‘It shouldn’t have come to this,’ my father said.
I didn’t acknowledge him.
QC was still striding for the tree.
‘The real shame is, I loved that job. I was fucking good at it,’ my father said. ‘I was fucking good at what I did. Palmer didn’t even bother talking to me, just cut me out the picture. He’s not even on a contract? Simple then, he’s gone. I bet he never even spoke to Eve about it, either. If he’d just come to one of us and said, I’ve heard this rumour going round—we could’ve told him what was really going on. I could’ve got back to doing what I’m best at. But who’s going to believe someone like me over her? Look at her. Look how she acts. Butter wouldn’t fucking melt, would it? Pretty little make-up lady minding her own business. Well, no, actually. Actually, she’s not like that, she’s petty and vindictive and she’s—’ He stopped. I don’t know if he caught a reflection of himself in the window and saw what I saw—the absurdity of a man keeping a woman in the backseat of a car against her will and trying to moralise about vindictiveness—but I was simply glad that he had finished. He started on a different tack: ‘You’re right, it probably doesn’t even matter. I should’ve just told you about it and faced up to things. But the more punches you take for no reason, the harder it is to feel nothing. They all add up. Like I said before, it’s like the universe is up against you, it doesn’t want you to have the things you want. Not ever. It’s hard to keep dusting yourself down and keeping on. I’m not an idiot—I know all this was my own doing. But I’ve done it now, and I wish I could say it hasn’t made me feel a whole lot better.’
‘I don’t believe you, Dad.’
‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘You and the rest of the world, eh?’
That acid taste was in my throat again.
My father peered out at the green of the fields. ‘I can’t let her go now—you know that, don’t you? If I let her out this car, she’ll just go straight to the police and blab on me again, and they’ll come after me. And that’ll be it. Well, I’m not taking any more punches. I’m not going to be like Pascoe, banged up just ’cause no one ever thought to stop and ask him Did you do it? I’m going to see this out. All the way. I have to.’
‘You need to let her go, Dad,’ I said.
‘No. I can’t.’
‘For me. You can.’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. Can’t do it.’
Chloe was biting down on her lip just to keep herself from speaking. There must’ve been so much she wanted to let out, but she was no more than twenty of QC’s strides away from safety. Nineteen, eighteen. Her jaw was shaking.
I tried again: ‘But, Dad, this isn’t right. It isn’t right. Even if you didn’t do the thing she said, all this, what you’re doing now, it’s wrong.’
Twelve, eleven, ten.
My father cleared the phlegm out of his throat and gulped it. ‘Soon as QC makes it to that tree, you’re going to get out and follow him. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Just step out and go. No looking back.’ Maybe he was not dispassionate—somewhere in the blankest recess of his mind, there might’ve been regret and pain and sadness, but he’d partitioned it so well that there was just one tiny indication of it: a twitch of his face, as if trying to shift a pair of glasses higher up his nose.
‘I’m not leaving you alone with her.’
‘Then you’d better learn to drive in the next thirty seconds,’ he said, ‘because I’m not letting her out.’
When QC reached the tree, he turned and started semaphoring. He was just a distant shape flapping its arms, indiscernible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. I wished he could’ve kept walking forever, in a permanent state between the here and there.
‘We see you, Barnaby, we see you,’ said my father. ‘All that money on his education, not a bit of sense.’
There was nothing else that I could think to do: I leaned and pressed the horn. A hidden crowd of birds darted up from the grass. I hit the hazard warning lights.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he shouted at me.
QC stopped waving.
The drone backwashed in my ears.
‘Turn those fucking lights off.’
Cars approached but didn’t slow down.
QC began to walk back, getting bigger by the tiniest of increments.
I felt a thump against the back of my seat.
Another.
Chloe’s feet.
He was choking her. She was bent up in the V of his arm, his right hand smothering her mouth, pinching her nose. ‘What’s it to be, Dan?’ he called to me. I was still blaring the horn. She was thrashing her feet. ‘You can run away or you can try and stop me, but you can’t do neither.’
I got out of the car. ‘QC!’ I shouted into the fields. ‘QC!’
He was running but gaining no ground.
The back of my father’s head was cushioned on the windowpane before me. I opened the door and he almost dropped out. He hinged himself upright, Chloe still kicking.
‘Let go of her,’ I said, chewing on the words.
The indifference he showed for me then was so familiar, the same attitude that overcame him when my mother used to beat his chest in arguments. He had seen the knife in my hand but was sure it wouldn’t trouble him. His brow hardly tightened.
‘QC!’ I called again.
Chloe’s skin was getting bluer.
‘I don’t think he’ll make it, Dan. Running’s never been his strength.’ He squeezed. Hard. Chloe sagged like paper under water. ‘Come to think of it, he’s always been a little—’
I slashed him—I had no choice. High on the meat of his arm. Every bit of it felt shameful: the easy way the blade took to his flesh and split it open, how the gash oozed straight away (not like nicking yourself with the point of a compass), how he didn’t so much recoil in pain as judder with it. The sheer speed with which blood permeates a woollen sweater is something you don’t expect.
‘Ow, Jesus fuck!’ My father was seething. ‘Dan, you fucking—you cut me!’ As he clutched at the wound, Chloe gasped and filled her lungs. She managed to scramble halfway out the door, her hands touching the kerb right by my feet. But he heaved her back in, shrugging the sting off. His blood smeared and flicked all over her. She reached for the other door, found the handle, but it wouldn’t open. The car was bouncing.
‘QC!’ I called. He was still too far away.
Cars went by in a flurry. They didn’t heed the hazard lights or the rocking suspension. If I’d been thinking straight, I would’ve tried to flag them down.
My father kneeled with her shoulders pinned beneath him. But she was strong, and buffeted him enough so that he swayed. She bit the inside of his thigh. Her teeth must really have sunk in, because his howl of agony was strident. It enraged him. He forced her down again. His hands surrounded her windpipe. Blood was leaching from his sweater, dribbling from the cuff.
I tried to jump on his back. I didn’t want to cut him any more, so I struck him with the butt end of the knife. Somewhere in the middle of his spine. He threw his head back to resist me. I struck him again, and nothing.
‘QC!’ He was getting closer. ‘Hurry!’
I dug the knife handle into my father’s gaping wound. He winced and toppled forwards, reaching down into the footwell. My fingers came back printed with his blood. Chloe thrashed and kicked. He pushed up with his knees and shoved me out onto the kerb again. There was some object in his fist. And he glanced at me, panting, tightening his grasp. As she tried to sit up, he lunged at Chloe and hammered her three times with it. The first impact made a thud, the next was like a splintering, the last was like the dropping of wet clothes. I saw her feet convulse and then go still.
I must’ve screamed something, I don’t know what. My legs collapsed underneath me. I sat there, jellified.
My father slid out of the car with the object still in his grip. When he tossed it back onto the seat, I realised what it was: the ashtray he had pilfered at the Little Chef.<
br />
He went to smack the hazard lights off, sweat-drenched and bleeding. Any traffic that there was fizzed past us—other people’s problems are invisible at sixty miles an hour.
QC was coming; he was at the barbed wire fence. I could hear him shouting, ‘Fran! Fran! Fran!’ I should’ve run to him, but instead I hurled the knife into the verge, as far as I could make it go; it landed somewhere in the thistles. My father snickered. He walked to the boot and raised the lid. I heard him digging for the bucket. He was so cold and nonchalant. The boot clunked shut, and he came round with another Stanley knife and a roll of duct tape. He’d removed his sweater and bandaged his wound with an old black shirt. I sicked up acid mucus down my front, then. He took me by the collar, reeled me in. Our backs were pointed to the road, our movements hidden by the car’s dumb bulk.
What was it that I felt while this was happening? A fear greater than words have the capacity to evoke. But more than that, I think: depravity. An evil that belonged to me by association.
QC came rushing through the brambles and skipped over the barrier. ‘Fran, leave him alone. What the fuck have you done?’ He saw the way my father was holding me and stopped. He was doubled over from the sprint, hacking the spit up from his lungs. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
My father just glided up the knife blade. He scraped it softly on the cartilage of my ear. ‘Here’s what you’re going to do now,’ he said, and we shook with the velocity of traffic.
SIDE THREE
Campion Ghyll
Do you want to know the moment it occurred? It was just after the fuel gauge needle sank into the red as we were coasting on the A590 and I said: ‘We’re going to run out of petrol soon. Shouldn’t we stop?’ My father didn’t answer, so I nudged forward to get his attention, rocking against the binding of the duct tape till it gave a little at my waist. It happened then—I saw the apathy in his expression. A look of sheer estrangement—from me, from himself, from reason. I glimpsed capabilities I never knew he had. He was no more than a brute and he seemed comfortable with the fact. And when I heard him say, so cool and undisturbed, ‘You mean diesel. We’ve got plenty,’ I understood that he had finished being my father, as he had finished being a husband, and a stage carpenter, and a painter-decorator, and a council maintenance worker, and a labourer, and a tomato picker, and a student, and a sheep farmer, and a son. He was so serene it chilled me, as though this was his resting state, his factory setting, to be unburdened of the people he was meant to care about, each slow-grown relationship, each held aspiration, each great and small responsibility that makes a life worth living.
We were in the South Lakes, heading west, driving through a landscape I had never seen before: crags of ash-grey rock bearded with conifers and liverwort, roughed-up grazing land and hay meadows, swathes of rhododendrons, disused stables, ruined barns, and distant bonfires—a pastoral inbetweenland. I had watched the dales of Yorkshire flow into the pale brown hills of Lancashire and reconcile with Cumbria. At Newby Bridge, he’d snatched the road atlas and dumped it in the quiet space behind us. ‘I know the way from here, don’t worry.’ Now the carriageway had merged into an overpass above a shining river. I couldn’t stop shivering. ‘I told you—cut that out,’ he said. ‘You’re being pathetic.’ There was a petrol station in the next little town (Greenodd—how could I forget a name like that?), but the forecourt was occupied (two Land Rovers and a motorbike—why do I recall this, too?) and my father just kept going. The road ascended. The tree cover thickened and the light became spasmodic, strobing on the tarmac. We emerged onto a skinny level track. There was a row of weathered cottages and a farmyard where small gangs of Friesian cows were lounging on the grass. The sky was vast and barren, the hills divided by a hundred walls and thorn dykes. And, under different circumstances, all of this could have been breathtaking. But no amount of scenery could distract from what he’d done.
Behind me, across the footwells, Chloe’s body lay under a mound of dustsheets.
QC was unconscious on the backseat, gagged, his wrists and ankles bound.
It seemed like hours ago that we had left the lay-by, but the clock said different—every second in that car was torturous. My father was not racked or haunted—he did not even look shaken. Nothing he had done appeared to shock him. Nothing he’d resolved to do was weighing on him, either. He was in a strange repose. But less than fifty minutes ago, he’d forced another man, supposedly his friend, to get into the backseat of his car and tape up his own ankles. He’d shut the door on him and locked it. He’d steered his own son to the boot at knifepoint, made him fetch an unlabelled plastic bottle and douse a rag with acrid chemicals. He’d compelled the man to scroll his window down partway so he could take the soaking rag and stuff it in his mouth and wind the tape around it—no, tighter than that, tighter. He’d waited for the man to retch until the vomit dribbled from his nose. He’d watched the man grow woozy and pass out. He’d pushed the boy into the passenger seat, coiled the duct tape round his midriff, one loop at a time, until the roll was spent. He’d stepped out to unhitch the off-cuts from the roof rack, ditched them on the kerb. He’d used the bungees as restraints, tying the man’s hands behind his back and coupling them to his feet. He’d shoved the woman’s body off the seat, into the footwells, covered it with heavy cotton dustsheets specked with white emulsion, snicks of wallpaper, tiny lumps of filler. He’d got into the driver’s seat and fastened the boy’s seatbelt, of all things. He’d turned on the engine and said, ‘Don’t make me gag you, too. Not a word, you hear? Not one fucking word.’
Someday you might see the Lake District. I’ve only been there once, but I suppose that I could claim it’s in my blood. There’s a special part of it that I remember from the trip, a sight that I’m ashamed to say I reminisce upon as though it were a postcard sent to me by someone else—I try hard to envision it sometimes without the context. It is the point when, leaving the brooks and streams of Ulpha, coming up the scrawny pass through Santon Bridge, the trees suddenly disperse, and up ahead there is a congress of high fells—among them, Scafell Pike, the highest of the English mountains, whose face is textured with as many shades of green as there are permutations of the stars. These rocks reflect a certain quality of light I’ve not experienced in any other part of the world. That someone could be born into a place like this and end up with a heart so dark is inconceivable. The sense it gave me, when I first saw it framed inside my father’s dirty windscreen, was the closest I have ever felt to God. It was only as we drew nearer, winding up the stone-walled road and coursing through the heaths, that I realised this mountain land wasn’t just part of him but part of me—and we had not lived up to it. We were changing it with every last rotation of our tyres, making it complicit.
My father drove by memory. His eyes were heavy and faltering. His limp hands made the slackest gestures with the wheel to steer us beyond Nether Wasdale, where one side of the wooded track began to lean into a gully. The dark mass of the fells loomed beyond the trunks of pines. Until the road dipped suddenly to give a clearer view, I didn’t notice that the gully was in fact a lake. The water was glaucous, troubled. It spread along the fellside where the scree inclined at an acute angle, an accumulation of black rocks and moss that looked ready to spill. We drove along the bank, almost at the level of the shore. Strange grey sheep were roving in the craggy pasture on my side. They were Herdwicks like my grandfather reared, but I didn’t know it yet. There was no cause for pleasant conversation about the local fauna. For once, my father didn’t take the opportunity to regale me with the things he knew—I suppose he must’ve recognised that everything he knew was insignificant.
I stared at him, his profile, the whiskery bulb of his Adam’s apple. He was pungent with white spirit. His skin had an unctuous sheen, a rawness at the creases. If he felt that he was home, he didn’t show it. There was not even a glimmer of remorse about his attitude. Wherever we were going, whatever happened next, the only map was in his head.
H
e seemed to want the quiet and it was not hard to uphold. There’s a state of mind in which all sound gets muted. Maybe you’ve experienced it by now. I don’t mean meditation. I mean a despondency that overrides even the noise of your own thumping heart. QC had begun to moan on the back seat as we were leaving Grizebeck, kicking his heels up, writhing, but I had tuned this out. Because I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t even lift my arms. So I had to blank the noise.
Further on, we started to encounter people. A few hikers on the fringes of the road moved aside to let us pass. I hoped that they might catch a glimpse of me and see the cargo we were hauling, but their backs were turned to us as we sped by. Later, we approached a hatchback parked up on the grass beside a slip of headland; an old woman in shorts and climbing boots was tidying the remnants of a picnic while another woman peered up at Scafell with binoculars. They didn’t even glance in our direction.
The track rolled on, hugging the shoreline, the fuel tank getting emptier, the fells getting taller, reigning over us. A cyclist struggled up the slope as we were coming down it, his face haggard and purple, and I held my breath as he wheeled by the window where QC’s legs were hinged up, wobbling, and I thought this was my best and only chance. I screamed until my lungs ached.
The cyclist looked, but I suppose he was too tired to gauge what he was seeing, and we were going at such speed I’ll bet he couldn’t gather his own thoughts in time. My father smacked the button on the stereo, blasting the end of a song. The dissonance of Cocteau Twins at such a volume was so jarring, the cyclist swerved away. He must’ve thought it was a joke—silly kids misbehaving, showing off—so he kept on pedalling.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 16