The picnic had been cut short when Pysk had been sick all over herself and started to cry. She'd wanted her nanny but, with only lesser choices available, she'd gone to her daddy.
"I met this guy the other day," Natalie said.
Malcolm snorted and rubbed his forehead.
"Am I meant to be jealous? I thought that was, what did you call it, bourgeois and passé?"
Natalie's gloved hands flexed around the wheel, her knuckles peeking white through the holes in the leather.
"It's not like that."
"Oh?"
"He's a priest," she said.
That earned her a started look and then wariness settled over Malcolm's face.
"Oh for…tell me he's a Catholic."
"No."
He smacked his hand against the steering wheel, making her jump.
"Jesus, Natalie," he snapped. Pysk stirred in the back seat and he dropped his voice to a hiss. "You are not getting involved in some nut-bag cult, OK. Or, actually, do what you want. You're not getting Pysk involved."
Fingers flexed again and Natalie felt the steering wheel creak. Her foot pressed down on the pedal and the scenery whipped by in a green and grey blur.
"He's not like that. He just wanted to help," she said. "Help me, help me get my husband back. The one I married."
"The drunk? The one that whored around?"
The pedal dropped another inch towards the floor.
"The fun guy. The one that didn't look down on me."
Malcolm grabbed the door as they rounded the corner, the muscles in his arm standing out as he steadied himself.
"Slow down," he said.
Natalie ignored him. "He's a witch," she said. "Not a warlock, apparently that's rude. We did a spell in his basement to bring you back to me. All I had to do was look in the mirror and say what I wanted."
"And then screw him, right?"
She gave him an irritated look. "It was part of the spell."
The next turn threw Malcolm into the door and woke Pysk up, although for once she didn't cry. Maybe she was learning that didn't get you anywhere. It was about time. Everyone had to learn that.
Malcolm grabbed for the wheel and they wrestled for control, veering back and forwards over the road. A horn blared and horror twisted Malcolm's face. That was the last thing Natalie remembered; she never saw the lorry bearing down on them.
"…ok. Just lie still," a woman's choked voice said. "Help's on its way. The ambulance will be here soon, but you just have to lie still."
An accident. Natalie reached up to check her face, feathering her fingers over her cheeks and nose and teeth. There was a bump on her forehead but everything else seemed where it should be. She opened her eyes and blinked until the face of a middle-aged woman in a bloody blouse came in focus.
"Don't worry about your husband and baby," the woman said. "Someone's looking after them."
She stroked Natalie's hair back from her face with a suddenly horrible gentleness, picking blood-glued strands away from Natalie's forehead.
"Where are they?" Natalie asked.
The woman didn't answer but her eyes flickered towards the road. Natalie struggled up onto one elbow and a raw cry tore itself out of her chest. Both Malcolm and Pysk lay on the road beside the car. They were both bloody. A big man in jeans and a sweater knelt beside them with her rearview mirror, the air freshener still dangling from it in a morbid touch. He held it under Pysk's nose first, his hands starting to shake when nothing happened, and then under Malcolm's.
It took a long, terrifying moment before the glass slowly misted over with his breath.
London, 2010
Natalie laid the rug back down on her dead daughter's bed, tucking it around the stuffed teddies and ducks and smoothing down the edges, and stood up. Her hands were shaking like she had the DTs. Not that she drank much anymore, it just didn't help.
"It worked," she said. "The spell."
Malcolm leant against the door, arms crossed over his bare chest, and watched her with those empty, mirror eyes. She'd tried to see past them, to catch him unawares and unguarded, but there wasn't anything in the depths. The surface of him was all she'd been left with.
Once that had been all she wanted.
"I wanted you back, remember, the man I married. Shallow, self-obsessed. Cruel. And I got you."
His lips twitched into a smile.
"I guess that means you won," he said.
Natalie walked over to him and reached up to press her hand against her cheek. It was almost a surprise when she felt warm skin instead of cold glass.
"So give me my prize," she begged in a rough whisper. "Let me go."
He smiled and bent down to kiss her cheek.
"You're drunk," he whispered into her ear.
She flinched and closed her eyes, a tear running down her cheek. It caught in the dip of her lip and she tasted the salty regret of it.
"Are you even real?" she asked. "Do you just disappear when I go to sleep, like a reflection when the light's turned out? Are you doing this to punish me, Malcolm, or is this really all that's left of you."
His lips touched her ear and she felt the damp shiver of his breath against her skin.
"I'm the husband you always wanted," he said. "Your mirror image. Now go to bed."
The Piano Song
Ian Whates
Kimberly Jeanette Hobson was coming home; perhaps in the only way she ever could have come home.
Her mum's death had left her feeling oddly hollow. There was sadness, but most of that revolved around the realisation that this marked an end in many senses — she was truly alone now. Her dad had gone first, claimed by cancer; and then Ed — killed in a head-on collision with a truck three years ago. Always cheerful, always there: Ed, her brother, who had been the one remaining link to the childhood she remembered. At least he'd gone quickly, or so the police assured her.
Now came her mother, who had never really been a link to anything. Her death was difficult to accept — not for any deep-rooted emotional reason, but because Kim had somehow assumed that her mum would live forever; this woman her father once referred to affectionately as 'a force of nature', though Kim had always seen her more as a feature of the landscape — a rocky outcropping, a mountain that blocked the view, refused to give ground and was impossible to get around.
Kim took a series of deep breaths and started to walk up the gravel drive. She'd parked on the road — couldn't bring herself to break that habit and drive onto the property itself for some reason.
Why did this whole thing make her want to reach for a cigarette that wasn't there? She had given up years ago, but right now she would have killed for a smoke. A betraying hand had sneaked into the bag before she could stop it; she quickly converted the action into a general rummage, as if to kid herself that the thought of cigarettes had never even entered her mind. Questing fingers closed on something; a packet of mints.
Her feet stumbled to a halt as she drew the mints out, leaving her to simply stare at the house — this Pandora's Box of her past — wishing there was someone to come with her, someone she could lean on for support and look to share this ordeal with, but there wasn't. Paul had been excised from her life nearly ten years ago — no children, and a swift divorce. Since then there'd been the occasional man, she'd 'dated' from time to time and had even slept with one or two, but none of these transient companions had touched her in a meaningful way and she'd always sidestepped anything that threatened to become a relationship, even Damon, who had pursued her stubbornly for a while.
None of them had been allowed as close as Paul, and no one ever would be again.
In a way, she didn't even blame the girl. Mandy was a slut, always had been, even at school. She went through men like crisp packets, picking them up, emptying them and then chucking them away before moving onto the next one.
"Look out, girls, here comes Mandy; we'd better lock our husbands up," wasn't even something they whispered behind her back, it was
something she laughed about with them.
No, she couldn't entirely blame Mandy, but Paul was another matter. If he were going to betray her with anyone, why did it have to be Mandy Gibson of all people? So blonde, so busty, and so fucking obvious.
In truth, she felt nearly as annoyed at her own missed opportunities as she did at Paul's actual betrayal. She remembered Martin from work; tall, buff Martin. The office party — now how was that for a cliché — when it would have been so easy to succumb to the alcohol, his flattery, his attention, and her own desires. Yet she'd resisted, because she was married, because of Paul. One kiss; that was all they'd shared; that and the feeling of his impressive erection pressing against her midriff. The temptation was there, raging inside her, the desire to abandon caution and go with the flow, to reach down and caress that bulge, to cling to him and demand that he took her, that he satisfied her, but instead she'd broken the clinch, stepped away and told him that she couldn't; that this must never happen again. In defiance of her own racing heart and mounting lust, she stayed loyal.
Not that her abstinence had prevented her from feeling guilty as hell for months afterwards, causing her to work her socks off to be the best wife she could possibly be, desperate that Paul should never suspect her of that one stolen kiss. A kiss? And there was her precious husband banging Mandy Gibson's brains out hard enough to break the bloody bed!
The fact that she'd fought so hard to stay faithful to him while he'd rolled over and screwed the first slut who batted her false eyelashes at him was something she would never ever forgive him for.
She slipped a mint into her mouth and instantly wished she hadn't. Whatever a mint was, it was no substitute for a cigarette. The headache that had plagued her ever since she woke up was threatening to get worse; a persistent throb of pain somewhere behind the eyes. She ignored it and sucked hard on the mint.
The house was exactly as she remembered: flat-faced, pebble dashed, imposing, and big. Someone had stripped the ivy away from around the door and never repainted, leaving a brown tattoo of the plant's former presence on the wall, looking as if all the colour and substance had somehow been leached out of the paint and the brickwork where the creepers touched, but that was about the only variance from the picture memory provided.
The door was just the same — solid wood and in need of a coat of varnish — while the cold metal of the key in her hand felt oddly awkward and out of place.
It was still hard to accept her mother's death as real, despite the funeral, the lawyers, the reading of the will and all that black — they were things that had happened to someone else, which she had merely observed.
There ought to have been more grief, but she'd been mourning her mother for nearly nine years. They'd only seen each other once in that time — at Ed's funeral — and spoken no more than twice otherwise, so her current sense of loss was minimal. Would it have been different if Mum had died first? Probably; she had always been a daddy's girl and would almost certainly have stayed close to her father had he been the surviving parent. Her mother on the other hand was a calculating manipulator, wrapped up in her own version of how the world should be and determined to make life adapt to her rather than the other way around.
Particularly as regards her daughter's husband.
When Kim started to suspect that her mother's hand had been involved in Paul's infidelity, she went ballistic. The worst part was that her mum refused to either confirm or deny any such involvement, insisting that Kim should not even think of accusing her.
The problem was that it would have been so like mother to feign illness that weekend, knowing that Kim would come across and stay to look after her, while making sure that Mandy knew Paul was alone and suggesting she should pop in to check that he was coping. That was Mandy's subsequent claim, and the more Kim mulled it over, the more she believed the slut.
Mum had disapproved of Paul from the start; not her choice of son-in-law at all.
Kim never did find out who her mother had lined up as replacement; by then, they weren't talking to each other.
The key slid into the ubiquitous Yale lock and Kim found herself hesitating. For some reason, she felt more trepidation about this moment than she had about any of it to date. Taking a deep breath, she turned the key and pushed. Brief resistance from the accumulated junk mail, which fanned out to form an irregular mat as she forced the door inward, then she was stepping inside.
Perhaps in retrospect she shouldn't have been surprised. After all, she was receptive from the moment the door opened. As Kim stood there on the threshold of that old house and of her childhood, it was with a sense of expectation, as if she was simply waiting for the memories to wash over her, to swamp her, to carry her along on a wave of nostalgia all the way back to the girl she'd once been.
Her and Ed, running along this hallway, laughing. Fun; that was another member of the family she's become estranged from in recent years. When exactly had she forgotten how to have fun?
At first the house felt lifeless, as if anything connected to her that might perhaps have lingered for a while had seeped away long ago. She struggled to feel something, to connect with this place that had been her home for so many years, and failed. Then came the music. Not distinctly, not pervasively, but distant and half-heard, as if someone had left the radio on in another room. The piano. She strained to hear, recognising the song immediately. A dam broke somewhere inside and all the memories came flooding back: that song…her song. No words, it didn't need lyrics; the rhythmic, melodic flow of notes spoke more poignantly than any verse man could ever articulate.
She sobbed, and was surprised to find tears welling up from the recesses of her eyes. How could she have forgotten her song?
Kim always assumed the haunting, rippling theme was something she had heard, perhaps on the radio; a snatch of tune that had connected to some element of her young mind and lodged there, but in all the years that intervened she had never managed to track it down, never succeeded in identifying that simple yet so effective melody, never heard it anywhere except in her own head.
Mind you, that in itself amounted to hearing the piece more frequently than any other music. The tune, which she'd come to think of purely as The Piano Song for want of anything more definite, had effectively provided the soundtrack to her childhood.
It was there when she played with her toys, when she read her books, when she was out somewhere with family or friends. As Barbie changed clothes for the third time in almost as many minutes, or sat wondering why Ken didn't take more notice of her, she'd be humming the tune in her head. When Kim's Pippa Dolls sat in their cardboard house on furniture made from matchboxes, yoghurt pots, sticky-back plastic and pipe cleaners — all based on designs taught her during recent episodes of Blue Peter — it was her tune that issued from the record player. As Mary Lennox nurtured The Secret Garden, she did so with The Piano Song playing in the background, and it was against this haunting melody that she first heard Colin Craven's weeping. When Lucy first tumbled out of the wardrobe and found herself in the magical realm of Narnia, there was only one tune that could possibly have accompanied her.
And as the adolescent Kim walked along a forest path, disdaining Ed's jibes and his yells for her to hurry up, The Piano Song added texture to the dappled sunlight, the sighing of the leaves in the gusting breeze, the distant bleating of sheep from somewhere beyond the trees, the sporadic birdsong, and the faint scent of wood smoke carried on the wind. The scene would have been beautiful without the music, but was even more so with it.
The adult Kim walked down a dark, carpeted hallway and imagined it was leaf mould and earth beneath her shoes; but she didn't have to dredge up memories of The Piano Song; it was there in her head, just as clear and beautiful as ever.
She wondered whether Mother had kept the piano. A grand — not a Steinway perhaps, but neither was it an electronic keyboard made of moulded plastic with pre-programmed rhythms and dozens of different voices. A real piano; a gracefully curved w
onder in polished rosewood, with the words 'John Broadwood and Sons, London' inscribed in flowing script above the ivory keys. She didn't care that it was valuable, didn't care that it was rare. It was hers, and that was far more important.
The first door, on her left as she drew level with the stairs, led to the dining room. Kim's hand hovered over the handle for a moment, as she worried what memories might be held within, waiting to pounce, but then she grasped and turned. The room smelt of stale polish and mustiness. How many times had it seen use in the past nine years? A dozen, perhaps? In truth she doubted if it was even that often. When left to her own devices her mum invariably ate her meals in the lounge, in front of the TV, with a tray balanced precariously on her lap. On the rare occasions she entertained friends the kitchen table earned its keep. But the dining room? That was reserved only for 'special occasions'. The room's purpose had become eroded and diminished with the passage of time and changing lifestyles, until it was finally reduced to being what, a status symbol? A nostalgic memory of the distant days when everyone had been expected to gather around it for the ritual of 'the family meal'?
Kim shivered and shut the door. She never had been especially keen on the dining room or the furniture trapped within.
But the song was still there.
The hall grew dimmer as she walked further into the house. Had it always been this dark in here? Memory suggested otherwise. And the song swelled up around her, lightening her feet and easing the headache.
The piano had been bought for her. Not entirely for her (after all, what better status symbol could there be than having a grand piano in the house?), but primarily so. Ed had never been bothered about playing the piano. Kim wanted to learn, was desperate to learn; so that she could play her tune: The Piano Song.
Scenes From the Second Storey Page 18