by Alex Marwood
‘Do you know what’s in them?’
‘Do you think I just power down when she goes out?’
Cheeky bint. ‘So what’s in them?’
‘Everything,’ she says. ‘Her whole life, from before. All of it. Designer clothes and shoes and bags and perfume and face cream that’s gone to wax and photo albums from before us and jewellery, all just chucked in together the way Simone did with Dad’s stuff. Everything.’
‘I don’t suppose she has much use for them in your new life,’ I venture.
She treats me to a snort of contempt. ‘Oh, please. Why not just get rid of them, then? Throw them away? Sell them? Seriously: we could probably buy a house with what’s in those boxes. Why’s she still keeping them, making a mess of our whole house so we can’t walk up the hall without turning sideways?’
‘I guess she’s just not there yet?’
‘Where? Not where?’
My house is full of the same. The brain rewires itself wrong all the time. We moved so often when we were young, and all our stuff would get ‘edited’ when we did it, and it’s left me constitutionally incapable of throwing anything away. In one of my many boxes is my teddy bear. I stopped using it when I was nine – I remember making a deliberate decision to stop – but throwing it away would feel like cutting out an internal organ. Someone else will do it, eventually, when my dead body is found eaten by cats. They’ll pause with it in their hand, feel melancholy, then they’ll stuff it into a black bag and my childhood will be gone at last.
‘It’s a holding pattern,’ I tell her. The past put away, but still there, always there, to sabotage you.
‘The photo albums are the worst,’ she says. ‘She had loads of friends once. There’s all this stuff from when she was at university, and she’s looking so happy. Surrounded by people, you know, boys, girls, people her own age, and they’re all having fun and hugging and laughing and dressing up for parties, and it’s almost unbearable.’
I hadn’t even realised that Claire had gone to university. God, we were so absorbed by our own hurt it never occurred to us to ask her questions about herself. Besides, I never thought of the Wives as anything other than addenda to Sean, as though they only came into being when he turned his holy gaze upon them. And it probably suited him that way.
‘And now she’s sad all the time,’ says Ruby, ‘and no one comes to see us.’
My father knew what happened to Coco.
‘Ruby,’ I ask, ‘do you think it would make a difference? If she knew? What happened?’
‘Why?’ She glances at me suspiciously. ‘Do you know something?’
I back off, sharpish. ‘No. No, nothing like that. Just a question. Just wondering.’
She turns away. She always turns away when she’s going to say something that makes her uncomfortable. ‘I fucking hate Coco for what she did to us,’ she says, and starts to cry.
‘Oh, Ruby,’ I say. I think she takes it as a reproof, because she wraps her arms around herself as though she has a stomach ache. I put an arm round her shoulder, and she cries harder.
‘It doesn’t fucking matter what happened, does it? The damage is done now. Who cares if she’s away with the gypsies or buried in an unmarked grave? It doesn’t matter! The whole world hates us and my mum won’t let me out of her sight and it’s all her fault. She’s just a – a fact. I don’t even remember her, not really. She’s a bit of history, a conspiracy theory like Princess Diana. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I just wish people would stop bringing it up, or bringing it up by avoiding the subject, or asking me how my mother is as if I’d ever say anything other than that she’s fine. I just hate it. I hate her. I can’t even go to school because of Coco.’
I throw away my butt and finally wrap her in a hug. Smell her hair pressed against my face and realise that she smells like India. Smells like Sean. Smells like family. I wonder if Emma does too? Oh, my little sisters.
‘It wasn’t her fault, Ruby. I know it’s unfair, but it wasn’t her fault any more than it was yours.’
She raises her tear-streaked face. ‘But what if it was? What if it was something I did?’
I put a thumb on to her cheek and wipe away the wet. Give her another squeeze. How do you explain the randomness of the universe to someone who’s looking for comfort?
‘I mean…’ Another sob catches in her throat. ‘Why did he take her and not me?’
No answer to that. I hug her more and let her cry. Think about Claire and all her boxed-up finery, pretending to live but unable to let go of the past. What good will it do, raking it all up again, stirring the hornets’ nest? Will she find it easier if she knows that someone who can no longer speak knew the answer to the riddle? Oh, God, oh, Sean, what did you do? Jimmy knows something. He couldn’t have been making that clearer if he’d tried. And that means they all know something. What do I do?
Her breathing slows and she takes a great gopping snort through her blocked nose. Disentangles herself and sits back. But I give her a hand and she holds it.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
‘Don’t be. Better out than in, you know?’
‘I guess,’ she says. ‘Never seems to feel like it, though.’
‘No. I don’t know why they say it, really. It’s patently bullshit.’
‘Just something to say, I guess,’ she says, ‘when someone’s just made a spectacle of themselves.’ She gives me a watery smile. ‘Thanks, Mila.’
‘Thanks for getting my name right.’
‘Oh, I know! Why do they do that?’
‘Have you noticed many signs of them listening to a single thing anyone else says? Come on.’
‘Huh. No. Joe’s nice, though.’
‘He does seem to be. Won’t break any mirrors, either.’
She doesn’t respond to that. Thought so. Our Ruby has a bit of a Thing for the Gavila boy. Can’t say I blame her. If this were London and I didn’t know who he was and he walked into a bar, I’d be dragging him home and giving him the full Older Woman experience myself.
‘They’re all okay, actually,’ she says. ‘They’re the only ones who aren’t mad, really.’
‘Even Simone?’
‘Not fair. You can’t tell, when she’s such a mess.’
‘Yeah. You’re a better person than I am, Ruby. But I knew her when she was young, of course. We could never work out how she managed to be part of that family.’
She’s quiet for a moment. ‘I miss him, you know.’
‘Yup.’ I’ve been missing him all my life, it feels like.
‘I know I shouldn’t, but I do. Even though he was a crap dad. How fucked-up is that?’
‘Yeah. Life’s more complicated than that, though, isn’t it? You can’t love someone into being good and you can’t stop loving them as if there’s a switch inside. People have carried on loving far worse people than Sean Jackson. You’ve just got to live your way through it.’
‘S’pose,’ she says. ‘Shit, I could do with a hot drink.’
‘And I could do with a warming whisky. Want to go to the pub?’
‘Am I allowed?’
‘Jesus, your mother’s not prepared you for anything, has she?’
‘I told you,’ she says.
We get up. ‘All right, all right,’ I tell her. ‘People who don’t listen to other people.’
There’s a pub a hundred yards away; one of those foursquare Georgian things that hide a history of criminal endeavour beneath a veneer of respectability. I know, because it’s called the Smuggler’s Arms. We walk in silence arm-in-arm through the dark, the slosh of water to our left somehow comforting. And we push open the door to the saloon bar and find ourselves face to face with Jimmy Orizio.
Chapter Thirty-Four
2004 | Sunday | Maria
For Maria Gavila, every crisis is an opportunity to show her competence. It’s been that way since she was a child. You grow up in the chaos of a family that’s given up, living on an estate that’s given up, in a city tha
t’s given up, and you have one of two choices: give up yourself, or become the one who refuses to give in. The one who gets out.
Already, she’s making lists in her head. She itches to get to her Palm Pilot – no, no records: paper, it needs to be, and everything written one sheet at a time so no one who’s looking for secrets can dredge them up from the lower sheets with some patience and a soft-lead pencil – and get the notes jotted down ready to tick off. Lists are Maria’s life-blood. In a world where everything operates on a need-to-know basis, being in charge of the lists makes you God.
‘Take Joaquin first,’ she says. ‘He’s the heaviest, so he’s the one most likely to wake up first.’
The others gawp. Maria is used to other people being behind the curve where reality is concerned. She and Robert have built up an entire fortune predicated on the fact that most people only consider the consequences of their actions after they’ve taken them and the consequences are making themselves apparent. Even while she was going along with the plan – weighed up the odds on it going wrong, found them so small she decided the convenience was worth the risk – her brain was going tick, tick, tick with contingencies. How to present as an accident if a trip to Casualty became a necessity, who to call for a charcoal flush. And this. This worst of all outcomes. So unlikely that it was only habit that had made her consider what she would do at all.
‘Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?’ asks Imogen.
Jimmy, of course, is right there with her. They’ve had enough what-happens-on-tour-stays-on-tour rock-star messes to clean up in their time, from addictions to beatings to helicopter admissions to a private hospital most people on the outside think of as a psychiatric facility, for him to know exactly what is needed now. There’s a reason why record companies hire Jimmy. He may spend most of his time out of his head, but he has an uncanny knack for snapping into sobriety when there’s a mess to sort out. And this is a mess. An almighty, suppurating mess with a dead child in the middle, and it will bring them all down.
‘She’s dead, Imogen,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing an ambulance can do.’
Sean gasps for air down on the floor. But he doesn’t argue.
Maria knows this: that there is a window in time, when they’ve had a shock, in which people’s brains hang, like computers overloaded by information, and they will stand there desperate for someone to tell them what to do. If someone doesn’t step into the breach, chaos will ensue. Linda is close to starting up again with the gibbering, and if she does that it’s only a matter of time before she attracts the attention of someone from the outside.
She kicks her shoes off. Though they make her taller and more authoritative, there are times when the practical is essential. ‘Come inside,’ she says, and holds open the door to show those on the threshold the way. Imogen glances back at the house as though she’s considering making a run for it. ‘Come on,’ says Maria, all business. ‘In.’
Imogen obeys. She will never be a problem. She dresses to look formidable, but Imogen is one of life’s followers. She would never tolerate that blustering fool of a husband if it were any other way. Charlie follows her, and stands in the corner like an overgrown schoolboy who’s been given a telling-off. Robert drops his head and follows suit. This is how they work, the two of them, always have: Maria the one with the instant response, Robert the one who considers the case law and issues a cerebral solution. She’s the speaker, of the two of them, the persuader, and he’s ceded authority to her because it’s her skills that are needed now.
Sean is sobbing. Big tears drop from the end of his nose on to the waxen face, but no one pays him heed. They’re all looking at Linda, who hangs back on the gravel, her phone in her hand.
‘Come inside, Linda,’ says Maria. The seconds are ticking by in which she will have any influence at all. Once Linda goes off-piste, there will be no controlling the situation.
Simone crosses the room and kneels down beside Sean. Gives Linda a look that says, ‘This is what you should be doing,’ and lays a hand on his shoulder, forearm draped down his back. With her long hair she looks like a water-nymph in her nightie. She slept last night in the maid’s room up at the house, at Sean’s suggestion. As the annexe is next to the pool, they all know why now. She puts out her other hand and wraps it round his wrist. Sean sucks in a huge gasp of air and melts against her. She props him up as he sobs.
Linda steps inside. Maria closes the door.
‘We need to talk,’ she says.
‘No,’ says Linda. ‘No, no, no, no.’
I wish I had a phone with me, too, thinks Maria. You always look as if you mean business if you’re wielding a phone. Not that my phone would be much use to me now. There are any number of people who will clean up messes for a price in my address book, but even their fluid morality would be tested to the brink by these circumstances.
Everyone else is silent as the kids sleep on. She’s not turned the light on – doesn’t want to show them the scene in all its horrid detail, because she needs to be allaying emotion, not ramping it up – but dim morning light seeps through the slats in the shutters and shows their seven faces, white and grey. Sean and Simone look up at her from the floor. Jimmy has started circling the room checking pulses, as though he distrusts Simone to have done the job properly.
‘Let’s get something straight,’ she says, and looks Linda straight in the eye as she says it. ‘If we do what you want to do, we’re fucked. Every single one of us.’
She chooses the swear word deliberately, enunciates it hard so that Linda jumps slightly when she says it. It’s Linda she needs to get on side, and penetrating her self-absorption is a job of work. The others have taken in the gravity of their situation already, and stare at her as though she were a messiah come to save them all.
‘Do you understand?’
‘But —’ says Linda.
‘No. No buts. No one’s going to look at this scene and say that it was an accident. We have six drugged children and one dead one. What do you think they’re going to see, if you bring them here?’
A muscle works in Linda’s jaw. She’s thinking she can lay the blame on everybody else, thinks Maria. She still thinks she can somehow wriggle out of this scot-free.
‘It was you who suggested it, Linda,’ she says.
Linda is aghast. ‘No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t!’
‘Oh, it was,’ says Maria, and lets the threat hang in the air.
‘We were all there,’ says Charlie. Never slow on the uptake where his own interests are concerned. He can see himself now, she thinks, the disgraced MP, no glory of Cabinet, no more non-executive directorships, not even, with a shady death attached forever to his back, fit for I’m a Celebrity.
‘Yes,’ says Imogen, picking it up. ‘It was you all right. We would never have thought of it if you hadn’t suggested it.’
Linda looks from face to face and her mouth falls open.
‘You can’t be serious. You cannot be serious. It’s – you can’t. She’s not even cold yet, and you’re… Sean!’ She appeals to her lover and gets a shaken, shamed look in return. Sean feels emotions, certainly. But they’re fleeting, compared with those of the normal run of people. There’s no doubt he loved his daughter, but she’s already receding into the past and turning into a problem to solve as her body cools.
‘Because time is of the essence,’ says Maria. ‘I’m sorry.’
She’s not surprised at her own coolness. She’s always cool under pressure. She can take time to feel the emotions when the practical is dealt with. But often, dealing with the practical seems to deal with the emotions as well, and she feels nothing at all.
‘I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you’re this hard-hearted, Maria. Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? Coco’s dead. Little Coco. Your goddaughter. I thought I knew you, but I don’t know you at all.’
No, you don’t know me, thinks Maria. Robert is the only one who knows me. But you’re not bringing us down by some sudden conversion i
nto pretending you have principles. Drugging the kids so you can fuck the dead child’s father? How do you think that’s going to play in court?
‘Let’s get something straight, shall we?’ she says. ‘Every single person here is going to jail. No mitigating circumstances. No he’s-been-punished-enough. People who do things like this go to prison. For a long time.’
Pour encourager les autres, she thinks. Even Sean is quiet, now, the tears long since dried up.
‘Did you think it would just be Sean?’ she presses on, staring Linda hard in the eye but knowing that her words will be sending shivers down the spines of everyone there. ‘Well, it won’t. Every person here has drugged a child or co-operated in it. That’s prison, right there, and your kids in care. You think you’ll get them back after you get out? Well, hello, Linda. They’ll be caught up in the care system forever, and you know what that means.’
Linda starts to sob. Not the celebration you had in mind, thinks Maria, and seizes the advantage. ‘And don’t think you’ll be able to go back to your lives when you get out. Charlie will be out of parliament, Jimmy and Robert will be struck off. I hope you’ve got some serious savings, Linda, because none of us will ever be earning again. I guess Sean will be all right. Though the whole company director thing gets trickier with a criminal record, let alone the ease of travel to foreign countries. And your social lives are over. How many charity galas are you going to get asked to now? Christ, we won’t even be able to walk down the street with confidence, once the Great British Public’s read all about it.’
It’s Sean who speaks first. ‘What do you suggest we do?’ he asks.
Chapter Thirty-Five
He’s propping up the bar and talking at the top of his reedy voice and he’s surrounded by people he shouldn’t be talking to. The men who were taking pictures outside the gate are there, and a hard-looking woman with a gammy eye and a tape recorder, and several other people who could be fascinated locals or could be more of the same. The pub is half empty. Or half full, depending how you look at it. Drinking time proper hasn’t started yet, and there are pitiful few tourists in Devon at this time of year. No one is talking but Jimmy, and Jimmy is talking a lot.