by Rebecca Wait
The rain had started up again, pattering against the window.
“Shall we get back to work?” Malcolm said.
By the time he returned home in the late afternoon, he was exhausted and soaked, smelling strongly of sheep, all his muscles aching. He found Tommy sitting on the sofa in the living room, wearing Malcolm’s clothes and reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Malcolm hovered in the doorway and, when Tommy looked up, gestured at the book. “Any good?”
“He likes the colour red,” Tommy said. “Blood. Fate. You know.”
Malcolm didn’t know. He wasn’t sure even Heather would have known what to do with this comment. She always said she just liked the plots.
“What did you study at university?” he asked Tommy suddenly. “Was it English?”
Tommy smiled. “No. History.”
“Oh.” There seemed nowhere left to go with this conversation. “Did you enjoy it?”
“It was all right.”
If Malcolm had thought their exchange the previous evening might have shaken something loose between him and Tommy, at least stripped away one layer of reserve, he appeared to have been wrong. He felt more paralysed with awkwardness than ever.
“I’m going to change,” he said, and left the room.
When he finally came back downstairs, having taken rather longer than he needed (he was ready to acknowledge now that he might possibly be avoiding Tommy), he found Tommy in the kitchen, frying onions. The smell made Malcolm’s eyes sting.
“I went to the shop earlier,” Tommy said, turning as he entered.
“Really? Long walk on a day like this.” Malcolm hovered in the doorway for a moment, then, seeing no escape, went to sit at the table.
“I wanted the exercise. I picked up some things. Thought I’d make tea.”
“Right,” Malcolm said. Then, rallying, “That’s nice. Thanks.”
“Pasta with a mushroom sauce. Hope that’s O.K. I don’t have a very wide repertoire.”
“Did Kathy serve you?”
“No. It was Fiona.”
Malcolm was silent, wondering what it had cost Tommy to make that visit, to endure that interaction. Tommy’s face gave nothing away.
“I told her thanks for last night,” Tommy said, turning back to the pan.
“Good. That’s good.”
So they were mentioning it then.
“Told her they were the best lamb shanks I’d ever had.”
Malcolm found it difficult to imagine Tommy making this comment. “They were certainly good,” he said. He felt a sudden and uncharacteristic need for a drink, and went to get the old bottle of whisky down from the cupboard. It would do, in the absence of anything else.
“I’m going to have a wee dram,” he said. “You don’t mind?”
“Of course not,” Tommy said. He added mushrooms to the onions in the pan.
Malcolm sat down at the table and sipped his whisky. He’d forgotten how steadying drink could be sometimes.
Tommy said, his back to Malcolm, “Look, I’m sorry about last night.”
Caught off guard, Malcolm didn’t immediately reply. After a moment, he said, “Nothing to be sorry for.”
Tommy nodded and continued to stir the mushrooms. Malcolm thought this signalled the end of the exchange—conversations seemed to stop and start abruptly with Tommy, frightening topics looming up out of nowhere and then vanishing almost as quickly as they came—but then Tommy said, “I’ve thought this whole time that it was my father I wanted to ask you about. But now I think that isn’t true. Maybe it’s my mother.”
Carefully, Malcolm said, “What do you want to know?”
Tommy was stirring more vigorously now. He said, “What she was like, I suppose. I mean, I remember what she was like to me. Most of the time, I remember. But how did she seem to other people?”
Malcolm would not have found this an easy question to answer about anyone, but least of all, perhaps, about Katrina.
“She was . . .”
And there was Katrina before him.
“She seems nice,” Heather had said after they first met her. “And very beautiful, of course. But is she a bit . . . ?”
“What?” Malcolm had said.
“I don’t know. Bland?”
Malcolm was surprised at this; it wasn’t like Heather to be hard on people. He didn’t remember how he’d replied. He’d found Katrina reserved, but not bland. He thought there was plenty going on beneath the surface. And later, of course, Heather and Katrina became friends. He’d hear them laughing together in the next room, or talking in low voices.
“What do you talk about?” he’d ask Heather.
“Oh, nothing really,” she’d say. “Just nonsense.”
Malcolm never reminded Heather of her earlier comment about Katrina, though he was curious to know at what point his wife’s opinion had changed, and how she judged Katrina’s character now. But perhaps, he thought, Heather wouldn’t have been able to answer, would not really have understood the question. She liked people, but she didn’t tend to think much about them when they weren’t in front of her; she didn’t go in for “plumbing their depths” as she said Malcolm did, making this comment with both fondness and bemusement. Heather had no use for their depths.
Like the rest of them, Heather had known little about Katrina’s marriage. Malcolm had seen from her shock after the murders that Heather had been no more aware of what might have gone on than anybody else. And how Heather had blamed herself.
But perhaps Katrina had a hardness in her, too. No good making her out to be a saint, because nobody was. She had absorbed so much from other people, who poured out their secrets to her (“Thank you for listening to me,” Malcolm would hear them say to her down by the harbour, or on the road outside the school); but Katrina offered so little of herself in return. Was this selflessness, as you might assume, or was it miserliness? Later, Malcolm thought it might have been self-preservation.
How much of this could he say to Tommy, who was still waiting patiently for an answer?
“Your mother,” Malcolm began, “was very kind. She had time for everyone.” Poor Katrina, he thought, reduced to these colourless phrases, as though she’d been as bland as Heather had once believed. Malcolm knew he had to do better. He said, “I know she must have been unhappy, but she never showed it. We knew so little.” Here he was again, trying to defend himself. He changed tack. “She adored you children. She . . .” He’d been about to say, She would have died for you, and stopped himself just in time. “She would have done anything for you,” he amended. “You three were her whole life.”
Tommy had turned to face him and was listening closely, his head slightly on one side. When Malcolm stopped, he said, “That’s how she made it feel to us, too. I suppose that’s what good parents do—make you feel like you really matter.”
Malcolm was quiet, thinking of his own mother.
“My father didn’t like her to talk to other people too much,” Tommy said.
Malcolm considered this. Another thing he should have seen at the time. Had seen, but hadn’t acknowledged properly, hadn’t seen in the right way. He remembered John hurrying Katrina away after church, saying they had to be getting the lunch on. He remembered the closed look on Katrina’s face when her husband was beside her, how much quieter her voice and her laugh became. Or maybe he was misremembering.
“I think your father had a lot of problems,” he said. “Most people wouldn’t have guessed. But I always knew he had . . . anger. A lot of anger. I just didn’t realize—’
“No, I know that,” Tommy said. “I was upset last night, that’s all.”
How is it, Malcolm thought, that we can both see and not see what’s in front of our faces? He had known something wasn’t right in that marriage. He had always felt it, even if he’d never articul
ated it. He knew John and Katrina were not like him and Heather. But it wasn’t as though John had treated Katrina like their own father had treated their mother—no shouting or hitting so far as Malcolm had been aware. He hadn’t realized there were other kinds of danger.
While Tommy was boiling the kettle for the pasta, Malcolm slipped out of the room and went upstairs. In his bedroom, he dug through a couple of the old boxes at the bottom of his wardrobe until he found the envelope he was looking for.
He brought it downstairs, took out the top picture and passed it, a little shyly, to Tommy, who was still standing at the hob.
The picture showed Katrina outside the house, hers and John’s (the Dougdales’ now, Malcolm thought), crouching down with Tommy and Nicky on either side of her, Nicky aged about three or four and Tommy still a toddler. The light looked warm and the boys were in jerseys but no coats. They looked serious in that way small children sometimes do. Nicky was frowning at the camera but Tommy was looking at his mother. His small arm was outstretched, reaching for his mother’s hair. Katrina was laughing, turning to catch his hand as the photo was taken.
“She was very pretty, wasn’t she?” Tommy said, and Malcolm nodded, feeling the old ache in his heart.
“Do you have any of my father?”
With some reluctance, Malcolm drew out the other picture, a faded photograph of Katrina and John, sitting side by side on the beach. There was a slightly strained quality to their smiles which suggested they had been posing for too long. Heather was there too, at the edge of the photograph, looking away; she’d never liked having her picture taken. Malcolm supposed he must have taken the photo, but he didn’t recall the occasion now.
Tommy took it from him and frowned at it in silence for a long time.
Malcolm wondered what was going through his mind, whether Tommy was struck by the resemblance between himself and his father, but all Tommy said when he finally spoke was, “He wasn’t as attractive as my mother, was he?”
“I think he could be charming, when he wanted to be,” Malcolm said, and then wondered why on earth he’d felt moved to defend his brother. But perhaps it wasn’t that. Perhaps it was more that he felt the need to explain Katrina to Tommy, how she might have ended up marrying him. He said, “He would go out of his way to be charming. It was important to him, I think, that people liked him.”
Abruptly, Tommy passed the photograph back to him. “Can I keep the other one?” he said. “Of my mother with me and Nicky?”
“Of course. It’s yours.” Malcolm stepped away from him. “Let me get you a new envelope to put it in, keep it safe.” He went quickly into the living room and rummaged through the desk drawers until he unearthed a fresh envelope. He was glad to have a moment alone, and glad as well to have something to occupy his hands, which he discovered now were shaking.
17
His mother’s face was clearer as he lay on his bed later that evening, but Tom wasn’t sure if he had stolen her face from the photograph in his hand (he had it out again, couldn’t seem to leave it alone) or if the picture had prompted his own memory.
If he could go back.
There were many other wrongs he would have liked to correct. How he had treated Caroline, for instance. But still, if he could go back, and if he wasn’t able to change the greatest crime he’d committed, he would choose this one. His mother would turn to him and ask for help with the laundry and he would say, “Yes.”
But you were a child, he told himself. Don’t magnify all of your actions.
Still, though. He had exposed his mother to his father’s anger. The argument between his parents had been one that he had provoked, and it had taken place only a few days before the murders. It was possible that he had done real damage. And in any case, regardless of whether the row had contributed to what happened next, it remained true that one of Tom’s final acts towards his mother had been to betray her.
He dozed off eventually and when he woke again it was the middle of the night and he was cold from lying on top of the covers. Sitting up stiffly, he found there was one clear question in his head, as though it was being spoken by somebody else.
Where was Nicky?
His mother was once again standing by the sink, and he was saying, No, no, he would not help with the laundry, and then he was going off to play with Angus. But where was Nicky?
This was a loose thread he had always ignored, so dwarfed was it by everything that had happened afterwards. Now, however, he pulled at it. Nicky had not been asked to help put away the laundry. That fact had never played much of a part in the story, although surely it must have fed his own sense of injustice at the time and strengthened his refusal to help. Had Nicky been out of the house? Carefully, as if picking gravel from a wound, Tom tried to take the memory apart. Both his parents were at home, so neither of them had taken Nicky out. Angus was waiting down the road for Tommy, so Nicky was not off somewhere with him.
It was the strangest thing.
Realizing he had to pee, Tom dragged himself up and groped his way along the corridor to the bathroom. How much longer would Malcolm let him stay? he thought. It had been eleven days already. Tom was certain his uncle didn’t want him here, however Malcolm might try (not very successfully) to pretend. Nobody wanted him here. The thought came to him without self-pity.
When he’d finished and washed his hands, he stared into the mirror above the sink for a while. He didn’t feel much sense of recognition when he looked at his own face, and he wondered if this was normal. Worse than the dissociation were the times when he saw only his father’s face looking back at him.
He had to make some kind of plan, he thought. He needed to come up with an idea of where to go next, what he might do. But he was tired. He was afraid there was no next.
There were still traces of shaving foam and tiny dark hairs in the sink from that morning. Tom ran the tap to splash them away. The water drained slowly, so he took the grille out, wiping the black slime off the edge with his finger and tapping it into the darkness of the plughole. Then he bent forward to peer after it. The grime round the edges of the plughole faded almost immediately into black; impossible to tell how deep it went. Tom was distracted for a moment by the idea of the void tunnelling on and on, sliding deeper into black; he imagined being small enough to vanish down it. He turned the tap on harder to see if he could make the water catch up with itself and rise to the surface. It was almost disappointing when he managed it, a faint sheen a long way below, beginning as a glimmer then gradually thickening, ascending, surging over the edges and turning clear and harmless within the safety of the sink.
He rinsed his hands again, and as he turned off the taps the missing piece of his memory came back, sidling quietly to the front of his mind. Where was Nicky? Nicky was in bed that day, reading his comics. Nicky’s shoulder was still sore; it was right after he had fallen between the rocks on the beach and he and Tommy had had to walk half the way home. Nicky had to rest for a couple of days, wasn’t allowed out to play, and wouldn’t be expected to help with any household tasks.
Tom experienced a strange sense of the pieces of the world realigning themselves around him. There was some satisfaction in having solved this puzzle, but mostly he felt thrown off balance. As he went back along the corridor to his room, something else occurred to him. Nicky dislocated his shoulder when he was about eight years old. Tom himself must have been six. This realization took the breath from Tom’s lungs: the incident could not have taken place right before the murders.
Was it possible? Tom lay back down on his bed and tried to think. He was almost certain that he wasn’t mistaken about Nicky’s shoulder still healing that day. That part, as soon as it came to him, felt true: not that his mind had invented it now, but that it had always been there, just out of sight. But who knew what the truth was? It was not as though he had anybody to ask.
He got under the covers and tried to
warm himself. Although he hadn’t bothered closing his curtains before bed, the room was in complete darkness. Nights out here were pitch black if the moon was hidden, not like in cities where the darkness was always diluted. Tom had forgotten the heavy texture of night on the islands.
Once more he tried to focus on the memory, but it wouldn’t stay still for long enough. He hated the indistinctness of the past; it frightened him. Above all, it seemed cruel to him how vividly the feelings themselves remained—terror, shame—even when so many of the details were slippery. It meant he suffered all the anguish of the past without it ever being eased by an adult’s detachment. Turning on his side, he pulled his knees up and closed his eyes.
When he woke again, it was dawn; the room was half lit by weak morning light. Tom sat up and let everything come back to him. His head felt a little clearer as he went downstairs to make a cup of coffee, relieved to find Malcolm wasn’t up yet.
Standing barefoot by the kettle and looking out at the dim moorland, Tom decided the most likely explanation was that his mind had conflated two similar incidents. He thought the row over the laundry probably had taken place years, and not days, before the murders. But perhaps there had also been an argument a couple of days before the killings—just not one he remembered now. Then, later, after everything went so wrong in his head, he had muddled the two together.
Once it had come to him, the idea did not surprise him. His mind was too intent on holding on to another memory: the terrible one that took up his entire core. Tom began to see how this had eventually distorted all his other memories. But it seemed no less than he deserved, that his mind had latched on long ago to that single moment and decided to keep it clear and sharp at the expense of everything else. Over time, his other memories had been twisted around the unbearable one until they all became warped by its ugly shape.
18
It rained hard that morning, and the wind was furious. Malcolm went out to work with Robert early, leaving Tom on his own. Having prowled around downstairs for a couple of hours, Tom accepted that it wasn’t walking weather; he would be blown off his feet. But he didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t feel steady today.