The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  “Eden,” I blurted. “I’m worried because that’s the only connection, isn’t it? Between April and Stig. They know each other from Eden.”

  “Don’t talk to me about that place,” said Angie. “If I never hear that word again it’ll be too soon.”

  “Ange,” BJ chipped in, sounding weary.

  She turned on him. “Shut it,” she said. “Sit there like a lump and leave everything up to me if you like, but don’t start moaning about it too.”

  “It must have been a terrible time,” I said. Even I knew how false the sympathy sounded in the middle of whatever was going on in that little room.

  Angie Tarrant laughed, just a chuff of breath, and not so much as the hint of a smile. “And every day since,” she said. Her voice was bitter. “For better or worse. Or in my case, for worse and worse and just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, a bit worse.”

  Wee J was squirming with embarrassment, but his father looked beyond being bothered by anything his wife said. He was looking at me, studying me really. “A friend of Stig’s,” he said. “An old friend?”

  Angie Tarrant stood up, slow and measured, as if a string on the top of her head had been pulled, lifting her. “Oh my God,” she said. “Now I get it! Which one are you?”

  “Which one what?” I said. “Mrs. Tarrant, I’m just worried about my son and—”

  “What’s your son’s name?” said Angie. “A Milharay resident? Aye, right! Which one of them are you? Walking in here—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “I’m not telling you my son’s name when you’re acting so—What’s wrong with you?” She took a step towards me and I bolted. I didn’t mean to do it, but somehow I managed to send the wheeled chair spinning as I took off and it tripped her, slowing her down and letting me get clear—that and the fact that her husband reached out and laid a firm grip on her arm. Wee J was running too, but he didn’t follow me to the front door; he took off the other way.

  The women in bathrobes stopped forking up their salads as I shot past them. Then I was back at my car, inside, engine on, ignoring the seat belt bleeps, ignoring the spray of gravel hitting the Range Rover next to me and the skid that ruined the shell pattern under my wheels.

  I was halfway down the drive when Wee J stepped out in front of the car holding his arms out wide to the sides, staring me down, daring me. I slammed my brakes on and stopped, slewing to the left. He came around to the driver’s side and mimed at me to roll down the window. I cracked it. That would have to do.

  “You’re not any of them, are you?” he said. “A Scarlet or a weather girl. You’re Knickerbocker Gloria.”

  I nodded. “How—” I began, but he shushed me.

  “Is he okay?” he asked, and the look in those blue eyes was like nothing I’d ever seen.

  “He’s at—”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Wee J. “Just tell me he’s okay.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “He’s safe.”

  “Don’t come back here,” Wee J said. “And be careful, won’t you?”

  I closed the window and drove away, watching him in my mirror.

  “Thank you,” he mouthed, then he turned and disappeared again between the rhododendrons along the side of the drive.

  “How did he know who I am?” I asked Nicky’s picture. It smiled back at me. “What’s going on?” Nicky just kept on smiling.

  Seventeen

  The Barrwherry trip was misery from the start—maybe from the minute Mrs. Best opened that door in her ugly blue jersey and looked at me out of those tired eyes—so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at how it ended. For sure, by the time I had cleared Gatehouse and was heading up the side of the bay and into the hills, I could feel a weight of dread pressing down on me and, whether I looked back to the memory of Angie Tarrant rising from her chair with her eyes flashing and her voice cold, or forward to the prospect of Stig at the end of another long day full of nothing but fear, there was nowhere to put my mind that didn’t press the weight down harder and fill the shadows with things I couldn’t see.

  The trees were almost leafless but the road, a green tunnel in summer, was no lighter for it, since it cut through deep valleys where the sun was gone by lunchtime. And the cold, away from the sea, was seeping and sly, three parts damp with no crispness to it at all.

  Barrwherry is one of those long, snaking villages, just a single street that starts spread out—farms and holdings and bungalows—then grows closer and more huddled until, at the centre, the cottages join together in a terrace for a while. Then the terrace breaks, the cottages start to thin, and eventually the village stutters out into more miles of emptiness before the next one. I’ve never liked them. They’re like clots, like blockages. And there can’t be anything pleasant about logging lorries thundering by your front windows. In the bigger towns at least there are bumps and cameras to hold the traffic to thirty, but not in places like this.

  I drove to the end, turned in a field gate and came back again. There were no side streets, just that double row of windows, each house joined to its neighbours on either side, laid bare to its neighbours across the way. Everyone’s business would be everyone else’s; surely an incomer couldn’t hide here.

  The old butchers and bakers and candlestick makers had all been turned into houses, some of them still showing pale rectangles in the stonework above the front doors where signs had been unscrewed and taken down, but a newsagents cum grocer was still trading, its lighted window like a single candle in an empty church. I hadn’t noticed how dark it had got until I saw that yellow square glowing in the unbroken grey of road and stone and slate and sky. I pulled in right outside and sat watching, through the decals, in between the posters and small ads, waiting for the customers to leave. It was afterschool time and children were spending their pocket money, but finally, the last of them cleared out and I made my move, hurrying into the warmth and greeting the smile from the woman behind the counter with one of my own. This woman would know. She’d sort newspapers for everyone in the place—The Times to The Sport. She’d know who came for rolls on a Sunday, who bought vodka when the shop was empty but walked out when there was a queue. She’d know which kids bought more hairspray than they needed for their hair and which housewives bought tubs of ice-cream and pound bars of chocolate on a school day. She’d know about Alka-Seltzer and condoms and who had cancelled their subscriptions when the work dried up at the quarry. If Alan Best lived here, she’d know him.

  “I like your hair,” she said, when I pushed my hood back. “That must keep your head nice and cosy.”

  “It’s awful out there, isn’t it?” I answered. “Miserable.”

  “Just passing through?” the woman said. “I can make you a coffee but it’s only instant. Fine with milk and sugar, but Starbucks isn’t trembling.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for someone. He moved here—Oh, must be nearly ten years ago now. Well, more than five.” She was looking at me as expectant as a collie watching the whistle between the shepherd’s teeth. She wouldn’t only oblige with information, this one, she’d pride herself on it. “His name was Alan Best.”

  She raised her chin very slowly and further than seemed reasonable or even possible, then she looked at me down the length of her nose, talking through her teeth, barely moving her lips.“Friend of yours, is he?”

  It was warm in the little shop, but her voice sent shivers down me worse than the damp cold outside.

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m trying to locate him in connection with something, but no he is not.”

  “In connection with something new?” she said.

  “Something very old,” I told her. “Nearly thirty years old.”

  “Makes no difference,” she said. “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  I nodded and gave her a tight little smile, just the sort of smile a woman with tr
oubles would give. Suddenly I was sure I knew where she was leading me, this friendly woman whose voice had turned to ice; where she thought I had come from.

  “He was here,” she said. “Came years back—maybe ten—with his so-called girlfriend. She was a funny one. Care worker, if you ask me, but she didn’t do much of a job of caring. Her conscience got to her and she told the mums of toddlers. He didn’t last long here after that.”

  “He was … on the register?” I said.

  She nodded. “Nice polite way to put it. Yeah, he got caught in Castle Douglas, moving in on a single mum, grooming her kid. They found the stuff on his computer when he put it in to get fixed. So they shipped him out here, Social Services did, as if our kids didn’t matter. He lasted a year, but we got him out.”

  My stomach had clenched, but my mind was tumbling over itself. How young could it start? Did Alan Best drive his brother to suicide that night? And Nathan McAllister too? Did Edmund die of guilt because he knew and didn’t protect Nod? Where did April fit in?

  “I don’t suppose you know where he went?” I said.

  “Maybole,” said the woman. “Just up the road. Another flat, all furnished no doubt. Another fresh start. But we found him and told them, and then he was off again.”

  “Where to this time?” I said, sure that she knew.

  “Dalmellington.” Another grey Ayrshire town with more houses than tenants who wanted to live in them. I could believe that Alan Best, men like him, would be put there.

  “Is he still in Dalmellington?” I asked the woman. I knew my voice was thick with nausea, but she didn’t mind. If anything, she looked pleased with me.

  “He’s not,” she said. “But I hope wherever he is, he’s suffering.”

  I nodded and turned away. I couldn’t believe that Alan Best, the Alan Best from primary school, Stig’s friend, was—

  Stig’s friend! My stomach suddenly seemed to unhook inside me and turn right over, long and slow like an eel in a river. Stig was in my house. Stig who’d had a hard life, according to his brother; Stig who was single; Stig who wasn’t part of the family business anymore, who was lost without the Internet. He was in my house with pictures of Nicky when he was a baby. Pictures and films and footprints of my little boy.

  “Get away from that!”

  He was hunched over the laptop again, as ever, his shoulders rounded and his tummy pouched out in front of him almost touching the keyboard. He started and pushed his chair back. Walter Scott had been sitting on his feet and he yelped as his roost was pulled out from under him.

  “Glo?” said Stig. “What’s wrong?”

  “Alan Best,” I said. “Your friend, Alan Best, is a paeodophile.”

  Stig’s face drained of colour, leaving a waxy sheen over it. “Bezzo,” he said. “Bezzo? He can’t be. He fancied the teacher and she was ancient.”

  “It’s not a joke, Stephen,” I said. “I’m not as big a fool as you think. If you’ve been looking at pictures on my computer, if you’ve been looking at videos of Nicky—”

  Stig’s face was bluish white now. “Me?” he said. “Me? And kids? Where did that come from?”

  I stood staring at him, breathing in and out like a bull, trying to get on top of the sickness rising in me. Then the whole day just piled onto my head and smothered me. I sank down, put my arms around my shoulders and tried to hug myself—like I hadn’t learned that that doesn’t work—and the sobs that had been building inside me since I left Mrs. Best on her doorstep finally burst out.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything. I thought I’d found a good place for Nicky and I thought I had happy memories of childhood and you, and now there’s April in the huttie that’s never going away and Alan Best and what he did and everyone’s face when they talk about him, and his mother in that empty wee house with both her sons gone, and your mum threatening me and your dad just slumped there, and Duggie moving on and I’m so tired and you’re so scared. It feels like something’s going to snap and Miss Drumm’s not herself and if she dies before Nicky, if she dies before Nicky, if she dies before Nicky, and what kind of mum am I to even think it?”

  Halfway through all of that he was there, kneeling on the floor in front of me, with his arms round my middle, and I finished up screaming the end of it into his neck. He said nothing, just rocked me. Over his shoulder I could see Walter Scott, lying listless in his basket with his muzzle over the side and his eyes half shut.

  In the only future I could bear to think of, Nicky was released from all his suffering—that was how I put it to myself—and then Miss Drumm got her rest, and then Walter finally went last of all. But I knew from looking at him that it wasn’t going to work out that way. Walter was going to break Miss Drumm’s heart and then she was going to leave me high and dry, and Nicky would have to move to a hospital and wait there for the end. Unless I went crawling back to Duggie for money or went crawling back to my mum for a roof over my head while I kept paying for the home.

  “Glo, I’m going to have to move,” said Stig. “My knees are killing me.”

  I laughed and couldn’t believe it. Two minutes before, I had thought I’d never laugh again.

  “Okay,” he said, getting to his feet and rubbing his legs through his sweat suit bottoms. “First things first. If Alan Best was caught messing with children—when was this supposed to be?”

  “It started ten years ago at least,” I said. “Did April have kids? Did she take a carving knife to her veins because she didn’t protect them?”

  “That wasn’t a carving knife,” said Stig. “You saw it, Glo. It was an oyster shucker, like a chef would use.” My head jerked up. “Yeah,” he said. “Nice touch. But listen.”

  I rootled in my sleeve for a hankie and blew my nose. It sounded so disgusting that I expected Stig’s lip to curl, but he just raised his eyebrows.

  “Impressive,” he said. “Now, listen to me. If Alan Best had hurt children, he wouldn’t be sent to Barrwherry. He’d be sent to Barlinnie. He’d be inside. I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, but whatever they’ve told you is gossip, not news.”

  I opened my mouth to argue with him then closed it again. He was right. Between the miserable woman in the empty house, the neighbour vicious with anger at his name, and then that long dreary road to that long dreary town, I had been ready to believe any horrors at all by the time I got there. And so the poison of that shop assistant had found a home in me.

  “But if it’s not true then he’s been hounded—”

  “It’s not true,” said Stig. “Believe me, I would know. I shared every magazine Bezzo Best ever laid his hands on from before Eden to the end of high school, and it wasn’t little girls he went for. Or little boys either.”

  “Before Eden?” I said “From Mrs. Hill’s class? You were twelve!”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “So … what was it? That he went for.”

  “Big and Busty,” said Stig. “Juggs. There was this one mag called Mambo Mamas and—”

  “You were twelve!” I said again. “You sat next to me and drew a love heart on my pencil case.”

  “That wasn’t a love heart,” said Stig. “That was Mambo Mama’s mammoth arse, seen from over her shoulder.”

  This time I laughed until I wept, rocking back and forward again. At some point in the middle of it, Stig came and sat on the arm of my chair, putting a hand on my back and rubbing me like a mum burping a baby.

  “I did draw a love heart on your pencil case,” he said, when the tears had subsided again. “And you just said you had happy memories of childhood and me. Maybe we should stop pretending we were just two random kids the teacher made sit together.”

  “We were.”

  “To start with,” said Stig. “But when my mum and dad were talking about Eden, I asked them if there would be scholarships. They laughed their teeth out. Sch
olarships! Where had I even heard that word?”

  “From my school stories.”

  “Exactly. You and your books.”

  “And one of these scholarships was going to be for me?”

  “That was the plan,” said Stig. “Thank God there weren’t any, eh?”

  “Except if a butterfly flaps its wings,” I said. Stig shook his head, not understanding me. “If I had been at Eden, it would have been different. Moped wouldn’t have died, because all the things that happened to bring him to that moment would have been changed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe I’d have caught a cold and given it to him and he wouldn’t have slept out. But I wasn’t there to catch one. Or maybe I’d have had a torch and woken up when he started moving. Or anything. There’s a thousand ways for things to go, and almost all of them are fine.”

  “It’s a Wonderful Life,” said Stig, and I smiled with relief that he understood me. I couldn’t have faced explaining it the only way I knew how. Cells and genes and alleles, recessive and dominant, like shuffling a pack of cards.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “A wonderful life, except everyone’s either dead or we haven’t checked yet,” he said. “Apart from Duggie and me.”

  “I’ll check the rest in the morning,” I told him. “The Scarlets and the weather girls. That’s what Wee J called them.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Stig said. “You said my mum threatened you? Why’d you go to Fawlty Towers, Glo?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. He waited for me to go on. “I suppose I thought they must have some answers.”

  “Who did you ask—Mum or Dad?”

  “They were all there,” I said. “But your mum was the one doing most of the talking. Stig … your dad.” He looked up at me. “What happened?”

  He shook his head slowly a couple of times before he answered. “What do you mean?” he said. “He got older, like all of us. His health isn’t great, but he’s fine.”