Midland

by James Flint

  Inside this bubble they floated the whole summer long. Then came September and Caitlin entered the sixth form at her new school. It shouldn’t have made a difference, given that Jamie was at the golf club most days and many evenings too, but it did. Staked down by the rigour of timetables and schedules, Caitlin soon found herself too tired to stay up and visit him during the night, and Jamie, once the reluctant partner, the one urging caution, the one who would always make sure that his half-sister was back in her own bed well before dawn, now began to feel the need to be with her growing ever more powerful.

  Soon he could think of nothing else, and it began to affect his work. At the golf club he grew moody and short-tempered with customers. Word got back to Tony, who issued a series of reprimands that served only to make matters worse. And then Jamie crashed his car. One night on the way back from work he lost control and wrapped the little BMW his father had bought him around a tree. Except for a few bruises and some minor whiplash he was fine, but the car was not, and Tony was incensed.

  In the row that followed too much was said. Tony accused Jamie of having designs on Caitlin; Jamie lashed back that Tony wanted her for himself. That was enough for Anthony Nolan – he grabbed his son by the throat and started slapping him hard in the face. When Sheila tried to intervene Tony hit her too, punching her full in the eye. Caitlin screamed and threw herself on her father’s back; Sean had to pull her off. Sheila had to pick up the phone and start calling the police before she could get Tony to stop. Tony released the boy, but told him to get out and never to return. That suited Jamie just fine: free of his father’s grasp he retreated to his room, threw some things into a duffel bag and set off up the road, not knowing or caring where he was headed.

  That night he slept in a barn, making a bed atop a six-metre stack of freshly milled bales. He spent the next day there as well, cold and hungry but too exhausted by the effort of trying to think his way out of the paradox of his love for Caitlin and his hatred of Tony to go in search of something to eat.

  The next night, however, he returned. The front door was locked and he had no keys, so he headed round the back of the house via an overgrown footpath that ran from the lane up the side of the property and round behind the stables in the paddock, where the fence was easy to climb.

  There were security lights at the rear of the house but he knew a route that would let him avoid triggering their sensors. He reached the patio and tried all the doors that opened onto the pool and then the main back door itself. Everything was locked. He rubbed his nose and suddenly felt very tired and very, very hungry. He glanced along the line of windows that dotted the wall. One of them, a small vent light, had been left ajar.

  His heart now beating faster, he felt inside the transom for the stay arm, which lifted smoothly off its pin allowing the window to swing open a little wider. With his knee placed on the sill he was able to lever himself up until his shoulder was jammed against the hinge and his arm just far enough inside to reach the fastener on the casement. That too opened easily, and a few seconds later he was squatting atop the tumble dryer in the utility room, embraced by the comforting smell of clean laundry.

  There were some of his clothes here; he bundled them together then sneaked round through the lounge and up to his room, where he shoved them into a holdall along with a few more of his things. He was nearly done when he noticed a padded envelope on top of his chest of drawers, sealed but unaddressed. He picked it up and tore it open. Inside were three thick wads of banknotes. He had no idea how much money it was, but it was a lot. He sat on the bed a while thinking about this, then shoved the envelope deep into his bag and crept back downstairs.

  Crossing back through the hallway and into the kitchen he opened the door on the double-fronted refrigerator and spilled a trapezium of light out onto the tiles. Inside he found an open packet of ham and half a sliced loaf, and set about folding several salty strips of meat and bread into his mouth at once, washing them down with great gulps of orange juice straight from the carton. He’d moved on to a pork pie and a hunk of cheese when there was a noise behind him. He froze, expecting his father’s bellow to rip through the tension. But it wasn’t Tony. It was Caitlin.

  She ran to him and kissed him and they made love right there on the floor of the kitchen, lit by the light from the open door of the fridge. Afterwards Jamie tried telling her how he felt, but none of what he said seemed to carry any meaning, so he stopped trying to talk and went with her through to the pool, where they swam together and made love again then sat, nested in towels, kissing and hugging and crying, until dawn came and he tore himself away.

  Caitlin watched him walk away over the patio and across the lawn, and after he’d turned for one final glance she threw herself in the water and lay face down trying to will herself to suck the chlorinated fluid into her lungs. Then Sean walked in for his morning swim and pulled her out and held her while she shook and puked and lay on the floor like a wounded bird, not saying a word about what had just happened and never mentioning it again.

  —————

  The first missed period didn’t alert Caitlin to her new condition. She’d missed periods before, usually when she didn’t eat enough, which was fairly common, as she found food more a chore than a pleasure. But she’d never missed two in a row. And now she had.

  It couldn’t be, could it? Her belly clenched at the thought. It couldn’t be. She slipped out from school in her lunch hour to pay a visit to the big chemist’s on the town’s main square, the one with enough cashiers and a high enough footfall for there to be a relatively minimal chance of being noticed.

  Nonetheless Caitlin passed the shelf displaying the pregnancy testers two or three times without plucking up the courage to take one. The pharmacist, the girl at the beauty counter, the office workers at the sandwich cabinet – all of them were surely watching her. Even though she’d left her blazer in her locker she was still wearing her school shirt and skirt, and these marked her out as someone who should not be shopping for that kind of item. Someone would remember her; someone would give her away to a teacher.

  The enormity of what she was facing hadn’t, until now, really dawned on her. It was as if a cliff had reared up out of the ground in front of her: gigantic, crushing, impassable. She was nothing, a speck, an insignificance. Who could she turn to? Jamie had gone, she had no idea where. Sean? She couldn’t drag him into this. Her school friends? She didn’t really have any at Wardle’s yet, and she didn’t live close enough to any of her friends from Stratford Grammar to just drop round and see them, and anyway, there was not one among them she really trusted. Her parents, of course, were out of the question. The thought of what her father might do if he found out made her shake.

  Her terror of not knowing was suddenly greater than her terror of being identified, and she reached up for one of the tester kits. Then, still not ready to take it to the checkout, she went to the chiller cabinets and grabbed a bottle of apple juice and a tuna-fish sandwich on the tenuous theory that the offending item would somehow be less visible to a cashier if it were bundled together with lunch.

  —————

  The night that Alex dropped her back after she’d been with him in Bearley she must have made more noise than she imagined coming up the stairs, because as she reached the landing her mother called out.

  ‘Is that you darling?’

  ‘Yes Mum. Just off to bed.’

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’

  ‘Yes thanks, really nice.’

  ‘Good. See you in the morning. Sleep tight sweetie.’

  ‘Goodnight Mum.’

  It made Caitlin want to cry, this little exchange, and once in the bathroom that’s what she did: wept quietly for her mum, and for her dad, and for Jamie, and for how everything that had been so perfect had gone so terribly wrong. When the tears ran dry she washed her face and cleaned her teeth, then went to her bedroom, changed into her nightdress and got into bed in the dark, not wanting to look at her body. All
night she lay awake like that, terrified, her mind racing from the cocaine, her limbs inert.

  She had never been so frightened. She thought she’d known fear the night that her father had hit her mother and made her run off to the Wolds’, and she thought she’d known it again the night Jamie left. But neither of those had come close to this, this terror so constant and complete that it hollowed her out and turned her into a shell of a person, a shell that the slightest blow would shatter.

  The source of the terror, its seed, was the thing growing inside her, suspended in her empty interior like the cocoon of a silkworm slung from the forking twigs of a tree. As she lay in bed, rigid and awake, she imagined she could feel it turning and turning, walling itself in ever more securely with layer after layer of matter scraped from the inside of her belly.

  It had to come out. Whatever it took.

  She saw Matthew on the Monday as usual, and now it was her turn to pass him a note. Because what choice did she have? What other way could there be?

  —————

  On a sunny day in May, four months after they’d stood on the Hungerford footbridge to get sight of the whale, Alex, Rufus and Mia emerged from Admiralty Arch at the end of the Mall and rounded the corner of Uganda House to see the Sultan’s Elephant heading towards them down the length of Cockspur Street. With them were Miles and Margaret, who had been persuaded to come and stay for a few days. Despite not really wanting to, for Rufus’s sake they’d made this trip to Trafalgar Square – he had pleaded with them to come, so they had. They did a lot of things they didn’t really want to, now, for Rufus’s sake.

  The elephant’s presence was immense – far more impressive than Alex had been expecting. He tried to count the number of people on board the thing: there were at least fifteen of them, mostly dressed in burgundy robes, either sitting in special alcoves at the head, mouth, trunk and tail, or gathered on the little balconies built into its flanks.

  As the articulated trunk swayed to and fro and showered the crowd with water, Rufus went completely wild. He leapt up at his father and pulled on his arm, pointing excitedly at the giant form. Dad! Dad! Look Dad, look! Look, Grandpa! Grandma! Look! Maybe it was just that he was a few months older now, but Alex hadn’t remembered his son reacting with this kind of enthusiasm when he’d seen the whale. Granted, there had been less to look at, but then the whale had been real, a living being, whereas the elephant, no matter how remarkable, was just an automaton, a human construction of metal and wood with no inner life beyond that of its drivers and creators, although ultimately, Alex conceded, they were living beings too. Still, it said something, didn’t it, about the appeal of art over nature? It struck him that this was probably the kind of observation that his brother had made all the time, one of the things that drove him so crazy, and he stored that thought away.

  Matthew had not survived the accident in Bearley. The Porsche’s exceptional safety cage and airbags had shielded him at first, but the roll had caved the roof in, and when the car hit the bridge his head took the full force of the impact. Emily and Sean had been luckier. Emily had managed to wrench her car out of the path of the Porsche, which must have missed her by mere inches, and into the car park of The Golden Cross, which as chance would have it was largely empty. They went straight across it and straight through the wall of the pub, coming to an eventual halt with the nose of the Renault poking through into the lounge bar right next to the fireplace. If they’d hit the chimneybreast they would probably have died, but the wall they hit was an old one, built from a single thickness of weakly mortared bricks, and it absorbed much of their momentum. Emily sustained three cracked ribs where the steering column had been driven back into her chest; Sean had whiplash and a snapped collarbone courtesy of his seatbelt. Otherwise they both escaped unharmed.

  For a period, then, there were four members of the two families in Warwick Hospital together. Sean spent a night under observation but was discharged the following day. Matthew was the next to leave, collected by a local undertaker and taken to a premises just a couple of hundred metres from the park in which he’d met Caitlin on the day of their boat trip. Emily stayed several days longer while she underwent an extensive series of scans and X-rays to check for organ damage and internal bleeding. And Caitlin emerged fully from her coma a few days after that, though it was several weeks before she was judged well enough to go home. Even when that did finally happen, there were outcomes to endure. She required extensive physio and would rely on a wheelchair for months. Her speech was slurred and also needed therapy. She had severe scarring on her face and torso, which might have psychological implications, and her hip was likely to give her trouble for the rest of her life. As Doctor Odili had predicted, she kept her right eye but lost most of its sight.

  But she was alive, unlike Matthew, whose funeral bore little resemblance to Tony’s. There was no sense of celebration of a life well lived, only that of a hole torn in the world. There was a short humanist ceremony, family only, at the crematorium, followed by a small reception for friends from school and colleagues from EcoPath and Greenpeace held at the Wolds’ home.

  For the next couple of months the reverberations from Matthew’s death, Jamie and Caitlin’s affair and Caitlin’s lost baby buzzed through the Warwickshire community. Then things went quiet for a while. Into the vacuum came rumours: that Jamie had taken Caitlin out to the Club Vayu while she was still in a wheelchair and that they planned to marry – it might have been illegal for them to cohabit in England, but it was apparently not against the law in Brazil.

  The truth, however, was less romantic. Once there had been a door, a door that Caitlin would have gladly stepped through to be with Jamie, a door that had been swinging open on her trip to Rosaventos. But that door had closed. Caitlin did not now go to Brazil, although Jamie had begged her to start a new life with him. Instead she went to a small private clinic in Wiltshire where she was able to get the care she needed to recover from her injuries and free herself from her addictions to alcohol and drugs. She didn’t find the regimen hard. Matthew’s death had changed something in her, and given her the strength to make the choices she needed to make. When she was able to walk again she moved out of the flat in London and back into the family house in Shelfield, not so that her mother could look after her, but so that she could look after her mother, who was not coping well with the torrent of paperwork that had swamped her since the floodgates of Tony’s probate had been opened.

  There was to be a wedding, however, and it was one that would keep the gossips happy until it came along in due course: the wedding of Emily and Sean. Their bond had been sealed by the trauma of that day of dual accidents, much as Alex and Mia’s had been by the collapse of the Twin Towers. The seed of attraction that had been planted between them at Tony’s wake somehow managed to put roots down into the wasteland of grief in which it found itself, perhaps drawing sustenance from the feeling, shared by both parties, that the damage inflicted on the fabric of all of their lives could be at least partially sutured by a love that would at last see these two families, Nolan and Wold, properly joined after so many false starts.

  Back in Trafalgar Square the elephant drew level with the Wolds, and they ducked and screamed as its great tusks tilted in their direction, its trunk lifted, and it drenched them all with spray. Now that it was closer Alex could see that it wasn’t really walking at all: although its legs moved in an illusion of perambulation its weight was supported by a kind of giant trolley to its rear and a set of wheels positioned under its throat. It was ingenious but also somehow disappointing: he had wanted it to be a fuller realisation of an autonomous being, rather than just a kind of glorified carnival float. Intriguingly, when asked about it later Rufus didn’t seem to have seen the wheels, even though they were obvious once you looked. He’d only seen an elephant.

  How much had Alex himself had similar blind spots, that night he’d taken Caitlin to the cottage in Bearley, or in the face of the unfolding tale of her split with Matt
hew, or even when he’d witnessed her reaction to Jamie’s absence in Rosaventos? He’d seen nothing of her inner turmoil then, but when he looked back – which, since her suicide attempt, he had often done – many of the signs had been there. And he’d seen nothing, either, of the demons with which his brother – his own brother! – had been grappling, despite having been, however inadvertently, the proximate cause of them, and despite having lived alongside them for years. What did that say about his own perceptiveness, about what he – or anyone – understood of the world and the way that things ultimately worked? Pretty much everyone at some point, it seemed, swam the wrong way up some uncharted river, and had to rely on luck, or strangers, or family, to help them to find their way back.

  Well, the artifice was revealed now. Maybe all of them were just mechanical elephants, contingent mixtures of cobbled-together mechanisms that kept going as best they could until one day, because of whatever cascade of reasons and accidents, they could not. It was easy to make sense of things in hindsight; harder when you were riding the crest of time as it unfurled.

  He didn’t know any more. He’d left his sunglasses at home and sun was in his eyes and his head hurt and he needed to think about what they were going to do for dinner. If they ate at home he would need to allow time to pick up something from the supermarket, and if they ate out he must think of somewhere that would be suitable for everyone, not just for Rufus and his parents but also for Mia, who was in her second trimester and getting picky about food.

  Alex felt another sudden wave of sadness for his brother. That’s how it came now, in waves, although they were slowly getting smaller in amplitude as well as lower in frequency. Clearly he had still not recovered from the blow of Matthew’s death, if indeed he ever really would. And if it was this hard for him, what could it possibly be like for his parents? Alex had visited them as often as he could since the accident, and was repeatedly struck by how fragile and slight they had grown – they who had once been so indomitable, so reliable and solid. Thank goodness for Mia’s pregnancy and Emily’s engagement, which had given them positive things to focus on. Because that was it, wasn’t it? It was all about the flow of responsibility down through the generations, and Alex had had the very definite impression over the last couple of months that, sooner than it might otherwise have been, the baton had been passed. Like it or not he was holding it now, and while he did so it was his job to look after all of them – children, sister, parents, wife – regardless of whether or not they asked him to. And cat, of course. Because to distract Rufus from the loss of his uncle, Alex had agreed to let him take Max.