‘I’ll see you soon, Lara. Very soon.’ He touched her shoulder, leaned in to kiss her on the cheek, then jumped back into the Wrangler and sped off.
Lara stood there waving, her shopping at her feet. Her cheek burned where his lips had touched it. A breeze shook the maples that towered around the house, rattling their leaves so for a second they were all she could hear. Hadn’t she resolved, just this morning, not to see Stephen again? And hadn’t she just spent the whole afternoon with him, drawing Jack into it all as well?
Then she saw Marcus at the far end of Main Street, the unmistakable shape and colour of him as he loped along, a heavy satchel on one shoulder, a cigarette in his hand. The low, late afternoon sun illuminated his hair, making him look as if he were on fire. From the spring in his step, he must have had a good day at work. He looked strangely complete, as if he at last belonged in the space he took up in the world.
‘Daddy!’ Jack said, running towards his father.
And here am I, she thought. His Lara, contemplating murdering all of that happiness.
BELLA LAY IN THE DARK IN HER SWELTERING BEDROOM, LISTENING
to the whine of a mosquito as it homed in on her skin, adding to her agitation after an awkward evening. One of the fly screens had a small tear, and when she went out the night before she must have left the light on. So she had to spend a good half-hour before getting into bed creeping about with a sandal, squashing the wily insects that had found their way into the room in bloody splatters on the mildewed wallpaper.
The drone of this last remaining mosquito stopped and she felt the prick as its proboscis pierced the flesh on her belly. Holding her breath, she lifted her hand up high and brought it down on herself with a slap. She rubbed the grainy remains of the creature between her fingers. If she turned on the light she would see her own blood, ample motive for the killing. But she just couldn’t be bothered to lean over and fiddle with the annoying switch.
The downside of not having the mosquito buzzing around was that she could hear Olly more clearly. He was writing a song, which meant he was making a racket, singing in that gruff wail of his that irritated her so much. It sounded so false, as if it were manufactured expressly to annoy her. He was, he had declared at the uncomfortable supper table the Waylands had shared with Sean, setting to music a Byron poem from the book Stephen had lent him. So now she was plagued with Olly’s voice, in the room next to hers, droning on.
‘Like me in lineaments: her eyes
Her hair, her features, all to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine …’
‘Shut up,’ Bella groaned into the dense darkness of her room. She knew his game exactly. She hadn’t studied the Romantic poets without learning about Byron’s goings-on with his half-sister. This was Olly, typically, trying to ennoble what had happened between them. He’d done it before, back home, swaying stoned at the top of the stairs when their parents were out, blocking her way, jabbering on about how in Bali fraternal twins used to have to marry because it was assumed they had already had sex in the womb.
Any sort of intellectual justification made it all right for Olly. But Bella felt only shame. She wanted to forget all about it, to make it something only she knew. But how could she, with him knowing it too? With him in her face all the time?
Olly finally finished his ‘songwriting’. Bella tried to breathe the tension in her shoulders down, out through the tips of her fingers and on to the wrinkled bed sheet. She forced her mind to empty its trash, trying instead to fill it with the good things.
It was so hot her chest felt blocked. Another storm was on its way. She ‘felt it in her waters’ as Marcus would say. She wasn’t going to waste electricity by turning on her fan, though. That afternoon, after their wonderful skinny dip and everything else – she gave a hum of pleasure at the memory of that
everything else
– Sean had driven her from his cousin’s remote pond into the town with the unpronounceable name he said was of Native American origin.
All the shops had their doors open to the stifling air, yet inside they were like fridges. She and Sean tried to work out how much energy all the shops across America wasted chilling their customers so they had to carry warm clothing, even when temperatures outside soared. It was obscene. Sweating in her bed was Bella’s personal direct action for climate change. She thought with a smile that if she had another body in there beside her, she would be even hotter and her protest even greater.
Fat chance of that with her brother around, though.
And there she was, thinking about Olly again, allowing him to poison her brain. She ran back again over the evening’s events, and, not for the first time, she groaned.
She lifted up her sheet and let it fall down, wafting air over her that was, if not cooler, at least not stagnant.
Everything Sean said at the table Olly did his best to do down with little underhand remarks and snarky comments. Sean hadn’t risen to the bait, but she could tell he was upset.
‘You could have knocked me over when I bumped into the pair of them in Pretty Fly Pie …’ her mother had said.
‘Lucky it wasn’t me bumping into you,’ Olly muttered with his head angled so only Bella and Sean could hear.
And Marcus had been so
gushy
, forcing wine on to Sean, asking him about his plans for the future, interviewing him as if he were a potential son-in-law. It was excruciating. But it was inevitable with Marcus, she supposed. He always liked to dole out the Wayland charm offensive when they had guests. And he was particularly full of himself that evening because his read-through had gone so well.
But her mother had been acting oddly too, knocking back the wine, smiling at them with this stupid look in her eyes, referring to them both as ‘you two’ and making little jokes about holding hands and billing and cooing. It had taken all of Bella’s strength to stop herself withering away in embarrassment.
Then there had been the detailed list of which bits of her underwear had gone missing in the stolen laundry. And what was that about? Bella sat up and tried to pummel some life into her lumpy pillow. Her favourite sundress and an irreplaceable bra, gone for good, nicked by some pervert because her mother had swanned off with Stephen Molloy and forgotten all about them. And now her parents had turned it into some big joke.
She scratched at the lump made by the mosquito. At least she’d get some new clothes out of it. That’s if she found a decent shop out here in the middle of nowhere. The only place she had seen in the unpronounceable town was the grimmest shop in the world, called Fashion Bug, which seemed to sell nothing but lime and pastel polyester.
She cast around for other positive things to think about. The
everything else
, of course. And Sean. Beautiful Sean. When they said their goodbyes on the porch, he had even said how much he liked her parents, how cool they were, how he hoped to see a lot more of them.
They had kissed – with less abandon than earlier at his cousin’s pond, but still enough to kindle that flame he had set burning in her. He wound his fingers in hers and they made plans to meet again the next day.
But then, of course, bloody Olly had blundered out of the front door and straight into them, making them jump apart.
‘OH GOD,’ Olly said. ‘I’m SO SORRY. I didn’t realise you were out here SNOGGING.’ Then, his face set in an ugly sneer, he shoved Sean away from her, making him stumble down the porch steps.
‘Olly, get in here this instant!’ Bella heard her mother call from inside.
‘I thought I told you to stay away,’ Olly hissed, jumping down, grabbing Sean by the collar and pushing his face right at him. Then, louder, he called, ‘Coming, Mother,’ and went back indoors.
Bella winced as she remembered Sean brushing himself down, trying to conceal his anger behind a set jaw.
‘What
is
it with your brother?’ he said.
She couldn’t say anything of course. She was utterly stifled by Olly. And her parents, come to that. She had no space in her family. She couldn’t wait to leave home and get away from it all.
She closed her eyes and again tried to clear her mind of the lot of them, tried to wind back to the picture of Sean, smiling down at her as he held her hand, but it was impossible. Olly’s face kept leering in, prising them apart.
Sean must never know what had gone on between her and Olly. It made her feel so dirty. She would die, quite literally, from shame.
And then the unmistakable whine of another mosquito started up by her ear, as if it had been sent to make this night a
total
misery for her.
It just wasn’t fair. None of it was at all fair.
‘I THINK I’D LIKE TO ASK JAMES IF, AS WELL AS HAMMERING UP THAT
hideous cellar, we can get some locks put on the doors,’ Lara told Marcus as she cleared away the breakfast things. Her head ached with a cheap wine hangover and her hands seemed disconnected from her body.
‘What on earth for?’ Marcus said, looking up from the online
Guardian
he was reading on Lara’s laptop.
‘After the launderette thing. I’m not so sure there aren’t some weirdos around, and I’d rather we could lock the doors.’
‘I’ll mention it today,’ Marcus said, but in a way that meant he’d do nothing of the sort.
‘If you’re not going to do it, let me know and I’ll ask him myself.’
‘Didn’t I just say I’d ask him?’
‘What are your plans this morning?’ Lara plunged her hands into the sink to tackle the washing-up. Marcus’s rehearsal didn’t start till after lunch. If he said he was going to sit about and learn his lines, she thought she might explode.
‘I think I’ll look at me lines,’ Marcus said. ‘Steady, old girl,’ he added as a plate slipped from Lara’s hand on to the floor, smashing into several pieces. ‘What are you up to?’
‘There’s that kid’s show at the library,’ she said, scooping up the bits of broken crockery. ‘I thought we’d go along to that. Jack and me, at any rate.’
‘Tell you what,’ Marcus said, shutting the laptop and stretching. ‘Why don’t I come with you? Let the lines go hang for an hour or two. It’d be good to be out together, just the three of us.’
‘OK then.’ Lara swirled the foamy dishwater round, trying to get an ancient stain out of the bottom of a coffee cup. She didn’t know what irritated her more: that Marcus hadn’t noticed she had smashed the plate on purpose, or that he hadn’t offered to take Jack on his own, giving her an hour to herself. She might as well give up on the business plan. It was never going to get written.
‘Has that launderette guy got back yet?’ Marcus said. He was concerned about what he called ‘that exorbitant shirt’. Lara had phoned the number on her arm when she got in the night before, and, after an answerphone greeting in a Russian accent so heavy she couldn’t make out a word, had left a message and the house number.
‘Did you hear the phone ring at all this morning?’ she asked Marcus.
‘Nope.’
‘Then he hasn’t got back. I’m going to have to go shopping. Olly’s got practically nothing to wear.’
‘Can’t we claim it on the insurance?’
‘We will, but we won’t get the money for ages.’
‘Well let’s not go too crazy with the new clothes, eh?’
By quarter to ten, they were on their way to the village library, Jack bowling on ahead. Lara and Marcus walked together, but they didn’t touch. Like many long-married couples, used to having their arms taken up with babies, buggies, shopping and small children, they had lost the habit of hand-holding.
There had been another storm in the night, which had washed reddish-brown mud down the grassy banks to their side, creating puddles in the warped and cracked paving stones. Jack stepped in a puddle a lot deeper than it looked, and the water soaked over the tops of his trainers and seemingly upwards into his eyes as, feeling the cold clam of soggy socks, he started to bawl.
‘Oh come on, Jack,’ Marcus said in his stern father voice. ‘It’s only a bit of wet.’
‘Sit on that wall,’ Lara said, ‘And I’ll sort you out.’
‘You spoil that child,’ Marcus said in a high, Pythonesque voice. ‘You’re making a rod for your own back.’
Lara knew he was having a laugh, imitating her mother – she and Marcus had made a mutually unfavourable impression on each other on the few occasions they had met. But behind all that bluster was what he really thought. She took off Jack’s sopping socks and wrung the water out of them. ‘Let’s go barefoot.’ She winked at Jack. ‘Then you can splash to your heart’s content.’
‘Recipe for disaster,’ Marcus went on in the same voice, and Lara wished he would stop.
They arrived at the library and climbed the steep stone steps that mounted the bank up to the picture-perfect building. Entirely symmetrical, with four columns supporting a gabled porch, it was backdropped by tall, green trees and sparkled in the morning sun.
Undermining this fine façade, someone had tacked a laminated, clip-art-adorned sign to an A-board in the street, telling passers-by that ‘
FOXY LOXY
and
CHICKEN LICKEN
are right here this
A.M.
at 10 a.m. and EVERYONE is WELCOME!!!!!!’
‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus muttered.
‘You didn’t have to come,’ Lara said. ‘Now, let’s get ourselves together, Jacko.’ She made him wipe his feet on the bristled mat on the library porch, setting his shoes and socks out in the sun to dry.
Inside they were greeted by a shiny woman sitting in front of a bank of wooden box files. A rack of rubber stamps stood before her, poised for action.
‘Hello,’ she said, standing up and extending her right hand. ‘You must be Marcus and Lara Wayland. And this is?’ She bent forward and beamed at Jack, who stared back up at her, sucking his thumb.
‘This is Jack. Say hello, Jack,’ Lara said.
‘Hello,’ Jack said, edging behind Lara.
‘I’m Tina,’ the woman said, shaking their hands. ‘Trout Island librarian. And don’t ask how I know who you are. I know everything and everyone that’s going on round here.’ She laughed, waggling her head in a strange, sideways motion. Although she couldn’t be more than forty, she was dressed in a voluminous patterned shirtwaister that bypassed vintage and shot straight into frumpy.