‘Which is why we’re here,’ said Guy, from the foot of the stairs.
‘Hello, Celia,’ I said. ‘I think we’ve met at parents’ evening.’ I held out a hand, but she didn’t take it, and I realized that she was holding back tears. ‘Please. Come in. It’s a bit of a mess – the others have all just gone and I haven’t cleared up. And I’m decorating.’ I made myself stop babbling.
‘He was here, was he?’
‘You mean Hayden? Yes.’
‘What about Joakim?’ asked Celia.
‘Yes, he was here as well.’
‘Of course he was.’ Her mouth tightened as if she’d sucked a lemon. ‘He wouldn’t miss a chance of spending time with his beloved Hayden Booth.’
‘Celia’s a bit upset,’ said Guy.
‘Yes, I can see that,’ I said cautiously. ‘Can I offer you anything? Tea? Coffee?’
‘I’m not a
bit
upset. I’m very, very, very upset.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I sat down in the chair but they remained standing, so I got up again.
‘Very,’ she said again.
‘He has a place at Edinburgh,’ said Guy.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘But he’s not going.’
‘He’s so rude to me.’ Celia’s voice caught on a sob. ‘He treats me as if he had contempt for me.’
‘Teenagers…’ I began, without knowing what was going to come next.
‘What have I done to deserve that?’
‘What I want to know,’ said Guy, ‘is what you’re going to do about it.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been there for him his whole life and a few days with this – this sleazeball…’
‘I don’t understand, Guy. Obviously I know you’re disappointed –’
‘You’re his teacher.’
‘I
was
his teacher. He left school a couple of months ago.’
‘You’re his teacher and you roped him into your wretched band, and now this second-rate musician has lured him away from everything he’s worked for.’
‘It’s like a cult. A cult and he’s been brainwashed.’
I stayed silent.
‘Hayden says this and Hayden does that and I’m going to dress like Hayden and talk like Hayden and lie around all day like Hayden. I’m losing him.’
‘Celia, let’s try and keep this rational, shall we?’
‘That’s all very easy for you to say. I’m his mother!’
‘I’m his father, you know.’
It was as if I’d blundered into a private argument. Guy seemed to notice my presence once more. ‘He’s a con-man,’ he said. ‘And he’s conned my son and you’re responsible.’
‘Joakim is eighteen years old,’ I said.
‘You don’t have any children. How can you be expected to understand? I knew she wouldn’t understand.’ Celia regarded me with distaste so that all at once I felt acutely conscious of my spiky hair, my nose stud, my ripped shirt.
‘I just don’t know what you expect me to do about it. Joakim’s an adult.’
‘He’s not an adult. He doesn’t know what he’s doing – he doesn’t understand the consequences.’
‘Have you tried talking to him?’
‘We’re not here to ask your advice about him, thank you,’ said Guy. His voice was tight with fury and a small vein ticked in his forehead. ‘We’re here to say that you have to undo the harm you’ve done.’
I was getting irritated. ‘Don’t you think part of the problem is the way you’re thinking of your son?’
‘No,’ he roared. ‘I do not think that is the fucking problem. The problem is Hayden Booth.
You
sort this out before I do. Got it?’
After
I left the police station, walking slowly and unsteadily. I didn’t know where I was going and the hot sun bounced on my skull and burned in my eye sockets. I needed to sit down. I needed to eat something. I needed to lie in bed and sleep and sleep and sleep and preferably not wake up for a year when all of this would be over – except, of course, it would never be over, not really. Above all, I needed for this not to have happened. I didn’t want to be me, here, now. I thought back to the end of the school term and the feeling I’d had then that summer lay ahead of me, wonderfully empty and full of possibility. I wanted to go back to that time and do it again, and not say yes to Danielle’s request, not meet Hayden by rotten random chance, not be this Bonnie Graham – the one reeling down the road from the police station with fear in her mouth – but the Bonnie Graham of before, carefree and untested. Go back, go back – and then I saw his face.
It stared up at me from the newsstand, taking up almost half of the front page under the banner headline: ‘Death in the Fast Lane’. It wasn’t the picture the papers had used previously. He was quite a few years younger; his hair was long and he had stubble that almost amounted to a beard. He was smiling at whoever was behind the camera and his eyebrows were slightly raised so that he looked sardonic and questioning, as if he was sharing a secret thought with the person facing him. He had looked at me like that, as if he understood me, recognized me. He had looked at Sally like that too. And who else? Hundreds of women, I was sure, who, even as they knew he was unreliable, had fallen for that charm. And then someone had killed him – a stranger, after all, or someone who knew him, someone who hated him, loved him, hated him because they loved him?
I told myself I wouldn’t buy the paper, but I found myself counting out the change, taking it and trying to read it as I walked along the street. The caption under the picture told me to turn to page seven, so I stopped in the first café I came to, where I ordered a cappuccino and a slice of carrot cake. I felt I needed a dose of carbohydrate and sugar. Only when I’d eaten half of the cake and finished the coffee did I turn to page seven, and when I did, another photo leaped out at me: of a youthful Hayden with his arm wrapped around a woman who was vivid with happiness. She was slight and had a mane of chestnut hair, a wide, smiling mouth. Underneath the photograph there was a caption. Her name was Hannah Booth.
I closed my eyes for a moment but when I opened them again, there she still was. I liked the look of her. She was someone I could imagine having as a friend in another life. I looked at the caption again. The photo had been taken in 2002, seven years ago. Hayden would have been about thirty then – his face was thinner and softer than the one I had known, perhaps happier. Or perhaps that was simply because he was standing arm-in-arm with his wife. Why was I surprised and why was there a pain in my chest and why did my eyes sting?
I skimmed the story, my eyes jumping from paragraph to paragraph. Much of the beginning was a rather floridly written repetition of what had been in the papers before – talented and reckless musician, mysterious death, shocked friends, body found in the reservoir, police following up clues. But at the centre was the interview with Hannah Booth, who had spoken to the reporter about her grief (‘although I always believed he would die young’) at the murder of her estranged husband. ‘Estranged’ – I seized on the word and let it comfort me a bit, until my eyes lit on another word: ‘child’. I felt as though someone had punched me hard in the stomach. Hayden had a child, a son, aged just six and a half, who had last seen ‘his daddy’ a few months ago. His name was Josiah. Hayden had left Hannah and Josiah four years ago, when his son was just a toddler. Hannah Booth described how their marriage, embarked upon with such hope, had deteriorated. ‘I don’t think Hayden knew how to be content,’ she said. ‘He never had that kind of stability. He let his ambitions and his dreams destroy the reality of what we had together. And he hated getting older – he was just a kid at heart. A great, lovable kid. But you can’t be married to a child, especially when you become a parent yourself.’
I laid the paper aside for a bit and finished my cappuccino, sipping it slowly through the froth, trying to concentrate only on its milky sweetness. He had told me he never wanted to be a father, and all the time he had been one; he had told me he never wanted to be tied down and all the time he was married. OK, married to a woman he never saw, but married all the same. She had even taken his name. Why hadn’t he told me? Then I remembered his hasty, urgent note, my last communication with him – was that what he had wanted to tell me?
When I returned to the story I read about his mother, who said that Hayden had been a naughty boy and a troubled man and, no, she hadn’t approved of his lifestyle, but that a parent should never have to bury a child. His sister, three years his senior, who said that he had a lust for life. His great friend Mac, who was absolutely gutted: he had seen Hayden just a week or so before his death and Hayden had seemed excited about life and newly happy. All these people whom I’d never known existed. Of course I’d realized that Hayden had a life of his own, friends, relationships and a complicated history behind him – but never before had I understood what a tiny corner of his existence I had occupied, how very little he had communicated to me. It was as if he could only live in the perpetual present, blotting out all that had gone before and all that would come after.
I closed the paper and folded it so I wouldn’t have to see his face. He had a mother and a sister; he had an abandoned wife and son; he had best friends who would miss him; and presumably he had made dozens of enemies along the way, people who would have wished him dead in the way that most of our band had done at one time or another. Even me. There had been times when I had wanted him, if not dead, at least wiped from my consciousness without a trace left behind, so that I could forget not just about him but about the me that I was when I was with him.
I put the newspaper on the table when I left and walked blindly home, with no idea of what I was going to do with myself when I got there.
Sally was crying. She lay on my sofa in a crumpled heap, her skirt above her knees, her blouse bunched up at her waist and her hair half over her face, sticking to her wet cheeks. I had never seen her weep like this – or anyone at all, really, except my mother on her worst days. Her body seemed entirely taken over by wretchedness: she gulped and sobbed; tears streamed from her eyes and ran down her face and into her neck; words came out in whimpers and hiccups and she couldn’t catch her breath for long enough to make any sense. Her crying was more like uncontrollable retching. She was heaving up her misery. All the while, Lola stood beside her, occasionally reaching out a hand to give an anxious poke at Sally’s shoulder or stomach.
She didn’t seem distressed, more curious and a bit nervous. ‘Mummy?’ she said every so often, but Sally would only wail louder. At first I tried to calm her, crouching beside her and putting a hand on her writhing body or wiping away the snot and tears from her cheek, but after a while I gave up and concentrated on Lola instead.
‘Do you want a biscuit?’ She stared at me. ‘Or some juice? No, sorry, I don’t have juice. I have milk. I think I have some milk. Or some –’ What did someone of Lola’s age like? ‘You could draw something,’ I said. ‘Shall I get you a pencil and some paper and you could make a picture for Mummy, to cheer her up?’
Lola went on staring at me. She chewed her fat bottom lip.
‘She’ll be all right soon,’ I continued. ‘Everyone cries sometimes. What do you cry about?’
Lola shifted from one leg to another. Her face was scrunched up with effort.
‘Do you need a wee?’
She nodded.
‘Here.’ I took her hot little hand in mine and pulled her towards the bathroom. ‘Do you need help?’
She nodded again.
I pulled down her knickers and lifted her onto the toilet. Her legs dangled; she was wearing red shoes with striped laces. We waited. She put a thumb in her mouth and gazed at me pensively. We could hear Sally’s loud sobs; there was a certain regularity to them now and I wondered if she was coming to the end of her crying fit at last.
‘Done?’ I asked.
She shook her head firmly. Sally’s sobs turned into long, shuddering breaths and then there was silence. I lifted Lola down from the toilet, wiped between her legs, pulled up her knickers and then washed her hands under the cold water. When we went back, Sally was sitting up, her skirt pulled down over her knees, her shirt straightened and her hair pushed behind her ears. Her face was puffy and there were red blotches on her cheeks.
‘You OK?’
‘I think so. Sorry. Lola?’ She opened her arms but Lola shrank back against me, her thumb in her mouth again. ‘Lola, will you come and give me a hug?’ There was a note of panic in her voice.
‘I’m going to make a pot of tea,’ I said, and left them alone.
I stood in the kitchen and stared out of the window at the blank blue sky, feeling so vastly tired that there was no room for thoughts or emotions any longer. I could hear the murmur of Sally and Lola’s voices from the other room. The kettle boiled, sending up puffs of steam. I poured the water over the teabags and found some shortbread biscuits at the back of the cupboard. I carried them through and sat on the sofa next to Sally. Lola was on her lap, her head on her shoulder and her eyes closing.
‘Do I look a wreck?’ asked Sally.
‘I’ve seen you better.’
She gave a tired grin. ‘You too. You look as if you’ve been up all night.’
I opened my mouth to say that I had, then stopped myself. I couldn’t start unburdening myself to Sally because that might be like easing the first small stone out of the wall.
Lola gave a long, gurgling snore and I could sense her body softening and slumping against Sally, who leaned her chin on her daughter’s hair and sighed.
‘Hayden?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Bonnie. Hayden, Richard, the whole sheer fucking fact of it all, if you know what I mean. Which I don’t. Bloody life. The mess I’ve made of everything.’