The Body Lies

by Jo Baker

  “It’s not true,” I said.

  He busied himself with tamping down the edges, getting the pages into alignment, not looking at me. “It was in my pigeonhole,” he said.

  “You should have come to me.”

  “You mean, I shouldn’t have read it—”

  “—It’s not true—”

  “The thing is, though, you see”—he still didn’t look at me—“he’s really got you.”

  “What?”

  “The way you are.”

  “Don’t.”

  “It’s you.” And then he looked at me. The light reflected in his glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. “I mean.” he said. “It’s you. It’s. Convincing.”

  I felt sick. I reached for a chair, sat down, put my face in my hands.

  “Since Beth left—” Patrick went on, “I’d not really wanted to, not get close to anyone. But I’ve been, for ages I’ve been—daydreaming about you…I really liked you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it was all—rather—easy. The two of us, you and me.”

  I looked up. “Easy?”

  “I mean, Mark was barely out of the door when you and I—got together. So. What I’m wondering now is if maybe you’re just like that. Maybe that’s just what you do.” He took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “You know what?”

  He gave me a look, wrung out, exhausted. “What?”

  “Even if it were true, you don’t get to be like this about it.”

  “What. Given the circumstances, it’s not unreasonable to be…upset.”

  “But the thing is, you see, whatever happened, this is before you, so it’s nothing to do with you. Even if I’d fallen into bed with every single man I ever met, it would be none of your business. Everything I did before you, and everything I do after you, has got fuck all to do with you, Patrick. It’s only while and during that’s any business of yours whatsoever.”

  He chewed on this. “Okay, well, tell me this then.” He touched the manuscript with tented fingertips. “Because this is the kid you were telling me about last term, isn’t it? And here he is writing about an obsession with you, writing about you in an intimate way, and you can’t deny that. This isn’t a coincidence. I need to know what I’m missing here. What don’t I understand?”

  I took a breath, I let it go. “Late last term. He walked me home and…”

  Patrick sat back. “So you did sleep with him.”

  I half shook my head.

  “What then?”

  “He put me in a situation where I—gave up saying no. I decided to give up; it was a conscious decision not to fight. But that doesn’t mean…And then he started writing this stuff, started acting like we’d been…”

  Patrick came over, hunkered down beside my chair. He put his hand on my arm.

  “All this time and you didn’t say,” he said.

  I shook my head, wiped my hands down my jeans. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. It’s completely incomprehensible to me, why someone would go and do a thing like that.”

  “No, I mean, I don’t understand why it’s better.”

  He squeezed my arm. He studied my face. “I don’t follow you.”

  “That it’s better, far as you’re concerned, that this happened to me, rather than I had a nice time. Than I had consensual sex with someone that I liked, before you and I got together.”

  He buffered at this. “I—”

  “But that’s where we are. That’s what this all means. This sympathy. You’re happier with this, now, than you were with that.”

  He stood up.

  “So,” I said. “Okay.”

  He went back to his seat. “What do you want me to do with this document?” he asked.

  “Best hang on to it for now,” I said. “I suppose it’s evidence.”

  I went straight to the ladies’ loo and locked myself into a cubicle. I stood there breathing till I could breathe normally. Then I went to the mirror and tidied up my face.

  I sprung Sammy from nursery. I bought him a new toothbrush in the Spar on the way past, because a new toothbrush always makes him happy. I found myself wondering what had made Nicholas happy, when he was three years old.

  We caught the bus. I read Meryl’s statement through as we jogged along, read it clearly, from start to finish, and I felt I began to get a fingernail at last into this. A bit of purchase. We got spat out at the crossroads in the drizzle.

  The worst was happening—my marriage was over, my job probably was too; that fresh new thing with Patrick was certainly done for—but I felt somehow lighter for it. I’d manage. I’d get a new job; I had other skills. Well. I could acquire other skills. There’d been a little recruitment poster on the back of the bus driver’s cab Join our team! They were promising 22K a year and that they’d put you through your PSV licence, so that was a possibility. Or maybe I’d be a postie. Sammy and I could buzz around the neighbourhood in a little red van. We’d get a fucking cat and call it fucking Jess. And when Sammy started school I’d deliver the post in the mornings and in the afternoons I’d write; we’d have time and sunshine and rain on the windows and crumpets over the fire and my novel would be good because I wouldn’t be drawing water from the same well and dishing it out for other people all the time, and my agent who hadn’t heard from me in years now would be thrilled with the new manuscript and we’d sell it for a six-figure sum, and I’d get on a couple of shortlists and the Guardian Weekend would profile me, the postie novelist of north Lancashire.

  Nicholas was sectioned, Scaife had said. He was in a secure psychiatric unit, so that was something. I couldn’t teach, I couldn’t even go into the department, so all I had to worry about for the moment was looking after Sammy and exonerating myself. I had to get my story straight, and to do so I needed to fill in some of the gaps in Nicholas’s, stat.

  We rattled down to the village. Me and Sammy and the pushchair, heading for the Palmers’ house. What had struck me from the final part of Meryl’s statement—aside from its stinging hostility towards me—was that the Palmers had seemed mightily concerned that Meryl get straight back to campus, and not hang around the neighbourhood looking for Nicholas. Why the urgency? Were they worried that she’d stumble on something they didn’t want her to know, or, I wondered, were they afraid that she was putting herself in harm’s way?

  * * *

  —

  There was an old Jag cooling on the drive. Sammy had fallen asleep in the pushchair; I’d rather been banking on that. I rang the doorbell. They didn’t know me, I reminded myself, shoving shaking hands into my pockets. They didn’t have clue one who I was. It wasn’t that I expected them to offer up much; I was just going to have a scrape and poke around here, see what set the nerves jangling. I waited at the door through a long silence, and then clicking footsteps, and the door opened. A woman in her early fifties, saluki-built and dressed in cream and beige. Behind her, that familiar hallway. The smell of vacuuming and lilies, perfume and afternoon drink.

  “Ah, hello. Mrs. Palmer?”

  She glanced me up and down as though expecting a lanyard, an ID card or a parcel to be proffered. But there was just me, with my child in a pushchair.

  “Yes, what is it?” She asked, speaking quietly, because of the sleeping child.

  I wafted my staff card at her, a finger over my name. She barely glanced at it, but she stared long and hard at Sammy.

  “It’s about Nicholas.”

  She looked at me now. “He’s not here.”

  “No, I know. I know. I’m from the university.”

  “I’m sorry—who are you?”

  I pocketed my card. “I just have a few questions.”

  She went to close the door. I put a foot across the threshold, a hand on the glossy wood, smiled
brightly.

  “It really won’t take a moment.”

  She called over her shoulder:

  “Andrew—could you come here, please?”

  There was a shifting and lumbering and a figure creaked down the corridor; she stepped back so that he could move in front of her. He filled the doorway. A bulky, bloodshot, liverish man; a hard, distended belly under a shirt and sweater.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “I need to talk to you about Nicholas.”

  “I don’t think so.” He applied his considerable weight to the door. My foot was getting crushed.

  “I’m here from the university. I was just telling Mrs. Palmer. We have some questions about your son’s file; we’re missing information, you see; I thought maybe you could help us. Just bureaucracy, you understand. In the circumstances. Keeping our records up to date.”

  A glance between husband and wife. Mr. Palmer lessened the pressure on the door.

  “Okay great, well maybe if you could just tell me what he was up to in his gap years?”

  “Gap years?”

  “Yes, all those years out. Did he travel, or do voluntary work, perhaps?”

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with his current situation.”

  “Or did he have any…previous problems of the kind he’s now experiencing?”

  “What do you know about his problems?”

  Mrs. Palmer called from behind her husband, “We want to talk to Michael Lynch.”

  Mr. Palmer leaned in close to me; his breath smelt of wine. “You know what, we don’t have to answer anything. You tell me. You tell me why our son, with so great an investment on our part, should be allowed to drop out of his course like a stone, without so much—”

  “Why would you talk to Professor Lynch, though? What’s he got to do with it?”

  Mrs. Palmer spoke round her husband’s shoulder. “He oversaw the whole thing. He was so helpful. If there’s anything to be said, we’ll say it to Michael.”

  “In what way helpful?”

  She moved in beside her husband, wrapped her cardie tighter round herself.

  “Nicholas’s results don’t reflect his abilities; Michael could see that. He knew Nick deserved a second chance.”

  “How did Professor Lynch come to know Nicholas?”

  “He’s always known him.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Michael and I were at school together,” Mr. Palmer said. “He’s an old friend.”

  “Okay, I see.”

  “Who exactly are you anyway?” Mr. Palmer asked. “Who sent you here?”

  “I’m just doing my job,” I said.

  “And what is your job?”

  “Filling in the gaps, like I said. Trying to understand.”

  Mr. Palmer seemed to consider all that had been said and weigh up the different elements; he offered up a concluding thought: “Look, just fuck off, would you?”

  He shoved against the door, and my foot began to crumple, and I yelped and yanked it out. The door slammed shut.

  Sammy jerked awake, and looked around him, startled.

  “Hello there, lovie,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  * * *

  —

  We rattled back up the road to Gill House. I might not have filled in any gaps, but I had a better sense of the background fabric now.

  “It’s just you and me, Sammy-boy.” He peered round at me, forehead bunched. “You and me against the world.”

  He considered this, still frowning, then he lifted his toothbrush and turned back to face the world as it rushed towards him. A little Don Quixote in his pushchair, tilting at the rain with his toothbrush.

  As we crossed the farmyard, Mr. Metcalfe was coming out of the tractor shed. He raised a hand to us. I wiped my face and summoned up a smile.

  “You’re home early,” he said. He looked small and wiry and windblown in his blue overalls and cut-down wellies.

  “They sent me home.” And I laughed again, because it sounded like I’d got caught smoking behind the bike sheds.

  He frowned, rubbed the rain from his nose with the back of a hand. This was a man for whom work was grained into every object that he touched, every moment of his day. “Why’d they do that then?”

  “Spot of bother with a couple of my students.”

  “You’ll need a brew.”

  * * *

  —

  Mostly it’s just the slogging on, head down against the weather; that’s how stuff can slip you by: the grizzled old farmer, the run-down farm, the elderly woman out wandering, looking for her daughter, Sarah. It never occurred to me that their troubles were in any way entangled with my own.

  I unbuckled Sam. We left the pushchair in the farmhouse’s stone porch; Moss the dog followed us in. The kitchen was unlovely and hard-worn, the air warm and stale. Mr. Metcalfe called up the stairs: “Gracie! Fancy a brew?” and there was a reply though I couldn’t hear the words.

  He put the kettle on, shifting it from the enamelled side of the Rayburn onto a hotplate. The dog curled up with the cat in front of the stove, and Grace came slowly down the stairs and into the kitchen, housecoat on over her skirt and sweater, feet in zipped-up slippers.

  “It’s that nice lass from Gill House, Grace, remember.”

  “Where’s James?” That anxious edge to her voice, as though panic were only ever held at arm’s length.

  “James is out int top field, fence needed mending, remember.”

  She gripped her housecoat closed at the neck, spotted Sammy. “Is that our Sarah’s child?”

  “No,” said Mr. Metcalfe. “This’un here belongs to yon lass, remember.”

  She nodded uncertainly. I rested a hand on Sammy’s head to confirm our connection. Sammy shuffled back in towards me.

  “I’ll be…” she said, and she turned away and went off up the hall.

  “She has the dementia,” he told me. “What she does is, she tries to fit people in with what she can remember. Have a seat.”

  He rummaged in a cupboard and lifted out a melamine cup; he slugged in milk and twisted on the lid and handed it to me with a nod to Sammy. The cup was decorated with a bunny and a ladybird and a few blades of grass; its spout was worn rough by other children’s teeth. The kettle whistled; he made the tea and took a cup through to his wife; when he came back he said, “You’ll be wondering about Sarah.”

  I wasn’t really. I’d figured her a bustling grown-up daughter, rushed off her feet with work and kids and popping in and out of the farmhouse to check on her parents when she got a moment in her busy day. I realised now I’d only heard her mentioned by Grace, and when Grace spoke of her, Sarah was present tense. But now John talked about his daughter, and it was in the past perfect.

  She had been a happy girl, full of sunshine, loads of friends. She had planned to go to Agricultural College. She had always said that she couldn’t wait for him to retire so she could be in charge of the farm. Once she got her hands on it he wouldn’t recognise the place.

  Sammy handed the empty cup to me, and I set it on the table. He leaned in against me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We’re all Chapel, up here; Methodist; drink is, well—we don’t hold with drink. That summer between school and college, she’d got new friends, she’d get back late, crashing around the place. We’d try and get her to stay home, or see her old friends, but. That Palmer kid would turn up in that eyesore of a car of his, and she’d dash out to it, and that was that. Short of locking her up, what could we do.”

  “The Palmer kid?”

  “Aye. The younger’un. Nicholas.”

  The three syllables of his name, and I realised: I knew this story. The lost girl now had a name. It was Sarah.

  Mr. Metcalfe to
ld me about nights that she didn’t come home, how he’d go out looking for her, driving round the lanes and pubs and the streets in town, peering at women and girls, making a fool of himself. One night he had to knock on the Palmers’ door at two in the morning and was sent away with a flea in his ear, and had to be up for milking at half five. And the next day she fell out of that little yellow Audi that swung round and was gone in a spray of muck before he could get his hands on the little…

  Then her brother, James. He’d stood there in his school uniform, told them that the crowd his sister was hanging round with had a reputation, and Sarah had that reputation too now, and the reputation was for drugs.

  “It might not seem like such a big thing to you, perhaps, coming from London where I s’pose everybody and their auntie’s on the drugs, but the strongest thing we have in the house is Benylin.”

  “It’s not my thing either,” I said. “And when it’s your own child…” I stroked Sammy’s head.

  They drew a line. She wouldn’t be seeing any of that crowd again. She’d be starting at college and knuckling down and no more nonsense. And if there were more nonsense, they’d be calling the police. And she, well, she just shrugged. It was like it didn’t matter, like nothing mattered. All the sunshine was gone out of her.

  He went quiet. Remembering.

  “The Palmer get went back to university, and Sarah started her course, and I thought it were over and she’d settle back down and be alright. But she were pregnant.”

  They had to drag themselves down to the big house again, cap in hand, talk to the Palmers, thinking the kids could maybe make it work; maybe it would be the making of them, bit of responsibility. But the Palmers were having none of it.

  “He said my Sarah was a…I’m not going to say the word. He said she were trying to get her claws into their son. That’s what Andy Palmer said. Like that boy were such a prize.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “We did what we had to. We put up and shut up. We’d raise the baby, me and Grace. A late one of our own, like; very late. But there’s always room for another child, on a farm. Sarah could still have had her life. She seemed resolved to it. Happy even, getting back on track. It certainly weren’t end of the world.”