by David Mark
In the second of not knowing, she pictures Adam’s face. His silence these past days. His coldness. His icy, distracted, passionless love-making. She knows it has got too much for him, now. She knows he will leave her soon, or worse still, ask her to leave him. She wonders if and when he goes, he will live with Grace, that perfect, sweet, sensitive ball of lard on the far side of town whom Adam has allowed to meet his parents and who can’t seem to leave him alone; texting him a dozen times in the moments that Zara is supposed to have Adam to herself.
My best friend, Adam had said, when they first talked about her. It was just one night. It’s not her I want. It’s you.
Zara wonders when he started believing his own lies.
Adam and Selena sit quietly, listening to Tilly squeal and point out the grey squirrels which play in the bare branches that form a canopy over the pond. In his pocket, Adam’s hand closes around his telephone. It is almost a permanent fixture in his fist. Each time it vibrates, he asks himself who he wants it to be. He fears new revelations, new slashes at his open wounds, but he also fears their healing. He wants to telephone Alison and ask more questions, but no answer he has yet received has made him feel any better and he doubts he could tolerate more pain.
Jordan runs up, muddy water dripping from soaked trouser legs. His face is a mask of hurt feelings.
‘One of my new friends said he didn’t want to play with me any more,’ says Jordan, panting, pointing randomly in the direction of the swings.
‘The swine,’ smiles Adam. He pulls him onto his knee and hugs him. ‘That’s people for you – thoroughly disappointing. Anyway, it’s his loss.’
‘But he was really mean,’ continues Jordan.
‘People can be mean sometimes. Blame jealousy. It’s because you’re funny and clever and handsome. I get the same treatment.’
‘He said my sword was rubbish.’
Adam turns Jordan to face him. He likes the feeling of comforting the lad. Knows he would miss it, and so much else, if he were to walk away. ‘What sword, mate?’
‘I made a sword out of a tree …’
‘You do me good, mate, you really do. Would other, less brilliant, people think your sword was just a stick, do you think?’
‘Yeah, it was my sword and he said it was rubbish …’
‘Well, what does he know? I bet it was a great sword. Where is it now?’
‘I left it by the swings.’
‘You’d better go back and get it then before somebody steals it. It could be valuable.’
‘Thanks, Adam.’
Adam realizes he feels better. Watches as the boy runs off, and feels the heat of Selena’s smile as she stares at the side of his face. He blows a raspberry, pleased to be feeling a little more familiar to himself. He wonders, idly, whether people will ever think of him as Jordan’s real father. Whether he will ever call him Dad. The absurdity of it all hits home. He feels at once foolish and disloyal. He’s had a good upbringing. His parents love him. He doesn’t need any more than he has. He closes his hand around the phone again, and calls Grace. He’s going to tell her that he’s decided to stop searching. Going to tell her that this has gone far enough. He knows who he is. It’s time to start living right.
By the third ring, the impulse to do the right thing has devoured itself. He knows himself incapable of stopping now.
‘I need to know what he looks like,’ he says, before he can stop himself. ‘I need to know if his face is anything like mine.’
TWENTY-FOUR
The Basil Pot, Bridge Street, Portsmouth
4.09 p.m.
The old man sips his glass of hot water and lights an untipped cigarette that he has extracted from a crumpled packet. When he strikes the match, Zara finds herself afraid that the strange aroma which engulfs him might be methane, and that he will explode, damply, like a compost heap.
‘You’re sure that’s all you want,’ she asks the man, and her voice is still teary, like a violin string wound to the very brink of snapping.
‘Coffee gives me heartburn and tea dries my mouth out,’ says the man, with what sounds like a London accent. ‘Hot water does me fine.’
‘Makes me think of drinking my bathwater,’ says Zara, with a girlish smile.
‘I’ve never drunk your bathwater,’ says the man. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
Zara dabs again at her eyes with the neat white handkerchief that he handed her as he picked her up off the floor and steered her to the nearest table. Her eyes are seamed red and she knows they will be puffy tomorrow. She says so to the man, as he sucks another inch off his cigarette, and then extinguishes it between forefinger and thumb.
‘You’re a looker,’ says the man, and a dribble of pinkish liquid runs down his chin. A piece of his lip has peeled off, attached to the cigarette.
‘Not today,’ says Zara.
‘Well, you’re prettier than I am.’
Zara picks up her second glass of vodka, but puts it down again before it reaches her lips. She doesn’t want to drink or smoke or eat or be held, or not be held, and she feels her skin prickle again as the enormity of it all presses down upon her.
‘Whatever it is, can be fixed,’ says the man, as he spots the dampness returning to her eyes. ‘You must have a nice young man who can make it all better.’
Zara blinks and gives in to another sob. She hates herself for showing weakness like this, but she can’t seem to stop. She feels mummified with ribbons of misery, and this big old man, with his sores and his wounds and his strange smell, seems a kindly soul who genuinely wants to listen. She felt strength in him as he picked her up. She saw tenderness in his face, and a competence, a knowledge, like a transfer stuck over the mismatched lenses, the black and white eyes. His face, almost cartoonish in its appearance, does not repulse her, but intrigues. She, with her piercings and paints, her shaved head, her short skirts, finds herself admiring his uniqueness; a compulsion to touch the shiny, gnarled skin that clings to his skull like a melted carrier bag.
So she tells him. She tells him that she has a man whom she adores in a way she didn’t think was possible, and that he has ridden in on a white charger and given her and her family everything they could wish for, but that she fears it is all becoming too much for him, and she has done the sums and knows that he can’t afford to keep looking after them all like this. And she tells him about Grace, and how she hates herself for not being able to accept that she is just a friend. Then, in a voice wrung free of tears, she tells him of her money woes. The bailiffs. The bad people who want to take her dream.
The man sits, and smokes his way through the packet. He nods, and smiles, and soaks up what she says. He asks gentle questions about her man. Is he a good father? Is he happy? Is he a violent man? Does he ever hurt you? What are his family like? Is he local? Does he see much of his mum and dad?
Zara, lost in her own story, her own woes, does not see pinpricks of flame dancing in his eyes.
As he gets up to leave and tells her it will all be OK, and she steels herself and treats him to a kiss on his least fetid cheek, she fancies she can smell something new emanating from his ruined skin. Hiding among the corruption and the earth and the damp leaves and the cigarette smoke, she can smell the faintest whiff of burning. And flesh.
On the street, outside the restaurant, Irons sees his breath turn to fog on the air. It is black, like a thunder cloud, and rises upwards on the breeze like smoke from a fire, like dust from a death camp.
Irons coughs, and feels wetness on his chin. He scowls, and zips his jacket up to the top. The zip tears a half-inch of skin from the loose skin at his Adam’s apple, but it does not bleed, and he does not feel it. He sets off towards his car, parked a few streets away, on a street of Victorian terraced houses, where people carriers sniff the bumpers of Minis and Suzuki Swifts.
Irons doesn’t like this city, with its wet, chilly air, its heat-haze of some undefined gloom. It is adding to his mood. He finds himself thinking about his home. He can almost
feel the soft cushions of his favourite armchair around his tired legs. Irons is not one to indulge much in regret, or want, but he feels somehow shaken by the past few days, and there is something about his own fireside, his own pictures, his own surroundings, that seems somehow soothing.
Irons reaches the Hilux and climbs inside. Lights another cigarette. Feels the smoke warming him through, clinging to his bones, adding another layer of varnish and tar to muscles and organs that he sees as those of a corpse preserved in peat; hardened and solid by damp earth, silence, and time.
He feels displaced.
The boy that was conceived in anguish and given away in disgrace, has tumbled back into his life in a swirl of dead leaves, on a maelstrom of memories.
The boy he allowed to be born, is here, alive, now.
He is trying to find a way to act like the automaton that he has always been. To be the ruthless, immovable monster that carried Franco Jardine up the food chain. But he is asking questions of himself. Doubting himself. Deconstructing his truths. And amid it all, his visions of her face, his mess of questions, lies, secrets, he finds himself catching the faintest trace of Zara’s perfume in his nostrils, and for the merest second, it overshadows the gunpowder, the damp leaves, the cigarette smoke, the corruption, the decay. He breathes it again, and it seems to soften his bones. It is a feeling he remembers, too fleetingly, and he wants to feel again.
TWENTY-FIVE
November 2nd, 9.36 a.m.
The same carriage, the same train, the same window. Same landscape, beyond the dirty glass, but this time it’s lit by a low sunlight that adds a sort of candlewax sheen to the houses, fields, estates, hills, swishing by, swishing by …
Grace sips her coffee and, surprising herself with her boldness, reaches out and closes her warm hand around Adam’s cold fist. He looks across at her and smiles, then strokes her wrist with his thumb. They have a conversation like this for the next few minutes, sitting in silence, communicating only by these faint, delicate, tender touches. Both have their eyes closed.
Adam has an air of unfinished business about him, this time. He doesn’t look angry, but there is something about his posture and his jiggling right leg that suggests he is feeling a lot more focused, this time. He wants answers. He wants knowledge. He’s absorbed what he was told last time, and now he wants to plug the gaps. It’s reasonable, he tells himself. It’s not much to ask, is it?
‘You really think she won’t mind me coming?’ asks Grace, pulling a face. ‘I’m not really a part of all this.’
‘Yes, you are,’ says Adam, giving Grace what she wants. ‘You’re my best friend and you’re Tilly’s mum, and you keep my brain from meltdown. I can’t do this without you.’
‘And she’s sure she can do this? It’s going to be hard for her too.’
‘She said I deserved it. She’s strong. She’ll be fine.’
‘And her boy? And her dad? He doesn’t know?’
‘She says her dad would go crazy. And if her boy turns up, I’ve got a few things to say to him anyway.’
They nod, and smile again, and then retreat into their own thoughts.
Adam sits and concentrates on breathing.
Today, Alison Jardine will take him to the hotel where his father raped his mother.
He will see where the rotten seed was sewn.
Alison’s waiting as they emerge from the station into the weak sunlight, leaning against the bonnet of a blue Rover 75 – the kind that looks like a Jaguar, but isn’t. She smiles when she sees Adam, but it flickers as it becomes clear that he is with the curvy, Indian-looking girl who walks two steps behind.
Adam strides forward, and this time, as though he has been thinking about it, doesn’t hesitate. He wraps his arms around Alison, who holds back for a moment, before responding in kind. They hold each other, warm and tight.
Grace stands awkwardly to the side. She looks around and sees nothing about the landscape that makes her want to stay, and nothing that makes her desperate to leave. It’s a car park, like any other, and it’s as cold as bloody England. She’s pleased she’s wearing tights under her jeans and a vest beneath her striped cotton jumper, though the denim jacket is offering little protection against the wind, which is piling up her hair on one side, like a dirty snowdrift.
Adam and Alison separate themselves and share a look, then Alison turns and gives Grace a glance. There is something appraising but not unkind in her gaze.
‘Alison this is Grace. She’s Tilly’s mum.’
Grace shakes Alison’s gloved hand, and wishes that Adam had found a better way to describe her.
‘He needed a friend,’ says Grace, by way of explanation. ‘This has all been quite a shock.’
‘It’s nice that he has people who care,’ says Alison, softly. Then she looks at the car and says, ‘Shall we?’
Adam gets in the front, Grace in the back. It’s comfortable, and tidy, save an open notepad with scribbled directions on the front seat.
Alison settles herself in the driver’s seat and then looks at Adam.
‘I’m doing this because you asked me to,’ she says, earnestly. ‘If you want to turn back at any moment, just say.’
‘I’ll want to all the way there,’ says Adam, looking at the floor. ‘But I won’t let myself. Maybe it is like playing with a scab. I don’t know. I just need to see. I need for it to become real.’
‘I’ve spent more than thirty years trying to make it a bad dream,’ she says. ‘I’ve never known which compartment of my brain to put it in, so it’s bled into everything.’
‘Well, I’m in your nightmare now,’ says Adam. ‘I need to wake up.’
TWENTY-SIX
12.58 p.m.
A fast eighty in the outside lane, slowing down to pass through market towns and yuppie villages, then foot down again, on grey roads bisecting green hills.
Silence in the car, laying over its occupants like a dust sheet.
‘Tell me about him.’
Alison seems surprised and asks him to repeat himself. He does.
‘Who?’
‘Him. The rapist.’ He can’t bring himself to say father.
Alison takes her eyes off the road to look at Adam. Grace feels the car swerve.
She talks in a way that suggests she has been rehearsing what to say. ‘Look, you’ve got to remember I was a kid when this happened. All I knew was that this creepy bloke from one of the firms we worked with had tried some stuff with me that he shouldn’t have done – and then he went and did the same thing to Pam. There was never any doubt who did it. Thomas Dozzle. Razzle-Dazzle, he went by. A nobody. I can’t even picture him.’
Adam looks down at his shoes. ‘I can’t stand this,’ he whispers.
‘Whatever badness might be in you is cancelled out by Pamela, I swear. She was clever and kind and lovely and what happened to her was the worst thing anybody could imagine. Don’t ask more questions than I can answer about Dozzle. He got what was coming to him. It was months later I found out Pam got pregnant but the baby – you – was going to a safe place. I knew better than to ask any more and I made such a mess of being her friend. Her face scared me, that’s the hardest part. Dad had plans – he was going to set her up, take care of her, give her a place to get well. But she was dead within days. An infection, so they said, though I don’t know if that’s what I really believe. Dad was so angry and upset. I heard people talking and I heard bits and pieces, and the next thing I heard that Dozzle had been killed and that was why Irons was in prison and we were tightening our belts. And we wanted to do right by you. Irons would have taken you in, but he couldn’t – not inside.’
‘Irons?’
‘Yes. I thought you knew that. Dad didn’t want it that way. He wanted Dozzle to face up to what he’d done. Irons went Old Testament on him. He went to prison for it. Didn’t offer a word in his own defence. Could have gone to a hospital instead but wouldn’t cooperate with the shrinks when they tried to test him. Didn’t speak for the who
le time he was inside.’
Adam grinds his jaw. ‘Your dad didn’t want it that way?’
‘He wanted to hear him admit it. To face up to it.’
‘So there was doubt,’ says Adam, quietly. ‘It might not have been him. The person who did this – who made me …’
Alison focuses her eyes on the road.
Softly, as if the words were written in water, she says, ‘I don’t know.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lathon Grange Hotel, Maidenhead
1.33 p.m.
They sit in the car park. Adam is breathing hard, half-moon scars in his palms, staring at nothing. Alison watches Adam, chewing on her thoughts like gum. Grace turns around to look at the big Georgian manor house with its mullioned windows and red brick and its giant plant pots standing either side of an open pair of double doors.
Adam says nothing. Just glares, his guts full of fire and snakes.
‘What do you want me to say?’ asks Alison, and those who know her as the boss of a criminal organization would be surprised to hear the little-girl-lost tone of her voice. She remembers stepping out of this car more than thirty years ago: high-heeled shoes crunching over the smooth gravel pathway. She remembers their laughter, their excitement. Pamela pointing out Thomas Dozzle at the corner of the dance floor, and giggling. She remembers running up to her father, and him breaking away from the circle of big men in expensive suits, to dance with her and tell the DJ to change the song to something she might prefer. She remembers him doing the same to Pamela – his other little princess.
Here.
In this house, in the middle of nowhere, so long ago.
Adam turns. Gives a half shake of his head, and looks back down at his shoes.
They sit, silently, their breath starting to fog up the windows of the car.
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ says Grace, and it’s as though she’s made a decision. ‘It’s no good for either of you.’