Untouchable Things (52 page)

She sits upright, serious, the holder of knowledge, flung out of Eden and newly self-sufficient. She knows the dark side now, the dark side of her, she has traced its snaking paths and found her way back again. She can take care of herself. Empowerment swells like an orchestra inside her but there’s an underlying shimmer of sadness, a single violin. She thinks of beating her parents at Scrabble for the first time, feeling thrilled and triumphant and then, later, after the packing away of the tiles, the feeling that one had dropped to the pit of her stomach.
Sadness, eight points.
A rite of passage moment, the beginning of independence, maturity. Aloneness.

But she isn’t lonely, that’s the distinction. She has people, friends, more than she needs, even. She doesn’t even need a boyfriend; she can be by herself and enjoy the space. She has a vocation she loves, something precious and life-affirming. She thinks of Catherine, drudging away in her firm of accountants, narrow shoulders bent over a task she doesn’t care about.
Poor Catherine.
Compassion takes her by surprise, sprinkling tears that make the picture run a little, so that Catherine and her desk start to melt and slide towards the ground.
I’ve been a bitch
. She closes her eyes. She won’t dodge it, she’ll stay with this,
take responsibility
. It was rivalry for Seth’s attention that made her put Catherine down. She swallows. She can fix it. Right now anything seems possible. She’ll buy a present for the baby, something nice.

She barely notices that she has got to her feet, zigzagging like a drunk, veering towards the dwindling dapples of sunlight. The wind takes the weight of her hair in delicious bursts and the goosebumps on the tops of her arms are stroked away by the next patch of sun. Something is lifting, loosening again. The ache has left her legs and each long breath draws in rippling energy. She thinks again of Anna and José and her unexpected discovery that they could still be friends. In a different way, a better way. Perhaps she is ready to base herself in London again, persuade Shaz to rent a new place, somewhere a bit nicer, where they could have dinner parties of their own. Then she’ll have a big break, get famous, do photo shoots for magazines. At the point where she’s moved into one of the mansions on the edge of the park she smiles, reins herself in. But not too much. Anything is possible, just as her parents always said.

She inhales to the perimeters of her new solidness, where something is perched, fluttering like a bird back from a faraway summer.

Hope.

Scene 25

Catherine lifts her voluminous white blouse so that the baby can sunbathe a little while she reads. She’s got at least an hour to sprawl across the sofa like a Rubens painting before Charles gets home. In her one brief foray outside it had been quite chilly, but inside the window serves as a solar heater and she basks in it.

Rebecca is back. Charles is seeing her today, with Anna and José. He invited her along but she isn’t ready yet, not willing to wheel out her pale, veiny, distended body and spread it out next to Rebecca’s long, lean, lovely one. Not ready for the feelings that seeing her may unsettle.

She has a pile of papers in a green folder and she lies back to read them one by one. She does this quite a lot. Charles doesn’t know, in fact none of the others know that she has copies of Seth’s poetry, at least the stuff he chose to share with her and the group. And maybe a few other bits she found for herself and copied down when she’d finished her piano practice and he still wasn’t home. It comforts her that part of him is still in her hand. Sometimes she reads aloud to the baby, although a lot of it isn’t suitable.

The baby is big now, protruding from her small frame in comical fashion. Sometimes it tries to push its way out of her stomach, pummelling her with tight fists, looking for the exit. Charles reassures her she looks more beautiful than ever. She has breasts for the first time in her life and suspects that’s part of her new-found beauty. She’s got no experience in finding supportive bras so goes to a maternity shop where the sales assistant straps her into a beige number with plenty of lace and no wire. Her bras used to get lost in her underwear drawer. Now they take up most of the space like granny girdles.

She rifles through to the last of the poems, appropriately called “
Endgame
”. This one isn’t good to read to Baby, isn’t really suitable reading for her either, but she’s drawn to it over and over, his last message to them. She scans the familiar words, absorbing more than reading.

Endgame

Orphaned in the lockjaw of

Elongated evening smiles

Dreaming of a death, the boy

Is watching his mother’s slender hand

Peel away from the soap-smooth rock

Unable to scream as he

Sips bilberry juice.

Then she stares. How could she not have seen it? Her heart bangs against her raised ribcage. She doesn’t know much about poetry, but isn’t that the oldest trick in the book? The first letter of each line, read vertically.

Oedipus
.

She racks her brain through school classics lessons. Killed his father, slept with his mother. Her hand trembles and she sits up straighter to try to pull in some breath.

She sees the narrowed, darting eyes of Julia Rothbury as they looked at each other through a glass screen. The smell of prison, layers of bleach with something rotten underneath. Her last-ditch attempt to find out where he was.

She knew she had made a mistake almost at once but she was shut in now, guards stationed all around to catch her if she bolted, as if she were the guilty one.

It was him, of course, who killed Clive. You know that, don’t you? Of course you do, you wouldn’t be here otherwise.

She clutches her stomach, trying to reassure Baby, cover its eyes and ears. Julia Rothbury was a liar. She’d felt it through and through; those fidgeting hands, that whine, those crocodile tears.

He was trying to protect me. He’d always do anything for me. Afterwards he went to Lucilla, raving and delirious, calling out for me.
A sudden cloud of confusion passing over Julia’s face.
But he wouldn’t have set me up, he’d never do that. God knows who he was, that man.

What man?

The one who taped me saying I’d consider using a hitman to kill Clive. Entrapment, they call it. Big man, broad London accent. Funny blonde streak like a racoon. Of course I didn’t mean it, I was angry, he was buying me drinks and flattering me. Goading me. Chatting me up. I would never really have done it.

Catherine is starting to hyperventilate, like she did at the time, and it’s bad for Baby, robbing him of oxygen. There’s some lukewarm camomile tea at her side and she takes a ragged slug.

Feeling queasy, by any chance? When’s it due?

Too sharp to be deceived by a big jumper.
July.

Not his, is it? My boy’s? You’re not expecting me to become Grandma?

A violent blush.
Of course not. I haven’t seen him – Seth – for nearly a year.

Nasty laugh, high pitched and nasal.
I was kidding. You’re not really his type.

Even in navy prison clothes she drips disdain over Catherine. And lies, dreadful things about Seth, her own son, so she wants to press her fists into her ears to stop the poison seeping into them. But the next minute she calls him
my boy
, claims she would do anything to protect him.
And isn’t he handsome, doesn’t he break hearts?
Her mouth twists as she takes in Catherine’s ankle-length skirt and shapeless jumper.
I suppose you’re in love with him too.

Tears of anger.
What makes you think you know anything about him?

Touched a nerve, have I?

Whatever you did to him, it was bad enough for him to tell people that you were dead.

That takes the wind out of her, for a minute. Then she lifts her head.
I made some mistakes. But he’ll come back to me. And he’ll get me out of here.

Catherine shook all the way out, like she’s shaking now, terrified she might shove the guard as he led her back to the entrance and end up being locked up herself. Outside the gates she put her hands on her knees and breathed the clean air.

She takes another sip of camomile. Julia Rothbury has been tried and convicted for her husband’s murder. There had been no doubt. She stabbed him, took out his eyes and was incriminated by one of those long, coarse red hairs. The judge had said something about a terrible crime planned meticulously. So of course she’d been lying. It was sick, trying to implicate your own innocent child.

She takes the copy of “
Endgame
” that she has allowed to drift to the floor, battling to reach over her own stomach. It’s a fantasy, of course, another fantasy from a traumatic childhood, like the poems Charles found.
Killed his father.
Well, he might have thought about it but he hadn’t done it.
Slept with his mother.
She shudders, thinking of the curling wisp of ginger she’d found on his pillow. It must have been Rebecca’s. Hairs like hers got everywhere; she’d even found one on her own jumper once. No, the whole Oedipus thing is poetic licence, a joke even – that sounds more like Seth.

She lies back and flips to another poem.

Scene 26

Charles finds her fast asleep on the sofa. She’s curled on her side, one hand cradling her bump, the other tucked under her head. He’s late and she’s conked out. Her mouth is open and she rasps and heaves like his own, adorable beached whale. He’ll start cooking supper and let her sleep. He notices a piece of paper on the floor and goes to pick it up. A quick, sharp twist of his guts when he sees what it is. His hand itches to rip it into shreds, bury it in the kitchen bin under junk mail and potato peelings. Instead he places it carefully back where he found it. He must be reasonable. He can’t expect her to forget about Seth straight away.

Which poem is it, anyway? He glances down, barely interested, he’s seen too much of Seth’s poetry recently. He misses the title but letters jump out and arrange themselves vertically and he blinks.
Oedipus
. Of course, how very Seth, an obscure reference to Greek mythology, an in-joke between him and Sophocles.

But… someone did kill Seth’s father. He frowns as more details of the story come back to him. Oedipus blinded himself. Clive Rothbury had his eyes gouged out. Surely, though, it should be Seth being blinded in that case?

He shakes his head. This is just more dust being hurled into their face by a gleeful, departing maniac. To keep them hooked in, wondering, forever trying to solve the mystery of why he disappeared. They are the blind ones and they always have been around him. He will not get sucked back in.

The next night, after Catherine has gone to sleep, he creeps to the living room and reads the copy of Oedipus he has picked up in Waterstone’s. Oedipus kills his father at a crossroads. He starts tugging at papers in the magazine rack. Catherine’s kept everything, all the press coverage, he knows she has. There it is, a green folder at the back of the rack with newspaper pages neatly filed, in backwards order, unfolding a story of violence and speculation. He thumbs through them until he finds the location of the disused basement, on a street corner near Hackney. He grabs the A-Z from the shelf and finds the page reference. His index finger traces the crossroads down and across, down and across. It doesn’t need to mean anything. There are many crossroads in a city like London. But it takes him two attempts to swallow.

The painting, the bloody painting. Oedipus on his knees. He’s always hated it, always wondered why Seth would sully a spectacular room with a look of such crazed anguish. He puts away the folder and paces the room, thinking of the play. Oedipus gouges out his own eyes with a brooch. As far as he knows, no details have ever been released on how Clive Rothbury’s eyes were removed.

His throat tightens. They know Seth is violent. He thinks of the woman, her half-closed eye, the marks round her neck. He thinks of her red wig, of the red wig that Sarah was wearing, the red wig they found in the Shepherd’s Bush house and the bile rises. Everyone dressed up to look like Julia. Everyone he fucked made to resemble his mother.

For a second he closes his eyes and the room swirls around him. He clenches the back of a chair with white knuckles. A picture of Rebecca, red haired and radiant at lunch yesterday, pops like a bubble over his head.

It’s a good job that Catherine is no longer light on her feet because he hears the creak of the bed long before she comes squinting into the lounge.

“I need a wee. What are you up to?”

He has immersed himself in a file of drawings and measurements. “Still a bit of work left to do here. You pop on back to bed and I’ll be in soon. Do you need anything, darling?” It thrills him to call her this. She shakes her head and shuffles out and he exhales.

He pours himself a large whisky from a crystal decanter. A certainty is settling over him. Seth did it. He killed his father, maimed and mutilated him, and then disappeared. He paid a hit man, possibly with Jake’s help, and then gouged out his eyes in a sick nod to the Oedipus story, his own private joke.

He slugs at the whisky so hard it makes his eyes water and his airways tighten. Seth’s still out there somewhere, crouching in the shadows, planning who knows what. But what can he do about it? Catherine would never forgive him if he went to the police, and who’s to say they would take any notice anyway? There’s no new evidence, only a theory born of ancient Greek drama.

And Julia Rothbury is clearly a nasty piece of work who quite possibly deserves to be in prison. Did she seduce her own son? Do all Seth’s actions spring from the damage his parents wrought on him?

He reaches to the coffee table for his inhaler. The shock of the sucking noise punctuates his inner dialogue, a sharp intake of breath. He thinks again of Rebecca. She’s a big girl. There’s nothing to suggest that Seth will get back in touch with her, no reason to warn her, alarm her. Nothing really to suggest that Seth is a danger to anyone else, now his father is dead.