by F. G. Cottam
Jack knew that it could not be his dad his mum was calling darling on the phone. His dad was at the wheel of the Saab, driving to the Cornish coast. His dad had a word for people who used their mobiles while driving. Regardless of their gender, the word was arseholes. He very seldom swore, but spotting the arseholes always made him do it. His dad never made or took a call at the wheel and his destination was a drive of four hours. Therefore, it definitely wasn’t him she was speaking to.
It didn’t sound like a business call. Anyway, she didn’t make those from home. She made them from the studio. And she didn’t make them on the landline. She made them on her BlackBerry. She was trying to keep her voice down. Probably she didn’t want to wake up Olivia. She would assume he was asleep too and, ordinarily, he would have been.
A dream had woken him. It had been an unpleasant and scary dream and when he had looked at his bedside clock it had read 6.55. The phone had rung only a minute later. And his mum had been up. She had taken the call at the extension on the kitchen wall. The kitchen echo was carrying her whispering voice up the stairs to where he lay.
It definitely wasn’t his dad. His dad could have been on the hard shoulder having broken down. Or he could be at a truck stop. You took an A road west, so it would be a truck stop, not motorway services. He could have pulled in and parked up at one of those. But his mother’s tone of voice told him it wasn’t his dad she was speaking to. She sounded like she didn’t want to be speaking to the person at the other end of the line at all.
She was saying no, over and over again. But she wasn’t saying it in the way she said it to him. Jack thought it much easier to get around his dad than it was his mum. Even his dozy sis, Olivia, had long tumbled to the fact that Dad was by far the softer touch when it came to their parents. When his mum said no to Jack, she used her ‘No means no’ voice. It didn’t really invite much argument. She wasn’t using that voice on the phone now, though. It was a voice new to him. He thought that she sounded a bit frightened and he had never in his life known his mum to be scared of anything.
The call ended. Jack closed his eyes and tried to get back to sleep. It seemed unlikely in the aftermath of her whispering from the kitchen that his mum had really been scared by the caller. She was cool and calm and quite tough. She was cool in the sense of the word that made him pretty thrilled to be her son, at least most of the time. But she was cool too in the way people were who didn’t panic in a crisis. She drove fast and she liked the white-knuckle rides at the fair. She had told him once that she had never been afraid of the dark and he believed her.
It was not dark now. The light was coming through the blind against Jack’s window like it did in a movie towards the end when the game was really up for the vampires. The sunshine was already strong, red against his closed eyelids. But in the aftermath of his dream, it was not all that much of a comfort. He had been among the scarecrow congregation at the ruined church. They had been reciting some lines that rhymed in a raspy straw chorus. Then they had gone quiet as though waiting for something. Then they had started to smoulder and burn and screech in terror and pain.
There was a faint knock at his door. He opened his eyes. He thought that his mum must have somehow sensed he was awake and made him a cup of tea. His mum’s tea wasn’t the epic brew his dad was capable of making, but it wasn’t at all bad. He sat up in bed.
‘Jack?’
It wasn’t his mum. It was just his numpty sister, Olivia.
‘Can I come in?’
He sighed. ‘I suppose so.’
The door opened and Olivia came into his room, careful to weave a way through the games and DVDs and consoles and remotes littering the floor without damaging anything; careful not to collide with the model aircraft and spaceships hanging on strings from the ceiling.
‘What do you want?’
‘Can I get into your bed? Can I get in for a cuddle?’
Jack sighed again. He aimed for exasperation, but the noise he exhaled was half-hearted. He was actually quite glad and relieved for the company after the dream he had endured. ‘I suppose so.’
She got into bed with him and she held him and he returned her embrace. He noticed she was paler than usual and shivering inside her pyjamas. Obviously, just by being born, she had completely ruined his life. But deep down, he loved her very much despite this.
‘You okay, Livs?’
‘I went into Mum and Dad’s room first. But Dad’s gone away and Mum wasn’t there.’
‘It’s all right, Livs. She’s downstairs. Why are you shivering? Are you cold?’
‘I had this horrid dream, Jack.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘I didn’t know you had nightmares.’
‘I don’t usually. Maybe my bang on the head is to blame.’
‘Shall I kiss it better?’
Jack laughed. He was very glad Olivia had knocked on his bedroom door. ‘Bit late for that,’ he said. He kissed her forehead. ‘Tell me about your dream.’
‘Way too weird,’ she said. It was a phrase she had learned from her brother and it made him smile, hearing and knowing it.
As Jack comforted his sister, in the kitchen below, their mother reflected on just how badly her conversation with Robert had gone before he had terminated it by angrily hanging up.
The injury to Jack had interrupted her routine. Her time was never entirely her own, but she had less leeway than usual because his recovery was the priority and both she and James were doing everything necessary to accommodate that.
She had not told Robert about the assault on her son. It had seemed an intimacy too far. Given that she had slept with him, this was probably sanctimonious and certainly contradictory. But telling him would have felt wrong, an invitation to somewhere in her life and heart he had simply never been welcome. Besides, she had made up her mind, hadn’t she? Or her mind had been made up for her. The threat to the integrity of her family inflicted by the attack on Jack had made her decide to end her involvement with Robert at that moment in the hospital room.
Since that moment, Robert had existed only in the past tense for her. But he had not known it when he had rung her half an hour earlier.
He had not risen early. That was not his style and he had, of course, no children of his own whose timetable he was obliged to accommodate. Instead, he had been up all night. He had been drinking and brooding and for all she knew doing a few lines of coke to give his thought processes the illusion of clarity. Paranoia had prompted the call. He suspected her of neglecting him because someone competing for her attentions had roused her libido and claimed her heart.
Libido had not entered into it. Heart had, though. Robert had been right about that. And he had known she was no longer interested as soon as she had begun to respond to his plaintive imploring and his silly accusations and the puerile insults that had followed. He had said something cutting about the imperfections childbirth had inflicted upon her body. He could have said nothing that would have done more harm to his own hopeless cause. She was proud of being a mother and proud too of looking like one.
Threats had followed the insults. And they had alarmed her. She thought it ironic that a man who made his living writing children’s books could be victim to such personal immaturity. But she did not have time to indulge in irony. Instead, she had found herself pleading with him to stay silent, to say and do nothing that would embarrass and expose her and jeopardise her family life.
Feigning indifference would have been a better tactic. But she was not a poker player. The call had taken her by surprise. And anyway, she knew with dismay and the bitterest regret that Robert was not someone she could ever have really trusted to keep his word. He lived like the indulged adult infant he was. He took what he wanted. When the toy he coveted lay behind the window of a closed shop, he was the sort who smashed the glass and took it anyway. Just the desire for something signified ownership.
Upstairs her children, in their shared warmth, lay drowsing together on the ver
ge of sleep. ‘Tell me your dream, Livs,’ Jack said.
‘It was night time,’ Olivia said. ‘And I was on a beach. And the sea was singing.’
Chapter Four
Robert O’Brien did not want to let himself off so lightly as to blame his performance on the phone either on the booze or the coke. Fatigue had also played a part, but he was not at all in the mood to mitigate his own offence. He had initiated the call. Then he had handled the call very badly on every single count. He had suspected that Lillian was, for whatever reason, having doubts about their affair. But instead of trying to discover the reason for those doubts, he had harangued and insulted and finally threatened her.
Her interpretation would be that he had revealed his true colours and they were all of an unattractive hue. She would come to that conclusion because for her, their affair was a casual diversion; no more than a bit of sexual adventure with a good-looking and slightly younger man. Ending it exacted no emotional cost. It was something she could take or leave and the time had come to bid him and their relationship farewell.
It could not be more different for him, he thought. The sex was good with Lillian; the sex was, in fact, the best he had ever had. But the reason for that was that he loved her, body and soul. It was because of the desperate depth of that love that he had lost control and spoken so spitefully to her during his call. She wanted to end it. He simply could not bear the thought that he had shared her willing company for the last time.
Aware that it was the classic response of everyone who did what he just had, but unable to help himself doing it nonetheless, he found he was wishing with all his heart that he could turn back time and make the call again. Better still, he could not make the call at all until he had slept on his suspicions and was rested and sober. Sober, he would not have made that vindictive remark about her body signalling the ordeal of childbirth in its flaws.
He closed his eyes. He groaned. He still had the phone in the grip of his hand. He was not just weak and stupid, he was unforgivably cruel. Lillian’s body was the more attractive for its curves and creases. They were features particular to her. The toned, anonymous, air-brushed perfection of a lap dancer’s physique did not do it for him. He had been there and tried that. When he had seen Lillian naked for the first time he had been beguiled precisely because she was so subtly imperfect and sweetly self-conscious and utterly unique. In her pale-eyed, honey-haired, fecund beauty, she was completely irresistible.
Robert paced the marble floor of his sitting room. His Queenhithe penthouse had a commanding view of the Thames. He loved London. Every time he looked at the view from his balcony, it brought home his success with a fresh thrill of vindication. But he did not feel like looking at the view just at that moment. Across the river, a mile to the south-east, the woman he frankly adored was in her Bermondsey home thinking, at best, dismissive thoughts of him. Contemptuous was probably nearer the truth. He should take a sleeping pill and awaken in a few hours free of the fog of the booze and the febrile jitter of the coke; free of the tiredness of a night devoid of rest.
He did not think it could be the husband. She had mentioned him vaguely. He had sounded dull and inconsequential to Robert; a talent-free man devoid of charisma who had hit the jackpot with his wife and then squandered his winnings. He hadn’t just sounded dull, actually. He had sounded terminally dull. Some problem with anxiety had sounded the most interesting aspect to his character. He was some kind of software design hotshot and this flaw had hampered his ability to present to potential clients and handicapped his progress in his career.
Creativity was not a very democratic attribute. You possessed it or you didn’t. But Robert did not feel lucky in possessing his own talent. He had exploited it, working bloody hard. He was consistent and prolific. If he had not earned his talent, that was all right, because no one did. It was a gift. He felt, though, that he had justified the gift he had been given. And he felt that achievement made him special, singling him out, apart from the rest.
The press release version of his life sold him as the Celtic product of picturesque Ennis in far-flung County Clare. It was a portrait misty with soft-water rain that dwelt on standing stones, peat-warmed cottages, the vastness of the Burren and the gaunt magnificence of the Cliffs of Moher. Had there been a soundtrack to it, Enya would have provided it. Or it would have been the Cranberries when they were still largely wistful and acoustic, before their antsy singer changed their sound.
The reality was a council house on a miserable estate, an absentee father and a mother who regretted bitterly leaving rural Spain as a teenager for a man she quickly stopped loving. His early years had been bleak and lonely. It had not been a childhood for dwelling on nostalgically. It had been the sort you escaped. His talent had given him the means to escape it and his industry had done the rest, but he was intelligent enough to know that you never truly escaped your origins because what happened to you when you were very young shaped your character for the rest of your life.
The Seasick Steve album he had listened to the previous evening summed it up very well for Robert. Its title was I Started Out With Nothing and I’ve Still Got Most of it Left. He knew how that felt. He had started out with nothing. He had grown up deprived of possessions and self-worth and parental affection.
Now he had lots of things. He had a state-of-the-art laptop and a growing collection of expensive wristwatches and his Queenhithe penthouse and the Harley Davidson motorcycle in the basement garage below. He was proud of the oil painting over the marble fire surround on his sitting room wall. It was of modest size. But the signature in its bottom right-hand corner was Peter Doig’s. He had a thriving investment portfolio and money in the bank and the respect of his peers.
All of this was important to him. He had constructed himself, piece by punctilious piece. And overall, he was pleased with what he had fashioned. He wouldn’t be thirty-one for another month. He was the third bestselling children’s author in Britain and the fourth most borrowed from the nation’s lending libraries. His books had been translated into fourteen languages and he had a development deal on the new series with a major Hollywood studio.
He still had the common touch. That very afternoon, he was scheduled to give a talk to the sixth-formers of a large north London comprehensive. The subject was creative writing. He would read passages from one of his own novels aimed at the young adult market. It would hit the spot. It always did. Afterwards, he would inspire them with some off-the-cuff observations about how many enjoyable ways there were to translate aspects of the world into words on the page.
He was a natural with kids. He liked them and they responded positively to him. He had been looking forward to meeting Jack and Olivia, Lillian’s two children; the two reasons, he thought, with something like self-loathing, that her body bore those tell-tale signs of motherhood he had just goaded her about.
He groaned and threw the phone at his sofa. It bounced off the buttoned leather and skittered on to the floor. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror hung artfully on the wall opposite the balcony to backlight anyone who looked in it. He looked tanned, composed and compellingly handsome. It was a Dorian Gray illusion. He felt soiled and tormented. He looked at the costly ticking bauble that kept the time on his wrist. It was seven-thirty. If he took a sleeping pill now, he would be groggy at the school later and would under-perform.
Robert trudged to his bathroom to get a Valium from the cabinet there. The cabinet had a mirrored door but he managed to open it without undergoing the ordeal of seeing himself for the second time in less than a minute just by glancing instead at the tiled wall. He swallowed the pill and drank a pint of water, standing over his kitchen sink. The kitchen gleamed. In the early light, everything did. He was dehydrated and his mouth tasted drily of stale booze. There was darkness here, he thought, but all of it lay within.
He took off his clothes and discarded them on his bedroom floor. He lay down naked and buried his face in the pillow. He would sleep till noon.
The alcohol and narcotic effects would have worn off by then. The injury to his heart would only have become more raw and unbearable.
He did not really know what to do. He had never been in this predicament before. The emotional stakes had never been so high. He would awaken later sober enough to see the situation he was in with greater clarity and calm. All he was sure of, as sleep gratefully claimed him, was that he would not give up on her. The prize was too great. He would never do that. He would never give up. He knew above all else that Lillian was worth fighting for.
The road reached towards the village of Brodmaw along a series of acute hairpins in woodland so dense James realised it was the reason why the route had been invisible in Lillian’s painted view from the sea. He had to put on his headlamps to pick out the way. The trees were ancient and deciduous. He could smell the bark and bittersweet, full summer leaf scent of them through his open driver’s window. Then he was out of the twilit tunnel they formed and in front of a painted iron sign bearing the name of his destination.
There was no hotel in Brodmaw. He had booked a room at the pub opened with the proceeds of his ring career by the prizefighter Gregory Abraham. He had memorised the way there. His sat-nav had packed up about twelve miles back, just beyond the outskirts of Truro. But he reckoned the village too small a place to get lost in.
His first thought on seeing the narrow streets and alleyways through the Saab windscreen was that Brodmaw was characterised in a weird way by absence. It wasn’t that there were few people about, or that the traffic seemed very light, though both those observations would have been fair ones. It was that James saw nothing that signalled generic trade. Driving along the high street he did not see a Starbucks or a McDonald’s or a Subway. There was a shop that sold cards but it wasn’t a Clinton. There was a bookshop, but it wasn’t a Waterstones and there was a bakery but it did not say Greggs in bold lettering above the door.