by Unknown
The same hazy dissatisfactions niggled at me now. On an impulse I zipped up my jacket to my chin, stood up and hoisted myself into the lowest branch of the tree. I clambered from branch to branch until I reached a familiar perch. I gazed through the skein of twigs with their pale green leaves at the Stead. There was the house, bearing its invisible signs of disintegration. How do you recognise, when all the features remain the same, the moment that life passes from the face of a friend, or know, although you can point to nothing that has changed, that a house is abandoned? From where I sat I could not see the front door, although I could clearly remember seeing it from here as a child. I clambered down the branches and jumped clumsily onto the grass; sat down once more with my back against the ancient tree.
I picked up my old diary which I’d picked out of my case as I’d set out that morning and idly started leafing through its later pages. Some entries were like triggers that brought memories easily back : the candle that had set fire to Alan’s beard when he’d leant over greedily to scoop up the last of the potatoes; I had laughed so hard that the muscles of my stomach had ached. Sailing in the gravel pit reservoir nearby, being frightened as the boat had keeled and water slopped over the edge but not wanting to admit it – certainly not admitting it to Natalie or to Theo, who were always physically brave and were contemptuous of timidity. Getting up at four in the morning with Alan and the twins to hear the dawn chorus and coming back chilly, ravenous and euphoric.
But there were some entries – an argument with Mum, which I represented with sanctimonious lack of imagination, or a visit to a medieval mansion where Catholics hid under the floorboards during the Reformation – that stubbornly refused to yield their treasures. They were like the graves in Highgate Cemetery, grown over with ivy and nettles, unvisited and quite forgotten. Most of our lives lie underground.
The last entry had always been available to my recall – which wasn’t surprising since the day before Natalie’s disappearance had been like the defined rim around a black hole. I could summon up the party preparations without much difficulty : I remembered kissing Theo in the square of mud between the newly laid stone tiles where the last pieces of the barbecue would be built in time for the party and jumping up guiltily as we heard Jim Weston approach.
I shut the diary and rubbed my eyes. A few drops of rain fell heavily on the book’s cover. I felt as if I were staring at something through thick liquid; all the shapes I was trying to make out were distorting and breaking up. Kissing Theo in the earth made ready for the barbecue. The barbecue.
I stood up, stumbling in my haste, and ran in the increasing rain to where Natalie’s body had been found. It was still a livid scar of churned-up mud and rubble and a few shallow-rooting weeds. I jumped down into the mud and sunk my hands into it, digging around messily. I pulled out the leg of a doll, a rusted fork, its tines clogged, a beer bottle with a chipped neck; then a broken tile, a fragment of rusty grating. They were the remains of the barbecue. Natalie had been buried underneath the barbecue.
Heavily, I sat down at the edge of the hole, wiping my muddy hands on my muddy jeans. Rain fell steadily now, obscuring the landscape, and it was as if a curtain was being drawn across the Stead and all its secrets. Something was wrong. I couldn’t think straight; it was like trying to remember a dream but losing it in the process. Natalie was buried under the barbecue but the barbecue was built before she died. I spoke out loud :
‘So that’s why the body was buried there. It was an improbable place because it was an impossible place.’
I buried my face in my hands and stared through my fingers at the muddy hole. Rain slid down the back of my neck. I tried again :
‘Natalie was buried before she died.’
Or:
‘Natalie was buried underneath the barbecue; Natalie died after the barbecue was completed; therefore…’ Therefore what? I kicked a few fragments of tiles back into the hole and stood up. Kim would be wondering where I’d got to.
Thirty-Eight
Kim was lying on her bed in our room when I got back, studying a map. She sat up.
‘You’ve been ages. Christ! Look at your face : have you had a mudbath or something? What’s the matter?’
‘What? Nothing. I don’t know.’ I went into the bathroom, washed the mud off my grubby face and hands. When I returned to the bedroom, Kim was pulling on her boots.
‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asked.
‘No. Go ahead if you want something.’ Then, abruptly : ‘Can we go for a walk?’
‘Of course; I’ve found one of nine miles that starts just down the road from here, so we should be able to finish it before it gets too dark. Lots of hills and valleys. I should think in this weather it’ll be a bit muddy.’
I looked down at my jeans.
‘I think I can cope with that.’
I didn’t say anything for the first couple of miles – and anyway we climbed up the narrow rocky path so swiftly that I probably wouldn’t have had the breath to walk and talk at the same time. Brambles tore at my clothes, and rain dripped from wet leaves. Eventually the path widened out and we reached the top of a rise. In fine weather there would have been a view.
‘It’s all jumbled up in my mind,’ I began.
‘What do you mean, jumbled up?’
‘At first it seemed clear, everything was as I’d expected. I mean of course it was – I know the Stead almost as well as my own house. I just mooched around for a bit; you know, all those old memories.’ Kim nodded but said nothing. ‘Then I went back to where it happened.’ It was strange how I still found it difficult to say baldly ‘where Alan murdered Natalie’. ‘I haven’t been there for nearly twenty-six years.’ I stepped over a tree that lay across the path, and waited for Kim to draw level with me again. ‘I started to walk towards it. But Kim, it was all wrong. I remembered it wrongly.’
‘What’s so surprising about that? You say yourself that you hadn’t been there for years. Of course you didn’t remember it.’
‘No. I remembered it – but I remembered it wrongly. Don’t you understand, Kim, I’ve walked through that landscape so many times in my memory with Alex, but when I actually went there it was all back to front. The wrong way round. Oh shit, I don’t know.’ I took out a damp packet of cigarettes from my jacket, and lit one as I walked along.
‘Let me get this straight, Jane. Are you saying that the walk that you pieced together with Alex was inaccurate?’
‘No, no, I’m not. It was accurate, all the details were there if you see what I mean, just the wrong way round.’
‘I’m a bit confused. What does it mean?’
‘I don’t know. I feel completely bemused, Kim. And that’s not all.’
‘What’s not all?’ Kim’s voice went up one notch more in exasperation.
‘It’s not just that the walk was the wrong way round, I worked something else out – I can’t think why no one’s worked it out before. Now it seems blindingly obvious.’
‘What’s obvious? Come on Jane, don’t be so fucking gnomic with me; spell it out, will you?’
‘Okay. Listen then. You know I’ve been re-reading my diary, the one Claud brought me, which takes us right up to the day before Natalie died?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, in the last entry – which was on the day before Natalie was killed – I wrote about the unfinished barbecue; the barbecue that Jim Weston was getting done in time for the party.’
‘So?’
‘That’s where Natalie was buried, Kim. Under that barbecue.’
I watched as very slowly Kim’s face turned from blankness to bemusement.
‘It’s not possible. It means…’
‘It means that Natalie was buried under bricks that were laid before she died.’
‘But…’
I counted off the points on my fingers.
‘Look, number one : we know that she died the day after the party. She was seen the day after, and by someone trustworthy, who
had no involvement with the family. Two : we know that Alan killed her – I remember it and he’s confessed. But Alan didn’t arrive at the Stead until after the barbecue was finished. Three : Natalie was buried under the barbecue.’ I was striding along now, with vigour borne of frustration. Kim had almost to run to catch up with me.
‘If what you say is true, you should go to the police, Jane.’
I stopped dead.
‘What on earth could I say? Why would they accept this new twist to my memory? Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference to the result. Alan killed Natalie and he’s in prison. I just want to know how.’
I kicked a bramble out of my path and dug in my pocket for another cigarette.
‘Oh Christ, Jane, can’t you stop this?’ Kim asked. ‘Why is it so important to know? Think about it. You know the big thing about Natalie’s death – you know who killed her. And now you want to know all the smaller things as well. And then if you find those out, you’ll want to ferret around and fret and smoke dozens more of those cigarettes of yours until you’ve pieced together all the tiny details. But you’ll never know everything about this, Jane. Do you want to hear what I think?’
‘Go on then; you’re going to tell me anyway.’
I felt damp and cross. A bit of grit in my shoe pressed against the ball of my foot; my scalp itched under my head and my neck itched and my hands sweated and my nose felt cold. Why couldn’t she just listen and nod and hold my hand?
‘I think you’ve turned this into a self-consuming obsession. Solve this puzzle, and another one will appear. You want some ultimate, complete meaning to a messy tragedy. You’ve lost your wit.’
‘Wits.’
‘Wit. You’re getting boring. Can’t you let it go?’
I climbed over a stile, staining my palms green with slimy lichen.
‘I want to. I thought it would all be over, that I was coming here to end the whole foul business and – this’ll sound stupid – to find Natalie again. She’d become like a jigsaw puzzle or something, and the only bits of her character I thought about were the bits that made sense of her murder. And then the other day I had this really clear image of her, it was as if I could reach out and touch her. I did love her, you know; she was my first best friend. So I needed to come and say goodbye to the real her, in the place where she last was. But I feel so… so strange, somehow. It’s as if I know something more, but I can’t get at it. It might be boring but… oh shit, lateral thinking, that’s what I need. I feel like I’m going mad.’
Kim said nothing. We walked down the hill to the car.
‘You do still want to stay for the rest of the weekend, don’t you?’ asked Kim, as we drove back to the hotel.
‘Yes, of course.’ Then : ‘Well, actually, Kim, I don’t think I can. I feel all restless now. I’m really sorry, but can we drive back tonight?’
Kim looked grim.
‘It was a bit of a long drive for one late night, and a single soggy walk.’
‘I know. I just wouldn’t be very good company.’ I opened a window and lit a cigarette. ‘Unfinished business and all that. It’s like that mad woman said to me : it’s not over yet.’
‘As usual today, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. However’ – Kim reached out a hand and touched me briefly on the shoulder – ‘let’s not bicker. I don’t mean to be so grouchy.’ She grinned ruefully. ‘It’s just that I’d planned what my evening meal would be : scallops and raw tuna marinaded in lemon juice and herbs, followed by spring lamb. Then I rather fancied the apple strudel and cream.’
‘I’ll buy sandwiches for the journey,’ I said. ‘Cheese and salad on brown, with an apple to follow.’
‘Whoopee.’
It was still not quite eight o’clock when we left the hotel with our bags and boots. I insisted on paying for the unused second night, and apologised to the perplexed owner.
‘They probably think it’s a lover’s tiff,’ said Kim.
‘They probably think we’re fair-weather walkers from London, fleeing from this rain.’
It was still raining as we drove off in the growing darkness, a horrible June evening. The windscreen wipers slapped down water, and Kim put on some music. Bent jazzy notes of a saxophone filled the car, drowned out the patter of wild weather. We sat in a silence that was not uncomfortable. Gradually the rain ceased, although puddles in the road still sprayed up under our tyres, and Kim had to turn on the wipers every time a lorry thundered by in the opposite direction.
I sat back wearily, and gazed at the countryside flowing past. I could see my face, a hazy blur, in the window. I hadn’t been able to stay, but I didn’t really know what I was going back for. What should I do now? My life was at an impasse. Maybe the only thing to do was to return to Alex’s couch and try to sort out all the ugly, itchy inconsistencies. With Alex, I had managed to illuminate one sickening patch of my past, but everything else lay in shadow. Perhaps I had to illuminate all of that, too. I felt unutterably tired at the very thought, as if my bones ached. When I had begun this journey back into my childhood, I had used the image of a black hole in the visible landscape of my past. Now it seemed as if, like the negative of a photograph, that image had been reversed. The only thing that was visible, dazzlingly visible, was that which had been obscure. Topsy-turvy land ruled over by a dead child.
‘Can you turn the light on while I try to find another tape?’ asked Kim, scrabbling among the mess of cassette cases in the compartment of her door.
‘Sure.’ I blinked in the light, and the world outside the car was blotted out. ‘You know, Kim, it all feels so inside out. When I walked up Cree’s Top this morning, I felt exactly like Alice in the looking-glass garden, where everything is back to front, and in order to get somewhere you have to walk away from it. Strange, isn’t it?’
I blinked back unexpected tears, and gazed at the window. A middle-aged woman, her thin face lined with worry, stared back, stuck in her world on the other side of the glass. We looked at each other, eyes wide and appalled. She wasn’t a stranger; we knew each other quite well though perhaps not well enough. A cold knife was slicing through my brain. Oh no, oh dear God, please no. What had I done?
I reached up and turned off the light. A flute, haunting, silver, trembled in the air. The woman’s face was extinguished. I had been looking at myself. Of course. I was that girl on the hillside, Natalie for an hour; I had seen myself on that hillside, and tracked myself down. I had been in the looking-glass garden and I had followed my own image and when I had found myself I had lost myself most terribly. Most terribly. I felt a scream rising up in me and clapped my hand over my mouth. It had never been Natalie on the hill; it had only ever been me, Natalie’s friend, her lookalike. It was me who had been seen all those years ago by an old man on his way to dismantle the marquee, me who had been called Natalie. It was me for whom I had searched among my living nightmares.
‘Please Kim. Please can you drop me off at the next tube station.’
We were coming into the suburbs of London and I knew where I had to go next.
Kim looked at me in astonishment but obediently braked.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Jane, because I certainly don’t.’
I kissed her on the cheek then gave her a long hug.
‘I know what I’m doing; for the first time in a long long while I know what I’m doing. There’s something I’ve got to sort out and I think it’s going to be painful.’
‘Jane,’ said Kim, as I turned to go. ‘If you ever get through this you owe me one. More than one.’
Thirty-Nine
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is that Dr Thelma Scott?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is Jane Martello, you may remember we met at…’
She interrupted me with a new note of interest in her voice.
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘I know this will sound stupid but could I come and see you?’
‘What? Now?’<
br />
‘Yes, if that’s all right?’
‘It’s Saturday night, how do you know I’m not having a dinner party or going to a nightclub?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to interrupt anything.’
‘That’s all right, I’m reading a novel. Are you sure this is important? You can’t just ask me over the phone?’
‘If it isn’t, you can send me away. Just give me five minutes.’
‘All right, where are you?’
‘Hanger Lane tube station. Should I get a taxi?’
‘No, you’re quite close. Just take the tube to Shepherd’s Bush.’
She gave me some brief instructions and in a few minutes I was walking out of Shepherd’s Bush tube station and around the corner into a quiet residential street by Wood Lane. Knocking at the door, I was greeted by the small woman with the alert expression I remembered from before, but dressed casually in jeans and a very bright sweater. She had a slightly sardonic smile, as if I were acting up to expectations, but her handshake was friendly enough.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Then I’m afraid you’ll have to watch me eat. Come through to the kitchen. No smoking, I’m afraid,’ she said, noticing the cigarette in my hand. I tossed it back onto the path. In the kitchen she poured herself a glass of chianti and I asked for nothing but tap water.
‘Since you’re not eating, I’ll just nibble a bit,’ she said. ‘Now what was it you wanted to see me about.’