Something Might Happen (6 page)

He looks at his drink but doesn’t drink it.

Con was sick, he says. Everywhere. All over Patsy’s fucking sofa.

I take a breath.

I suppose that’s to be expected, Mick says.

Yes, says Lacey in a low, quick voice. It’s the first time he’s spoken and we all look at him. He looks down, as if he’d
prefer not to have the attention on him.

I mean, he says, all kinds of reactions are normal, especially with young kids and—

He doesn’t finish.

This is Ted, by the way, Al says, as if he’s suddenly remembered his manners. He’s been so great—you wouldn’t believe it,
how he’s looked after me today.

Lacey gives a weak smile.

He’s done all this before, Al says in a harder voice.

Lacey shakes his head, rests his elbows on his knees and clasps his hands together.

You know, Alex tells him, this is my home from home. These two lovely people are our best friends, our oldest mates, everything—

He breaks off.

I look over at Lacey. Blotting my eyes with the sleeve of my jumper.

Ted’s sticking by me, Alex says, been with me all day. He’s even going to stay over. Are you sure about that, Ted—that you
want to stay over?

Lacey says, I think it’s best—

You see? Al says, looking at us as if it’s all a bit of a joke—probably because he’s in shock.

Where will he sleep? I ask Al, and he looks at me.

In the studio, he says. He means Lennie’s studio.

Great, Lacey says.

Good, says Mick.

* * *

Alex says that what Lacey needs right now is a photo. Of her, he says, taking a mouthful of whisky, a nice little snap.

He spreads his hands on the table and studies his knuckles.

You don’t mind? he says, only I can’t face—

I squeeze his shoulder.

Hey, I tell him, I’ll get it now.

Lacey stands up and looks at me.

It’s for the press, he says.

Oh.

I’m really sorry, he adds, to have to ask for it now.

I tell him it isn’t a problem, I’ll get it. In my hurry to move towards the stairs I kick the chair and disturb Fletcher who
comes wobbling up out of sleep. Stretching, yawning, shaking himself, claws clicking on the stone floor.

Give me two minutes, I say.

In our house, in our family, I am the archivist. I am the one who can produce evidence to show that we were all here and happy
together. But it can be lopsided, this evidence. So, there are loads of photos of Nat as a baby, and plenty of Rosa too, in
all situations, all moments of life. Fewer of Jordan and then, as poor Liv was born, they tail off altogether.

I think I have one hazy faraway one from the day she came into this world—and then nothing at all until the one where Lennie
is holding her up in the garden of the pub at Blackshore and she is wearing the faded paisley hand-me-down
sunhat that all of our kids have worn at one time or other. Also, because Mick took most of the pictures, he is more absent
than he should be, too. But not Lennie and Al—they’re in nearly all the pictures. A measure of how much they’ve always been
here with us in our lives.

Fletcher is loudly lapping water as I open the little door and start upstairs.

I’m halfway up before I realise Lacey is right behind me.

Sorry, he says softly. Just—wait a moment.

I stop and turn.

It’s just—I didn’t want to say it in there. This photo, it’s going to be all over everywhere, in the papers and on TV and
so on—what I mean is, he and the children will be seeing a lot of it—

Oh, I say, thinking how helpless he looks.

It needs to be current, obviously, he says, and it needs to be—well—

How they’d want to remember her?

Lacey takes his eyes away from mine.

Yes, he says, that’s right. Thanks.

That night, the first night of our knowing that Lennie is dead, I sleep a strange sleep of amazement. Amazed that I can sleep
at all. Again and again in the blue darkness, the fact of what has happened slips over me. Icy, amazed, over and over again.

That’s what I was most afraid of—of waking up and having to think about it. I can’t. I can’t think about her. I can’t think
about the car park.

Livvy sleeps right through. Only the second time ever. I ought to be pleased but it scares me to death. At 5
A.M
. I poke her to check she’s still breathing. She is.

Mick brings me coffee. I mention to him about Liv.

He says, For God’s sake, Tess, she’s shattered. Leave her. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

Enjoy. The word wedges itself in the air between us.

The school is closed while the police make enquiries, but the kids know better than to say they’re glad. They watch TV downstairs
while we drink coffee and wait for the phone to ring. If I can just get through the morning without crying, I think.

The man called Mawhinney comes round to have a word with us. They’re making house-to-house enquiries throughout the town,
he explains. Though obviously, he adds, he would have wanted to talk to us anyway, because of our relationship with the family.

He says he’s sorry to have to do this when we’re still feeling so raw and having it sink in, but he needs to ask us both exactly
where we were on the night it happened—between eleven and, say, eight in the morning.

I blush hot to my hair, but Mick doesn’t hesitate. He takes my hand and squeezes it. He tells Mawhinney that he and I were
both in bed.

We were exhausted, he tells him, really shattered. That’s why Tess didn’t go to the meeting. She’s on the PTA and she should
have been there but she just couldn’t face it. I wouldn’t have let her go. I think we went to bed at—well at a guess—ten,
ten thirty.

Mawhinney listens.

Would that be earlier than usual then?

Mick pinches at his nose with his thumb and finger as he thinks about it.

Pretty early for us, yes.

Something unsaid floats past me. In my hand the balled-up tissue is coming apart with dampness. Bits of it sticking to the
sides of my fingers like skin.

Mawhinney turns to me. I can see he is trying to be kind, to make it easy. I wonder if he has a wife and kids at home and
if he goes home and takes a beer from the fridge and tells them all about his day.

Is that right? he says and you can see by his eyes what he expects me to say.

Yes, I tell him, yes, that’s right.

Then I remember a sudden, true thing: that I had to stay awake to feed the baby. I tell Mawhinney this, though my heart bangs
crazily as I say it.

He listens without much interest.

Oh yes, says Mick just like it’s not important at all, so you did, I’d forgotten that.

I glance down at Mawhinney’s little notebook. He hasn’t written anything down.

We’re bringing her feeds forward, I explain, or trying to anyway.

My voice sounds reasonable. I hate myself.

Why did you say that? I ask Mick once Mawhinney has gone.

He looks up from the floor where he’s kneeling on newspaper and cleaning Rosa’s brown school shoes.

Why did I say what?

About us being in bed at ten thirty?

He goes on dabbing polish in with the cloth, working it carefully into all the cracks and creases. He breathes through his
mouth as he does it, his tongue touching the inside of his top lip. That’s what he does when he concentrates. Mick’s good
at concentrating. He says that’s how you make the smallest jobs satisfying.

Because we were, he says carefully.

I swallow, taste polish in the back of my mouth.

You were, I tell him. I wasn’t.

He sits back on his heels in an unsurprised yet exasperated way.

Oh for fuck’s sake, Tess—

I wasn’t.

You wanted me to tell him that?

I gaze at him. Sometimes his confidence amazes me.

I thought you’d tell the truth, I say.

Well I was in bed, he says. And as far as I know you were too. As far as I’m concerned I was telling the truth.

He says that but his eyes narrow. He’s angry.

But I got up, I tell him. You know I did. You know I got up.

He says nothing, picks up the shoe.

Don’t you want to know where I went?

He hesitates and I don’t like the look on his face.

You’re saying I should stop you?

No. I don’t know.

You can’t have it both ways, Tess.

He laughs then. He laughs because he knows my position is ludicrous. You can’t make someone want to know things. Just like
you can’t force someone to be jealous or upset or aroused. They either are or they aren’t and that’s it. There are no halfways.

But I love him, I tell myself. I do. I would never, never want to be married to Alex—thank God I didn’t stay with him, we’d
have been hopeless together, fatal, lethal, always knowing what each other wanted and getting there quicker, wanting it first.

Now, every clock in the house is ticking, but each one says a different time. Mick’s job is to wind them up. He’s the one
who likes antique clocks, the noise and the work of them, not me. If it were up to me, I’d have something modern: fierce red
digits glinting in the dark.

The thing about Mick is, he thinks it’s clever not to rise to things.

I’m not trying to hide anything from you—

That’s what I tell him, but he shrugs.

I know, Tess. I don’t think you are. It still doesn’t mean I need to know.

It’s your life, he says when I don’t reply to this. Your life, your time.

No, I say as carefully as I can. Don’t you see how maddening it is when you say that? It’s not. It’s our time.

He laughs.

What? What’s funny?

He doesn’t answer, just laughs again. Then turns away and begins the thing of buffing the shoe. He does it hard. Rosa’s feet
will shine. Not that she’ll notice.

I went to The Polecat, I tell him. That’s all.

He gives me a quick look.

Fine.

Fine?

Lucky you’re still alive, he says and his voice is small and dull and tight.

He places Rosa’s shoes perfectly straight on the mat by the back door and folds the newspaper and stuffs it in the recycling.
He recycles every piece of paper in the house, Mick does. Sometimes he recycles things before I’ve had a chance to read them.

I think he’s going to leave the room then, but he doesn’t. He comes over. Holds me for a quick moment.

Let’s not do this, he says. Please, Tess. Not now.

I kiss the bristles on his cheek.

I don’t want to do anything, I tell him.

He sighs.

I thought this was what you wanted anyway, he says. I thought it was the whole point?

What? I say. The whole point of what?

Of everything. Of what you say you want in life?

I don’t know what I do want any more, I tell him.

He pauses and looks at me.

It’s not relevant to any of—this—where you were.

Is that why you lied?

I didn’t lie. I just told them what I knew for certain.

But don’t they have to—look at everything?

He touches my face, my cheek, my jaw. I shiver.

You tell them then.

What?

Tell them where you were.

You think I should?

No. I don’t. Where would it get you? What’s the point of confusing things further. For God’s sake, Tess, I was only trying
to help you, keep you clean.

Clean?

Out of it. Uninvolved.

You think I should be grateful?

Don’t put words into my mouth.

IT TURNS OUT THE CORONER NEEDS TWO PEOPLE TO
identify the body—another person, an independent witness who knew Lennie, as well as her next of kin. Bob, her dad, is struggling
to get his doctors’ permission to fly over from Philadelphia. But he is eighty-one and frail with a poorly heart and the journey
itself will be hard enough.

Mick says he’ll do it—go to the morgue with Alex. At first I try to persuade him out of it. It should be me. He’s never seen
a dead person and I have. I cut up plenty when I was training.

Those were strangers, he says. This is completely different.

Is it?

Tess. For fuck’s sake. You know it is.

Anyway, he tells me, he wants to go—he wants to do this for Alex. And for Lennie. He means it, but I am tempted to remind
him of how little more than a year ago just the sight of Livvy’s reptilian shadow on the ultrasound almost made him pass out.

When I hear that Lacey is going with them, I feel better. In all these hours, Lacey’s barely left Alex’s side. Mick says that’s
the whole point of what he does—to offer continual support, twenty-four hours a day.

When Alex comes and sits in our kitchen—hunched at our plate-strewn, crumb-covered kitchen table still wearing his rough and
musty-smelling coat and rolling cigarettes with shaky hands, now Lacey comes too. They make a strange pair—Alex with his pale
face and fair unwashed hair and visible grief, Lacey smaller, darker, younger, mostly silent and watching.

Mick says that’s how he’s trained to be—to make himself invisible, so that he doesn’t inhibit any of us, so that he doesn’t
intrude. He accepts my offer of a cup of coffee and then just sits there in his smooth, dark London clothes, elbows on his
knees, watching us all. Maybe he’s looking for clues. Maybe he’s thinking that by finding out how we all live, he can somehow
work out how Lennie died.

He’s not a detective, Mick says.

I say I think he seems far too young to have such a terrible job and Mick agrees.

I couldn’t do it, he says, but I think he’s good. He’s a good guy. I like him.

* * *

Alex tells us that new details have emerged from the post-mortem. He says they suspect the killer used a lino-cutter. He says
that Lennie’s sternum was cracked open, her ribs forced apart like the bars of a cage. The vessels that pumped blood from
her heart were severed in a surprisingly methodical way, the organ lifted out intact. Though the initial attack was frenzied,
uncoordinated, the subsequent surgery on her torso was carried out with chilling accuracy and cool.

The fucker knew what he was doing, in other words, he says.