The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  It seems like no time at all has passed when Hana’s bags thump down onto the hall floor. Jess straps Ruby into her high chair in the kitchen so she doesn’t have to witness any histrionics. But Hana is perfectly calm, offhand almost. Her house keys in her hand, she picks at the chain in a fruitless attempt to remove the pink diamantē key ring then tosses them towards the glass jar on the radiator. She misses, and the keys clank onto the floor. Hana and Jess both look down at them, pink sparkles glinting under the halogen, but neither bends to pick them up.

  Meanwhile, a slow wail is spiralling up out of the kitchen. By the time Jess has reached Ruby, the crying has taken hold. And as the front door closes on Hana, Jess feels herself begin to crumble.

  Ro has sobered up. He is lying on the sofa in the drawing room watching a programme in which a nerdish couple are being shown around a converted barn in France. The ashtray has disappeared, but the place still smells of smoke so she sets the extractor fan in the kitchen to run full blast. With all the shutters closed, and the TV beaming out sunshine and vineyards and warm stone, it is almost possible to forget the hostages to fortune closing in around them. She gets between Ro and the screen, and clicks the TV off.

  ‘Were you in Ireland before you came here?’

  ‘I think you asked me that already,’ he says. ‘The answer hasn’t changed.’

  ‘Can you remind me what the answer was? Because I don’t think you gave one.’

  ‘I can’t believe you even need to ask me that.’

  ‘A woman is dead, Ro.’

  ‘Women die every day. Men, too.’

  ‘But the police want to talk to you.’ Her voice weakens, as if her breath is no longer strong enough to power it. He gets up from the sofa and walks out into the hallway.

  ‘Because a woman died? We’ve all got to go sometime.’

  She follows him. How come she failed to notice this hardening in him? It terrifies her. ‘What are you even talking about, Ro? This is mad.’

  He turns and strikes a pose he often adopts when under attack, feet slightly turned in, arms hanging out from his sides. It makes him look vulnerable, too easy a target for the inevitable victory to be worthwhile. But she doesn’t let that stop her, not this time.

  ‘There’s a man called Crowe. A policeman. He’s from before, from when we came back from Goa. He was keen on football.’

  ‘So were you.’

  ‘He used to try to get you to play. Maybe you don’t remember.’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t remember.’

  ‘Will you talk to him? If I make the call perhaps?’

  ‘Why does everyone always want to talk?’

  ‘It’s a simple matter. You’ve nothing to hide – so just tell him that.’ But even as she’s uttering them, the words sound weak, unconvincing. She realises then that she is starting to doubt, and doubt is not who she is. She is certainty and clear purpose. And so she tries again.

  ‘Where were you anyway, before you came here?’

  He looks her in the eye, and for a moment she thinks he might be about to answer, but instead he shrugs and picks at the paintwork on the banisters with a fingernail.

  ‘You’re going to have to leave, Ro. I can’t just hide you here. I can’t just pretend. I mean, twenty people, maybe more, must have seen you at the party. If I keep having to lie on your behalf, we’ll …’

  He walks around her and out the front door, but he will have left his yellow backpack here, and she’s pretty sure he’s still got the key he never returned the last time – that horrible row, the plates, the screaming that stayed with her for weeks.

  This time she’s glad he’s gone. But it doesn’t bring her any relief, because she is full of apprehension for what he might have done. Her lost little brother. There are tears in her eyes when she thinks of that, the awful waste of it.

  Outside, rain has begun pelting the gravel. He has always hated rain, and she allows herself the fantasy that he will be back, that he will see sense, that there could still be some innocent explanation for this belligerence of his. Two people banished in an hour, she is drained by that. She pictures Hana, sheltering under the tarp-covered bandstand, looking out onto the harsh lamps that now edge the paths through the Common. What kind of woman just casts her employee out on the street? She didn’t even offer to pay Hana for the days she’d worked that week. She didn’t even ask if she had her fare home to Brazil. Scrolling down the numbers on her phone, her finger hovers over Hana Mob. But then she remembers the party, the back gate. She remembers the two heads that seemed joined together in a kiss, and then she puts the phone away.

  Upstairs, she reads to Ruby with the lights low. By the fourth reading or the fifth, Ruby is asleep. Jess is hungry. She is hungry and disorientated. She doesn’t know how the days pan out when you don’t have work to go to. She has no idea when Charlie will return, or how long they can last with just his salary, which is much less than it used to be, although they’ve never discussed that fact.

  When she goes downstairs to make herself some cheese on toast, she notices a smell of curry from a ready meal Ro must have eaten earlier. She swipes a gloop of bright orange sauce off the work surface, and deposits the black plastic container in the bin. When she realises that all the bottles have been collected and packed into a recycling bag, the ashtrays emptied, she feels a momentary pang of guilt for pushing him away.

  They used to talk about all kinds of things. He has travelled a lot, and so long as it’s possible to get him off the subject of, well, off the subject, he is surprisingly well informed. He has certain obsessions, of course, and they are not always, or maybe ever, her obsessions. He knows the cast of every Hitchcock film off by heart, for instance, though she has no idea what started him on that tack. She isn’t a list person herself, but it can feel like a kind of anchor, this mastery of fact, when reality is so difficult a thing to grasp.

  But Ro doesn’t reappear. To fill the silence, she sits watching the ten o’clock news on the TV she scarcely knows how to use. Now and then, a car swishes along the rainy street outside. She feels ill at ease in her own house, though she doesn’t doubt that it’s secure. Soon after they moved in, the local bobby made what he called an awareness visit. He arrived in full dress, complete with squawking radio, to explain that it was sensible to have gravel out front instead of grass (so that an approaching intruder could be heard), that she should get rid of the hedge outside that front window (so there would be no place to hide), that an alarm is worthwhile, but no guarantee, that keys must require ID for cutting, and so on. By the time he left, she was exhausted, bombarded by all this new potential for disaster.

  Just for a moment, she wonders if ignorance is bliss. After all, disaster doesn’t always hit. She has plenty of friends who lead charmed lives. Hana’s sparkly keys are in the jar on the radiator cover. Jess might have lent her another spare set, but she can’t remember. She should know for sure how many sets of keys there are for the house, but she doesn’t.

  The day has sucked the energy from her. Upstairs, she closes the plantation shutters and the heavy drapes and lies down on the bed. It’s a comfortable room, and she feels safe here. The rug, an abstract design in cream and black, is soft underfoot, and the bed is piled with Hungarian goose down topped with a throw whose weight makes her feel secure and whose faux-fur texture reminds her of a beloved teddy bear, long before the beach. Just as she feels herself relax, she has an image of Hana, crouched on the other side of the garden wall in the cold and dark, being pelted by rain. It is a vision straight out of Thomas Hardy. Even though she tells herself that Hana isn’t the kind of person to find herself washed up against a wall, the image doesn’t fade. And then an alternative anxiety develops – Hana, in secret occupation of the cellar, awaiting Charlie’s return. She is half listening to Book at Bedtime, a gentle story about a family of girls in wartime Cornwall, when the bedside radio switches itself off. She is left alone in the suspended quiet of her padded room and soon she is asleep.


  Later, she wakes. Or rather, something wakes her. She starts, sits up, pulls the covers to her throat. The sound is coming from downstairs, and her first thought is that at least whoever is down there is nowhere near Ruby. She doesn’t move, not at first, but she listens hard, straining to hear beyond the dull thud of her own blood in her ears. There is the faint, hollow noise of feet on the cellar stairs, a clatter of something, a slow dragging sound. This is her house, and yet she doesn’t have the courage to challenge whoever might be down there. As for her mobile, she left it in the kitchen to charge. She closes her eyes and prays to the darkness behind them that whoever it is leaves soon, that he doesn’t mount the stairs.

  Just then, she hears the bifold doors into the garden open and then shut again. Hauling herself out of bed and over to the window, she pushes aside the drapes and opens the shutters and is just in time to see Ro leave the back garden, Charlie’s rucksack on his back. Relief washes over her, but she is furious with him too. He doesn’t shut the gate, and that infuriates her even more. She knocks on the window, but he doesn’t turn. He is walking with that strange gait he’s had ever since he was a child – stiff, upright, slightly robotic, with his hands held a little way out to the sides. It looks more tentative than it is, that gait of his. He is not the willow he seems. He is used to getting what he wants when people have given up trying to stop him getting it. She knocks again, harder this time, then slides the window up.

  ‘Sparrow!’

  But he doesn’t seem to hear her, and she realises then that he has probably got his earphones in. Her eyes are tired now, but she’s determined not to lose track of him. The path he’s following is a diagonal that leads in the direction of the copse of trees, almost a wood, that scratches up against the cut-through, close to where the burger van is parked. She is afraid of woods. She has never ceased to fear that big bad wolf. But that isn’t where he’s heading. He stops and seems to look back at the house, and then he steps off the path and out of the light. It’s only then that she realises Ro isn’t alone.

  The fact that there is someone with him slides into her heart like a chip of ice. How Hana would relish stoking his paranoia, feeding his fantasies. She runs down the stairs, slides her feet into her shoes and crunches out across the gravel of the back garden towards the open gate. There is a man on the bench out there, playing with his phone. He looks up when he sees her, and his thin face is lit by the electronic glow. She attempts to put a foot out onto the grass. What is the Common, after all, except an oversized garden? But she finds that she has become too afraid of such places. Besides, Ruby is alone in the house, and so she steps back inside her garden walls and shuts the gate.

  13

  The wet grass squeaks underfoot. By the time Ro and Nefertiti reach the cut-through, Ro’s Converse are soaked and his toes feel gritty and cold. Eddie’s van is parked a little way from the bright lights of the burger hut and the oniony smell of fried fat, but still too close to the idling cop cars for comfort.

  ‘Fuck that,’ says Nefertiti. ‘We’ll just have to wait it out.’

  He takes the swigs she offers from a naggin of vodka. When he lowers his backpack carefully to the ground, she starts to giggle.

  ‘What you got in there?’ she asks. ‘You look like a commando.’

  Nefertiti’s attention switches back to the cops, who don’t seem to be in any hurry, over there by the duck pond, while she is wound as tight as her dreads. As the alcohol starts to singe his veins, Ro feels himself begin to change until he has become more than he was – vigilante, avenger, renegade. But the feeling doesn’t last and, when the fat cops are still there a half-hour later, he grows bored. Their crackling radios disturb clusters of birds that whip up out of the high greenery and off into the night, and he wishes he could fly off with them. He’s on the verge of going over there and getting a cheeseburger for himself, but she tells him not to be daft, that they have to stay incognito. It must be pub closing time before each of the three cop cars heads away from the cut-through.

  ‘No breaking windows or fucking up the engine. We’re delivering a message,’ Nefertiti says. ‘Keeping it dignified, yeah?’ When she closes her eyes, she looks as if she’s praying, and her black eyeliner has soaked into little black rays like cat’s whiskers. He can see this escapade means a lot to her, though she swears blind it isn’t personal.

  ‘My own creepo fucking weirdo went to Australia,’ she says. ‘Nothing to do with him.’

  Ro stands there, just looking at her, until her eyes flash open.

  ‘Well, OK then,’ she says. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  Nefertiti goes for it. Soon, she is doing it to the max, a spray can of acid yellow paint in each hand. She has left the bangles at home for reasons of stealth and, as they stride out together, he feels proud to have a project and an ally. Once he gets the hang of it, he starts to enjoy himself, spraying a bright yellow cock and balls on the bonnet of the van, and another one on the boot. He can see how this spray-can lark could get addictive. It makes him feel high, and he tells her that. Nefertiti laughs. ‘Just don’t inhale,’ she says.

  This daring, this breaking of boundaries, he’d forgotten he had the capacity for it. But then he thinks of the girl from the café, the one in the pink jumper, and how perfectly he judged the moment it made sense to let her go. It’s all about keeping your head. He wishes he’d kept his head with Mags Madden. Losing the rag meant never finding out what it was she had to say. He looks back at the house, where Jess’s light is still on. He feels sorry for her – always trying to shut things out, while he’s discovering how exhilarating it is to let things in, to chase possibility all the way to the end of the line.

  It thrills him to imagine Eddie arriving at his van tomorrow morning. Whistling, most likely, and fiddling with his ponytail. Ro pictures Eddie at the moment of realisation, when it’s all about getting that van away as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. Paedo, Nef is spraying. Paedo, paedo, peado. She spells it right twice and wrong once and that annoys the shit out of him, but he says nothing. So what, if it gets Eddie out of the way? He is thinking about the next stage, about the cottage he can just about glimpse out of the corner of his eye, about the small haul he has for it from Jess’s house (to add to the stocks he’s already put in there), when Nefertiti reaches into the pocket of her jacket and draws out a stubby little steampunk knife. She was the one to set the limits of violent conduct, yet here she is, jabbing at the tyres with her little goth knife. It takes a surprising amount of effort to prod a hiss out of one of those tyres. The passion she displays is exhilarating, but he hasn’t agreed to take this as far as tyre-slashing, so when the wounded van starts leaking air he tells her, no offence but he’s off.

  ‘Let me walk you to the main road,’ he says, while she’s still down on her knees wrecking the tyre. ‘Before the cops are back for their chips.’

  ‘You backing out then?’ She gets to her feet and draws some posters out of a plastic sleeve. ‘Here,’ she says, handing him a roll of gaffer tape. ‘Trees, lamp posts, whatever.’

  He does the first six or seven, but the surfaces are soggy, so there’s no guarantee they’ll stay in place till morning. She’s casting around her like some comic-book villain. ‘We’d better split,’ she says. ‘You coming my way or not?’

  ‘Not,’ he says. ‘But I’ll walk you all the way to the bright lights.’

  ‘OK then,’ she says. ‘I’m fine once I have the lights.’

  He leaves her on the South Side, at the bus stop with the big, bright shelter, and then he doubles back onto the Common.

  There must have been a match earlier. Clods of earth still litter the concreted area in front of the changing rooms, though the rain has turned them into mulch. He looks around to check that no one’s watching. To the right, the broad road that skirts the Common like a gyratory around an oversized field is busy even after midnight with cars and buses and throaty black cabs hissing through the surface water. All around him, the branches are
weighed down and sagging, and up in the higher foliage the occasional bird is still cheeping wildly.

  He stops dead a moment when he spots a group of men walking steadily towards him, four abreast, their string bags slung up over their shoulders. He steps off the path, and they don’t even look in his direction. Another couple of men overtake him from the opposite direction. They head for the undergrowth. And in that moment, with all this night-time activity taking place around him, he has a perspective on where he is and on the place that he’s about to explore. He considers the copse of trees like a location. Let’s call it woods, but not really. Let’s think of him as babe in the woods, but not actually. Let’s pretend this is a challenge, a task, a talent to be rescued. But no, this is his entire raison d’être. It’s the day he’s been waiting for. All his life, he has been awaiting the return of his mother while the father whose body was discovered in the trees was scarcely given a second thought. So much for fathers.

  As he stands there, contemplating the hole in the fence, there is a moment when he could draw back from this. And he does consider consequences. Or at least he considers them as far as he can trace them, which is not that far. He looks at the fence and wonders if the hole has got bigger, if there might be competition for this hideout in plain sight. He has no home, equipped with all the homely things, though he held on to the flat for a while. His heart has roamed too widely to allow him to stake his claim to a single set of walls. He has found most of his requirements in Jess’s kitchen, in her cellar, in the neat blue shed in the back garden. He has brought steel wool to stuff into any holes made by rodents, a sleeping bag, a soft pink and green throw he found in Jess’s dining room. As for food, it’s not as if they’re in a wilderness. There’s a Tesco Metro just down the road. He will feed her sandwiches and fruit and chocolate. He will bring her hot tea in a Thermos. His eyes smart to think of it. Once he’s close enough to listen to her pulse, the bloom of blood around her veins, he will know if she’s telling him the truth. And he won’t berate her. He will be gentle. He will invite her back into his life as if she’s barely grazed him.