by GJ Minett
‘So you felt . . . what . . . that she neglected William?’
‘I’m not having a pop at her,’ said Hall, nodding at one of the other customers who’d just entered the bar. ‘She did the best she could. But Owen took up so much of her time. Practically demanded it. He was such a needy little prick and she was so worried about what the hospital had said about how he might be a bit on the slow side. She was determined that wasn’t going to happen. Not on her watch. You know that thing they do now – where they make sure women and minority groups get jobs they shouldn’t necessarily get?’
‘Positive discrimination?’
‘That’s the one. Positive discrimination. She was doing that long before all these do-gooders got hold of the idea. She wasn’t going to let Owen fall behind if she could help it. I mean, William was a bright kid, right? Reading before he went to infants’ school, you know? Must have been four and he was sitting there working his way through these old Janet and John books she’d kept from when she was a girl. So when Owen couldn’t do the same she used to spend hours with him, going through the same bloody pages over and over again. Christ, even I knew the books off by heart after a while, so it’s no wonder Owen managed to recognise a few words eventually, and when he did . . . fuck me! You’d have thought he’d done one of those Ruby cubes or something.’
‘Maybe Owen was just better at other things,’ prompted Phil. ‘Isn’t he good with numbers?’
‘Good? He’s unbelievable. But it’s not like he can take any credit for it. It’s not something he’s worked at, sorted out for himself. He was born with it, know what I mean? I always said it was something to do with the way he came out. I mean, when that cord was wrapped round his neck and he was being starved of oxygen for however long it was, you’re not going to tell me that doesn’t bend you out of shape in some way. It’s got to make you different, put a bit of a kink in the system somewhere. The poor little sod lost out in so many other ways, there was bound to be a bit of compensation somewhere. Anyway, when the wife found out he’d got this gift, I suppose you’d call it, she clung to it like a fucking life raft. Like it made up for everything else. Turned it into some sort of party piece. Used to piss me off no end, to be honest. The moment anyone came round, she’d go, “What’s twenty-seven times twenty-four, Owen?” And he’d be like, “One thousand and whatever,” before you’d even worked out what the question was. And then, of course, because it all had to be balanced out properly, William would have to read something and who the fuck wants to sit there and listen to a four-year-old telling you about some cat sat on a fucking mat? You could see whoever it was rolling their eyes the moment she wasn’t looking cos she did it every sodding time. No wonder people stopped calling after a while. I mean, you want to see a performing seal, you go to the zoo, right?’
He drained the second of the glasses and waggled it in front of Phil’s nose. Phil got up and ordered a refill from the bar. Just the one. There was still a detail he wanted to pick up on.
‘So what happened to William?’ he asked, as soon as he’d returned to the table.
Hall said nothing for a moment. A group of half a dozen or so people had arrived to take up their reservation and order drinks from the bar. An old golden retriever hauled itself to its feet, turned a couple of circles and then collapsed again in a heap alongside an elderly man who reached down absent-mindedly and scratched the dog’s ear without looking up from his Mail on Sunday.
‘His brother happened to him.’
‘His brother? How d’you mean?’
‘Six years old, they were. Way too young but they’d both been on at me for months about how they wanted a tree house in the garden. Tree house, my arse. We hadn’t even got a fucking tree. But they’d been to this kid’s birthday party and the complete dickhead of a father had put up this platform on stilts and then built a playhouse on it. You know the sort, with steps going up one side and a slide and ropes coming down the other? Never saw it myself, just went by what the wife told me. Anyway, the moment they got home it was, “Can you make us one, Dad? Please, Dad. Robin’s dad made him one.” Like I’ve got all the time in the world and no way am I a proper father unless I do this. I kept fobbing them off, hoping they’d forget about it and get into football or something but they kept on and on and the wife was just as bad, so in the end I gave in just to shut them up. Paid this mate of mine to come round and do most of it cos I’m useless with my hands – always have been. Useless at most things.’
He paused for a moment and used a finger to trace circles in the beer that had leaked onto the table. For just a moment it was possible to catch in his distracted stare a glimpse of the family man underneath all the bravado.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘they came home from school one day and saw this bloody great thing in the garden and you’d have thought all their Christmases had come at once. All of a sudden I was the best dad ever and they wanted to sleep out in it that first night, so guess who had to kip out in a sleeping bag on the lawn to keep an eye on them? Right in the middle of an ants’ nest too. Woke up, I’d got bites all down one arm.’ He chuckled at the memory, but it didn’t stay around long enough to lighten the mood.
‘Then one day I was at work and the boss called me in. Said I’d better phone home cos the missus was screaming the place down and when I did it was one of the neighbours who answered and told me she’d just left. She was following the ambulance to the hospital and wanted me to meet her there, and I’m like, “What fucking ambulance?” and that’s when I found out William had fallen out of the tree house and landed on his head. The first-aid guys had taken ages to move him cos they were worried about his neck, maybe even a fractured skull. Anyway, the boss took my keys off me and drove me there himself. Said I wasn’t in a fit state. And by the time I got to the hospital they’d got the wife and Owen in a side room and she was in tears and you know the first thing she said to me when I came in? Before I’d even had a chance to ask what happened. “Owen was with me in the kitchen, practising his reading.” That’s what she said. And I thought, OK . . . bit weird, but then again maybe she’s in shock. Only she must have said the same thing half a dozen times while we were waiting there for someone to come in and explain what was going on cos I remember thinking yeah, well, maybe if she’d been keeping an eye on William instead, this wouldn’t have happened.’
He held out a couple of crisps to try to entice the retriever to get up and claim them but the dog had already stirred once in the past few minutes and showed no interest in doing so again for such feeble pickings.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘this surgeon comes in when he’s good and ready. Looks about twelve, all pleased with himself, like he’s just hit puberty. Starts using long words and I’m just about to ask him if someone shoved a dictionary up his arse when he was a kid and can’t he speak English so we’ve got some vague idea what the fuck he’s talking about when this nurse pokes her head round the door and says he’s needed in theatre urgently. And we can hear all this commotion going on next door, machines bleeping, alarms going off, people hurrying here, there and everywhere – you know the sort of thing. Only no one’s telling us a fucking thing. We must have been in there for half an hour on our own, wondering what the fuck was going on before he came back with a face like a slapped arse and told us he was sorry – there’d been a massive bleed on the brain or something and they hadn’t been able to do anything to save him. Gone. Just like that. Like flicking a switch. And I’m holding onto the missus for dear life cos I swear she’d have hit the floor otherwise and all I can hear is Owen, sitting there in the corner, playing with this toy Bugatti we bought him and singing some bloody stupid song to himself, over and over, like nothing had even happened. And I know he was only six, but even so . . . Jesus Christ! There should’ve been something there, you know? Should’ve been something.’
He shook his head and made deep inroads into the next pint. At this rate, Phil calculated, he’d get through five or six in a
n hour. He wondered whether this was a regular routine or maybe he was taking advantage of the opportunity Phil’s interview had afforded him. Probably a bit of both, he decided.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, meaning it. He was trying hard not to recall the moment, less than four weeks earlier, when he’d learned of the death of his own son. Whatever his opinion of Hall as a person, they had at least that much in common.
‘Yeah, well . . .’ Mask of indifference firmly back in place. Nothing gets to Mick Hall. ‘Anyway, the next few weeks I figured I needed to see if there was some way I could build some sort of relationship with Owen. I mean, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. As far as I was concerned, the good sperm had been taken from us and we were left with the bit that should have run off down the wife’s leg, but she was a real mess herself so I thought what the hell. I took him to the cinema, brought him little treats that I’d picked up on the way home from work – you know, nothing much. Just sweets or chocolate. He had this thing about Jelly Tots – you remember them? Ate the things by the bucketload. But it didn’t matter what I tried; he just didn’t seem comfortable with me. Kept fretting all the time if we were out together: “When are we going home?” And the moment we got back he’d go rushing up to her and cling on as if they hadn’t seen each other for a year or something. I guess you can’t fool kids, can you? They always know.’
Callum was the same, Phil remembered. Always more comfortable in Sally’s company. Always sensing he’d get a better deal out of her than he would out of his father. Go for the instinctive sympathy every time. He felt he understood the sense of rejection Hall was trying to articulate, even though he hoped to God he hadn’t anything like as much with which to reproach himself.
‘So about two or three months go past and the wife and I, we’re still struggling to get our heads round what happened. Part of the problem for me was I just couldn’t make any sense of it. William was such a confident little kid, used to shin up and down that ladder to the tree house like something out of Jungle Book. I didn’t understand how he could have fallen like that. And I mentioned it to her a couple of times and straightaway she’s slipping in comments like she didn’t know, she wasn’t there, she was in the kitchen with Owen. And I’m like, “For fuck’s sake, will you shut up about Owen for five seconds? Why do you keep going on about where Owen was?” And I think it just sort of started from there, you know?’
Phil looked closely at him.
‘You think Owen had something to do with his fall?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, do I? I wasn’t there either. But the thought just sort of crept up on me over a period of time and I must have done a bad job of keeping it to myself cos one day she lost it completely and started having a go big time. Said she knew what I was hinting at. What sort of a father was I? How could I think for one minute my own son could do something like that? And the best joke was it wouldn’t even have occurred to me if she hadn’t kept banging on about it. And then, final straw, I heard him in his room one evening, shouting at William. I mean, he used to talk to him all the time as if he’d never gone away and Jesus, that was tough. But this time, must have been about three or four months after the accident, he was yelling at him, saying it was his fault. Something to do with this Bugatti car he had, how it was his not William’s and how many times did he have to tell him he wasn’t allowed to play with it unless he asked. “Your fault”, he kept saying. “Your fault.” And, I mean . . . you hear something like that, you can’t help asking yourself what he’s talking about, right? What exactly was William’s fault?’ He sketched the speech marks in the air.
‘So,’ he continued with a shrug, ‘that was just about it for me. I left soon after, and never went back – which, OK, it doesn’t exactly make me father of the year, but you know that thing they say about walking a mile in someone’s shoes before you judge them? Maybe when you’ve kissed your own kid goodbye and set off for work, not knowing that’s the last time you’re ever going to see him – maybe when that happens to you, you can come back and point the finger, yeah?’
Phil bit his tongue, held his breath, worked his way through every cliché known to him. Said nothing. Instead, he got up and thanked Hall for his time.
‘You’re not going yet, are you?’ Hall replied, dismayed that his meal ticket was suddenly on its way out of the door. ‘There’s plenty more I can tell you.’
Phil thought about throwing a fiver on the table, then thought again.
He felt he’d heard enough.
ANNA
By nine o’clock she’d considered the alternatives and reached the depressing conclusion that bed was as good an option as any. She’d worked her way through a mental checklist, crossing items off one by one:
TV? Crap. Mental candy floss.
Go for a run? Seriously? Again? How many times could she do that in one day without asking herself a few pointed questions?
Read a book? Not in the mood.
Call a friend? Sure. Nine o’clock on a Sunday evening. Not like that would set alarm bells ringing or anything. Her friends thought she was desperate enough as it was – the last thing they needed was more ammunition.
Give in, grab a bottle and go join the party downstairs? No way. She knew she’d only been invited as an afterthought, a courtesy gesture designed to ensure she was inside the tent pissing out, rather than the other way round. The last thing they wanted was for her to start complaining about the noise. And that was the generous interpretation; a more plausible one was that there was a serious shortage of women on tap and someone had come up with the bright idea of drafting in what’s-her-name from upstairs. Better than nothing. Well, sorry, but she wasn’t about to be the token anything.
People had been arriving for the past half hour or so and her flat had been resounding to doors crashing, footsteps on the stairs, voices getting louder by the minute. The hilarity of it all. No way. Bed was starting to look appealing. She knew there was a danger she might end up lying there for hours staring at the ceiling and straining to piece together fragments of conversation from the balcony below but she might get lucky and drift off to sleep before the pubs emptied and the mayhem really kicked in. Worth a try at any rate – in the absence of anything better.
She was so caught up in feeling sorry for herself that she almost missed the phone call, picking up on the vibration only at the last minute. She snatched her mobile from the coffee table and checked the caller ID.
‘Hey,’ she said, throwing herself onto the settee and striving for a cheery nonchalance to disguise the sheer relief she felt.
‘Anna?’
‘Phil?’
‘Is this OK?’
‘Is what OK?’
‘Ringing you like this.’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘I was worried it might be a bit late.’
She looked at her watch. ‘It’s only just gone nine,’ she said, laughing at the irony of it all. ‘My social life may not be sizzling right now but even I draw the line at going to bed this early.’
‘If you’re sure . . . Only it can wait till morning.’
‘No need. Now’s fine.’
‘I don’t know why I rang, really. I mean, we could talk about it while we’re on patrol, if you’d prefer.’
‘It’s the duck joke, right?’
‘The what?’
‘You didn’t get it and were too embarrassed to say so.’
‘Very funny,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s something you said earlier this week. About how I ought to be doing a bit of digging around to see if I can come up with something that will . . . you know.’
‘The private-eye thing?’ she said, swinging her legs down onto the floor. ‘Tell me you’re going to give it a go.’
‘Well, I was thinking maybe –’
‘You’ll need a glamorous assistant. All the best private eyes have one. Someone who works as receptionist and keeps his life in some sort of order and listens while he
bounces ideas off her, and he sort of takes her for granted at first, like she’s only there to answer the phone and make coffee, only eventually he gets to realise how clever she is and she’s the one who spots the tiny detail that he’s been overlooking which means he can make that crucial breakthrough. I could do that. I could be a sort of Lois Lane to your . . . whoever it was?’
‘Superman?’
‘Superman wasn’t a private eye, dummy.’
‘Whereas Lois Lane was a receptionist, right?’
‘I think you might be missing the point.’
‘Anyway, we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here,’ he said. ‘I was thinking more of an informal sort of thing. What you said the other day, it got me thinking, and tonight I finally got off my backside and did something about it.’
‘Did what exactly?’
‘I went to see Owen Hall’s father.’
Without me? was the thought that leaped unbidden into her head. Why didn’t you think to ask me?
‘And? What did he have to say?’
‘I’ll fill you in tomorrow. But it was really interesting and it’s given me an idea as to where I might go from here, only . . . I don’t think I can do it on my own. I’d need help with it.’
There was something in his tone of voice, a strange sort of hesitancy that hinted at the need for caution.
‘Is it legal?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think so.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘No, not really.’
‘You think so and not really? Wow, you really know how to sell an idea. I’ll need to think about all this.’