I remember Peter’s father in the church telling the story of Jesus and Pilate, and jesting Pilate asking Jesus what the truth was but then not staying for an answer, and so we never got to find out, not any of us, not ever. I was so disappointed and on our way back to the vicarage, hell-bent on my share of the roast dinner—chicken, chicken, let it be chicken!—I pestered the vicar, “But why didn’t the disciples ask him instead? There he was on the cross, it’s not like he was going anywhere. Why didn’t they ask him?” With his hand on the gate, he turned. A watery smile. “Sometimes Andy, I think you are the only one who is listening.” Which, of course, was no answer at all.
Nor was there anything in the Gospels that shed light on what Jesus would have said about Joe. I don’t remember anywhere in the Bible Jesus meeting a truly wicked man. It was all tax collectors, moneylenders, and Pharisees. A savior for the poor, the meek, the oppressed, but what did he actually say?
In my pocket, my phone went on beeping and buzzing, work stuff.
Joe had been from the Midlands and drove a battered black Merc. Came and went as he liked, a fat wad of notes in his pockets, no job but always off on business. I was thirteen. Life had been chaotic before but I was used to it. My mum had an eight-octave emotional range and more black keys than most.
But then, thirteen and enter Joe. Fourteen and a half, exit Joe.
Interim: I started losing my hair, got a bald patch, but I parted my hair over it. Stopped talking back. No one could believe it. Stopped talking. Sometimes I wouldn’t go to school. I’d go up the castle or wander the fields, ears open for the sound of the Merc’s engine. No words. Never any words. Even now, here. The silence spread to Peter, neither one of us saying anything to one another, to anyone. But he knew, I don’t know why I’m so sure. The vicar asking me once if Peter was all right. “He’s having bad dreams. He woke his mother. You would tell me…”
A loss of control. Black dream hurtling toward something final, that was how it felt, the last days of Joe. Something final coming. But I woke up in time. Joe went out and didn’t come back. One day, two. A week. A month.
“He won’t come back, Andy.”
I shook my head. Peter couldn’t know for certain.
A winter spent biting my nails to the quick, cutting school to hang round the traveler camp or busing into Swindon. Spring made me a believer, bringing small flowers, rain, and rage. Rage made me vicious, sent me wild, climbing buildings and trees, at their apex I wanted to rattle the earth. No one was in my mind, there was no room for anything but rage. Rage taking me out to raves, into the backs of cars with boys, me and my rage. Only, I lost Peter. The rage took up Peter’s space and when it was finally sapped, I looked around me and he was gone. There in body, as I took up my old place next to him at the desk in class, the same old Peter with a book in his hand and his effortless A grades, but with the door firmly closed, even the secret doors that only I knew about.
Outwardly, I accepted it. I took what was going. But I resented Peter, his withdrawal from me, his retreat into a fantasy of the halcyon future in which I played no part, the way he seemed to shy from me as though I were not only contaminated but dangerous. Gross insult upon a grievous injury.
We had met Joe at the pub. My mother and her mini-me, perching on the climbing frame that was for the under tens, bickering for shandy, slipping inside to down the last two inches of any pint that had a back turned on it. Out on the climbing frame in the dark with someone’s fags and a lighter. A figure at the back door, a man watching and then later his arm around my mother. I lounged in the back of the car as he drove us home. Smirking when he told me to put the seat belt on. Looking up to see his eyes in the rearview mirror. At the house, my mother had turned and invited him in.
“That all right with you, young lady?”
And I had said that it was.
The world only really has one story for that girl. That’s one of the reasons why you don’t tell, don’t report. Because among other concerns, it means being that girl. I won’t be her for you. I can’t even be her for myself. Beyond the walls I have erected, I sometimes hear her weeping. Sometimes I do not think it is her, I think it is my mother. I hear the weeping woman behind the wall. Sometimes it is the music I live by.
“Are you all right? Can I help at all?” I looked up. The vicar, of course. A kindly face, but vicars, I wanted to tell him, shouldn’t have beards. Vicars should have nude pink faces. Once, on a Saturday afternoon walk, we had come across rutting donkeys in a field, Peter’s mother had said, “Well really, Richard,” in a disappointed way, and on the way back to the car I had noticed that the vicar, while pretending to stare into a field, was silently weeping with laughter. A vicar should, after taking you to a football match—and God only knew why because none of you liked football—and after listening to the crowd jeering insults and making monkey noises at a visiting black player, say in a tight voice in the silence on the way home, “Those were the men who crucified Christ.” A vicar should be quite shy and get himself into such a state before giving a sermon, your son and his friend were forbidden on pain of death from occupying the bathroom on a Sunday morning
“I am all right,” I told him. I sailed to my feet. The vicar was sorry. He hadn’t meant to disturb me. I was welcome to stay. “It was a very long time ago,” I told him, making for the doors.
I wanted to protect him, Richard White, that is. Protect him from ugliness, keep him innocent. I should have trusted him, but the thing is, of course, that to trust you have to be taught to trust. If I’d been capable of it, I wouldn’t have needed to tell him anything.
Outside, it was raining again. As I left the church behind, I felt myself calming down. Once, I met Peter in a museum. After I’d come to London, but before I’d turned things around. By then, he was working in Geneva and on his way to becoming the Peter of recent years, the outward confidence, the nice clothes, stories that would begin, “After the club, Pierre took us all out on his boat on the lake…”
We’d meet when he was over. Sometimes I put on a front that everything was fine. Sometimes I didn’t have the energy. Sometimes Peter gave me money and it felt like being paid off, the envelope of fifties thrust from his hand into mine and tucked away out of sight with undue haste. Like neither of us could bear being asked what it stood for.
The exhibition was entitled The Secret Cabinet. As we paused on the threshold a glance passed between us, something of the old spirit. We went in. Disappointingly, it was about sex, stuffed with lewd bits of pottery, classical erotica, and ancient sex toys that had once belonged in the private collections of Renaissance princes. But I had liked the idea, the idea of a secret place inside a palace where precious things were kept. That you could be the curator, that you could choose what you kept there, in the secret cabinet.
I was high, I think, that day. It made me garrulous. I tried to tell Peter what I was thinking. He cocked his head. “So what’s inside?”
“Moments, words even. Do you remember the foal with the furry ears?” We had gone to one of the racing yards on race day to buy hash from a stable lad who was dealing. The foal had been a couple of months old. It had raced at me across the dark barn, stood shivering under my hands, its muzzle pressed into my armpit. Like it knew me, like it knew there was something special in me. I thought of David too. David in the little room under the eaves at the manor. Listening to wood pigeons with David on the mattress, the light pink as roses.
“There are some moments, Peter, don’t you think? That are never quite over.”
Peter was quiet. In his eyes was the memory of something awful. He had not understood.
I thought I knew what it was. I thought he was thinking about that morning at the manor, out on the drive in the snow. The body. The cold hands. As he tore his gaze from mine and stumbled away, it seemed like an admission of an accusation I hadn’t been able to whisper, not even to myself.
* * *
I had every intention of going to the office and being pr
oductive for a few hours. Afterward, at home, I would treat myself to dinner in bed in my tights where I would lose myself in news websites, celebrity gossip, in the scroll, the Wiki trails, the image parade, the sly, beckoning click bait. But I didn’t go to work and I didn’t go home, not straightaway. Perhaps because it was a Friday, and the prospect of the whole weekend ahead unnerved me to a greater extent than I was willing to admit. I got close, as far as the bar two streets away, where I sat in a corner and ordered the first glass of wine, discussing my choice with the bartender as though I actually cared what it was. He promised me notes of passion fruit and kiwi, something slightly oily with an almost maritime finish. It could have been turpentine. I wanted a tunnel deeper and blacker than the screen could provide, no matter the consequences. I wanted escape, and my body, although part of what I wanted to escape, was also the means.
At five the bar began to fill. At the next table, a girl said something and her friends cried out that it was her, so her, to say what she had said. But even personality seemed to me a game, and she was being congratulated for getting it right, the performance of herself. I sat there drinking with the telephone box still in its plastic bag on the seat beside me. Sometime around the third glass of wine it came: the roar in the blood. A soaring feeling of excitement, the promise of change, the sense I was leaving behind what I knew. Strength. Power. Recklessness. A lurking knowledge, that alcohol didn’t make everyone feel this way.
I got my phone out and went from app to app. By the time I realized I should eat, the kitchen was closed, so I ordered more wine and four or five packets of bar snacks, fancy ones with rosemary and glazing and sea salt, and a joker at the next table thought he’d ask me if I was enjoying those. Possibly he meant it in a friendly way, but I paused in the shoveling to stare into his eyes, so the smile slid right off his face. Then, at some point, I went on LinkedIn and sent a reckless message, before taking up a stool at the bar.
The lights were already flickering on and off in my head, my hand jerking every few minutes to my bag to make sure it was there. At some point, I had the sense to hand my card over and pay up. On the way home, weaving down the pavement, I called Peter and left a message, a long message my phone told me the next day, nearly an hour long, only by then I couldn’t remember what I’d said.
CHAPTER 13
THE BODIES IN THE LIBRARY
Twinkling lights were up in the market square. Christmas was a week or so off, the new millennium within touching distance.
“How’s Marc?” Em was back from London. We were eating cake in The Polly. She’d cut her hair short and it suited her, made her look simultaneously older and more elfin. The waitress asked her where she got her earrings and seemed put out when Em told her a friend had made them.
“All right, I guess.” Distant and barely speaking to me would have been more accurate. It had been worse since she left. Sometimes when he looked at me, it was like I was something he had spent a fortune on, and now wished he could take back to the shop. Em was quiet. I had the feeling she was measuring her words.
“You have to do something, Andy, get help. This is not fair. It’s just not fair on … anyone.”
I stared down at the crumbs on my plate.
“It’s not healthy, not for either of you.”
“I know I’m not much fun.” It was difficult getting the words out.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, Andy.” Like it was her fault.
When we said goodbye, Em hugged me hard. Drawing apart, she held on tight to my wrists.
“Come to London. Stay with me. You can get a job up there easy. Get away from here.”
And I would, of course, only not with Em.
* * *
When I turned, Marcus was in the doorway, his mouth a tight line. How long had he been there?
“We need another beater to come on the shoot tomorrow. Out on the Collingwood Estate. Darren says he doesn’t need you in the office.”
“I don’t think—” It had snowed in the night. I tried to picture myself flushing a load of pheasants from their hiding places toward a row of shotguns. That morning, I’d only made it as far as the kitchen and a cup of tea, and from there looked out into the white day and the mist. The contours of the hills were fading in and out of sight as though struggling into being. I waited there, at first thinking and then not-thinking, with the sensation of being emptied, as though through the corridors of my vision something was passing out of me, expending itself in the snow. Now it was dark. Where had the day gone? The week, the month, the last three years? “Marcus, I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
“You’re coming,” he said.
* * *
The alarm went off at six in the dark. Marcus had stayed at his mum’s again. I pulled my clothes from off the chair next to the bed and struggled into them still under the bedclothes. When I heard the van, I got up and half fell down the stairs and out the front door into the snow. I took a handful and rubbed it across my face.
“You better have made tea.” And he had, a thermos of it, and as we took the road to the shoot I poured myself a cup, spilling scalding drops on my thighs. The Collingwood Estate lay out past Hungerford and the road wound there through villages and hamlets and over hills where the tarmac was frosted, and then down among darkly wooded dells.
In the car park near the big house, we met the other beaters and then walked down to the river. The black water flowed clear and fast, and a lick of vapor was curling from it. The water was warmer than the air, and although the sky was clear there would be more snow. The guns were parked up by the house while the beaters, mostly old boys, had congregated round the game cart, a pickup with rails in the back to string up the birds. They were exchanging gossip while the dogs nosed about their feet. A pair of Labradors, sisters with fox-red coats and black-tipped ears, cried with excitement. It was their first season and as they danced and fretted, I felt a little of their joy seep into me, like a tiny drop of dye—yolk yellow—falling into a pool of white paint. Col, an old friend of Darren’s who’d taken Marcus fishing and to shoots when he was a boy, offered me his hip flask.
“That’s the one, one Marcus is talking to.” A young man in tweeds was going round shaking hands with the guns, all of whom had paid upward of five hundred quid for the day’s shoot.
“The one what?”
“Zack Allerton. His family owns the estate. He’s got an older brother, Lawrence, but he’s in banking. Not interested. So Zack’s having a go at running the shooting and fishing. He’s a DJ. Plays records in those London clubs, the ones the kids thrash about in like de-knackered bullocks while clutching bottles of water.”
“How do you know about them, Col?”
“I saw it on Panorama.”
By nine, I was standing on the perimeter of a field, holding my flag, a white triangle of fertilizer bag nailed to a stick. Marcus was a hundred meters to my left, Col further up on my right. The other beaters were on the other side of a small copse. The drive began and we advanced toward them over the sheep grazing and then through a small field of rotting maize stalks, waving our flags and driving the pheasants into the waiting guns. Dark birds with long tail feathers burst upward and sailed frantically in the direction of the river. The guns sounded, and I watched as a pheasant dropped out of the air mid-flight, like a switch had been flipped. They fell among the brush that bordered the river where it split into channels. The dogs hurtled in and out of the freezing water bringing back the bodies.
At lunch, the beaters perched on the veranda of the club hut. Most were retired country folk like Col, or dog breeders, but there were a few hobbyists like us, doing it for the fresh air and a couple of crisp twenties. The guns sat at picnic tables by the river. There was wine, beer, and whiskey for everyone, and Zack took around bowls of crisps and made sure people’s glasses were topped up. He was just a few years older than us, but so polished he seemed ageless. I sat with my eyes closed, facing the sun. Mike, the gamekeeper, was conspiring with someone.
“We’ll give him a brace,” I heard him say in a low voice. “He kept quiet about the business with the mower, he deserves some birds.”
Two women had arrived. They were talking some feet away by the picnic tables about the drive down from London and I amused myself by trying to picture their faces. They would be blond, of course, but whereas one—Priss, what kind of name was Priss?—was bursting with words, juicy with enthusiasm for the shoot, the day, the drive across the snowy country, the other sounded dry, had a voice that twitched with a permanent-sounding dissatisfaction. She would be dark, I decided, wasp-waisted, perhaps a bit wolfy around the face.
I opened my eyes. I’d been right the first time. Both blond, Priss taller and sandier, full-lipped and big-chested with narrow hips. The second woman I recognized as Alice Calcraft, the girl whose family owned the manor and who didn’t rate iceberg lettuce. She was as slender as a weasel with small, even, white teeth and fine, fair hair, the kind of woman who would always be girlish. She caught my glance and then turned her back, like even a glance was common.
But then, I was never going to warm to Alice Calcraft. Because of ponies and skiing and posh school, and because for Alice to be nice to you, you had to disarm first. But mainly because, after she turned her back on me, she bent down to say something to the man sitting next to her brother at the picnic table—hair tickling his cheek, one hand on his shoulder—and this man, when he stood up, turned into David.
We did another drive, this one through the thickets by the river. I climbed over mossy fallen trees and through reed beds and brambles and patches of marsh, thrashing my flag about and banging it on the trunks of cricket willows, nose streaming. It was good to feel something as simple as fury. The guns fired overhead, and shot fell from the sky, pattering down through the trees. It sounded like summer rain on the roof of a tin shed. A small piece hit me on the forehead. I swore and rubbed the spot. The metal had been hot.
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