The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  ‘Dad’s at a conference,’ said Georgia. ‘Not back till tomorrow.’ She had begun to look fragile again. She picked at her dark nail polish. On her little fingernail, there was barely room for a brushstroke. They sat in silence for a while.

  ‘It’s my long-term goal to be, erm, man of a house one day,’ Christopher said.

  Cynthia marched back into the room and slammed a packet of cigarettes on the table in front of Georgia. ‘Right. Georgia. These. On the floor of the closet,’ Cynthia said, the pitch of her voice uneven, breaking.

  Christopher reached across and took the packet, slid it under the table. ‘Erm, erm, in the pocket of Christopher,’ he said.

  Cynthia and Georgia continued to stare at each other. Georgia’s glasses, even with the lenses thinned, magnified her eyes. She was completely still.

  Cynthia squinted at her daughter and then turned to Christopher. ‘Christopher, if you want to smoke, please do so at the bottom of the garden. It is slabbed, so you won’t get muddy. Your boots were getting wet, so I put them on some newspaper in the utility room.’

  ‘Oh right. I don’t really fancy a cigarette right now. They’re great and everything, but I’m not in the mood.’

  Cynthia left the room again, and Christopher turned to Georgia and laughed. Georgia did not laugh. She wore the same stunned expression as she had when her mother banged the packet of cigarettes on the table. The same expression she had when Christopher introduced himself. Christopher stopped laughing and nodded seriously. He leaned over to Georgia and whispered, ‘Erm. There’s nothing cool about emphysema.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Georgia said, and left Christopher alone at the empty table. A few moments later, Cynthia came in, her eyes rimmed red. The colour clashed with her silvery blue eye makeup. ‘Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s only early,’ Christopher said.

  She looked towards the stairs and waited until he stood.

  THIRTY

  For the first few seconds of the day, between opening her eyes and getting out of bed, Maggie felt better. She was happy to be anywhere but the Pylon Inn. She rose, and walked to the window. Looking out, she saw the shell of the aviary. She did not panic immediately, but became conscious of various fragments of conversations and memories, all of them unreliable.

  Maggie dressed quickly and ran out into the steady rain. She crossed the muddy field, stooping to roll up her jeans as she walked.

  The aviary looked like a splintered crown. Between the blackened props Maggie could see the deformed metals and plastics of the bow perches and tools. Feathers stuck to the tar.

  Any hopes Maggie might have had about the safety of the hawks were extinguished when Louisa answered the door, haggard and red-eyed, her neck covered in patches of raw skin like scraped brick. Maggie put her arms around her. She barely noted Louisa’s rigid resistance. ‘What happened?’ Maggie said, smelling the staleness of Louisa’s clothes.

  ‘It’s not completely clear,’ Louisa said in one tone.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Diamond got out, but I lost him.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Maggie said, beginning to cry.

  ‘So am I.’

  Maggie tried to turn her friend so they could go into the cottage, but Louisa did not budge. ‘Louisa what are you going to do?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing.’

  ‘You have to start again.’

  Louisa bowed her head and let out a brief, crooked laugh.

  ‘I can help you,’ Maggie whispered. ‘I want to.’

  ‘Nobody can help me. I’ve let my guard down recently and this is the result.’ She gestured to the ground with her left hand.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I’m not fit to be around people.’

  ‘Louisa, come on,’ Maggie said. She looked around her. She could hear the animals. ‘Where’s Christopher? At college?’

  Louisa shrugged. The gesture would not have troubled Maggie, but then their eyes met. Maggie took a deep breath, her mind reaching for something that she could not quite articulate. ‘Is he alright?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know you’d be back so soon, actually. So he’s at his mother’s.’

  Maggie did not understand. ‘His mother’s? You don’t mean Cynthia, surely? Why is he there?’ There was a sharpness in Maggie’s voice, and Louisa returned it.

  ‘Because I took him there.’

  ‘And why did you do that?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ Again she gestured at the ground, more vehement this time.

  Maggie stepped away and looked at the aviary. ‘He did that?’

  Louisa shrugged again. ‘A lot happened last night.’

  ‘But Louisa, he wouldn’t have done that. What happened?’

  ‘Like I said. A lot.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done that. Not on purpose.’

  ‘What has purpose got to do with it? I’m not responsible for him. I couldn’t be, after that. They’re all dead. I was lenient. Anyway.’

  ‘Anyway, what? He’s not a well boy, Louisa. You don’t know what this kind of situation could do to him. His mother didn’t want him. She didn’t even want to see him. It’s been fifteen years.’

  ‘Look. He’s too frightened to hurt anybody, and he’s got too much self-interest to hurt himself.’

  ‘Fuck you. Fuck you for even thinking that.’

  Maggie began to run back towards the big house, slipping and sticking in the mud. Louisa, a second of outrage still left in her, took a step out onto her path and shouted, ‘He’s old enough to know better.’ Maggie did not offer the obvious reply.

  * * *

  As she stood before Cynthia Driscoll at the door of the house, Maggie recalled David describing her as ‘a bit icy’. It appeared that he had been surrounded by such women; women with complicated roots of bitterness stretching back before Maggie was even born.

  ‘I thought he’d probably just gone back to you,’ Cynthia said.

  ‘He hasn’t,’ Maggie said, and the woman almost shrugged. Maggie heaved the suitcase out of the door.

  With a jolt, Maggie realised that Christopher was this woman’s son, not hers, that the exchange was all backwards. ‘So you don’t have any idea where he is?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Look, he’s a grown boy. I’m sure he’ll be fine. You can tell Louisa that I took him in, though, so . . .’ She raised her hands, as if to suggest that she had done her duty, that the problem was no longer hers.

  Maggie had no time to argue. She tried to stem her growing sense of panic. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. As Cynthia closed the door, Maggie scanned the fields around the estate. Her vision of this landscape was blighted by lack of familiarity, and the rising waters, which had begun to rob the plain of landmarks. Cynthia’s house was on high land, but lower down the villages were brown, the roofs of cars humped like pills in a blister pack. She hoped to God that Christopher wasn’t drunk.

  She started from Cynthia’s road and drove towards home, snaking through the parallel streets at a slow pace. If Cynthia had woken at 6 a.m. to find him gone, he could have spent the night outside. Normally, Maggie would have willed him to keep to the country, away from the towns where a boy like him could find trouble, but the flood plain was a death-trap.

  Back home she spoke to Philip and the other staff, none of whom had seen Christopher. Philip filled in the details of the fire. ‘Awful business,’ he said, and Maggie could see that he meant it sincerely.

  She went to Christopher’s room again, looking for clues. The wardrobe had been hastily emptied of clothes, leaving behind videotapes, childhood books, pornography. Shirts hung raggedly by collars where Louisa had tried to tear them free; some garments had dropped to the floor. The room smelled of Christopher’s unwashed hair and the residual traces of David’s aftershave. Clags of dirt were caught in the fibres of the thin carpet.

/>   Christopher’s bed was lumpy and unmade, the impression of his chin still on the pillow. Maggie leaned over the bed now and buried her face in the covers. Her grief was in the floors and ceilings of this house – the memories and signs of people who were too rarely in the same room as she was. On those summer nights when David had out-drunk her and she lay in bed, she would feel the resonant hum of his voice caught in the floorboards beneath her. If she felt too hot beneath the sheets, she would lie on the floor with her cheek against the vibrations.

  And on those days when she came in from her first two hours’ work out in the fields she would hear David getting dressed upstairs – the three pumps of the hairspray. She knew that his eyes would be narrowed and he would have one hand shielding them, as though he were looking out to sea.

  One morning, after he had gone, she had woken to find the cover on the attic had slid across slightly, leaving a thin slat of darkness. It had made her feel helpless for reasons she could barely describe.

  She knew she could not lose anyone else.

  * * *

  Adam tried to drive out of Detton, through the tunnel of pines. It was mid-afternoon, and the weather kept him at a funereal ten miles per hour. He felt a familiar sense of oppressive agency, some giant hand on the roof of his car. The windscreen was just a blue wash-out. He was struck by a sense of physical futility, and so stopped at the Strutt Arms on the outskirts of the village, got himself a pint and a window seat, and looked out on the crushing folds of the weir. The water was almost up at the bridge.

  The pub was empty but for a couple of bar staff playing the fruity. Adam was reading the explanation of water-powered mills when his phone rang – a withheld number. Another recommend, probably. There was always work to throw yourself into, its sweet disgrace.

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Erm. Howdy. Is that Adam Gregory?’

  ‘Christopher?’

  ‘Erm. No. It’s a sexy lady and I just wondered if I could have a erm, erm, home visit.’

  ‘Where are you, pal?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were an American Gigolo. I did think it was a bit strange that my new arch-nemesis Smedley had a boyfriend. Given her appearance and personality. Now it all makes sense. Erm. Does it mean I’m off the hook, at all?’

  ‘Youth. Did you really do the aviary?’

  ‘Eh? I put my hand on her, erm, leg, but it was just an affectionate gesture between, erm, friends,’ Christopher said.

  ‘What are you talking about? Where are you?’

  ‘Two-faced Smedley dumped me at my mother’s.’

  ‘Your mother’s? You mean Maggie?’

  ‘No. How could Maggie be my mother? Erm. We’re practically classmates.’

  ‘Oh,’ Adam said. He thought hard. Louisa had told him about Christopher’s mother. Not good.

  ‘But I’ve buggered off, anyway. I’ve decided I don’t really like the bourgeois life. I could probably live quite comfortably off the land.’

  ‘If you could find it.’

  ‘Yes, it’s not very, erm, clement out. Erm. I hate that saying: “it’s raining stair rods”. If it was raining stair rods, we’d all be killed. It’s the magic of the greenwood for me, from now on. It’s the only place I really fit in.’

  Adam thought of Louisa, of the birds. Where would Christopher stay if he could not come home? ‘Listen, do you fancy a pint, youth? I’m in Strutt.’

  ‘Erm. No thanks. I’ve things to do. Besides, I don’t drink, now. It’s impure.’

  ‘Is that because of what happened the other night?’

  ‘Erm. Why does everyone keep banging on about the other night? I touched a woman’s leg. It’s not like I murdered anyone. It’s not like I’m a bloody, erm, prostitute.’

  ‘You don’t know what happened to the aviary.’ It just occurred to him. It was not a question.

  ‘Erm. What?’

  ‘You didn’t go in there? Yesterday morning? The bird house?’

  ‘I don’t even know where it, erm, is. I went to college yesterday morning. Erm. I left at the crack of dawn.’

  Adam swore under his breath.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ said Christopher.

  ‘The aviary burned down, lad.’

  ‘Oh right.’ Christopher said. He was silent for a moment. ‘Louisa must have gone ballistic. Oh. Right.’

  Adam put his elbow on the table, which was sticky with cleaning fluid. He put his head in his hand.

  ‘I don’t think I need my Zuclopenthixol any more,’ Christopher said. ‘I feel just fine. A little bit dreamy, maybe.’

  ‘Listen pal, just tell me where you are.’

  ‘Phone box,’ Christopher said, giving a grizzly laugh.

  ‘Yeah, but . . . Look. Y’ought to come home. You can’t hang around out there. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Erm. I’m not coming home. What’s home anyway? I can make my home in the forest.’

  ‘You’ll catch your death.’

  ‘That’s a good one. Erm. I like that one.’

  ‘You can kip at mine.’

  ‘No thanks. I hate it when people say “ring off” as well. You don’t ring off. Erm. What is it that rings when you hang up?’

  ‘Eh?’

  The line went dead.

  ‘Fucking Ada,’ Adam said to himself. The two bartenders looked round briefly, but a tinkling crescendo from the fruit machine regained their attention. Adam finished his pint quickly but then realised he had nowhere to go. He thought of what Christopher had said, and called the fire service.

  ‘I wonder if you know anything about the fire up at Drum Hill,’ he said.

  ‘With the birds?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Nasty one. You from papers?’

  ‘No. I was there. I called it in. Do you know how it started yet?’

  ‘’Lectrical fire, that one. Likely as not. Can’t say for definite how it cracked off.’

  ‘Oh. It wasn’t from a fag or oat like that, then?’

  ‘No way. Wood were sodden. Wire and water, that. Been a few on ’em, this last few days.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘One a them things, I’m afraid.’

  Adam hung up. He checked his phone for details, but there were no clues as to where Christopher had called from. He thought of speaking to Maggie, but what good would that do, if she was away? It struck him, also, that she would not answer the phone if his name came up on her caller ID. Most people, he realised, probably did not assign a real name to his number in their phone memories. He had forgotten, temporarily, what he was to people. It hadn’t really mattered before.

  He caught sight of himself in the window. The thought of being in love – he had shot it out of the sky, before now. But he pictured Louisa in that field, mud all over her clothes, the smell of cinders and rain. The feelings were like nothing he had ever imagined, and he knew he could not change them.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Christopher had been unable to sleep, for one thing. The room that Cynthia put him in had clearly been Georgia’s when she was a little girl. Rather than redecorate, they had simply started her teenage room somewhere else, and left the childhood one behind. A globular sky-blue lantern with rainbows on it surrounded the lightbulb. The remnants of half-peeled stickers glittered on the walls, and Christopher noted the assortment of wooden boxes with keyholes. By the bed, one of these small boxes was open, and four dried-out seahorses – two big, two small – lay on tissue paper inside. The bed itself was a narrow single, and Christopher’s feet hung off the end. This did not trouble him so much, but he was accustomed to the huge room at Drum Hill, and here it felt like the walls were caving in on him.

  On his way to bed that night he had heard Georgia in her room, crying on the phone. Perhaps she had called her father, Mike. Perhaps she had called a friend. Perhaps she had just been talking out loud, as he sometimes did, though Christopher doubted that. He looked at the wooden boxes around the room, and tried to imagine Georgia hiding things in them, as a little
girl. It was difficult. What was more bewildering was the thought that, as Georgia had played in this room, Christopher himself, at the very same time, had played only twenty or so miles away. When she was four, he would have been nine, still at primary school with his special tutor. When he was fourteen, wishing for wet dreams, and dangling his feet in the brook, she would have been eight. A whole life going on parallel to his own. It was difficult to imagine.

  He didn’t know her, but then again she didn’t know him. For a few sad moments he experienced the situation from her point of view: the teenage years were a time of great upheaval, and the last thing you needed was some massive psycho turning up claiming to be your half-brother.

  He thought of the woods back home. They were lush and junglish in the rain. With all the things Robin Hood stole, he could have redistributed the wealth and still had enough left over to settle in a decent castle. But he didn’t. Sometimes it felt good just to knock the walls down and get to somewhere that’s been there forever.

  Christopher rose from the bed. He had not removed his clothes, just rolled his sleeves up to let his itchy forearms get some air. He tried to lift his suitcase, but it was too much of a burden, so he walked downstairs without it. In his coat pocket, he still had Louisa’s US Air Force T-shirt, which he had stolen after vomiting in her bathroom, back when they were friends.

  He walked through the heavy smoothness of the house, retrieved his boots from the utility room, carried them to the front door, and quietly put them on. On the driveway he turned and raised his hand in a stiff goodbye salute. As he walked away, he felt a twitch of light fall on the pavement, just for a second.

  The night had not been so bad. He had a student bus pass, and once he got to Nottingham he had just sailed up and down the A52 on the Red Arrow, watching the rowdy young drunks swap cities every half-hour. The Red Arrow smelled of sticky sweet perfume and sticky sweet alcohol, mint sauce and red onion, and hair gel – the kind with bubbles in it. Christopher recoiled from the distorted appearance of a boy with a stretched condom pulled over his head, the seriousness of his face as he waved to the cars on the road long after his friends had stopped laughing. At one point, a lad wearing dog tags and a gladiatorial belt approached Christopher, and asked that most dangerous of questions between Nottingham and Derby: