A Private Haunting (21 page)

On Tuesday morning Jonas almost went out. He made it to the front door. Out he would go, no problem, for a walk, nothing as normal as a walk, a jaunty step and click, click, click go the cameras but I'm only walking, I'm only walking. Hand on the door handle, he heard two things. First a ripple of laughter, the journos with their morning coffee. Then a metallic clanking, the pipes in the upstairs airing cupboard again. Then once more the laughter and again the pipes. There could be a problem with the pipes. He would have to stay in, see to it, see to the pipes before something burst, flooded the house and can you imagine the poor plumber who had to turn up, run the media gauntlet to fix his pipes? It was unfair, he couldn't ask the plumber to do that. So he got the tool box from under the kitchen sink and went upstairs to the airing cupboard to consider the decrepit heating system, the mysterious pipe-work leading from the giant boiler that looked like one of Saturn 5's fuel tanks. In his hand was a ratchet. That's what you needed, surely, to fix pipes. He peered for a long time, reached behind the water boiler, stood back with his arms folded and patted the ratchet against his palm, frowning and considering. In the silence he could still hear the laughter.

 

He stayed in all day. Made lentil and bacon soup and bread. Five loaves from the bags of flour he had in the cupboards. Then an over-hot bath and to bed, the boiling seas of the fever-dreams.

The rabbit came back. Tonight it was man-sized, like the one in that creepy film he couldn't remember. It walked right up to him, slow steps closer and closer until he was forced to shut his eyes, and then somehow through him, a crossing of dimensions he felt as coloured vibrations across his body. When Jonas opened his eyes again it was over by the window. A vaguely visible darkness on darkness but looking back at him, he knew. He saw that he was hanging out of bed and reaching towards it, a deep and permanent sadness in his chest.

As Jonas watched, the slow transformation began once more, the rabbit becoming smaller and smaller, morphing into that familiar child's shape. He had to get out of this occult darkness.

He came to at the window. A confused sense of time. Two seconds he may have been there. Two years.

His arms were wide and he was gripping each flung-open curtain. He stared at the dead flies on the windowsill, gaze moving up to the dusty window panes then outwards, beyond the glass, the houses across the street he may have been seeing for the first time. Then movement below, two figures under a streetlight, looking up. He realised he was naked.

Naked with his arms wide.

Like Jesus.

He laughed out loud as he stepped back from the window, pulling the curtains closed again. The dream was gone, the rabbit vanished and no Anya to see, lying at his feet, bleeding.

In the darkness, the fluorescent arms of the alarm clock said 3.33. He doubled it to 666 and started laughing again. Halfway to the Beast. Normality had floated free. Just a speck now.

 

You can lose it in a thousand different ways. It's all dependent on the individual. To some extent you can even rationally lose it, like one part of you is watching another with curious detachment yet lacks the power to intervene, to say,
really, Jonas?
He wondered which one of him was the more real, the one rummaging in the garden shed or the one watching the rummaging?

He was still naked. The Petzl strapped to his forehead cast a thin and powerful beam, straight from the Third Eye of one of those two Jonases. It didn't matter which, all that mattered was the head-torch found his bow-drill kit on a shelf, the sycamore hearth board, and the bag of hay.

When Jonas finished there were five scorch patches on the lawn, like the five on a giant dice. Pink and yellow streaks had appeared behind the roofs to the east. One or two windows were lit. He felt dazed but better. His shoulder might ache and the tips of his fingers may be singed from the heat of the spindle turning in the bearing block but he felt better.

People had seen his firelighting frenzy. He'd heard their windows open, wakened by the screech of willow on sycamore. No one had shouted at him to shut up. They just watched from a silent, appraising distance, letting the maniac work through whatever he had to.

A third coffee told him to go back to work. Work meant normality. Meant nothing had changed. Hogg would be pleased. He was bound to need the labour. Jonas. He was here to help.

He phoned Eggers, who didn't answer, leaving a message to pick him up at the usual time. On his way for a shower, he checked the spare room. Fletcher still hadn't reappeared after the search and Jonas indulged the little part of him that wanted to believe he'd gone for good.

So he smiled as he showered and dressed and waited for Eggers to blast the horn. He felt better, remember? He would not be Jonas of the Cross. He would remember goodness where Big Haakon had forgotten. This was his home. This was where he'd met beautiful young Lacey. This was where he'd continue to smile, no matter the media camped outside his door.

Eggers didn't come.

Jonas paced the living room and peered through the gap in the curtain. He shrugged at Li Po, wondered what to do and decided. He strode into the hallway and there was the front door.

In Bergen, there had only been two or three journalists waiting for him when he returned to the house on Christinegård after being charged and released on bail. Outside End Point there were almost a dozen. Plus two TV cameras. All of them asked different questions at the same time, about Lacey, Eva and his daughter, fires in the night. But they wanted reaction, not answers, a spat-out
no comment
, a look of panic or a very public meltdown. So Jonas settled a beatific smile and pushed a way through the throng. He even managed a wave at the green-haired teenage hairdresser opening up another empty day in her salon. She lifted an automatic hand and dropped it like a stone but that was ok, at least she'd tried.

 

Two journalists got on the bus with him. One sat directly behind him and continued to jabber questions. The other sat a few seats back, trying to convince himself Jonas hadn't seen him. Both got off when he did, the last stop before the pedestrianised zone in the town centre.

He shook off the first in the market. In one door of the fishmonger and out another. He lost the second by joining a group of Spanish tourists crowding along the High Street. When they reached St. Francis' church he ducked down Finstock Lane and didn't stop running until the park.

It took half an hour to walk to the ring road. Half an hour of faces on buses, cars, pavements. Quick looks, held looks, recognition flashes. He pulled his 49ers cap lower but felt more conspicuous than ever. Just needed to pull his collar up to complete the effect. So he did.

Because it was all a game. An unbelievable game. Two streets later he flung the cap in a bin.

It was just after 8 am. They were creating a new hamburger roundabout and the traffic was nose to tail, four lanes of dual-carriageway reduced to one each way as they built a relief lane through the centre of the old roundabout. A six- to eight-month job to relieve the traffic that would build exponentially until three years from now they'd have to think again.

He crossed the lanes to the work site, the ground where they'd scraped off the vegetation dry and rutted. Men in yellow bibs and red machines, like animals at a dried up watering hole, milling and shouting as a thousand engines revved. He headed for the Portakabins.

 

‘Jonas?' Boss Hogg looked up with a classic double-take. He was sitting at his desk reading a newspaper.

‘Hogg.'

‘You're supposed to be on leave.'

‘I guessed you might need me.'

‘Did you now?'

‘The team's a man down.'

‘Not today. You guessed wrong, Jonas. Go home.'

‘Come on Hogg, I – '

‘The boys don't want you here, Jonas.'

‘They might not want me here but it's my job.'

Hogg tapped his fingers on the desk. Thinking about something. Holding Jonas's gaze. ‘Not for long.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

He picked up the two-way radio on the desk. ‘Eggers. You there?
Eggers
.'

The radio buzzed a few moments later. ‘Boss man. What's up?'

‘Get yourself in here.'

‘Gimme ten, I'm on a break.'

‘Just do it!'

Jonas looked down at the newspaper on the desk.
The Sun
, a double-page spread. He saw the word
Lacey
. Bold black letters. ‘If this has got anything to do with her you're way off the line.'

‘Off the
mark
. It's got nothing to do with that. There's a process there and there's a process here.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

The door handle turned and they both looked round. Eggers saw Jonas and stopped dead.

‘Jackie,' said Hogg. ‘What was that you were telling me this morning? Jonas using the work van for personal use.'

Eggers stared at him. ‘You what?'

‘Come
on
,' said Jonas, ‘this is – '

‘This morning. Remember? You said it was out of line how Jonas kept taking the van for personal use.'

Eggers frowned. He was still staring at Hogg. Then nodded, slowly then faster, a man in the process of making a decision. ‘That's right. Personal use of the van. A few times he's taken it out.'

‘You have to be joking!' said Jonas.

Hogg stood up and pointed Jonas towards the door. ‘You heard it. There'll be a letter in the post.'

‘About what?'

‘The disciplinary.'

‘That's what happens when you step out of line, mate,' Eggers blurted out. ‘There's consequences.'

They followed him across the site. When Jonas crossed the lanes of traffic they were still watching, watching him all the way into the distance.

Eggers. He was doing a Haroldson and Mikke. Two teacher friends from Skillebekk High who kept a similar distance when Jonas was released. Neither would meet him and no chance of a reference. Not that he'd have got anywhere near a teaching post. A warehouse job was hard enough. They wanted to know about the long employment gap so Jonas started to lie. He turned himself into a fish packer from Lofoten, a trawler jock from Hammerfest...

It was startling, how it flowed, the details Jonas conjured. He almost convinced himself he had a gift for improvisation until he realised that most people weren't listening. They wanted to hear but they didn't want to listen. He could stretch his nonsense to higher planes of inanity before they finally twigged. It made him feel better about being shunned by old friends. In true connection was loyalty and forgiveness. In its absence there could have been no connection to begin with. He wondered what Haroldson and Mikke had
heard
when he had talked to them, joked with them, all those hours in the bar after parent evenings. What were they really thinking about when he was rambling on? And then he realised he couldn't remember a damn thing about what they had told
him
. It was a liberating moment, to know that every face was a mask and behind every mask was a stranger.

 

He headed back into town. To the bus station and a coffee while he waited for the B4, watching the orange scrolling digital destination screens, nine mins, six mins, two mins. DUE.

One of the place names drew his eye, something there he suddenly remembered. Longworth, the village where the weapons expert, Dr David Kelly, was hounded to an alleged suicide after questioning Blair's weapons of mass destruction claims. Twenty-nine co-proxamol and the heart-breaking pathos of a childhood pocket knife. But if there is despair in killing yourself there is so much more in wanting the bliss of an escape you know you can't make.

That December afternoon at Christinegård. Mad as the blizzard outside. Staring into the bathroom mirror and shivering with soul-deep cold, more profound than the harshest winter. Fifty paracetamol and a bottle of vodka. He swallowed twenty before Eva touched his cheek.

Such forgiveness for what he had done to her and Anya. Or such pity for his lack of courage to follow through. He began to cry. Felt her stroke his head as he made himself throw up.

The B4 rolled in and Jonas got on. Ain't no one likes a killer. It's just a
thing
. Made you think twice about a handshake, never mind sex. But c'mon, Mary, what's a little killing between friends and lovers? Uncork that fine Burgundy and let's drink! Drink to the last images of a wife and daughter, to the blood on the floor of an old Saab and rain like in the movies, Jonas on his knees and he'd only had two beers,
two beers
, he wasn't drunk, the car skidded on slick moss at the side of the road is all, green and unseen but he was still over the limit.

No one forgave. Not Eva. Not one of the people who stared as he walked from the bus stop to the supermarket. Not Mary, who Jonas told himself he wasn't looking for as he walked the aisles. He just needed some food. Even the hunted needed baked beans. Baked beans meant normality. He picked up a tin and turned it in his hand. Supermarket brand. There was nothing as reassuring as a tin of beans. You may be lying in bed with the final fever but hey, be reassured that a few streets away there's a tin of beans on a supermarket shelf as there always would be. A tin of beans could save a man. A tin of beans was normalising in a way that making five little fires with a bow-drill in the middle of the night could never be.

He put nine tins in his trolley alongside the seven tins of tuna. Tuna was also normal though not as normal as beans, tuna being a little bit more aspirational. All in all, though, these were normal items. The abnormality came from the numbers, the till assistant would think it peculiar that he was buying seven tins of tuna and nine tins of beans. And why odd numbers? Why not eight of each? Jonas had no answer. The numbers were weird. He was weird.