The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  Opposite Charlie, sitting with his back to the window, is a man with a grey-gold ponytail. Eddie, of course. Jess and his mother are facing each other across the table. When Jess reaches across to touch his mother’s hand, Ro’s heart lurches. The gesture is casually affectionate, as if it’s no big deal to be sitting in the same room as Sophie Considine, resurrected from a Goa beach.

  How did he find himself shut out like this? When did he move to the other side of the glass, and become a danger to rough sleepers, a night-time peril? Seeing them all together, all fed and warm and nurtured, he could scream the whole city down with rage and indignation on behalf of all things forgotten.

  ‘Would you mind if we left a key with you, Jess?’ Maya is saying. ‘If you had time to pop in now and then and just check that everything looks OK, that would be great.’

  Jess finds herself examining Maya more closely than she’s ever done before. Her unlined face has a kind of otherworldly benevolence about it. It’s hard to guess her age, but sixtyish feels about right.

  ‘I’ll drop one over tomorrow, try and catch you before you leave for your weekend.’

  Maya’s silvery plait rests on her shoulder much like Sophie’s might do, if this were Sophie. There is a slight accent, something flat about the vowels, but it is scarcely there at all. Swedish? She isn’t sure. But yes, perhaps it could be Swedish.

  For a moment, Jess is tempted to be straight with Maya, to let her know how these things run with Sparrow – a mad gush of obsession and then the slow trickle of realisation that this is one more blind alley. She could suggest they get a DNA test and just knock the whole subject on the head, but it seems unnecessary, now that Eddie and she are going away, now that Ro seems to have gone. It would sound alarmist, and Eddie has already told her how it’s not good for Maya to get worked up.

  Later, when they have eaten the mushroom masala she defrosted, the dhal, Jess asks Maya straight out if she met Eddie in Goa. It comes up quite naturally in the context of travel and where they might go now, on what Eddie has taken to referring to as their ‘year abroad’.

  Maya glances at Eddie and when he doesn’t react she smiles. ‘Oh no, I didn’t meet Ed till I was well into my fifties. I moved here after my divorce, in fact. I’d been living in Devon, in a village in the middle of nowhere. I relied on friends for transport – never learned to drive myself – and then there was the impossibility of earning money. An income is hard to come by down in Devon.’ She glances at her pearly nails. ‘I’m not much of a gardener either, so I was never going to be Miss Self-Sufficiency.’

  ‘She found her place, though,’ Eddie says and squeezes Maya’s hand.

  ‘In South London. Who’d have thought?’

  ‘By the way, Eddie,’ Jess says then. ‘I’ve been given the details of a woman who was in Goa the same time as my parents. Evelyn Tuite. I wondered if you recognised the name?’

  She detects something like alarm in Eddie’s face before his attention is drawn back to Charlie, and how dhal is a completely different dish if you go to Kerala.

  Later, Eddie draws Jess aside. He seems agitated. ‘You shouldn’t do that, you know,’ he says. ‘You shouldn’t let just anyone inside your head. You have no idea what their motive might be, who they are and where they’re coming from.’

  It takes Jess a moment to realise that he’s referring to Evelyn Tuite. ‘What harm could it do? There’s nothing wrong in hearing what she has to say.’

  But Eddie is shaking his head. ‘I don’t know what her angle is, but a woman popping up out of the blue, blast from the past, she’s probably out to make mischief. God knows, she might think there’s money in it, with the press interested.’

  ‘You remember her then?’

  ‘Yes. I bloody do. I remember her all right. She’s my ex.’

  Maya puts her hand on his and pats it gently. She is watching his face closely, waiting for the moment when she can catch his gaze and hold it in hers. And when the moment comes, it seems to calm him. Jess tries again. ‘Well, to be fair—’

  ‘To be fair, Jess? To some stranger? How about a bit of fairness towards those who love you.’

  She has never heard him say love before, in any context. He has certainly not said he loved her before, and she is knocked off balance by it, she is a grown woman now, but she is still a girl without a father. Her skin, the secret one, is tender and it feels the word like a caress.

  Ro doesn’t launch himself towards the window and attempt to burrow through. He doesn’t scream the house down. Instead, he watches the silent movie and notes it all – the murky dish that resembles porridge, the sliced mango and coconut laddu – until, after the production of a bottle – a Speyside malt, no doubt, a favourite Charlie tipple – and its rejection by the guests, the show is over.

  He half considers rushing round to the other side of the house and intercepting his mother on the way out. His heart batters at the thought of Eddie’s face as he reclaims her. But he has learned restraint enough to stick to the plan. He watches the bottom floor go black. Up at the top of the house, a dim light flicks on in Jess’s room and then the window is swept dark again. On the first floor, however, the window of the room that was once Hana’s remains stubbornly lit.

  He sits down in the gravel and waits, fondling the key in his pocket, winding it through his fingers. He waits until the only sound is the occasional motorbike, the thrum of a taxi, until he comes face to face with a fox who stands and glares at him. But that first-floor light just won’t go out.

  17

  Renton is somewhere they used to go in the good old days, all velvet sofas and long walks. Jess used to love it there, they both did. She will try not to think about the cost.

  ‘We’ll switch off our phones and leave the iPads at home. Catch a glimpse of the blood moon without all this light pollution. Stand in the middle of a field and hold hands.’

  Jess can’t imagine Charlie wanting to stand in the middle of a field with her and watch a moon, even a bloody one. She can’t imagine either of them would ever have wanted that. She takes a side glance at him, but he seems perfectly serious.

  She is in the middle of feeding Ruby when an email pings into her phone. The message is peppered with references to people called Soph and Will, though she has never heard them abbreviated like that before. Evelyn Tuite has attached two images.

  The first is of Jess’s mother on a beach – young, beautiful, fey. Maybe this is the beach, it’s hard to tell in black and white, but she thinks the throw on which her mother is sitting is the same, and her heart is scraped raw by the sight of it. She has always felt that if she only had that throw, or her mother’s wicker basket perhaps, she might be able to come to terms with the reality that one moment they were there, and the next they were gone for ever. The other image is of Sophie with a man – a youngish man, perhaps in his early thirties. This one has been taken on a beach, too, but whether it’s the same beach, or even the same day, it’s impossible to say.

  The stranger on the other end of the email addresses her as if they already know one another. The chattiness is disconcerting.

  I was in Goa, same place as your parents. Can’t say it was the happiest of times, not for me anyway. You’ve seen this man before, but you probably don’t remember him. That’s Ed, my ex. He was mad keen on photography, Ed. We were going to travel the world and collect it in images. His words, not mine. In the end, we didn’t get past Goa. Arrived together, went home separately. Soph was like that. She took what she wanted. Not that she wanted Ed for long, as it happened. I still have all the old pictures he took. In fact, I have shoeboxes full of people who have nothing to do with me. It seems wrong to bin photos, I always think. I’m a bit superstitious like that. I got in touch with Bill Crowe when I read about the passport in the Daily Post. Brought it all back.

  Taking another look at the photo, she can catch a glimpse of Eddie in the smile, in the way the man holds himself, the slightly concave chest. But the hair is short and there is
no beard. He looks more conventional, somehow, and she realises how instrumental Goa must have been in shaping him. Nonetheless, Eddie looks quite handsome enough to have been her mother’s lover.

  At the bottom of the email, there is a landline number. When Jess has put Ruby down for her nap, when she has nestled her and kissed her hair and vowed never to be the kind of woman who could walk away from her child, she punches the number into her phone.

  His night in the cottage has been cold and uncomfortable. Having kept the one remaining sleeping bag for his mother, he lies curled up in a corner, well away from where he encountered the slug, with only his jacket for cover. He wakes longing for a shot of hot coffee, for something warm and comforting to eat. No one sees him elbowing his way out through the broken fencing, he is sure of that, or heading for the Costa down the road.

  He dreads to think how cold the cottage would be in winter. He sits in the rear of the Costa, his back to the door, warming his hands on the supersized mug – palm, back, palm, back – while the unseasonal hot air pumped out from under the banquette scorches his calves.

  He has the queasy sense that he needs to take her soon, before somebody finds the slug. But he still hasn’t got the drugs. He plugs Jess’s iPad in to charge and finds that the consensus on 4chan is for one unpronounceable thing, while Reddit subscribers favour another. Which, either, both? He is almost at the point of walking into the Boots next door and asking for a sudden, foolproof sleeping draught when his patience pays off. He is just approaching the final curve of his pain aux raisins when a new post appears on 4chan from someone who claims to be able to supply the perfect substance from the McDonald’s on the Old Kent Road.

  A delegation of mums arrives, heavy with prams and buggies slung with nappy bags, while he sets up the drop for later. He angles himself away from them, but, even so, he knows it’s not wise to hang around. His belly full and his plan in place, he makes his way back to the Common. He tries hard not to look towards the place where the slug is buried, but the pull he feels towards his pyre-in-waiting is irresistible. It takes him off the path, and into a thicket of saplings and barbed scrub. Soon, he finds himself standing in the clearing, right where his head has told him not to go.

  Shocked at himself for having succumbed to temptation, he shoves his hands in the pockets of his jacket and walks quickly past the spot. So far, the slug is undetectable, its resting place still latticed with twigs and tangled foliage. But there is a faint odour, he will admit; there is what Auntie Rae would have called a farmyard smell.

  As he passes the side of the cottage, the barricaded door, he looks back at the Common, its great expanse filtered now through a fringe of glittering leaves. That first stretch of open field presents a problem. Even if she proves willing to come along with him, at least at first, they will be visible from all directions. He will have to take her through the chestnut trees instead. Once he’s seen that the barricade is still in place, that the cottage is secure, he sets out to walk the route that he will have to take when he brings her back. Affecting a confidence he doesn’t feel, mindful of the old rules of invisibility, he strides towards the school, past coaches parked in the spaces reserved for them on the red route and a long trail of cars hitched up on the pavements on the Common side, mothers and nannies and Hackett dads, jabbing at their little screens.

  This will be difficult, even with his old friend the high-vis vest. But there is another worry, too. What if she doesn’t conduct herself like a mother who has walked away should do, with proper contrition and regret? What then? When he gets her to the cottage, he will have a list of questions for her. And topping the lot of them, the biggie. The one he can’t ignore.

  Mama, oh sweet Mama.

  Those nights at school when he cried so hard his pillow was salty, when he swam oceans in search of her.

  Did you ever think of me?

  You are not angry, he tells himself, and neither will she be. She is hoping you will come for her.

  He passes the bandstand café and Nefertiti is outside, wiping down the metal tables under the huge tree. Two men are playing chess at a battered board, just like in the old days, and the Ray-Bans dads are there with their helmeted kids. So much has happened since he last saw Nef.

  ‘Hey,’ she says, waving over at him though a little less enthusiastically today.

  ‘No sign of Eddie Jacques,’ he says. ‘I reckon we’ve got rid of him.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she says, scrubbing at a little scabbed stain on the corner of a table.

  ‘Only a matter of time now till I see my mum.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she says again, still not looking up at him. ‘We should have a party. Your mum, my mum, Lady Gaga and Donald Trump. Fucksake.’

  ‘No need to be so aggressive, Nef.’

  ‘Amanda. My name is Amanda, right?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘Your mum? Who are we even talking about?’

  But as he opens his mouth to answer her, she gives him a go-no-further hand. ‘Look, don’t tell me. I really don’t want to know.’

  She doesn’t give him a chance to tell her he thinks he’s found a dealer who has what he’s looking for. She just flounces off, flicking the cloth onto her shoulder and gathering glasses into a tower she carries between her hands like an offering of air. But he doesn’t need her now anyway. He will stock up on supplies at Jess’s house, and pick up the drugs this afternoon.

  A man answers, and in a parallel domestic world from Jess’s an opening door releases muffled TV voices and a clatter of plates. Evelyn Tuite lifts the phone with a rustle.

  ‘I’m glad you called,’ she says, pausing to get the name right. ‘Jessica-May.’

  ‘Jess,’ she says. ‘Jess is fine.’

  ‘Bill Crowe gave me your details. He’s a doll, isn’t he, Bill? He told me this case had never left him, the sight of you children, all alone. And I remember you two myself, little blond sweethearts, holding hands like the babes in the wood. Some people stay in your head for all the wrong reasons, though, don’t they? Bad penny always gawking up from the bottom of your bag. You know what I thought when I heard about Mags? Good riddance, that’s what I thought.’

  Jess is beginning to feel things spiral away from her. She moves into the bathroom and locks the door. She sits on the edge of the bath and concentrates hard.

  ‘You knew Mags?’

  ‘Not well. She was only there a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Mags Madden was in Goa?’

  ‘Sure. Didn’t you know? She’d been teaching English somewhere. Delhi maybe? Job came to an end. God knows, probably fired the little tart. Came to us to have a little break, that’s what she called it, not that she knew anyone there except Soph. Your mum, she really didn’t want Mags coming, though they’d known each other since they were little ones. But Mags turned up anyway. And you know what? I’m no fan of Soph’s, but Mags was a whole other nightmare. She was a right nasty piece of work. Little weasel of a thing with that real carroty red hair, slathered on the sun cream like you wouldn’t believe. Fancied your daddy something rotten. Believe me, Soph was right to be careful.’

  Jess wants it all to stop. Her first reaction is to put down the phone, but somehow she can’t bring herself to do that. Because she also wants to know it all, about her mother, about Eddie.

  ‘The day I saw the news in the paper about Mags, I had to talk to somebody about it. So I called Inspector Crowe.’

  ‘You weren’t exactly friendly with my mother, then?’ Jess asks, because it seems important to establish just how much her mother might have been hated. That she expects her mother to have been hated comes as a surprise to her, but it seems she is right.

  ‘Friendly? She was screwing my chap. What do you think? She was pretty, though, I’ll give her that. Hope for your sake you got the genes. You blonde, dear? Like your mum?’

  ‘I’m just mousy.’

  ‘She had lovely hair, I’ll say that for her. It was that silvery kind of blonde you don’t find very oft
en.’

  ‘And she sang, didn’t she,’ Jess says, keen for her mother to be more than just beautiful.

  ‘Oh she sang all right. Though there was nothing special about her singing. Nothing original, anyway. Old school, that’s what she was. She had a guitar with a braided strap, for Pete’s sake. In 1992.’ Evelyn Tuite is taking a long drag on a cigarette, and that makes Jess long for one too. The woman exhales luxuriantly. ‘She went in for that breathy style. Like one of those French singers. You know? What’s her name that was married to the tiny little politician?’

  ‘Carla Bruni.’

  ‘Yeah. Like her, can’t sing for toffee but somehow carries it off. To be honest, I thought it was a load of crap. Not that I want to speak ill of your mum, love. Really, that’s not why I’m talking to you. But it wasn’t singing, it was just sex.’

  And the way Evelyn Tuite says the word makes it sound worse than murder. Jess can’t imagine this woman on a beach in Goa. She can’t imagine her young, irresponsible. And that’s the thing. If Evelyn Tuite knows anything, if she can remember anything useful at all, perhaps that’s because she was the only one who was sober.

  ‘Jessica-May, you’ve got in touch with me because you want answers. So let me tell you what I know.’

  So there is something. Jess wants to be able to say that she knows as much as anyone could be expected to know about a mother last seen on a Goa beach twenty-five years ago, that she doesn’t need a complete stranger to tell her about her mother. But none of that is true. She is frightened, though. She isn’t sure how much truth she can stand.

  ‘Inspector Crowe,’ Jess says, ‘Bill, I’m sure he’ll have passed on anything you told him, but thanks anyway.’ And right then, she almost puts down the phone.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t told Bill any of this personal stuff,’ Evelyn says. ‘It’s none of his business. But I’m telling you now, love. Your mum was a hard nut. She didn’t need to take my Ed, but she did. Shame, really.’