Mary appeared just after eight thirty, a light wind carrying the pad of her trainers on the road. He peered above the bobbing wheat, watching her run to the entrance of the building site. She looked good in her running gear. Tight Lycra running top and loose, mid-thigh shorts.
She stopped and looked around but Jonas didn’t stand up and wave. He wanted to observe, just for a bit, taking his time with his impressions. This woman appeared. High noon in his ever-scrolling melodrama. Draw the gun and shoot the past, something ridiculous like that. Even Eva was rolling her eyes, like how can she be jealous of something as histrionic as this?
He didn’t know why he ducked down when Mary stared straight at the spot where he was crouched. Eyes closed, he lay down and waited for her to come to him through the fussing wheat.
Mary stood for a long moment, looking down at him. Jonas’s eyes were closed. ‘You hiding from me?’
Jonas said nothing and kept his eyes shut. The wheat crunkled as Mary shuffled on the ground and sat down cross-legged. His eye-lids were flickering. She studied the face, the lines round the eyes, wondering if she had ever looked at someone as closely as this. A tuft of hair blew across his face and she wanted to brush it behind his ear, with an affection she wasn’t sure about. She looked away, into the sky. When she looked back he was squinting up at her.
‘You’re awake,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’
‘I know.’
‘I almost fell asleep.’
‘Bit uncomfortable. I’ve got something poking my bum.’
She couldn’t help thinking about the magazines. Her smile wavered. ‘Why are you hiding here?’
‘Cops.’
‘You serious?’
‘Angry locals with pitchforks?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘You know how many people came to my party? Twenty-two. How many people do you think will come next year?’
‘C’mon. There’ll be a few.’
‘A few?’
‘Maybe more.’
‘Doubt it. They came again. The police.’
‘When?’
‘This morning. They wanted to know why Lacey came back after the party and why I hadn’t told them.’
‘She came back? What for?’
‘Her jacket. She left it in the kitchen. I gave her a glass of lemonade.’
Mary felt her stomach turn. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’ But of course there was.
‘I know.’
She nodded vaguely.
‘I know,’ he repeated.
She closed her eyes. She felt his fingers seek hers and grasp them tightly. She resisted the urge to pull her hand away. She wanted to scream at him that you don’t do those things, Jonas. You open the door and you leave her right there and you go back inside the house and find the jacket that you bring to her and good night. You do not invite her in. You just don’t and you know you don’t. Otherwise you would have told the police in the first place.
‘What do you see up there, in the clouds?’
She turned her face. He was looking directly upwards. ‘I think you see whatever you want to see.’
‘I used to dream about this when I was a teenager. Alone in a field with a girl.’ He sat up quickly and turned to her. ‘It was the expectation I looked forward to, I think, knowing something was about to happen but not knowing when. She’d look at me like you’re looking at me and – ’
He lunged at her and she let him briefly kiss her before pushing him away. He tried again and again she pushed him back, acutely aware, suddenly, of the remoteness of the field and her skimpy running gear. She wondered if she was frightened as she watched tears well in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Jonas. It’s just... I better go.’
Jonas nodded. He pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged himself.
‘I think I need some space.’
‘Mm.’
‘It’s nothing personal.’
‘I get it.’
She had waded a few metres back through the wheat when he called out.
‘I killed them, you know.’
When she turned she could only see the top of his head.
‘My wife and daughter. I was the drunk driver. I wanted to tell you before someone else did.’
* * *
The doorbell rang just after 6 am. The sad-eyed detective presented a warrant. Jonas was free to stay while they carried out the search and was not under arrest. He was accompanied upstairs to get dressed by a jittery constable in a short-sleeved shirt, who frowned briefly when Jonas paused on the landing to look into Fletcher’s room. It was empty, no sleeping mat or one-eyed doll, just the few cardboard boxes that had been there for years.
Thirty-three
The Skull was cool. Fletcher peered out the left eye at the overgrown golf course. The heavy green vegetation had thickened with the rain of the last few days. He imagined the End of Days to be just like this, weeds and plants pulsing unhindered in the ruins of civilisation. He used to read science fiction as a boy, projecting into the Apocalypse. But where he once fantasised about being the last human on earth, he now wondered about the vanity of survival.
He’d returned to The Skull the evening before, after removing all signs of himself from End Point.
The police were going to search the house. It would happen soon and it would be very early in the morning. He took no satisfaction in being right when he walked past End Point just after six that morning and saw a forensics van and three police cars pulled up outside.
Back in 1991 these tactics were bewildering, carefully designed – it seemed – to maximise his alienation: that odd way the police talked, a mix of procedural formality and exaggerated crassness, the occasional huddles in the corner and sometimes he heard those whispers, never sure if he was meant to. Two minutes alone with him, two fuckin minutes is all I need…
It would get so much worse for the Norwegian. The hostility would swell. If Mortensen had any sense, he would get out of the village. If he didn’t then Fletcher could wait. His vicious little sister had taught him patience long before the Marines. He let her kick and nip and scratch and put the anger someplace for later. On that last day she went crazy because he laughed at her for being fourteen and still playing with that creepy, one-eyed doll.
The police kept on about those scratches until Fletcher admitted they hadn’t been caused by crashing his BMX. You tell me what brother and sister don’t fight, he said, thinking that it sounded so grown-up to rationalise like this. I can show you a scar where she bit me, if you want?
They didn’t. They exchanged angry glances because their absolutism made him guilty and his evasion outrageous. He respected it, now. An absolute imposed a discipline. The desert had taught him, the relentless sun burning off the flim-flam, the dust in his boots the last of his doubt, crumbled away to nothing. It made the killing easier. Maybe he’d tell the priest about the Taliban soldier, a teenager cursing him and refusing to die, Fletcher plunging his bayonet again and again, over thirty times, still thrusting after the boy finally died because his eyes retained their contempt until Fletcher stabbed them to a final blindness. There’s more than one absolute, he would tell the priest, and even you with all your cosmopolitan guilt will, come the end of your time, stress one truth to the detriment of all others.
No one wanted McQueen’s stories of traumatised, homeless veterans. They wanted Union Jacks by the side of the road as another cortege of heroes who couldn’t be helped passed in the rain. They wanted red poppies on every lapel.
Fletcher lay down, drowsing to the distant thrum of the traffic on the bridge. He daydreamed of the girl in the blue jacket, saw her through murky water as he hovered overhead like a kestrel. When he opened his eyes a magpie was sitting on the eye socket of The Skull, looking at him. One for sorrow, and although he told himself not to, he couldn’t help looking for a second as he crossed the golf course and walked into the village to The Black Lion.
H
e wondered if this, at the end of the day, was what it came down to, a simple search for joy.
‘I’ll murder the fucker!’
Fletcher saw the barwoman glance along the bar, where an old man pretended not to hear. He’d just opened the door. For an instant he wondered if John Smith was talking about him.
‘Watch your language, John, or that’s your last,’ said the barwoman.
The face beneath the fuzzy hair was red and outraged. ‘What, you defending him?’
She sighed and looked at Fletcher. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘Bottle of Bud... and whatever he’s having.’
‘Serious?’ she said.
Smith’s gaze shifted. ‘You’re a gent!’
‘That’s me.’
They sat at a corner table and watched the live news broadcast from the village green. Councillor Bacon was being interviewed, sweating in a tweed suit and canary yellow shirt. He made clear to the interviewer that he would not speculate and then proceeded to speculate.
‘There is mounting anecdotal evidence, it would seem.’
‘What would you anticipate next?’
‘I would expect an arrest.’
‘Do you know the individual in question?’
‘I know of him.’
Smith looked away from the TV. Leaned close to Fletcher. Told him Mortensen was responsible for Lacey’s disappearance because he was a foreigner, we know fuck all about him, nothing.
When the TV anchor cut to the sports news Smith turned his attention to the old man at the bar.
‘What about it, Sam? Not seeing you watching much of this? You know him, don’t you, so what’s the score?’
Sam spoke without turning. ‘Never said a bad word to me.’
Smith was disgusted. ‘It’s not about you, you silly old fart. It’s about Lacey and what he did to her.’
‘So you say.’
‘Watch the telly! It’s not just me. It’s everyone else, the whole world apart from you!’
‘Enough, John, finish your drink and get out,’ shouted Clara.
‘The hell is wrong with you people.’ Smith’s attention suddenly shifted to the window. ‘There’s another, Mary Jackson. She’s round his place all hours, probably gets a kick out of it, like those women who write to men on death row. What’s all that about, eh?’
Fletcher watched Mary pass the window without glancing in. She was wearing her supermarket uniform. He thought about her childhood bedroom, the posters of those boy bands.
‘I’d bang it, though,’ said Smith.
Later, when Smith went to the toilet, Fletcher made up his mind. When Smith woke up on the toilet floor with a hand trailing in the stinking gutter of the urinal he had no idea who’d crept up behind him and smacked his face off the wall as he stood with his cock out. His first thought was old Sam. He had no way of knowing that Fletcher was a man of absolutes.
Thirty-four
The police were thorough. Quiet machines. Jonas waited in the kitchen. No one acknowledged him. It was perfectly feasible, he realised, to be the centre of attention yet completely invisible at the same time. They left at midday, leaving a small crowd on the pavement, nausea in his throat and a sense of exposure that reminded him of those last few months at the house in Christinegård when he returned to Bergen after being released from prison.
That day of return. A livid scar on his memory. Jonas wasn’t doing well, back then.
All those white-painted wooden houses and oppressively neat gardens, it took so long to pass them, to get to his own front door, like in a troubling dream, that unknown something pulling you back. He was so tense, ready to apologise to anyone he saw, every neighbour known and unknown. But he met no one and the empty street seemed almost purposeful, as if word had been passed to stay out of sight, make sure Mortensen saw only ghosts.
He stood in the hallway, the house pressing, shrinking in, a quick falling of memories. He took off his shoes and socks. Then the rest of his clothes. And started slapping himself. Hard as he could on the face and body, again and again until his skin was red, singing with pain.
Still naked, he paced the rooms. The rugs too rough and the polished floorboards too cold, as if the fibres were curling away and the pine somehow frosting over as he walked, appalled by his touch. He opened every window but the bright August sun transformed at the sill to a yellowing that fell on him like jaundice, fetal-curled on the couch and looking up and out at such an epic blue, the blue of freedom, but this just one confinement swapped for another.
Even in the back garden he was trapped, the flowers planted by Anya now spread and colonising. He had to get out of there. To stay was to become a recluse, peered at by children who came creeping at night, spying through the windows at Killer J, head in his hands and it’s such a spooky living room, Kjetil, it’s like there’s people in there only he can see.
End Point felt the same. Compromised by Fletcher and now by the police. Trapped again.
He walked through to the sun room. Stood for a few moments, looking round at the surrounding houses. He turned his back to the garden, looking through the sun room and into the shadowed kitchen. Then he turned round again, looking up at the house directly opposite.
It was all a matter of trigonometry. Except he couldn’t remember anything about High School maths. Still, he made the process relatively scientific. He pulled the kitchen table one foot back, one foot to the right, then sat at each chair. The angles said he could be seen through the kitchen window from the house on the left and from the second floor windows of the house opposite the sun room. Four more attempts and the table was now three feet back from its original position and two feet to the left. It was pushed almost up to the sink but Jonas couldn’t be seen through any window, so long as he sat on the back right chair.
Crack open a beer. Crack another. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not watching. The photographers would also find the angles. No question. They would pay the neighbours to poke long-lensed cameras from the windows and maybe catch him.
Doing what?
Didn’t matter. Anything would make him seem guilty. A brief smile proof of the psychopath with no conscience.
He went to check the bedroom curtains were completely closed and did the same in the living room. He couldn’t resist the urge to peek outside. A small crowd of peering locals had gathered on the opposite pavement, drawn by the search. And the media, of course, still circling, instantly recognisable by their bogus indifference; mobile-phoned and all a-strut.
Even Li Po was unsettled.
Jonas stared at the scroll painting. The little figure outside the temple seemed to shift in the half-light, as if looking over his shoulder, towards the distant mountains. Somewhere up there a refuge, as End Point had once been. He’d found it one morning when still bivvying down at Sycamore Camp, a quick recce all that was needed to tell him the house was long uninhabited. Three days later a rain-swept dawn allowed him to explore properly. Over the side fence and into the cypresses. The downpour hid the noise of the break-in.
And so much dust lifting from bare floorboards. It didn’t catch his throat as back in Christinegård. This was the dust of someone else’s past. The dirty marks on the kitchen lino when the light was right told stories he knew nothing about. Perhaps if he’d looked closer he’d have seen Fletcher’s face in those shapes, the ghost that was yet to come. Not that there had seemed to be any danger of someone reclaiming that history anytime soon. The most recent letter in the pile under the letter box was nine years old. Clearly no inhabitant since.
So Jonas moved in.
A very private fitting of new locks and a very public cleaning of the ivy from the name plate beside the front door. Electricity? Jonas did as Asamoah showed him in that Harlesden squat he shared with seven others. On came the lights. Jonas started greeting his neighbours as the new owner of End Point, slipping himself into the village, another history emerging in the lino shapes, Jonas of the Jonsok parties, the Viking, an
unfurling of a new life that was impossible in Bergen, where memories of Eva and Anya thundered like a winter waterfall and the neighbours all knew, whose contempt clung like leeches until he fled to Larvik once more.
That last home-coming. Thirteen months since the disastrous visit to Haakon, and thirteen months of avoiding contacting his father. Now Jonas stood outside his front door, winter-chilled and an even colder chill to come, feeling the slow fade of that final tenacious delusion, the thought he could build an elusive new life on the bones of another, more distant past.
It was why he stopped off en-route to buy a one-way ferry ticket to Denmark, leaving that evening.
His father opened the door and the performance began, a tour de force from the master: making his son face the sun so he had to squint; cupping his hands round the coffee mug, as if Jonas had brought an iciness to his home; a strained holding of his son’s gaze after delivering the killer line, how many times in your life are you going to be wrong... son? There was genius in that pause, Jonas almost admired it. It held a lifetime, a universe. When the bells of Langestrand kirke began to toll he wondered if his father had somehow planned that too.
Nowhere to go but the sea, the fever roads of all Norway behind him and still pushing, into the salty water and in time, maybe, the salt would eat away at him, break him up to drift on blissful currents, away from Haakon’s judgement and his father’s incredulity, the same incredulity which leached from Mary the day before, there in the wheat with her head slightly angled, as his father’s had been, face shadowed and an uncanny halo around his head, silver strands of hair so clear in the last of the light that Jonas could have counted them.
His father wanted Jonas to acknowledge his failure, he knew it, an apology to underline his inferiority. But because his father was such a manipulative bastard he didn’t say anything, just seemed to project it, like a hypnotist, right into his hippofuckincampus. Jonas refused. There would be no forgive me for what I’ve done, father, for what I’ve become...
A Private Haunting Page 19