by Louise Voss
Meredith was the isolated one, since the Earl and his family had moved out of the house. At nights just her and Leonard on the whole fifteen-hundred-acre estate, and if someone was prowling round her cottage, Leonard would be at least five minutes’ away, since her place wasn’t even on his rounds.
It had never bothered her before, but now she felt spooked.
She wanted to tell Andrea about Ralph, how something weird was going on. She had no idea what, and maybe she was being totally self-obsessed and narcissistic by thinking it had anything to do with her. She couldn’t help remembering the last time she felt like this, though, even though it was so long ago.
As if activated by her concern, the puckered purple scar over the hole on the back of her left hand started to burn and itch, and she had to press her right thumb down on it to keep the sensations at bay. Andrea, like most people, had always been too polite to ask what had happened, but Meredith saw the covert glances it received when she forgot to place her hand palm up, or cover it with her other hand. If anyone ever did ask, she had her story down pat: a knife, a late night, a drinking game that went horribly wrong…
But only Pete knew that this wasn’t the truth.
13
Meredith
Six days of limbo passed. Nothing else strange happened; everything just carried on, as if Ralph had been beamed up by aliens. He was officially a missing person, and the staff at Minstead spoke about it in huddles, with hushed anxious whispers.
‘I’m just going for lunch, OK?’ Meredith told Doris, who was sitting precariously on the high stool behind the cash register, polishing stained-glass window decorations. Her bald skull shone disconcertingly under the shop’s halogen spotlights, barely covered by a few remaining strands of candyfloss grey hair.
At eighty-three, Doris was by far the oldest and most doddery of the volunteers, but Meredith couldn’t let her go. She’d been volunteering a day a week since her husband died thirty years before and, like Ceri, would probably lose the will to live herself if she no longer had the anchor of Minstead House tethering her to this mortal coil.
Meredith felt another pang of sorrow at the thought of Ceri, who was out of her mind with worry that Ralph was missing. Since last Friday, she’d been mostly sitting at her desk outside his office, twisting rosary beads between her fingers and staring vacantly at her telephone.
‘Be careful on that stool. You know I worry about you up there,’ Meredith said.
Doris looked over her glasses at her. ‘I haven’t fallen off it yet,’ she said. ‘See you in half an hour. Have you got a hat? It’s sweltering out there.’
‘Good point.’ Meredith borrowed a branded baseball cap from the rack of merchandised apparel, and stuffed it in the bag with her foil-wrapped sandwich. ‘Call me if you need me.’
Doris wasn’t wrong. Opening the side door into the sunshine felt like walking into an oven, after the cool flagstone floors and air-conditioned shop. But the sun’s soft fingers stroking her face felt good. She strolled away from the house, through the wrought-iron arbour arch and into the rose garden, which was in full, insanely colourful bloom, an explosion of scent and pastel shades.
There weren’t many visitors about in the grounds – it was too hot, probably. They’d all be inside, their gazes sliding across boring oil paintings by minor eighteenth-century artists, and marquetry cabinets. It made Meredith smile that the words she heard most frequently when she walked through the public areas of the house were from children: ‘I’m bored. Can we go now?’
At the end of the rose garden, she turned left into the vegetable patch, a regimented riot of tomatoes, marrows, netted strawberries and courgettes, then out through the gate marked STAFF ONLY, heading in the opposite direction from her cottage. This took her to her favourite part of the grounds, a once-ornamental pond with a low crumbling wall around it, closed off to the public while awaiting restoration. The pond was surrounded by a scramble of rhododendrons and bulrushes, and Meredith loved it because it was completely private, with a view to die for. The rest of the staff rarely bothered to walk this far from the house, so she almost always had it to herself.
She headed straight for ‘her’ bench, greedily taking in the view over the ha-ha, across the woods and to the Surrey Hills beyond, now shimmering in hazy layers under the cloudless cerulean sky. It soothed her without fail, particularly after a morning spent with the colourful busyness of all the shop’s offerings in her eyeline. A blackbird chirped sweetly in the huge oak on the lawn a few feet away. For the first time since Ralph’s body vanished a week ago, she felt the distant echo of a sense of peace. It wasn’t back yet, but there was the hope that it might be.
Meredith pulled the borrowed baseball cap out of her bag and rammed it on her head to shade her eyes from the sun’s dazzle, moving the label to one side so that it didn’t dangle in her face. She unwrapped the cheese and pickle sandwich she’d made the night before and took a bite. As she chewed, she took the top off her juice and was about to take a swig, when something caught her eye.
The surface of the pond was usually still and bottle green, the only movement the stilted skedaddle of the water bugs. It had been many years since the curly-haired stone cherub in the centre had spat any water through his patinated trumpet. But something looked different today. There was something in the water, a lumpish mass breaking the surface, hidden in the rushes to the far side of the cherub.
Meredith wrapped her sandwich back up in its warm foil so that the wasps wouldn’t get to it and went over to investigate. It was a huge, dark object. She stepped carefully round the pond on the chipped and uneven crazy paving.
At first she thought it was a duvet, or maybe some large coats that someone had, for some unfathomable reason, dumped in there. Her heart was in her throat as she climbed onto the low wall to try and get a better look, still refusing to allow herself the thought that it was anything other than a discarded sleeping bag or suchlike. But she still couldn’t see properly because of the thickness of the unkempt reeds. She needed something to part them with; a stick or branch. There was no way she was getting into the pond herself – she didn’t even know how deep it was. She jumped off the wall and searched around, but there were no sticks on the ground. Then she ran back into the kitchen garden and yanked a cane out of the raspberry bushes, the effort in the hot sunshine making her hands slippery with sweat and fear.
She approached the pond more slowly this time. Should she call security now, save her having to look herself?
No – that would be stupid, she thought. It still might turn out to be nothing. Small insects hummed and buzzed around her head, intensifying the white noise inside it. She got back onto the wall, already feeling unsteady. She focussed intently on the sight of a bee bouncing into a foxglove to help her keep her balance.
She reached forwards with the cane. Parted the rushes, touched the floating lump. Then prodded it, to try and push it out into more open water. It moved, turning slowly.
Later she thought that was the point she knew, deep down. Even though it just couldn’t be … Even though he was unrecognisable.
The body floated free, breaking the surface of the pond, pushing aside the waterlilies in a way that gave Meredith the grim, fleeting thought: pushing up daisies. It rolled slowly over onto its back, an actual dead bug in the water. She glanced at his bloated, greeny-grey face, the skin already beginning to slide off the skull. Then looked away, nausea rising fast.
It was impossible, surely? But from the faded sodden pattern of his shirt, the same shirt she’d ripped most of the buttons off, she knew it was Ralph.
14
1983
Meredith
I didn’t go to Greenham Common because I wanted to make the world a better place. I only went to piss off my parents. That, and because I happened to own a teddy-bear suit.
It was my seventeenth birthday, but had that stopped Mum and Dad being really annoying? It had not. I’d been wondering if they were getting divorced or something: Dad was rea
lly quiet, and had been for a few weeks; and recently Mum seemed like one of those small plastic toys on a spring – the ones where you licked the suction base, pressed the top to stick down, waited a few seconds for the spit to dry and then watched it boing up and off the table. Mum was boinging up every five minutes, running her hands through her wiry hair, shouting at me for no apparent reason. Even though it was my birthday, after they’d given me and Pete our presents (driving lessons – brilliant – and some new guitar strings from my brother, ten pounds from my uncle and auntie), she asked me to run down to the newsagents to pick up a copy of the Times Educational Supplement.
‘I can’t, I haven’t done my make-up yet,’ I said, packing The Anatomy of the Industrial Revolution into my backpack. I couldn’t see why she wanted the teachers’ magazine right that minute, anyway. ‘I’ll bring one back this afternoon. I’ve only got fifteen minutes before I need to leave.’
‘I need it now!’ Mum’s eyes were wild and bulging.
Dad sat on a bar stool at the counter, mute and miserable, like he wished he could be anywhere else.
‘The new jobs will still be there later.’
‘Meredith, please just do as you’re told. It’ll take you ten minutes!’
I looked at my watch. ‘Why can’t you ask Pete?’
‘He’s already left. Meredith. Please.’
I hitched up my backpack – the Industrial Revolution was heavy – and grabbed the only apple with fewer than two bruises from the fruit bowl. ‘Sorry. I can’t go in without my make-up on, and I’m not going to be late. I’ll get a detention, and it’s my birthday. I don’t see why you can’t go.’
To my shock, Mum burst into tears. She never cried. But – being selfish and seventeen – all I could think was, how could she cry on my birthday? Emotional blackmail!
Fuming, I ran up to my bedroom, grabbed my make-up bag then stomped out of the back door and down the garden path, without stopping to comfort her. I’d have to do my face at school, and if any of the boys saw me without mascara on, I’d be mortified.
‘Happy fucking birthday, Meredith,’ I said out loud.
I was, retrospectively, deeply embarrassed at how selfish I’d been as a teenager.
Caitlin was just pulling up the shutters outside Sarum Discs when I passed through the Old George Mall on my way to school, an unlit rollie stuck to her bottom lip. The little bells at the bottom of her crinkled Indian drawstring-waist skirt tinkled as she moved. ‘Hi Meredith, beautiful day, isn’t it!’
I grunted. Caitlin was one of life’s relentlessly cheerful people; even more so in the past few weeks since she’d had a new boyfriend. It was ‘Sam this, Sam that, Sam thinks … Sam says…’ all bloody day. It sometimes made it a bit hard to work with her on a Saturday, particularly if I was hungover. I usually just turned up the volume on the stereo to drown her out.
‘Oh dear!’ Her voice chimed like the tiny bells. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s my birthday,’ I said. ‘And I hate my parents.’
She rushed over and gave me a tinkly hug, wafting patchouli as usual. ‘Happy birthday! What a bummer you have to go to school. And don’t worry, everyone hates their folks. Come in after and we’ll have a special celebration, Alaric’s got the new Bauhaus record in. I’ll get a cake and … Oh wait, what am I thinking? I can’t. I took a half day. Guess where I’m going?’
My mood plummeted again at the immediate retraction of the offer – even though it wasn’t like this was my only chance to mark the occasion; I was having a night out with friends at the weekend. ‘Oh right. Don’t know. Somewhere with lover boy, I imagine?’
A brief, agonised expression flitted across Caitlin’s face, and I thought, uh-oh, trouble at t’mill?
‘No – Sam’s … busy this weekend. We’ve had a bit of a fight, actually. Try again.’
I wanted to ask if she was going to dance naked in the moonlight at Stonehenge. Caitlin was what my mother called ‘a loosely woven sort, probably knits her own yogurt’. Mum didn’t like hippies.
‘I’m going to Greenham!’
‘Wow, no way. Really?’ I probably sounded sarcastic, but was actually quite impressed. The women’s peace camp had been on Greenham Common for more than two years, and apparently there were tens of thousands of women living there, camping around the airbase perimeter fence. Living! I’d often wondered how they supported themselves financially. Or bathed. Whenever it featured on the news, I was simultaneously curious and appalled at the sight of all the mud, filth and violence. A few months back they’d managed, just by sending out a chain letter, to get thirty thousand women linking hands around the fence. ‘Embrace the Base’, it was called, and the media attention had been huge.
Caitlin extracted a lighter from the pocket of her patchwork waistcoat. ‘Yeah. This friend of mine’s borrowed a camper van, and we’re all going for a few days. I’m so psyched.’ She dropped her voice. ‘There’s going to be a special protest tonight – well, two, apparently: a human chain all the way from Greenham to Burghfield – there’s a big weapons factory there. We’re not doing that, though. A load of us are going to dress up as teddy bears and break in while the human chain’s happening. Honestly, Meredith, it’s so amazing there at the moment. The vibe is incredible.’
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly. ‘Teddy bears?’
‘Yeah. How brilliant is that? A sort of teddy bears’ picnic, you know, to symbolise what those weapons could do to our children, and their children. And it’ll be a statement, you know, contrasting with the macho militarisation of the base.’
‘I’ve got a teddy-bear costume,’ I said contemplatively, accepting a drag of the roll-up once she’d lit, inhaled and offered me it. ‘You could’ve borrowed it, if I’d known. My granny made it for me for a school play when I was thirteen. Might be a bit small now, though…’
‘No problem!’ she chirped. ‘I have one too. I sewed it myself last weekend. It’s so cute, I want to wear it all the time!’
An idea formed in my mind, one that would really piss off my slightly right-wing parents. ‘What time are you leaving?’
‘After lunch,’ she said vaguely. ‘I wish you could come. It’s gonna be epic. But Willow says they’re squeezing me into the van as it is. I’m going to have to sit on someone’s lap.’
So much for that, then. Nothing was going right today. Nothing.
‘Oh well,’ I said grumpily. ‘Couldn’t go anyway. Got a mock history exam at two. Just what you want on your birthday. Well, I better go, or I’ll be late.’
I thought with a pang of guilt that in the time I’d spent stopping to chat to Caitlin, I could probably have run to the newsagents and back for Mum.
All that day I couldn’t stop thinking about the protest, and the camper van full of militant teddy bears. As I daydreamed through each period, I realised I was desperate to go. In the free period before lunch, when I ought to have been doing revision on the role of Edmund Cartwright’s power loom in the mass production of textiles, I went to the library, got a roadmap down from the shelf marked ‘Maps of Britain’ and worked out which trains I’d need to take to get me to Newbury, where RAF Greenham Common was. It was only an hour away, with one change at Westbury. Easy. And I had Uncle Mike’s birthday money to buy the ticket with. Of course I didn’t have any more details, like, what time this protest was, where the rendezvous point would be; because the whole camp surely couldn’t be dressing in bear costumes – it must only be a breakaway faction. I had no idea of the size of it, but I knew it must be pretty big.
At lunchtime, as was our wont, my friends Julie and Charlotte and I set off down the path to the back of the school to sit in Julie’s ancient two-tone 2-CV and drink Baileys (I only had one swig, since I did actually want to do well in the mock history exam). They’d bought me a piece of lardy cake on a paper plate from the baker’s – my favourite – and stuck a candle in it, which Julie lit and I blew out. Then they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ lustily and tunelessly
while Julie fluffed her perm in the rearview mirror. Charlotte lit a cigarette mid-refrain.
‘Guess where I’m going later?’ I announced indistinctly, my mouth full of dough and sugar, unintentionally echoing Caitlin’s earlier words.
They thought I was insane when I told them. Julie, in the driver’s seat, puckered her lips in horror. ‘With all those … old lesbians? Why?’
‘I’m sure they aren’t all lesbians. Lots of them have kids living there with them. And they definitely aren’t all old. Caitlin’s only twenty-six. Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is…’
I paused. Why were they doing this? Did they really think it would make them take all the nuclear weapons away?
‘Being part of something,’ I said vaguely.
Julie and Charlotte looked at each other and rolled their eyes.
15
Present Day
Emad
Gemma and Emad bumped into one another on the steps of the police station; he was coming in, she was going out. He recognised her immediately, and was unable to believe his luck that their paths had crossed again, a good ten years after they’d last seen each other.
‘Gemma McMeekin – Meeks!’ He grabbed her sleeve then blushed puce and dropped it, thinking how presumptuous he was being. ‘It’s me, Emad. Emad Khan. Do you remember me?’
Gemma stared at him: a moment’s confusion then delight all over her face, making it light up. She looked a bit tired, but fantastic, he thought. The extra decade had slimmed down her round cheeks and dissolved her puppy fat, and braces on her once appealingly goofy teeth were dragging them back in line. Emad remembered how he’d first fancied her in sixth form, precisely because, he guiltily thought, she wasn’t one of the pretty and therefore unobtainable girls. She’d been the funniest, and the most outrageous, and she had gorgeous eyes – but she’d never been conventionally beautiful. And she’d always been kind to him, where most of the other girls had laughed at his shyness and how hirsute he was.
