The kitchen clock reads half past four. I’m desperate for the toilet and I wriggle on Mum’s lap to get more comfortable but I don’t want to leave yet. I want to curl into her shoulder and sleep.
‘What do you think then, Rachel? Good idea?’
I mumble into her shoulder. ‘Yes, Mum, I’d love to.’
She holds her arms round my middle and squeezes my bladder tight. I jump up and stand in front of her with my legs crossed.
‘Please don’t go, Mummy. I need the loo. I’ll be back as quick as I can.’
‘You silly thing, Rachel,’ she says, laughing and shaking her hair with big flicks of her head. ‘Where would I go?’
I speed to the bathroom and when I come back down she’s on the hallway phone. She’s taken it into the living room, and the phone’s spiral cord is jammed in the door frame so the door won’t shut properly. The coil jiggles as she moves on the other side. I put my ear on the wooden panel and listen.
‘No, I’ve told you already,’ she says, ‘I’m not standing for it any more. I have a child to think of as well, if you hadn’t noticed.’ The curls of the cable stretch and wiggle.
From the kitchen comes the smell of burning. I run to the oven and with a tea towel I pull out the hot baking tin. The cake is my favourite – pineapple upside-down. I love the way the gooey syrup from the fruit soaks into the dough and oozes down the sides when it’s turned out of its tin. It’s even better a little burnt like this, as the edges of the cake go crispy and chewy. I get a plate and try to turn the tin over, but the towel’s too thin and the cake and plate slide around. Some of the hot juice dribbles over my hand.
In the other room the receiver slams down, and through the walls I hear Mum say, ‘Well, we’re not going to let that man spoil our day now, are we, princess!’ She comes back into the kitchen and I freeze with the plate in one hand and the tin in the other. The metal burns through the towel.
‘I’m really sorry, Mummy,’ I say. ‘I was trying to help but I think I got it wrong. Please don’t be cross.’
‘Oh, let’s not worry about that, shall we?’ she says, and takes the plate from me. ‘Old butterfingers Rachel never could do these things, could she? What a princess she is!’
At the sink I wash my burn in cold water and wipe some tears on my sleeve, thinking about the eggs on toast I cook myself most evenings without making a mistake.
She laughs and sets the cake in the middle of the plate and wipes the messy bits from the edge of the china with a cloth. The juice is the best bit and I almost ask her to leave it but decide it’s better we have a nice time.
‘Right then,’ Mum says, ‘let’s get on with our lovely day, shall we?’ She pats a chair for me to sit on and then sits herself down opposite. The side flaps of the yellow table have been pulled up to make it big enough to fit everything on. Mum takes a tea towel from a plate of sandwiches, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, then she puts the cake plate down next to it and does little hand claps in front of her face. There are egg, ham and fish-paste sandwiches, with slices of tomato and cucumber in a green and red pattern round the edge of the plate. In the middle of the sandwiches is a sprinkle of cress. Her head dips to watch my face. ‘Well, go on then,’ she says, ‘help yourself.’
I tuck into the food – it’s really lovely – and for afters we have cups of tea and the cake, still warm and eggy from the oven. The slice crumbles in my hands so I make a ball of the bits on my plate, sticking it together with little dabs, and I hold the plate up to my face to get the food in my mouth without spilling. I’ve seen Chinese people on TV eating bowls of rice like this. Mum does the same and we giggle, our faces close across the table. When we’re finished we leave all the mess on the table apart from the leftover cake, which I don’t want to go stale. I put it in the empty red biscuit tin. Mum puts on her shoes and brushes her hair in big sweeps in front of the mirror by the back door. Most weeks the hairdressers do her a style: a puffy round bun with tassels of hair round her face. Today though she wears it down past her shoulders. I hadn’t realized it was so long. Her dark roots are beginning to show where she hasn’t had it dyed recently, and a few really blonde strands float down and stick to her cardigan.
She grabs my hand and leads me outside. The back door is open and I pull away from her, getting the key from my pocket to lock it. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she says. ‘You can leave it wide open for all I care.’ She laughs with a big open mouth and her head turned up to the sun. ‘We’re perfectly safe. I’ve decided that today we’re untouchable.’ I leave the door and catch up with her, taking her hand again, and she swings our two arms forward and back in the air.
We go left into the lane at the end of our road. This is the way the bus goes, past fields and to the next big town. The other direction is my school and our village. Mum says it’s the perfect place to live and that we’re lucky to have the best of both worlds, ‘Countryside and community.’ It’s getting late and the sun makes golden spots on the trees. Tiny buds dot the branches and there’s the smell of wet mud. I hold the air inside my lungs until I think I might burst.
A car passes at speed and we have to stand back quickly.
‘Silly old so-and-so,’ Mum says in a sing-song voice.
I breathe out. ‘Is Uncle Peter coming over tonight, Mummy?’
She steps into the road and pulls me after her. ‘You should call me Patty, like my friends do. After all, we’re always being mistaken for sisters.’
Mum’s name is Patricia. She shortened it after Dad left. We’re almost the same height now and I no longer have to bend my neck to look at her. Her skin shines and bounces in the sunlight. Long lashes flap against her cheeks, like mascara butterflies, and when she smiles there are small creases at the edges of her eyes. I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful. We chat about boys and school and what we could do in the summer. She says maybe I won’t have to go to Daddy’s and we could go bike riding instead and swim in the sea. I think she’s forgotten that Daddy’s last letter said he was too busy this summer to have me anyway, but it’s fun making plans so I don’t say anything.
A few more cars pass and we pull back into the verge, getting tiny twigs and mud in our shoes. We empty them out and walk in our tights and socks. Mum smiles and waves at all of the cars with big sweeps of her arm. Some of the drivers wave back. Some don’t. The last car that passes speeds up as it rounds to the other side of the road to avoid us. Mum holds her arm high in the air and waves it to and fro, as if she’s calling a ship, but the driver keeps her eyes on the road. The red tail lights vanish round the darkening corner. ‘Yes, and you’re not so perfect yourself, Mrs Pierce,’ she shouts at the car which has already disappeared. ‘Interfering old cow!’ Mum’s voice echoes against the steep banks of the lane. ‘You’re just jealous of other people having fun.’
Mum turns swiftly round, as if we’ve reached the end of the track, like at school when we race up and down the field, circling a traffic cone. ‘Come on then, spoilsport,’ she says more quietly, but walking fast. ‘You should have brought your coat. I guess we’ll have to go back.’
My jumper is thin and my hands are cold, but I’m trying really hard not to shiver. ‘I don’t mind,’ I say, ‘let’s keep on going.’ I tug her arm back towards the way we were walking even though she’s already built up speed in the direction of home. ‘We can always get the bus back from town.’ I grasp her hand with both of mine.
‘Don’t be daft, old silly-pants.’ She pulls her hand out of my grip. ‘Mummy’s got things to do.’
On the way back, if a car passes, Mum looks to the side of the road, commenting on a tree and touching its leaves, and after the car has gone Mum rejoins the road with a fast walk. I try to talk about the school holidays again but instead she asks what homework I have to do this evening.
As we turn the corner into our street, we see Uncle Peter’s car is parked in our driveway. He leans against the bonnet with straight legs crossed in front of him and his pipe h
anging from his mouth. In his arms is an enormous bunch of flowers. Mum strides ahead of me and past him, up the path to the front door. He runs after her and grabs her round the waist.
‘Pat, please, Patty, hear me out,’ he says.
She struggles away from him and reaches for the door handle. I walk round to the back, run up the stairs and peep from an upstairs window. Mum and Peter are standing in the front garden near the door, and the tops of their heads are stuck together. Mum’s long hair mixes with his as Peter grasps it in his hands. I think about what their tongues are doing and whether it feels different to the back of my hand. Across the road, there’s an eye-sized gap in Mrs Simpson’s net curtains.
I lie on my bed watching the light fade from blue to black. The pipes in the wall hiss when a tap is turned on and from downstairs there’s a chink of metal on glass. I guess Mum is filling a vase. Peter’s smoke creeps up the stairs and curls round my door. I open the window to let out the smell and the room turns to ice.
10
PENCIL POINT
Less than a week has passed since I came back from Will’s, and the stand-off between David and myself remains unbroken. The ash I threw over his toy collection was cleaned up by the time I woke the next day, and nothing was said about the mess, as if it never happened, as if I’d gone mad and imagined everything. I showed David the receipt from the Grand but he ripped it up without looking at the date. When we’re together now, David’s eyes follow my every move, and most of his phone calls are taken in private. He leaves small clues around the house to remind me that he hasn’t forgotten, that his silence is merely a mask for intention. A jugged hare has been in the fridge for days, uncovered, so everything including the milk has taken on the flavour of the gamey meat. I’ve had to throw all the food away.
Each day I wake before dawn to a quick pulse in my chest and a dream-replay of the man on the road, now a truncated version of the main events: wide eyes, thud, flip, blood, drag, dead. At times it seems like this same vision has been the recurrent theme of my whole night’s sleep, and I’m more tired when I wake than when I go to sleep. The pain in my stomach grows daily, and I choke down tablets the size of horse pills. I finally made it to my GP. She’s concerned I’ll get woozy with anything stronger, but the meds only knock off the edge. Sometimes I experiment with an unsafe dose, or take nothing at all and let the sensation in my body remind me that I’m still alive. The doctor has sent my blood for tests and has requested an ultrasound of my abdomen, but at the last appointment she prodded and pressed and said she could feel nothing alarming. ‘Have you been anxious at all lately?’ she asked when I said the pain sometimes travels to my legs. I didn’t tell her about the times I go numb and feel like I’ve shrunk to the size of a pinhead inside my body.
This morning I creep from under the covers, and my husband’s sleeping body rolls into the warm space I’ve left behind. The bed looks full, as if there was never enough room. In the bathroom I wash the crust from my eyes, dress, then take the watch I found at the roadside from my tampon box – its overnight hiding place – and wind the piece before putting it in my bag. The tick is old-fashioned and loud, and in the morning quiet I think I can hear it through the leather of my bag, so I muffle it with tissues, holding the pulse for a moment before it goes silent. Downstairs I grab a coffee then leave, driving through unlit streets and past hibernating houses, willing the new morning to arrive and with it the offer of a day. Any day will do, only better than the last. Instead I feel like a trespasser.
My plan is to get to the office early to prepare for my public persona of work Rachel, the authoritative and decisive manager who oversees the rivers of finance flowing in and out of our current productions. It’s becoming harder these days to summon up this character, and as soon as I return home she scuttles away and hides for the rest of the night. Today, on my way to work, I decide to make a detour down the road where the accident took place, to witness the size of the police operation, and calculate the impact of one man’s death.
I drive to where the lane bends sharply at the tree. My car slows to a standstill in the centre of the road. Tarmac sucks at the tyres.
This is the place.
All that’s left of the investigation are car tread marks on the muddy verge and a flapping strand of blue and white police tape. There’s nothing else here; the evidence transferred to the lab now and the body in deep freeze. I’m sorry they took the man away. There was some comfort in knowing he lay close to where he’d lived, his body returning to the woods atom by atom. I wonder what else the police found, if anything of mine was discovered. A small part of me wishes they’d come and get me so I could be done with all of this.
My car engine murmurs in the background of my thoughts. I press the accelerator and the vehicle jolts forward, carrying me further down the lane, and again I pass the horse-box house I saw on the day of the accident. It’s joined now by two other vehicles, both in the same ramshackle state. One looks like an ex-post-office truck, the writing on the side painted over with a darker shade of red, and the other vehicle was probably once a police van, the type that would have ferried officers with riot shields to a demonstration. In its previous incarnation, the van could have been used against these activists whose camp of tepees and tree houses has spilled into the woods. Smoke drifts across the road from a camp fire.
About half a mile further along the lane I catch a glimpse of something through the bare trees: a flash of colour in the distance, a structure on a small incline. A roof and a window, the glass filling up with the grey dawn. It must be the caravan Alex spoke of. The home of the man I killed. Cold fear creeps up my spine and I speed up towards Brighton.
Teller Productions is situated on the main route into town, about a twenty-minute drive from the woods. When I arrive, I park in the forecourt and turn off the engine. Reflected in the gloss of the windows, a pale sun bleeds into the dark sky, the image broken by a polka-dot of rain on the glass. I run to the entrance and fumble with the keys in the lock, and once inside a single tone counts down the thirty seconds before the alarm proper goes off. I input the code twice before getting it right. Then silence. The hush expands through the still air.
The heating hasn’t come on, but even when it does the office will still be cold. David goes to the gym every morning and comes to work pink and sweaty, ordering Kelly the receptionist to open windows. She brings extra layers of clothes which she keeps in a bag under her desk. ‘Good temperature for mental agility,’ David says. He’ll shower again in his office en suite even though he’s already washed at the gym; if David had a choice, he’d deny his body the filth of natural secretions.
Here in this early dark the chill is almost solid, and the room is paused, waiting for the labour that will lift it from sleep. I pace between the desks and mute phones, gathering my jacket and scarf round me. My breath dusts the air for seconds before melting away. In the middle of the room a chair is slung out from its desk; a witness to a rushed exit last night. The standby light on the copier flashes in the corner like a distant satellite. I’m careful not to disturb anything, as if I’m a time-traveller passing through, and only the persistent rain ticking on the windows lets me know the world is still turning.
This empire has taken David and myself fifteen years to build, and we moved to these premises about five years ago when our old offices had reached bursting point. David spotted this run-down warehouse in the right part of town, the building next to a nursing home, and he made enquiries with the owner, convincing them to sell at a knock-down price – ‘Take it off your hands, smarten the place up. It’ll increase the value of your adjoining business.’ The place was gutted, internal walls were pulled down and a suspended steel mezzanine cut the space in two – upper and lower. Where once stood a brick wall with a few small windows, huge sheets of tinted glass now front the open-plan layout looking out over the car park and road.
We have desks for about twenty staff, and each of their workstations is cluttered with the mino
r debris of their outside lives – family photos, kids’ drawings, snow domes from Florida and the Canaries – set there as small acts of defiance; a retreat to better times. David hates the way these knick-knacks ruin the lines of symmetry made by the desks, but in order to appear the tolerant, benevolent boss he allows the clutter. Our people are expected to check in to work at least once a day, preferably in person even if they’ve been on location, and their broad desks and ergonomic chairs are a declaration of the company’s investment in each individual. David is in by 8.00 a.m. and leaves twelve hours later so ‘there are no excuses for shoddy work, only poor time management’. In our line of business you stay until the job is done – contracts are only given to mothers willing to dose up their kids on Calpol and send them to school with a fever – and most of our staff and freelancers know that the boss’s expectations are a small price to pay for the chance of almost constant work, plus the golden ticket of a future reference from David Teller himself.
I walk up the metal stairs to the suspended floor where a glass balcony runs the entire width of the building. Standing at the bar it’s possible to survey most of the office. It’s David’s favourite spot. The only rooms in the building with a door, apart from the toilets, are on this floor, and they are the meeting room and mine and David’s offices. David insists I keep my door open so I am present to all incoming traffic; I’m the gatekeeper of his day, a stronghold reinforced by the austerity of my welcome through which nothing and no one can pass. His door remains shut at all times.
The Liar’s Chair Page 9