The Concrete Grove cg-1

by Gary McMahon

  She sipped her wine and wondered whether she could possibly summon any more tears, or if her well had finally run dry. Then, disgusted with herself, with her stupid self-pity, she emptied the glass and refilled it. She was getting drunk. Her eyes were heavy and her mind was blurred, as if layered in cotton wool. She could no longer trust her emotions, or her instincts.

  But that was good: she liked being drunk. It made the lies seem more like truths.

  That man. The one from earlier this evening. What was his name? Tom? He was nice. She smiled at the memory of his nervous grin, his loose limbs, dumb T-shirt and silly running shorts. Why was she thinking of him now, at her lowest ebb? Was it because, for some reason, when she had spoken to him she had felt less alone?

  “Fuck,” she said, enjoying the way the word tasted of wine and stolen kisses. “Get a grip, woman.”

  Now that she had time to think about him, Tom seemed even more attractive than he had when he’d brought Hailey home. After Hailey had gone to bed, Lana finally had the time to consider what she had felt as he stood there, bare-legged and shaking in her doorway. Clearly he found her attractive too — Lana was experienced enough to recognise the signs. But it was more than that, deeper. There was a connection between them, a quiet spark that had simultaneously slowed down and speeded up the short time they’d spent together. He was older than her, but that might even be part of the appeal: a figure of authority to cling to in the night, when her demons came loping towards her out of the dark.

  Lana struggled to understand the thoughts in her head. The wine, the night, the worry over Hailey and those weird fainting spells, it was all setting her off balance, confusing her to the point where she no longer felt that she could trust herself to do the right thing.

  But what was the right thing? And how would she recognise it? There were no rules here, no written bylaws she could follow. Everything was fluid: even emotions were up for barter.

  She took another mouthful of wine, held it, and then swallowed. The taste was good: bone-dry and woody, just how she liked it.

  When the telephone rang she took a few seconds to register its quiet buzzing. Frowning, she glanced over at the handset where it rested on the windowsill. She stood and walked to the window, once again looking at the fiery darkness hanging above the distant silhouette of Far Grove.

  Sirens drew close as she reached out to pick up the phone, as if the sound had been triggered by her motion.

  “Hello.” Her voice was bounced back at her through the earpiece — a fluke of acoustics, or a fault on the line. “Hello,” she said again, and this time she was answered by a thick, heavy silence.

  Feeling her heart swell in her chest, Lana waited. She knew who it was. There could be only one man who would call her so late, and project such a sense of menace down the line.

  The line hummed. It sounded like distant wings, hundreds of them, beating so fast that it filled her ears with a single note.

  “Do you have it?” His voice was like rocks splitting, concrete breaking under immense pressure.

  There was no point in pretending, in playing dumb. “No. Not yet.” She closed her eyes. “But I will.”

  She pretended that she could hear the sound of her own heart beating, and if she waited long enough it would rise in volume and drown out his words, silencing his threats.

  “I want it tomorrow.” Again, that gritty voice: pure verbal hatred. “I’ll send a couple of the chaps round.”

  Lana still could not open her eyes. If she did, she thought she might see him standing there, grinning, his hair slick with gel and his eyes blazing. “It’s too soon. I don’t have it. Please… just give me a few more days. A week.” She loathed the pleading tone in her voice, the fact that she was reduced to begging from scum like this, whining like a dog for scraps from the table.

  “Tomorrow.” That humming. The sound was audible behind his voice. “The chaps’ll call on you. Be there or it’ll only be worse for you.” Then he hung up.

  Lana stood there, bathed in distant firelight, her forehead sweating and her hand gripping the telephone receiver. She was unable to put the phone down. Her fingers refused to budge, to open and relax their grip.

  “No,” she said, and the word was like an exhaled breath. It made as little impact on the world as a sigh. “I don’t have it.”

  Finally, after what seemed like a long time, she was able to relinquish her grip on the handset. She put it back on the windowsill, carefully, delicately. She still had her eyes closed. Her lips were trembling. Darkness danced behind her eyelids. The world was unstable, as if someone had untied her from her moorings and she was beginning to drift, to move away from everything that had ever seemed safe. The darkness behind her eyes beckoned.

  “Mum?” Hailey’s voice, behind her and filled with concern.

  Lana opened her eyes and the fiery darkness flooded in… then, gradually, it receded, letting in the light. The sirens were louder.

  “Mum? Are you okay?”

  She turned round and faced her daughter. Hailey was standing in the doorway, the light from her bedroom forming a bright pool at her feet. She was wearing an oversized nightgown and clutching the ear of a ragged teddy bear — the one her father had given her, and which they had both, for some reason, christened Well-do. It was a private joke, one of the few things father and daughter had ever really shared.

  “Hi, honey. Can’t you sleep?”

  Hailey shook her head. She was fourteen years old, yet she often seemed a lot younger. Right now, standing there with her weight on one hip and Well-do in her hand, she looked about ten, maybe even younger than that.

  “What’s wrong, Hay? Bad dreams?” Lana started to move across the room, towards her daughter, but Hailey flinched long before she even made it to her side. “What is it, honey? Tell me about it.”

  Then, at last, she saw it: the dark stain at the crotch of Hailey’s nightdress, the way she was standing turned fractionally to one side to hide the damp patch. “Oh, Hailey. Oh, baby, come here…” She went down onto her knees and hugged her daughter close, ignoring the smell of urine and the way that Hailey shuddered at her touch. “It’s okay. Just an accident, that’s all.” She felt her eyes begin to prickle and blinked away the threat of tears. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  So for the second time that night Lana comforted her daughter, treating her as if she were an infant. She ran a hot bath and watched in silence as Hailey undressed, trying to hide her thin body in the steamy bathroom. Lana stared at her slight arms and legs, at her small mound of a tummy. She was aware of a strange sensation in her chest, like the slicing motion made by a thin blade, and she looked away, unsure of what it was she was feeling.

  There was a soft splashing noise as Hailey climbed into the bath; a louder one as she sat down in the water and moved her hands through the bubbles.

  “Everything’s going to be fine.” Lana heard herself say the words, but she couldn’t believe them. The lie came easily, like a gift, and she accepted it with good grace. Sometimes it was easier to let people hear what they wanted, and this was certainly one of those times. “We’re going to be fine.” But they weren’t; of course they weren’t. They were in a lot of trouble and nothing she could do or say could alter the facts: she owed money to the biggest bastard in town, and he wanted it back, one pointless payment at a time.

  Lana ran the sponge across her daughter’s narrow shoulders, letting the hot water spill across her pale skin, turning it pink. Hailey said nothing. She just sat there in the bath, letting the water soak her, staring at the same spot on the tiles. She didn’t even blink.

  What is it? Lana squeezed the sponge, stared at the soapy water on soft flesh. What’s come between us?

  A lot more than the murders and Timothy’s suicide had created a vast gap between them, pushing them and keeping them apart. There was something else — an unknown quantity — and Lana did not know what she was meant to do to fix the problem. She was not armed with all the facts; whate
ver Hailey was going through, she was keeping it to herself. For some reason, perhaps even fear, the girl would not come to her mother for help.

  “Speak to me, honey.” Lana whispered through tight lips, her jaw aching from the tension. “Tell me what it is.”

  But Hailey kept staring at the wall, at the stained white tiles, her eyes unfocused yet seeing something beyond the room, the flat, the entire estate. Whatever it was she was looking at, Lana felt that it was changing her daughter, transforming her into a stranger. Making her different. Turning her inside out.

  The room was filled with steam, obscuring her vision, and Lana felt that she should open the window but she didn’t want to leave Hailey’s side. Something kept her there, near the body that had begun life curled up within her, the construct of skin and hair and bone she had built for nine months inside her womb.

  Lana was afraid for her daughter, but she didn’t know why.

  Hailey had not wet the bed since she was two years old, and even then it had been an accident. Even her father’s death had not caused this kind of physical reaction, just the expected crying and outbursts of rage.

  So what, Lana thought, was so terrifying that Hailey was suddenly fainting in the street and pissing herself in her sleep? What the hell was scaring her this much?

  The steam moved sinuously, as if it were hiding shapes within its cloudy mass. At last Lana was able to move away, and she walked to the window and opened it, letting in the cool night air. The steam shifted, breaking apart like a hacked sheet. There was nothing behind it, no monster hid within the folds of dissipating steam. Nobody was in the bathroom apart from the two women, mother and daughter, and the unmistakable presence of their shared fear.

  “Please,” said Lana, once again hating the fact that she was forced to plead.

  Hailey said nothing. She twitched her head to the side, one corner of her mouth turning up in an expression that was not quite a smile but something else, something unreadable. “It’s nothing,” she said, and her voice was like that of a small child, not much more than a baby. “I promise, Mum. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”

  Lana stood by the window, the cold air kissing her neck, the sirens wailing in the night. In that moment, with the song of the estate ringing in her ears, she knew that Hailey was lying.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEN LANA WOKE she felt a strange sense of panicked urgency, as if she should be doing something important but couldn’t remember what it was that required her attention. She blinked at the daylight, opening her mouth to run her dry tongue across her even drier lips. She felt the beginnings of a headache flaring up behind her eyes.

  The radio was playing at a low volume on the dressing table. There was make-up scattered across the table’s surface, on the seat of the chair and on the floor. Eyeliner pencils, tubes of lipstick and other beauty paraphernalia had been thrown down carelessly. She didn’t remember much, just a vague notion of applying make-up, washing it off, and reapplying it differently. She had a mental picture of her face in the mirror, eyes blackened by mascara, lipstick smears across her mouth.

  She sat up slowly, not wanting to encourage the headache. An empty wine bottle rolled off the bed and onto the floor, hitting the carpet with a soft thud. She’d taken alcohol to bed again. That was never a good idea, and she knew that it was happening too often for comfort. Her father had died from drink — his heart had failed under the pressure of too many years of chronic alcohol abuse. She didn’t want to go the same way, leaving behind a blotchy, wine-sodden corpse for her daughter to bury in a cheap coffin.

  Lana glanced over to the open bedroom door. She usually closed it at night — a leftover fear from her childhood, when she couldn’t sleep with an open door — but now it was wide to the wall. Daylight slanted through the gaps between vertical blinds, forming lines across the carpet which stretched to the doorway. Lana watched the bright tramlines, light-headed and slightly nauseous.

  She reached out and turned off the radio.

  There was a noise from somewhere inside the flat. It sounded like something heavy falling to the floor, or perhaps a door slamming. Was Hailey up and about, getting ready for school? Lana slid out of bed and put on her dressing gown. She caught sight of her reflection in the wall-mounted mirror and was relieved to see that last night’s horror-show make-up had been cleaned away. Her cheeks were bare, shiny. They looked sunken. Her eyes were too wide, and as flat as old-fashioned copper pennies. She tried to swallow but it hurt her throat. Her skin was clammy.

  She left the room and walked along the short hallway, towards Hailey’s room. “You up yet, honey?”

  There was no reply.

  “Hailey? Come on, let’s get up and get you ready for school. No messing about, now.” She stood outside Hailey’s room, one hand on the door handle. She squeezed the handle but didn’t turn it. Something held her back, an echo of fear. She didn’t understand why she felt so afraid, but terror filled her like water, drowning her from the inside. Lana felt like she was about to choke on it, to stop breathing.

  She turned the door handle and pushed open the door. Breathing steady now, she entered the room. Some identikit boy band stared down from a poster on the wall. Hailey’s books were all lined up neatly on their shelves. Stuffed toys glared at her from the floor. Her television was on, the picture stuck on a DVD menu: images of dancing animals dressed in human clothes.

  The bed had been made, the quilt smoothed down on the mattress and the corners — weren’t they called ‘hospital corners’? — tucked down tight. “Hailey, where are you?”

  She listened to the silence, waiting for a tell-tale sound, but none came. Hailey, if she was still indoors, was keeping quiet. Lana glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. It was 7:30. Hailey didn’t usually leave for school until well after 8 o’clock, so she must still be here. The girl didn’t have many friends she could go and meet up with before classes, and there was nowhere else she could have gone this early.

  She turned and padded quickly back out into the hallway. The bathroom door, at the far end near the front of the flat, was closed. She moved towards it, wondering if Hailey was having a bath — the shower had worked only sporadically for almost two months, and no-one from the council had been out to fix it. This failure to fix things was a recurring pattern, both in the home and in Lana’s life in general.

  She paused for a moment at the door, and then knocked. A sudden burst of daylight shone in her eyes, reaching her through the lounge window; it was hot and bright, making her wince. Then the light faded, and when she looked at the window the day outside was dull and hazy.

  “Are you in there, Hailey? What’s wrong? Are you ill?”

  There was a long pause, and then Hailey finally answered: “Not feeling well, mum. Just a bit sick, that’s all.”

  Lana tried the handle but the door was locked. “Come on, let me in. Do you need something? Is it your period?”

  Again, Hailey said nothing. Lana knew that the girl was embarrassed to talk about these things, but it was an important part of life, and one that required discussion, particularly if Hailey was having problems.

  “Listen to me. I used to suffer really badly with cramps. They were so bad that I used to vomit. Is that what’s up with you? Is it cramps?”

  “Yes.” Then she heard the sound of the toilet flushing, followed by what might have been Hailey putting things back in the bathroom cabinet. Was that a bottle of pills she could hear rattling?

  The lock clicked; the door opened. Hailey stood there in her white school blouse and pleated black skirt. The tail of her blouse was hanging out of her waistband, and she looked small and frail. Her eyes were huge, with dark circles beneath them. There was a splatter of vomit on her chin.

  “Wipe your mouth,” said Lana, picking up a tissue and using it to wipe Hailey’s face, doing a mother’s job before Hailey even had the chance to pull away and look in the mirror. “It’s okay, honey. I can do this.” She smoothed down her daughter’
s hair with her fingers, noticing how dry it felt. The skin of Hailey’s forehead was hard and flaky; her T-zone felt like fine emery paper.

  “Thanks,” said Hailey, taking a step back, part-way into the bathroom. Her eyes were squinted, as if the light hurt them. She licked her lips and her tongue looked dark, almost purple.

  “What is it? Aren’t you feeling well? Maybe you should stay off school today.”

  Hailey shook her head. “We have a maths test. If I miss it I’ll have to sit it again some evening after school. I’d rather go in. I’m fine.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes with her thin, white fingers.

  “I’ve never seen you look so pale… it’s like you’re anaemic. Maybe I should make an appointment with the doctor.” Lana wanted to hold the girl, but felt that it might scare her. When exactly had they moved so far apart?

  “No. Really. I said I was fine. I am, really. I’m okay. Just a bit tired.”

  Lana moved away from the door. “Aren’t you sleeping?”

  Hailey shook her head. “Not too well. Not here, in this place.” She walked past Lana, being careful not to touch her.

  Lana felt like crying. “I’m sorry. I never wanted it to be like this. I had plans for us, big plans.” She stood where she was, bathed in the glow from the bathroom light, feeling its fragile warmth on the side of her face. “I thought things might be better once we settled in.”

  Hailey wasn’t listening. She crossed the lounge and went into the kitchen area, where she sat down at the breakfast bar, staring at an empty bowl. Her eyes looked odd, as if she were blind.

  “Let me get you something.” Lana followed her daughter, opened a cupboard, and poured some cornflakes into Hailey’s bowl. Then she opened the fridge. “Fuck,” she said, feeling useless. “There’s no milk. I forgot to buy milk.” The omission felt like a metaphor, a symbol of how bad a mother she was. “How could I forget to buy the fucking milk?” She felt hysteria building, as if she were about to laugh or scream — she wasn’t sure which, and even when it came the sound would be difficult to identify.