by Sam Hayes
Alex shrugs and I don’t press him because there is suddenly the sound of breaking china. Flora has knocked Mum’s plate on to the floor.
Don’t worry, I tell her with my wet yellow hands. She tries to hide the smile and pushes her face into Mum’s shoulder, who vaguely curls an arm around Flora’s waist. It is the most animated I have seen her in days.
Murray is an hour late. He stands in the doorway and I throw my car keys at him a lot harder than I intended. He clutches them to his chest, surprised, hurt, but then his expression tells me he understands completely. His car is at the garage for repairs and is likely to be there for a while longer. I’m praying that the use of my car will discourage him from taking the children on the boat and also from drinking. Surely I can trust him.
‘Sorry. I was—’
‘Kids!’ I don’t want to hear why he was late or, indeed, why he is only wearing a T-shirt when a frost has already set a glaze on the courtyard beyond. ‘Come in and shut the door.You’ll freeze.’ Come and join my kindergarten class, I think, yet I still find myself wanting to wrap a blanket around him, to huddle under the curve of his shoulder. I sigh through the realisation that such moments are gone for good.
‘How are you?’ he asks. ‘How are you after finding—’
‘Tea?’ I interrupt, then wish I hadn’t asked. It’ll take the kettle an age to boil on the range and I don’t want the children back late. It will also mean awkward conversation as we sip our scalding drinks, blowing ripples on the surface to prevent what needs to be said but never will be. It’s too late now. ‘And I’m doing OK, thanks. There’s no more news on Grace.’
Murray nods thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, tea would be good.’ He goes to stand with his back to the fire. ‘Mary,’ he acknowledges. He doesn’t know what to say to her. ‘How are you?’
Mum happens to be staring at Murray’s knees now he is beside the fire. She doesn’t reply, just a swallow and a blink. I ease between them and put the kettle on the hotplate.
‘She’s the same,’ I say. It’s the wrong thing to do, talking for her, but David said to include her in conversation as if everything’s normal. ‘David . . . I mean Dr Carlyle . . . comes to visit her regularly.’
‘Do doctors make house calls these days?’ Murray rubs at the stubble on his chin.
‘Are you growing a beard?’ I shouldn’t have mentioned David in front of Murray.
‘How often does he come?’ Murray presses on.
I concentrate on making the tea. ‘He came yesterday and he’ll be back tomorrow.’ I spoon tea into the pot. No quick-fix teabags here at Cold Comfort Farm. ‘I think Mum likes his visits.’
‘And you?’
I stop, sigh and make my face into a picture of weariness. ‘I’m not sick, Murray. I don’t need a doctor.’
‘Do you like his visits, I mean?’ His voice is dry and determined.
My head hangs instinctively. ‘Murray, please . . .’ But Alex hears that his dad has arrived and runs into the kitchen, begging him to take a turn on his Nintendo, interrupting me. ‘Why not wait until you’re in the restaurant to show Dad your new game?’ I say, thankful for the reprieve.
‘We’re going to a restaurant, are we? The four hours of time with my children has already been planned. That’s nice.’
‘Well, you wasted one of them by being late,’ I mutter.
Swiftly Murray unhooks Alex’s coat from the overburdened stand and tucks our boy inside. Then Flora spills into the room – delighted to see her father even though she hates the upset of being taken from me just for an hour – and she too is padded in coat.
I am struck by a slice of freezing air as they leave. ‘I’ll have them back by ten,’ Murray commands in a voice I recognise from way back.
‘Nine! ’ I call out, but the word gets caught in my throat. For the rest of the evening I sit in silence with my mother and wonder what happened to my family.
MURRAY
It was going to be better than that. I was going to kiss her when I arrived. I was going to say she looked good even though her eyelids were a little heavier today and she’d forgotten to brush her hair. I was going to wear my new trousers and have my car fixed and perhaps, if things had gone really well, I would have asked her to come with us. Flora signs that she needs a wee.
‘Guard the table, mate,’ I say to Alex. He’s already done the puzzles on the table mat.
‘Sure, Dad.’
It wasn’t that she didn’t want me there. I know Julia. God, I’ve known her practically since she was born. But because she never quite looked at me, never quite managed not to look at the teapot, the floor, Mary, her own fingernails, there is still hope.What Julia doesn’t look at, she generally wants. So maybe she still wants me.
With that in mind, I’m grinning as Flora comes out of the ladies’ loo. Did you wash your hands? I gesture, and instead of signing back she shows me tiny glistening fingers. We go back to the table.
The pizza’s OK, although each bite is automatic. Alex struggles with the spice of his pepperoni sausage so I give him half of mine. I get him to tell me again what Santa brought last week and he likes scooting down the list of things I’ve never even heard of; likes telling me that Santa’s not real and I shouldn’t treat him like a kid. I’m asking again because in all honesty I can’t recall what he said the first time he told me on the phone. I can’t even remember a phone call.
Flora, I sign. Don’t interrupt your brother. She’s being impatient, begging for vanilla ice cream, and when it arrives – because I can never say no to her for long – it has the same colour and smell as her hair. It reminds me of when she was a baby; of when things were whole and sweet.
‘What’s wrong with that girl Mum found in the field?’ Alex finishes his chocolate ice cream in record time.
‘Grace Covatta?’ I say. There’s no point in hiding her name. It’s been all over the newspapers. Witherly – where if someone bumps their head it’s big news – is steeped in Grace Covatta. Within hours of Julia’s discovery the press were camped along the muddy verges of the village, their satellites pointing skyward beaming out the shocking news. Even days later, the Three Horseshoes is still base to a couple of journalists still hungry for information as well as the home cooking. ‘She got hurt, buddy. But she’s going to be fine.’
‘Who hurt her?’
‘The police are trying to find out.’ I don’t have the words to explain such a vicious attack to an eleven-year-old.
‘But how will they find out?’ Because of his Uncle Ed, Alex wants to be a policeman when he’s grown up.
‘Through forensic testing. By talking to her. Searching the area.’ I’ve had enough of this. I’ve seen what it’s done to Julia and I’m not getting my son involved, however manly he’s trying to be. ‘Come on,’ and I sign this for Flora. ‘Anyone fancy hot chocolate on the boat?’
I’m grateful that the muddy towpath is frozen solid tonight. Dirty shoes would flash a beacon of deceit to Julia, and really, deceiving her is the last thing I want to do. She would say I am an expert at it.
‘Careful, now.’ Alex steps across the small gap of water on to the rear deck and Flora gasps when I scoop her around the middle and place her beside her brother. Keep back from the edge, I tell Flora for the thousandth time, and she thumbs the side of her head in disgust.
I know. At eight, she is wiser than me.
I settle the children with steaming mugs of hot chocolate, and before long the cabin is warm and cosy. Half an hour after I shovel in extra coal, the stove puts out more heat than we can stand. I slide the roof hatch open a little.
‘How come Grandma Mary won’t talk?’ Alex asks. ‘Is she deaf like Flora now?’ My son wears a premature moustache, and before I answer, it dawns on me that he will probably start shaving in years that I can count on one hand. ‘Mum says Grandma is a mute.’
This is Julia’s territory. I feel the ice creaking beneath my feet before I even answer. ‘Your grandma’s been sick, as well.’Why I p
ut her alongside Grace Covatta isn’t clear, but with the two incidents hammering against Julia’s life, the problems have fuzzed around the edges.
Aren’t you having hot chocolate, Daddy? Flora is thoughtful.
No, I tell her. And when she asks why I’m not thirsty after all that salty pizza, I realise that I am and pour myself a Scotch. For the next hour, we laugh and tell stories and bundle ourselves up in blankets on the roof of the boat, waiting for the moon to shine bright enough to reveal the face of a pike in the water below. All we see are our own shiny grins.
When Julia was twelve she nearly drowned. I can label every childhood nick and scar on her body and gives dates and reasons, too. It was a summer so hot the lanes felt like melted treacle as we hammered our bikes along the tarmac at midday.
‘Slow down,’ she cried. Even then her hair was thick and lustrous and fell behind her in plumes of red gold as she struggled to keep up with my frantic pedalling legs. At my age, I should have known better, but showing Julia that I was faster than anyone else was more important than waiting for her to catch up. It was Mick, five years my junior, who helped her cart her bike down the bank and over the stile to the pond at the bottom; hoisting her bike way higher than necessary just to show how strong he was. And I was meant to be in charge.
The three of us sat in a row on the jetty that stretched out into the man-made pond. It was Mick’s rod but I’d brought along the bait. Julia lay back on the hot wooden planks while we argued over who should thread the worms. The sun stung our necks and made the fronts of Julia’s skinny legs go red.
‘Who wants to swim?’ she said, sitting up suddenly. Perhaps she was sick of our bickering or the heat had got to her, but before we could even answer, she’d slid her halter top off and was standing in her bra and shorts at the end of the jetty.
‘Don’t dive, Ju,’ I said, remembering my promise to her mother. But I was worried about the worms. ‘There’s a whole scrapyard down there.’ I still didn’t look up. In fact, neither of us looked up until it was time to cast the line, by which time, Julia’s dive was nothing more than a series of ripples fading away at the shore.
‘Where is she?’ I peered over the end of the jetty. ‘Julia!’ I yelled. I shielded my eyes from the sun, expecting to see her eager face break the surface, gasping for air, grinning. ‘Ju-li-a!’
‘I dunno,’ Mick said. ‘She’ll be OK.’
And if it hadn’t been for the sunlight as sharp as a razor, I’d never have seen her waterlogged face bobbing a foot below the murk. She was floating on her back, nostrils flared, her lips fat and eyes wide open with a slim streak of blood winding its way from her temple.
‘Shit,’ I heard Mick say behind me as I leapt off the jetty. As soon as my legs cut the surface, I reached out and grabbed her body, yelling for Mick to help me haul her in. I don’t know how we did it – her back got grazed from the rotting wood scraping against it as we manhandled her – but somehow we hoisted her to safety. What I remember most about that day is the softness of her lips the first time I ever kissed Julia Marshall.
‘You’re late,’ she tells me sternly. I want to crack a smile to see if she crumbles, like we did as kids. But laughing won’t appease Julia. The children filter inside and I am kept in the kitchen doorway, half in, half out of the house in which I spent three-quarters of my childhood hanging out.
‘Only half an hour,’ I say, glancing at my watch. I’m not wearing one. It takes me a few moments of staring at my wrist to realise this and a few more to accept that I can’t remember where I left it.
‘Two hours!’ she screams. ‘I’ve been worried sick.’
Then she slams the door but can’t because my foot is in the way. That’s when I laugh, even though it hurts. Julia lets out something between a scream and a growl and her cheeks turn pink. She flings the door open again and gets up close to me. It is a distance at which she should either kiss me or slap me. Our noses are nearly touching and something stirs inside me, a warning, a pre-programmed instinct to back off quickly. But I ignore it just to stay close to Julia for another second. I might not get the chance again.
‘You’ve been drinking. You’ve been in charge of my children, in my car, and you’ve been bloody drinking.’ She breathes in deeply and recoils. ‘Christ, Murray. How could you?’
She bangs her fists on the wall.
‘I mean, the kids . . . the car.’ Her face is softening a little now, as she thinks of our children. ‘God, Murray, you are the biggest dick I know.’
She slumps on to the chair and cradles her head in her hands.
‘It’s not what you, think. I drove before I had a drink.’
She looks up. ‘Then where did you have a drink?’
‘On the boat.’ I kick myself for letting it slip.
‘When will you understand that I don’t want my children on that hulk?’
‘I made them hot chocolate and we looked for fish in the moonlight.’
Julia sighs. ‘What if they’d fallen in and you didn’t even realise because you were . . .’ She can’t bring herself to say the word.
‘Drunk, Julia? Did you mean to say drunk?’
She nods. Not looking at me.
‘And do you mean drown, like the time you fell into Beck’s Pond and I pulled you out?’ I say.
We are both back there, the sun burning holes in our skin and me sucking the brown water from her throat. Mick shouting beside me as I worked. Julia’s chest sputtering back to life and the blue finally seeping into her eyes again. I hardly admitted to myself – the big brother of her best friend sent to keep watch – that my kiss of life was way longer than necessary.
‘One Scotch, Julia. One or two is all I had. Out on my boat with my children, watching for fish. They had fun. They were bored with pizza and ice cream. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘One now. Two tomorrow. Three the next.’ She feels the weight of the kettle.
‘It’s not like that any more.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She turns from the stove and I don’t recognise her. Her curves, her softness, her glow, have gone. She’s lost weight and there’s something brittle about her, as if she might shatter.
Then he walks into the kitchen, striding to Julia’s side, breathing the air that I was just about to, saying the words that I should have spoken. Julia doesn’t know where to look as my eyes zig-zag between them.
‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ His rich voice even convinces me. He’s not noticed me yet, but I see his hand on Julia’s shoulder. ‘Trust me.’ The smile is indelible.
Julia is startled. She looks at me, her eyes wide. She tucks a chunk of hair behind her ear. ‘David,’ she says nervously, and I know she just wants to get it over with. Julia would never flaunt this. I know she doesn’t want to hurt me. ‘This is Murray, Alex and Flora’s father.’
David turns and eyes me for a second. ‘I’m very happy to meet you, Murray. Your children are a credit to you.’ How he traversed the room without me noticing, I don’t know, but his hand is there for me to take, to shake, to formally let him know I’m OK with this. ‘I’m Dr David Carlyle,’ he adds. ‘I’m looking after Mary.’
I pause, then say, stupidly, slowly, curiously, ‘Are you?’ And as I take his hand – the smooth, warm skin pushing against me – I realise that this is it, the moment when Julia finally slips through my fingers.
‘Your mother is sleeping now,’ he says, turning back to Julia. ‘The medication will help her rest.’
‘Thank you for coming out at such short notice,’ Julia says softly. She doesn’t look at me any more. Instead, I see her roll her lips together, smooth out her sweater, stand a little taller. She is relieved that the moment she was dreading has been traversed without incident.
‘I didn’t think the NHS budget ran to house calls.’
David pauses and considers my remark. His face relaxes into a spread of friendly lines. ‘Generally speaking, you’re right. But Mary is a special patient. Julia was worri
ed about her so I decided to come out. Really, it’s not a problem.’ The doctor smiles, floodlighting the entire kitchen.
I can see quite clearly that Julia is dazzled.
JULIA
It was Christmas Day. We’d opened the stockings, eaten turkey, pulled the crackers and, as usual, we trundled over to Witherly to see Mum in the afternoon. She didn’t like to leave the farm if she didn’t have to. But this year Christmas was different, as if something vital had been chipped off all our lives.
‘Will Dad get any turkey?’ Alex asked as we pulled down the lane towards Northmire Farm.
‘If he bothers to cook one,’ I replied. Murray’s Christmas dinner wasn’t something I had considered. I tried to strike the thought from my mind, but it wasn’t easy.
‘What about presents?’ he continued, worsening the image of his father’s lonesome festive season. As we pulled up to the farm, I cursed Mum for leaving days’ worth of newspapers stuck in the gate. I yanked on the handbrake, jumped out of the car with the rain and wind lashing my face, and gathered up the wet papers.
I leapt back in. ‘Perhaps we could wrap something for him before he fetches you tomorrow.’ I wiped the rain off my cheeks and steered the car down the long drive.
Alex didn’t seem enthusiastic. ‘But you and Dad always buy each other presents. And you get something for Flora and me to give you both.’
It’s different this year, I wanted to tell him.Your dad and I are separated now. Not in love. We don’t give gifts. Instead, for Alex’s sake, I agreed to buy something for them to give their father the minute the shops reopened. We would wrap it and write a card and Alex and Flora would present their father with it on Boxing Day. But then Alex had to go and suggest a bottle of whisky, ‘Because Dad likes that, doesn’t he?’ just as we pulled into the yard.
I unhooked my seatbelt and then unbuckled Flora.
