Midland

by James Flint

  Sheila’s eyes flickered as they hunted for purchase.

  ‘Why would she do such a thing?’

  Jamie looked not at his stepmother but at his half-sister, lying silently on the bed. How beautiful she was, how beautiful her skin, turned to alabaster by the flight of her will and the eerily even light from the diodes of the machines. He bent over her, guided a strand of hair back from her damp forehead and tucked it behind her ear.

  ‘You know why,’ he said.

  Sheila stiffened. Her eyes stopped their saccades; her hands – still holding Caitlin’s fingertips to her lips – paused in space. Even her tears seemed to halt their progress down her cheeks and hang poised in the moment like little beads of glycerine. Then the moment passed, she placed her daughter’s wrist back down on the bed, stood up, and walked directly out of the room, the skin of her face glistening as if just turned from a mould.

  As she pushed the door ajar it knocked into Margaret, who had been attempting to open it from the other side while carrying two large blue Tupperware boxes.

  ‘Oh! Sheila,’ she said. ‘I—’

  But Sheila just shook her head mutely and hurried off back through the ward.

  ‘Oh poor Sheila!’ Margaret said, as Emily came over to help her with the boxes and Sean rushed after his mother. ‘She looks terribly upset.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘I bought some sandwiches and fruit for you all,’ Margaret said, indicating the boxes. ‘Oh my goodness, look at Caitlin. No wonder Sheila’s in such a state. Alex – you’re here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I could have sworn you passed me just now, as I pulled into the car park.’

  ‘Nope, I’m definitely here.’

  ‘It was your car, I’m sure of it. It’s quite distinctive.’

  A thought flashed through Alex’s mind and he patted his pockets. ‘My keys have gone! I must have dropped them when we had that fight.’

  ‘What fight?’ Margaret asked. ‘Who’s been fighting?’

  ‘God, you don’t think Matthew took them, do you?’ Emily said, ignoring her mother.

  Alex looked panicked. ‘I bloody well hope not.’

  ‘Do you want to go and check?’

  ‘I think I’d better.’

  So now it was Alex’s turn to leave the room. He soon returned, flushed and out of breath. ‘The car’s definitely gone,’ he said to the others, who despite themselves were eating the sandwiches that Margaret had pressed on them in his absence. ‘Rick’s truck’s gone too, but I didn’t see Matthew anywhere and I bet he didn’t go with him. He must have taken it.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Emily asked.

  ‘The Porsche came with a built-in satellite tracker. There’s a bit of software on my laptop that will show its location. If you can go and get it from the house, you can fire it up and at least get some idea of where he is.’

  ‘Why don’t you just take my car?’

  ‘I can’t have that,’ Margaret interrupted. ‘He’s not insured for it. We don’t want any more of you driving around illegally, thank you very much. We’ve got enough on our plate as it is.’

  ‘Okay, okay, Mum, I’ll go. What’s the program called?’

  Alex told her and gave her some quick instructions on how to use it. ‘Mum, why don’t you go back with her?’ he said, as Emily made to leave. ‘Sheila’s in the café near the entrance. Sean’s there too, but I think he could use your help.’ He glanced at Jamie, who was sitting with his head in his hands by Caitlin’s bed. ‘I can stay with these two.’

  —————

  Sean was more than happy to be relieved by Margaret. He’d not been able to get any sense out of his mother at all. But when Emily suggested he go back up to the ward he shook his head.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said. ‘Or you’ll be the only one without any moral support.’

  ‘Oh I don’t need it,’ Emily replied, then quickly added that she was glad he was coming in case he took her too literally and changed his mind.

  They left, and when they had gone Margaret bought two cups of tea at the counter and brought them back to the table where Sheila was sitting staring out through the café window into the brightly lit car park. She pulled up a chair, took a sip of her tea, then took out the little embroidery she kept in her handbag and began to work away at a half-completed flower motif.

  ‘You got away lightly, Maggie,’ Sheila said, when one petal had been finished and the next begun.

  ‘You remember that night, that night I came to yours?’

  Margaret shuddered. She knew which night Sheila meant.

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  Sheila blew her nose on the serviette Margaret had brought with her tea. ‘Well when I came back home, there he was, passed out on the sofa from whatever it was that he’d drunk. I went upstairs to check on the children and Sean was still fast asleep. But Caitlin … I couldn’t find Caitlin.’

  ‘She wasn’t in her bed?’

  ‘No, no she wasn’t. I didn’t know where … I searched the whole house for her, I was in a terrible panic, I thought she might even have set off down the lane to look for me and that something had happened to her, anything – God it was horrible.’

  ‘But you found her in the end? You must have done.’

  ‘She was in the back of her wardrobe, hiding behind all her dresses. She’d heard me calling for her but been too scared to come out.’

  Margaret’s mind was the one spinning awful scenarios now, conjuring possibilities she didn’t want to contemplate. ‘And she was, she was all right?’

  ‘I told myself she was. But do you remember, my eye was so terribly swollen where he’d … She saw that and it brought it all back. She wouldn’t even let me near her to comfort her. She made me get out.’

  ‘Oh Sheila.’

  ‘I told myself it would all sort itself out. But things were never the same with us, after that. Sean was fine, but Tony, and me, and Caitlin – after that it never really worked.’

  ‘Did Tony ever hit you again?’ Margaret asked. It was, she decided, important to say the words that for too long had been left unspoken.

  ‘Oh yes. Not very often. And it stopped after Jamie left. That night was so terrible it shocked even him, and after that he really managed to change. But before then, yes, sometimes. You know how he could get. He’d get so het up about things, so fixated.’

  ‘And you didn’t think about leaving?’

  ‘All the time. All the time.’ Tears swamped the flow of words and Sheila took Margaret’s hand while she sobbed. ‘And just look what it’s done to poor Caitlin. Look what it’s done!’

  ‘Shhh,’ Margaret said. ‘Shhh. You can’t blame yourself like that. It wasn’t your fault. You did what you could.’ She was starting to cry herself now. They’d all known, of course. She and Miles and all of their friends. It had been whispered in the kitchen at dinner parties, in the lounge bars of the local pubs. But for all that, at least as far as she knew, no one had ever spoken to Sheila about it. In those days that was the attitude. It was their marriage, and thus their private concern. How stupid and naïve that seemed now. How wilfully blind. If this was indeed one of the reasons that Caitlin had done what she’d done, then it was all of their faults.

  ‘Any of us could have said something,’ she said, trying to articulate these thoughts as best as she could. ‘We should have given you more support. Especially me, I really should have done. But I didn’t want to interfere! I didn’t want you to think, because I’d been married to Tony, that—’

  ‘You couldn’t have stopped it.’

  ‘I could have at least let you know—’

  Sheila cut her off and sat up. ‘You couldn’t have stopped what happened with Caitlin and Jamie.’

  She wasn’t crying now, and her voice had changed its timbre. Previously thick and rich with grief, it had now turned dry and cold.

  ‘Why?’ Margaret asked, worry once again rising up in her chest and displacing
the guilt she’d been feeling. ‘What happened with them?’

  Sheila wiped her nose.

  ‘It was wrong, Maggie. It was so wrong I … I couldn’t … I never told anyone. But I think it’s why Matthew – oh Maggie, I’m the one who should be apologising, not you. But you have to believe me, we just didn’t know. We honestly just did not know anything about it.’

  ‘What?’ Margaret said, truly confused now, no longer sure whether to be worried, guilty or scared. ‘What didn’t you know? Please Sheila. Please tell me. What didn’t you know?’

  —————

  The daylight was already fading when Emily had arrived at the hospital; now that she and Sean were leaving it was properly dark. The two of them threaded their way between the ranks of cars glowing beneath the sodium lamps until they reached the Renault 4.

  ‘Not exactly the world’s best pursuit vehicle, is it?’ Emily said apologetically, as they climbed into the sparse and functional interior.

  ‘It’ll do,’ Sean said. ‘I’m not sure speed is what we’re looking for right now, in any case. We don’t want to outrun him. We just want to find out where he is.’

  ‘Just as well. I’ll go through the lanes anyway instead of taking the bypass. In this thing it’s quicker.’

  Though both of them were desperate to talk, neither was sure how to broach the subject of why Caitlin had done what she did. And what had Jamie meant when he’d told Sheila she knew? It was what Emily most wanted to ask and what Sean most wanted to tell, but neither could manage it. Instead, as they came down the hill into the centre of Snitterfield Emily dropped her hand to Sean’s thigh and gave it a squeeze. Their eyes met briefly and then, as she returned her hand to the wheel and turned into the road that led to her parents’ place, another vehicle, long and low, slunk past them in the other direction.

  ‘That’s bloody well him,’ she exclaimed. She jerked the car to a stop, slammed it into reverse, and steered them back around the turn before spinning the wheel back round, shunting the gear lever into first and setting off after the Porsche.

  For half a minute or so the sports car stayed within sight, slowed by the speed bumps outside the village school. But once the road curved behind the Snitterfield Arms and became free of restrictions its tail-lights quickly dwindled into the night.

  ‘Is this as fast as it’ll go?’ Sean asked as the Renault’s engine whined under the bonnet.

  ‘Yes, unless you want me to tip it over the next time we go round a bend,’ Emily said. ‘If you fancy that then I can probably squeeze another five miles an hour out of it.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Sean. ‘Then we might as well give up. We’re never going to catch him. We’re better off going to get the laptop.’

  Matthew was indeed long gone, not that he’d been trying to lose them. He hadn’t even spotted the Renault at the crossroads, let alone clocked that for a short spell it had been following him – he’d been far too focused on a mission of his own. He couldn’t tell how it was going to play out, but knew that the first stage involved the bag of weed he’d just retrieved from the backpack in his bedroom. Stage two was about finding somewhere quiet to stop and smoke it while he worked out what, now that he had control of his brother’s prized possession, would be the most appropriate thing to do with it. Just lighting up a joint in the Porsche’s luxurious leather-trimmed interior would be a retaliatory act in itself, of course, given Alex’s terror of any such contamination. But there had to be something more, some other mechanism of revenge that would taste even sweeter.

  He reached the junction with the Birmingham Road and pulled out carefully, aware that this stretch of highway was a notorious speed trap and regularly patrolled, then cruised down beneath the railway bridge until he reached The Golden Cross. At the pub he hung a left down Salter’s Lane, the same route he’d cycled to see Caitlin for their picnic that fateful afternoon so many aeons ago. He didn’t have to travel very much further to find what he was looking for: a tarmacked turn-off that led to Dockert’s dump, where he used to come with Alex and their father to deposit their empty cans and bottles.

  The access road was long enough to get the car out of sight of the lane, and he drove down it until he reached a set of chain-link gates that blocked his way. In front of these he stopped, turned off the engine, and sat for a couple of minutes soaking up the stillness before reaching for the pouch in which he kept his papers, marijuana and tobacco.

  When he’d first got hold of Alex’s keys Matthew’s angry fantasy had been of spectacularly writing off the Porsche, steering it off a bridge or into a lake or a quarry and jumping out at the last minute, or perhaps even staying at the wheel in a suicide of passion that would somehow mirror Caitlin’s fall. As he sucked smoke into his lungs he allowed himself to indulge these thoughts again, embellishing and annotating his earlier visions while knocking his ash into the footwell of the Porsche. But soon reality bit. It wasn’t only to protect his upholstery and Rufus’s lungs that Alex forbade smoking in his car. Very quickly the tiny cockpit had become completely fogged and Matthew was forced to open the door.

  He got out, went over to the gates, and slipped the fingers of his right hand through the mesh. Reassured by the pinching sensation of the cold metal against his skin he peered through the links at the scene beyond, dim but discernible in the moonlight. And what he saw there took him completely by surprise. The dump of his childhood, with its landfill trenches, lines of yellow skips, dark green bottle banks, Portakabin offices and general air of squalor and decay, was all gone. In its place was a wide landscaped basin full of ranks and ranks of saplings. He blinked and ran his hand round the back of his neck as if to haul himself back into the present, then walked over to a sign clipped to the fence to the left of the gate which he’d hitherto ignored.

  When he saw what was on it he started to laugh. The sign said the land was now owned by Tony Nolan and that these trees were his trees, part of his forest of the future.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Matthew hissed to himself. ‘Jesus fucking H fucking Christ. There is just no escape, is there? There is just no fucking escape.’ He bent down until his forehead pressed against the sign and stood like that, his neck taking his weight and his shoulders quite limp, while he took the last few pulls on the joint. When it was finished he very deliberately ground out the hot ball of embers in the middle of the metal plate, twisting it until the shower of bright orange sparks became a tumble of blackened tobacco.

  Then, as he turned to flick the roach into the dirt, he found himself face to face with a fully-grown stag, staring at him down the line of the fence from a distance of some twenty metres.

  A song popped into Matthew’s head, one he’d heard somewhere years before about stags being the colour of bonfires, and even though the weak polarised light from the moon washed all the colours but greys, purples and blues from the scene he could see what the singer had meant. The animal seemed almost hewn from bark and fallen wood, seasoned by the weather, its antlers dried branches jutting from the great bole of its forehead, the bright mirror of Earth’s satellite deflecting sparks deep into the knots that served it for eyes.

  Presumably it had been chased out of the plantation, and now here it was patrolling the fence, preparing itself to push out and find a new territory. Not that there were many options round here, what with all the roads and railway lines and driveways chewing up what was left of the countryside. Matthew didn’t know how the animals managed to survive in what hedgerows and small pockets of woodland still existed. It might have been rural, but it was hardly the Scottish Highlands or the wilds of Dartmoor. Maybe that was in the end why Nolan had started planting his forest – to bring back the deer and the boar. The irony being, of course, that nowadays you could only create free land by enclosing it and shutting those animals out, by making it into a policed slice of park.

  Matthew punched the metal sign at the thought, rattling the chain-link and spooking the stag which turned and slipped away into the bushes as deftly as a trou
t into reeds. Then he let out a howl, venting his frustration at the peppering of stars that blinked, unmoved, overhead. Needing a more responsive outlet, he started kicking at the fender of the Porsche and was instantly gratified by the way its memory plastic buckled and re-formed with each blow, as if it were mutely acknowledging and accepting this punishment as fully deserved.

  He knew then what he must do, and that of course was to take the car back to his brother. But he wasn’t going to capitulate completely. He still needed some kind of token, some talisman of revenge, and crossing the Birmingham Road had given him an idea. He would run the speed cameras on the way home. Alex would get his toy back, but it would come with some points on his licence and a fat little fine. That was the very least he could do.

  —————

  While Matthew had been getting high Emily and Sean had been firing up the tracking software on Alex’s laptop in the Wolds’ kitchen. Rufus was asleep but Miles and Mia had met them when they’d arrived, desperate for news about Caitlin. Matthew had said nothing when he’d turned up: just come in, gone upstairs to his room and gone straight out again.

  ‘When I saw the Porsche I thought Alex must be driving it and was waiting for him in the driveway,’ Miles had told them, very concerned. ‘I should have thought he would have known better than to go driving someone else’s car.’

  ‘He’s not in a good place, Dad,’ Emily said. ‘He was in a terrible mess at the hospital earlier. What happened today has really upset him.’

  ‘Well, I know he and Caitlin used to be close, but it’s still no excuse.’

  ‘I think there’s a bit more to it than that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Emily! There are some things you just don’t do, not unless there’s a genuine emergency.’

  The laptop had powered up now and Emily was too intent upon entering the password that Alex had given her to answer her father. As it was she got it wrong on the first two tries.