‘You knew I found her. In the boot of the car. You knew I saw her there.’
Ben closes his eyes. Is this suffering, or is he reliving a painful moment of the past? It could be he’s just savouring his cigarette. With a face like his, it’s impossible to tell. Its mask of habitual suffering hides any ephemeral emotion.
‘I can tell you about it if you want.’
The story comes out of him easily, without any kind of struggle. I don’t know whether to believe it or not. There are details which ring with such a nice irony, I wonder whether life can really have thrown them up. The bag, he says, was hers. The plastic bag, wrapped round her head with packing tape. It’s how he found her – after racing to her aid, frantically trying to make sense of her confused directions. (‘I’m in a phonebox.’)
How Sara’s bipolar trajectory had kiltered so far off its usual orbit, driving her to try suicide even before she made it to the camp, Ben can only speculate. ‘I got her to take her pills,’ he says. ‘Before she went to the camp. It was a deal we had.’ Blaming iatrogenic medicine again. Presumably this is a trick he learned off her.
He found her in a motel room, the evening after she left. He knocked on the door and the door was already open. Perhaps she wanted to be found and rescued. Perhaps this was her cry for help.
The bed was a pool of vomit, with here and there frothy little islands of half-dissolved aspirin. Sara had passed out. The bag crackled as it rose and fell against her face. It was torn.
How long he sat there beside her, he cannot now remember. Eventually, borne down by the weight of things, he reached for a pillow and pressed it over her face until she stopped moving.
He picked her up in his arms and carried her down the corridor to the lobby. It was empty. He laid her down on the sofa by the door and went to the desk and rang the bell.
No-one came.
He waited. He doesn’t know how long. In the end he picked her up again and carried her out to the car. He laid her on the back seat and looked up the location of the nearest hospital on his phone. He drove there and sat in the hospital car park all night. An edge of blue touched the horizon, and he remembered me. He pulled Sara off the back seat and laid her in the boot of the car. He drove home. He came home in time to see me safely to school.
‘Come on, Connie. Up and at ’em.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Oh, Connie.’
‘I was fifteen.’
‘Conrad.’ He squeezes me. He has his arms round me. Strange, that I should be here now, on the sofa, pressed against him, his arms around me as though I was a child. Is this, after everything, what I have come here for? Can the body betray the mind so far? One thing I know – I can no longer bear it. The smell of him. The past. I push away from him, as I have never felt able to push away as a child. I am grown and he is old. At last, and more than twenty years too late, I push away.
‘What?’ His voice has grown stronger. Having me come here, only to crumble into his arms, has given him back his confidence. He imagines, perhaps, that we are father and son again.
I keep my back to him. I do not want him to see my face. (I don’t even look like him. I am my mother’s son. I look like her, now more than ever. Put me next to her as she was the year she died, frame us in a white-framed mirror, and you would not be able to tell us apart.)
‘You let me hide Mum’s body.’
Ben shakes his head. ‘It all happened so fast. I was so afraid—’
‘
You
were afraid!’
‘Please Conrad.’
Bit by bit he grinds it out. His version of events. Frozen with fear, he had not been able to decide what to do with the body in the boot of his car. In the morning, very early – he had not even tried to sleep – he woke me. He knew I’d be expecting a lift to school, so he invented a last-minute conference to keep me from dumping my kit in the car. ‘But you opened the boot anyway. You saw.’
‘Of course I bloody saw. And you just stood there in the porch in your stupid apron and you didn’t say a thing. Not a thing.’
He palms the table for his cigarettes. Bottles and canisters fall off the table. He cannot find his cigarettes. Where are his cigarettes? Idiot, they’re in the breast pocket of your curry-stained lumberjack shirt.
Eventually the penny drops. He draws on his cigarette, shakes out his match. ‘When you said nothing, I thought maybe – I thought maybe she wasn’t in the boot any more. I thought maybe, in the night, she had . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Anyway I dropped you off at school and when I got back home I opened the boot and – and I saw. I knew that you knew.’
‘And then?’
‘I figured, while you were at school, I would, I would have to find somewhere to leave her. I waited till the afternoon, I had appointments, clients to see. And just as I was wrapping things up – do you remember?’
‘Remember what?’
‘You turned up!’ He finds it in himself to laugh. ‘You remember that? Outside the conservatory? Tapping on the glass? Three o’clock in the bloody afternoon. Christ.’ He sucks flame, desperately. ‘I thought you were her.’
‘And you still didn’t say anything.’
‘No.’
‘You still didn’t do anything. You had until six o’clock and you just carried on sitting there until it was time to pick me up from cricket and when you picked me up you said – this is all you said – “Let’s get a drink.”’
‘Yes.’
‘So in the end,’ I say, ‘you didn’t have to worry about anything, did you? You just let me deal with her.’
This much he must allow. He coughs, and the cough dislodges something solid-sounding from somewhere in the back of his throat.
‘And if she’d been found?’
He coughs some more. A lot more.
‘If she had been found and I had been charged—’
‘No.’
‘You left all of it to me. You let me think you didn’t know about her. You carried on for months as though you thought she was still alive.’
‘No—’
‘You had me carry all that shit. All that guilt. That fear. And even then it got too much for you, so you abandoned me. Left me in fucking Sand Lane. You ran away.’
He fans the table with his hand, feeling for his medicine. He stares at me. His skin is not grey now. It is red.
If I did nothing, what would happen to him now?
He breathes, and then he doesn’t, and then he breathes again.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ I cross the room, heading for what I imagine must be the kitchen. (The only other door smells of drains.) ‘Just wait.’ Like he is going anywhere.
There are books in the kitchen, too. Cookbooks. There are vegetables in a wire rack by the sink. The room is a mess, but not that much of a mess. It draws me up, to discover that Dad’s life is not a complete disaster. He cooks. He eats.
There’s a single glass upended on the draining board. I run him some water from the tap. There’s no heat in here but at least there is water.
Click-clack.
The water runs over my hand.
Click-clack.
I wrench the tap off so hard, the pipe trembles under my fingers.
Click-clack.
I carry the water into the lounge.
Dad is sitting on the sofa, crouched forward. He’s a little recovered by now. He is pressing pills into his hand from a plastic dispenser.
Click-clack.
He looks up, sees me, sees the glass, and extends his hand.
I’d always wanted Mum’s body to be found. Ben hadn’t. He must have followed me when I left the Margrave. He must have seen me struggling with her. He must have seen me throw her away, like so much garbage, into the water. And when he saw me botch the job, well, he must have finished it.
‘Conrad?’
I pour the glass out over his carpet.
‘Conrad?’ he calls after me. ‘Will I see you again?’
He is pathetic. I can’t even be angry with him.
I head back to the railway station. The cold calms me down. It occurs to me that Ben was frightened of me today, and that he probably always has been frightened of me. It is strange, to imagine myself as something other than a victim. But picture me the way I must appear to him – the son who silently abetted his father’s crime.
By the time I’ve boarded my train, and too late to make any difference, I feel almost sorry for him. I sit drinking the coffee I bought on the station concourse. It isn’t good.
I watch the town’s industrial hinterlands fall away. Goods trains, car transporters, tanker trucks and passenger locomotives weave in and out of sidings and through tunnels, braking and accelerating with an unnatural ease. We stop at red signals, go at green, signals responding to signals, and the scenery flashes by, less a landscape than a series of stills. We enter hilly countryside. The gradient doesn’t bother this behemoth at all, and in minutes we have churned along mountainsides and over low saddles to regions so pure and bright, they might be made out of crystal.
The eye hunts for stories. At this speed, it catches only stills. A lorry on a country road, stationary before a flock of sheep crossing a ford. Its livery is in Cyrillic. The trucker has driven a long way – will he fall asleep at the wheel?
A car has come to rest, skewed across both lanes of a mountain road. Its front is stoved in where it pranged the safety barrier. Witnesses are running up the hill, around the blind bend, to warn on-coming drivers and prevent more collisions.
We flash through a small station. On the platform, a couple are embracing a child. Something peeks out of her daypack: a teddy bear, or a rabbit. Her parents have come to wave the child off. Where is she going? To school, perhaps, or to stay with a grumpy lone relative, high in the mountains.
The train is as clean as the landscape beyond. Clean and bright and new. Sweet smelling. Silent. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is like me.
Even the coffee tastes better now. I look out of the window, smiling into the light of the rest of my life. Every moment is a bonus. Every day is an adventure. The view is wonderful. The window is clean, with not a smear or scratch.
Only here and there, where the light hits it at an angle, can you see, printed on the glass, the handprint of a child.
Hot Head
Hotwire
City of the Iron Fish
Headlong
Painkillers
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Simon Ings 2014
All rights reserved
The right of Simon Ings to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
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London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 575 11990 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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