd have to listen to that wanker whining all the way home. Mind if I smoke?'

  Ben did, not liking even the smell of stale joints in his car, but he always felt picky saying so. He told her to go ahead.

  She lit up a St Moritz, offering him one which he declined. She put her head back on the seat as she inhaled, gratefully. 'He doesn't like models smoking when they're in his "creations",' she told him, making a parody of the last word. 'Says he won't have them smelling of ashtrays. I mean, I know he's the designer, but come on! God, what a tosser.'

  Ben smiled noncommittally. He had learned never to engage in slanging sessions with people he worked with. Particularly not when the subject was the one paying his fees.

  The girl took another languorous drag of her cigarette, turning her head to look at him.

  'A friend of mine worked with you last year,' she said. 'You shot a piece on young British designers for Vogue. She was one of the models. Black. Tall, looks sort of Egyptian.'

  Ben blanked, then recalled the shoot she was talking about. It had run over several pages in the magazine, and involved several models. It disturbed him that he couldn't remember one of them. A year ago, that was all. It seemed an age. Back in prehistory, when Sarah had been alive, and Jacob had been their son. A year ago he'd had a family. He felt his stomach drop. 'Oh, yeah. Right.'

  'She said you were pretty good.' The girl took a final drag of the cigarette, wound the window down an inch and slid it out. It was whipped away in a flare of sparks by their slipstream.

  She closed the window and moved around in her seat, so that she was half leaning against the door, facing him.

  'I saw about you in the news,' she said.

  Ben felt his stomach drop some more.

  'They warned us at the agency not to say anything. They didn't want anybody putting their foot in it and annoying you, but it seems like a lie, sort of, to pretend I don't know, doesn't it?'

  Ben didn't want any part in this conversation. He gave a shrug, hoping she would take the hint. She interpreted it as agreement. She nestled down in the seat, settling herself into the topic.

  'You must have been really upset. Some of the things they said. I mean, I thought they were really horrible.'

  'That's the press for you.'

  'I know but, you know…it seemed so unfair. I don't know how you could stand it.'

  I didn't have any fucking choice. And when he had he'd made the wrong one. 'It's past now.'

  Her hand shot to her mouth. 'Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—' She put her other hand up with her first, so it looked as if she were praying with clenched fists. 'Shit, I shouldn't have said anything, should I?'

  'It's okay.'

  'I just thought…well, I don't know what I thought. I just wanted to let you know that I knew about it, and…shit, I'm doing it again, aren't I? Look, I'm really, really sorry. Just ignore me, okay?'

  'Don't worry about it.'

  'No, but you must think I'm really callous, or stupid, or something…'

  The assured pose had left her now. She looked so contrite and young that Ben felt old and shopworn, which didn't help.

  He sighed. 'It's all right. Forget about it.'

  She subsided for a while, then asked, 'What made you want to be a photographer?'

  Christ. He stifled his impatience, knowing she was only trying to be sociable. 'I was studying fine art, and started experimenting with film. It went on from there.'

  'I didn't want to be a model. I wanted to be a dancer. But I was too tall and couldn't dance.'

  Ben smiled dutifully. She took it as encouragement, and for the rest of the journey chatted about herself, telling him about her background, her childhood and her favourite foods.

  Practising for all the interviews when she was rich and famous, he thought. But at least it didn't require much input from him. He switched off, nodding occasionally to give the impression he was listening while his mind went off on its own track.

  He dropped her outside the house she shared with two other girls, parts of whose life histories he had also been treated to en route.

  'Do you want to come in for a drink?' she asked, stooping slightly to talk to him through the open passenger door. 'Or there's a good pub on the corner. Irish. Serves great Guinness.'

  'No, thanks, I've got a lot to do.'

  She said that was fine, she would see him tomorrow.

  It was only when he was almost back at his ow
n house that it suddenly struck him that the girl wasn't just being friendly, that there had been, if not a come-on, then a shy offer behind the invitation. His first reaction was surprise, not so much that it had been made, but that he should have missed it.

  His second was dismay that he wasn't interested anyway.

  For a time he'd been able to convince himself that the utter lack of arousal he'd felt since Sarah had died was only normal.

  Or, if not normal, then at least understandable. It had only been five months, and it wasn't as if he wanted to go to bed with anyone else. He still missed her too keenly. By the same token, he didn't like to think that he might be permanently dead from the waist down.

  He could excuse the episode with Zoe as a drunken fiasco.

  The guilt and disloyalty he felt for even thinking about such things no doubt added their own contribution. Even so, he knew his own body, and if five months was short in terms of grief, it was still a hell of a long time to go without a hard-on.

  On a couple of occasions he'd deliberately tried to provoke a response, but they'd seemed seedy and furtive. The faces and bodies of models and past partners he'd pictured all blurred and became Sarah, and he would feel that he was somehow desecrating her. When he tried remembering the two of them making love, the sense of loss would overwhelm him.

  Even the purely physiological reflex, the morning glories, the hangover erections that would pulse in time to the painful throb in his head, seemed to have deserted him. It was as though the sexual side of his nature had been cauterised. If he didn't even notice any more when an attractive girl more than ten years younger came on to him, he thought, sourly, as he unlocked the studio, it must have been burnt out altogether.

  He was planning to make an early start the next morning, but one look at the way the rain was sheeting down told him there was little point. The fashion designer shouted and swore when he called and suggested delaying the shoot until the afternoon, but finally agreed after convincing himself it was his own idea.

  Ben phoned Zoe to tell her the new arrangements, then made a flask of coffee and some sandwiches. He couldn't say if the idea of going to Tunford had presented itself to him before or after he'd decided to postpone the session. He wasn't even sure why he wanted to go, since it was a weekday and they would probably all be out. But it was better than sitting in the house by himself.

  The rain cleared before he reached the town, although it was still overcast. Ben parked in the usual place and headed for the oaks where he'd hidden the previous time. As he neared them he saw two men walking a dog up ahead. He cut deeper into the woods, letting them get well past before dropping down to his hiding place.

  The wind and rain had stripped some of the leaves from it, but enough remained to conceal him. He looked down towards the Kales' house as he gave the branches a shake, dislodging the rain in a silver shower. The garden was empty, but someone was apparently home because the back door was open. He pushed into the trees and sat on the low, collapsible fisherman's chair he'd brought with him this time.

  He was setting up the tripod when Sandra Kale came out. She wore what looked like a long white T-shirt. Even at that distance, unmagnified, he could see that her legs were bare. She went to the bottom corner of the garden, where the junk was lowest. She stepped over it, and Ben noticed for the first time that there was a gate made from the same wire mesh as the fence. She opened it and glanced quickly up and down the track that ran along the backs of the houses, then turned to the house and beckoned. A man appeared and ran down the garden in a low crouch. He reached the fence and said something to her. She nodded, hurriedly pushing him through the gate, and it was only then that Ben realised he was gaping like an idiot.

  'Shit!' He grabbed for his camera, fumbling to attach the telephoto lens. A film was already loaded, but there wasn't time to waste with the tripod. The man was already moving down the track as Ben hefted the Nikon, struggling to support the huge lens while he focused. He only managed to fire off a couple of shots before the man cut up a path between two of the houses.

  Swearing, he shifted his attention back to the Kales' garden. Sandra had shut the gate and was almost at the door. Before she went in she took a last look around. Under the magnification she seemed to be standing right in front of him.

  Her face was without make-up, the bleached hair uncombed and ruffled. Its dark roots contrasted with the artificial yellow of the rest. One cheek was marked by an angry-looking red spot, and her lips were puffy and bare of lipstick except for a smudge at one corner. Her nipples pushed at the T-shirt, and the bounce of her breasts as she moved suggested that she wore nothing under it. As she stepped into the house the T-shirt rode up fractionally, giving him a glimpse of a bare buttock. The door closed behind her.

  There was a shadowy glimpse of her walking past the kitchen window, heading into the house. Ben automatically raised the camera. One of the upstairs windows was frosted, obviously the bathroom or toilet. He shifted his attention to the other. It was the one where he'd seen Sandra the first time he was there. The telephoto lens didn't have a zoom capacity, but by sharpening the focus he could make out some of the details of the dark interior through the glare on the glass.

  There was the pale square of a double bed, the bright sliver of a dressing-table mirror. Then a door opened and Sandra Kale appeared. Only her white T-shirt and yellow hair stood out in the room's shadows, but she became more visible as she moved nearer the window. Ben took several shots as she changed the sheets on the bed, then bundled the dirty linen in her arms and left the room.

  The ache in his arms made him lower the camera. The house was again reduced to an innocent part of the row. He stared down at it with a hollow feeling of excitement.

  'You randy bitch,' he said, wonderingly.

  He began setting up the tripod.

  Chapter Twelve

  'Of course, that's only my opinion.' the woman said. 'But the courts are far too lenient. It's so obvious I can't believe there's any argument about it. Sentences have dropped, and crime's increased. Even a blind man could see the correlation. And yet—and this is what really amazes me—yet you still get these people crying on against sending criminals to prison!'

  The woman looked around the table, hands spread, her incredulous smile inviting everyone to share her amazement.

  The other guests looked back at her with uniformly bland expressions. Ben felt pins arid needles starting in his legs and recrossed them. He took another drink of wine and silently congratulated Maggie on another rip-roaring success.

  She was sitting opposite him at the far end of the table, her russet-coloured dress clashing in an unhappy combination with her dark red lipstick. Neither of them suited her. The party was to celebrate her and Colin's tenth wedding anniversary, but her inverted Midas touch applied to social events as it did to everything else. By some perverse gift of planning she had managed to invite exactly the wrong number of guests; too many for a dinner party and too few for anything else.

  Even so, the food had been good, the wine even better, and it might not have been so bad if the chemistry between the guests hadn't been non-existent. Sometimes a mix of different types could make an evening, but in this case they had simply cancelled each other out.

  Except for the woman.

  She had started before the cheese course, and as the other conversations had dried up, hers had expanded to fill the gap. Attractive in an overfed way, she had the loud, moneyed confidence that came from never having her opinions challenged, and not listening when they were.

  'It's like the whole question of capital punishment,' she explained, smiling reasonably. 'Everyone knows its a deterrent, so why in God's name we don't use it heaven only knows! These people wouldn't be so ready to murder and rape at the drop of a hat if they thought they'd be strung up for it. Instead, what do they get? Something ridiculous like a suspended sentence or community service half the time. I know that certainly wouldn't deter me!'

  Ben didn't doubt it. It
would take beheading just to shut her up. He looked across at Colin, surprised that he hadn't stepped in to steer the party back on course. But Colin was staring with absorption into his glass, either unaware of or indifferent to the woman's monologue. He had seemed subdued all night, which Ben thought was understandable after ten years with Maggie. She was shooting her husband meaningful glances, a fixed, desperate smile on her face.

  Colin didn't seem aware of that either. He drained his glass and silently refilled it. Ben thought that was a good idea and did the same. The woman droned on.

  'Our entire society's too soft, that's the trouble. And it isn't just the prison system. There's no discipline in schools any more, so it's hardly surprising we're turning out generation after generation of uneducated louts. And as for this new vogue for parents not smacking their own children…well, I ask you!' She laughed at the absurdity of it. I'm sorry, but children need to be taught right from wrong. That's why we're getting so much crime amongst youngsters, because there's no discipline and no respect for authority. It needs to be drummed into them.'

  Ben had been drinking steadily since he had arrived. He'd had a couple of beers before he went out, partly because it was Saturday night and partly because he'd been to Maggie and Colin's parties before and knew what to expect. But it wasn't until his muttered 'Hang 'em all' came out louder than he'd intended that it occurred to him that he was drunk.

  Oh shit, he thought as everyone turned to look at him.

  The woman regarded him as if she'd only just realised he was there. She wore a faintly condescending smile, but her eyes were bright as spikes.

  'I know common sense isn't very popular these days. It's much easier to mock than actually do anything about it. Perhaps you'd like to tell us what you think should be done.'

  Ben didn't want an argument. He wasn't even sure how much he disagreed anyway. It was just the woman herself he didn't like. He felt every glass of wine conspire to make his tongue lie thick and heavy in his mouth. 'Not really.'