The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It was going to be too disruptive. And so, we, I, we thought—’

  ‘You brought back Hana.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly like that.’

  ‘You’re a shit, Charlie. You know that? You make me sick.’

  She hangs up on him, and discharges herself, which really just amounts to saying that she’s leaving. She doesn’t wait for the doctor. She doesn’t know what she would say.

  Stepping into the Uber, she feels like one of those friendless elderly women who wait forlornly for a minicab in the Sainsbury’s car park, clutching at bunches of orange plastic bags. She spends the trip home examining the balding head of the cabby because it is easier to concentrate on that head than to let herself worry about Ruby.

  Crossing the bridge, the tower they have spent an eternity constructing has acquired several storeys of windows since she was last over this way, while the wrapped power station has lost two of its chimneys for reconstruction. The taxi whispers along the wet streets until they are passing all the places she knows by heart – the plastic Costa, the dry-cleaner’s with the smiling Cypriot couple, the Japanese restaurant, its Korean neighbour, Ruby’s nursery, the Common.

  Arriving at Riverton Street, she feels the first stirrings of alarm as the real world, the one she needs to do something about, reasserts itself. And then she sees them, right outside her house – the journalist from the other day, and Hana. Despite the rain, Hana is wearing a pair of tight white jeans that almost match her hair. The journalist is holding a yellow umbrella high above her so that the street light turns golden as it floods her face. She is an exclamation mark. She is trouble. Jess feels a jag of panic at the thought of coming face-to-face with both Hana and the journalist. She plays for time.

  ‘Go round the block,’ Jess tells the driver.

  ‘This is the address,’ he says, and brakes, sending a knife of pain between her ribs.

  He glares at her in the rear-view mirror, and she tries to recover her composure, taking small sips of breath. ‘No sweat,’ she says. ‘I’ll pay.’

  She eases herself back in the seat, and the car lurches towards the edge of the Common where thick foliage crests against the skyline like an inky wave. She directs him along the cut-through and past the derelict changing-room block with its battened roof, past the scrub where a lone man sits on the trunk of a felled tree, past the empty playground. She tells the driver to stop.

  ‘What, here?’ He looks suspicious, then wary. He winds down the window, as if he needs to assert himself by doing something she hasn’t instructed.

  He turns on the radio. There are tailbacks on the M4, which couldn’t matter less to her right now. She scans the messages on her phone, but there’s nothing new from Charlie or Ro, or anyone but Martha, who says she’s stocked the fridge with breakfast things. And welcome home, by the way. She dials Martha’s number, and tries to stay calm.

  ‘Why did you let Charlie get Hana back?’

  Martha seems to be having difficulty remembering who Hana is. ‘Hi, Jess. You OK?’

  She tries it from a different angle. ‘Were you not able to have Ruby in the end?’

  ‘Hana? You mean the old nanny? The one who left?’

  ‘The one I sacked.’

  ‘Oh.’

  For the first time, she wonders if she is the kind of person that people feel they have to humour, if she has something in her that is like Sparrow. The thought appals her.

  For a moment, Martha is silent. When she speaks, she is circumspect, evidently feeling her way.

  ‘I did offer. I’d hate you to think I didn’t offer. But Charlie said he had it covered.’ She sounds like she is keen to get off the phone now. ‘I’m sorry, Jess. Of course I’d have looked after Ruby. You’ll have Charlie back tomorrow anyway, I hear, so things can start to get back to normal.’

  Jess doesn’t know what to feel about that. And she doesn’t know what to say to Martha, who is kind, of course. Entirely without suspicion, and kind. She tries to soften her tone. But all she can think about is the reality of Hana taking care of Ruby, with axes to grind.

  She leans forward to speak to the driver. ‘Back to Riverton Street now, please.’

  She gets him to stop at the other end of the street. When he cottons on that she’s struggling to push the door open, he steps out to help her, so keen to get rid of her he practically lifts her out of the back seat.

  As she walks towards the house, she finds herself hobbling a little, her arm pressed tight against her ribs to hold herself in place. No sooner has she reached the house two doors away from her own than she is seen. When the reporter realises who she is, his attention shifts, sudden as snow. Hana is left open-mouthed, like a cartoon-strip heroine, as the streetlit rain drizzles down on her.

  Ignoring them both, Jess pushes open the gate. On the other side of the door the house feels overwarm and muggy. She pushes down the snib and leans back against the door, leaving Hana outside. She flicks the light switch, but the bulb has blown. The air is heavy with the sharp, sour tang of mouldering nappies. All she wants now is Ruby, to have her child’s soft plump limbs around her, to stroke Ruby’s velvet skin. But the odour of neglect makes her anxious. The dark, the silence. She stands perfectly still, and listens. From the very top of the house comes a long thin wailing, an old cry that has almost exhausted itself. Ruby.

  Slowly, painfully, Jess drags herself upstairs to where Ruby is standing in her cot, her sobs hiccoughing in her chest, her face red with fisted-in tears. She cries even harder to see Jess, as if she is summoning up her last reserves of strength to keep her mother there. When she takes Ruby in her arms, the child’s cries heave up from somewhere Jess recognises: the place of abandonment, somewhere no one should ever have to visit.

  They gaze into one another’s eyes – mother and child – and there is a moment of perfect joy. So overwhelming is that love that she is more certain than ever that Sophie would never have walked away from her children, not for all the pleasures of Goa. She is sure now that her mother is dead.

  When Ruby is fed and changed, she curls up against Jess. They lie together on the huge white bed. And this is love. From downstairs, the twee game-show chime of the doorbell. Hana. Chee chung, chee chung, on and on and on. Finally, the doorbell stops ringing and Jess, still clinging to Ruby, closes her eyes and luxuriates in the silence. Her anger starts to melt away, until there is nothing else but the soft skin of Ruby’s cheek against her own, the melding of their breath, slow and calm.

  But it’s as if her fury has left behind an odour. Once she notices the smell, sweet and rotten, it clogs her nostrils until she is almost unable to breathe. She untangles herself from Ruby, and switches on the bedside light. On the dressing table, there is a bouquet of dying lilies. Not a bouquet exactly, more a cluster of plastic-wrapped cones. Right away, she realises that these are the same flowers that she abandoned outside the back door. Charlie’s flowers. The thick white petals are shrunken now, their edges brownish, and the stems are sappy and weak. She has always hated lilies, and inside the house they have putrefied, their pollen scattered over her dressing table like powdered spice.

  She imagines Hana retrieving them from outside the back door, leaving them there for her return. Furious now, she grabs them by their necks, and whisks them from the vase. Opening the window, she flings them out into the night. Someone, in the morning probably, will see a dozen mangled flowers strewn across the gravel and wonder why. Unless that person is Hana, still loitering down there in the front garden, who has probably already seen them, and will know.

  Ro catches the stink as soon as he opens the door of the cottage. He gets the air freshener he took from Jess’s bathroom and sprays it round the place in great hissing arcs. White lavender is what it says on the tin, but the place still smells of shit. Someone has been smoking in here, and his mother doesn’t like smoke. He’s seen her flap her hand in front of her face whenever Eddie lights up.

  As his eyes
acclimatise, he can just about decipher a shape in the opposite corner of the room. A roll of roofing felt, perhaps. He moves closer, and sees it’s softer and less evenly contoured, more like a gigantic slug. The nearer he gets, the more certain he becomes that beneath the stillness there is movement. Pump of heart and rasp of lung and surge of blood, and a brain that might be tick tick ticking its next move any moment now.

  When the rain begins, it’s like being inside a drum pelted with gravel. He can’t blame the slug for not wanting to be outside in that. He gets it, the need for shelter. But to use his mother’s sleeping bag, to steal the soft pink and green blanket. And when the creature stirs, when it lifts its head, it doesn’t have an apology to offer. Oh no. It goes on the offensive instead. It starts mouthing off, though it’s impossible to hear exactly what the mouth is saying, with all that gravel overhead. And though the creature on the floor is fumbling at the sleeping bag, though it is trying to find the zipper, though it is shuffling off towards the wooden hatch in the brickwork, Ro gets there first.

  And even if that creature were willing to repair the wrong it’s done, even if it were able to stand on its hind legs like a man, it has still ruined things by coming here at all. When Ro lifts the hammer, this could be the moment he discovers that the slug is so much stronger than it looks. But it has tangled itself up in quilted nylon, and when the first blow comes it hasn’t got an answer.

  Ro has already decided this can’t be a token matter. With the creature almost on its feet, having slithered halfway out of the sleeping bag, he’s going to have to finish it off. But when he brings the hammer down again, the creature stops, turns slightly, then falls. Nothing’s certain. It might be over, but only time can tell. All he can do is wait.

  Ro’s heart is pulsing in his throat now. He takes pot luck with the hip flasks. Eeny, meeny, miny, gin. It tastes rank, but it blunts the edges. He keeps his eyes on the slug. In movies, he’s seen them check a pulse in the neck, but the thought revolts him. He’s hardly noticed that the rain has stopped when it starts again. And the slug doesn’t stir. It’s dark now, and the night is surprisingly cold for the time of year.

  Even if it’s dead, Ro knows the slug will come for him, just as Mags Madden sometimes does, with her sour breath and that papery rustling inside his ear that’s just a notch too low. He waits on another half-hour or so before approaching it. He stays as still as he can, so that if there is breath to be heard, he will hear it. Then he gets to his feet and walks over there. He peers down, and can see now that it is a man, more or less. When he touches the man’s brow, it is not marble yet. Not even nearly. But the fight is over and Ro is empty because there is a body now, and a body very quickly becomes an even bigger problem than a slug.

  He will have to find a way to drag the dead slug out into the undergrowth. It is still tangled in the sleeping bag, and pulling the bag back up around its torso is no easy matter. And all the time, he is focused on the other slugs who must be out there somewhere and who may sense that one of their number is missing.

  To cover the damage to the skull he ties on a cushion he brought to the cottage to cradle his mother’s head. What if he were to leave the slug out there, in the small, enclosed patch of grass? How long would it take for feral things to come and eat it? How long till he’d be driven mad by knowing it was there? And what about the stink of it?

  There is no option. If he wants to use the cottage, he will have to get rid of the slug. He tugs at it and starts to ease the body towards the door. It is hard work, and the gin is wearing off now. Outside, the dark is thinning and the birds are going wild.

  There is a high gate set into the fence at the side of the garden that backs on to the wooded area where men have always gone for sex. Does anyone still go there these days, when you can grind away wherever you like? He takes a chance that they might, that the haters might still be cruising too, that there is always someone handy with a hammer lurking in a place like this.

  He prises back the bolts on the high gate, and jerks it open. Birds flounce up and out of the clearing, at the centre of which a fallen tree lies like an invitation surrounded by tissues and used condoms. The birds turn up the volume somewhere out of sight, and he wonders then what else is out of sight, if there are cameras, hidden eyes, what time the dog walkers arrive.

  At the far end of the clearing, there is a tangle of old cuttings, sharp criss-crossings of this and that. It’s an imperfect solution, but he can’t think of a better one. He can’t think at all. Better to leave it in the open, uncushioned and debagged, and hope to pass it off as someone else’s victim? He doesn’t think so. His instinct is to conceal.

  He drags the slug, still in the greenish sleeping bag, still with its pinkish-cotton head shedding feathers on the wet leaves. He drags it over to the pile of cuttings and branches and undergrowth and starts to make a nest for it. But time is thinning with the dark, and the first hints of light are in the sky. Panic assails him as he scrabbles at twigs and bracken, young green and old brown. He looks for fallen branches that might form a barricade against an inquisitive terrier, for a while at least. Because they will be here soon, the dog walkers, he is sure of that.

  He arranges the heavier branches like a wooden casket around the body, then lattices the lighter vegetation on top. He takes a risk when he chooses to reinforce the structure with some planks from the cottage, but without them a large dog would have the body free in no time. Finally, he criss-crosses the entire construction with birch twigs until it looks as if it’s always been there, in among the flitters of wildflowers. By now, he is exhausted and covered in burrs and brambles. He seems to be slug-free, but he feels as if he’s sloshed around for hours in the black gunk of a nightclub floor. He needs coffee, carbs, sleep. He needs Nefertiti.

  He can scarcely recall where exactly it was that Nefertiti lived. But he thinks he will know it by feel if he just starts off in the right direction. As far as he remembers, it was a red-brick barracks of a block with a railing extending right the way along in front. One street from the Common, he reaches the first of a series of similar estates. He turns in at the gate and stops at the corner of a building whose stained concrete staircase disappears in a dog-leg. He examines himself in a convex security mirror. He has become a fairground attraction, warped, more dirt than blood. There is surprisingly little blood.

  But even so, he smells like a butcher’s shop, a metal tray of meat. And he can feel Mags Madden at his back, pinching the soft skin on the inside of his arm, whispering at him. Jess. Jess. Jess.

  He walks along a row of doors, all painted a peculiar green that might be Kelly or Shamrock or even Curramona. The doors have numbers, and he thinks she was a 40-something but she can’t have been because the numbers run out at 33. Someone passes, a woman with a shopper and a beanie. But she doesn’t even glance at him. Number 29 opens and a man sticks his head out, then pulls it right back in again. Ro is lost now. He is lost and dirty and there must be DNA and evidence spidering out all over him. He leaves the estate past the metal bins and the abandoned skeleton of a racing bike, and keeps on walking.

  He walks until he’s far away from the Common, until he’s in the next manor, more or less, where there is a Tube station and a row of early-morning caffs and a pool. He’s surprised to find a pool in operation when they’ve closed down all the libraries. But there it is – a brown-brick monolith – and the smell of chlorine is the smell of redemption. The girl on reception, on early shift, scarcely looks at him when he passes across his fiver and exchanges it for a fat blue rubber band to put around his wrist.

  He undresses to his underpants and wades through the footbath disinfectant to a kind of ante-room by the side of the pool where there are push-button showers and plastic bottles of bright yellow multi-purpose soap. Later in the day there might be a gaggle of schoolkids in regulation blue twittering past him, a regulation teacher, but at this hour of the morning there is only the lone swimmer he hears ploughing back and forth on the other side of the d
ivide. The water is hot and he pounds the button on the wall to keep it coming until the images in his head are only shadows of what they were. Air-drying in the tiny changing cubicle, he discards his hoody, shoving it into one of the plastic bins, but his blue shirt looks fine, respectable even. His hair could still do with a trim, but his face is clean. He looks innocent and, in this world away from slugs and pyres, perhaps he is.

  In a caff on the other side of the street he drinks coffee with sweet cream, and the ordinary world settles back around him. He can’t risk going back to the house because Jess will force him to speak to the police as soon as she knows he’s still around. Besides, the cottage is the thing. He needs to repair the rotten hatch in the wall, and block off the door that’s unsecured now. And then he remembers the efficacy of a high-vis jerkin. And the bandstand, with all the materials required to build a barricade.

  16

  Jess isn’t aware of having slept, but there is a moment when morning arrives all at once with a sense of pressing newness – the smell of toast, the burble and grind of a faraway coffee machine, the clean Common light. Ro, Charlie, Hana. There is no one emotion tagged to each of these people. Her feelings fluctuate between rage and anxiety, inexplicable guilt and fearful apprehension, and, in the case of Ro and Charlie, love. When she remembers Ruby, alone in the dark house, she pulls the sleeping child towards her. From downstairs, a declamatory Today programme voice is the clue that Charlie is back. She doesn’t know yet how she feels about that.

  Her gaze drifts out towards the Common and the sky above, its scudding clouds reflected in the huge mirror it took three men to hang. Out there, people are doing what they always do. Stretching, jogging, being pulled along by dogs or by the magnet of a ball. The door edges open, and Charlie has brought her coffee, hot milk on the side. But the toast she smelled earlier is cold now, the butter sunk deep into it, and the paprika sprinkled on the smashed avocado reminds her of the lilies she is trying to forget. He puts the tray down next to her on the blue bedside table, then takes her in his arms, a little too tightly.