The lines deepening on his forehead and around his mouth might have been cut by the headless grief cannoning about in there. The lines and circles were etched deeply enough to read the truth, or one version of it:
Ben Shelton was dying on the inside and the transformation was as rapid as it was shocking.
Last week, scouring the hills around Westbrooke for Johnny Lisker and Alex Slater, Kristy had met a Thirty-something man who seemed comfortable with himself, easy-going and unhurried and seemed likely to be unfazed by any of life's great curve balls. She had judged him content with his lot as one of life's nearly men.
Now she was driving through subdued streets with an empty husk in the passenger seat. For the five minutes between the cemetery and the restaurant Kristy chatted non-stop, half the time not even giving Ben the opportunity to mumble a non-committal response for fear of getting nothing at all.
She swung off the High Street, over wet cobbles and into the car-park of The Watersedge Restaurant. Apart from Evie's Fiat, they shared the car park with a pair of squabbling seagulls fighting over scraps and a whirlpool of fallen leaves twisting and skipping on the rutted gravel. Ben stared through the window at the naked display of savagery; one mouth greedily ripping food from another. On another day he might have appreciated the ironic allegory. Today though he was unable to pull his eyes away from the primitive dance of the gulls.
“Why?” Ben asked simply. He could have been asking a thousand questions with that one word. Kristy wished she had an answer for just one of them.
* * * * *
The restaurant was submerged in darkness. Kristy pressed her face against the glass and peered inside, trying to make sense of the collage of crowded shadow-shapes behind the glass.
“I can't see anyone,” she said finally, giving up. The rain had stopped but the sun was still refusing to come out of hiding.
“If I know Evie, she's probably in the kitchen taking it out on a tray of pastries.”
The way he said it, it didn't sound like a joke. Kristy opted to read it as one regardless.
“Then that's where we start.”
They walked across the rain-damp patio and around the side of the old boathouse, stopping to check each successive window for signs of life inside until they reached the kitchen door. The door was closed, but the small glass panel was lit from the inside. It swung open with the softest push from his fingertips. Evie was inside, as he'd guessed, juggling with a tray of piping hot pastries fresh from the oven and humming along with a radio he couldn't hear from the door.
Ben knocked quietly and stuck his head around the door. “Mind if we sneak in the back way, Evie?” He called more to let her know they were there than to ask permission to come inside.
Evie slid the hot tray down on the metal work surface and offered a wan little smile that looked dreadfully old on her usually bubbly face. Her hands, he could see, were trembling. The oven gloves defied Evie for a second, refusing to slip off her hands. Ben couldn't recall ever having seen her look so old. The effect of the mask slipping down over her face was uncanny. For once she had no banter to lure them into her parlour, only a tired out twitch of her lips.
Evie shook her head, held on to the oven gloves for their scant comfort. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away, nor to stifle the sobs that shook her.
Ben stepped across the gulf between them and took her into his arms, holding her tight, his own grief unlocked and free of embarrassment. He surprised himself by not feeling clumsy or awkward with first open show of affection in a long, long time.
“It's going to be all right. Shush. . . Come on, Evie. . . It’s going to be all right,” and maybe, just maybe, it was.
Kristy stood back, hovering awkwardly, not sure whether to slip away quietly or to take the five steps across the paraquet floor and hug them both. She did neither, not at first. She stayed back, feeling painfully remote from them both now, cut off from them by more than the five steps between where they embraced and where she stood. The exclusion hurt more than it really ought to have.
“Anyone for a coffee?” Kristy offered, and then went across to pour three cups when no one answered.
The percolator was on the work surface, beside the tray of pastries Evie had been rescuing from the oven when they walked in. They smelled heavenly. Sweet aromas, cinnamon and caramelized sugar and other unearthly delights.
“Help yourself, flower. Best had hot,” Evie grinned, catching Kristy red handed with her fingers in the pudding pot. Her smile had more strength to it now; one ghost exorcised now that she had one of the brothers' to hold on to. Her eyes were still bloodshot and red-rimmed, and she looked as if one misplaced straw would crack her spine in two, but the sobs had ceased and that in itself was something to be thankful for.
“Thanks,” Kristy went for a double-folded lattice of glazed pastry topped with finely chopped pistachios and swirls of flaked chocolate and caramelized sugar. As hot as it was, the pastry tasted even better than it looked. After the first mouthful Kristy found herself smacking her lips and trying to lick the sweet smears off her lips even as she took another bite. “Good,” she mimed theatrically, licking her fingers.
“Plenty more if you're hungry, love. I've made enough to feed a pig farm. You take yourself outside and enjoy the sun while it's out. I'll bring you something out in a minute.”
“It's no problem, really,” Kristy protested weakly, wondering if the old woman even knew that it had been pouring all morning.
“Nonsense, I'd be offended if you didn't have at least seconds. Get yourself out and I'll hear nothing of it. Now, go on, scoot before I have to shoo you out with a broom.”
Kristy did as she was told, pulling up a garden chair and gazing up at the cloudbank forming above her head. Growing up in Liverpool, Kristy had lain in the grass of Anfield Park for every summer she cared to remember, some days reading a book, some listening to tapes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Madness, others playing out her own Rorschach tests with the clouds as her blotter pictures on cards of blue sky, searching out shapes and faces in them. The cloud gathering above the Watersedge looked like a kindly, watchful guardian angel.
Too late, she wanted to say, but stamped on the bitterness that fuelled the thought.
“What do you see up there?” she asked Ben when he emerged from the kitchen bearing a tray over-balanced with two plates of French salad and thickly buttered bread sticks.
Placing the tray on the table, he pulled up a seat and sat back to look up at the sky. Kristy watched his forehead crease up with concentration as he actively studied the shifting puffs of cumulo-nimbus and siro-stratus, looking for something she couldn't see.
“Clouds,” Ben said at last, and shrugged. He wasn't going to tell her he saw a body on the floor with a knife between its legs.
“Let me tell you what I see, okay? I see a face. A big smiley face, like those yellow badges the kids used to wear a couple of years ago. Big eyes and a big kindly smile. The restaurant’s very own Guardian Angel. You try.”
”Okay. I see life up there, I suppose. I see clouds. And I can’t make sense out of either of them. Happy?”
* * * * *
Ben found himself craving a cigarette even though he hadn't smoked for a long, long time. He was doing everything he could not to let himself start thinking back to happier times when Westbrooke had been a village of size and wonder for two lads growing up in the early eighties, a time when everything was possible and nothing was taboo and Dad was nothing worse than a no-good and a drunk who picked fights with his kids and slapped his wife when she tried to intervene.
Only now he was grown up and the world had played its trump call, turning his life up on its end just when things threatened to be evening out once and for ever.
He knew he was sitting bolt upright, even though he had his eyes squeezed tightly shut, his hands clutching at the edge of the table as if his very life depended upon it.
“Ben?” he heard
her ask tentatively, and wished she didn't sound so scared. Without opening his eyes, Ben asked in a low, urgent, voice even he couldn't understand: “Has it gone?”
He knew he meant the cloud with Mike's body lying in it, but how could she know that was what had frightened him so badly if he didn’t tell her?
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes. It's gone.”
Ben opened his eyes and looked at her. The rain was holding off but the sky was heavy with the threat of a return to the morning’s damp, miserable conditions. “Did you see it?” He said, before he thought about what he was saying, and then he wanted to kick himself. Of course she hadn't seen it. It had been in his mind, nowhere else.
The silence that slipped down like a fence between them reeked of uncertainty. It felt like a shard of shrapnel working its way methodically out of her neck and upwards. Kristy thought about it. At last she said, “I don't think so. . . What was I supposed to be looking for?”
“It doesn't matter, I'm sorry.”
“It's not your fault.”
“No. I know. Your salad's getting cold.”
Evie stuck her head around the door to check on them, smiled sadly at Kristy sensing the silence between them, and called Ben through to give her a hand. Ben excused himself with a shrug and a “What Can I Do?” gesture of hand and shoulder. Kristy sat back, interlacing her fingers behind her head and stretching the tension out of her shoulders with small rolling motions. The sunlight fell short of their table, staining the veranda between the table and the toy wall like luminous paint. Beyond the wall the glitter of Devil's Water puddled, catching rainbows from the sky and throwing them out in hypnotic, ever decreasing circles of shifting colour.
She picked at the salad. “Nice lass,” she heard Evie telling Ben. “Not plastered with makeup an' all that malarkey. Good plain girl. Not that she's plain mind. Very pretty. You could do a lot worse than her.”
”Thanks mum.”
“Get off with you, Benjamin Shelton before I tan you hide for your cheek.”
“I'm gone.”
“Thought you would be.”
Kristy smiled to herself when Ben came back outside.
“You heard, I take it?” he asked, sheepishly.
“I heard,” she admitted, enjoying watching him squirm this once.
“Sorry about that. Evie's not content unless she's trying to pair someone off. That's how Mike and Hannah got together in the first place. The Odd Couple, those two. I never gave them more than a month, but I misjudged Evie.”
“Fatal mistake, I take it?”
“Cardinal sin's closer to the truth.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“No point. You don't want to listen to me running off at the mouth all afternoon. It won't be very interesting, I can promise you.”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows sceptically. “I'll take my chances.”
“You can't say you weren't warned.”
“Cross my heart and hope to –”
“Don't say that. No one hopes to die.”
* * * * *
He talked for the entire afternoon and well into the evening, disregarding the chill that set into the air and the faint drizzle that threatened to become a downpour around five.
Releasing the words unlocked a deeper, more primitive vault of memories; the cellar of dreams and tragedies buried so far deep down Ben had half-convinced himself he had lost or thrown away the key. He had done neither, of course.
While he talked, Kristy watched him for the obvious signals, but early into the afternoon she came to realize that Ben Shelton was harder to read than one of his cute modern day fairy stories.
She stopped listening to him and started bending her concentration to fathoming what it was about him that succeeded in getting beneath her skin quite so easily. Something that she couldn't pin down or put her finger on was incredibly attractive without being forced or deliberately seductive. Innocence touched the reality closest. Listening to him carve a path through a very troubled childhood, beatings from a drunkard father, bullying at school and the other more familiar childhood terrors to the day he first decided real work wasn't for him and he made the break by starting to tell lies for a living, she found herself wishing time would stop so she could listen to him talk forever without worrying about Brent Richards, Havendene, N.E.S.T. or what was going to happen tomorrow.
And then she found she hated herself for that selfishness. It was painfully obvious just how much it hurt him to dredge up some of the memories. He described himself as a one-man runaway train disaster movie kept on the rails by a big brother who acted before he thought about what he was doing and ran his whole life that way, looking out for his little brother and engaging his fists before his brain every time the old man came looking for trouble. She knew he wanted reassurance. Knew he wanted to hear her say someone was going to be around to pick him up and dust him down just exactly as Mike had done for years. That she couldn't promise, even though she wanted to.
Kristy took him home in her car. His house was near the cavalcade of police cars and campers, on one side of a wide street with big old country houses. Scooby met them at the door with a practiced toss of the head and disinterested turn. The old Labrador padded into the family room and hunkered down on his rug beside the fire. It was obvious Ben lived alone and had done for a long time. Indeed, she was hard pressed to see signs of his having lived any other way. His books were the one overpowering presence, rows and rows of them, on shelves and piled high on the floor, hard backs, soft backs, old, new, leather bound, cloth bound, collector’s editions and comic books. Just about any and every form of the written word she could bring to mind was represented somewhere in his library. She ran her fingers along the spines of thirty modern fairy tales, looking for a Ben Shelton original.
“In the office,” Ben directed her search, when she finally admitted what it was she was looking for.
The office was everything she had ever imagined a writer’s paradise would be. Books lined every wall in cheap looking bookcases that looked as if one good nudge would send the whole lot toppling. Again books were stacked in every available space.
Wires snaked across the floor, running from the wall to his compact computer and printer set up on the desk. A sheaf of printed pages lay face down beside the keyboard. She couldn't resist a peek, and then felt incredibly guilty and turned the manuscript face down again without reading a word. She could just imagine him sitting in the chair, fingers tapping out the words of some dream or nightmare, Scooby curled up at his feet. Did he smoke a pipe while he worked, or was he like Hemmingway, addicted to brown-skinned cigars?
Uneasy Streets was on the bookshelf above the desk, as were a dozen or more copies of The Swords of Scorn. She lifted down one and leafed through the pages, reading a few words from each on the way to the author's photograph on the back of the dust jacket. The Ben Shelton in the photograph wasn't the same one she had left in the family room. In the photograph he looked younger, fresh-faced and ready to wrestle with all comers. She slipped the book back onto the shelf and returned to the main room where Ben was sat with his head in his hands, caving in on himself like the little pig’s house of sticks.
She sat down beside him, reached out to cup his hands in hers. He flinched and shied away as if she had struck him, then started to shake. Kristy drew herself closer to him, began to stroke his hair with one hand and then gently to knead tight muscles in his neck and shoulders, working them, forcing them to relax.
Neither of them was ready for what happened, neither of them expected it but even as it was beginning Kristy recognised it for what it was. Sex and death. Death and sex. The intrinsic co-existence of the two, irrevocably joined, life's Siamese twins. Death, a constant handmaiden this last week. Sex the penultimate surrender; it's comfort proving life in the ultimate act of the body. A potent brew of opposites that was just about undeniable.
Whether it was something in her subconscious looking for that bit more out of t
he contact-frisson already there between them, or whether it was Ben, drunk with the demands of grief, seeking sanctuary in the nearness of her body and its heady mix of poisons she would have been hard pressed to say, one way or the other. She couldn't even have said exactly how it happened, only that they moved from the fierceness of kissing to hurried fumbling and tugging at garments very, very quickly. There was the urgency of an avalanche now, the momentum bullying them past the point of no return.
And although she was well aware of what she was doing, and the numerous reasons that she shouldn't be doing it, not now, not with this man, and certainly not like this, Kristy didn't do a thing to stop it. More the reverse, she rode the moment as if she were suddenly cast adrift amid white water, taking the rapids in a coracle. Minutes later they were both half-undressed, Kristy kneeling, pulling Ben down, hungry for him, eating every inch of his body with eyes and hands and mouth, savouring him.
And still, between them, Ben's was the overpowering hunger. The strongest need. His hand moved across her breast, kneading it against the roughness of his palm. The nipple a deep, husky brown around the puckered areola. She felt a delicious shiver arc through her spine, from between her legs right through her breasts and up into her brain, as Ben took first one then the other into his mouth. Her hands sought out his belt, struggling and tugging with the waistband of his trousers, then inside the cotton of his shorts to his very essence.
* * * * *
They writhed and rolled across the fireside rug, their cries, too close to pain, driving Scooby out of the room.
The rug burned their slick, sweating bodies; entwined like rambling thorns, hips pistoning frantically, they rutted like animals. The muscles in their bonded bodies stood proud, corded against the strain of the effort pushing the momentum gradually higher.
Gasping, then whimpers; a final screamlike sound.
Then release.
Sufferer's Song Page 38