by Unknown
Lance sat at the kitchen table, hands spread out before him.
‘Come on, Dad,’ Frank said, voice gruff as he slopped water over a tea bag in a mug. ‘Don’t start. It’s routine police semi-boiled procedural stuff.’
‘I don’t know about that, son.’
‘Here, drink this.’
Lance looked dubiously at the cup filled to the brim with grey liquid. He shook his head.
‘I think I need a lie-down, Frank. It’s the beer.’
‘Come on, Dad.’ Frank took the old man’s arm in a clumsy gesture of tenderness. ‘You can kip on the couch downstairs.’
WHEN FRANK woke up a few hours later, he went down to the kitchen to find Wanda snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She turned on the tap so that water gushed at full force, spraying the tiles and plate rack. She squeezed washing-up liquid into the bowl, spun the tap to off and said, ‘We’ll soon have this place back the way it was. Then when Bea gets back, it will look lovely.’
Frank wondered whether she had misunderstood. ‘Bea has disappeared, Wanda.’
She tossed a laugh up at the ceiling and he wanted to hit her. ‘She will be back. It’s Saturday afternoon. Next Wednesday is her mother’s birthday. She wouldn’t miss that.’
‘How the hell do you know that?’ The woman had no boundaries whatsoever.
‘She’s having a break. And I don’t blame her. At least now I will get a chance to clean that front room of yours!’
He watched her hoist the vacuum cleaner out of the broom cupboard and lift a bucket of sprays and dusters with her other hand. She looked at the mess they had made of Bea’s ceramics and tutted to herself. Piles of painted china littered the floor and kitchen table. Under the rocking chair lay the family of Portuguese donkeys in white clay. One had lost its head, others their legs.
‘They are bastards to do this,’ announced Wanda quietly.
‘You’d better go,’ he told her gruffly, hoping that she wouldn’t leave without clearing up. There was something improper in her being here, even he could see that. He didn’t want her here if the police came sniffing round again. Did the police interview cleaners in such cases? he wondered. Somehow it seemed unlikely.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Wanda strode out into the hall, banging the bucket as she did so. ‘What if she comes back and it’s like this? She’ll run away again.’
With Lance in the front room and Wanda roaming the house, Frank wanted very much to be alone; or rather he wanted to be here without Wanda so as to be able to think clearly about being here without Bea.
‘Oh my G-o-d,’ sang Wanda. ‘What have they done to her garden?’
Frank ignored her and went into the front room, where he sat on the edge of the couch next to Lance’s motionless form. He winced at the sight of Chekhov with a pair of Wanda’s tights tied like a bandanna round his head. Some joker from CID, no doubt. He noticed his camera on the coffee table, the memory card removed. Well, it wasn’t illegal to take photographs of naked women if you were a photographer, was it? He got up and peered at the bookcase, where a stack of records still lay on the shelf. Perhaps the search had been a rushed job, a careless job, designed to intimidate more than anything else. He looked inside the sleeve of Tubular Bells. The photos of Wanda were still there. It wouldn’t do for the police to find these. That would make everything so much more complicated.
He lifted out the photographs, a cool handful of slippery gloss. There was Wanda face down across the couch, Wanda astride the chair, Wanda bent backwards over the coffee table. One by one he held them over the metal waste-paper bin and snapped a lighter at their corner. He watched the jaundiced flame climb up each print, watched it darken, flare and curl before dropping it, a stinking, sooty mass, into the bin.
‘Whatever are you doing, Frank?’ asked a voice from the duvet.
‘I am disabling one of Adrian’s pyrotechnic devices,’ said Frank, impressed, as always at his ability to dissemble.
‘Adrian?’ Lance poked his face out above the duvet. ‘Is he here?’
Frank picked up the chess box and began laying out the pieces.
‘I’ll give you a game,’ said Lance.
Frank nodded and wondered whether he would see Adrian again.
‘Okay, Dad, yes. That’d be nice.’
Stairs
WHEN ADRIAN opened his bedroom door late that Saturday night, he found Laura sitting on the top step, knees drawn up to her chin, head cocked in the direction of the kitchen door. She slid him a look as he sat silently on the step below her and pressed his forehead against the banisters. The voices of their parents drifted up towards them, rising and falling as they moved about the kitchen. Laura sniffed the air. Cigarette smoke lingered high up near the ceiling. Smoking was taboo in their house, but on rare occasions, in that extraordinary way that only parents are allowed, Katharine broke her own law. Distress signals was how Adrian thought of his mother’s smoking transgressions. The sour, hopeless scent of burnt tobacco in the house meant that things were slipping beyond the manageable.
Adrian felt Laura’s eyes on the side of his head and he looked up at her. She had the schoolgirl’s demonic ability to stare unblinking at a foe until they withered or turned to stone. He opened his mouth to speak, to say that it didn’t look like they were going to new schools on Monday after all, but she intensified her stare and his words died on his tongue. Katharine’s voice, jangled with wine and worry, reached them clearly.
‘I’m not sure I want the children alone with that man right now, Richard.’
The chair creaked and they heard the cat meow once.
‘Well that seems rather harsh in the circumstances, darling. He could have them tomorrow while we go to Hastings.’
‘No, I’ll go on Monday while they’re at school. We do not need to bring Frank into this.’
They heard a cigarette packet flipped open, then the flare of a match. A chair was pushed back suddenly as she got to her feet. Both children prepared themselves for flight, but the doorway remained empty except for the cat, which came and sat and looked up at them.
‘But the man must be in torment.’ Their father’s voice again.
‘Would you please stop being so damned reasonable!’ Something clattered on the table. ‘Every time I ring Frank they’ve dug up his garden or they’ve searched his house again. What do you think they’re looking for? Buried treasure?’
‘But they’ve also searched the river and the common. They’re just doing their job.’
They heard the clink of a bottle and the slide of a glass across the table. Laura put her lips to her knees and licked. Her mother would smell rank and stale in the morning and she would have a mood to match. Their father’s voice burred indistinctly. They heard ‘police procedure’ and ‘leave no stone unturned’, which prompted a ‘Christ, Richard!’
The cat meowed up at them.
‘If they thought he was a suspect they would arrest him, Katharine. Do be reasonable.’
Adrian winced and looked down at his toes. They waited for the explosion.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Katharine’s voice was shredded with alcohol and fear. The cat scuttled down the hall and into the front room. Something between a grimace and a smile visited Laura’s face and she clasped her hands at her chin, curling in on herself. There were no more words, but they heard their father get to his feet. He would be holding her now, pressing her head to his chest.
His voice was gentle. ‘We have to keep things in perspective. For all his faults, Frank really does not have it in him to . . .’
Katharine was crying now and her words were gulped and swallowed like a child’s. Laura started to stand. She punched Adrian hard between the shoulder blades with her fist. He didn’t respond.
‘I mean, think about it, darling, the man’s lost his wife . . .’
The chair scraped again and fell with a clatter to the floor.
‘Well he should have taken more care of her!’
‘Katharine!�
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But she was already below them in the hall, bumping against the wall, footsteps heavy and uneven.
Both children scrambled up and out of sight before she reached the bottom of the stairs, but not before Richard came to the doorway, looked up and spotted their feet darting like startled fish round the turn on the landing. He sighed and looked back at the debris on the kitchen table. In pectore robur. He collected up their wine glasses, the ashtray, Katharine’s cigarette packet and matches. He wiped down the tabletop and rinsed the glasses out in the sink. He heard Katharine blundering into furniture and doors above his head. He hesitated by the dining-room window and heard, but could not see, the branches of the trees tossing in the strong October winds. One of these days a tree was going to come crashing down. He looked up at the sky for a moon, but there was no trace of one tonight.
Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like to stay a while longer in the pale sheath of grief that Katharine lifted him from sixteen years ago. Sometimes, with difficulty, he remembered the tenderness of Sophie, her head on his chest or her fingers at his mouth. Sometimes he wondered about another life, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, and the wife and the children he might have had there. But mostly – he persuaded the cat out of the cat flap with his foot and switched off the kitchen light – mostly he performed the tasks expected of him; and he gave the rear end of the cat, for it had hesitated halfway through the cat flap, a firm shove with the toe of his shoe.
Fair
FRANK OPENED the front door on Sunday morning to find Adrian standing there, just dangling there in that way that he did, his face white against the flames of his hair. He could have kissed him.
Adrian did kiss him. A cheese-and-onion-flavoured peck on the cheek. He said, ‘Hello, Frank. I think we know each other well enough now to do that.’
Frank stepped out into the front garden. He didn’t want Adrian seeing the house right now. It was in a state. He’d had a bit of a night.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Mum and Dad have gone to the Salvation Army – they find missing people as well as playing carols at Christmas – and Laura’s making a YouTube Missing video.’ He squinted up at the sky, a gentle pearly grey with occasional flickers of sunlight.
Frank looked up the road. ‘I’m not sure that your parents want you here.’
‘Yes, but that’s not fair.’
Adrian was jumping, both feet together for maximum effort, up on to and down off the step. Ah yes, fairness, thought Frank. That rare and quaint concept beloved by children and eroded by adults and experience. Adrian told Frank, panting, and in rhythm to the jumps, that the move to London was postponed, that they weren’t leaving school after all, and that he thought Frank should come for a walk with him because he shouldn’t neglect his health given his age and circumstances.
‘Did anyone find Bea’s passport?’ panted Adrian.
Frank shook his head and confessed he had no idea where she kept things like that.
‘That’s good then. It means she’s gone away somewhere.’ Adrian stopped jumping and nudged Frank down the path and out of the gate. ‘Come on.’
‘Where to?’
‘A step to Stir-Bitch Fair?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
He followed Adrian down the street to the common and the river. A few feet before the cattle grid where the common began, Adrian took a sudden run at it and leapt across, mooing loudly. He waited for Frank on the other side and pointed to a National Waterways sign that said ‘Stourbridge Common’.
‘Stir-Bitch. It’s what Stourbridge used to be called. Site of the largest fair in Europe once upon a time. Isaac Newton came here. Everyone did.’ Adrian patted his man-bag, something that Frank was quite certain he would never wear himself, and added, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s all in there.’
Stir-Bitch, thought Frank as he fell into step beside Adrian. Stir-Bitch indeed: Katharine, Wanda, Precious, Richard too probably. Even Bea, damn her, creating all this upheaval. And very little progress, when all was said and done.
‘They used to sell everything here,’ said Adrian casting an expansive arm around the grass and hedgerows. He flicked through the pages of the book he pulled from his bag until he found a place he had marked. ‘. . . titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures . . .’
Frank let the boy drone on. He felt a good deal stupider than he suspected he looked today and found the dank river smell that pervaded everything faintly nauseous. It was no doubt a fitting flavouring to the unfolding nightmare of his days.
‘. . . whores, bawds, blood, bodies, souls, silver, precious stones . . .’ continued Adrian, reading from the book.
The last time he had slept, proper easeful sleep, it seemed to him, was in the moments before the phone call from Precious five days ago. Other than the bloody police, only Lance had been near him these last few days.
‘Also, if you wanted juggling, cheats, fools, apes, knaves and rogues . . . then this was the place to come.’
Frank felt a momentary breathlessness looking at the path ahead and the sense of the past and the present and Adrian walking into the future without him and how Bea had loved this walk and all the times he had let her do it alone. He quickened his pace, afraid that Adrian would stop his recital and look at him. The boy was already taller than him, not so much a growth spurt as a fountain or geyser. It showed no signs of stopping, just as there seemed no limit to the space inside his head from where information and words and ideas seemed to gush. Physics, chemistry, history, the stars – everything, even literature now, for heaven’s sake, Adrian was overtaking him, while Frank felt he himself wasn’t learning anything new. Frank rubbed his head and nodded. He straightened his spine and tried to breathe. It was a daily struggle to hang on to what he had in there already.
‘And not forgetting thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers . . . Are you all right, Frank?’
They were opposite the mustard-coloured Penny Ferry pub, which stood across the river. Ahead of them were ditches and patches of brambles and hawthorn. Scruffy piebald ponies dotted distant fields.
‘We should go back.’ Frank was abrupt. He suddenly felt uneasy being out here with Katharine’s son. ‘Where do your parents think you are?’
‘Oh, I’ve gone to buy trainers. These ones hurt my feet.’
A train flew along the track that bordered the far meadow, clanging across the old ironwork bridge up ahead. A chill breeze cut through his jumper and the sky had a bruised and purplish look. Frank pulled at the thin beige machine knit. Today’s jumpers were no good for keeping out the wind. What he needed was a home-knitted one. Bea had laughed with him at the Fair Isle tank-top Margaret knitted him that first Christmas. Both were reminded of the jumpers of childhood, the fierceness of knitted care in cable and moss stitch, the way they twisted and rucked at throats and underarms, the purl and the plain, the drop one and knit one. God knows where that tank-top was now. It had vanished somewhere down the years. He remembered it had beautiful colours and shivered. It was nearly November and he ought to have worn his coat. Bea hated the winter. He was fairly sure that what Bea liked best was the light and the sun. He stopped and looked at Adrian, who wore no coat and no jacket, just a T-shirt.
‘Bunyan,’ said Adrian, tapping his book.
Frank doubted the boy had a bunion, at his age, but who knew what went on inside the footwear of the youth of today?
‘John Bunyan. He wrote A Step to Stir-Bitch Fair.’
Adrian passed Frank the book and stared hard at a cyclist approaching from the far side of the common. He thought of the hundreds of fairs this common had seen, held his breath and looked hard to eliminate the cyclist, the newly planted trees, the women with buggies and dogs. He tried to conjure the noise and the smell and the crush of people in 1665, tried to pick out the curling grey hair and long nose of Isaac Newton, and wondered whether if he could just find the spot, the very exact spot, where Newton bought the prism he used to show that light is mad
e up of many colours, then—
‘Perhaps we should go back,’ said Frank. He didn’t like it here, the interminable, flat horizon. It felt hopeless.
They were at a small footbridge that crossed the ditch into Ditton Meadows. The ditch was choked with brambles where shrivelled blackberries still clung to some of the stems. Something scuttled in the dense, dying undergrowth. Adrian hopped across the bridge.
‘Let’s go on to Fleam Dyke. Bea liked it there,’ he called back across his shoulder. ‘And then we have to buy my trainers.’
Exit
KATHARINE HURRIED through the underground car park, unlocked her car from twenty paces, threw in her briefcase, coat and handbag, slammed the door and started the engine, reversing at speed into the path of an oncoming Mercedes, which braked hard, tyres squealing and horn blaring. Seatbelt warning light bonging, Katharine threw the car into drive and went forward into the parking space again. Cursing, she checked the rearview mirror, saw the coast was clear and put her foot on the accelerator. The car leapt and surged forward, hitting the car parked ahead of it with a sickening force and the crash and splinter of breaking glass. Stunned by the violence, for a moment Katharine did nothing. Then she got out and looked about her. No one was around. She went to the front of the car and was surprised to find not a scratch on her machine; the cow bars had absorbed the impact. Glass crunched underfoot and her eyes skimmed the damage to the Daimler in front of her. The headlight had gone for sure; perhaps there was damage to the bonnet too, it was hard to tell in the gloom. She wavered for a moment, wondering whether she should leave a note on the windscreen with her number, but a Daimler, for God’s sake: the cost was likely to be wildly out of proportion to the damage. By the time she had told herself it was akin to leaving a blank cheque on the windscreen of a total stranger, she was back in the car and in search of the exit.