‘The justice system is rational and humane there,’ Millicent said to me one evening. ‘You guys have European passports. And I’ll get leave to remain because of you. We really have no other choice.’
Yes, I know. But what kind of father would risk his son being tried and sentenced as an adult? Max was not a Freak of Nature. He had not led a Life of Depravity. He was not The Monster Next Door.
Millicent and I were damaged people. That’s why we fitted, of course: any two-dollar shrink would say so. And like so many damaged people of our generation, we masked our pain behind alcohol and easy cynicism. Which worked well until we had Max.
Our cynicism confused our son. It masked the line between pain and cruelty. But Max saw the contradiction too – that I never acted on my anger, that I did nothing to change my circumstances. He saw this as my tragic flaw and he killed Bryce because he knew that I would not.
His mother and I were certain that Max wouldn’t make the same choice a second time. He had learned from his terrible mistake.
Now that Max had time to reflect on what it meant to take a life he was truly sorry for what he did. Our only-begotten son killed from the very purest of motives, which is love, and from the very oldest, which is revenge.
When Max is a little older he will come to understand this as his own tragic flaw. For now it must be enough that he is sorry.
I did read the letter Millicent wrote to Sarah. I read it first on my own, and then again with Max. It was beautiful, and simple, and very raw indeed. We read the letter with Millicent’s permission, and it made us both cry.
I looked at my boy, beautiful in the low sun, backlit and self-assured. You knew, I thought.
‘What, Dad?’
His bearing had changed: he was fitter now, more poised. A little taller.
‘Dad, you’re staring at me.’
‘I was thinking … Are you OK, Max? You seem to be OK.’
‘I’m fine, Dad.’
You knew, I thought. You’re the only one of us who knew, Max. Millicent couldn’t explain how she had wandered from the path. Nor could I. But you knew exactly why you killed Bryce. You wanted to keep the family together, thought that was what it took. Your crime ruined your life, as it did ours, but you knew why you committed it.
What Max had wanted, in short, was this: father and son, fish and ice. Love expressed through the doing of stuff.
‘You’re fine, Max? You’re sure you’re fine?’
‘I like it here, for faen.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
In an hour there were five cod. Max threaded an orange cord through their gills and carried them in a gloved hand as we skied slowly back across the ice to where Millicent stood waiting on the shore.
Acknowledgements
My agent Judith Murray and my editor Julia Wisdom both saw something in my manuscript, and made me rewrite and rewrite until we were all happy with it. To them and to everyone else listed here I am extremely grateful. Tim Lott, Eleanor Moran, Kate Stephenson, John Tague, Thorgeir Kolshus, Charles Boyle and Tor Øverbø read and advised on drafts. Johnny Acton, Phil Wiget and Jeremy Drysdale read early chapters and encouraged me to keep writing. Kathy O’Donnell, Lucinda Acton, Fiona McLaney, Dominic Edmonds, Leslie O’Neill, Gabrielle Osrin, Francis McPherson and Satnam Virdi helped me with the research. Dehra Mitchell, Oliver James, Davinder Virdi, Thomas Bjørnflaten and Simon Aylwin gave specialist professional advice. Ida von Hanno Bast, Signe and Stein Lundgren, the staff of Kaffebrenneriet on Frognerveien, and the House of Literature in Oslo all – in one way or another – gave me a place to write. And Charlotte Lundgren did every one of these things, and more.
About the Author
Ben McPherson was born in Glasgow and grew up in Edinburgh, but left Scotland when he was eighteen. He studied languages at Cambridge, then worked for many years in film and television in London.
In 1998, after working a 48-hour shift, he went for a drink at the Coach and Horses in Soho and met the woman he would go on to marry. Similarities to the characters in A Line of Blood end there.
Ben now lives in Oslo with his wife and their two sons. He is a columnist for Aftenposten, Norway’s leading quality daily newspaper.
About the Publisher
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BEN McPHERSON
Copyright
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Ben McPherson 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photograph © Henry Steadman
Ben McPherson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007569564
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007569588
Version: 2015-02-11
Dedication
For Charlotte
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: The Man Next Door
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two: Secrets, Shared with Another Girl
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three: Manifest Destiny
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
PART ONE
1
The precarious thinness of his white arms, all angles against the dark foliage.
‘Max.’
Nothing. No response. He was half-hidden, straddling the wall, his body turned away from me. Listening, I thought. Waiting, perhaps.
‘Max.’
He turned now to look at me, then at once looked away, back at the next-door neighbour’s house.
‘Foxxa,’ he said quietly.
‘Max-Man. Bed time. Down.’
‘But Dad, Foxxa …’
‘Bed.’
Max shook his head without turning around. I approached the wall, my hand at the level of his thigh, and reached out to touch his arm. ‘She’ll come home, Max-Man. She always comes home.’
Max looked down at me, caught my gaze, then looked back towards the house next door.
‘What, Max?’
No response.
‘Max?’
Max lifted his leg over the wall and disappeared. I stood for a moment, unnerved.
In the early days of our life in Crappy we had bought a garden bench. A love seat, Millicent had called it, with room only for two. But Finsbury Park wasn’t the area for love seats. We’d long since decided it was too small, that the stiff-backed intimacy it forced upon us was unwelcome and oppressive, something very unlike love.
The love seat stood now, partly concealed by an ugly bush, further along the wall. Standing on it, I could see most of the next-door neighbour’s garden. It was as pitifully small as ours, but immaculate in its straight lines, its clearly delineated zones. A Japanese path led from the pond by the end wall to a structure that I’d once heard Millicent refer to as a bower, shaped out of what I guessed were rose bushes.
Max was standing on the path. He saw me and turned away, walking very deliberately into the bower.
‘Max.’
Nothing.
I stood on the arm of the love seat, and put my hands on top of the wall, pushing down hard as I jumped upwards. My left knee struck the head of a nail, and the pain almost lost me my balance.
I panted hard, then swung my leg over the wall and sat there as Max had, looking towards the neighbour’s house. Seen side by side, they were identical in every detail, except that the neighbour had washed his windows and freshened the paint on his back door.
A Japanese willow obscured the rest of the neighbour’s ground floor. A tree, a pond, a bower. Who builds a bower in Finsbury Park?
Max reappeared.
‘Dad, come and see.’
I looked about me. Was this trespass? I wasn’t sure.
Max disappeared again. No one in any of the other houses seemed to be looking. The only house that could see into the garden was ours. And I needed to retrieve my son.
I jumped down, landing badly and compounding the pain in my knee.
‘You aren’t supposed to say fuck, Dad.’
‘I didn’t say it.’ Did I?
‘You did.’
He had reappeared, and was looking down at me again, as I massaged the back of my knee, wondering if it would stiffen up.
‘And I’m allowed to say it. You are the one who isn’t.’
He smiled.
‘You’ve got a hole in your trousers.’
I nodded and stood up, ruffled his hair.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not much. A bit.’
He stared at me for a long moment.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘it hurts like fuck. Maybe I did say it.’
‘Thought so.’
‘Want to tell me what we’re doing here? Max-Man?’
He held out his hand. I took it, surprised, and he led me into the bower.
The neighbour had been busy here. Four metal trellises had been joined to make a loose arch, and up these trellises he had teased his climbing roses, if that’s what they were. Two people could have lain down in here, completely hidden from view. Perhaps they had. The grass was flattened, as if by cushions.
Now I noticed birdsong, distant-sounding, wrong, somehow.
Max crouched down, rubbed his right forefinger against his thumb.
From a place unseen, a small dark shadow, winding around his legs. Tortoiseshell, red and black. Max rubbed finger and thumb together again, and the cat greeted him, stood for a moment on two legs, teetering as she arched upwards towards his fingers, then fell forwards and on to her side, offering him her belly.
‘Foxxa.’
It was Max who had named the cat. He had spent hours with her, when she first arrived, whispering to her from across the room: F, K, Ks, S, Sh. He had watched how she responded to each sound, was certain he had found the perfect name.
‘Foxxa.’
The cat chirruped. Max held out his hand, and she rolled on to her back, cupped her paws over his knuckles, bumped her head gently into his hand.
‘Crazy little tortie,’ he whispered.
She tripped out of the bower. Crazy little tortie was right. We hadn’t seen her in days.
Max walked out of the bower and towards the patio. I followed him. The cat was not there.
From the patio, the pretentious absurdity of the bower was even more striking. The whole garden was no more than five metres long, four metres wide. The bower swallowed at least a third of the usable space, making the garden even more cramped than it must have been when the neighbour moved in.
The cat appeared from under a bush, darted across the patio. Too late I saw that the back door was ajar. She paused for a moment, looking back at us.
‘Foxxa, no!’ said Max.
Her tail curled around the edge of the door, then she had disappeared inside.
Max was staring at the back door. I wondered if the neighbour was there behind its wired glass panels, just out of view. Max approached the door, pushing it fully open.
‘Max!’
I lunged towards him, but he slipped into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the garden.
‘Hello?’ I shouted. I waited at the door but there was no reply.
‘Come on, Dad,’ said Max.
I found him in the middle of the kitchen, the cat at his feet.
‘Max, we can’t be in here. Pick her up. Let’s go.’
Max walked to the light switch and turned on the light. Thrill of the illicit. We shouldn’t be in here.
‘Max,’ I said, ‘out. Now.’
He turned, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and the cat jumped easily up on to the work surface, blinking back at us.
‘She likes it here.’
‘Max … Max, pick her up.’
Max showed no sign of having heard me. I could read nothing in his gestures but a certain stiff-limbed determination. He had never disobeyed me so openly before.
Light flooded the white worktops, the ash cupboard fronts, the terracotta floor tiles. It was all so clean, so bright, so without blemish. I thought of our kitchen, with its identical dimensions. How alike, yet how different. On the table was a pile of clean clothes, still in their wrappers. Two suits, a stack of shirts, all fresh from the cleaners. No two-day-old saucepans stood unwashed in the sink. No food rotted here, no cat litter cracked underfoot, no spider plants went short of water.
From the middle of the kitchen you could see the front door. The neighbour had moved a wall; or perhaps he hadn’t moved a wall; perhaps he had simply moved the door to the middle of his kitchen wall. Natural light from both sides. Clever.
Max left the room. I looked back to where the cat had been standing, but she was no longer there. I could hear him calling to her, a gentle clicking noise at the back of his throat.
I followed him into the living room. Max was already at the central light switch. Our neighbour had added a plaster ceiling rose, and an antique crystal chandelier, which hung too low, dominating the little room. The neighbour had used low-energy bulbs in the chandelier, and they flicked into life, sending ugly ovoids of light up the seamless walls. What was this? And where was the cat?
Max found a second switch, a
nd the bottom half of the room was lit by bulbs in the floor and skirting.
‘Pick up the cat, Max-Man. Time to go.’
He made a gesture. Arms open, palm up. Then he held up his hand. Listen, he seemed to be saying, and listen I did. A dog; traffic; a rooftop crow. People walked past, voices low, their shoes scuffing the pavement.
These houses should have front yards, Millicent would say: it’s like people walking through your living room. You could hear them so clearly, all those bad kids and badder adults: the change in their pockets, the phlegm in their throats, the half-whispered street deals and the Coke-can football matches. It was all so unbearably close.
But there was something else too, a dull, rhythmic tapping that I couldn’t place, couldn’t decipher. Max had located it, though. He pointed to the brown leather sofa. A dark stain was spreading out across the central cushion.
I looked at Max. Max looked at me.
‘Water,’ said Max.
Water dripping on to the leather sofa. Yes, that was the sound. Max looked up. I looked up. The plaster of the ceiling was bowing. No crack was visible, but at the lowest point water was gathering: gathering and falling in metronomic drops, beating out time on the wet leather below.
A Line of Blood Page 37