The Rye Man

by David Park

  The bathroom door was closed but there was no reply to his call and when he opened it he was aware immediately of the smell – gaseous, septic, angrier than it had been for a long time. As he stepped towards the windows to open them he saw the first floorboard, then another and another, ripped up with the claw hammer which rested on the floor, splinters of wood still trapped between its forks. Bent nails slithered across the floor as he kicked them without seeing them. There were half a dozen boards up exposing the criss-cross of beams, blotched and blackened copper pipes and a meshed twine of wiring. He knew she had done it, in some final desperation to discover the source of what had come to seem to her like a personal provocation, a malignant and spiteful incursor into their world.

  He dropped to his knees and stared into the opened gullies, his eyes focussing on the steady ooze of water seeping from a hairline crack. It dripped down over a mess of rotting membrane and puddled into a stagnant slime. He stretched out his hand to touch it but pulled it back with a shiver, then pushed two of the boards over the stench. He closed the bathroom door and hurried into the bedroom. The crumpled quilt bore the imprint of her body. All her coats were still in the wardrobe and nothing seemed disturbed or out of place.

  Taking the stairs two at a time he ran out of the house and across the yard into the outhouse she had turned into a studio. The fluorescent light flickered into an angry spasm of light which bounced off the white-painted walls. There was no sign of her, or her recent presence, but he looked around the room as if searching it for some clue as to her whereabouts. Picture frames and backing card were stacked on shelves amidst jars of murky, unchanged water. Some uncleaned brushes hardened on the table, their bristles stiff and splayed, blue paint squirming out of an open tube on to the board she used as a palette. There were a couple more coffee cups and some brown-ringed magazines, while on her easel was the current painting she was working on – a view of open countryside which he recognised as the view from the house. It was only half finished and didn’t look as if she had worked on it for some time. When he went back out he left the light on, as if somehow that might reclaim the studio from its gloom.

  Perhaps she had only gone for a walk, perhaps her parents had called and they would all arrive back at any moment. Maybe he should just put the kettle on and wait patiently for her return. Gradually he convinced himself that it was too soon to start to worry. Making himself a cup of tea he sat with it at the kitchen table, cupping the comfort of its warmth, and waited for it to cool. Then without having put it to his lips he left it sitting on the table and climbed the stairs again, this time stepping slowly and gently, listening all the time. Past the closed door of the bathroom and then another glance into the still empty bedroom, up the stairs to the attic. The door was partly open and he pushed it lightly and stared into the half-light.

  She was sitting on the cane chair, the contents of the suitcase laid out neatly at her feet. In her hand was one of the cardigans his mother had knitted. She looked up at him as he stood in the doorway, frightened to step into the privacy of the moment, unsure of what to do or say. He saw no anger in her face or bitterness towards him, only the raw openness of her grief, like some scar tissue that would not heal. He felt a sudden burst of guilt, as if he had left her to deal with something which was greater than she could be expected to bear. Ignoring the possibility of rebuff he stepped towards her, calling her name, and like a child she stretched out her arms towards him, burying her head in his chest and crying without restraint, her whole body shaking as if convulsed. He stroked her hair, comforted her and held her tightly until she trembled to a pause. She borrowed his handkerchief and he squeezed on to the chair beside her, his arm still holding tight. She tried to say something but couldn’t and he told her it was all right, that everything was going to be all right and they sat in silence for a long time.

  Gradually he sensed her finding a control again but he didn’t rush her, let her find her own time. And then, helping her from the chair, they both knelt on the floor and carefully folded and replaced all the objects in the case. Neither of them spoke but it felt as if they were facing what had happened together, perhaps for the first time, and then the case was closed, the metal clasps clicking in the silence. He led her down the stairs into the bedroom and they kicked off their shoes and slipped under the quilt. She clung to him as if she would drown in some fathomless sea if she were to let go.

  ‘You would have liked a son John, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I would have liked a son.’

  ‘I always felt you wanted a girl.’

  ‘A girl would be nice too. At least you wouldn’t have to call her Phoebe.’

  ‘You know something – Phoebe doesn’t sound such a terrible name.’

  ‘You always laughed at it before.’

  ‘Well I’m changing my mind. John, do you think we’ll ever have a child?’

  ‘Yes, I do. We just have to be patient Emma – there’s plenty of time for both of us. Look at Fiona Craig – she’s four or five years older than you. Everything’ll work out all right.’

  For a second her body quivered in his arms and he thought she was going to cry again but she stifled it and went on talking. ‘Sometimes I think it was my fault, that I must have done something wrong, that it was my body which let him down.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, it was nobody’s fault.’ He brushed her hair gently, caressed the nape of her neck.

  ‘I wish it had been somebody’s fault because then there would be somebody to blame, somebody to hate.’

  ‘If we really believe it Emma, then we’ll have another child, a boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, but we’ll have our own child and we’ll both love it and then this pain won’t hurt so much.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, sometimes I think the pain’s never going to go away. It just seems as real as when it happened, sometimes worse. For a while I thought it was getting easier, just after we moved here, but then it all came back. I see something, hear something, and it all comes back.’

  ‘You should have told me, maybe I could have been better for you.’

  ‘You’re always busy John, so wrapped up in school and the children that I find it hard to believe you’ve any space in your head for me. You shouldn’t need me to tell you, if we were close you’d know without me having to spell it out.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time I started putting you first.’

  ‘We’re not close any more, not like we used to be. This thing should’ve brought us closer not driven us apart.’

  ‘I know Emma, I know. I’m sorry, really sorry. Listen, why don’t we go away this summer, rent somewhere in Donegal, spend three or four weeks doing nothing but pottering about on beaches and sitting in some tiny pub with a turf fire. You could do some painting – I was looking at your stuff in the studio and I think it’s good. Some of the best you’ve done. We could go to one of those thatched cottages – you know the ones, quaint on the outside, all mod cons inside. What do you think?’

  She nodded her head and he felt as though he was leading her away from the edge of the abyss, guiding her towards some safer path. He kept talking to her about the future, planting seeds of ideas and hoping he could slip something into her mind which she would hold on to, look forward to. She was curled into him and he told her again that everything was going to be all right in a repeated incantation of hope. The whispered words soothed her and then, exhausted, she started to slip towards sleep. As her eyes closed she told him she loved him, and as he cradled her gently he lied to her in the darkness.

  *

  He was vaguely conscious of the phone ringing in the kitchen. He hoped it would stop but it persisted, shrill and insistent, until it felt like it was ringing from the very inside of his head. He squinted at the alarm clock, saw it was 7.00 a.m. and couldn’t think who it was could be calling so early on a Saturday morning. Emma slept on, oblivious to the ringing, still wearing her jeans and sweat-shirt from the night before. He slipped out of be
d, stuck his feet in his slippers and hurried down the stairs. As he made his way to the phone he was sure that at any moment it would stop – it seemed to have been ringing for so long – but as he stretched out his hand to lift it, its sound didn’t fade but seemed to grow louder in the sleeping silence of the house.

  He had guessed at many voices waiting on the other end of the line but hadn’t thought of Tom Quinn. At first he couldn’t get a hold of what Quinn was telling him, couldn’t translate the unbroken rush of his jumbled words into any coherent reality, but gradually their meaning lodged and registered in his fuddled, drowsy brain. As he started thinking clearly he asked Quinn a flow of questions but all he got in response was a re-hash of the original outpouring. Then he put the phone down and sat at the kitchen table, listened to the steady, somnolent breathing of the house. It seemed to arch over him like a giant bell-jar and he was suddenly aware of his own breathing, the loosening of his stomach.

  He had an hour to get to the McQuarrie place. Too much time. He was sure that if he had tried to eat something he would be sick. He leaned back on the chair and looked at his hands. The fridge hummed and kicked itself into a louder whir. For some reason his mind flitted back to the early morning phone calls of his childhood. A couple of stray sheep that had squirmed their way out of a field, a loose cow wandering down country roads. Friendly calls from watchful neighbours, and his father would head off with the tractor and trailer, come back and resume his breakfast, muttering about having to spend the morning mending fences. Maybe it could be like that. Maybe it could be as simple once again.

  He went to the sink and doused his face. The coldness of the water splashed him into a consciousness of the world outside. Thick frost sugared the windows of the car and behind it white-barked birch trees shredded themselves like paper. The silvered grass in the garden sat up in stiff tufts and the hedgerows glinted with a filigree of web. He filled the kettle and, unlocking the kitchen door, went and poured it over the windscreen. As the water dripped on to the bonnet he stood looking down into the blanched sweep of fields and shivered. A rabbit bolted from the bottom of the garden and vanished into the long grass of the bank. The gravel of the driveway felt compacted and clogged by the frost as he walked back to the house. He refilled the kettle and plugged it in. He should at least have something to take the chill out of his insides before he went out. Something to stop the churning.

  It seemed to take a long time to boil and he sat again at the kitchen table wondering if there was anyone he should phone, but he guessed that all the calls that needed to be made had already been made. He was glad Quinn had phoned, wondered where he had heard. Going back upstairs he dressed quickly in his warmest clothing. As he closed the wardrobe door clumsily Emma wakened and looked at him in confusion. He sat on the edge of the bed and told her what had happened, tried to keep her calm, promised that it would be a false alarm and he would be back home soon, then he tucked the quilt round her and went back downstairs. He sipped his coffee quickly, trying to turn his head away from the smell and when he heard her footsteps upstairs swirled what was left in his cup into the sink and hurried out to the car.

  He had to scrape the windscreen with the edge of a cassette case until he had cleared a viewing panel. The side and rear windows were still iced and as he started the engine it felt like he was sitting in a blind box. With a crack he unwound the two front side windows and then wound them up again, paring the surface of the ice. As he set off down the driveway he knew without looking that she was standing watching him, but he was no longer able to give any of his thoughts to her and concentrated on driving the car safely along the glittering roads, following the snakeskin patterns already printed. Soon the blower cleared the windscreen and as the heat started to seep into the car he was able to glance into the fields he passed. They sloped up from the road, a skim of white, static, lifeless, as if cemented into place, and nothing moved or broke the stillness of the morning.

  There was a long line of vehicles parked in the verges leading to the McQuarrie place – cars, Land Rovers, a couple of tractors. A man stood at his opened boot, lifting out a pair of water boots and a waxed green coat. He parked at the end of the line and walked down the road to their lane. There was a policeman standing just inside the entrance but when he asked him the questions Quinn hadn’t been able to answer, he politely pointed him towards the house. As he hurried along the muddied lane he could still hear the crackle of his police radio.

  In the yard were maybe fifty men standing round its edges in tight little knots. Three or four dogs sniffed round the groups. The men were dressed in similar style – heavy farm coats and flat caps, boots, and nearly all carried sticks or poles. They looked like a group of beaters. One man wore waders. A police car was parked beside the Volvo and a constable stood on the doorstep of the porch controlling admission to the house. He looked round the groups, nodded to some of the faces he recognised. He heard someone say it had been announced on the local radio and then a figure broke away from one of the tight groups and came towards him. It was Quinn and he welcomed the opportunity to speak to someone and end his self-conscious isolation. He thanked him for the phone call then wondered if he should go and speak to someone inside the house, but there was no opportunity to do anything because the constable stood aside and a group filed into the yard. There was a police inspector and a policewoman followed by McQuarrie, his son, and another man he didn’t recognise. Through one of the porch windows, behind the hanging spider plants, he caught the face of Mrs McQuarrie, holding herself back from the glass. He tried to catch her gaze but she seemed to pull herself back further from the clouded pane as if unwilling to be seen.

  The inspector stopped in the middle of the yard and called the groups of men towards him. He told them little of the circumstances, only that she had gone missing the previous night, hadn’t slept in the house and that he was concerned about her safety. His tone was neutral, undramatic, almost as if this was no more than some familiar routine. He thanked them for their response, told them the types of places to look, the areas which they were to concentrate on initially. It was when the first groups were starting to move out of the yard that McQuarrie saw him for the first time. He burst towards him, his face tightened into ugliness, the shouted curse bruising and tearing the stillness of the morning. He saw it coming – the broad band of wedding ring, the knots of knuckles swinging towards him – and although he twitched his head enough to avoid its full weight, it struck an arcing blow to the side of his face, burning and skinning his cheek. He felt the corner of his mouth split as if sliced by something sharp and then the taste of his blood.

  ‘You bastard Cameron, you’ve no business being here.’ He swung his fist again but his arms were clamped by restraining hands and Tom Quinn was pushing his way between them. Then others were ushering him away as McQuarrie struggled in his frustration to get at him, able only to spit obscenities. ‘If it wasn’t for you Cameron she’d still be here.’ And then appealing to the police who were now the ones holding his arms. ‘It was him that was trying to throw her out of his school because she wasn’t bloody good enough for it. It were Cameron told her she’d have to go to another school, made her sick with worry. You’re a bastard Cameron.’ They trundled him back to the house, his shouts still spewing across the yard.

  He touched the broken skin but felt only the flame of his humiliation. He looked around him, saw their faces turn away from his. McQuarrie had stopped shouting but the words he had used still seemed to linger and fester over his senses like some spreading sore. The police inspector draped an arm round his shoulder and ushered him away with Quinn following protectively a few steps behind. They got into the back seat of a police car parked at the bottom of the lane.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked as he unbuttoned the top of his heavy coat.

  ‘I’ll live.’ He dabbed the cut with his handkerchief and felt pathetic. He could taste the trickle of salted blood seeping across his tongue. He thought of the girl who
had fallen and skinned her knees the first day of school, the red berries round the autumn display.

  ‘McQuarrie’s obviously upset at the moment as you can appreciate, but there was no call for that. If you want to press charges I’ll act on it.’

  ‘There’s no need – it wouldn’t help. Let’s just find her.’

  The inspector nodded, took off his cap and pushed a hand back through his flattened hair. ‘So you’re the headmaster then. What can you tell me about Jacqueline?’

  ‘She’s not academically bright – in fact she’s very slow. She’s got a reading and writing age well below her chronological age. That makes her a loner, an outsider – none of the other kids have much to do with her. I don’t think she’s been very happy . . . When did she go missing?’

  ‘Some time between eight and ten last night. They thought she was in her room. When the mother called her for supper there was no reply. Have you any idea why she might have run away?’

  He thought of the armlet of bruising coloured like a withering leaf, hesitated. Two men with sticks walked past, their dog running ahead and sniffing in the verges. ‘I don’t know, maybe something happened at home.’

  ‘Parents say not. McQuarrie obviously blames you, says you were trying to throw her out of the school.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to throw her out of the school. She needs special help, teachers who can give her the time and attention she needs. We don’t have the staffing and resources to give her what she’s entitled to.’

  ‘Did you discuss this with the McQuarries?’

  ‘Yes, I came to the farm, we talked about it.’

  ‘And they weren’t happy with what you suggested?’

  ‘McQuarrie’s not a man who listens well. He thinks his child’s happy. I couldn’t make him understand. I could have explained things to his wife but he obviously makes all the decisions.’