And she was gone. As he watched her walk away, he was surprised; walking a few steps behind her, its rear end wagging as it went, was the biggest black dog Chris had ever seen. He hadn’t known she had a dog and had certainly not noticed it while they shared a coffee. Almost as if the creature read his thoughts it stopped and turned round, sitting down in the middle of the Saturday hurly-burly and staring at Chris with a penetrating stare. He tried to return it and looked away then forced himself to look again. But, like Cassie, the dog had gone.
Ain’t No Man Righteous
*
Chris’s stomach was rumbling as he turned into the drive of the vicarage but he didn’t have high hopes of getting any lunch today. He had hung around in town as long as was feasible, but he was, after all, a grown up and so were his mother and stepfather; surely, talking things through had to be the best plan? All was silent when he pushed open the door. He remembered when he and Megan used to fight; before the fight, of course, which wasn’t a fight at all, more of a mutual capitulation. Then, when all passion was spent, they would usually end up in bed and it was true; make-up sex was just about the best there is, beaten perhaps only by revenge sex, but his experience of that was minimal so he was perhaps not the one to judge. But his imagination baulked at his mother and the vicar upstairs working it all out that way; even so, he listened particularly hard at the foot of the stairs, to avoid embarrassment all round. Nothing. The house was quiet as the grave.
He went down the hall, aware that he was trying to walk extra quietly on the parquet floor. There was one loose block in front of the lounge door and he instinctively avoided it; it gave a click which in this boundless silence would have sounded like a pistol shot. He edged the door open into the kitchen and looked around. No one. The lounge, as he back tracked down the hall again and peeped in, was the same. The study was off to the left, in a little annexe; he guessed it had been originally intended as a utility room but had been remodelled for the vicar’s use; there was a door out to the garden which he had always assumed was for the use of parishioners with something on their mind they wanted to share with Mike Green but now he wondered whether it had a more sinister purpose. Perhaps he had watched too many Midsomer Murders – only the old ones, before they got the new bloke in that no one he ever met could stand. In every episode, a sneaking figure would ooze round a half closed door. The next scene was always of a screaming cleaning lady who had come upon the body. Realistic, not. Anyway, no one in the study either, living or dead. Which, God forbid – he had stopped apologising in his head by this time – meant that they probably were upstairs, at it like superannuated weasels.
But, no – what was that in the garden, down behind the shrubbery? His heart stood still. He could see his mother, wielding a spade with unwonted fervour; she really seemed to be knocking seven bells out of something … or someone … on the ground. He wrestled for a moment with the door, but it was locked. By the time he was haring across the lawn towards her, Sarah Green was standing back looking down admiringly at her handiwork. He hardly dare look down but when he did he nearly cried with relief.
‘A rhododendron,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking down at it fondly. ‘Mike brought it back for me. I’ve always wanted one. It seems so … vicarage garden, somehow.’
Chris lowered his head and breathed slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth, to a count of ten. When the red mist was starting to clear, he spoke, low and steady. ‘So, that’s it then, is it? You found some lesbian porn on the vicarage computer, but he bought you a …’ he suddenly lost control and shouted in her face, ‘he bought you a … a fucking rhododendron! And that makes it all right, does it? Naked women all forgotten, because of a shrub?’
‘Don’t swear, please, Christopher,’ she said, as if he were twelve. ‘The neighbours might hear.’
He took a step back, amazed at her hypocrisy. ‘I’m sure if they don’t mind living next to a porn-addicted vicar, they won't mind a bit of profanity now and again. If I can remind you, I walked off down the drive this morning to the background music of two women …’
‘Chris! That really is enough!’ She leaned her spade against a small apple tree which was fighting for breathing space in the already overcrowded garden, a garden that needed another shrub like a fish needs a bicycle. She lowered her voice and moved closer. ‘Yes, you’re quite right, what you’re thinking.’
He looked mulish; she had always been able to do that, since he was a little boy.
‘I am a hypocrite. But I am also a hypocrite who needs a roof over her head and a man to lean on.’ She gave a laugh, but it was just a sound; there was no humour in it. ‘I don’t love Mike Green, as your sister has been heard to remark many times, perhaps the loudest at our wedding. I have never loved anyone except your father and that won't change until the day I die. But I have to live with someone, I just don’t do lonely. Despise me all you like, but don’t rock the boat. I’ve told Mike what I think of him which is best summed up by the phrase “not much”. He knows what he did was wrong …’ she stopped and wrinkled her nose and Chris saw through surprised eyes that his mother was still a pretty woman. He felt sorry for Mike, but, she was right, not much. He had bought the package and hadn’t bothered to check the contents. ‘Well, I may be overstating there. I don’t think in fact that he does know what he did was wrong. He knows I don’t like it. He knows not everyone does it. But he doesn’t really see how hurtful it is to me. We … well, I don’t have to trouble you with all that.’
Chris heaved a sigh of relief. Damn straight she didn’t – he had enough to cope with as it was without hearing bedroom confessions from his own mother.
‘So, anyway, long story short, we have agreed to a compromise.’ She smiled at him. He knew what that meant of old. ‘Which of course means that he does as I say. No porn sites. No porn magazines. No visiting … well, he says he hasn’t done that since we got married, but even so, it needed saying. As long as he sticks to all that, I won't shop him to the bishop.’ She started off across the lawn towards the house, with him in hot pursuit.
‘But, Mum … that’s just blackmail. Isn’t it?’ He looked at her, determined as ever, striding out across the grass. ‘Can you live like that?’
She turned round and looked at him. The usual errant lock of hair flopped over her forehead and she pushed it back with a grimy hand. ‘I don’t know. When I do, I’ll tell you. Deal?’
He walked up to her and put his arms around her. He could hardly speak for the love he suddenly felt for this woman, love he knew in his gut he would soon not be in a position to tell her about. ‘It’s a deal,’ he murmured, and had to clear his throat to stop the tears.
She leaned against him briefly, then broke away. ‘You’ll have to speak to him, you know,’ she said. ‘And … Chris … I don’t know how …’
‘You don’t know how to say this,’ he finished for her, ‘but I’ll have to go. Yes, I think I’d already decided that. I couldn’t stay a night anyway under a roof with that total arsehole.’ He held up a hand, stopping her protests. ‘No, sorry, I can't pay lip service any longer. He is an arsehole, Mum, and you know it. Anyway,’ he looked around the garden. It was a shame he had never really got round to doing his five miles a day. ‘Anyway, no time like the present. I’ll get my things.’
‘Darling!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘I don’t mean today …’
‘If not today, then when?’ he said. ‘Where is the … where is Mike? I’d like to shake him warmly by the throat before I go.’
Alarm flared in her eyes.
‘Joking. Just joking. I do want to give him fair warning of what will happen to him if he upsets you again, though. So, where is he?’
‘He went upstairs. To pray, as I understood it.’ She was straight faced and even her son couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
‘Well, call him down. I don’t want to talk to him on the landing. I’ll get my things after and then be o
n my way.’
‘I’ve … I’ve had a chat with Claire. She wants you to go and stay with her.’
‘Really? She wants me to go and stay.’
‘Oh, Chris. Will you two ever stop sniping at one another? You’re like children, sometimes. No, I will admit she didn’t say she wanted you to go and stay. But she did say you could, if you needed to.’
‘Ah, now that’s very different, isn’t it? I’ll see how I get on. I’ll let you know. I’ll wait in the study, shall I? For the arsehole?’
With a sigh, his mother went up the stairs, calling her husband as she reached the landing. Chris pushed the door of the study open but felt it was more than just a door into a rather bland and unprepossessing room. It was a door into the rest of his life and so far, he didn’t much like the view. He pulled a chair across the room and sat in it with as much aplomb as he could muster. He didn’t want to sit in the naughty chair and the vicar had his study arranged just so, with the spare chair across from his being a little lower and also in a bright spot from the lamp. The man had clearly watched an awful lot of Apprentice episodes. So, moving the chair across the room next to an occasional table to rest a casual arm on removed that advantage and levelled the playing field a little.
With a pounding of feet on the stairs, the vicar burst into the room, like a TV evangelist on some public broadcast station. He swung round behind the desk and leaned forward, hands clasped together and looked at Chris brightly for a moment. The computer was conspicuous by its absence.
‘Well, Chris,’ his stepfather said in jolly, kindergarten teacher tones, ‘Shall we pray together?’
‘No.’ Before that morning, Chris would have dutifully bowed his head and thought of nothing for a moment or two, but that ship had sailed.
The look on Mike Green’s face was enough to turn milk, but his voice was his usual faux-gentle sing-song. ‘You don’t mind if I do, I hope,’ he said and bowed his head, muttering.
Chris could only think one thing – sanctimonious git. But he stayed silent. The moral high ground was his position of choice for what was to come.
Eventually, the vicar raised his head and smiled encouragingly, if the nervous baring of his teeth could possibly be called a smile. ‘Now, Chris,’ he said, lacing his fingers more tightly together so that the knuckles shone white. ‘We have a lot to talk about.’
‘Not really,’ Chris said, slouching even more in his chair. He was trying not to behave like a truculent teenager, but this man just got him on the raw. ‘Let’s recap. Yes, I came home drunk. I had been out on a stag night, it is almost mandatory. Yes, I ruined your hanging baskets. But you have been accessing porn on the church computer. I think if you asked for a quick vote by your congregation on which sin was blackest, I don’t imagine there would be many votes for my little lapses, do you?’
The man behind the desk said nothing, but a small muscle began to tic beside his eye.
‘And also, to add to the detail in case anyone was in any doubt, I got drunk and committed petuniacide once. You, on the other hand, were on the porn sites … how often? Once a day? More than that? I can't think it would be less. And apparently, according to my mother, there are magazines and prostitutes in the mix as well. Lovely.’
‘In my defence …’
‘You have no defence.’ Chris had never actually told anyone off before and he was loving it. He felt the power surge through his body. ‘I’d love to hear it, though – just for the craic.’
‘In my defence, I was alone for a long time before I met your mother. And added to which …’
‘No!’ Chris raised a hand. Not the parents’ sex talk. He really didn’t need that. ‘If that’s all you’ve got, I don’t want to hear it. And also if I may pre-empt you; please don’t give me the I-think-it’s-time-you-moved-on speech. I’ve had it from my mother and I will be gone inside the hour. I won't say thank you for your hospitality, because the words would choke me. If there is a reason I will be sorry to go it is because I am leaving my mother on her own with you. But needs must when the devil drives and you can take that any way you like.’ With that, he got up and walked out of the room, resisting by the merest whisker the urge to punch the man’s lights out. Within the hour – very much inside the hour – he was walking down the drive, his bag over his shoulder, his black dog panting at his heels.
Why Megan found the weekends worse than the weekdays, she would never know. She had the odd day in work in the week, to break up the silent hours, but there was still small difference. A day was a day was a day. Get up. Feed Kyle. Deal with Kyle’s increasingly frequent tantrums. Put Kyle to bed. Go to bed herself, often more than a little squiffy on cheap wine. And the wine had to be really cheap; she had some savings from the money her grannie had left her, she had the money Chris had transferred but it was all dwindling. She would have to do something, soon. But money worries could wait. Each morning, she had more of the same, with possibly a slight worsening each sunrise. But even so, weekends were worse. Families out and about everywhere she looked, friends too busy with their families to make any time for her, not that she would ask. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in weeks; somehow the Monday Kyle-watch had just stopped happening and although it was driving her crazy to deal with his meltdown after every nursery session, it was preferable to having to look at those pursed and disapproving lips as they mouthed the words of criticism and spite that seemed to be the woman’s only vocabulary. Her father, as usual, sat immobile and silent in front of daytime television and for all the good he was, he might as well have been stuffed. In fact, for all she knew, he had been, stuffed and mounted for posterity years ago, on the day he was made redundant from the insurance office he had worked in since he left school. At least he was harmless; people often said of him he never said an unpleasant word. Megan would go further – he actually never said a word at all.
Sam was her rock, as she had always been. She had even offered to babysit Kyle, although Megan knew that she would actually rather babysit a room full of angry scorpions. If she had anywhere to go, she would have accepted, just to see her face. But she didn’t want to go anywhere and she was certainly not going to wander round town for a couple of hours, spending money she didn’t have, just so that she could make Sam squirm. So Sam would come to her, with a cold bottle of white in a bag and they would drink it and talk endlessly about Chris and what he did until Megan could scream.
As the weeks had gone on, the whole situation had taken on the feel of something she had once seen or read; it certainly couldn’t have happened to her, could it? She was too ordinary to have this kind of disaster visit her life. If she had ever thought about the future, it always featured a wedding – she in frothy white, Chris in morning dress, with an angelic Kyle, behaving perfectly, as ring-bearer. Perhaps even a sweet little girl, just toddling, their second and much discussed child, as bridesmaid. At no point did she see herself like this, a tear-stained, muddled wreck with a child who was fast becoming the kid no one invited to parties and just one friend in the whole world.
And weekends were the worst. They were the days when she would have had a lie-in and hear her boys creating havoc in the kitchen. They were the days she hankered after, yearned towards as though they were the Holy Grail. And yet she knew, if she was being honest, that she could actually count their occurrence on the fingers of one hand. She just didn’t have that kind of family. Had never had that kind of family. She stood in the kitchen, no mess in sight, no smelly socks, no muddy shoes, no Chris. She closed her eyes and tried to see his face. She listened for his voice but realised, with a sinking heart, that his face was growing fuzzy around the edges and that all she could hear him say was ‘I can't help it. I can't help it. I can't help it,’ on and on, round and round in a loop. She couldn’t bear it that they were the last words she would hear him say and picked up her phone to ring him, to tell him to come home, that they could work it out.
Then, by that strange alchemy of the mobile phone, it rang in her hand.
>
‘Hello?’ Her throat was tight with tension but she tried to sound normal.
‘Megs? It’s Sam. What are you up to this evening?’
She tried to think of a snappy answer, but there wasn’t one to hand. ‘Usual. Kyle. Telly.’
‘Well, stuff that.’ Sam clearly had something planned. ‘I’ve found you a sitter, lovely woman, got loads of grandkids, she’ll be good for Kyle, a new face.’ The unspoken phrase ‘and not your mother’ rang in the air. ‘I won't take no for an answer, Megs. Her name is Lily and she’ll be with you at six. Time to get to know Kyle while you get your gladrags on. We’re off out on the town. One of the girls here is getting married next week. We’re having a bit of a do for her – not that she’ll get much out of it, she’s pregnant, silly bitch, but what can you do? They don’t listen. So it won't be a late one. I’ve told Brian …’
‘Brian? I thought …’
‘I’ll fill you in tonight. I’ve told him I won't be home. I thought I could crash at yours. Don’t make the spare bed up, we can have a girlie night, share the old double, natter, see the dawn come up. Remember those times?’
Despite the fact that it seemed like something that had happened to her before the dawn of time, she did indeed remember those times, with an empty longing. She nodded, then remembered she was on the phone. ‘Yes.’ She couldn’t trust herself to say more.
‘Great. That’s sorted then. Gladrags. Six. You’re going out on the pull, my girl!’ And that was it. Sam had gone, to do whatever her weekends were full of; Megan smiled softly to herself. She assumed that that was presumably Brian.
Chris’s stomach was still rumbling when he got back into the city centre and he decided that he would treat himself – if that was the word – to a burger. It wouldn’t make a hole in his bank balance and he was rather tired of his mother’s gargantuan meals anyway. But he was really hungry for the first time for ages and it was in the mood for some grease in a bun. He sat as long as he could bear in the garish interior, his ears assailed by what sounded like a thousand screaming children. In the corner, a clown with his damp desperation making his makeup run, was entertaining a birthday party.
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