Freeing Grace

by Charity Norman

  ‘Who’s this?’ I ran my fingertips across the soft mane.

  ‘Frederick the Lion. I’ve had him ever since I was born. My grandma knitted him for me. I’m going to give him to Grace.’

  Abruptly, he snatched the toy back and crammed it into the drawer. Then he lit up and sat down next to me, and we both stared at our feet. I was wearing desert boots, as I recall, and Matt was barefoot, his jeans frayed around his ankles.

  He handed me the spliff. ‘Um . . . thanks for bringing my mum back.’

  ‘No worries, mate,’ I said, and inhaled. ‘No worries at all.’

  ‘She’d better not try coming in here. I’ll fucking tell her what I think of her for going off. Selfish bitch.’

  We both heard it then. Voices in the hall.

  ‘Talk of the fucking devil,’ said Matt hopefully.

  Footsteps, gently creaking up the stairs. Then, so quiet that it might have been a bird under the eaves, a tapping on the door. Matt sat completely still, gazing vacantly at the ceiling.

  ‘Go on, mate,’ I whispered. ‘Let her in.’

  ‘You let her in,’ he sneered, ‘since you’re such a frigging gentleman.’ He took the spliff out of my hand, leaned back on his elbows and shut his eyes.

  I was halfway across the room when the door inched open and Deborah’s face appeared around it.

  ‘Ah!’ Matt breathed out a defiant stream of smoke. It rose past his nostrils in a herbal cloud. ‘The prodigal mother.’

  ‘Jake!’ she hissed accusingly, her gaze sliding from Matt to me. ‘What are you two doing in here?’ She was sniffing at the loaded air.

  I tried not to hop from one foot to the other.

  She clicked her tongue. ‘It’s like having two teenagers in the house.’

  ‘Just dropped in to catch up with old Matt,’ I mumbled. ‘Good mate of mine. I’m off to bed now, though.’ I saluted him. ‘See you, mate.’

  ‘No need to go, Jacko.’ He sounded anxious. ‘Don’t go just because of her.’

  I suppose he wanted the moral support. I hesitated, hovering unhappily. Deborah caught my eye and nodded. Quickly, she crossed the floor. She leaned down and tried to hug him, but he went totally rigid.

  ‘Hello, darling.’ It sounded a bit forced; maybe she was nervous. Matt eyed her, his face expressionless, and she tried again. ‘How have you been?’

  He yawned and looked away, flicking his ash into a coffee mug.

  Deborah crumpled onto the beanbag. ‘Okay,’ she croaked, ‘I give up. You’re very, very cross. Message received and understood. Well, so am I.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Matt, looking genuinely mystified.

  ‘You managed to get a girl pregnant, right? I think most mothers would have views about that. You’re welcome to sit there sulking if you want to. Go ahead. I’ll be off to bed. You and Jake can blow your tiny brains out with that joint.’

  ‘It all turned to shit here. You switched your phone off. You never emailed.’ He dropped the last half inch of spliff into his mug. Then he got to his feet and started his restless roaming, up and down.

  Deborah watched him for a little while, her head turning like a spectator at Wimbledon. In the end she snapped, ‘For God’s sake, Matthew, sit down. This room’s too small for pacing. I’m sorry about the phone. It was stolen.’ She glanced defiantly at me, but I kept my trap shut. If she wanted to tell whoppers, that was her affair.

  Matt took a final swing at the door before launching himself onto the bed. He sprawled on his front, head over the edge, glaring morosely at the carpet.

  ‘You’re my bloody mother,’ he said flatly. ‘You’re supposed to be here for me. Isn’t she, Jake? She’s supposed to be here for me, my own bloody mother.’

  A smile tugged at Deborah’s mouth. ‘I saw some pictures of Grace.’

  He lifted his head and met her eye for just a moment. ‘She’s okay,’ he mumbled. ‘Not a bad kid.’

  ‘You visit her twice a week?’

  He nodded. ‘She recognises me. Imogen—she’s one of the social workers—thinks so too. I give Grace a bottle. She’ll drink the lot for me, four ounces, won’t do it for anyone else.’ He let his head hang down again. ‘I’ll never see her again if she gets adopted.’

  ‘There’s no chance of you keeping in contact with her?’

  ‘Nah.’ Matt sat up, teeth clenched. ‘Lenora fucking Blunt—team manager down at the SS, ugly as sin—reckons I’d “destabilise the placement”. She said it about fifty times. Eventually I asked her what the fuck that means, and she said, “It means you might cause trouble.” Stupid bitch. Too right, I’d cause trouble. I’d go and get my daughter and bring her home.’

  Deborah nodded. ‘Yes, I can see—’

  ‘Photos! If I behave nicely, I might get a photo every year. Big of them, isn’t it?’

  He looked extra fierce, like a toddler trying not to cry. Swiftly, Deborah got up and sat next to him. He hunched himself angrily away, his mouth a stubborn line, hands clasped together. I remembered doing that to my mother when she tried to comfort me.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Deborah stroked his powerful shoulder. ‘We’ll get her back.’

  I edged closer to the door and then eased myself through it. As I closed it behind me, they were sitting side by side on Matt’s duvet, staring at their feet.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It’s odd. I can sleep on a plane or in a taxi—at uni I was famous for snoozing through lectures with my head propped on an upright pencil—but lay me horizontal between ironed linen sheets and my eyes snap open like starting gates. So there I was, tucked up in Perry’s spare bed, listening to the murmur of voices from Matt’s room. And wide awake.

  I heard a thud, and grinned. He was belting that door again. Later on, I heard the door quietly open and close. Deborah, presumably, on her way to bed. I turned the pillow over and shut my eyes, and then opened them again. My future was an empty page, and it wasn’t quite so pleasant a sensation as I’d expected.

  Thoughts ricocheted exuberantly from one side of my mind to the other, yelling for my attention like a troupe of monkeys who’ve drunk far too much coffee. They were giving me a headache. For hours I lay there, listening dazedly to those crazy voices while my alarm clock smugly flicked numbers at me.

  Nearly two am. Bugger this, I thought. There’s nowhere lonelier than a sleeping house at two in the morning. I rolled out of bed, dragged on jeans and a jersey and headed for the kitchen, intent on raiding the fridge.

  The hall was in darkness, but the kitchen light was on. Surprised, I put my head around the door, squinting into the brightness. Perry was sitting at the table reading, a bottle of whisky at his elbow. He looked up and smiled delightedly.

  ‘Jake! Couldn’t sleep?’

  I slumped into a chair. ‘Nah. Wide awake. I can’t bloody believe it.’ I made a pointless attempt to smooth down my hair.

  He took off his reading glasses. ‘Have some of this.’ He fetched another tumbler and sloshed in a vast amount of Scotch. It’s not really my drink—my father lives on the stuff—but Perry’s was pretty drinkable, actually. It had a seriously expensive taste.

  I peered over at his magazine. What does a man like Perry think about in the blackest hours of the night?

  ‘New Internationalist.’ He held up the article he’d been reading and gave me a thumbnail. I can’t remember much now, except that it was full of uncomfortable truths about oil companies in Nigeria. Then he closed the magazine and fixed those gypsy black eyes on me—a little squiffily, I thought. I glanced at the bottle. Only about a third of the whisky was left, and I was willing to bet it’d been full at midnight.

  ‘You know,’ he began, too seriously, ‘what I owe you can never be expressed.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I hate it when drunk people are grateful. They’re always so embarrassingly sincere.

  ‘Well, don’t rush off. Be our guest here. Least we can do. What are your plans?’

  ‘Ah. That’s a good question.’r />
  He raised his eyebrows helpfully, topping up our glasses with impressive control.

  ‘Thanks.’ I nodded towards the bottle. ‘This is bloody good stuff.’

  His thin mouth lifted wistfully. ‘That’s the tang of the peat bog, and drizzle on the bracken. From the Isle of Jura. A wild, mystical place. You must go up there.’

  ‘One day.’

  ‘One day . . . So. What’s on your mind?’

  It was slipping down easily, that whisky. ‘I met up with a couple of guys in Kenya. They drove all the way from London in an ex-army Land Rover. Took them months.’

  ‘I had some friends who did that. People kept pinching their jerry cans, and they got shot at in Mali. They had a marvellous time.’

  ‘I thought I’d give it a try.’

  He nodded approvingly. ‘Alone?’

  ‘I’ll probably find someone to come with me. From what I can gather, the trans-Africa routes are crawling with antipodeans all, as they say, “doing” Africa.’

  ‘Is that really the term they use? How very irritating.’

  ‘Very. My brother Jesse “did” Canada once. Took him all of three weeks. He calls it his Big Overseas Experience, poor bugger. Anyway, I’ll sell my car and find some kind of four-wheel drive. And it won’t be a bloody army Land Rover, either. No offence.’

  ‘None taken.’

  ‘I’m going to need sand mats and jerry cans and all kinds of gear, visas, and a carnet for the vehicle. I won’t get away before the New Year.’

  ‘Excellent!’ He spread his arms. ‘Then make Coptree your base. Come and go as you please. You can use the phone, the internet: make yourself at home. Your worldly goods are safe in the garage. Leave them there for as long as you like.’

  I looked into my glass, thinking fast. On the one hand, I actually had nowhere else to go just then. Nowhere very convenient, anyway. But on the other hand, the Harrison family were—quite clearly—stark staring bonkers, every last one of them. They’d lied and they’d cheated, and sent me prancing off to Kenya on their secret mission. If I had an ounce of sense, I’d kick up my heels and be miles away before they roped me into any more of their wild schemes.

  There again—and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why this should be—I liked them, very much. All of them. And I was bothered about them too. Especially Matt.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’

  He allowed himself a brief, gold-toothed flash of satisfaction, raising his tumbler in a small toast. ‘That’s settled, then.’

  I raised mine, half-heartedly. ‘I’ve got various friends in London I can stay with for a while,’ I explained, ‘but it’s a bit awkward just now. This girl I lived with—most people seem to think I treated her badly.’

  ‘And did you?’

  I made a despairing gesture with my hands. ‘I just didn’t marry her.’

  ‘And you’d been together for how long?’

  ‘Four years.’

  He watched me with narrowed eyes. It was a funny thing about Perry: for all his faults, all his manipulation, you caught yourself wanting him to like you. There was something compelling about his stillness. I wanted him to understand.

  ‘I don’t want to get married, Perry,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t want kids. That makes me a self-centred tosser, I guess. Childhood isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.’

  ‘That depends, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No.’ I took a gulp of whisky. ‘And what’s more I’ve never seen a married couple that were genuinely happy. My mother, for instance. She’s had a pig of a life. The most exciting thing she’s ever done is to stand between me and Dad’s flailing belt.’

  ‘And she put up with that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s what you do where I come from. Put on a brave face and get on with it, even when your man’s a howling butcher. My mum might as well have been a goldfish swimming round and round in a bowl all her life, for all the freedom of expression she’s had. And that’s a hell of a shame, because she’s a good person.’

  Perry twitched one eyebrow. ‘That is a hell of a shame,’ he said smoothly, ‘but it surely doesn’t mean the entire institution of marriage is flawed?’

  It felt as though we were the only ones awake, anywhere in the world, in our brightly lit room; and even we weren’t really awake at all.

  I ran a finger around the top of my glass. ‘From what I can see, getting spliced means being mildly unhappy, or possibly profoundly miserable, ’til death do you part. That’s why people’s mothers cry at weddings, I’m sure of it. They’re in on the secret.’

  ‘Secret?’

  ‘They know it’s really a funeral. A farewell.’ I searched for the right words. ‘The end of everything fun and easy.’

  I knocked back the last of my drink, and he quietly refilled it.

  ‘Married people were always on at Anna and me to get hitched,’ I said. ‘They didn’t see why we shouldn’t sacrifice ourselves to the great god Stability, like them. “So when are you going to get a ring on her finger, Jake?” Never used to shut up about it. They wanted us to be as disappointed and dismal as they were.’

  Perry looked mildly amused, as though he knew something I didn’t. ‘You might be very lonely when you’re old.’

  ‘What kind of a reason is that to live in a fish tank?’

  He inclined his head, gravely. ‘I’ve married twice, of course. And I’ve been supremely happy each time.’

  My jaw dropped. This bare-faced whopper was too much for me. I wasn’t letting him get away with it.

  ‘I don’t want to off end you, Perry, but that isn’t strictly true, is it?

  I had to go and shanghai your wife back from Kenya. And, as you very well know, I wouldn’t have agreed to go if you’d told me the truth.’

  He became absolutely still, the glass in his hand arrested in midair, watching me with eyes like glittering black slits. An owl hooted, out in the dark.

  ‘Truth?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said savagely. ‘Truth. What you tell when you’re not trying to mislead someone into travelling halfway around the world to do your dirty work.’

  ‘Out with it, then, Jake. What, precisely, is the truth?’

  Perhaps it was sleep deprivation or the effects of the whisky, or maybe it was indignation at the way I’d been duped. I found myself leaning forward, meeting his eye. ‘The truth is that Deborah wasn’t on an assignment, and you knew it. She didn’t want to be found. The truth is that you didn’t look for her yourself because . . .’ I ground to a halt. Even Deborah hadn’t opened the box on this one.

  Perry raised his eyebrows. ‘Because?’

  ‘Well . . . you can’t.

  ’ He laughed without humour, showing his teeth like a yawning cat. His cheeks looked hollow tonight, and I reckoned he’d lost weight in the short time I’d been away. His shirt hung off him in artistic folds, as if he were an oil painting.

  ‘Let’s start with my anxiety,’ he said calmly. We might have been swapping recipes. ‘Since someone’s clearly been so good as to enlighten you.’

  ‘It wasn’t Deborah.’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter who it was.’ He played with the liquid in his glass. ‘What do you know about agoraphobia?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘You believe it means fear of open spaces, I imagine?’

  I’d started this conversation, but I wanted to stop him. He’d regret it in the morning. Perry, sober, was good company, if a little off-centre. Charismatic. But with about a pint of Scotch inside him, his intensity was a bit spooky.

  ‘Forget it, mate.’ I could hear my words slurring, despite my best efforts. ‘Honestly. Forget it.’

  ‘Now, where to begin . . . I was married before, as you know.’

  I nodded dumbly, and he went on. ‘Yes. I was married for ten wonderful years to Victoria. Her death came out of the blue—it was a matter of weeks from diagnosis to the end.’ He shook
his head, squinting at me as though he still couldn’t believe what had happened. ‘She was so angry.’

  ‘I guess none of us know how we’d cope,’ I said. ‘I don’t think my upper lip would be very stiff.’

  ‘She didn’t seem . . .’ he began, and then stopped to knock back more whisky. ‘She didn’t seem to have space left in her soul for me. The last time she went to hospital, I carried her into the ward—like this, in my arms—and then I felt her turn away, as though I’d abandoned her because I wasn’t coming all the way to death with her.’

  He blinked, staring right through me. ‘She wasn’t conscious, at the end. There wasn’t much to show she was alive at all. But at the instant of her death, the feeling I had of being abandoned was . . . One second she was still there, with me. The next, I was alone.’ He looked dazed. ‘She just wasn’t there any more. The finality of it was unbearable. I wanted to run after her, like a child running alongside a train. D’you know what I mean?’

  I could see Sala’s head beside mine as I lay, snotty-nosed and sobbing, on the filthy ground under the dog kennels. Her kind brown eyes were already empty, turning opaque, and the farm dogs had gone deathly quiet. Dad said they were licking their lips because they could smell the blood and he was going to feed her to them, and if I didn’t stop fucking snivelling he’d give me something to cry about. He said the other barrel would be for me. We were never allowed to cry.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I do know.’

  Then Dad stumped off to the house for tea and brownies, and I fetched a spade. It was hard to dig a hole in the stony ground. Her ears were still warm and soft when I lifted her in, and I wanted to stroke them for the last time, but I didn’t dare because I had to cover her up before he came back. I lifted a spadeful of earth and tipped it into the hole, and Sala began to disappear, and I knew I’d never touch her again.

  Perry was swinging the drink around in his glass. ‘Once I’d buried Victoria, I relied on the bottle to keep me going.’