The Slaughter Man

by Cassandra Parkin

  She can see her mother in him as he kneels, in the way he reaches tenderly out to the frame as if he’s picking up something alive and vulnerable. For the second time that morning she remembers the book that was destroyed. Guilt thumps in her stomach.

  “Maybe… no, the frame’s gone too, it’s cracked.” He’s trying not to mind, but she can tell that this has hurt him, hurt him deep in his heart in a way she hadn’t imagined anything ever could. She ought to say something, one of the things you’re supposed to say. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. I’ll clean it up. The things you say when you’re a child, words that work like a spell to get you out of trouble. If she could say these things, perhaps he’d reply with the counterspell, It’s all right, I know you didn’t mean to. I’ll clean it up, it’s not safe for you. Don’t worry. Instead, all she has is silence, as her uncle kneels at her feet and picks up the jaggedy shards of mirror as if he might somehow piece them back together.

  “We were on holiday,” he says, almost to himself.

  I’m sorry, she thinks. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please believe me. If he’d only look at her, if he could only see the words that she’s longing to speak, he’d understand. But he doesn’t look.

  “What were you doing with it? Did you try to take it off the wall?” She shakes her head. “You must have been, it was on there securely enough. Seriously, Willow, there’s a mirror over the basin if you needed a better light for your make-up or whatever.”

  I’m not even wearing any make-up, Willow thinks. I can’t. I can’t look in mirrors any more, all I see is… She needs to do something to remind him who she is, that she’s allowed to break things and wreck things and make mistakes, and it’s his job to forgive her because he’s the adult and she is broken, and that’s how this is supposed to work. Perhaps if she cleans up the mess she’s made, he’ll forgive her? She lifts her foot, looking for a safe place to put it down again.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he says wearily. “Don’t be ridiculous. Stay there and don’t move. I’ll need to sweep up first before you walk on that floor. Oh, you would pick right now to learn to climb the stairs, wouldn’t you?” He grabs the kitten, who is sniffing curiously at the broken frame, and passes him to Willow with an artificial smile. “Look, it’s all right, it’s only a mirror. We can always buy another one. The important thing is you’re okay. Stay there and keep him out of mischief. I’ll get a dustpan and brush.”

  These are the words he’s supposed to say, but she can tell his heart isn’t in it. He’s going through the motions. She hadn’t thought of him as a man who treasured possessions. It occurs to her that she doesn’t really know him at all. She waits exactly where she is, holding herself perfectly still, the kitten riding on her shoulder. Joe comes back up the stairs.

  “Okay,” he says, squaring his shoulders as if he’s recommitting to the right behaviour. “First things first. Willow, are you all right? You’re not cut anywhere?” She shakes her head. “You’re sure? Glass cuts can be funny, you don’t always feel them straight away.” She holds her hands out to him, turning them over and over so he can see the pristine envelope of her skin. “How about your feet? Did it get you on the way down? Yes it did, look at that. No, keep still and let me—”

  He grasps her ankle firmly, and plucks a small bright splinter from her foot. She only feels the pain as he takes it out of her. She watches in fascination as a fat ruby cabochon grows on her skin.

  “Don’t move,” he says again, and this time he sounds as if he means it, as if he really cares about her not hurting herself. The anxious knot in her stomach begin to unravel. There’s something almost soothing about watching the mirror being cleaned away, knowing there’s one less reflective surface where Laurel can hide and peer out at her.

  “It wasn’t expensive or anything,” he continues as he works. “The mirror, I mean. It was only from a junk shop in Stratford.” Nonetheless his movements are careful and slow, as if even the fragments that spark and tumble in the sunlight, gathering like glitter on the bristles of the brush, are precious. “Have you been there?” She shakes her head. “It’s pretty. Full of pictures of that hideous Shakespeare portrait, but the buildings are nice. Anyway, it wasn’t like we’d had it for years, we only got it last October. We were there for his—” The brush, which has been making slow careful arcs of the floor and gathering up miniscule looking-glass fragments, stutters to a halt. She’s in the presence of something very precious, and if she moves at all or even breathes, it will shatter and disappear.

  Keep talking, she wills him. Please. I want to know. Tell me about this bit of my family. Tell me his name, that’d be a start, and then I could Google him and find out the rest. She can see he wants to talk. She knows what that looks like, what it feels like to have the words piling up inside of you with nowhere to go.

  “Anyway,” he says, and shakes the glass briskly down into the dustpan. “You’re sure you’re not cut anywhere else?” She nods. “Good. Are you ready for lunch? Give me twenty minutes and I’ll give you a shout when it’s ready.”

  Alone in the bathroom, she pauses to take stock. There is one piece of glass still remaining, a lone survivor that slid beneath the doorway to hide in the corner. It’s well-concealed, but she sees it glint when she moves. She picks it up, careful not to cut herself. When she holds it in her hand, she can feel the potential dripping from its edges.

  She shouldn’t keep this. She ought to take it downstairs and throw it away.

  Instead, she takes it back to her room and stashes it in the drawer beneath her underwear. After a moment, she takes the torn poetry book and puts it with the glass spike.

  Feeling light and free, she hurries downstairs to the kitchen where Joe’s doing something fiddly with plum tomatoes and basil and a long flat loaf of ciabatta.

  “How’s the school work going?” Joe is himself again, breezy and contented, in control of his world. Willow shrugs. “I know, stupid question. I used to hate people asking me when I was your age as well. What were you working on today? Nod when I get it right. French? History? English?” She nods. “Okay, Shakespeare? Dickens? Oh, hang on, poetry?” Another nod. “Bet you’re doing the English Romantics. I remember absolutely hating them. Flouncing around in their huge white shirts, always starving to death or getting TB or drowning or, I don’t know, having sex with their sisters or something. Am I allowed to say that in front of you?”

  I’m seventeen and I’ve got the Internet and even if I didn’t, the teachers go out of their way to tell us this stuff, to try and get us interested. She resists the impulse to roll her eyes. It’s not his fault he’s so innocent.

  “And then the way they make you take all the poems to pieces,” Joe continues, gloomily scooping out the seeds from another tomato. “How they expect anyone to enjoy a poem they’ve spent weeks ruining… You know, if you and Luca want to study together, he’s more than welcome. I know he’s doing resits and you’re doing A-levels, but, you know, if you fancy some company.”

  The sudden change of direction takes her by surprise. She doesn’t have time to arrange her face into a suitably neutral expression. Luca is just for her, and she isn’t even sure what they are to each other, but she doesn’t want to ruin it with textbooks, to see his weaknesses and failures exposed. She likes him wild and rebellious, out in the woods doing things they both know they shouldn’t do. Joe is watching her as if he can read everything she’s thinking in the shape of her face.

  “Yeah, I thought not,” he says. “I don’t blame you. Why ruin everything with work? I promised Katherine I’d ask, is all. She’s worried he doesn’t spend enough time studying. But if you want to have him round here and hang out together, that’s fine too.” He shreds basil leaves with his fingers. “Be careful, though. He’s a bit of a wild boy apparently.”

  I know he is, Willow thinks proudly. He’s a criminal, sort of. He beat up his mother’s boyfriend to keep her safe and now he might go to jail for it. Does that make him the
hero of the story, or the villain? She isn’t sure if she approves of what he did, exactly, but there’s something appealing about his recklessness, the way he charged straight in without stopping to think of the possible consequences.

  “I mean, not that there’s anything objectively wrong with a wild boy,” Joe adds, almost as if he’s talking to himself. “But I promised your mother…”

  What? What did you promise her? She thought she knew everything her mother had told Joe about keeping her safe, shamelessly eavesdropping on as many conversations as she could. Don’t let her have knives or scissors. If she needs any medicines, make sure she only gets one dose at a time and lock the packet away afterwards. Listen out for her sleepwalking. If she wets the bed in the night she’ll try and clean it up herself. I think it’s best to let her but I’m not sure, I don’t want to embarrass her but I don’t want her feeling like it’s something she’s got to hide. Make sure she eats regularly, she tends to starve herself and then steal all the biscuits… Nothing at all about boys.

  “Mind you,” Joe says, putting the complicated sandwich down in front of Willow with a smile, “you should have seen the rough trade she used to drag home when she was your age.”

  She knows what he means by rough trade, but she’s never heard anyone use the phrase out loud before. She likes its slightly out-of-time feel, like a piece of vintage clothing scrummaged from the back of a second-hand shop. Rough trade. Is Luca rough trade? Did her mother know that queasy feeling he induces in the pit of her stomach, as if she isn’t sure whether she finds him attractive or repulsive? The sandwich is impractically fat, oozing olive oil and tomato juice. When she takes a bite, scarlet shells tumble from the sides and onto the plate. It’s delicious, but she has no idea how she’s meant to eat it with anyone watching.

  “There was this one guy when she’d just turned sixteen,” Joe says. “He dropped out of school – because that was actually a thing you could do when we were kids – just stopped going a couple of months before GCSEs and didn’t bother turning up for the exams. I don’t think anyone was really looking out for him and he was kind of flailing around, hoping things would work out somehow. But at the time she thought he was this huge rebel – well, we both did, really – and I think that’s probably why she liked him. Our parents were shitting themselves in case he messed up her exams.”

  Willow tries to imagine her mother besotted with an unsuitable boy. She thinks of the certificates that hang on the wall behind her desk, of the carefully stored rolls of exam results, year after year of academic perfection.

  “And,” Joe continues, “he had this denim jacket with a dragon hand-painted on the back, and he gave it to her as a present.” Willow chokes on her sandwich. “I know. It was a different time. She used to wear that jacket all the time, and he used to take her out on these really long walks, and they’d hang around in old graveyards and by the side of disused railway lines and so on.” He’s smiling, but she can tell from the look in his eyes that this is a sad memory too. “And she used to come home with little bits of flowers and grass in her hair. She looked so pretty and wild.”

  Willow picks up three tomato shells between her fingers and pops them into her mouth one at a time. There are times when she’s glad she’s not able to speak.

  “It was a bit hard to watch from the outside, though,” Joe says thoughtfully. “I mean, I didn’t mind her fooling around with boys or anything.” He laughs. “I was probably just jealous because it wasn’t me.”

  He’s talking to her in the same way he talks to the kitten, as if nothing he says can ever be repeated, as if she doesn’t matter. Her mother must hear confessions like this all the time. She must know how to move and breathe and respond in a way that doesn’t interrupt the flow of self-analysis. What would her mother do? Willow sits as still as she can, keeping her breath slow and even and quiet. If the kitten wakes up and starts begging for attention, she’ll wring his neck.

  “She’d go out with all these cool boys, wearing their clothes, and they’d be looking at her, in that way. And I’d feel this awful despair, you know? Because she was my little sister and she was having proper relationships, and I’d never even kissed someone I liked. I mean, none of us were out then, you know? Absolutely none of us. Hopefully it’s better for your generation.”

  Back in the days before, she and Laurel would have long, deep conversations, with each other, with their friends, with the occasional boy who had been temporarily admitted to their friendship group. At these times they all knew they could be completely honest, offering up their naked souls to the group and receiving only love and validation in return. She’d thought this was a unique quirk of their generation, something they had invented that would one day change the world as they came into their power and built a kinder society. She’d never imagined adults, fully formed and in their final lifetime shape, would do the same.

  “I mean, I loved her to bits, of course I did, she’s my little sister. But when you like the same boys they like, and it’s blatantly obvious which of you they prefer… do you know what I mean? Feeling like you’ll never quite live up to your… Wait, no. Shit. Sorry, I didn’t mean… God, did I leave the oven on? Hang on and I’ll check and see if—”

  She’s never seen an adult blush like this. His face is scarlet, his neck is flushed, even his hands are shaking and blotchy. He pushes his chair away from the table, leaving his sandwich oozing and abandoned on the plate. She can see the pinky-red mush at the edges of the bread where his teeth have crushed the tomato into the dough. When he bends over the stove, pointlessly checking a dial that she can see from where she’s sitting is firmly in the ‘off’ position, she can see the mottling on the back of his neck.

  Tell him it’s all right. Tell him you understand. Tell him it’s not the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you about Laurel. Tell him people say stuff like that all the time. Come on. You can do it. You broke his mirror. Now make up for it.

  She gets off her chair and stands beside him, laying a hand awkwardly on his arm. When their eyes meet, for a moment he looks like her mother.

  “I am so fucking sorry,” he says, and the obscenity reinforces to Willow how strange this moment is between them, as if she is an adult now and he is the lost child. “I am the most thoughtless, stupid man on the planet and I can’t believe I said any of that to you. I don’t know what was going on in my head. Jesus. If I was a dog they’d probably have me—” He shakes his head fiercely, as if his thoughts are insects he’s trying to dislodge from his hair. “No, no, no, I didn’t mean that either. Sorry, Willow. You’ve officially got the world’s worst uncle.”

  He’s trying to claw his way back into the safety of adulthood, but it’s too late now, she’s seen the real person underneath.

  “And while I’m at it, I’m truly, truly sorry I wasn’t around for so long. I mean, six years of your life, Jesus. And it wasn’t your mother’s fault, not at all. The door was always open. It’s just I was too stubborn to walk through it. She doesn’t like Shaun, you see, and I got the hump and said we came as a package or not at all, and then before you know it—”

  She wants to ask him, Was it because Shaun’s a man? She wants to ask him, If Laurel hadn’t died, would you have come back at all?

  “And I wish I hadn’t missed so much of Laurel,” he says, so soft and hesitant she can hardly hear him. “If she was anything like you she must have been lovely. I feel like I’m getting a second chance here, getting to know you a little bit. And I know that however sad I am, it’s not even the tiniest little scrap of what you’re going through. I don’t want to be this crashing idiot who keeps putting his foot in his mouth and mentioning stuff that upsets you. I’ll try and do better from now on. And I’m sorry I made such a bloody fuss about the mirror.”

  She’s had enough of this conversation now. He’s kind but clumsy, and he talks too much, and she isn’t sure she can take the pressure of any more sorrys from him. Wondering how to make it stop, she’s inspired by the
thought of her mother, who would close a conversation as if closing a book – a quick folding of her hands, a smile and a turning away towards the next task – which in her case is the unfinished sandwich waiting for her on the table.

  “You are so much like your mum it’s almost spooky,” Joe says, and Willow feels as comforted as if her mother has joined her for a moment at the table, caressing the back of her head with gentle fingers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

  Listening to her mother’s voice is like sinking into deep warm water. With no need to reply, she can simply drift, letting the words cocoon her in love. Sometimes her mother talks to her about what she’s done that day, a slow rundown of household tasks accomplished, interspersed with and then I went to work and I saw sixteen patients, admitted one and discharged two, then spent the afternoon talking to the CCG about a project I want funding for. With no visible evidence to contradict, they can both pretend Willow’s a baby again, her silence the silence of the pre-verbal rather than the traumatised. Last night her mother read to her, the first chapter from Moominvalley In November, and Willow only realised she was being woken up when she felt Joe take the phone from her hand with gentle fingers, heard him murmur the words “I think she’s asleep” and heard the faint tinny echo of her mother’s chuckle.

  But tonight there’s something different, something she can sense even through the electronic distance separating them. Her mother sounds, well, how does she sound? She considers her options. Angry. No, that’s not it, it can’t be. She hasn’t been there to do anything that might make her mother angry. Stressed. That’s not it either. When under pressure, her mother’s outward demeanour becomes very calm, and her voice becomes clipped and tight, as if she’s commanding a military operation. Upset. Anxious. Embarrassed.

  “Your dad and I were thinking about holidays,” her mother says, to Willow’s total surprise. “A holiday to go on, I mean.”