Perfect (16 page)

When Byron had reported this development to James, he said they must come up with a new plan of action.

‘But what?’ Byron had asked.

‘I’m still thinking about it,’ said James.

There was also his mother’s behaviour at the weekend to consider. Diana couldn’t seem to get things right. She had been so frightened of being late for Seymour they had waited nearly an hour on the station platform. She painted her mouth over and over until it began to look like someone else’s. Byron tried to distract Lucy with a game of I-Spy but had only upset her by failing to guess what began with ‘Ch’. (‘Chrees,’ she sobbed. She was still crying when the train drew in.) Afterwards his mother had dashed to the car, talking nervously about things that didn’t connect, the heat, Seymour’s week, something nice for supper. She might as well have been shouting, Hubcap, hubcap, hubcap. On the way back she kept stalling the car.

It had been no better at home. Over Saturday dinner Byron had tried to lighten the tension by asking his father his views on the European Economic Community but his father merely wiped his mouth. Was there no salt, please, he had asked?

‘Salt?’ his mother had replied.

‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘Salt.’

‘What about salt?’

‘You seem preoccupied, Diana.’

‘Not at all, Seymour. You were saying something. About salt.’

‘I was saying I don’t taste any. On my dinner.’

‘Salt is all I can taste.’ She pushed her plate to one side. ‘I actually can’t eat this food.’

It was as if the words had meant something else, something that was
not to do with salt, please, but another thing entirely. Byron had listened out for his parents afterwards and they remained in different rooms. Whenever his father walked in, his mother seemed to fly out. Once again, Seymour had left early Sunday morning.

‘It sounds as if she is worrying,’ James had concluded.

‘What can we do?’

‘We have to help her. We have to prove there is no reason for concern.’

‘But there is,’ said Byron. ‘There are actually lots of them.’

‘You have to keep looking at the facts.’ James had slid something from the inside pocket of his school blazer and unfolded it twice; he had clearly made another of his lists over the weekend. ‘Operation Perfect,’ he had read out. ‘One: we do not think the little girl was seriously hurt. Two: the police have not come to arrest your mother. Three: it was not her fault because of the extra seconds. Four.’ Here he paused.

‘What is four?’ Byron had asked.

‘Four is what we must do next,’ said James. And he had explained his plan in detail.

The morning light at the glass doors showed up the smudges and stains as if the sun preferred not to come inside any more. It gathered in secret, dust-filled pockets and showed up the dirty trail of Lucy’s footprints from the French windows.

Byron said, ‘Did you hear me, Mummy? We have to do something. About the thing that happened in Digby Road.’ His heart was beating hard.

Chop, chop, chop went his mother’s knife through apple. If she wasn’t careful she would hurt her fingers.

He said, ‘What we have to do is go back. We have to explain it was an accident.’

The knife stopped. His mother raised her head and stared. ‘Are you joking?’ Already tears were springing to her eyes and she did nothing to
stop them, she just let them slide down her face and jump towards the floor. ‘I can’t go back now. It happened a whole month ago. What am I going to say? And anyway, if your father found out—’ She failed to finish that sentence and took up another one instead: ‘There’s no way I can go back.’

It was like hurting someone and not wanting to. He couldn’t look. He simply kept repeating James, word for word: ‘But I will come with you. The little girl’s mother will see how kind you are. She will see you’re a mother. She will understand it wasn’t your fault. And then we will replace the hubcap and all this will be over.’

Diana held her face within the basket of her fingers as if there was something so heavy inside her head she could barely move. Then a new thought seemed to snap her awake. She broke across the kitchen and placed his chopped fruit decisively on the table. ‘Of course,’ she almost yelled. ‘What on earth have I been doing all this time? Of course I have to go back.’ She plucked her apron from its hook and wrenched it round her waist.

‘We could wait a bit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean we had to do this today.’

But his mother failed to hear. Kissing his mop of hair, she ran upstairs to wake Lucy.

There was no opportunity to alert James. Byron scoured the pavements from the front seat of the car but since they were not even parked by the school he knew it was hopeless. He knew he would not find him. The sky that morning was so flat and new it looked ironed. Sunlight splintered the leaves of the trees and the faraway peaks of Cranham Moor melted into lilac. As Diana set off to walk the last few streets with Lucy, a mother called out hello but she went fast with her arms tight round her waist as if she were holding herself in one piece. Byron realized he was very frightened and that the last place he wanted to visit was Digby Road. He didn’t know
what they were going to say when they arrived; James had not got that far with his plan. Everything was moving much faster than either boy had intended.

When his mother swung open her car door and sat beside him, Byron jumped. Her eyes shone hard, almost the colour of tin.

She said, ‘I have to do this on my own.’

‘But what about me?’

‘It isn’t right to take you. It isn’t right for you to miss school.’

In a rush he tried to think of what James would say. It was bad enough that the plan was progressing without him; his friend had been very clear that the two boys would accompany his mother in order to take notes. He said, ‘You can’t. You don’t know the spot. You can’t go alone. You need me to come.’

‘Sweetheart, they will be angry. You’re a child. It will be difficult.’

‘I want to come. It will be worse for me if I don’t. I’ll worry and worry. And everything will be all right when they see us. I know it will.’

And so it was settled. At home Byron and his mother avoided eye contact and spoke briefly, mentioning only the smallest of things. Digby Road had already become a presence in the room, like a sofa, and they moved carefully around it. ‘I need to change before we go,’ she said at last.

‘You look nice.’

‘No. I need the right costume.’

He followed his mother upstairs and checked his reflection in her mirror. He wished he wasn’t in school uniform. James had a grown-up black two-piece suit that his mother made him wear for church, despite his failure to believe in God. Meanwhile Diana took a long time to choose her clothes and she did so with scrupulous care, standing in front of the mirror and holding up dress after dress. In the end she settled on a peach-coloured fitted tunic. It was one of his father’s favourites, displaying the pallor of her bare arms, and the ridges of her collarbone. Sometimes she
wore it for dinner when his father was home and he guided her down the stairs with his hand on the small of her back as if she were an extension of his arm. ‘Aren’t you going to wear a hat?’ he said.

‘A hat? Why would I do that?’

‘To show it’s a serious occasion.’

She chewed her lip, thinking this through, and pulled her arms around her shoulder blades. There were goose bumps popping all over her skin; she probably needed a cardigan as well. Then she dragged the upholstered armchair to the wardrobe and stood on it while she rummaged through a selection of boxes on the top shelf. A number of hats came floating to the floor, along with the odd feather and scrap of netting – berets, pillbox, stiff wide-brimmed ones, a Russian sable hat, as well as a white silk turban and a jewelled headdress with a plume of feathers. ‘Oh my goodness,’ said his mother, chasing after them and shoving them out of the way. She perched at her dressing table, pulling on the more sensible models, one after another, and tossing them to the floor. Her hair flew out slightly static from her face so that she looked pressed against a window. ‘No, I don’t think I will wear a hat,’ she said at last.

She dusted powder on her nose and pressed her lips together to paint them red. It was like watching her disappear and he was filled with such sadness he had to blow his nose.

‘Maybe I should wear something of Father’s?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ she said, barely moving her mouth. ‘He’d know if you did.’

‘I was thinking something small like a cravat. He wouldn’t know about that.’

Byron eased open the double doors of Seymour’s wardrobe. The jackets and shirts were lined up on wooden hangers like headless versions of his father. Byron slid out a silk cravat as well as his father’s deerstalker, and then he slammed the doors before the jackets and shirts could shout at
him. The plum cravat he wrapped around his neck. He kept the hat in his hands because you were not supposed to wear them inside the house. James would call that bad luck.

‘There,’ he said. ‘All sorted.’

She gave a backward glance over the room. ‘Are you sure about this?’ she asked, not of him but of the furniture, the upholstered chair and the matching chintz curtains and bedspread.

He gulped. It made a splashy noise all over the bedroom. ‘It will be over soon. Off we jolly well trot.’

She smiled as if nothing could be simpler and they left.

Diana did her most careful driving. Her hands were exactly at the ten to two position on the steering wheel. Over the moor, the sun blazed through the vast sky like a searchlight. The cattle stood anchored in swarms of black flies, flapping their tails but not shifting, only waiting for the heat to go away. The grass was bleached to straw. Byron wanted to say something but he didn’t know where to begin and the longer he failed to speak, the harder it was to touch the silence. Besides, every time the car moved to the left or right, his father’s deerstalker shot down over his nose. It seemed to have a life of its own.

‘Are you all right?’ said his mother. ‘You look very red under there.’

She chose to park at the end of Digby Road, just beyond the burnt-out car. When she asked if he would remember the house he produced the map from his pocket and unfolded it for her benefit.

‘I see,’ said Diana, though she didn’t pause to look. Now that she had made up her mind about returning, there was no stalling her. All she said was, ‘Maybe you should take the hat off now, sweetheart.’

Byron’s hair was pasted in wet spikes to his forehead. He heard his mother’s heels hitting the pavement like sharp hammer blows and he wished she would go more quietly because people were beginning to
notice. A woman in an overall stared from over her washing basket. A line of young men perched on a wall whistled. Byron felt squashy inside and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. The estate was even worse than he remembered. The sun bit down on the stone houses and cracked their paintwork. Many were sprayed with words like
Pigs Out
or
IRA Scum
. Every time he looked he felt a whip of fear and wished he would stop doing it but he couldn’t. He remembered what James had told him about the kneecapping in Digby Road and then he remembered the remark his mother had made about driving that way before. Again he asked himself why she would do that.

‘Are we nearly there?’ she said.

‘There will be a flowery tree. The gate comes right afterwards.’

But when Byron saw the tree, there was a further shock. In the four weeks since their last visit to Digby Road, it had been assaulted: its wide branches snapped off, the blossom scattered all over the pavement. It was not a tree any more, it was only a stunted trunk without limbs. Everything was so wrong. His mother paused at the gate belonging to the little girl and asked if this was the one. She held her handbag with both hands and suddenly she looked too little.

The gate gave a screech as she lifted the latch. Inside his head, he prayed.

‘Is that hers?’ Diana pointed to a red bicycle leaning against a dustbin beside the house. He nodded.

She made her way towards the door and he followed closely. The garden was small enough to fit inside one of the main borders at Cranham House but the path was clean and there were small rocks either side, dotted with peeping flowers. At the upstairs windows the curtains were drawn. It was the same downstairs.

Maybe James had been wrong? Maybe the little girl was dead? Maybe her parents were at her funeral or visiting the grave. It was an insane idea
to come back to Digby Road. Byron thought with longing of his bedroom with the blue curtains. The white-tiled floor in the hall. The new double-glazed windows.

‘I think they’re out,’ he said. ‘Shall we go home now?’

But Diana tugged her fingers, one by one, from her gloves and knocked at the door. He stole another look at the red bicycle. There was no sign of damage. His mother knocked a second time, a little more urgently. When there was still no answer, she took a few steps backwards, her heels pinning the hard turf. ‘There’s someone in,’ she said, pointing at an upstairs window. ‘Hello?’ she called out.

The window swung open to reveal a man’s face. It was hard to get a real picture of him but he seemed to be wearing only a vest. ‘What do you want?’ He didn’t sound friendly.

She broke the silence with a small click of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you. May I have a word?’

Byron took hold of his mother’s fingers and gripped hard. An image had come into his head and he couldn’t shift it. No matter how hard he tried, he could only picture his mother lifting above the ground, light as a feather or a wisp of cloud, and drifting clean away.

When the front door opened, the man stood staring down at them. He filled the threshold. He had clearly combed his hair on the way downstairs and put on a shirt but there were bloodstains at the collar the size of tomato pips and some of his buttons were missing. Byron’s father would never leave his shirt open; his mother would never fail to sew on buttons. The skin of the man’s face was grey and hung in oily folds, shadowed at the jaw where it was unshaven. He remained blocking the door.