Frozen (16 page)

I WAITED IN the garden by the apple tree.

I had thought of nothing but her all weekend. The time with Dad had drifted by, evaporating as easily as the clouds through two hot blue days. It had been one endless moment, a single mood made of leaflight and dry wood and anticipation and thrill and fear, all shot through with her warm smell and lips. It was unbearable—and I loved it. Finally the wait was over. I clambered from Dad's car and said my farewells, kissed Mum hello, dumped my bags and rushed outside. Verity knew when I was due back. I had been secretly hoping that she would be waiting for me. In fact, I had been secretly hoping all sorts of things, many of which I could hardly put a name to.

I waited in the garden by the apple tree, in the early evening.

She was having her tea, or Gabriel had taken her out for the day, she would be back at any moment. She had homework to do (
homework
, two weeks before starting at a new school?). Or she was ill, or Gabriel was ill, or she had moved house without telling me, she had known it all along. Why wasn't she waiting? Suddenly the days since we had kissed seemed an eternity. It had been enough time to alter everything. She had vanished—or, worse, she had changed her mind about me.

She was at the treehouse, waiting for me. That was it. I strolled completely uncasually to my bike (no running; I was determined to be cool) and set off, fast.

I waited on the same boards I had sat on after our kiss two days ago, stroking the planks where we had lain, summoning her out of the wood, touching her, bones and flesh and supple skin, not minding the splinters. The same leaves and branches arched through the same green light, carving shapes and substance from the air. The same whispers surrounded me whenever breezes shimmered through the tree's green vault. The soft sigh of the woods, untouched by time or thought. Or solitude.

She wasn't there.

The cameras were gone. The piles of earth they had stood on had been kicked flat, the stones and trigger-twigs scattered. Tangles of string littered the great tree's shade. I gathered them up and wadded them into my pockets. Then I cycled home slowly, meandering between the lane's broad banks, thinking nothing, riding each erratic curve.

I waited in the garden.

Cushioned in the long grass at the apple tree's foot was a half-inflated football. I picked it up, tossed it a few yards away, and followed. I slipped my toe beneath it and hoicked it up towards a three-pronged fork in one of the tree's stubby spars. It missed and dropped slackly to the ground. I collected it, slipped my toe beneath it once again.

When it was too dark to see the tree, I headed for the back door. I glanced up at her window. There was a light in it, slitted through the curtains, and a shadow moved inside.

There was no sound at all except the last screams of the swifts.

*

I woke late, and rose later. My bedroom was at the back of the house, and when I opened the curtains I saw Verity kicking idly on the tatty metal swing in her garden. She glanced up and I turned away guiltily, as though she had caught me snooping, embarrassed and thrilled that she had seen me in my pyjamas. I dressed hurriedly, but when I checked again at the window she had gone.

It was a bright day, but overcast. The sky was a white haze and sudden cold gusts stirred the hedges and the dusty ground. On the rim of the sky's bowl, heavier clouds passed us by.

I waited in the garden. I was trying to lodge the ball in the tree.

I couldn't bring myself to knock for her. It would have shown her my eagerness. It would have been humiliating. I would let it happen naturally, as everything else had done. It would happen. I just needed to be cool, patient. She couldn't have changed her mind. Not Verity.

*

After lunch I went to see Adam. I didn't dare ring the doorbell, not after what his dad had done, so I hung around on the other side of the road, kicking a crumpled can along the gutter, one way then the other. Fanta. Sticky orange round its lip. I sat for a while on the low kerb, arms dangling outwards, my upper arms propped on my knees, squinting at nothing in particular. After an hour, I gave up.

I rode along the river towards Port Meadow. At the far end there was a slope covered in smooth hillocks, perfect for riding down and for bike jumps. I wanted to speed up the slow roll of time through the afternoon. The distant thunderclouds seemed heavy and immobile, the river so sluggish it barely stirred the reeds. I passed the ruined abbey and headed for the river lock. The meadow stretched beyond.

A bike I recognised leaned against the arm of one of the lock gates. Sitting on the narrow board that spanned it, legs dangling over the ten-foot drop to the water's outflow, was Adam. He didn't look at me. I dumped my bike on the verge and walked out along the gangway. I sat next to him, arms hung over the lower spar of the handrail, chin resting on the cold metal, staring along the towpath towards the meadow. Below our feet, the river frothed through gaps in the gate, creating a steady roar and sending thin bubbles whirling uncertainly out into the current.

“Not allowed to see you,” Adam said, not looking round. The side of his face was swollen and shiny. The skin around his eye and across the bridge of his nose was stained purple and black.

I looked away. A coot skittered between two clumps of river-grass, screeching as she went. “Yeah,” I said, and sniffed companionably.

Adam sniffed too, and we watched the river together. Then he sighed wearily, and unwound himself from the rail post he was straddling. He clambered to his feet, wincing. Rather than climb round me, he walked off the gangway the wrong way, along the side of the lock to the other set of gates, and crossed there. I craned to follow his progress. He headed back down the lock for his bike. He was limping.

“Adam,” I pleaded. He ignored me. “Adam!” He stopped, not looking at me, but his posture told me he was listening. I hauled myself upright and crossed to stand in front of him. He still did not look at me.

He was standing awkwardly, lopsided, with his head twisted to give his unswollen eye a better view. When the wind shoved us unexpectedly, he swayed and flinched. His jaw was puffed, and his lips were thick and too red on one side. There was a scratch running down his temple towards his good eye.

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“Have you seen Verity?”

“Not allowed to see you. Not allowed to talk.” He looked at me, and then got on his bike and rode back towards home.

“Adam, what's going on?” I called after him.

Over his shoulder, he yelled, “Fuck off, Harry,” and was gone.

I waited by the river.

I went and sat where he had, legs dangling above the water, watching the clumps of muddy foam from the lock spiral unevenly out between the pale banks, catching one by one on the river-grass and the dead branches and the weeds.

*

A few days later I knocked on Verity's door. Gabriel answered. His eyes were deep and glittering, his face solemn and untroubled.

“Is Verity in?”

“She's gone away for a while, Harry. She's staying with her aunt in Huntingdon. Sorry.”

“When's she back, then?”

“She'll be back in time for term, Harry. But she'll be very busy. She won't have time to play.”

I must have stood with my mouth open. I had no idea what to say. I had a thousand questions, and I asked none.

“She doesn't want to see you anymore, Harry,” Gabriel said calmly. The words sliced through me. There was a small, bitter smile on his lips. “I'm sorry, Harry,” he said.

He closed the door very gently in my face.

*

The next morning, my five cameras were in a torn cardboard box on the back doorstep. None had films in them, although we had bought or borrowed new film for almost all of them before we had even developed the first set of photos. A few days before, the cameras had seemed like instruments of infinite potential. Now they were a message, written in brute lumps of plastic and brushed chrome. Their single eyes were dulled and unseeing.

Later that day, as I came downstairs from reading a comic in my room, I saw Gabriel start his car and drive hastily away. In the back seat, next to a few bags and boxes, hunched a small figure. A yellow dress, dark brown hair in a bob, and for a fragment of a moment, two wide dark eyes. Then they were gone. When Gabriel drove the car back two hours later, he was alone.

*

I waited in the garden. I nudged my toe under the half-inflated football, and flicked it upwards towards the tree. It slapped against the underside of a branch and dropped heavily into the grass.

I picked it up and began again.

“HARRY, I'M WORRIED about you.”

I shook my head vigorously, and then had to hold on to the table for a moment or two to get my bearings before I could carry on. I must have been about three pints in and the evening had barely begun. Typical Adam. “What's to worry? I'm just saying that whoever Verity was supposed to see in that pub must have had something to do with her falling.”

Adam opened his mouth to reply, and then shut it again and settled for rocking his hand uncertainly from side to side.

He had been ringing me for days, worried that I wasn't as fine as I sounded—which, of course, I wasn't. Actually, I was confused—by what Kate Fullerton had told us, by the burglary, and also by Sam, although I didn't admit that to him. The burglary and the psychiatrist were enough for Adam to insist that we should meet. I'd agreed, reluctantly.

I had intended to spend the evening with Sam, going over Verity's Filofax for anything we might have missed; I suggested to her that she stay over anyway, and promised I'd be back sober and in good time. But good intentions and an evening with Adam were not exactly compatible. I'd already blown it, and the night was still young.

“She was seeing someone,” I insisted.

“Yeah, her boyfriend. That Slav bloke, Karel Whatshisname. Plus the psychiatrist. You told me.”

“No, not them. The person she was supposed to meet at the pub.”

I fished around in the plastic bag at my feet and slapped Verity's Filofax down facing Adam on one of the few dry patches on the table. I flicked through the diary section and smartly tapped the Birling Gap entry to drive home my point.

Adam rolled his eyes impatiently. “Harry, I'll bet you any money it was Whatshisname. Or even if it wasn't, maybe she's got some frail little auntie, lives in Eastbourne.” We were on uncomfortable ground, and we both knew it. Adam really didn't see any mystery; when he looked at me, all he saw was a friend in distress.

His suggestion was no help at all. Verity had no relatives other than Gabriel. I thought guiltily of the calls from Erica McKelvie on her answer-machine, and promised myself yet again that I would track her down. Tomorrow. Soon. Some time. Whoever she was, though, she surely wouldn't have arranged to meet Verity in Birling Gap, then left messages at Verity's as though nothing had happened.

“Well, if there isn't an auntie, then it had to be Whatshisname,” Adam said, as though it was self-evident.

I wagged a finger at him and gulped at my beer at the same time. “This was someone new. Look.” I pushed the Filofax closer to him.

I marched him through the last few weeks of Verity's life, page by page, jabbing and barking in a rather more emphatic voice than I really wanted to use. Against every appointment in the diary, she had neatly written who she was seeing. Mostly she used initials. I was H; KF was the psychiatrist; K, I assumed, was her poisonous boyfriend, Karel. But over the last two months, there had been frequent meetings with no name attached, one or two a week, sometimes with a gap. There didn't seem to be a pattern, except that they were all in out-of-the-way places: a hotel in Dorking, a pub in Catford, another in Docklands; a couple were even in car parks and lay-bys. The only thing that connected them was that none had a name attached to them, just a time. There were also a few entries with just a time and no other information; Sam and I had wondered if these marked meetings at places Verity already knew.

It looked nothing like a life. There were very few fixed points. I was there, an H every second Wednesday, circled. There was also a note from the day before the fall,
ring H
, also circled, and then question-marked, circled again. But she hadn't.

Adam listened patiently to my explanation. Then he shrugged and pursed his lips.

“Anyway, it's just not her style,” I yelled, over the din. A television had been switched on at the far end of the bar, adding a fuzzy rumble to the higher notes of chattering drinkers. “Beachy Head's not her style.” I was getting nowhere with the mysterious meetings. Time to play the trump card.

Adam frowned. “But you said yourself. It's beautiful. Perfect spot.”

“But she didn't
know
that, did she? Not until she got there. So why would she go there in the first place?” I really thought that was the clincher. Adam didn't, though, and his argumentativeness was irritating.

I pinched the bridge of my nose for a moment, trying to squeeze some clarity into my thoughts and my tired eyes. The drinks weren't helping my concentration—not the three pints I'd already had, or the fourth, which was half empty in front of me now.

“What I mean,” I said slowly (and loudly), “is that she had a big prejudice about that whole stretch of coast. If she talked about old people she'd make jokes about sending them to Eastbourne. She thought the whole coast was made up of retirement bungalows and screaming children.” I reached for my beer. “It just isn't her style,” I said again, and then corrected myself. “Wasn't. Whatever.”

Adam slapped his thighs and stood. “Food,” he said. “We'll talk about it on the way.” He pointed at my drink. “Down the hatch.”

I obliged, and immediately regretted it.

It was around half past nine, and still light. It had clouded over, and the streets were grey, glowing, and quiet. Adam knew a wine bar nearby, and we strolled through the streets, me meandering, him walking more purposefully.

“Then there's the break-in,” I said. “It all ties together. You're not going to tell me that that's coincidence as well. I mean, come on!” I stopped dead and waved my arms expansively, forcing an oncoming pedestrian to veer into the gutter to avoid being hit. “Oh, sorry. Very sorry.” The woman didn't look back.

Adam watched me expressionlessly. “I thought you said that was this guy Karel. He knew the flat was empty, didn't he?”

I squinted at him. “Actually, you've got a point there,” I conceded. I felt a little foolish, the way you do when you have become absorbed in something and then suddenly see yourself as others must.

Adam laughed and clapped me on the back. “It doesn't matter, Harry. We'll work it out.” He pointed across the road towards the far end of the street. “Nearly there.” I could see a cream-coloured awning with a few diners sitting at tables on the pavement.

We got a table, ordered more beer and a couple of steaks, then some wine.

“It's not just me, Ads,” I said. “We both reckon there's something weird about this.”

“We? Who's
we
?”

“Sam and me. Verity's design partner. We both reckon—”

“I thought you were pissed off with her.”

“I was, but then she came round. And... well, stuff.”

“What stuff?” He frowned at me. Then a grin split his face. “Harry, you're not screwing her?”

I couldn't help grinning. “I demand my right to a lawyer.”

“Aha! That'll be me! You'd best tell me everything.” Adam slapped the table and roared. “Harry, you crafty old bastard!”

“Well, I
like
her.” And as I said it, I discovered that it was true. Within limits, of course. Sam made me feel good and guilty at the same time. Since the fumblings of our first night, the sex had been fantastic. That wasn't the appeal, though—and neither was the fact that I liked her, if I'm honest. It was something far more basic; it was just knowing that someone was there.

But nevertheless, it was a kind of betrayal. While Sam and I made love, Verity lay in ITU, with a tube down her throat. Verity deserved better—from me, in particular. I clung all the more fiercely to my determination to understand what had happened to her.

“You really think there's nothing to it, Ads?” I asked. “Just life as normal, just what happens if you're down?”

Adam sighed dramatically. “Harry, how could I possibly know?”

It was a rebuke, if a gentle one. I had reminded him endlessly over the last few days that I knew Verity and he did not. I studied him blearily. He hadn't shaved that morning. The light, patchy stubble almost hid the way his jaw muscles tightened and then released, over and over. And there was something in his eyes; they were remote, and perhaps a little sad. Had I been sober, I might have read the signs of his growing frustration, but I was drunk, and although I was aware that he was chiding me, I took his gentleness as encouragement.

“What
is
it between you and Verity?” I blurted.

Adam looked startled. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“You always avoided her.”

Thinking about it (fuzzily), it seemed odd that Adam and I had never discussed it. As the years passed the subject had become taboo somehow, for no other reason than it had become pointless to discuss it with either of them. Long before any of us moved to London, they had become insignificant to each other. It had never seemed anything other than natural, but now, obsessed and inebriated, it seemed worth chewing over.

Adam looked at me expressionlessly for a long time before he spoke.

“Harry, you're upset, and you're tired,” he said carefully. “And, to be completely candid, you're pissed.” He blew out sharply. “Look, I really can't cope with this. I'm...” His eyes were shining. “Um, I'm pretty fragile myself at the moment. So let's just get you home, yeah? Talk in the morning.”

I failed to ask him what the problem was. It wasn't that I didn't care; it was just that I was too busy being selfish. Adam waited for me say something. I didn't. I simply didn't think to.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Whatever.” He dumped his napkin on the table next to the half-full carafe, and stood. I sat back. He was right: I was drunk, very.

He went over to join the waitress, and bantered with her in a low voice as she prepared the bill. She laughed. I watched from a great distance, my thoughts swaddled in booze and indistinct memories that were just out of reach.

When he came back to say that the taxi had arrived, he had to help me up.

*

Coping with the jolts and sudden swerves of the cab took all my attention. Adam sat neatly next to me, gazing out of the window. We didn't talk much. It was me who broke the silence; about halfway home, a thought drifted through my head. And when I studied the idea, I was puzzled, and then surprised. So surprised that, for a moment or two, I felt almost sober. The question blurted out of me, with no conscious intervention on my part. “So how come you know where she lives, then?”

“Oh, for—” Adam snapped. Then, more calmly, “What
is
this, Harry?”

“Nothing,” I protested. “Just… you don't know her, right, 'sall nothing to do with you, you said—so how come you know her address? Picked me up there the other day.”

“You must have told me.”

“Didn't.”

“You must have. On the phone. When you rang me. How else would I know it?”

“Didn't.”

“I'm not going to argue, Harry.”

“Yeah, but how did you know?”

“You
told
me, Harry. You must have. Now
leave it
.”

“Well, I think it's weird,” I muttered.

Adam ignored me. I tried to focus my thoughts enough to make sense of the puzzle, but the effort blurred my vision. Drunkenness swept back over me, and I felt sick. I concentrated once again on keeping my head from rolling.

The taxi stopped at the end of my street, because there's a one-way system and it takes another five minutes and a couple of extra quid to get dropped at the door. “Nightcap time,” I said to Adam, and lurched out of the cab.

Adam leaned forward to talk to the driver. “Can you take me on to Clapham?'

“Nah, mate. Got another job, see?” the driver yelled cheerfully. “That's six-eighty, ta, guv.”

I reached into my pocket and had to stagger to stay upright. Adam shook his head and fished in his own pocket. He paid, and we set off towards my flat. He flipped out his mobile and ordered a taxi to collect him from my address.

“Thanks, Adam,” I said blearily. “Not for the taxi,” I added, in case there was any confusion. “Just thanks. You know. Being there and stuff. I know I'm being a bit—well, you know...” I banged him on the shoulder, an attempt at a gentle squeeze. He staggered, looked at his watch and sighed again. We stopped outside. I groped for my keys, and then poked around for the lock.

“Hey!”

The yell came from somewhere behind us. I turned as quickly as I dared, which wasn't fast. By the time I had got all the way round, Karel Novak was mounting the kerb. He stopped a few paces short and waved his fists at me. “You fucking shit bastard! I fucking kill you, maybe.”

His heavy accent didn't disguise his fury. But somehow his anger made him seem smaller. Maybe I just didn't care. Maybe I was drunk.

“You!” he yelled.

He lunged closer and pushed me in the chest. I tottered back until my ankles caught on the doorstep, and sat unceremoniously—and painfully.

“Fucking bastard fuck idiot, Harry, man!”

Really, it would have been funny if only I hadn't been so tired.

“You fucking tell police! You say, ‘Oh, yes, Novak, he bad guy, do stuff with flat of Verity.’ And police, they come take me.
Lose
fucking girlfriend,
lose
fucking job next day. I complain and they say they send me back to Czech Land! Is lie, I have visa—but is no fucking good, man! And Karel do nothing!”