Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  Tom found he was sitting with both elbows on the table, his knife and fork sticking straight up in the air. Bo, passing by, said, “That’s what I like to see. An empty plate. How are you feeling?”

  “What?” Tom said.

  “How do you feel? Sometimes when your body’s not used to a certain food it can upset your stomach a little bit to begin with. That’s why it’s a good idea to build up gradually.”

  “What?” Tom said.

  “Never mind,” she said kindly. “If you feel a little strange this evening just lie down for ten minutes. You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m going to need more guys,” Luke said. “Want a job?”

  “Making furniture? I’ve never done anything like that.” Tom was examining the models—he’d taken a seat in Luke’s booth. “This is really nice stuff. I’m not surprised they want it.”

  “These are all machine-made,” Luke said. “Not hard to learn.”

  Tom would have liked to have a close look at the branching handmade chair, but the woman had taken it with her.

  “You have work lined up for after the snow goes?” Luke said.

  “Not sure. Last summer I drove a lumber truck. Is your workshop out at Crow Lake?”

  “Yeah. It’s in the garage. I’m going to need to extend it, get more machines. I’ve got to go see your dad, talk to him about money.”

  Tom put down a chair and picked up the circular table with its central leg and three elegant feet.

  “I did aeronautical engineering,” he said. He hadn’t realized he was going to say it until it was out. “I was working on supersonic flight.”

  Luke raised his eyebrows. “Wow! Sounds really interesting.”

  “Yeah. It was. But things got a bit … messy, a year or two back. Personal things.”

  Luke nodded.

  Bo appeared with more coffee. “Make him treat you to a brownie,” she said. “He’s going to be rich.”

  “Want a brownie?” Luke said.

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  Bo smiled at him and vanished.

  Luke started wrapping up the models and putting them back in the box. “Well, like I said, I need to talk to your dad again, arrange some financial stuff before I know how much I can offer money-wise, but I definitely need more guys, so the job’s there if you want it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind. And congratulations, by the way. Glad you got the contract.”

  While he’d been in Harper’s the wind had changed again and tiny stinging flakes were driving into his face as he walked home. He wondered what it would be like to work with a bunch of other guys. Six months ago—even six weeks ago—he couldn’t have considered it, but he liked Luke. He was a straightforward sort of guy and working with him might be okay. As for the others, if there were machines going, they probably didn’t talk much anyway. He could just keep himself to himself. It would be a completely different life from the one he’d imagined for himself, but that in itself might be good.

  The downside would be that, to start with at least, he’d have to live at home and he’d been thinking it was time he got out. Things seemed to be falling apart there and it was definitely no longer a refuge. He needed to give the whole thing some serious thought.

  As he was walking up the drive he noticed the sled he’d borrowed from Marshall’s Grocery leaning against the side of the house. He’d meant to return it weeks ago. He looked at his watch, then studied the sky. If he took it back right now he’d have time to get home before the weather got serious.

  He flipped the sled over and towed it around to the front of the house. As he passed the living room window something made him look up. Adam was standing right up against the glass, hands clenched under his chin.

  “Shit!” Tom said to his feet. “Shit, shit, shit!” He dropped the tow rope and went in. Sherry was bashing about in the kitchen. Adam was watching him, his whole body taut with longing.

  “I’m taking the sled back to the grocery store,” Tom said sharply. “You can ride there but you’ll have to walk home. Can you walk that far?”

  Adam didn’t waste time replying. He shot into the entrance hall and started pulling things from the rubble. “Is this your coat?” Tom asked, taking a coat off the hooks.

  “Yes.” Adam’s face was shining like a candle; it made Tom want to smash the wall with his fist.

  “Boots,” he said. “Scarf, hat, mitts. That hat isn’t warm enough—put this one on top of it. Okay, we’re off.”

  The wind had dropped, which was something. He walked fast, listening to the swish of the sled’s runners on the hard-packed snow. Each time he looked back Adam grinned up at him like a jack-o’-lantern. You’d have thought he’d never been on a sled before. The thought made him wonder if Adam had ever been on a sled before. It’s not your bloody fault, he said to himself. It’s not up to you, it’s nothing to do with you, it’s not as if he’s starving or living in a doghouse, just fuck off and leave me alone.

  Marshall’s was on the same side of the road as Harper’s and three stores farther along. The worst thing that could possibly have happened, the thing so bad that even he with his genius for imagining disaster hadn’t thought of it, was that as they passed Harper’s Bo would be serving someone in one of the window booths and would happen to look out and see them.

  She was out the door in a split second.

  “And who is this?” she demanded, hands on hips, looking down at Adam with astonishment. “Who is this and why haven’t I met him before? Hello, gorgeous, what’s your name?”

  “Adam,” said Adam.

  “Adam is a wonderful name,” said Bo, “and you have the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life. Is this your daddy?”

  She gestured at Tom without looking at him.

  “No,” said Adam.

  “We have to go,” Tom said. “Sorry, but we’re in a hurry.”

  “So, if he’s not your daddy, who is he?”

  “Tom,” Adam said. “My brother.”

  “Okay, good. I know all about brothers. Is he nice to you?”

  “Yes,” Adam said. He’d tipped his head back as far as it would go in order to take in all of her, which made his mouth hang open and his parka hood come down over his eyes.

  “That’s good,” Bo said, “because otherwise I was going to have to kill him. Would you like to come in and have some ice cream?”

  “We can’t,” Tom said, very fast. “We have to get this sled back and get home before the storm sets in.”

  “What storm?” Bo said, still looking at Adam. “How would it be if you came in while your brother takes the sled back, which will take him quite a long time because he’ll have to apologize profusely to Mr. Marshall for keeping it so long. Does that sound like a good idea to you?”

  Adam looked anxiously at Tom. Tom couldn’t look at him.

  “We don’t have time,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll bring him back another day but we don’t have time now.”

  “You do if I get Luke to drive you home,” Bo said. She looked him in the eye. “Small boys need ice cream,” she said. “This is a fact.”

  His fear was that when Adam took his coat off Bo would recoil with shock at the stench. In the event, maybe due to all the other odours in the place, it didn’t seem too bad, but Tom was still in a sweat of anxiety the whole time. He declined Luke’s offer of a lift home because the cab of the truck was so small Luke would be bound to notice the smell and anyway, there was a whole lot of stuff jostling around in his mind and he needed to think and walking was good for thinking. Things couldn’t go on as they were, that was the gist of it. It just couldn’t go on.

  He walked faster than he should have, but Adam trotted beside him, uncomplaining. His uncomplainingness was one of the things that bothered Tom most. If he’d whined and sulked and been a pain in the ass like other kids, it would have been easier to ignore him; it was the fact that he was so good and had such low expectations of everyone around him that got you in the guts.


  When they got in, when he was helping Adam take off his boots, Adam said, “I liked it.”

  Tom looked at him. His eyes were still shining.

  “What did you like?” Tom said.

  “The lady and the ice cream and the room with all the people. Mostly the lady and the ice cream.”

  Tom forced a smile, but it was hard. He hauled off his own coat and boots and went into the living room and then paused. Sherry was still in the kitchen. He’d thought she’d have gone but maybe it was good that she hadn’t. He crossed the room and went upstairs.

  Pushed out of his mind these past weeks, because to acknowledge it would mean dealing with it, was the knowledge that only one thing could be causing his four-year-old brother to smell like he did. When he opened the door of Adam’s room the stench almost made him retch. In the week or two since he’d last been in, it had become far worse. He crossed over to the bed. It had been made, but badly, the bedspread hauled up over crumpled blankets and sheets. He pulled it away and stepped back, covering his nose and mouth with one hand, his eyes stinging from the ammonia. Sheets, blankets, everything sodden. He grabbed the bedding, tore it off, flung it on the floor, took the mattress by one corner and heaved it up. It was saturated—it sagged under the weight. How did the kid climb into that bed every night? How did he even stay in the room?

  He went out into the hall, closing the door behind him, and stood for a few minutes, head down, taking deep breaths. Adam was standing at the top of the stairs, looking at him.

  “Go into Mum’s room,” Tom said. “And stay there.”

  He felt amazingly calm; a flat calm, quiet and still. He waited until Adam had disappeared and then went downstairs. Sherry turned around as he came into the kitchen and her face lit up.

  “Well hiya, Tom,” she said. “It’s a long time since I seen you. How you bin?”

  “Come upstairs,” he said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “Well now, that’s a nice invitation,” she said, tipping her head down and looking up at him under her eyelashes.

  “Upstairs,” he said.

  She rolled her hips up the stairs ahead of him. When they reached the top she headed for his bedroom but he put a hand on her back and steered her along to Adam’s room. “In here,” he said.

  “We ain’t goin’ in there,” she said, stopping abruptly. “I don’t like that room.”

  “Why is that, Sherry?” Tom asked. “This is a nice room. Why don’t you like it?” He gripped her arm with one hand and opened the door with the other.

  “I ain’t goin’ in there!” Sherry said, louder, pushing against him, but he shoved her in and stepped in behind her and closed the door.

  “Okay,” he said. “You wanted a bed. Here’s a bed.”

  “You leave me alone, Tom Cartwright!” Her voice was shrill. “You don’t—”

  “Don’t you want to lie down, Sherry? You were so keen a minute ago.”

  She tried to get to the door but he blocked her.

  “Lie down, Sherry.”

  “You let me outta here, Tom Cartwright, or I’m gonna say you raped me!”

  “Now why do I think you’d have trouble getting anyone to believe that, Sherry? A girl with a nice clean reputation like yours. I just want to know why you won’t lie down on this bed but are happy for a four-year-old kid to sleep in it every night for weeks on end.”

  “It ain’t my job to clean up after some filthy, stinkin’ kid who wets his bed!”

  “Yes, it is. It is exactly your job. You are paid to clean this house. Would you call this a clean room? At the very least, at the very least, you should have told my mother he was wetting the bed.”

  “Your mum ain’t right in the head! I could’a told her ten times and she’d never do nothin’. And if you din’t know about it yourself, that’s ’cause you din’t want to know, ’cause anyone could smell that stink a mile off.”

  “Get out,” he said, sick with disgust, because there was no answer to her accusations. She was right in every respect. “Just get out.”

  “I ain’t goin’ without my money!”

  “Oh, but you are.” He opened the door and propelled her out. “You are going now. You haven’t earned a goddamned cent since you came into this house. I could sue you for taking money under false pretences. In fact, maybe I will. Down the stairs. Down.” He grabbed her arm, forced her down the stairs.

  “You let go of me!” Sherry screamed. “You let go of me, you bastard!”

  “And out we go,” he said, propelling her across the living room and into the entrance hall, opening the two doors and heaving her out into the snow, which was coming down fast now, spearing through the dark.

  “One coat!” he yelled, throwing it out after her. “One pair of boots!”

  He closed the doors, leaned against them, then pushed himself off and back up the stairs. Adam and his mother, holding the baby, were at the top, looking down.

  “Go back to bed, Mum,” Tom said. “Adam, go with her. I told you to stay in her room.”

  He went into the bedroom, gathered up the sodden sheets and blankets, took them down the stairs and into the kitchen, opened the back door and threw them out. He went back upstairs.

  Adam was there again. He was crying. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  In the past year and a half Tom had never seen him cry. Not once. He pointed a shaking finger at him. “Stop crying,” he said. “And stop saying you’re sorry. It isn’t your fault. It. Is. Not. Your. Fault. Do you get that? Do you understand? So stop crying.”

  He went back to the bedroom, heaved the mattress off the bed and out the door and down the stairs and through the kitchen and out the back door to join the blankets. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink and went back upstairs to his mother’s room. Adam wasn’t there but his mother was in bed, holding the baby to her. She looked at him with wide eyes.

  “Mum, Adam’s started wetting his bed,” Tom said. “He needs to have a diaper at night.”

  “Oh,” his mother whispered. “All right.”

  She wasn’t taking it in. Tom went back downstairs. Adam was standing in the living room. Tears were still rolling down his face but maybe he couldn’t stop them.

  “I need the paper your new car was wrapped in,” Tom said. “Do you know where it went?”

  Adam ducked into the space beside Tom’s chair and came back with the paper. Tom smoothed it out on the table, then took it over to the telephone. He phoned International Inquiries and asked for the number of the Montrose Hotel. He glanced at his watch, then dialled the number. There was a pause, then a couple of clicks, and a phone rang twice.

  “The Montrose Hotel,” Megan’s voice said crisply. “May I help you?”

  “Hi, Meg,” Tom said. “It’s Tom.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Megan

  London, December 1968

  Most of the time things were very good. In the evenings, if Megan wasn’t on duty at the hotel and Andrew wasn’t out researching, they would sometimes eat together. She would cook or he would cook and they would share a bottle of Mateus Rosé or Chianti and talk about their days and then Andrew would go back to his desk and carry on with his work. Often they left their doors open and then really it was like having one large flat instead of two small ones. It was like being married, Megan decided, thinking of her father shut in his study. But hers and Andrew’s was a much better marriage than her parents’, more like Annabelle and Peter’s. Though, of course, without the sex.

  If you didn’t want children, which she didn’t, sex was no big deal, was it? You can’t have everything. Most of the time she was able to convince herself of that.

  A couple of times, when her day off coincided with Andrew having some free time, he took her to see something famous, something he thought she really shouldn’t miss, such as the Tower of London (amazing) or Buckingham Palace (disappointing) or Hampton Court (wonderful curling chimneys). Megan sent postcards home to please h
er father.

  So most of the time things were very good. It was when her body refused to listen to her head that it became difficult. She had worked very hard at making Andrew think that what he’d told her in Bradgate Park was of no particular importance to her—that she considered him just a friend—with the consequence that the guardedness she’d noticed previously had left him. Not that he walked around naked or was given to displays of affection, but sometimes he’d put an arm around her in a brotherly fashion, rather as Tom used to do. (Though Tom only did it when he was teasing or trying to get something out of her.)

  That was what she found difficult. Being so close to him. Touching, but not properly touching. Sometimes that hurt so much she wanted to cry.

  Occasionally he was out very late. She couldn’t sleep until she heard him come in and then she couldn’t sleep for wondering where he had been and with whom.

  Once he seemed low and when she asked, cautiously, if he was all right he said he’d met someone he liked but it hadn’t worked out. Then he’d smiled at her and shrugged and said, “Never mind. It’ll happen.”

  That was very, very hard. To know that he wanted someone, but not her.

  Most of the time, though, she was able to not think about it and things were good.

  One night Andrew said, “When am I going to see this hotel of yours?” so she took him there on one of her evenings off. Annabelle and Peter were supposed to be out for dinner with friends but as it happened the friends had cancelled and they were still at the hotel. Megan had carefully never spoken about Andrew, so they were a little surprised when she showed up with a strange man, but they were friendly and gracious, as she’d known they would be.

  “This is Andrew Bannerman,” Megan said casually. “He lives across the hall from me.” (She’d worked out how she’d introduce him just in case something like this happened.)

  “We’ll give you a guided tour,” Peter said expansively. “This is the bar, which is the perfect place to start. You’ll need to fortify yourself for the tour; it’s very strenuous. What’ll you have?”