Once, just once, I tried to get the three of us back together again.
“Do me a favour?” I asked them when they were standing in the kitchen waiting for the Chinese carry-out to reheat in the microwave. Marco clearly wasn’t in a cooking mood. I held out a sheet of paper and a black marker to each of them. “Take this and draw me a house, a tree, and a person.”
“Mu-um,” said Angelo.
“What?” Marco said.
“It’s for work. I want some examples to show the patients that might have trouble with it. Come on, ten minutes, eh? I’ll dish the food up when it’s ready.”
“Don’t give me any mushrooms,” said Angelo as he threw himself down into one end of the couch.
Marco took the other end and uncapped the pen, then stared back at me through the open kitchen door. “Examples,” he said. “Not a test?”
“A test of what?” I asked him.
I couldn’t resist watching over their shoulders as they worked. Marco drew our house, our old house, as detailed as the elevation we’d pored over when it was being built, double-garage and all. He drew a Christmas tree covered in decorations, baubles filled in with black except for a bit left white to look like a highlight, and endless interlocking circles for the paper chains we used to make when Angel was tiny. The person he drew was me: hair scraped up in a ponytail like for work and dressed in my short-sleeved tunic and my flat, comfy shoes. I ruffled his hair then turned to check on Angelo.
He had drawn a child’s house, four windows and a smoking chimney, an apple tree in the garden, heavy with fruit, and under it, a baby. Swaddled up into a little lozenge with its eyes shut and its lashes sweeping its cheeks, it was cuddled into the roots of the tree.
“Cheat!” said Marco. “Draw another one with hands and feet, you lazy git!”
“That’s fine, Angel,” I said. “Don’t listen to him.” I twitched both sheets away and rolled them up.
“If you did that in likes of Afghanistan,” Angel said, “would you just get those big blue blobs? What are they called?”
“Burkhas?” I said. “I suppose so.”
“You wouldn’t do it there,” Marco said. “You’re not allowed pictures of people. It’s against their religion.”
“Why?” Angel said. “What harm does it do?”
“Same as eating a steak on a Friday,” said Marco. “Zero.”
Then the microwave pinged and, as if it signaled the end of a game, the moment of closeness was over. Angel took his plate to his room. Marco turned the volume up on three angry pundits arguing strategy, and I ate standing up in the kitchen, both the drawings spread before me, wondering. Maybe it wasn’t a swaddled baby at all? Maybe it was supposed to be a mummy in bandages. Maybe he was thinking of the long-dead monks over the road, buried among the tree roots, wrapped in their winding sheets. But I had told them it wasn’t a test, so I could hardly start poking around asking questions.
We made it to the shore of Monday morning somehow. At seven o’clock, Marco and I were doing our usual dance, reaching past the other on the landing to get our clothes out, skirting round each other to get dressed in the one spot in the bedroom you could stand upright at the bottom of the bed, then we were bumping into each other in the kitchen where you couldn’t open the fridge all the way if someone was bending over the grill to see how the toast was doing. It never occurred to me when we lived in our own house that some of our ease and affection was because we could all get away from each another. I didn’t want to face what that might mean.
When the bell rang, I wondered if Lars had come early and I felt myself flush. I hadn’t mentioned him yet. I told myself Marco—burly, handsome Marco with his great smile and his great hair—wouldn’t think Lars was worth mentioning. So why was I blushing, I asked myself. I went to the door to distract myself from the answer.
It was the police. The same sergeant with a different WPC, just as eager as the last one to show her boss she wasn’t soft. She looked at me as if I’d come in on her shoe.
“It’s just too much of a coincidence, you see, Mrs. McGovern,” the sergeant said, once he was inside, settling himself. “Your lad. He hangs out at the Abbey every night after school, fair weather or foul. But he doesn’t tell you anything about the body. But the report comes from his phone. But he says it’s been stolen. But he hasn’t told you that either. You see the problem, don’t you?”
“I see a lot of but on show,” I said. What was wrong with me? It was stupid to piss off an overweight cop. And it was probably Marco I was angry with really, because for some insane reason, he had gone and blabbed to the cops that the stolen phone was news to us. Maybe he had even confirmed the neighbour’s muckraking about where Angelo hung out too.
Then the rest of the sergeant’s words sank in and I came back from inside the cloud of rage and dread and really looked at him.
“Doesn’t tell us anything about the body?” I echoed. “Likes of what? Is that right enough what they’re saying about the flood washing it up then? Was it visible?”
The sergeant stared back blankly. Too blankly. He had slipped up and given me information he hadn’t meant to. The young girl at his side raised an eyebrow with perfect cool disdain. She didn’t respect this guy, even though she sucked up to him.
“So here we are back to talk to him again,” the sergeant said. “Last chance, I think, before we take him in. We can’t be having this, see?”
“He’s not here,” I said. I wasn’t lying. Or not exactly. I had got up a bit late and I hadn’t looked in his room. If push came to shove, I could say I was mistaken.
“Ali,” said Marco, a warning note in his voice.
“Away to school already?” the sergeant said. “It’s early, surely?”
“Not that early,” Marco said. “In fact, I need to be getting going, if that’s okay.”
The young girl turned her head a little, intrigued by this, but she kept her eyes on me and her thoughts were on her face. I’d settled for not very much, in her opinion. This little house and a man who’d walk away and leave me to deal with cops on my own. Not to mention the mess I’d made of bringing up my son.
“You can have the car,” I told Marco. “I’m getting a lift. So you don’t need to go belting off.”
Marco eased himself back down to sit on the windowsill where he’d been perching. I was on the footstool, the two police side-by-side on the couch. I couldn’t help it; I was ashamed of the way we were living.
“You can’t honestly think my son knows anything about the murder,” I said, deciding not just to take it. Whatever “it” was. “It said on the news he’d been there for years and years. I mean, have you even identified him yet? Are you round here bugging us because you can’t think what else to do? Because we’ve only been here six months. Him next door that was so happy to point you our way? He’s in with the bricks. He’d have been here when the body was buried. Have you just taken him at his word?”
“Ali,” Marco said again. His face was a picture of something I couldn’t name, but it wasn’t husbandly concern. Maybe I was talking louder than I realised. He turned to the cops and gave them a grimacing kind of smile. “You need to excuse my wife,” he said. “She’s been under a lot of strain recently and she sometimes doesn’t keep very well, you know.”
“What sort of strain would that be?” the sergeant said. He’d been sitting back against the cushions, but he bent forward now. “Do you spend much time over there, Mrs. McGovern?”
“I never go near the place!” I said. “I’ve just started a new job, so I’ve been busy. Is that what you mean, Marco? As to ‘not keeping well,’ I haven’t had so much as a cold for ten years, so I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”
The young cop was exploring one of her molars and staring down at her notebook.
“Oh, we’re not dinosaurs in the police service,” the sergeant said. “We und
erstand there’s more to good health than colds and cholesterol. So, would you say your child inherited any of your problems, Mrs. McGovern? Is that the cause of you being so very protective?”
I stared at him. “I don’t have any problems,” I said. “And Angelo doesn’t have any problems either. No more than every other teenager.”
He must have been standing right behind his door listening, because I didn’t hear a single footfall before the door blatted open and Angelo came out, walking in a strange stiff-legged gait around the little living room, hopping over everyone’s legs. “For fuck’s sake, Mum!” he said. “What is wrong with you? What’s wrong with both of you? You’re not fine. I’m not fine. I never was. What’s the point of saying it when everyone knows it’s not true?”
“That’s more like it,” the sergeant said. “Now we might get somewhere.”
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to pick up the stupid glass bowl we kept in the middle of the coffee table and run at him with it, drive it into his stupid face for sounding so pleased when my boy was in this state.
“I saw it,” Angel said. “I was over there on the Sunday night after the flood drained and there was a hand sticking up out of the ground. But I thought it was a monk. I thought it was funny.”
“Funny?” said the girl. She hadn’t learned the poker face yet, new to the job of not reacting.
“Harmless,” Angelo said. “Gross but harmless. Like mummies or that. I never knew it was a real person from now.”
“And your phone?” said the sergeant.
Angelo stopped stalking around and stood panting. “It. Got. Stolen,” he said.
“Not lost,” said the sergeant. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because it was in my back pocket and then it wasn’t,” Angel said. “Like I told you. At the school and at the police station. Over and over and over again.”
“Yes, I remember,” the sergeant said. “Stolen from your back pocket while you walked through the Loreburn Shopping Centre on the afternoon of Monday the fifteenth of February.” He was watching me as he spoke and I’m sure he saw the quick tug at my eyebrows. Had Angel been in Dumfries that day? He could get there easy enough. He just had to stay on the school bus all the way, but then he was stuck. He had to phone one of us to get back again. Had he? The day before my interview at Howell Hall. Had he?
“Quite a coincidence,” the sergeant was saying. “A phone’s stolen all that way away and then used to report a body right across from where its owner happens to stay. Twenty-four hours after the owner admits he saw the body.”
Angelo said nothing.
“Well, son,” said the cop, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come back with us again. Sorry and all that, but since your story has changed so much I think we need to take a different statement.”
“After school,” I said. I wanted some good to come of this, and getting Angelo back in the classroom would be something to be thankful for. “After his school and our work. We’ll all come in tonight.”
“This is a murder enquiry, Mrs. McGovern,” said the sergeant. “We make the timetable.”
“Did you not just hear me saying I’ve got a new job?” I said. “And my husband too? What do you think’s going to happen if we start taking time off already?”
“Ali, Ali,” Marco said. “It’s okay. I can take a bit of time off this morning.”
I didn’t want to argue, but I didn’t see how that could be true. It was one thing walking out of training days, but it was something else on the first real shift. Marco had never worked for anyone but his dad and then himself; he had no clue.
“Don’t look like that,” he was saying to me. “Honest, Als, I’ll take Angel in and then get him to school after. It’s no problem at all.”
“Can we say we’ll see you there within the hour, Mr. McGovern?” the sergeant said. “We’ve got more enquiries to make but we’ll see you when we get back.”
Marco went out with them, God knows why. Angel and I stood staring at one another across the coffee table. I couldn’t read his expression.
“At least put some decent clothes on and have a wash, eh?”
“Behind my ears and under my fingernails?”
“But not your black waterproof, because I’m borrowing it, because it’s teeming and you’re getting lifts.”
“You’re getting lifts too,” Angelo said.
I took his coat down from the peg and hooked it over my head by the hood, hoping he would protest, tell me I was a weirdo for wearing his clothes and if I got perfume on it he’d never wear it again and I’d have to buy him a new one. But he knew I was goading him and he didn’t rise.
“Aye, okay, whatever,” he said. “Go to work and stop worrying.”
“We’ve gone over this,” I said, trying to sound light. “I’ll stop worrying about you when I’m dead, oka—” But I cut my words off when a sort of yelp escaped him.
“Don’t,” he said. “Stop being brave and stop trying to be funny. For God’s sake, just try to be okay. Okay?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Of course I’m okay. I’m worried about you. And I’m pissed off with you too. Why didn’t you tell someone about the monk?”
He opened his mouth to speak but the door opened and Marco was back. “Your lift’s here,” he said. His voice was flat and his face was blank, but as he turned to Angelo he managed a smile. “Right then, my wee gangster! Here we go again, eh?” So it looked like the flat words and dead look were just for me.
Lars was parked outside the gate with his engine running but he had stepped out of the car, into the last heavy splats at the end of the rain, to get a better look at the Abbey. And he had attracted attention, standing there in his uniform. The neighbour was just closing his door when I came out of mine.
“Here! You!” he said. “You can’t just stop there and gawp. That’s a crime scene.”
I was at the little hedge before I knew I was moving. “Leave him alone,” I shouted. “He’s a friend of mine and it’s none of your bloody business who parks where on a public road or who looks at what. If you would keep your nose out and stop spreading lies about other people to cover your own arse the police might actually find this murderer. Unless there’s some reason you don’t want them to. Eh? Eh?” I could feel a bulge of sour heat rising up inside me.
The man was shrinking back against his front door like my words were darts. “What’s that supposed—” he said. He put a tremulous hand up to his mouth. “What lies? Cover what?”
“Lies about my son,” I said in a fierce whisper. I knew my face was red. Maybe my eyes were red too. Maybe my hair was smoking. “And I don’t know what you’re covering, do I? I don’t go sneaking around in everybody’s business to find out.”
“Ali.” Lars put a hand on my arm. I flinched at his touch but just before I jerked to shrug him off, some bit of me registered the warm firm grip and the steady sound of his voice. “Come on, come away, come and sit down. Sorry, pal,” he said to the neighbour.
“I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life!” the man said. He had misted up behind his bottle-bottom glasses, though whether from fear or anger, it was hard to say.
“Well, this has been a nice change for you then,” Lars said, guiding me over to his car and helping me in. He did up my seat belt then hopped in the driver’s side and drew gently away. “Want to tell me what that was all about?” he said, so reasonable.
I bent over at my waist and pressed my face into the fabric of my white uniform trousers, not caring if I was covering them in tears and snot. At least I never wore make-up for work. I thought it was better to be bare-faced and show my clients the benefit of a good cleansing routine. That was me: nothing to hide.
“Angel knew about the body,” I said at last, sitting up and letting my head fall back against the headrest. It was hammering. “He lied
to the police.”
Lars had just slowed to turn off at the checkpoint. He tooted and waved to the soldier on duty and then, when we were out of sight, he pulled off the track and turned to me.
“You mean he was lying about the phone being stolen?” he said. “Why?” I just shook my head. It wouldn’t sound any more sensible if I told Lars than it had when Angelo told the sergeant. “And what’s the problem with your neighbour?” I shook my head again. “I thought you were going to lamp him. And I’m not the only one; he was shaking like a Chihuahua.” He was almost laughing now. I tried to join in but it came out like a sob so I bit it back again.
“What else is it though, Ali?” he said. “Is it this place?”
“Else?” I asked him. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Plenty, but I can tell the difference between massive trouble hitting you like a frying pan when you’re basically okay and massive trouble coming along like one last thing and finishing you off.”
“I’m basically okay,” I said.
“Sure?” said Lars. “Because that would mean I can’t tell the difference at all.”
I nodded. I sat forward, flipped open his sun-blind mirror and looked at my face. “Bloody hell. I’m getting too old to cry. I’ll look like shit for days now.”
“So you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong?” Lars said.
“Right now, what’s wrong is if Dr. Ferris sees me looking like this she’ll think I’m too flaky to be doing my job and she’ll sack me.” But again my voice let me down. It shook towards the end.
“Look in that bag on the back seat,” Lars said. “If you can reach it. I know it sounds daft but it helps.”
House. Tree. Person. Page 16
