‘Joy Division are a band,’ Charlie told her, trying not to sound scornful. ‘You haven’t heard of them?’
‘I didn’t listen to pop music as a teenager. My school friends all watched Top of the Pops, but it was banned in our house, effectively.’
‘What do you mean “effectively”?’
Ruth sighed. ‘My parents never actually told me I couldn’t do anything. Their particular brand of mind-control was far too subtle for that. Somehow I just knew I had to pretend not to want to do the things they’d disapprove of.’ She looked up at Charlie. ‘Were your parents strict?’
‘I thought so at the time. They tried to stop me from pursuing my hobbies: smoking fags, getting hammered, taking boys I hardly knew up to my bedroom.’
Charlie didn’t want to talk about her teenage years, but there was an avid look in Ruth’s eyes. ‘Fights aplenty. My sister was the good one-didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t screw around. Never challenged the regime, thereby making it look fair, and shafting me in the process. Her greatest triumph was to defy medical science and single-handedly defeat ovarian cancer. I can’t even give up smoking.’
Ruth was nodding. Keep your fucking mouth shut, Charlie ordered herself. She felt an urgent need to take back some of the poison she’d released. ‘It’s horrible having to admit your parents were probably right,’ she said. ‘Without Mum and Dad’s interventions, I’d have been mainlining cheap cider and hosting orgies every night of the week, especially school nights.’
‘There were no rows in my house,’ said Ruth. ‘There was only ever one opinion. I never heard my mother and father disagree about anything.’
‘Well…’ Charlie cast about for something to say, feeling uncomfortable, wondering how they’d ended up here. She and Ruth weren’t friends, swapping confidences. What would Ruth expect in exchange for her unhappy childhood stories? No, that was the wrong way to look at it. What might Ruth offer in return, if Charlie showed herself willing to act as a sounding board? There were still a lot of questions she wanted to ask; it would help if Ruth was favourably disposed. ‘Whenever I catch a bit of those Supernanny-style programmes, that’s what they seem to advise,’ she said. ‘Parents need to back each other up, not undermine one another.’
‘That’s so wrong,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘If a child never sees its parents disagree, how’s it supposed to learn that it’s okay to have your own mind? I grew up thinking that if I ever said, “I disagree with you”, the sky would fall down. My parents only ever read the Bible or biographies-ideally of Christian martyrs-so I had to pretend I did too. I hid my real books where they’d never find them. I used to be sick with envy when I heard my friends scream at their parents that they hated them, when I heard their mums and dads scream back, “As long as you’re under my roof, you’ll live by my rules.” At least my friends could be honest about what they wanted to do.’
Christians, thought Charlie: pure evil. The Romans had the right idea throwing them to the lions. What a pity she’d omitted that line from her engagement party speech. She’d barely skimmed the surface of controversial; Simon had massively overreacted.
‘I lied to you on Friday because I needed to,’ said Ruth. She picked up her tea and took a sip. ‘I don’t disapprove of lying. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if there’s an unreasonable constraint in your life stopping you being the person you want to be.’
‘How’s your relationship with your parents now?’ Charlie asked.
‘I don’t see them, not any more. We haven’t spoken since I left Lincoln. After years of being too scared to do it, I finally broke their heart. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘that’s not what I did. I put myself out of harm’s way, that’s all. It’s up to them if they choose to allow their heart to break.’
Charlie noted the singular, used twice in rapid succession: heart, not hearts.
Ruth said, ‘Some people choose never to see themselves in the mirrors you hold up for them. That’s their choice. I assume it’s what my parents have chosen. I’ve got a PO box address-it was in the letter I sent them when I moved to Spilling. They’ve never used it.’
‘They live in Lincoln?’ Charlie asked. No wonder Ruth had got the hell out.
‘Nearby. Gainsborough.’
‘You gave up a lot when you moved. I Googled Green Haven Gardens this afternoon. Sounds like you had a thriving business. ’
Ruth’s body jerked, as if she’d been shot. Charlie wasn’t surprised. She knew all about feeling invaded, finding out that someone was more interested in you than they ought to be. Interested enough to carry your story in their coat pocket. She pushed the thought away. ‘Organic and chemical-free before it was fashionable,’ she said. ‘And you won three BALI awards.’
‘I won the main BALI award three years running,’ Ruth corrected her, her eyes full of suspicion.
‘I was only skim-reading,’ said Charlie. ‘I had two seconds between meetings. I might have missed some of the finer points.’
‘Why are you interested in Green Haven? That part of my life’s over.’
‘Why did you give it up?’
‘I didn’t want to do it any more.’
Charlie nodded. It was an answer and, at the same time, no answer. She hoped Ruth wasn’t regretting how much of herself she’d already given away.
‘Let me show you the tape,’ said Ruth, standing up. Charlie didn’t know what she meant at first. Then she remembered: the man in the red bobble hat. She rolled her eyes behind Ruth’s back, lacking the heart to point out that her watching footage of a man walking past a house and looking at it would achieve nothing. She followed Ruth out into the hall and saw what she’d missed on the way in. Above the front door with its unusual leaf-patterned glass panel was a shelf with a TV on it, a video player, and a row of cassettes numbered one to thirty-one. One for every day of the month?
While Ruth reached up to put a tape in the machine, Charlie surveyed the hall. Apart from the door to the lounge, there were three others: kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, presumably. Only one was ajar, and through it Charlie caught a glimpse of shiny maroon fabric and a pink cushion. That had to be the bedroom. Checking first that Ruth was still busy with the machine and the remote control, Charlie pushed the door gently to open it further.
Yes, this was Ruth’s bedroom, Ruth and Aidan’s, though the only evidence of a man’s presence was a bulky watch with a leather strap lying on the floor. The rest was over-the-top feminine: ornate perfume bottles lined up on the window-sill, a pink voile scarf draped across the bed, silk curtains, also pink, white lacy underwear strewn everywhere, a pink heart-shaped hot-water bottle. Even the paperbacks with creased spines in lopsided piles looked girly, with titles like Hungry Women and Public Smiles, Private Tears.
Ruth was busy rewinding a tape. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The remote’s bust. I have to keep my finger pressed down on it to make it work. It takes ages.’
‘No problem,’ said Charlie. She leaned into the bedroom to get a look at what was behind the door, and nearly cried out in shock, lurching back out into the hall. She’d seen it only for a split second, but it was enough. What the fuck…? Her mind reeled. It was absurd, the sort of thing you might have an anxiety dream about-too extreme and too ludicrous to happen in real life. But this was real; Charlie knew what she’d seen.
Nearly a whole wall in Ruth’s bedroom was covered with newspaper cuttings about her, Charlie.
She pulled the door to, her heart juddering, the full range of headlines pulsing in her brain, phrases that had haunted her for two years, that she struggled every day not to think about: colourfully worded assaults on her character, selected by hacks for their shock value or alliterative appeal.
Headlines that Ruth had collected and stuck up on the wall beside her bed. Why? More recent articles too, Charlie could swear-though she had no intention of looking again to check-about her return to work, the forum she’d set up to tackle business crime in the area. No, she hadn’t imagined it
. As well as the many photographs of her crying at the press conference in 2006, there had been one or two of her in uniform, after her transfer out of CID, wearing her polished I’m-so-proud-of-what-I’ve-done-for-the-community smile. She felt sick.
‘Here we go,’ said Ruth.
Charlie knew she didn’t have long to compose herself if concealment was her preferred option, and all her instincts were screaming at her to conceal, withdraw, hide herself away. To demand an on-the-spot explanation from Ruth would constitute exposure on a level that, in her state of shock, she couldn’t even contemplate. No, she must avoid a confrontation at all costs, or something disastrous would happen: she’d end up attacking Ruth physically, or become hysterical. Later. Deal with it later.
She blinked furiously to banish the tears that had sprung up out of nowhere, and tried to focus on the white bookshelves on the opposite wall that sagged slightly in the middle and made the hallway half as wide as it would otherwise have been. Ruth was evidently a collector of self-help books as well as the self-appointed archivist of Charlie’s disgrace. In a better mood, Charlie would have found these titles amusing: What if Everything Goes Right?, The Power of Now, What You Think of Me Is None of My Business.
She didn’t know what she thought. All she knew was that her insides had liquefied, she felt as if she might throw up and she wanted desperately to leave this house.
‘I asked my landlord to install CCTV when I first noticed the man hanging around,’ said Ruth. ‘He thought I was making a fuss about nothing, but in the end he agreed. Some rowdy lads had colonised the park at night, and I managed to persuade Malcolm that we could kill two birds with one stone. By the time the cameras were in, the man had stopped walking past. I didn’t get him on tape until yesterday.’
Charlie wondered if Ruth had videotapes of her from two years ago, old news reports, the press conference she’d given, the extended interview she’d agreed to at the insistence of the press office, when public opinion was still violently against her three months after the scandal had broken.
Later. Not now. There were other things to think about, like fighting back: finding out everything she could about Ruth Bussey and using it to devastate her sad, inadequate little life. At the moment, Charlie told herself, the advantage was hers; Ruth didn’t know she knew.
She watched the grainy image on the screen change, saw a man in a woolly hat approach the park gates with a black dog. ‘Has Aidan seen this?’ she asked. If by some remote chance Bobble Hat was spying on Ruth, did Aidan know about it? Did he know who the man was? Spying on someone who spied on others, who broke into their private pain and…
‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘Only Malcolm’s seen it, apart from me, and now you. Aidan and I haven’t spoken properly for months.’ She looked bereft. ‘I thought if Malcolm knew what the man looked like, he could look out for him. He’s often here when I’m not-bit of a guardian angel, really. He keeps an eye on things for me. There, look, you can see the man’s face.’
Malcolm. He must have seen the display wall in the bedroom. No wonder he’d reacted oddly when Charlie had turned up in person. Clearly Ruth’s made herself known to you… She didn’t tell me she was going to make contact. Did Malcolm Fenton know why Ruth was obsessed with Charlie? Did Aidan Seed? He had to, surely, if he shared Ruth’s bed. What possible reason could there be? How many other people had seen the wall? Had the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers seen it? Had they also recognised Charlie this morning?
Her eyes were fixed on the screen, but she wasn’t really looking. Ruth’s voice cut through her thoughts and she realised she’d missed most of the show. ‘Look, you can see his face clearly now. See the way he’s looking at the window?’
No. It couldn’t be.
It was. Bobble hat or no bobble hat, it was him. With a black Labrador, for Christ’s sake? Now Charlie knew two things Ruth didn’t know she knew.
‘He’s probably just a nosey bastard,’ she said. If Ruth noticed that her tone or manner had changed, she showed no sign of it. Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d trusted anyone less than she trusted this strange woman who was staring at her wide-eyed, apparently waiting for help of some sort. ‘Why did you seek Mary out?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Pardon?’ Ruth paused the tape.
‘You said she attacked you. You left the gallery and never went back. Sounds pretty upsetting. Yet subsequently you went to her house. Why?’ I’m going to stick my fingers into every hole in your story, bitch, and I’m going to pull and pull until the whole thing snaps and I get to watch you fall apart.
‘For the painting,’ said Ruth. ‘For Aidan. Aidan wanted it. But that was later, much later.’
‘All right, so what happened next? After the incident with Mary in the gallery last June, and you leaving your job? That was six months before Aidan told you he’d killed her, right?’
‘I can’t tell you everything you want to know.’ Charlie heard panic in Ruth’s voice. ‘I can tell you everything I know, everything that happened, but not why, or what it means.’
‘I’ll settle for anything that isn’t a lie.’
‘No more lies,’ Ruth promised. ‘What happened next was that Aidan and I went to an art fair in London.’
7
Monday 3 March 2008
The Access 2 Art fair at Alexandra Palace in London was the first one I’d ever been to. I didn’t know such things existed until Aidan told me. One of the artists he frames for was going to have a stall there, and sent Aidan two free tickets. Aidan tore open the envelope at work one day-it must have been October or November last year. It’s strange, that’s the one detail I don’t remember. Everything else about the art fair is fixed in my mind as clearly as if someone had filmed what happened from start to finish and implanted the footage in my brain.
I saw Aidan grinning down at something. ‘What?’ I asked.
He passed me the envelope. I opened it, pulled out two stiff rectangular cards and a folded leaflet.
‘Access 2 Art? What’s that?’
He waited for me to read the leaflet, knowing all the relevant information was there. He and I have never been good at answering questions.
‘It says here hundreds of artists will be exhibiting,’ I said.
‘Have you ever been in a maze?’
‘You mean like the one at Hampton Court?’
‘That’ll do,’ said Aidan. ‘Picture Hampton Court maze, except bigger. Instead of hedges, picture endless rows of stalls selling paintings, prints, sculptures, so many that you start to worry about finding your way out once you’ve gone in. You start to walk a little bit faster, unsure if you’ve walked down that aisle ten times already or never before. You look at so many pictures that you lose the ability to see them. You start to feel as if you’ve eaten a bucket-load of sweets, or the visual equivalent. It gets to the point where you don’t think you could stand to see another painting as long as you live…’
‘I’d never feel like that,’ I told him.
‘… but you’ve got no choice. Every corner you turn, there’s more of the same: hundreds of artists and galleries flogging their wares.’
‘Stop it!’ He was teasing me deliberately. ‘You’d better be telling the truth.’ There was a light, fluttery feeling in my stomach. What Aidan had described was my idea of heaven. I was already fantasising about finding something special. I hadn’t felt strongly about anything I’d seen for several months-not since Abberton, which I tried very hard not to think about-but I was used to seeing only nine or ten paintings at a time, twenty at most; no more than a small gallery’s walls could accommodate.
‘I’ve got to go to this,’ I said, clutching the tickets as if someone might take them away from me.
‘It starts on Thursday the thirteenth of December,’ said Aidan. ‘All you have to do is square it with your boss for you to have the day off. Oh, that’s me.’ He pretended to think about it. ‘You can have the day off.’
‘I won’t need to. It says here it
’s all weekend. We could go on the Sunday.’ Aidan and I sometimes worked Saturdays if we were busy, which we usually were.
‘No. Take the Thursday off,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to an art fair you need to be there when it opens.’
‘The pictures can’t all sell before we get there,’ I protested. ‘The stuff I like best never sells, anyway. Apart from to me.’
‘That’s not why,’ said Aidan. ‘You’ve got to see the pictures before any of them are sold, or as few as possible. Once red dots start to appear, you look at the work in a different way: the successes and the failures. The popular ones and the rejects.’
‘Let’s go for the whole thing,’ I suggested, bobbing up and down on the balls of my feet, too excited to keep still. ‘Thursday to Sunday. If we’ve got a full four days, we’ll be able to see everything. I won’t have to choose too quickly, or panic that I’ve missed anything.’
Aidan’s face had lost its happy glow. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It might take that long to do it justice, but… Ruth, I can’t go. I can’t close up here, not even for a day. Too many people are relying on me for exhibition deadlines.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and heard my own disappointment thudding dully through the air, like a clumsily thrown ball. I couldn’t imagine going without him. We’d hardly been apart since the day we’d first met in August. ‘Can’t you…?’
‘Oh, sack it,’ he said, changing his mind so quickly that I didn’t understand what he was saying at first. ‘They can wait. They can all wait.’
‘You mean… you’ll come?’
‘I’ll come, but only for Thursday and Friday. I’ll go home Friday evening. Saturday and Sunday I’ll stay up all night if I have to and make up the time I’ve lost.’
I smiled. ‘So they won’t have to wait after all.’ Aidan pretends to have contempt for our artist customers, but I think secretly he admires them. Maybe he even envies them a little. How could he feel no affinity with artists, when his approach to his work is so creative? If he’s framing something for me, he doesn’t use ready-made mouldings. He starts from scratch. The same for himself: all the frames on the walls in his room behind the workshop are hand-made-the ones with nothing inside them. ‘They’re my only works of art,’ he once said. ‘Frame-makers used to be perceived as artists, and frames as works of art, before they were mass-produced. At one time, it was normal for a picture frame to cost more than the picture inside it.’
The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down Page 16