by Stef Penney
“Course not.”
“I’m glad Christo is coming to you and Sandra. You’ll be fine.” “Well, unless Uncle Ivo comes back.”
At this, Great-uncle just grunts and blows on his tea.
“You don’t think he’ll come back?”
He sighs. I hold my breath.
“Why’re you asking me?”
“You’re his dad. You know him better than anyone.”
Great-uncle shakes his head slowly.
“Ivo’s not coming back. I should never have tried to make him stay.”
I didn’t know he tried to make him stay. I suppose that means they talked about it.
“Do you know where he’s gone, then?”
“No,” he whispers.
Great-uncle hangs his head, as though it’s a great heavy weight and his neck might break.
Something, or someone, walks over my grave.
“I love this song,” I say loudly, to change the subject. I do. It’s a true story. The man who wrote it was in jail in New Orleans when all the down-and-outs were arrested after some murder. He got talking to one old guy who told him stories of dancing for food, and how his dog got run over, and that made him so sad he became an alcoholic. All the down-and-outs had nicknames so the police couldn’t identify them, and his was Mr. Bojangles.
I would rather think about this than why Great-uncle is talking to me in this odd way. When I look up again, Great-uncle is looking at me in a way that makes me squirm.
“We never paid you enough attention, did we?” he says. “We should have.”
I mumble, because I don’t know what he means. “Course you did.” I smile, to make things normal.
“You were there all along.”
“What? What do you mean?”
But Great-uncle shakes his head again.
Sammy gets to the bit where he lets rip, and all the brass and violins swoop together into a beautiful climax. And I watch in horror as a drop of water slithers down Great-uncle’s cheek, leaving a gleaming trail.
“What’s the matter, Great-uncle? Are you feeling ill again?”
He shakes his head.
“No, I’m all right.”
“Are you sure?”
He attempts to smile at me, though his eyes are wet.
“Yes. I’m all right, my kid.”
“What can I get for you? More tea?”
“No . . . Nothing.”
“You’re probably tired, yeah? Do you want me to go?”
My chair seems to be pushing me out. It’s excruciating. I’ve never seen him like this before, and I don’t know what to do.
“I’m all right.” He looks up at me, jigging around. “Well, yeah, I am a bit tired, kid. Maybe I’ll have a bit of a kip.”
“Okay, then. Are you sure?”
I’m standing up, smiling, with no intention of staying. Because if I smile, then it will all be all right.
I go back to our empty trailer and turn all the lights on, but I can’t sit still there, either. I look through the videos but can’t find anything I want to watch. I put some music on and immediately turn it off, because it makes me feel guilty. I hate myself. I am useless and pathetic, and, what’s worse, unkind. Great-uncle is ill and sad, and I can’t even bring myself to sit with him. I’m too much of a coward, is the truth.
I go back outside and pace around the site, torturing myself with what might be happening inside his trailer (but doing nothing!), glancing up at his unlit windows, on the verge of tears, until the day has faded so much that I am shivering in my T-shirt, and the birds have stopped singing, and I can’t tell the color of anything.
51.
Ray
Last night I signed the divorce papers and put them in an envelope ready for posting. I signed them without emotion. Now, at last, I thought, I am getting on with my life. I am moving on.
This morning I have one of those dreams that seems more real than anything in your waking life. I dreamed that I was still with Jen, in our house. She came in and casually introduced me to her lover, who was Hen. There is nothing more of the dream that I remember, just the shock of finding out: a sensation like that of having a chest wound ripped open. There was never anything between Jen and my business partner—he has never been unfaithful to Madeleine, nor, I think, has he ever wanted to be—this is pure masochism on my part.
I switch on the bedside light, which makes the grayness outside turn back to black. It is not yet dawn. I blink, sticky-eyed; my mouth is dry; my teeth feel rough and taste of monosodium glutamate. At this hour there is never anyone to turn to. Never was. I go to the bathroom, drink noisily from the tap, and splash water on my face. And on the way back to bed I am stopped in the doorway by the reflection in the window.
Yesterday, I had a strange impulse. I was walking back from the Chinese takeaway when I passed the late-night newsagent’s. My eye was caught by a patch of red among the buckets of flowers. I didn’t know their name, but their color, their waxiness, reminded me of Lulu. I bought all the red ones, took them home, and put them in the biggest jug I could find. I put them on my chest of drawers, where I could see them from the bed. Rows of little red bells with pale, freckled throats, a sweet, cloying perfume. I went to sleep thinking of her. I was happy. So how could I have been ambushed like this? Brought down by memories that still have the power to draw blood?
The reflected room bears little relation to this one. A warm glow of light falls on the mass of red flowers, which pulse with a horrible vitality. Beyond them, a figure of a man is a shadowy, sinister presence. When Jen finally told me of her affair—I have forgotten the exact words she used—she started to cry. As if my reaction genuinely surprised her. As if she had convinced herself I wouldn’t mind. I was insulted, furious at her stupidity: how could you not know how much this hurt? How could she be that dumb? I wanted to howl like a wounded animal. I wanted to set fire to her car. Beat whoever the fucking cunt was to death with a shovel, and carve patterns on his tawdry, self-justifying face. Perhaps out there, in the other room, is the man who did that.
There is a dark glamour to the room out there that beckons and appals me; it is the glamour of the cliffedge, the waterfall, of the pain that creeps out to snare me when I think I am past the worst. To be honest, I wonder, sometimes, if I have the will to escape it, or if this coruscating grief will always be the deepest, the brightest, thing of my life.
I know I am not going to sleep again, so I pad to the kitchen to make coffee. As the kettle boils, something comes to mind that I haven’t thought of in years: early in our marriage, Jen and I went for a walk on a lakeshore in Scotland. The water was flat and still; barely a wrinkle disturbed its brittle calm. We searched for flat pebbles on the shore and tried to make them skip over the surface—something I have always been good at. Jen, to her annoyance, was hopeless; her stones plunged into the water a few feet from the edge, or sailed into the air. I wandered along the water’s edge, improving my total—six, seven, nine . . . when something hit me extremely hard between the shoulder blades. I shot around, flaring with anger, to see Jen, face in hands in horror.
“Sorry, darling, sorry!” she cried. “It went wrong! It was an accident!”
Clearly she was trying not to laugh as well. I smiled, although it hurt and developed into a small deep bruise that we joked about.
She never managed one skip out of those stones. Couldn’t hit a wastepaper bin from three feet (“Not fair—it moved!”). But when it came to a direct hit on me, her aim was unerring.
At long last it’s a beautiful day. The sun has come out, burning off an early mist. From the train, I watch its light winking off ditches and little temporary lakelets that have formed in hollows. I get to Ely at half past ten.
Considine maintains his veneer of gruffness, but I think he’s actually thankful for a bit of novelty.
“What’s the matter with your arm?” he asks, having poured me a cup of stewed coffee and noted my right hand’s lack of response.
I
explain, briefly. It is, after all, relevant to why I’m here.
“Come with me,” he says, when we’ve swallowed our coffees, before ushering me out and driving me to a building on the outskirts of Huntingdon.
It’s the forensics laboratory. He sweeps me inside and up to an office on the third floor. Inside a small, cluttered room, a woman looks up over her glasses, gray hair coiled back into a smooth knot, dressed in an expensive-looking trouser suit. She’s barely recognizable as the woman from the Black Patch; when I last saw her, she was in slime-spattered plastic overalls, with boots and gauntlets of mud.
“Dr. Alison Hutchins, this is Ray Lovell.”
“We met. I haven’t anything new to tell you, Considine.”
The meek way he accepts her casual authority is interesting.
“I’d invite you both to sit down, but . . .” She sweeps her hand over the ragged stacks of files piled on her desk, on a couple chairs, even on the floor.
We both insist that we like standing.
“It’s about the possible ID he brought us. She’s turned up, alive, so that’s that.”
“Oh . . .”
She peers at me over the specs.
“Bugger.”
“But he’s got something else to tell us.”
Hutchins raises her eyebrows.
“I can’t give you a name, but I’ve still got a missing person. She was the mother of a young child. She gave birth nearly seven years ago, and then seems to have completely disappeared. There’s a definite connection with the site. I thought the woman I was looking for was the mother of this boy, but it turns out she isn’t.”
“Can you give me any details—age she went missing? Anything?”
“No. I’ve got nothing. I just have a”—I lift my shoulders. How do I describe it?—“a blank hole in this family.”
She looks at Considine.
“And what makes you think that our body might fit your . . . hole?”
“Well, the family has always claimed that the child’s mother was Rose Wood, who had been missing for some years. But when we found her, it turns out that she has never had a child—and that stands up. She can’t be the mother. So they lied. Clearly, the child has a mother, but there’s no sign of her. The child’s father found out about the body here, and, er . . . well, after eating a meal cooked by him, I suffered a severe case of poisoning.”
I lift my right arm.
“My right hand is still mostly paralyzed. And now he has disappeared.”
“Ergot poisoning,” says Considine.
Dr. Hutchins looks impressed, despite herself.
“Ergot and henbane. I find it hard to believe that two poisonous plants got into my food—and only my food—by accident. I’m convinced he knows something about the body in the Black Patch. His behavior is suspicious, to say the least.”
Dr. Hutchins leans back in her chair.
“What an eventful life you lead, Mr. Lovell. Well, well. Can we get DNA from the child?”
“I don’t know. He’s in hospital at the moment.”
“Oh? What for?”
“He suffers from a chronic disease that they haven’t identified yet. It seems to be hereditary. Many members of his family have suffered from it, and several of them died young—mostly males, as far as I can tell. His father was ill when he was younger but recovered.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. Like the Romanovs.”
Apparently, I look blank.
“The last Russian Tsars. Only their problem was hemophilia. And you wouldn’t recover from that.”
She pulls a face. I can’t guess what it means.
“So you think our unidentified body could be this child’s mother— and that she was put there by the father?”
I shrug again.
“It’s at least a possibility, wouldn’t you say?”
Dr. Hutchins taps her pen on the edge of her desk. She seems to be lost in thought. She takes her glasses off and pinches the bridge of her nose.
“That’s interesting.”
She pulls out some papers covered in tiny writing and studies them for a couple minutes. For long enough that I wonder whether she’s going to say anything else. Without looking up, she says, “How much do you know about forensic osteology?”
“Very little. I’ve read a couple of books . . .”
She waves her hand, dismissive.
“People tend to think it’s very obvious. Sex, age—everything’s clear-cut. But it isn’t. Some skeletons are easy, of course—if they’re whole, or if there are corroborative features. But it’s rare that you can be a hundred percent sure of an identification from hard tissue alone. Even if you’ve got a perfectly preserved sexually dimorphic bone—the pubic bone, say: you think if it’s square it’s from a female, if it’s triangular, from a male. But what if it’s halfway between the two?”
She’s watching me as she says this. Partly to read my reaction, and partly, I suspect, because she enjoys the sound of her own voice. I don’t blame her for making us wait; I suspect she’s had to earn it.
“And the younger the skeleton, the harder it is. But few skeletons I’ve come across have been quite as frustrating as this one. Of course, there are only a few bones—so far. And almost all of those have been broken. But there are other features about them that make it especially difficult. The size, for one thing—they’re very small, in some ways I would have said from a juvenile, but other features, and the epiphyses, suggest a higher age at death.”
She pauses for us to wonder what that means.
“So what age do you think she was?”
“Well, adolescent. Anywhere between thirteen and eighteen; I can’t be more precise at this stage.”
“Okay . . . But it is a girl?”
“From the size and form of the bones we have found, I would say they are more likely to belong to a female—but I can’t be definite until we find a dimorphic bone.”
She cocks her head at Considine.
“Did you tell him what we found yesterday?”
He shakes his head.
“You found something? What?”
Considine says, “We found a length of narrow gold chain. Not particularly expensive. It’s broken, but it was near some rib fragments, so that suggests it could have been worn at the time of burial.”
“So it’s unlikely robbery was a motive.”
“And there was something else. Something much . . . odder . . .”
Hutchins takes over, unwilling to let him take the limelight. Surprisingly, Considine doesn’t seem to mind.
“We’ve found plenty of plant matter near the body, as you might expect, but this one was different. About four feet down, at the same soil depth as the body, there were a number of stems tied together with a piece of yarn. What does that sound like to you?”
Feeling as though I am taking an exam in primary school, I say, “A bunch of flowers?”
Hutchins smiles, waiting for me to go on.
“But . . . how could it be? Plants wouldn’t survive that long in the soil, would they? I mean, they’d rot very quickly.”
Her smile broadens.
“Usually. But these were wooden flowers—wooden chrysanthemums, you know?”
There is a loud silence in the office.
“Were they . . . Can you tell what they were like?”
“Well, they are rather the worse for wear.”
“Did they appear to be handmade?”
Hutchins and Considine exchange glances.
“I would say they were handmade but quite well done. Not something a child would make.”
My heart has speeded up, but the significance I feel is not quite— yet—tangible. I search for the right questions.
“Can you tell from the bones whether someone has given birth?” “There’s no way to be absolutely sure. But finding some pelvic bones would be a start; sometimes there are traces there. We live in hope, don’t we, Considine?”
“You’re thinking: who make wooden f
lowers? Gypsies do.”
Considine is looking at me.
“Well . . .” I lift my shoulders. “It’s a traditional craft . . .”
I comb my memory for images of wooden flowers in any of the Janko trailers. I don’t come up with any.
“In itself, of course, it doesn’t prove anything.”
“No, of course.”
We all stand—or sit—in silence.
Maybe it’s not proof. Not evidence. But it is a fact. It means something. It means, perhaps, that rather than simply being concealed, the girl at the Black Patch was mourned.
52.
JJ
I seem to have a new hobby: it’s called Expecting the Worst. I don’t know what the worst is, but the last few weeks of my life seem to have worn me out. Whatever the worst is, I feel its closeness. Awful things keep happening—it’s not my imagination. There’s Christo and Ivo, of course, and Great-uncle being unwell, and Mr. Lovell and me in the hospital. Some poor person being found dead at the Black Patch. The radioactive rain that’s poisoned all the sheep. The giant hailstones that fell out of the sky and killed people—in India, of all places. Everything’s gone mad. I can hardly get up in the mornings. Of course, it’s the school holidays, so there’s not much to get up for, but still. Mum usually goes out at about nine, while I’m still lying in bed behind the curtains, drifting in and out of sleep. She’s given up shouting at me. Then I get up and eat some cold breakfast that Mum’s left out for me. Then I usually go back to bed. I’ve tried reading and wanking and listening to music and watching videos, but nothing grips my attention like worrying about all the awful things that have happened to us, or are just about to.
I’ve been Expecting the Worst since we arrived at the children’s hospital up in London—in fact, since we set off in the car early this morning. Christo’s doctor is Indian and young; he has very dark skin, very thick hair that grows straight up off his forehead like a dense fur, and round gold-rimmed glasses. He speaks very precisely. He seems fond of Christo, and for that, I’m prepared to like him. Mum and me are sitting at the edge of a waiting area, in front of a sort of indoor playground for young kids. It’s full of brightly colored toys and has brightly painted walls. Even a small, colorful climbing frame. I think it’s meant for the brothers and sisters of children who are patients here. But there are also a couple kids playing here who don’t have any hair, so I suppose they are patients. There are a lot of bald kids in the hospital. It gave me the shivers when I first saw them; they look like little aliens. Then I remembered that having treatment for cancer makes your hair fall out, and now I smile at them if one of them happens to look at me. It makes me feel bad about having so much hair myself.