Borrowed Time

by David Mark

  ‘Irons?’ asks Alison, reaching out a hand.

  ‘Are we done?’ wheezes Irons.

  ‘Irons, we’ll talk later …’

  ‘Are we done, Alison?’

  Alison nods her permission. He stares at Adam, the same searching gaze that Alison had given him as she emerged from the house. He’s beginning to feel there is a treasure map drawn in his freckles and wrinkles.

  ‘We cool?’ asks Adam, feeling daft.

  Irons turns away. Walks off across the forecourt, onto the grass, and out of sight, down the garden and into the trees. The whiff remains on the air, a heat haze of wet vegetation.

  ‘He’s a very intense man,’ says Adam, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Irons. It suits him.’

  Alison gives him her attention. She smells of orange juice and grenadine. ‘He’s a good man, is Irons. I know he looks a bit …’

  ‘Like a leper who shaves with a potato peeler?’

  ‘… a bit, funny, I was going to say, but he’s done a lot for my family. He means the world to my father. He was away for a long time and I know how he missed him. Been friends for years.’

  ‘Does he live in a cave in the woods?’

  ‘No, no. He’s got the old gamekeeper’s cottage. It used to … never mind.’

  ‘So, Mr Jardine is your dad, yes?’

  ‘For my sins, yes.’

  They stand looking at each other, buffeted by the wind, their clothes growing damp on the misty rain, the darkness sliding towards the ground like a screen. Even this, this discussion of Alison’s origins, seems to tweak something inside them both, some reminder of why they are here, now, in the forecourt of the big house, too afraid and too curious to open themselves up.

  ‘This hasn’t really gone as I planned, you know,’ says Adam, with a half smile. ‘Not that I planned anything, really. I just had to know. When my dad, my adopted dad, I mean, when he told me the truth, I just …’

  ‘I can’t imagine it,’ she says, and seems to shudder, as if in pain. It seems for a moment as though the action is a response to her own words, a manifestation of the voice inside her which says, Yes, you can. You’ve imagined it all his life.

  ‘This is all kind of doing my brain in,’ says Adam, and wishes he could find a more impressive, articulate turn of phrase. He feels like he might shiver at any moment.

  ‘Me too,’ she says quietly, and Adam wonders again, if this might be her. If his reunion with a woman he did not know he had lost has come here, in the half-dark, in the shadow of a gangster’s mansion.

  He searches her face for familiarity, a feature he knows as his own, an expression he recognizes from his reflection. Perhaps the mouth, he thinks. The full lower lip, the smile’s sternness in repose. The eyes? The dark beneath. Is the blonde real?

  They catch each other staring, and smile, give in to a shared moment that pricks the balloon of anxiety, and they deflate a little, smile again, and roll their eyes.

  ‘Weird, this,’ she says, laughing.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Just a little. Look, shall we take a walk?’

  ‘If you like. You’ve seen one stately home, you’ve seen them all.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that stately. Costs a bugger to heat. Would cost a fortune if we bought it today.’

  ‘It’s nice. Very secluded.’ Then, tentatively: ‘Is your father inside?’

  ‘Yes, he doesn’t get out much any more,’ she says, and takes her eyes from Adam’s for the first time. ‘He doesn’t know you’re here. He’s old. He doesn’t need those feelings again. I wasn’t even sure if I should respond …’

  Adam looks up at the house, its stained glass and leaded windows, its sloping eaves and sturdy brick. In this light, it is a sinister place, a fairy-tale castle on a hillside. Adam sees Jardine stalking the corridors of his vast home, torn with guilt and regret, remorse over past deeds. He wonders where the image comes from.

  ‘There’s so much I need to know,’ he says, softly. ‘And I don’t know why I have to. I wasn’t exactly living the dream before I knew, but now? I’m lost.’

  Alison steps closer and looks up into his face with a tenderness, and perhaps a flicker of something more.

  ‘Let’s take that walk,’ she says, and he feels her warm hand through the thick cloth of his coat.

  ‘Fine,’ he says, blinking, slowly. ‘It’s nippy, though. Are you warm enough?’

  Alison looks at her best friend’s lost son, and gives a grin that warms her through. ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she says, and links her arm through his. She steers him off the gravel and onto the path, paved with wood shavings, which leads into the woods, and down to the stream. She holds him tighter than she means to, and wonders if she holds him close enough, it will be possible to feel Pamela again.

  TWENTY

  5.11 p.m.

  Were anybody watching, it would appear that the big, scarred man in the living room of the drafty cottage were having a heart attack.

  He is on his knees before the fireplace, gazing up at the savage strokes; the scars and swirls of lurid paint which pattern the wall.

  His hands clutch at his chest, as though he is trying to pull a stone from inside his ribcage.

  His face, never pretty, is now a tortured, writhing thing. It is as if the mask of his features is mirroring some anguish within.

  Irons sees his breath upon the cold air. It rises as a cloud, and in the sepia glow of his melted eyes, it takes shape, and becomes a veil, draped across the images which adorn the chimney breast: the paintbrush having been wielded with enough force to scar the brickwork and plaster.

  He sees her.

  He clutches at his chest and inhales, deeply, sucking back his own breath.

  One thought, thumping the inside of his skull.

  Pamela.

  He falls backwards inside his mind, crashing through layers upon layers of stacked memory. Halts that cold, pretty night in the spring of 1971. Sees Pamela. Sees the night it all went wrong …

  She’s barefoot. Happy. She emits something between a wriggle and a shiver as the grass folds her feet inside a lovely, damp embrace, and takes the sting from her mucky soles and painted toes. She holds her high-heeled shoes in her hand. She could not have afforded to buy such shoes herself, with their sleek black straps and teardrop crystal studs, and she intends to keep them as pristine as the white cardboard box (with its waves of pale blue tissue paper, scrunched, elegantly scrumpled, a breaking wave) in which they arrived, and which she now keeps under her bed, filled with her paints, her charcoals and oils. She does not mind getting mud on her feet or legs. They are her own. They are trifling things. They were not a gift from Mr Jardine, and as such, require less care.

  The fine rain feels gloriously cool on her bare arms, as she had known it would when she slipped away from the party to wrap herself in the oily dark. Her eye make-up is smeared, having been sweated into paste during the last dance. The white dress, with its tapered waist and its bulbous bottom of scrunched-up silk, is a very grown-up affair.

  The girl is too young to dress this way, but allowances have been made because it is a special occasion, and because Mr Jardine will look after her.

  The girl, who is called Pamela, feels like a princess. She has felt this way most of the time since Mr Jardine decided that his daughter could use a sister, and took in the clever, pretty orphan girl.

  Beneath the damp leaves, beneath a sugar-dusted blackboard of stars, Pamela stands in the darkness and listens to the faint noise coming from the party in the big Georgian manor house behind her. The DJ is playing ‘Puppet on a String’, one of Alison’s favourites. Pamela can’t imagine the other guests are enjoying it as much. Mr Jardine, despite tonight’s good mood, is more of a jazz man, and the big men in suits and expensive coats who are standing at the bar and drinking champagne and laughing and slapping backs, don’t seem like big Sandie Shaw fans.

  Pamela wishes Alison had come outside with her. Though she likes the dark and the rain and the f
resh air, and the dark shapes of the hedgerows and the trees and flowerbeds in the plush gardens, she would like to have somebody to talk to as she stands on the wet grass beneath the big weeping willow and catches her breath. She wonders if Alison will kiss Thomas tonight. She wonders if she will dare. She and Alison have practised kissing on their pillows and on the backs of their hands, and even tried kissing each other before they started giggling, but she knows she would be too afraid to let somebody like Thomas put his tongue in her mouth. It seems gross. Thomas is sixteen, and with his smell of cigarettes and Brylcreem, he seems to her more like a man than a boy, and she associates men with big underpants on washing lines and proud after-dinner farts. The only men she exempts from this harsh categorization are Mr Jardine, and Irons. Mr Jardine has a graceful kind of firmness about him. An unimposing solidity. A strength contained. He is the equator of her world. Irons is something else. Something cold and pale and nameless. He is a shiver. A handprint on a condensation-speckled mirror. He is the shadow at the window. The sensation behind you. Never smiling, but always watching. Alison doesn’t know the full details but she told her the story of how he got hurt. How they tied him to a chair and super-heated a sharpening iron in a brazier. Held it to his face and made him listen to his own sizzling flesh; to smell himself cooking. Alison doesn’t find his face frightening so much as interesting. She enjoys his company. He’s quite clever, when he lets himself talk. Nice manners, too. Always thanks her when she pops over to the cottage and reads to him, or sketches him a picture of one of the wildflowers from the woods behind the house.

  The light from the half-moon glints off the bonnets of the big expensive cars in the driveway, and Pamela takes a pride in knowing she arrived in the finest one of all. She lets herself remember the journey here with Alison and Eva. It was sixty miles across dreary countryside, but the comfy seats and the low hum of the radio made it pass in a snooze.

  Pamela feels cool enough now. The sweat she worked up dancing has dried on her body. She hopes she doesn’t smell. Although she is enjoying herself, she feels a little out of place, here, in this big hotel. The other guests all have that whiff of money about them. She recognizes some of them from the newspapers. Alison told her that the tall man in the pink shirt and the white tie is a footballer. Ace Somebody. Ace-hole, she jokes. There are politicians, too, drinking honey-coloured liquid from big, goldfish-bowl glasses. There are policemen, dressed in more luxurious suits than their salaries alone could provide. They orbit Mr Jardine like flirty moons.

  Rubbing her chicken-skin arms and checking the soles of her feet for dirt, she turns to walk back into the party. She hopes she hasn’t been missed. She fears Mr Jardine will be cross if he knows she has been outside on her own, and his fondness for her makes her feel special, and almost as pretty as Alison, and enables her to come to big houses with beautiful gardens like these, and to dance to pop songs with her friends. She hopes to slip back to her table without being noticed. She decides to tell anybody who asks that she was busy sketching. Immortalizing the moon, the petrol-black of the cloudy sky, the heat-haze of rain against the forest. Mr Jardine likes her sketches. Says she will go far, if she works hard. Even presented her with the most beautiful set of oil paints she had ever seen, when he hosted her birthday party at one of his snooker clubs last year.

  Pamela takes a step towards the house. The darkness around her becomes alive. A patch of charcoal air becomes a blunt black mass, and it steps forward and lashes out. Pamela feels something cold and hard strike her above her left eyebrow, and everything suddenly tastes like money smells, and she feels as though she’s being sucked down the plughole in the bathtub and she swirls into unconsciousness.

  The shape leans down and picks her up like a mannequin. It hoists her as though she were weightless. One of her shoes slips off as it carries her, soundlessly, through the trees and the darkness and across the grass. The sounds from the party fade away.

  The lights from the road grow brighter, and the shape becomes a man. His face is red with excitement and exertion. He is wearing jeans and white trainers and a black jumper and a waterproof coat. Pamela is slung over his shoulder, her arms hanging down his back. The man fancies she is trying to touch his bottom, and he smiles, showing teeth, and his breath begins to come in a stutter.

  He reaches the low dry-stone wall at the edge of the stately gardens. He drapes Pamela’s body on the top of the wall, and climbs over it himself. He lifts her into his arms, the way he would comfort a crying toddler and walks with her down the kerb of the quiet country road to the passing place where he has parked the van. He opens the unlocked back door and with a grunt, tosses Pamela inside. She lays on her back, arms outstretched like a snow angel, one leg drawn up, a gash and rapidly swelling bruise on her forehead. Her lips move, wordlessly, and her eyelids, fluttering like leaves, make the man wonder for a moment if she is having a fit.

  The man climbs into the back of the van, and pulls the door closed behind him. His trainers leave a muddy print on the paint-splattered dust sheet he has laid out like a tablecloth. He pulls two large, black torches from the metal toolbox behind the door, and switches them on. Two garish circles of light illuminate the darkness within the van. Coils of rope and rolls of gaffer tape appear snake-like on their hooks on the van walls. The hard hat, donkey jacket and luminous waterproof on the back of the door are suddenly human-like, standing mute witness as the man begins to remove Pamela’s clothes. When she is naked, he places his face close to her bushy vagina, and breathes deeply. He repeats the process at the armpits, neck, mouth and feet. Then he begins to remove his own clothes.

  The man lifts a World War Two gasmask from the toolbox and slips it over his face, before unfastening his jeans, pushing them down, and kicking them off with his trainers and socks. His penis has been hard all day, but now juts from his body like a lance. Each breath now comes with a faint grunt.

  The man steps out of the van and feels the faint rain on his skin. He walks, naked, to the driver’s door, leans in, and switches on the ignition. The radio comes to life. He walks back to the rear of the vehicle, and climbs inside once more; his breath warm and fetid on his cheeks as he sucks hot air inside the gas mask. In the hours that follow, the mask will fill with spittle and hot air, and his eyes will grow wide, and he will skin his knees, shins and toes. Pamela will see her own frightened face in the reflective eyes of the gas mask. She will be reminded of the giant squid that attacked the submarine in the black-and-white film she saw on her washed-out TV. She will see her freckly, rounded features, twisted and tear-streaked, stretching away on a neck of straining tendons, as if trying to get as far away as possible from the hot, burning squelching pain between her legs. She will know her rapist only from the grey-black of his hair and the patterned ink on his chest and forearms.

  When Pamela stops resisting and appears to let her mind leave her body, the man will feel cheated, and visit fresh atrocities upon her. He will place a sharp blade across her cheek as he enters her, and slash jagged scars into her eyelid and earlobe. He will cut through the epidermis of her face down to the jaw-bone. He will drop the blade in his ecstasy and his fingers, scrabbling and clawing at her skin, will find the puncture wound and tear at her face, as though removing old wallpaper from a damp wall.

  The skin will hang from her jaw like veal.

  A winter will enter Pamela soon. Parts of her will simply cease to operate. Neural pathways will lock themselves. The best parts of her will die.

  Later, Mr Jardine’s men will find her at the roadside: naked, blood-soaked. Even the strongest of them will feel heat prickling at their eyes and a coldness in their guts. Mr Jardine will cry for the first time since Alison was born, and despatch death.

  Nine months from now, Pamela will give birth to a son. She will not cry out during labour. She will save her tears for the moment he is plucked from her embrace, and given to the lady from the agency. She will cry then, until her soul is dry, and then never again. A week later, she will
stuff tissues into her mouth until she chokes to death.

  Then her benefactor will sell her son.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lower Drayton Lane, Portsmouth

  10.58 p.m.

  Adam sits at Grace’s kitchen table, his coat still on, both hands wrapped around the mug of coffee that Grace has insisted he drink. The mug is unpleasantly hot against his skin, but has no desire to release it. He listens to the faint sound of Grace’s lullaby as she shushes Tilly and strokes her to sleep in the Little Mermaid bedroom upstairs. His phone keeps pinging with messages from Zara. He can’t find any words to reply with.

  It’s dark in the kitchen, lit only by the dim bulb of the extractor fan above the oven. He wishes it were brighter, but knows that if the room were light, he would long for dark.

  Footsteps grow louder, and Grace comes into the kitchen. She has put her pyjamas on, to convince Tilly it is bedtime, and is wearing a grey, Snoopy-motif outfit underneath her black dressing gown.

  ‘Dead to the world. Snoring like a docker.’

  She starts clucking as she busies herself picking up Tilly’s toys and moving dirty plates onto the draining board. She looks at Adam intermittently, smiling, in case he should turn his head and catch her looking. He does not look up. He simply stares into his coffee, and watches the galaxies of cream swirl on its surface.

  He is thinking of Alison Jardine. He’d expected her to be hard as nails. Had expected her to order that he strip to his underwear before she would even consider sharing confidences with him. Had thought that she would be difficult to read: face inscrutable as a dinner plate. Instead she had spoken to him as if they were old friends. She spoke as if she owed him an explanation. At times, he had felt that she was talking to somebody else, her words directed at some other figure, somewhere just outside his peripheral vision, watching and listening and passing judgments as they sat on the stone bench and watched the rain and told one another how they had spent the past thirty-six years.