by Graham Joyce
Genevieve appeared in the doorway. “You’d better come in.”
“What now? ”
“It’s not the kids. It’s Richie.”
With the malfunctioning lamp illuminating, then shadowing, his face, he blinked at her. “What about him?”
“He’s here right now. You’d better come.”
Genevieve turned and walked back to the house and Peter followed her indoors, with a steel one-seventy shoe in his hand.
There in the kitchen, pale-faced, shivering and seated at the kitchen table, he found Richie. Peter closed the door behind him.
Richie didn’t look up. “She’s gone,” he said.
“What?” Peter said.
“She’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“Tara. Who do you think? She’s just gone.”
“What do you mean she’s just gone?”
“What I say.”
“Where’s she gone?”
“No idea.”
“Fuck,” Peter said.
“Daddy swore,” Josie said. Genevieve turned and shepherded her away and into the living room. Josie protested all the way. She wanted to stay with the visitor; she’d dropped the knife, so it was her visitor. Voices were raised. Then the living room door slammed shut and Genevieve slipped back into the kitchen, silent as a shadow.
Peter sat down next to Richie. “Did she say anything?”
“No. She left a note.” Richie stuck a hand into his back pocket and brought out a scrap of paper. He slung it across the table. Peter read it carefully and put it back on the table. Genevieve snatched it up, read it quickly, and also put it back on the table.
“I don’t believe it,” Peter said.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” Genevieve said.
“Somebody once tell you you can mend everything with tea, Gen?” Richie said.
“Give him a bloody brandy,” Peter said.
“You give him a bloody brandy,” said Gen.
“I don’t want a bloody brandy. I want Tara. All I ever wanted was Tara.”
“Has she taken her things?” Genevieve wanted to know.
“She didn’t have much. But what she had is gone.”
Peter picked up the note again and studied it closely, as if a more revealing message might have magically appeared on the paper in the intervening moments. It offered no more than it had before:
Richie, I’m saving you. For once in my life I’m not being selfish, though you will think I am. I’m saving you from myself. Tara.
Peter put the note down again and laid his horseshoe across it, as if to stop it from blowing away in a wind. He picked up the phone and called his parents. He spoke with Mary and quickly established that Tara had only just been there to see them and had said her good-byes. After a brief conversation he rang off. He reported to the others that she’d been collected by a taxicab.
“Not a fuckin’ white horse this time, then,” Richie said.
“Apparently not.”
“Why did she have to come back in the first place?” Richie protested. “I was perfectly all right as I was.” No one said anything. Then Richie said quietly, “No, I wasn’t.”
“Let me at least give you something to eat,” Genevieve said, her maternal instincts working overtime. “I have to say you look awful.”
“I’m not hungry, Gen. I couldn’t eat a thing. Honest.”
Then Genevieve remembered Richie’s hospital appointment. “Don’t you have to have another scan? Before the biopsy? Isn’t it today?”
“Tomorrow. To hell with that.”
“Not a chance,” Genevieve said. “Whatever has happened with Tara, you’re going down to that hospital if I have to drag you there. Peter will take you.”
“Yes, I’ll take you down there,” Peter said. “I’ll wait with you.”
Richie was about to argue when the kitchen door opened. It was Zoe, pretty and vivacious and bright-eyed, streaming the perfume of shampoo from the shower, utterly oblivious to the conversation that had taken place in the kitchen. “Hey, Richie!” she said, with a huge smile for him. “I didn’t know you were here!”
“Hi, darlin’,” Richie croaked.
“Know those chords you taught me? I’ve been practicing them. Over and over. I’ve got it down really good. Well, not bad. And I love that guitar!”
“That’s great, darlin’.”
“Can I show you? Can I get the guitar and show you?”
“It’s not the time, Zoe,” said Genevieve.
“It’s okay,” Riche said. “I want to hear.”
“Now is really not the time,” Peter said firmly, looking hard at Zoe.
Richie stood up. “Never mind that. Get your guitar, Zoe. I wanna hear what you’ve got.”
Zoe looked at Peter and then at her mother, now realizing she’d gate-crashed a crisis. But Richie insisted and at last Genevieve nodded briefly at her. Zoe went upstairs to get her guitar, and Richie, without invitation, made his way through to the living room. The children were all in there: Amber, Jack, and Josie. Richie slumped on the sofa and told the kids to turn off the TV because Zoe was going to play. Sensing an unfamiliar mood, Jack complied and snapped off the TV with the remote control.
Zoe returned with her instrument, took a seat, and self-consciously twiddled with the tuning on the guitar. Peter and Genevieve stood near the door. Zoe blushed. Then she started to strum a sequence of chords.
What she played wasn’t complicated, but it was exactly as Richie had taught her, accurate and in good time. She repeated the sequence, becoming more confident, and Richie let out a little laugh of pleasure. Zoe felt encouraged to strum louder. Then Richie’s shoulders were shaking and he was sobbing quietly. Zoe, engrossed in her performance, continued to play. Then, in the middle of her strumming, she glanced up to see all the children’s eyes not on her but on Richie. Richie had collapsed forward, one hand squeezing his eyes shut, his shoulders quivering until at last he sobbed aloud.
Zoe stopped playing.
Genevieve stepped forward and put her hand on Richie’s shoulder.
“God,” Zoe said. “Was it really that bad?”
PETER SAT GLUMLY IN the waiting room of the X-ray department of the Leicester Royal Infirmary. There were a few other people in the waiting room, either patients waiting for scans or the relatives of patients who were waiting for scans. Everyone seemed to be dazed, half asleep. Richie had been in with the radiologist for a long time—too much time, Peter thought. In that period an elderly person had come and gone on a trolley pushed by a tattooed porter, and two policemen had turned up escorting a shirtless man with his arm in a sling. Both the elderly patient and the police prisoner had been processed through the system in the time that Richie had been with the radiologist. Peter hoped this didn’t mean something very bad.
Peter had also used his waiting time to phone his parents again. He’d stepped outside to call them. Mary was philosophical; he recognized that she had slowly been hardening against Tara, and he wasn’t surprised. He detected something in her voice akin to relief. Peter also spoke to his father; Dell, on the other hand, was distraught all over again but was putting on a cheery manner. Dell suggested that Tara would be back again when she was ready.
Somehow, deep down, Peter knew otherwise.
He also called Genevieve. They hadn’t had much time to discuss Tara’s departure out of Richie’s earshot. Peter said what a bitch she was. Genevieve told him not to be too hard because there might have been things about Richie and Tara’s relationship about which they knew nothing, and about which Tara might have been reminded all too keenly.
Peter returned to the waiting room. Richie still hadn’t been released. He closed his eyes. More time passed. He wasn’t sure whether he’d drifted asleep when he became aware of someone standing over him.
It was Richie. “There’s a problem,” he said.
Peter blinked himself awake. “What kind of problem?”
Richie sniffed and wrinkled h
is nose. “Well. It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeh, it’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“The thing. Tumor.”
Peter thought he might still be sleeping. He rubbed a broad hand across his face. “What do you mean, it’s gone?”
“I can’t explain it. Neither can they. They want to do me all over again.”
“Do you again?”
“Scan.”
Peter stood up. “Talk sense, Richie. Please.”
The senior consultant came out, an intense man with a close-cropped beard and a haircut almost like a monk’s tonsure. “Are you ready?” he asked Richie.
“What’s going on?” Peter asked.
“Can he come?” Richie asked the consultant. “It’s a bit hard to take in.”
The consultant turned the full beam of his gaze on to Peter. He stroked his short beard. “I don’t see why not.”
There was an office adjacent to the radiography studio. The consultant led them to a computer monitor. He had two images on the screen. He pointed to the image on the right. “There’s your friend’s scan from a few days ago. Here’s the tumor: size of a bloody grape.” Then he pointed at the left-hand image. “Here’s today’s image. No tumor.”
“A mistake,” Peter said.
“Exactly what I thought,” said the consultant. “We don’t normally collate the images at once but we do check to make sure the equipment has been running properly and the radiographer picked it up at once before calling me. At first I thought—as she did—that the images must be from two different people. But look here, and here, and here. There is no possibility that these scans aren’t taken from the same brain.”
“Well, where’s it gone?” Peter said. “Where’s the tumor gone?”
The consultant bunched a hand in front of his mouth and looked hard at Peter. He didn’t have an answer.
“It can’t just go!” Peter said.
“I want to check it all again,” said the consultant.
“It can’t just disappear!”
“I’ve never seen it in all my career,” said the consultant, “but sometimes it happens and it’s called spontaneous remission.” He turned to Richie. “Do you believe in God?”
“Nope,” Richie said flatly. “And I ain’t about to start.”
“Me neither,” said the consultant. “Thing is, if you don’t believe in miracles, you’re left only with the beautiful and unsolvable mystery.”
“I’ll take that,” Richie said, “if it means the tumor might have gone.”
The consultant appeared to smile and frown at the same time. “Shall we get on with repeating the scan?”
“I’m ready,” Richie said. “You all right waiting for me, Peter?”
“I’m right outside the door, brother,” Peter said. “I’m right outside.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Come live by the great moon
That rules the strong tide
Climb up on my horse love
And be my sweet bride.
KATE RUSBY, “Sweet Bride”
A couple of weeks or so after Tara’s second disappearance the family took a winter afternoon’s walk in the Outwoods. Peter and Genevieve were there with Amber and Josie. Jack was there, too, even though Peter had said no, don’t be so bloody silly, you can’t take your air rifle. Richie was there, having become a regular face at The Old Forge. He carried Josie on his shoulders through the woods. Perhaps more extraordinary was that Zoe wanted to be there, too, and she’d dragged her dreadlocked boyfriend along. Dreadlocked boyfriend was very happy to be there because he thought Richie was cool. He’d seen Richie play a set at The White Horse.
Word had got around among those in the know that the old muso had come back to life and was playing fresh material for the first time in a decade. It was standing room only at The Phantom Coach. Everyone in the local music world nodded sagely and said, Richie, yeh, that Richie, he knows his way around a guitar; yeh, that Richie, that’s a class act. For some reason everyone claimed to be familiar with his music of old; and for some reason everyone wanted to know him.
As for Richie himself, he was still hurting badly over Tara, but he was working on a song to express the sentiment that the second hurt never wounded like the first. There were lines about a scar covering up an old scar. The song wasn’t ready yet, but he was working on it. More miraculous than songs, however, was the disappearance of his tumor, and with it the headaches. The awful blinding migraines that had arrived with Tara had vanished along with her. There was an extraordinary coincidence to it all, and one that Richie didn’t like to spend too long thinking about, but for some reason it was a thought that wouldn’t leave him alone.
His subsequent brain scans had revealed nothing. It all seemed like a bad dream. There was no evidence to show that there ever had been a tumor of any kind. The sum total of medical science, expert opinion, and extensive doctoral experience had nothing to say about what had happened other than “Be thankful.”
He was thankful, as thankful as it was possible to be without actually being on his knees. Beyond his emotional hurt he saw the world with rinsed eyes. A new light poured into his life and it made time slow. What’s more, Richie had found himself a complete family, and he’d been adopted into it. He’d supped at The Old Forge frequently since Tara had left, and he liked being around. When the incessant chatter and knockabout behavior and bickering got too much for him, he just left without a word, only to appear another evening after Peter had finished work.
“Has Richie gone?” Genevieve might say.
Someone in the house might answer.
No one seemed to mind or to find his intermittent presence an intrusion on the family. Genevieve cooked a little more food or packaged up leftovers for him to take home, an arrangement he was very happy with. She was on a mission to fatten him up and get him to eat healthily. If she found him skulking outside smoking a cigarette she took the ciggie out of his mouth and crushed it under her foot.
“No smoking anywhere on the property,” she said.
“Fuck! It’s like a prison regime round here.”
“No, it’s not. You can smoke in prison. Are you hungry? Let me get you something.”
Peter was very happy to have him around. He was fun. He tried to teach the kids how to charm rats and mice away from the property. He said Tara had taught him and since the day Tara had exercised her powers in his kitchen, he’d never seen a mouse. Everyone was skeptical.
But he and Peter had twenty years of conversation and experiences to catch up on, and Peter had as many years of guilt to exorcise. He’d already committed himself to becoming Richie’s gig driver: after all, Richie had a drunk-driving charge coming up and was about to lose his driver’s license for a while. Peter also hired Richie to give regular guitar lessons to Zoe. They had an argument about it.
“I ain’t taking your money. If I’d asked for cash for guitar lessons twenty years ago you’d never let me hear the end of it.”
“It isn’t twenty years ago.”
“You’d have called me a capitalist hyena or somethin’ o’ that order.”
“Well, you better take it and look happy.”
“A running dog of the merchant classes. A lackey.”
“We’ll pay you a proper hourly rate.”
“You can fuck off with that. If I want to teach Zoe it’s up to me. An imperialist dog.”
“I’m not having that. If you’re not paid then you can always make an excuse and slink off, can’t you? Not doing it this week, sorry. Bit busy. Got something on. I know what you’re like.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do. I want her to have proper structured lessons, paid for and accounted for.”
“What do you mean, accounted for? I’ve never done accounts in my life and I’m not starting now.”
It took Genevieve to shame them into stopping. “Are you two still arguing about that? For God’s sake!” In truth, they weren�
��t arguing about the teaching of music at all; and she knew it.
They walked through the Outwoods that winter afternoon, Josie still perched on Richie’s shoulders, the two hounds bounding and crisscrossing the tracks ahead of them. There were no bluebells; only the rust-colored ghosts of dried bracken and brambles, plus a primal odor of wet leaves and mud underfoot. They arrived at the ancient protruding crags of green and gray rock, speckled with lichen turned the color of marmalade by the winter temperatures.
“That’s where she said she sat,” Peter said, and they all stopped and looked at the small and mysterious outcrop of stones.
There was a moment of communal silence, as if they half expected the stones to begin to hum, or to pulsate, or to advertise their presence in some way. But there was only the penetrating stillness of the damp woods, until it was disturbed by the shrill call of a crow.
Genevieve shivered. She looked around her. “Where’s Jack?” she said.
He was missing from the pack. Everyone looked around for Jack. He wasn’t there.
“Jack!” Genevieve called.
The woods breathed a hollowness back at them.
Genevieve felt a thrill of alarm. “Did anyone see him?”
“No,” said Amber.
“No,” said Josie.
“I think he drifted off that way,” Zoe’s boyfriend said. “He followed the dogs.”
Peter looked nervously at Richie. Genevieve was already striding in the direction indicated. She called again. “Jack!”
There he was, standing on a slight rise, partially obscured by a second outcrop of rock. He was gazing out across the woods, where the trees and the bushes grew thickest. The trees were mostly bare but the dense bramble offered plenty of cover. The two dogs were alert, too, and motionless, gazing at the same spot, as if waiting for some tiny movement there that would release them into the thicket.
His mother ran to him and hugged him from behind.
“What?” Jack said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” his mother said, feeling both foolish and relieved. “Stupid. I thought I’d lost you for a moment.”
“I’m thirteen!” Jack protested.
“Yes.” His mother was embarrassed now. “What were you looking at?”