‘I’m sorry.’ I rock back and forth under the radar of Will’s eyes. ‘But at least it means you’re safe.’ I look up at him. ‘Now that they’ve got him, I mean.’
‘Jesus!’ Will shouts. ‘You don’t care about anyone or anything apart from yourself, do you?’ His mouth trembles and he clamps his teeth over his bottom lip. The incisors dent the flesh white. He comes towards me with eyes glistening and holds me up by the scruff of my coat so I have to tiptoe. Nose to nose, he bares his teeth. ‘You, Rachel, are dangerous to know.’ We stand like this for seconds, heat radiating from his body, then as fast as he grabbed me he shoves me away from him with a growl. ‘You know what? You’re not fucking worth it.’ And he turns and strides up the path to the road.
I chase after him and stand in his way. He keeps walking and looks to one side of me, towards the line of parked cars.
‘Will, please,’ I say, ‘I’m begging you, listen for a minute.’ I put up both my hands to hold him steady as he strains against me, then settles. ‘I’m sorry about that man. Really sorry. I knew David was dangerous, but he’s never gone this far before. If I’d known how bad it was going to get I would have left when you said. Now everything’s gone crazy.’ I focus on the buttons of his shirt. The bulk of his ribs heaves up and down against my palms. ‘I need to explain.’ I take a breath. ‘Always, even as a child, I’ve known I was totally alone. There was no one who could help. I thought you might know how that feels.’ Will’s breathing steadies. ‘I don’t know how to let anyone in, but I’m trying to change. Please believe me. I’m begging you, I know it’s hard, but please forgive me. You’re the only person I care about, the only one I don’t want to leave behind.’
‘Bullshit.’ He stands back from me and my balance totters. ‘God,’ he yells, ‘I could kill you right now.’ He points at me. ‘You. Have had. The last. Of me.’ He knocks my hand away with the side of his arm. ‘You deserve every bloody thing you get.’
‘Please. I’m scared. I need your help.’
‘The only person you need to be scared of, Rachel, is yourself.’
Will turns and strides to the road. He gets into his van, attempts the ignition three times before it starts, then swerves a U-turn back towards the city centre, not once turning to look at me. I stand at the deserted roadside and watch as he disappears into the effervescence of lights that line the coast.
Today it’s almost the shortest day of the year, and even though it’s only afternoon, the sun is fading fast. The beach is empty. Windows and balconies of the flats which overlook the promenade are decorated with twinkling lights; one set is a Father Christmas climbing a ladder. Curtains are drawn as people prepare for the evening’s television. Oblivion. ‘You’re a long time dead,’ my mother used to shout at the neighbours when they complained about the noise, and for once I agree.
It’s coming at you, faster than you think. Almost here.
A seagull rides the air and I wonder if there’s pleasure in the action, like play, or whether it’s purely functional; to stay up from the ground away from predators, with a constant eye on the opportunity for food. Relentless survival.
I walk back to the beach. My hair blows across my face and I pull strings of it from my eyes. The sea has turned black as if it’s sucked the slate from the sky. Waves push and drag, push and drag.
Faint footsteps. A man walks towards me holding a can of beer in one hand. He takes a swig. A skinny dog is beside him. The man’s shoes are loose and they slap on the ground with each step. His coat sweeps up at the sides. He walks with a slow pace and a small limp, but it won’t be long before he reaches me.
19
CHRYSANTHEMUMS
The B & B I’ve been staying in for a couple of nights in Brighton is cash only. It’s a different hotel from the one where I met Alex, and this time I’m alone. In my single room with corner sink big enough for one hand at a time, I’ve been hovering between fast food and the rattle of daytime TV. I’ve rung and texted Will many times, but he’s replied only once. His text said, ‘Leave me alone.’ So I have. David’s made no attempt to call.
On the second morning when I wake, the television is dead, and I have to settle instead for stillness. Noises leak into the room from downstairs and next door: voices, a vacuum cleaner, doors banging. A group of young men call to each other on the street outside. They’re lunchtime drunk, and they sing Christmas carols, replacing the traditional lines with swear words and jokes. Their voices lift up past my window and bounce from the bricks, travelling higher, dissipating and softening as they meet the vacuum of space. I swig from the bottle of gin I bought yesterday before I try standing up, but the movement is awkward, as if my body is solidifying. Turning to salt.
The voices of the men outside recede, after which there’s another kind of quiet into which my thoughts drop, back into the hole of my past. I pick at the muck in there but it doesn’t go away. With the layers peeled back, I’m surprised at the density of the anger, but there’s no specific focus, nothing concrete to kick at, only a need to go back as far as I can to the beginning and extract the rotten tooth. Cauterize the infection. The persistent taps of memory, brushed off by years of distractions – men, work, marriage, booze – have latched on. The truth is crouched and ready.
After all this time the hardest part is remembering his surname – he was always just Uncle Peter – but with some concentration the name slides into my consciousness like a whiff of his pipe smoke. After this, tracking him down to a nursing home takes only a few phone calls. All these years he’s been on my doorstep. He still lives in Brighton, close to my office and the house I shared with David, as well as to the town where I grew up, so he hasn’t strayed far; not much of an adventurer, more of a man who finds his security and pleasure in familiarity.
I pop to the corner shop for some gifts to take with me, choosing an ugly plant and some lardy chocolates, then order a taxi. En route, the cab passes Teller Productions. The windows of the building flash back the sun, and in the forecourt there’s the usual jam of expensive cars. One of them is David’s. With the small separation of three weeks away from the office since my very public shaming, the place appears smaller, foolish in its over-blown formality on this crappy feeder road into Brighton. I used to believe we were so swish, but really, who does David think he is?
It feels as if the taxi is glowing with my presence, and after my first glance I sink down in my seat and look the other way. David’s inside, most probably at his desk marshalling his troops in the money trenches, and the thought of him in there perpetually pursuing matter and quantity, widens the few metres between us as if an earthquake has wrenched open the ground. He’s welcome to his cold soul which knocks about inside his chest. It’s all he deserves.
Twenty minutes later and the cab pulls up outside the nursing home, Chantry Hall; a mock-Tudor mansion on an avenue of grand houses, the kind of place designed in Victorian times for a family with live-in servants. Most of the houses have now been converted into flats or daycare centres, and phone masts line the busy road. The old and infirm are the new gentry, the nurses their underpaid servants. Anyone with money today would choose to live elsewhere.
I step out of the car and on to the driveway. Unpruned shrubs – the relics of a mature garden – compete for status among tall weeds. A tree reaches above the roof and salutes me with a swoosh of pine needles that fall as the wind gusts. Next to the lion’s-head knocker on the front door is a plastic doorbell that chimes a Big Ben melody inside the house. Footsteps, then the door is opened by a flustered woman in a grubby apron. Behind her in the hallway there’s a trolley with a gigantic teapot on top, plus a selection of beakers with lids.
‘Hello. Can I help you?’ she asks, wiping her hands on her sides.
‘I’ve come to see Mr Davis.’
‘Peter? Peter Davis?’ She looks at my pot plant and chocolates. I nod. ‘Matron’s not here to sign you in, but I’m sure it’ll be all right. Come on in.’ She turns, walks to her trolley
and begins to push. I follow. ‘Family are you?’ she says.
‘Yes, he’s my uncle.’
She nods. ‘He’ll be very pleased to have a visitor. No one’s been for quite some time.’
Ammonia mixes with a fog of TCP. The smell will stay on my clothes after I leave.
‘I’m on my way upstairs,’ the woman says. ‘I’ll show you to his room.’
We enter a lift, its concrete shaft protruding from the panelled walls like a bedsore. The trolley clunks over the entrance lip and a beaker falls to the floor. I pick it up and put it back next to the others. All the spouts have been chewed as if they’ve been drunk from by teething toddlers. We arrive at the first floor and walk along a corridor. Open doors reveal crumpled people, some in bed, some on chairs, and the noise of their TVs merges in the hallway into a manic opera. One lady catches my eye and waves. I wave back. She’s wearing a too-tight nightie, and wisps of grey hair stick up in electric shocks from her pink scalp, like she’s been plugged in.
At the end of the corridor we turn a corner and reach a door where the trolley lady pauses. ‘Here he is,’ she says, and steams her vehicle through the door. ‘Peter, dear,’ she shouts, ‘you’ve got a visitor!’ The man in bed opens his eyes for a second then shuts them again. She pours a cup of milky tea with two sugars into one of the beakers, puts a lid on it then rests the cup at his bedside. ‘I haven’t got an ordinary cup to give you a tea,’ she says to me. ‘Don’t suppose you’d want to drink from one of these?’ She holds up one of the translucent containers and smiles.
‘No, but thanks anyway.’
‘You can have a lovely catch-up when he wakes,’ the woman says as she leaves the room. ‘The tea should get him going.’
I follow her to the door and shut it as she leaves. Through the walls I hear her rattle into the next room. ‘Hello, duck!’ she bellows.
Next to Peter’s bed is a red cord with a triangle of plastic on the end. I ravel it into a bundle and tie it high and out of reach. He’d been about ten years older than Mum, which means he’s closing on eighty now, but the years of alcohol, tobacco and canteen breakfasts make him look even more ancient. Layers of blankets cover the old man, and his lungs heave against the weight of fabric on top of him. Underneath I imagine the raisin of his body. His breath sucks in and out of crumpled lips and a clock ticks an infinity through the mud of heating in the room, but it’s taken me a lifetime to get here so I can wait.
Through the window is a view of the back garden where an empty bird table stands. No one has bothered to put out food so no birds will come. Peter must have thought he had the best suite in the house when he got here, tucked away nice and quiet with a lovely outlook, but he’s on his own at this end of the corridor, and to see through the window he’d need to twist his neck.
He coughs. Lips part. Tobacco teeth with a few spaces. He splutters again and wakes, turning his head, starting when he sees me. Bushy brows push worms of skin up his forehead as he struggles to sit up.
‘Hello?’ he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Yes, you do.’ I press his shoulder back on to the pillow to settle him. His skin is loose under his pyjamas, and I snatch my hand away.
‘I’m sorry.’ He lies back and wheezes. ‘My memory’s not what it used to be. Have you come to do my assessment? Remind me of your name?’
‘It’s Rachel, Rachel Teller.’
He looks at me for seconds, squinting. ‘I’m sorry, dear. You look familiar but I can’t quite place you.’ The skin at his jowls shivers. ‘Do I need to fill out a form?’
‘No, that’s not why I’m here. I’m an old friend. Well, a friend of a friend. You would know me as Rachel Sharp.’
His cheeks freeze.
‘Yes, Patty’s daughter,’ I say and sit up straight with my hands clasped round each other in a double fist on my lap. Outside a crow calls. ‘Is it still OK to call you Uncle Peter?’
His eyes steady and his hands grasp the sheet into little balls. ‘No, I’m sorry, dear, I don’t recall you.’ He pushes to sit more upright, joints mashing. ‘Patty, you say?’
‘Yes, Patty, your girlfriend.’
‘I don’t have a girlfriend. My wife died some years back.’
‘And Patty’s dead now too,’ I say, leaning a little closer with a tight jaw. ‘I think you remember. I think you remember everything.’
‘Rachel, you say?’ His eyes jump towards the door as the clatter of the woman’s trolley disappears down the hallway. He looks to the side of his bed for the emergency cord and his vision scrolls up towards the ceiling where the thread hangs in a knot. With his elbows holding him up, he looks back to me. ‘I’ve forgotten so much.’
Anger rumbles in my belly. ‘You were Mum’s boyfriend. Patty, my mum. You were with her for a couple of years. Back in the seventies.’
‘The seventies? I was a policeman then. Worked for them my whole life, but they didn’t bloody look after me when I retired. It’s criminal, the pension I got. Criminal.’
‘Peter,’ I raise my voice. ‘I’m here to talk to you about Patty. Patricia. My mum.’
‘I don’t know any Patricias. What is it I’m supposed to know?’
I lean closer, smelling his boiled-sweet breath, and say in a low voice: ‘What happened? I want to know what you did to me.’
‘Did to you?’ he shouts. ‘Whatever are you talking about?’
I sit up straight. ‘When I was a girl.’
‘I don’t understand.’
I jump up and the chair falls back. Peter yelps. My arms are stiff and straight at my sides. ‘You don’t have to understand, I just want you to remember.’
‘Remember what? I think you’ve got the wrong person, young lady.’
He sits more upright in the bed, trying to pull the bed sheets off, and the sticks of his legs edge towards the floor. I throw the covers back across him and hold him by his shoulders, pushing him down on to the mattress. Peter scrabbles at my arms with ribbed yellow nails, but I press harder, feeling the loose twigs of his bones inside the sack of skin. Tears spring up in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry for whatever it is,’ he says. ‘Believe me, I’m truly sorry.’
I lean in close and spit my words in his face. ‘You can’t be sorry unless you remember.’ He struggles as I press down, then with his teeth bared he stills under my weight. His breathing speeds up, lungs hungry for air, and tears roll down his cheeks. Me on top, him underneath, the reversal of how it had been all those years before, and the memories tumble out. All of the times. Each and every event rushes at me as a fresh incision.
‘Please forgive me, for whatever it is you say I’ve done.’ He wheezes and his face turns from grey to white. ‘I’m just an old man.’
Under Peter’s head is a stack of pillows. I could put one over his face and hold it there; he’s weak and it wouldn’t take long. Who would know? I have already disappeared.
‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘please go. Please leave me alone.’
‘That’s what you should have done to me.’
Under my pressure his shoulders bend into the mattress, and his fragile bones remind me of Seamus’s limp body as I dragged him through the woods. From the bed there’s the popping sound of a ligament. Peter screams. My hands spring from his shoulders, and I grab one of my fists with the other and restrain the pair against my chest. The old man’s cheeks are wet and he rests shaking hands over his face.
I slump back in the chair at his side, watching Peter until his hands slide off. He looks at me and his body shudders, then he sputters and retches, grabbing a tissue from his bedside table. He spits. Damp green leaks through the thin paper. As I lift up my hands to run them through my hair, Peter screeches with the sound of a little girl and fumbles to the other side of the bed, almost falling off. He grabs the sheets to haul himself back. Again he sobs and I chuck him the box of tissues. He blows his nose several times, focusing on the bedding in front of him, before he flits a look at
me. I catch his eye. He turns his face back to the bed.
‘What do I need to do to make you go away?’ he says in a quiet voice.
‘Tell the truth.’
He wipes his eyes and sighs. ‘It was . . . you know. All those notes. What did you expect?’
‘Notes? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘The letters in my jacket, the ones I used to find in the mornings after I’d stayed with your mother. You were persistent, I’ll give you that. I thought you wanted me to . . . Well, Patty told me to sort it out.’
Another piece of the story breaks off and slides into place. My father’s writing pad on the desk in my childhood bedroom. The letters I wrote to my dad were pages long, telling him all about what I’d been doing, asking when I could see him again. I used his old fountain pens, thinking they made my writing more grown-up. When Dad wrote back I was so excited, but over time the replies became shorter, replaced by the occasional postcard, until Mum told me he’d moved abroad.
Absent fathers, letters unanswered. ‘Pa, when are you coming home?’ Was it the same for Seamus; easier to hide his mistakes and pretend he didn’t have a family? Let the women do their growing up in front of the children.
It’s a sin for the woman to leave, but damn the wife who tries to contain her man. Like my own dad who bounced between lovers and wives, siring children along the way, his offspring passed over like puppies for the pet shop. When the forwarding addresses for Mr Sharp changed to ‘Return to Sender’, he got the freedom he’d always desired.
So in the absence of my dad, the letters to my guardian angel became prolific. I’d sit in my room at my nanna’s old desk, creasing the pages of the writing pad with my fingernails painted red and tearing the paper into tiny pieces to make it last. I’d fold these notes over and over then hide them around the house: behind picture frames, wedged into gaps in the skirting board, tucked into shoes and jacket pockets. If they’d disappeared by the next day, I knew the angel had found them.
The Liar’s Chair Page 19