The Stopped Heart (45 page)

A
T HALF PAST EIGHT,
G
RAHAM AND THE GIRLS STILL AREN
'
T
home, so Mary walks the five minutes down the lane to the pub.

The verges have all been mown and the grass lies in piles where it was chopped, a couple of blackbirds wrestling a worm from underneath. The sun has gone and the sky is mauve, the air still warm but moist with the promise of dew. Two kids with scooters are playing in the road, chatting and laughing and swearing. Mary hears a woman calling to them from somewhere behind the cottages.

She goes around the back of the pub, through the car park,
her feet loud on the gravel. Graham and the girls are sitting out on the darkening lawn in the exact same place where she and Eddie sat that day that already feels like a very long time ago. For a moment she's stopped in her tracks by the sight of them. A relaxed and smiling man and two teenage girls. A family. Then Graham sees her standing there and waves. She goes over.

“We'd have waited,” he says. “But we didn't know where the hell you were.”

Mary looks at Lisa. She sees that her lips are drawn on in a dark pencil and she has a dirty leather jacket around her shoulders. Pale hair sticking up around her small head. As she leans forward to wipe her finger around the salty inside of a ripped crisp packet, Mary glimpses black underwear, the freckled top of a breast.

“I went for a walk,” she says in the brightest voice she can manage. “It was such a lovely afternoon. Hello, Lisa. How're you doing?”

Lisa nods but doesn't speak. Graham asks Mary what she wants to drink. She says she won't have anything.

“Aren't you eating?” she says.

Graham throws her a helpless look.

“These two refuse to have anything except crisps. They keep insisting they're not hungry.”

“Lisa ate on the train,” Ruby says.

Mary looks at Lisa.

“I thought you didn't have any money?”

Ruby picks up her glass.

“She managed to find some.”

“Did you?” Mary asks Lisa.

At last Lisa raises her eyes. Mary sees that the makeup is less dense than usual, a little less convincing. Without it she looks younger, smaller.

“I found a fiver,” she says.

For a moment Mary wonders if she's been crying.

“Do your parents know where you are?” she asks her.

Graham puts a hand on her wrist.

“Darling,” he says, “it's all right. We've talked about it. I'll fill you in later. It's all a bit complicated.”

Lisa looks at her.

“It's all right,” she says.

Mary stares at her.

“All right for who?”

Ruby makes an angry noise.

“Can you just leave off interrogating her? She's had a fucking awful time today if you really want to know.”

But Lisa looks at Mary.

“I meant, it's all right that you're worried. I don't blame you for worrying. But I left my mum a note. You don't need to worry about anything. I've sorted it. She knows all about what's happening.”

“S
O WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
M
ARY ASKS
G
RAHAM WHEN THEY
'
VE
sent the girls off home and he's persuaded her to change her mind about a drink and ordered a last-minute plate of lasagna for himself.

He makes a face.

“As far as I can gather—and, all right, I admit I didn't want to press too hard—it's the age-old story. Unsuitable boyfriend. Someone they don't approve of anyway. I got the feeling he might be older. And there was a fight. But I'm not sure it's true that her father hit her. Her stepfather, it turns out. But I'm sure there's a whole lot more to it than that.”

Mary looks at him.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Oh, I don't know. It's just—those girls. It's part of why Veronica and I felt Ruby shouldn't be in London.” He hesitates, picking up the beer mat and putting it down again, “Actually I don't have any evidence that Lisa's using anything. But Ruby, she's just got so reckless.”

“Reckless?”

“Well, casual. About herself. Her body. About taking things.”

“You mean drugs?”

“Or pills, medicine—anything she can get her hands on really. You'd think after what she did to herself—ending up in the hospital—well—”

“You think she ought to know better?”

“You'd think she'd at least be scared.”

Graham blinks.

“I want her to stop taking stupid risks, yes.”

Mary thinks about this.

“And you think she's safe here?”

“How do I know?” He sighs. “And then of course there's the cutting.”

Mary is about to say something when he puts his head in his hands. He stays like that for a very long time.

“I'm sorry,” she says at last.

“It's not your fault.”

“No, I mean I'm just sorry.”

“Sorry for me?”

“You know what I mean.”

Without looking at her, Graham reaches out and puts a hand on her knee. She looks at the hand for a moment before putting her own hand on his.

“Anyway, I'm sure she'll grow out of it,” she adds.

“Grow out of it? Grow out of being unhappy, you mean? Will she?”

“Most kids do, don't they?”

He takes a breath.

“I'm just not sure I can cope with all of this right now. I mean it literally. I'm not sure I have the strength. I'm genuinely not sure.”

Mary squeezes his hand.

“You're just tired.”

“I am. That's right, I am. Very tired.” He lifts his head. “Anyway the point is, Lisa's here now. And she promises me that her mother knows where she is.”

Mary shakes her head.

“And you believe her?”

“What can I do? If she's lying to me, seriously, then what can I do?” He looks at her and sighs. “Look, I know you don't like her—and God knows I'm not necessarily sticking up for her over all of this—but all I can say is, she's been a good friend to Ruby.”

“Has she?”

“She was there at the hospital, you know, when they took Ruby in. And I actually get the feeling that she's a bit more responsible than Ruby when it comes to all this so-called partying.”

“Do you? What on earth gives you that idea?”

“I don't know. Just a feeling I get. She's more together than Ruby. Ruby's so all over the place, but Lisa seems more mature, don't you think? More of a young woman. I get the sense that she knows what she wants, knows what she's doing.”

Mary thinks about this. Graham takes her hand, holds it in both of his.

“Anyway she's not our responsibility, is she? And she's going back tomorrow afternoon. Just try and bear with it if you can till then.” He looks at her. “And don't think for one moment that Ruby's getting away with what she said to you, by the way. I haven't even begun to deal with that.”

Mary shuts her eyes.

“Don't worry about it. It really doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters.”

“She's just angry, isn't she? She's very angry.”

“What the hell's she got to be angry about?”

Mary hesitates.

“Lots of things. She's got lots of things to be angry about.”

A girl brings the lasagna. So hot that steam fills the air, illuminating for a moment the cluster of midges hanging above them. The sky is black now, the air cooling. Scent drifting over from the lilies in the flower beds.

Mary tells him about the call from the coroner's office. The pregnant teenage girl, the violent death. Graham listens with a serious and attentive face while he pokes at the lasagna with a fork.

“Did it upset you?” he says at last. “Hearing all that?”

Mary looks at him. “Does it upset you?”

He picks up his drink. She watches him thinking about it.

“I don't know. Poor girl. But it's a long time ago, I suppose.”

“What difference does that make?”

He looks at her. “Well, time. All that time. It pushes things farther away, doesn't it?”

“Does it?” Mary says.

“You don't think so?”

She takes a breath.

“I think that only someone with not very much imagination could think that.”

He scoops a forkful of lasagna.

“All right. I don't have very much imagination, then.”

“I didn't mean it like that.”

“I suppose I just meant there's a kind of distance, isn't there?
More than a hundred—hundred and fifty—years. Surely you agree about that?”

Mary thinks about this. Trying to decide what distance means and whether there is any or not.

“Do you think Lisa's pregnant?” she says.

Now he stares at her. Putting down his drink.

“What on earth makes you say that?”

“I don't know. I don't know what made me say it.”

He pushes his fork around the plate, scoops up a fold of pasta and offers it to her. She shakes her head.

“I don't think so,” he says. “All right, I suppose there's always a possibility, but—well, I don't think she's pregnant, no.”

Mary is silent for a long moment.

“I thought I was pregnant,” she tells him then. “Until tonight.”

“What?”

“And then, just now, a little while ago—just before I came here, in fact—I got my period.”

Now he puts down the fork and stares at her. Something on his face that she cannot read.

“What? Pregnant? Sorry, what are you saying?”

She blinks.

“Just that. That for a while, I think I honestly began to believe I was.”

She watches his face as he struggles to take it in—shock and bewilderment—and for a moment, in some vague way, she feels ashamed.

“But how could it even be possible?” he says at last.

She shakes her head.

“It's not.”

“So—then, but how could you think it?”

“I can't explain it,” she says, telling the truth now.

“You can't?”

She licks her lips, gazing at him, almost afraid. At last she shakes her head.

“I can't even explain it to myself,” she says.

He is still looking at her.

“But you're not. You're not pregnant?”

“No.”

“Then—I still don't understand. What on earth made you think that you were?”

She hesitates.

“All those things. Exactly the things I felt both times with the girls. Tiredness. And sickness—most mornings—I had them all.”

“You had symptoms of pregnancy?” She nods. “You never told me. That's what the sickness was? You felt all these things and you never said anything to me?”

She shuts her eyes.

“I didn't know what to think. And it wasn't just that, anyway. There were other things too.”

“What do you mean? What other things?”

“Remember how I was with Ella? Always so jumpy and tired and hearing strange noises, everything so loud and odd, everything I ate tasting all wrong.”

“But then why didn't you go to the doctor's?”

“I did. I did go to the doctor.”

He lets out a breath. Hands dropping to his lap.

“You went to the doctor and you never told me?”

“You were busy with Ruby.”

“That's not fair.”

“I'm sorry. I don't know if it's fair or not. It's how it felt to me at the time.”

Graham passes a hand over his face.

“What did the doctor say?”

Mary hesitates. Remembering that when the young woman with the long brown hair and the cheesecloth dress checked the pregnancy test, when she smiled at her and said, “Well, that's all OK, then. We'll just have to work on the basis that you've had a bit of a virus or a vomiting bug or something,” she did not seem able to hear her. That instead, something massive and unexpected went sweeping through her. A kind of devastation. For a moment the room was entirely, violently dark.

“That's it? You're sure? I'm not pregnant?”

The doctor blinked at her.

“I didn't get the feeling you were expecting to be? After what you said about your husband and—”

She went on to say something chatty and conciliatory—about statistics, about vasectomies and their occasional yet rare failure rate, something like that.

But Mary was no longer listening. No longer even there. The most terrible chill pouring through her.

And maybe it began because she hadn't been honest about what had happened to her own children, her own real children. Writing their ages down on that form as if they still existed. A lie, of course, and yet a lie that had, briefly and quite unexpectedly, given her an immense and secret pleasure.

Or maybe it wasn't that at all. Maybe it was something less easy to define, something to do with what Graham had just said. Distance. And probability. After all, if you can lose two little girls outside a leisure center on a sunny afternoon, if you can wake up one morning a mother and the next morning not a mother, if you can lose the one thing you were living for in a space of one quick, blameless and unremarkable afternoon—

“The doctor told me I wasn't. But I suppose I wasn't able to take it in. Literally unable. I didn't believe her.”

“You didn't believe what she told you?”

“I was just so very sure. I knew that I was.”

“But you weren't.”

“No. No, I wasn't.”

Graham pushes away the plate of food.

“I can't believe it. All of this has been happening to you and you've told me nothing. Nothing.”

“I'm telling you now.”

“Wonderful. I appreciate it. Thank you.”

“Please don't be angry.”

“I'm not angry. I'm—”

“What? What are you?”

“I don't know. Something else. You telling me all of this now. It makes me feel—lonely.”