by Sarah May
‘Cas’ was Miles’s take on his son’s full name, which he didn’t like. He wasn’t entirely convinced by ‘Cas’neither was Casper, for that matterbut they were both going along with it because the intention was right.
He tried to keep his voice level, aware that he got snappy easily at the moment. In fact, ever since a fortnight ago, when Mr Jackson took No. 8 Beulah Hill off the market. He hadn’t said anything to Harriet, but he’d been thinking of buying it.
‘What was there before buildings and roads and trains?’ Casper asked suddenly.
Miles sat down on the edge of the unmade bed. ‘Well…there was forest.’
‘But were there people?’
‘Not very many, but there were people, yes.’
‘Where did they live?’
‘They lived in caves in the forest.’
‘Did the caves have doors?’
‘Nothey were just caves.’ Miles pulled a pair of socks on.
‘So how did they stop the burglars coming in?’
‘Well, there weren’t any burglars, there were just lots and lots of beasties.’
‘So how did they stop the beasties from coming in?’
‘Fire. They were terrified of fire.’
‘Why?’
Miles thought about this. In fact, Casper was the only person who made him think about anything. ‘Well, they were kind of racing each other, the men and the beastiesto see who would come up with fire firstonly they didn’t know it was a race.’
Miles had been touched, lately, by the way Casper came to find him. At the weekend, he actively sought him out, and the nights Miles was home late, Harriet just couldn’t get him to sleep.
‘Dad?’
‘Um?’
‘Can you imagine if the beasties won the race?’
‘Nope.’
‘I can.’ Casper paused. ‘I don’t like my packed lunch.’ Then he started the Raptor up again, sending it out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
Miles got up and was about to start making the bed when he noticed the hard yellowish patch on the sheet on his side. He stared at it.
He must have come in his sleep again last night.
It was the same dream every night. An alley…in the dark…rain…Jessica Palmer dressed in the grey pinstripe suit she had that looked so good with the yellow blouse under it…pressed against a wet wall. She was covered in bruises, cut up, her clothes torn. She’d been seriously roughed up and he couldn’t work out whether it was him who’d done it to her or somebody else and he’d got to her just in time. In fact, she was so badly roughed up it was as though she’d only just got to her feet again. Her right cheek was completely swollen, her lips were doubled in size and her right eye was almost closed.
He went to get a sponge from the bathroom to clean off the stain, sponging it down as best he could before making the bed and following Casper downstairs.
Downstairs, Harriet and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table, so alike from behind that he couldn’t tell the difference.
Harriet’s mother, Caroline, had arrived a fortnight agoostensibly to help with Phoebe, who was going through a bad patch at nights, but really to look after Miles who was, Harriet had clearly indicated to Caroline, going through his own bad patch.
It wasn’t until Caroline arrived and Miles saw her in action that he realised just how much Harriet had inherited her mother’s tendency to treat him like a child. In their eyes, he was playing up at the moment; suffering from a lack of attention following Phoebe’s birth. Every time Caroline called out, ‘Tea time, boys,’ he felt a surge of rage. Or when him and Casper were talking and he pushed Casper to argue his case, Caroline would scold them both waggishly with, ‘Stop the fighting now, boys.’
She had moved tea time forward so that they all ate together with the children, which not only meant they had time in the evening to watch even more TV than usual, but that he didn’t get his first proper drink of the day until eight o’clock.
The other night they had all been sitting round the table when Casper had said suddenly, ‘Where did Grandma Burgess go?’
There’d been a pause. The women had looked unusually incapable of answering this. So Miles had stepped in with, ‘She’s in the sky.’
‘What’s she doing up there?’
‘Sleeping.’
‘How did her bed get up there?’
‘Well…’ Miles had thought about this, pushing his fork around his plate of kiddie food. What had possessed Caroline to cook dino burgers for all of them? ‘She doesn’t need a bed because…because just before going up in the sky you turn to dust.’
‘How d’you turn to dust?’
‘Casper, eat up,’ Caroline put in, starting to panic.
Miles could hear it in her voice. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they burn you.’
‘They burn you?’ Casper looked horrified.
Caroline and Harriet looked horrified.
‘But if they burn me that would hurt so much. I don’t want to go up in the sky.’
‘Well, you won’tnot for a long, long time.’
Then, not only to distract Casper, but also himselfhe was, he realised, close to tearshe’d changed the subject, turning to Harriet again and saying, ‘Have you got any idea why Martin Granger would call round here at eleven o’clock at night?’
‘Martin Granger?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Martin GrangerRos’s husband?’ Harriet had said again, slower and more heavily this time.
‘I was running through last month’s CCTV footage and there he wasmust have been about four weeks ago.’ He didn’t mention how struck he’d been by the expression on Martin’s face.
‘At eleven o’clock.’
‘At eleven o’clock,’ he confirmed.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever answered the door to Martin Granger.’
‘Neither have I.’
‘So who did? Wait a minuteit wasn’t the night we went to The Phoenix, was it?’
They’d stared at each other.
Caroline had stared at them staring at each other.
‘Martina,’ he’d said, interested.
‘Martina,’ Harriet had echoed, worried.
That had been last night.
Now, he ambled over to the bench, extracted two slices of breads from the debris, and put them in the toaster. While these two pieces were toasting, he pulled out another two pieces and ate them, his eyes flickering over the newspaper in front of him:
ANGRY CHEF KILLS LOVER, CUTS HER UP IN PUB KITCHEN AND PUTS REMAINS IN WHEELIE BIN…
Half-interested, he read through the piece, shaking some orange peel from the last paragraph.
‘Did you see it?’ Harriet asked.
She must have been watching him.
He quoted the article he’d been reading. ‘Angry chef kills lover, puts her in pub kitchen—’
‘No,’ Harriet cut in quickly, ‘Not thatthe house.’
Miles picked up the newspaper. ‘What is this?’
‘Mum’sshe brought it with her. Go to the Property section.’
Miles flicked throughWOMAN DRIVES CAR INTO DISUSED QUARRY WITH DEAD HUSBAND BESIDE HER. He started to read again, fascinated by the idea that there were still people out theremost of them in Buckinghamshire by the looks of thingswho quite literally loved each other to death.
‘Not therethe back,’ Harriet’s voice commanded as he read how Mrs Milbank had driven the car over the edge of a quarry with her dead husband beside herHarold Milbank, aged 52, had died of a heart attack forty-eight hours previously.
He gave up trying to read the article and turned to the Property section. Harriet was standing beside him. He couldn’t be sure, but it felt like she was making a point of rubbing against him. She’d been, he noticed, a lot more physically demonstrable since the arrival of Caroline, who had clearly been lecturing her daughter on her lackadaisical attitude towards her wifely duties. Harriet had taken her mother’s advice to heartas she always didand was attem
pting to be more proactive in that area, but there was nothing inherent about it and, as a consequence, this renewed effort had the adverse effect on Miles. The other night, as Harriet rolled onto her backon Caroline’s ordershe couldn’t even get it up, while later, in his dreams, he raped Jessica Palmer down the alley in torrential rain again.
He couldn’t bear the thought of the mother/daughter exchange that would have taken place when he’d gone to work the next day. Caroline probably already had the pot of Viagra to hand. For all he knew, they could have been crushing it up and adding it to his food for days now.
Marriage mattered a lot to Caroline, especially her daughter’swhich had, in her opinion, been far too long coming.
She knew all about the death of the libido, the exhaustion, butas she told Harriet time and time againthere was no point explaining all this to a man who was no longer counting the days, or even the weeks, but the months since he’d last had sex.
‘If nothing else, you could at least, you know go down there and…before nodding off,’ Caroline had pointed out over coffee the other morning while Phoebe was feeding.
At which point Harriet had completely flown off the handle at her, letting out a stream of nonsensical outrage, finally culminating in an explosive, ‘Why would I start that now?’ Which sent Phoebe into hysterics.
Caroline, incredulous, had said, ‘You mean you’ve never given Miles a blow job?’
‘For Christ’s sake, I’ve never given anyone a blow job.’
‘But you’re thirty-nine!’
It was worse than Carolinetaking call after call in her Buckinghamshire kitchen from a sobbing Harriethad ever imagined. Well, it was all Charles’s fault for over-educating her like he did: ruining her, in Caroline’s opinion. No wonder it had taken her so long to get married.
‘Keeper’s Cottage,’ Harriet said softly to Miles, leaning over to point out the picture of an eighteenth-century cottage semi-masked in an abundance of flora and fauna. ‘LookI never realised they had a paddock as well. That’s the cottage I’ve dreamt of living in since…since forever.’
‘But it’s in Little Widdrington,’ Miles said, trying to imagine himself holed up with Harriet in an eighteenth-century cottage in the middle of some woods in the middle of Buckinghamshireand shrinking from the idea. What would be the chances of spotting Jessica Palmer from behind the lead mullion windows of Keeper’s Cottage in Little Widdrington? Nil. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Fortunately, Harriet couldn’t see his face.
Unfortunately, Caroline could.
He looked quickly away.
‘And Mum says the Fishers were thinking of selling their estate agency,’ Harriet carried on, bringing the whole package together and presenting it to Miles.
‘Would you seriously contemplate moving to Little Widdrington?’
There was nothing, as far as Harriet could see, that needed contemplating. Casper not getting into St Anthony’s…Keeper’s Cottage and the Fisher Estate Agency coming onto the market…it was fate. The planets had aligned. ‘I’ve always dreamt of living in Keeper’s Cottage,’ Harriet said again. ‘I can’t believe it’s actually for sale.’
‘It’s only the second time it’s been on the market since we moved to Little Widdrington,’ Caroline put in.
‘And look at the price,’ Harriet said, speeding up, allowing herself to get excited now. ‘Look at the price, Mileswe’d reduce our mortgage by half. And the gardenthe garden, for the children.’
‘The Fishers want a quick sale on their businessthey’ve bought land in Spain they want to build on.’
‘They’ve still got the original flagstones downstairs,’ Harriet said.
His eyes scanned the ad. ‘How d’you know about the flagstones? It doesn’t say anything about flagstones here.’
‘Mum went to have a look.’
‘You’ve been to see it?’ Miles said, turning to Caroline, who was pretending to wash up. ‘Whatlike a viewing?’ He was aware, as he said it, that his tone wasn’t pleasant, but didn’t care.
‘Oh, Milesjust imagine it,’ Harriet gushed, giving in to her ecstasy.
They were closing in on himhad been closing in on him for goodness knows how longand he hadn’t seen it coming. The relocation to Little Widdrington was being presented to him as a fait accompli. There was no escape. He was being sucked into the black tunnel that was Little Widdrington. If he didn’t do something they were going to bring him to closure on thisright here, now, on a Saturday morning over a couple of slices of burnt toast.
Yellow blouses, yellow roses…all receding; barely visible now at the end of the tunnel.
Caroline and Harriet were staring at him, worried, as if they were about to bind and gag him right then and there and start driving to Little Widdrington with him in the boot.
Chapter 46
Inside No. 283 Prendergast Road, Jessica stood banging on Ellie’s door.
‘Ellieopen up! Ellie!’
There was no sound coming from inside Ellie’s room.
‘Mum!’ Arthur called out from somewhere.
‘Just a minute.’
‘There’s something wrong with Ninja Action Man’s eyes…Mum.’
‘Just a minute, Arthur.’
Jessica pushed open the bedroom door.
Since Ellie’s GCSE exam leave started last month, she’d barely spoken to her. Something was wrongmore wrong than usualand Jessica didn’t know how much more of it she could stand.
Ellie rolled slowly over, blinking in the light and air coming into the room through the open door. She stared at Jessica then rolled back over.
The smell of dope in the room was overwhelmingmade worse by the fact that the windows and curtains remained permanently closed. The dope fumes had in fact permeated the entire maisonnetteas she’d kissed Arthur goodbye at nursery the other morning, his hair had smelt of dope. The only two suits she possessed came back from the dry-cleaner’s still smelling of it. As soon as she opened the downstairs door, she smelt it. And she’d only found out on Wednesday when she called in to check on Ellie at lunchtime that her supplier was the girl from the florist’s downstairs. She’d found them both on the sofa smoking and watching a documentary about Papua New Guinea. The erroneous copies of CHAT that kept turning up in the maisonette came from the same source.
The dope smoking had intensified since exam leave started and now Jessica, worried every second of every day, called in as often as she could to check on Ellie. Nobody ever came to the house and Ellie never seemed to go outother than when she had a shift at Film Nite. Occasionally she might be out of the house the whole afternoon, returning at dusk with mud on her shoes. She said she went to the park.
Jessica wasn’t sleeping at night and by two in the afternoon could barely keep her eyes open at work. She’d fallen asleep in the car after a viewing on Thursday, and most nights now she fell asleep for forty minutes beside Arthur on his bedafter settling him.
She was smoking as much nicotine as Ellie was dope, and on Friday she’d had a complaint from nursery staff who’d overheard Arthur saying ‘fuck’which was highly probable given that ‘fuck’ was pretty much the only word Ellie used when she did bother to talk to her.
She crossed Ellie’s room and opened the curtains and the window.
‘Why are you doing that?’
‘It stinks in hereI’ve got to get some air in.’
‘God, what’s that?’ Ellie groaned as the smell of barbecue filled the room.
‘The street party.’
‘Street party? Have they only just found out we won the war or something? I’m going to puke.’
‘Sopuke,’ Jessica said, breathing in the dope-free barbecue fumes.
Behind her Ellie rolled off the bed and made for the bathroom. Outside, the road curved and went downhill, so she couldn’t see any signs of the street party from the bedroom window. She’d left messages with Evie, offering to help on any stalls they were short of help on, but Evie hadn’t got back to her. She didn’t feel like going, but Arthur wa
nted to. Casper Burgess had told him that they were doing face painting.
‘Maybe we could look for some new clothes for you,’ she said, turning round as Ellie walked, swaying, back into the room. ‘Boutique have got a stallwe could have a poke.’
A sudden memory cut through the morningof her mother, Linda, saying exactly the same thing to her, and of her giving the exact same response as Ellie was about to give.
Ellie collapsed back onto the bed. ‘I don’t want any new clothes.’
‘We need to start lookingas of September you’ll be able to wear your own clothes to school and you haven’t got many.’
‘Mum, when are you coming?’ Arthur called out.
Jessica moved towards the door. ‘D’you want me to run a bath or something?’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘I’ve ironed your jeans.’ As she spoke, her mind filled with the image of Ellie, Arthur and her moving happily among the stallsArthur getting his face painted, Ellie choosing a couple of tops. She allowed herself to become aware of the day outside, the brilliant June day whose airy, wide-flowing breeze brought round stretches of human noise that seemed to Jessica to come from another world.
‘Ellie, what’s going on? You have to tell me what’s going on.’
‘Nothing,’ Ellie yelled back. ‘Nothing’s going on so just fuck off.’
Jessica slammed Ellie’s bedroom door shut and went downstairs, glancing into the kitchen where there was a lot of milk on the floor. ‘Arthur?’
‘I was hungry. I was trying to put it on some cocoa pops then it fell on the floor because of the lid.’
‘It’s okayI’ll sort it out later.’
Arthur was kneeling at the coffee table with Burke the Transformer in one hand and Ninja Action Man in the other. The lab goggles he wore all the time were over his eyes.
He didn’t look up when Jessica sat down on the sofa, folded her arms and put her head on her knees. He carried on staring down at his right foot, resting his chin on his knee and hooking his hands under his toes. ‘Mum,’ he said tentatively, without looking at her, ‘Mumcan you sort out Ninja’s eyes?’