by David Park
‘I have to go now,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay in touch and you have my number if you remember anything or if you want to get in contact. Doing the television appeal is the right thing – it’ll bring new publicity to the case, stir a few consciences. Bring us a bit closer to the lead we need.’
After she’s gone her scent lingers in the room. Martin speaks to her outside the front door. He’s talking about catching those responsible, about punishment. She hopes they never catch them and that she never has to look at their faces, doesn’t understand why anyone would want to see the faces of those responsible for their child’s death. Rachel’s face is already blurring, her memory unable to focus on it as sharply as she wants, so she doesn’t want to have it replaced with the faces of those who killed her.
‘What do you make of her?’ Martin asks when he returns. But she only shrugs her shoulders in reply. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says. ‘She talks a good game but I’m not sure. You don’t see many women doing her job.’
‘You think she’s no good,’ she says, ‘because she’s a woman.’ Sometimes even an argument feels as if it might bring solace, transfer the pain for a little while, distract, even for a fleeting moment. ‘She wouldn’t be where she was if she wasn’t any good.’
‘I don’t care about her being a woman. All I care about is her catching them. I don’t care if she’s from outer space so long as she puts the scum where they belong.’
‘What good will it do?’ she suddenly asks, indifferent to the voice telling her she shouldn’t say it. ‘What good will it do?’ She watches as her words scratch at him. She wants to hurt him, is desperate to strike some flame of feeling from the friction. ‘It’ll not bring her back.’ Why should he be able to ease his pain with thoughts of punishment of the guilty? Why should he find something to hold on to? The only person she wants to punish now is herself. Let them put her in the dock, lock her up. Throw away the key.
‘We owe it to Rachel,’ he says, his voice high and thin, fraying at the edges like a wind-blown flag. ‘We can’t let them do it to some other family. They’ve got to be stopped.’ He shakes his head. He’s talking someone else’s words. He doesn’t know how to go on. His hand fastens on his throat as if he’s trying to squeeze it free from some obstruction. ‘We owe it to Rachel.’
Owe? How will this pay back? What will she ever know about this? How can this transaction ever balance the books? She looks at him and thinks that he doesn’t understand, that she’s married to a man who is stupid and she hates him a little because he wants to make this thing, that is more terrible than anything she’s ever known, into some small boys’ game. A game of gangs and tit for tat. When she was a child in primary school they used to play chain tig. When you were caught, you joined the chain, became a hunter. She doesn’t want anyone to come to the funeral. It’s none of their business, it’s got nothing to do with anyone except them and because he no longer sees what’s important, she’s on her own. Just her and Rachel. No one else. She doesn’t want to be part of a chain, to have someone hold her hand. This is private and she needs that privacy to speak to Rachel. She needs the silence.
*
The funeral is all wrong. It’s not how he wants it to be. Even the wreath is wrong – all garish colours and the words ‘From Mum and Dad’ puffed up in white petals. He knows Rachel would have hated it. And somehow everything feels like a secret, something that has to be hushed up. He doesn’t even know half the people here, people who shake his hand or put their hand on his shoulder. Those he knows least are the ones who say the most and sometimes he’d like to stop their mouths with his fist. Those he knows best, like the people from work, skirt the circumference of the mourners, huddle in tight little groups and when they approach him no one knows what to say and so they shake his hand in a slow procession as if he’s become a dignitary and they’re being introduced. He stops speaking, just nods his head at each of them. They wear their green blazers. They look strange against the black. Part of him wants to run away and find the most silent corner of the museum. His hand wants to touch something solid – the stone axes, the cold glint of machinery – not this soft slither of endless palm on palm. Alison is always somewhere else. They should be together, shoulder to shoulder. Tom, too, is always on the periphery of his view. But he’s never seen him look so well. Alison has bought him a new black blazer and trousers that fit him. He looks older, less of a child. Soon he’ll try to talk to him – he’s put it off for too long. Things should get fixed, not put off to a future that might never come. He’ll work harder at it than he’s ever done.
The minister talks about waste, about tragedy, about the evil men who prey on our children. He calls them Vultures’, prays that God will bring them to account. And if it doesn’t happen in this world, then it will surely happen in the next. For God is not mocked and those who have done this thing out of their lust for money and the things of the flesh must face their maker on the Day of Judgement.
At the graveside Alison almost faints against him and he has to hold her close to his side. He looks through the minister’s interminable words to the rim of the crowd and sees a group of girls huddled close to the cars. He recognises some of their faces but doesn’t know their names. Rachel’s friends – perhaps the friends who took her to the club, the friends who gave her the tablets. For a second he wants to go to them and ask the questions that rattle round his head, press them for the truth that will help him understand how this thing happened but Alison slumps into the hollow of his side and the minister’s prayer is slipping to its terrible conclusion. This is the moment when they give her back, let her go. It’s the thing that Alison said she couldn’t bear. And now he understands because how can they walk away, get back in the cars and leave her here? Leave her on her own with the cold, clotted clay and the already wind-blasted wreaths? How can they return to the warmth of the house when on top of her casket they’ll pile this mound of earth? When she was a young child on holiday and they stayed in a little cottage in Donegal, she differentiated their permanent home from the cottage by calling it ‘Home sweet home’. Now she’s taken that name with her and he never wants to go back to the house, never wants to climb the stairs and see her empty room. The room that’s just as she left it. Suddenly Alison falters towards the lowering coffin and she’s trying to shake away his arm but he pulls her back and locks her into him with the stiff brace of his arm. Her whole body is trembling inside the ring of his arm but he keeps it taut and rigid until her struggling subsides into the quiver of her sobs, keeps it locked there until all the faces and the final tumble of words have faded into silence.
Chapter 5
‘We can’t go on like this, Marty,’ Rob says, his agitation unravelling. ‘Something’s going to happen to her. Something bad.’
At first he can’t believe what he’s hearing. He doesn’t think he has the patience any more to play these games.
‘I don’t think she can live in that house on her own. She’ll fall or burn herself. It’s not right, Marty.’
‘So what do you think we should do, Rob?’ he asks.
‘We’ll have to get someone to look after her full-time or get her in a home or something. She can’t go on like this.’
It’s as if after all these years of zero contact, he’s allocating blame, accusing him of neglect. It’s Rob. All these years later it’s the same old Rob. He wants to say, Tuck off, Rob’; the words are on his lips, he wants to say it for all the times in the past he should have said it. The words are on his lips but he stares at his brother’s face, the tightening frame of his anxiety and he hesitates.
‘She’ll hurt herself, Marty, maybe fall and break a leg. We have to do something.’
He’s not quite ready to assume his familiar role, so he says out of spite, ‘Maybe she could go and live with you, Rob? Maybe you could look after her.’
Rob blinks. It’s not something he’s ever considered so he blows a little wisp of air through the tight purse of his lips and his face furrows int
o a pained simulation of thought. ‘We haven’t got the room, Marty. Not with Corrina getting bigger and everything. I’d like to but I can’t see how we could do it. Know what I mean?’
‘Sure Rob, you haven’t got the room. No problem.’ He watches his brother’s relief, the smoothing of the furrows, the untangling of his clenched hands. ‘I’ll speak to the doctor again, try and get things speeded up.’
‘That’s good, Marty, that’s the right thing to do.’
He watches his brother walk away just the way he’s always walked away from things. For a second he envies the sudden, easy, lightness of his step, his ability to transfer what has weighed him down to someone else. He watches as he gets into his red van, the one that used to be a post office van and on whose side the covered-up letters gleam faintly visible through the paint, listens as the exhaust spurts into a gravelly, throaty churn. Watches as it makes its way to the end of the street.
Fuck off, Rob,’ he says. Fuck off.’
*
It’s bound to make a difference. They’ll all know why he’s been off school so it’s bound to make a difference. He’s lost his sister. The whole school will know for sure. It might even make a big difference. He stops at a shop window and looks at his reflection. He probably even looks different. His reflection isn’t sharp enough to see his expression but he pushes his face into what he thinks must look like sadness, lets his shoulders droop and his bag sag loose on his shoulder. He thinks he should have been allowed to stay off longer, calls up, as evidence, the names of those who have stayed off for much longer, with less cause.
He’s a little late so there are only fellow stragglers about and a couple of younger kids who’ve already decided that they’ve had enough and are heading in the opposite direction. None of them pays him any attention. At the newsagents he goes in and buys himself some sweets then splits them into handfuls and secretes them in various pockets and the fluff-filled, ink-stained corners of his bag. There is a sudden hollow squirm of nervousness in his stomach – it feels like it did on his first day when his head was filled with stories of initiation ceremonies and having your head flushed down the toilet. But he survived it then and he thinks he can again and he tells himself that he knows so much more now, that he’s learned stuff, that he can ride whatever waves rise up and not be engulfed. And it’s different now, too, because he is someone he wasn’t before; he’s the victim of a tragedy that’s been on the news and in the papers. His steps take on greater urgency, if he hurries he might just make registration, but maybe it would be better to be a few minutes late, come in when everyone’s already there. He rehearses it in his mind. He’ll not speak to anyone, just nod his head, not let anyone see what he’s thinking and he’ll not rush to his seat like he normally does, but walk a little slower, drop his bag to the floor as if he’s not bothered about what’s in it.
The bell has already gone when he enters the school but people haven’t yet reached their form rooms so the corridors are a stream of counterflows and changing currents of bodies. People see him but there is no sudden sweep of silence, no collective fixing of gazes on him and he has his first tremors of doubt. Snuffling his glasses back on the bridge of his nose, he sifts the sweets in his pocket through his fingers as if they are gold coins, talismans of good fortune. There is a knot of his classmates at the foot of the stairs which lead to his form room. They look at him now. They’re looking at his face.
‘All right, Tom?’ a voice asks. It’s his name. It’s his name they’re using and he almost smiles at how strange it sounds in this place but he only nods and keeps on walking. The echo of his name seems to bounce off the walls of the corridor and ricochet round the walls and tiles before it gets slowly absorbed in the scrimmage of more bodies and the voices of teachers telling people to get to their form rooms. All right, Tom? Just for a moment he feels all right. He remembers the ice-hockey players, their puffed-up, parcelled-up bodies balanced on the thinnest of blades, and the way they sped across the ice, scoring only their lightness into the flurry and squeak of its surface. So cold and light. Light as air. ‘All right, Tom?’ another voice asks and this time he stops on the stairs and blows the thick quaver he feels sliming his throat into a clean breath of air. But he doesn’t speak and instead nods his head while turning his face away from them. Then he hurries up the stairs and opens the door of his form room.
Mr Benson hasn’t arrived yet and there are hard-edged huddles of boys strung round desks and perched on radiators. A few heads turn towards him as he makes his way down the first row towards his seat but he stares at the back wall and doesn’t meet anyone’s gaze. As his bag hits the floor, he kicks it under his seat and flops down on the chair, then stares at his fingers as if there’s something sticking to them. He starts to pick at a bit of loose skin, pulling at a little whitened corner. The new skin is pink and smarting. Just for a second he wonders if it might be possible to peel away layers of yourself, slither by tiny slither. He eats the slither of skin he’s detached, playing it first between his teeth and the tip of his tongue. There’s someone standing at the edge of his desk but he doesn’t raise his eyes to see who.
‘All right, Fat Boy? asks the voice he recognises as Chapman’s. He watches the hands he recognises also prise free a strip of the wood veneer which bevels the edge of the desk before they let it smack back to its original position. The classroom door opens and Mr Benson enters, simultaneously kicking it closed behind him and ordering everyone to their seats. ‘Enjoy your holiday, Fat Boy?’ Chapman asks, while briefly and very lightly patting him on the back before strolling to his seat. The roll is started, the names barked out, and the owners respond with weary and studied indifference. His own is called and he has to speak for the first time. He says ‘Here,’ and he knows it’s true, knows that he’s here again and that nothing but nothing has changed.
Afterwards he doesn’t follow the rest of the class to assembly but slips under the stairs and squats where the shadow curtains the corner. His fingers find one of the sweets and he takes the paper off without removing it from his pocket. Then he says sorry to Rachel.
*
The lights make the room unbearably hot. He’s squeezed up beside Alison on the settee, their bodies positioned by the man behind the camera. It feels as if all her nervous heat seeps into his body, intensifying his own, choking the breath out of him. A girl has already wiped his forehead once and puffed and dusted his skin with powder to try to stop it shining like glass. They know where to look, they know what to say. It’s all been rehearsed and the interviewer has told them what is good and what will be most effective. She’s been gentle, like a minister or a doctor handling someone who’s fragile, like a teacher helping a young child. ‘I know this must be very difficult for you,’ is what she says in between the advice and the directions. ‘Very difficult.’ Sometimes, when she looks at the photograph Alison has to hold, she says things like, ‘She’s a lovely looking girl,’ or ‘You must have been very proud of her,’ and it almost feels as if she really cares. But when he sees her speaking to the cameraman with her eyes, or looking at her reflection in a small hand mirror, he knows that she’s only doing a job and that doing it right is more important to her than anything else.
‘Mr and Mrs Waring, this must be a particularly painful time for your family. Would you like to tell us about Rachel? What sort of girl was she?’ she asks, leaning towards Alison with her face open and inviting, almost like she’s asking the question for the first time and hasn’t heard the answer a dozen times before. It’s Alison who must answer this and so he hears her speak about ‘a good girl’, ‘a girl devoted to her studies who worked so hard’, ‘a girl who never missed a day of school and who never gave a moment’s trouble’, ‘the best daughter anyone could have’. He knows it word-perfect by now – it sounds like a nursery rhyme to him as he anticipates the cadences of his wife’s voice.
The proudest, happiest day he had with Rachel was when she came that Sunday morning to the closed museum. It f
elt as if he owned it all and that it was within his power to give her everything inside its walls. The empty galleries were laid open for her private inspection, and when she wanted to know things about the exhibits, he was able to satisfy her with what knowledge he had. It was probably the last time she asked him for answers. And in her child’s eyes his job wasn’t a mundane, repetitive nothing, but something special and important, as if he had been personally entrusted with the guardianship of this valuable treasure trove. He tried to remember what she had liked best but it’s started to blur in his memory. She wouldn’t look at the mummy – he remembered that. Wouldn’t look at Takabuti’s wizened, black scab of a face on her own, even though like all the other children it usually drew her like a magnet. Had he teased her about it? Had he made a joke? Already it’s slipping away and then he shivers as he remembers where they have left her.
Alison’s elbow is pressing into his side. The interviewer is nodding her head in encouragement. His mouth is dry, the palms of his hands damp. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to speak. What is it she’s asking him? What is it he’s supposed to be talking about? ‘She was very gifted academically, wasn’t she Martin?’ Alison prompts him again. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, blinking his eyes and trying to find his focus. And then he talks about the stars and prize day and the cup they gave her. Talks about Oxbridge. Talks about the future she was going to have.