4
THE NEWS WAS not good. Paul asked how long, as if he were looking at lit X-rays in a consultant’s office. End of the week. The staff was skeletal. The operation was being moved to the East. Far or Near? Who knew? The guy even suggested that Paul would have been let go long before now, but for his circumstances.
‘My circumstances.’
‘You know.’
Paul shook his hand, left the building and ran to where his bike was locked, got honked at twice on the ring road, cutting across lanes, breaking lights. His daughter was standing out on the close’s dust track in her pyjamas. ‘I felt safer outside,’ she said.
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘She’s not in her room.’
Paul let his bike go, and heard it hit the ground behind him. Up the stairs: Martina’s humid room, his own, the girl’s. He was shocked to find nothing; more than anything he was shocked to realize, once again, how disappointed he was to find nothing. There was no answer from the caravan. He picked up his bike from where he had dropped it and coaxed his daughter back inside, insisting that Martina would be back.
‘Simple reason?’
‘There is,’ he said. ‘There has to be.’
He told her about the job. He said that he was delighted. To prove it, he burned his suit in one of the empty oil drums on the site. They sprawled out the back, splitting Martina’s last small bottle of rosé from the fridge, as ribbons of black smoke from Paul’s burning suit tangled upwards into the clear sky, and not once mentioning that there was still no sign of Martina. They slept in, were fairly silent over lunch and walked the mile and a bit that it took to reach the centre of the town from their close. It was mid-afternoon and they felt like aliens. It was, Paul said, like a coach tour of the Balkans, where you take a pit-stop in one of those dying hamlets that had been the centre of some medieval empire. A few upright chairs outside open terrace doors, bearing magazines so out of date they must be used as fans. A handful of lurchers sniffing around the base of a granite statue. A stack of bikes unlocked at the top of the street. The hum of a wireless through someone’s open window.
The shops were desolate. Even the minimart, usually stocked with tat for passing traffic, felt empty. Paul bought a net of satsumas and a Sharpie of royal washable blue for the girl, but there was nobody to pay. He tapped a coin’s rim against the checkout, called through the ‘Staff Only’ door and, when nobody answered or came through, poured a fistful of spare change onto the rubber belt without bothering to count it. There was footpath for half a mile of road from the edge of town, and none for the second half-mile after the supermarket. They stepped into long grass and briars whenever they heard a car coming. Twice they made way, and twice nothing came.
He waited until almost eleven, when it was starting to get properly dark and there was a light clearly glowing from the caravan.
‘I’m going up to ask Marcus.’
‘I’m coming.’
‘Stay where you are. Me and Marcus need to have a proper chat.’
He made that last bit sound like there would be raised voices, language. She was better off sitting tight. When there was still no answer from the caravan, he tried the locked handle. No Marcus. Not much of anything, except for some class of bed, visible through a gap in the curtains, where Marcus must have got his head down. With the light off his bike, he went into the townhouse nearest the caravan.
‘Marcus?’
His voice sounded thin, hollow, in the black cavities that were intended to be rooms. He thought he could hear footsteps. He started whistling. Had he ever whistled before? He couldn’t remember ever whistling. Yet there he was, trying to hold still a light that was dwindling fast, edging through the shell of a half-built apartment block, and whistling for all he was worth to keep himself company. All the floor’s crap had been swept into a single pile in one of the rooms: broken pallets, buckled screws, scraps of piping, foam pellets and dust. At the centre, what must have been the entrance hall, a wooden ladder leaned up into a fathomless rectangle.
‘Hello?’ Flood answered on the ninth ring, just as Paul was preparing to speak to the recorded message.
‘Flood?’
This was the following day. Paul had promised his daughter, when he came down from the site, that he would try Flood. She had written out what to say while Paul watched her. She was still in her pyjamas. Her hair was pure black, just like her mother’s. The hand holding her Sharpie had little patches of eczema around the knuckles. Though twelve and getting lanky, she had looked small and vulnerable with her clipped accent and her series of bullet-points. Paul hadn’t wanted to call Flood, in case Flood pressed about rent that was owing, but the girl insisted.
When he answered, Flood sounded as if he was waiting to hear from someone else.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Paul. From number seven?’
‘Yes?’
It wasn’t clear whether or not Flood had any idea who Paul was. It was weeks since he had called in. Apart from that first visit, he and Paul had hardly exchanged two words. Paul needed to speak quickly, before Flood hung up.
‘I need to speak with Marcus.’
‘Okay . . .’ The Flood of a few months before had been so sure of himself, with all the time in the world, shooting the breeze with the ladies, full of lame flirts and riddles. This Flood had a way of sounding cornered, one that seemed to dread what Paul might ask of him. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I just need to talk to Marcus.’ Paul didn’t want to say about Martina going missing, and he reckoned Flood knew nothing about her and his nephew. ‘Just some stuff on site.’
‘Okay. I’ll pass on the message.’
‘Can you not give me his number?’ It sounded as if the line had gone dead. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
‘Can you not give me Marcus’s number?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘No, as in you won’t give me Marcus’s mobile number?’
‘Can’t.’ The far end of the line rustled. ‘Can’t, won’t, same difference.’
‘I’ll go up myself and see him tonight so.’
It was then, only then, that Flood cleared his throat and spoke something resembling the truth. ‘He won’t be there tonight,’ Flood said. ‘He won’t be there tomorrow night either. He hasn’t been on site since the end of last month.’
‘Excuse me?’ Paul knew he shouldn’t have come across as stunned as he did, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘His light is on in the caravan every night. I’ve seen him around too.’
‘The light in the caravan’s been on a timer for the past three weeks. Maybe you saw his shadow, but it wasn’t Marcus. There wasn’t funds to keep Marcus on site. He was offered a start in Reading and he took it.’
‘So who’s been looking after the place?’
Instead of answering that, Flood rattled on awhile about times being bad and not getting better any time soon. All these weeks, had Martina been dolling herself up to visit an empty caravan? It was as if, Flood was wittering, they were back where they’d started and the whole shebang never happened: places closing all around you and no life anywhere.
‘Are we nearer completion your end?’
‘Completion?’ Paul had no idea what Flood was on about. ‘I wish.’
‘That family from the midlands might be moving in. Any day now.’
Flood had promised the same thing two months ago. There was no family from the midlands. The family from the midlands was a mirage, a dim collective ruse shimmering out there on the horizon.
‘Fantastic,’ Paul said finally. ‘Us and all the other neighbours will be sure to throw them a huge fucking beach party when they land.’
‘Then where did she go?’ The girl was sitting on one of the chairs at the picnic table. Paul didn’t tell her that Marcus wasn’t around, only that Flood knew nothing. Even as she asked that, her voice seemed to be breaking. ‘We saw her go up. Remembe
r?’
The girl cried. She was probably crying for Martina and her mother all at once. Mostly, she had seemed a bit dazed for months. But the shock had been short-circuited for his daughter as well, Paul could see, by Martina’s being there, being so like Helen and so prepared to think the best. Now Martina was gone as well. Now the forty-eight hours which the officers had said see most similar cases resolved were almost up. Paul went around to his daughter’s side of the kitchen table and held her small face against his T-shirt’s logo.
‘It’s okay,’ he kept repeating. ‘It’s okay.’
‘So be it.’
They said nothing about this either, just as they had said nothing to one another about Helen. They said nothing about Martina’s absence, her possible whereabouts. Paul withheld the fact that Martina had been pretending to wander up the close to pay visits to someone who had weeks since left the country. Had she, after a fashion, followed Marcus to Reading? That didn’t sound like the kind of thing Martina would do, any more than Helen. And what if she had done? Good luck to her, Paul thought. His daughter said nothing to Paul about the words on the kitchen window that she and Martina had found, washed away, and couldn’t help chirping at every opportunity since. Paul said nothing to her, yet, about what he had seen up in the townhouses. Nor did he make any reference to the way in which his daughter had moved into her auntie’s room, was sleeping in her unlaundered bedclothes and had taken to wearing her ochre lip-gloss.
In fact, they said nothing about Martina to anybody. There was really nobody to say anything to. Martina and Helen had been one another’s only family. Paul didn’t report Martina’s absence to the authorities, nor did he decide not to. He just never got around to making a phone call. When his daughter asked him if he was going to, he said he was afraid of how it would make them look to the outside world. He said he was afraid she would be taken from him.
Slattery started putting in appearances. They knew it was him, even before they spoke to him. He had the very demeanour Flood had described – of one who forgot that he no longer owned that plot, making free with all the unoccupied houses and their flotsam. He came down the hill between the row opposite and the townhouses, across the green area that still had no grass seeded on it. One day he just seemed to fade into view out of scrub and bushes. After that, he came down so frequently that there were tracks from the tyres of his quad in the long grass on the hill up to his place.
He looked in his late fifties at least – a small man, though it was hard to tell since he never climbed down off the quad; as if coming in contact with this earth would wither him in an instant. He wore a tweed fedora and one of those quilted sleeveless horsey gilets in navy blue. The girl even referred to his quad as his horse. She spent her afternoons at the window of the master bedroom, surveying the close. She kept Martina’s penniless phone charged and with her, in case of any calls or texts.
‘Here he comes!’ she would shout down through the silent house. Or ‘Your friend is coming on his horse.’
Slattery had nothing in particular to do. He was just snooping. He appeared at the same hour most evenings, after the spite had gone out of the sun and before it had started its slow descent, cruising from shell to shell in low gear. Sometimes he would come to a standstill, raise himself slightly off his saddle and peer into each abyss. Sometimes you could see him shake his head before inching forward again. He came up their side of the close once.
‘He’s coming our way!’
Slattery paused right outside the front window of Sheila’s empty place. Paul had gone upstairs to watch as well. Slattery was having a proper gawk in through the bay window of number three. He shook his chubby head again, reversed back out into the dust and disappeared into the rear access between number three and number four. He was out of sight so long that they thought he must have gone home and they had somehow missed his going. Next thing, he was at the end of their drive. He was braking.
‘Can I help you?’
Paul had run downstairs and stepped nonchalantly out onto their doormat. In Marcus’s absence, Paul had appointed himself unofficial site watchman. Not that there was much to watch over. It was just something to do, a distraction from the aimlessness of their days.
‘I beg your pardon.’
Slattery was hamming up surprise when he said that. He was pretending he had no idea that anyone lived there. He pronounced ‘pardon’ as if he had a hard-boiled egg lodged on his tongue and the word rhymed with ‘Gordon’. Was Slattery’s first name Gordon? He certainly looked like a Gordon, to Paul standing there unshaven and thick with the tedium of another stifling evening.
‘I suppose,’ Slattery said, ‘this makes you and me neighbours.’ He pointed backwards up the hill, in the direction of the horse-chestnuts. He smiled a smile of benevolence. He was, after all, treating Paul as an equal of sorts. ‘Howdy, neighbour.’
Slattery was assuming that Paul knew all about him. Paul knew all about him, but really did not want to give Slattery the satisfaction. Paul sauntered down the drive, taking one hand from a pocket of his shorts.
‘I suppose it does,’ he said. Slattery’s hand, when they shook, was cold and damp. It was also strangely small. It wasn’t like the hand of a grown man. It was slender, weak and weightless. ‘Paul.’
‘That’s right,’ Slattery said. ‘Paul.’
‘I didn’t quite catch—’
‘No, no,’ Slattery said. ‘We know all about you, Paul.’ He removed the fedora. He had arrived with the air of one whose words came preformed, had been tested many times in their own echoes and proven to be sufficiently appropriate. ‘You have our sympathies, Paul.’
Two minutes before, Slattery had been doing his little shock routine. Now here he was, not only admitting that he’d known they were there, but admitting, too, that he had read all about them in the papers. Or, rather, some anonymous plural (in which Slattery included himself) had known and had read all about them.
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘Forgive me.’ Slattery replaced his fedora, back to business, a tad put out by Paul’s bluntness. ‘Myself and Hazel.’
Nobody was entirely sure where Slattery made his money. That was what Flood had told Helen. The one consensus seemed to be that nobody with a name like Slattery could be to the manor born. Dog food, some said. A handful of factories around the country. There was talk, too, that he had married into a dog-food fortune and had acquired the nobility of dog food overnight.
‘Haze is a big fan.’
‘Haze?’
‘The little lady.’ For a second there, Slattery looked unsure if Paul and he spoke the same language. ‘Hazel.’ He squinted. He seemed to reach the decision, right in front of Paul, to speak slowly to him. ‘I call her Haze. She’s a huge fan. Of yours.’
‘Of mine?’ Paul wondered if Slattery was making fun of him. ‘Aren’t they all?’
‘I beg your pardon.’ There it went again, the hard-boiled egg. ‘I phrased it tactlessly. Forgive me.’ It was becoming obvious that Slattery had an errand to run, that he was not trucking further distraction, that Paul was the errand. ‘My little lady has admired how you have disported yourself through this whole . . .’ he threw one hand away from himself, seeking the precise word ‘. . . trauma?’ Was ‘trauma’ the precise word? Had Helen been beaten to a pulp and found naked from the waist down in some shore-bound field up the coast, gnawed to the bone by crows and stoats? Was that the truth Paul had deleted from his hard drive? Slattery looked so positive that ‘trauma’ was the precise word. ‘Haze has all the cuttings and she talks about you all the time. She has asked me to tell you that if ever there is anything we can do for you, not to hesitate.’
Slattery did something with the right handle of his quad. It locked into reverse and twisted backwards, away from Paul.
‘Anything at all,’ Slattery was calling from the dust pluming around him. What did Slattery have in mind? Babysitting? A spot of landscaping? ‘Anything.’
‘What was all that
about?’ the girl asked, when her father came back into the house. She had been watching from upstairs. The last thing she needed, Paul figured, was Slattery’s little lady’s obsession with their ‘trauma’.
‘Who knows?’ Paul said. ‘A prick.’
Slattery came back about an hour later. It was just starting to get dark. He didn’t knock or anything of the sort. He simply braked at the end of their drive once again and flashed the headlamps of his quad. Paul and the girl were sitting at the flicker of their flat screen. The room lit and blackened and lit again in a few short jabs, like sheet lightning minus thunder.
‘Come for supper.’ The voice still belonged to Slattery, but the person was scarcely visible behind the beam of the quad. Just the outline of the fedora. ‘Haze insists.’
‘You’re very good.’
Paul had come back to the front step. He had his top off, was in the shorts he wore cycling and in bed. He was shielding his eyes with his left hand. He was speaking down to the beam, through the engine’s grumble, to the disembodied voice behind it. Supper chez Slattery sounded like a night in hell. Slattery may well have been the prick everybody said he was, but he was still the only prick kind enough to invite them over.
‘Shall we say the Friday of next week? Sevenish?’
‘Perfect.’
‘Not this Friday. We have to go away. The following Friday, next week.’ He was determined to be understood, Slattery was, amid the noise and the glare. ‘Not this one coming. The next one.’
Paul’s eyes were aching. ‘You’re very good.’
Two men moved into Sheila’s empty house. They worked in construction, judging by the cut of them: jeans and boots spattered with chalk and paint. They looked, indeed, like brothers. They were gone all day every day, weekends included, in an old station-wagon with strange plates, which they parked at odd angles to Flood’s barrier, ferrying all manner of gear to and from the house. Their patio door was open every evening, through which wafted loud trashy rock and the smells of frying meats. Paul referred to them as ‘the Poles’, though they could have been from anywhere. They certainly didn’t appear to have a word of English, and they never waved or acknowledged the presence of their neighbours.
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