The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  Nefertiti and Ro stand together on the pavement and watch the greyish couple disappear beneath the street lights.

  ‘How come you know Eddie Jacques?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t,’ she says. ‘I mean, not really. He’s got this van on the Common, funny-looking thing. Sells ice cream in weird flavours.’

  ‘Just after the beach, he was the one to take me in.’ And then an idea forms. It comes from nowhere, and he goes for it. ‘Did you say ice-cream van?’

  ‘Yeah. Ice cream. Why?’

  ‘Kiddie magnet, isn’t it? Probably up to his old tricks again.’

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment, but the shock on her face says he’s crossed a line.

  ‘Seriously?’

  He enjoys landing Eddie in the shit. Besides, he’s stuck with it now.

  ‘And he’s selling ice cream next to the playground?’

  She looks furious, murderous even. Maybe he’s gone too far, so he tries to lighten things a bit. ‘Oh he’ll probably be off again in a month or two. And anyway, what’s it to you?’.

  She glares at him, and for a moment she looks as if she might hit him. ‘What’s it to me? I just told you, didn’t I?’ She pulls her hand from his. ‘Which is why I’m not too keen on paedos, yeah? Next time you’re here in the daytime, take a look. It’s not even a proper ice-cream van, just an old red banger some mate must have converted for him. You must have seen it. Real crappy home-made look about it. “Ed’s Organic Ice Cream”. Hippy-dippy stickers, and a window cut into the side. Fucking paedo, I’m gonna get rid of him, you wait and see.’

  They walk in silence along the road. And now that he knows her story, more or less, he needs to make a gesture. They reach a bench facing back into the Common and he sits with her there a moment, guiding her head on to his shoulder and stroking her hair. Ro has lost the taste for Nefertiti after that, but there is still the problem of a bed for the night, and so he lets her take him home. Her flat is on the third floor of a council block with a reconditioned stairwell faced in glass bricks that are lit ice-blue. There is a warm kitchen and an even warmer bedroom – an orange and purple flowered duvet and a big wicker chair. It’s surprising, he thinks, how little her flat resembles the face she gives the world. She is a Goth with a coloured nest.

  In the morning, she seems eager to be rid of him. There are no scrambled eggs like there would have been with Pia, no little sweet cakes. Just a spoonful of instant in a china mug. Take your pick, she says, presenting a selection. Bleeding Heart, Boy Racer, Silver Fox. But he couldn’t care less about any of that because his mind is fixed on Eddie. Eddie is no paedophile, but he knows more about what happened on that beach than he has ever admitted. And that’s enough to damn him in Ro’s eyes. As for the woman with him, she is the right age, the right height. His heart skips when he thinks of how close she is to perfect.

  7

  Charlie has gone to collect the hired glasses while Jess and Hana prepare the garden for the party. She has been keeping Hana away from Charlie. An intuition for self-preservation. A precaution.

  Meanwhile, Ruby seems to guess that something is happening that isn’t focused on her. Each time a piece of food is put on the tray of her high chair, she swipes it off, or rubs it in her hair, or flings it grandly to the floor. And then the rain begins. It batters at the gazebo, lashes the pale blue wall they had painted specially.

  Jess turns her back on it all, and clatters down the cellar stairs to count the cases of wine. Two of red, three of white, two of Prosecco. When she comes upstairs with a case of white to be put on ice outside, the sky rumbles and sighs and the deluge starts.

  She inspects the drenched garden through the French windows. There are puddles developing all over the gravel, and the gazebo they installed bang centre, with the four little parterres squaring off it, is almost swamped. She wonders if it will survive the night. But then the rain stops and a little slice of blue splits the clouds.

  Hana is helping Jess set up the garden tables they hired from a place on Wexboro Road. They are laying each one with a white cloth, a candle in a hurricane jar and a disposable camera, bought cut-price from the bridal range, when the doorbell rings. Eddie is standing on the mat with not one but two tartan shopping trolleys trailing off behind him. There is the usual awkwardness when it comes to the number of kisses.

  ‘I’ve come to bring offerings,’ he says.

  ‘You look so domesticated, Eddie,’ she says, trying not to make fun of him.

  He ignores that, and walks into the hallway. ‘Maya says to tell you there are four different fillings, all veggie, no nuts. She’d have come herself, only she has class today.’

  ‘Meditation?’

  ‘Yeah. I walked her down to it. She hasn’t been so well this week. Had a bad attack last Thursday, and it helps to calm her down. I’ve got an hour or so. Thought you might need a hand.’

  ‘Another asthma attack? Oh, Eddie, I’m sorry.’

  ‘She’s fine, really. Just so long as she has her inhaler and doesn’t rush around the place too much.’

  She nods. ‘I hope you don’t smoke in the house, though. Seriously, Eddie.’

  ‘What you take me for?’

  ‘Maybe I should do Maya’s class,’ she says. ‘Do you need to be some sort of expert?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he says. ‘It’s not a competitive sport.’

  When he is seated at the kitchen table, she looks at his hands. Slotted together, veined and age-spotted, his fingers look like ancient roots.

  ‘Cup of tea? I got in some of that peppermint and nettle stuff. Just for you.’ She lowers a tea bag into a mug and passes it under the boiling-water tap.

  She hopes they don’t have to pussyfoot around the article in the Daily Post. She hopes that he’s seen it and that they can talk about it openly. And sure enough, he goes straight there.

  ‘About the passport,’ he says, ‘I’d hate to see you get your hopes up.’

  With Eddie, there is always the sense that he knows more about her than anyone else, except for Ro. After all, he was there when the sky fell in and there was no one else to comfort her. Eddie saved her, she still believes that.

  And as she glances across the table at him, she takes another sip of water before tackling it head-on, the question she has asked him many times over the years.

  ‘What do you think really happened?’

  He looks away, and she knows he has no intention of spelling out his theory, if he has one. ‘Your mother would never just have left you.’

  ‘How do you know, Eddie? Did she tell you that?’

  The hesitation is only momentary, but she notices it.

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘But what? That’s not what women do? That’s not what she would have done?’

  ‘Think about it, Jess. Just imagine what it would cost you to change everything, cut all ties. Then, think of that on a day-to-day basis over many years. It would be so hard. And it’s much, much harder to disappear than you realise. The lies, the constant pretence. The psychological strain is so great that sooner or later …’

  He sounds like he’s speaking from experience, and she has a thought she’s had before, but never let herself pursue. What if? What if the link went deeper than she’d thought? Eddie and her mother? What then?

  ‘You knew a lot of those Scandi guys, didn’t you? The ones who used to hang out down on the beach all night?’

  ‘They were from the Balkans, actually.’

  ‘They left soon afterwards, though, didn’t they? I mean, I wonder is that something worth pursuing? I just thought, if you knew them.’

  ‘I knew them a bit, I suppose. But they were techno-heads.’

  He loves to talk about the golden days when acoustic was everything, before the dark shift that came with the craze for techno and the arrival of the huge speakers brought in from Delhi, before the advent of the harder drugs.

  ‘A little bit of noise,’ he says on cue. ‘That’s good. But all these new
people – things were never the same again.’

  ‘But could my mother have left with them? Because Ro has always been convinced that she did come back here, you know that. And now with this passport, it seems he might have been right.’

  He’s on the verge of saying something uncomplimentary about Ro, and she watches him think better of it.

  ‘Look, we’ve been through all this before.’ He has taken off one of the heavy rings he wears and is clinking it on the marble top. ‘I wish I had something new to tell you, Jess. Because your mama, your papa, too – they were good people.’

  Were they? Good people? Because she’s not sure about that. They sound infuriating to her, maddening. They sound like interesting, mad people.

  His blandness strikes her very much like insincerity. She hadn’t noticed that about him before, and it disappoints her. Despite what he says, she has never really rehearsed all of this with Eddie. She feels like she needs to do that. Right now.

  In the few pictures of her parents in Goa, they are surrounded by people. Europeans, mainly. Fellow travellers, burned brown by the sun. People with plaited hair and long skirts and hennaed hands and twists of fabric in their dreadlocks. But who they were and what they thought of any of this is anyone’s guess.

  Hana is busying herself with transferring bottles from their cardboard boxes onto the trestle tables. She is just outside the French windows, and she might well be listening, but Jess doesn’t think Hana would be interested in any of this. Even so, she can’t help lowering her voice when she turns back to Eddie. ‘So, what’s your theory?’

  ‘My theory? It hasn’t changed, Jess. They got into trouble with dealers, I’m sure of that. Your father was insatiable. There was no way anyone could feed that hunger of his. She tried, of course. But it was hopeless. She was the one to negotiate with them, and she was lovely and charming and sweet. My guess is she was used to getting her way. But she was naïve. Know what I mean? She was just foolish. She made promises she couldn’t keep and that your father had no intention of keeping.’

  She bristles at that. ‘You knew him that well?’

  The change in his face is only slight, but she knows that he has seen her notice it.

  ‘What is this, some kind of cross-examination?’

  ‘Never cross-examined anyone in my life, Eddie. Boring old contracts, that’s me. You don’t blame me for asking, though, do you?’

  ‘You know I knew him. I’ve already told you.’

  ‘But didn’t like him.’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t say that. There was a bit of a frisson between us, I suppose.’ He gives the word a flourish, as though he wants her to know he’s only half serious. ‘Class war,’ he says. ‘All that.’

  He throws his head back, but she can tell there’s a grain of truth in it. And that he’s dying for a smoke. Jess doesn’t let anyone smoke in the house, so it’s a mark of Eddie’s status that she almost opens a window and tells him to go ahead. After all, what would it cost her? But she doesn’t, and he plucks a crayon from the tub she keeps for Ruby on the kitchen table. He flicks the crayon in and around his fingers.

  ‘Well, we came from different planets, didn’t we? I was a working-class boy from Nottingham.’

  ‘Just like Paul Smith,’ she says.

  ‘Not at all like Paul Smith. No talent. Just a notion I was a bit special, that’s all. Took myself off and became somebody else. Those days, there were always people passing through. Folk with hippie notions about discovering themselves. People taking time out of their lives. Full moons and weeds and roots and tie-dyes. And they would do that, quite happily, for a couple of months. And then the call of convention would come and they’d be off. Your father – he was like that.’

  ‘My father was a heroin addict.’

  ‘That’s what he became, Jess. It’s not who he really was, though. He would have ended up in yellow cords and brown suede loafers, just like the rest of that family. He was a boomerang. He wasn’t a conviction traveller.’ He says this without a hint of irony. She is amazed and somewhat disappointed. She has often wondered what version of her father she would have preferred. Not that it matters, when he’s no longer here. Not that she will ever really know what he was like now.

  She gets the feeling that Eddie is enjoying this, that it matters to him that she should have a low opinion of her father. She is becoming emotional, and she mustn’t let that happen because it skews things. She strives hard to keep the emotion in its place because she knows from experience that it will weaken her, make her less. But the tears are sitting fat on the rims of her eyes and she doesn’t know if she can keep them there. And there is still so much to do. For tonight, but not just for tonight. There is all the stuff she hasn’t done anything about yet. Ro, and all the rest of it. Meanwhile, at the office, Miles has begun to pile on the work. It seems overwhelming.

  ‘Hey hey hey,’ Eddie says, and she knows from the way he is gripping on to the side of the table that he is about to get up so he can give her a hug. But she fends him off.

  ‘No, Eddie, I need you not to do that, OK? I need you to tell me what you remember.’

  There was a time during her teens, and living in a family of women and girls, when she wished that Eddie was her real pa. She doesn’t wish that now.

  ‘About your father? About William?’

  And the way he pronounces the name – with three whole syllables – she can tell he despises even that. She fixes her father in her mind. The wild, joyful way he would carry her on his back and point out the most ridiculous things he could find. He was adventure. Until his light went out, that’s what he was. And that was good. She knows she is not adventure. There was that brief period of wildness in her late teens and early twenties. But she is certainly not adventure now. She would not want to be what he was. But she wonders at it all the same.

  ‘You say you want the truth, Jess, but you don’t. Even if I had it, you wouldn’t want to hear.’

  And right now, the only person she wants near her is Charlie. Because Charlie wouldn’t take this bullshit. Where is Charlie when she needs him to be here with her and hear the truth?

  ‘Did my father kill my mother?’

  ‘And then kill himself? That’s a brave question,’ he says. ‘And one I’m afraid I can’t answer.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened, and that’s the truth. Of course, who says it didn’t happen the other way round?’

  The thought’s occurred to her, of course, but she’s shocked to hear it said. Spoken aloud it sounds brutal, and yet there is a look of satisfaction on his face when he says it. She doesn’t know how to reply to that. All the things that spring to mind seem equally disloyal.

  She is relieved to hear Charlie’s key in the front door, the scrape of his leather soles on the hallway tiles. When he enters the kitchen, he crosses the room to kiss her.

  ‘Sixty wine, sixty highball,’ he says. ‘They’re in the boot of the car.’

  At first, he doesn’t seem to have seen Eddie. And then it’s apparent that Eddie simply wasn’t the priority.

  ‘Hey, how are you, man?’ Eddie says. As if they are old friends, not adversaries.

  ‘So, you heard the news,’ Charlie says. ‘What’s your take?’

  She can see Eddie recoiling at this. Your what? But Charlie doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘What struck me was that they bothered telling Jess. I don’t see what good it does unless they’re suggesting that—’

  ‘Nobody said that,’ says Jess. ‘They never once mentioned that she might still be alive. And anyway, it wasn’t an official visit, I don’t think. Only afterwards, I realised that one of the guys had been to see us at the time of the original investigation. I think the visit was just kindness on his part. To let me know, before I heard some other way.’ She glances up at Eddie but he isn’t reacting. He has lain back against the bench and his eyes are closed. He could be dead, or meditating, or just removing himself.

  ‘They
must think it’s significant in some way or they wouldn’t have bothered telling you about it,’ Charlie says.

  ‘I don’t buy that,’ Eddie says, which doesn’t mean much because everyone knows that Eddie would never buy anything that Charlie has to offer. With his striped suits and his shiny shoes and his unspeakable allegiances, Charlie is everything that Eddie professes to despise. They are all silent for a moment, and she can tell what the others are thinking. The single trip from Delhi to France. The fact that the passport surfaced some place Sophie Considine might well have hidden for a while, if she’d run out of options. And why did she have two passports anyway? The old name and the new, that’s odd too. She imagines Ro as a little boy, making an imaginary circle with his hands, so large it nearly toppled him over. She could be anywhere.

  The night before she married Charlie it was Eddie who had a message for her. Don’t think you have to go ahead with this. Nobody will think less of you if you decide to walk away. He had come to Auntie Rae’s house. Auntie Rae didn’t invite him in, and he stood in the porch to deliver his message, then walked back out into the rain. Jess stood there and watched him leave, slightly stooped, his shirt pulled up at the neck to shield him. She tried to process what it was he was telling her, but it made no sense. She wanted somewhere to belong, a safe haven. Someone who was certain about things. And she loved Charlie, she did.

  Whether he intended to or not, Eddie had taken the shine off the day, which had been a fine day, come to think of it. All high drifting clouds and streaked sky and whiffling showers of confetti, with champagne prickly on the tongue and the frozen-face aftermath of a battery of cameras. All that, and yet an unsettling sense that she might be making a mistake, that she might not have seen the signs she should have done.

  Even though it had its impact on the wedding day itself, she tried not to think about what Eddie had said during the three-week honeymoon they had in a small open-top car – a Fiat something – racing along stomach-clenching roads on the Amalfi coast. It was only later, the first time Charlie didn’t come home, that she remembered. And, though it didn’t make her think she ought to have done things differently, it did make her think.