Dead End

by Dead End (retail) (epub)

  ‘I’ll have that nice sausage roll in the fridge, and a cup of tea, please.’ Kelly was alarmed; her mother was distant, withdrawn almost. Perhaps she’d be able to get hold of the oncologist tonight.

  She made a cup of tea and placed the sausage roll on a plate. By the time she’d tidied up and checked the fridge for milk, Wendy had fallen asleep. Kelly stood looking at her for a long time, and finally went back to the kitchen to make a note of the name of the new drug. A second check confirmed that her mother was still asleep and so she shook her gently awake and helped her upstairs, taking the snack up to her and leaving it on a side table. She did a final check of lights and windows, then left, locking the door behind her.

  As she headed to Pooley Bridge, she phoned the hospital on speaker. The oncologist wasn’t due in until tomorrow, but his secretary said she’d get him to call first thing. Next, she phoned Johnny.

  ‘Sorry it’s late,’ she said.

  He yawned. ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What’s with all the sorrys? Where are you anyway, still at work?’

  ‘No, I’m on my way home after seeing Mum. She had a bit of a funny turn, but I got her into bed.’

  ‘You want to come here?’ She closed her eyes in relief; that was exactly what she needed.

  ‘Yes please,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll open the door.’

  Chapter 12

  Zachary chose a damsel nymph he’d made himself to attach to his lead line. The forests behind Wasdale that led up Little Mell Fell were full of deer that had roamed there since ancient times, and their hair was an excellent buoyancy aid for his flies. There was also a constant supply of pheasant tails around the lanes, if one knew where to look, and these added colour to his booby traps. The indigenous wild brown trout loved them, but he wouldn’t share his secrets with his fellow anglers competing on the lake, even when asked directly.

  Grandpa preferred perch, and occasionally Zachary would land one for him.

  But that no longer mattered.

  The brown trout season was short, lasting only as long as the mayfly: March to June. He was fishing off the shore, and no one else was about. The mouth of Aira Beck was the best place to go, and only serious anglers started as early as he did. There was a steady swirl of water on the surface of the lake generated by the wind, which kept it oxygenated.

  Zachary didn’t bother to fish on hot, airless days, as the trout stayed at the bottom, unwilling to venture out if not even flies could be bothered. Today he already had three good-sized trout in his bag: one weighed around a pound and a half, and the other two close to two pounds. They would fillet nicely.

  Something tugged at his line, and his rod bent firmly downwards.

  He pulled resolutely and gave a little line at the same time as reeling it in, repeating the action until he saw a struggle near the surface. It was a perch, and it looked a decent size. The familiar razor-sharp spines on the back and the orange colouring confirmed it, but they were notorious fighters and wouldn’t come in easily. He remained steadfast and repeated the strict operation of bending and reeling every five seconds or so. Finally the whole fish leapt out of the water, and Zachary knew that the hook was embedded; the damn thing had probably swallowed it and it would be impossible to remove. Never mind, a quick blow to the head would sort that out, and then he could retrieve his hook. Perch made good eating; Zachary liked them baked with slices of lemon inserted in the cavity. Nothing else was needed, apart from butter.

  As he pulled the fish towards him, he took care to avoid the spine, and grabbed the head at the same time as abandoning his rod and catching hold of the tail. A spike caught him and sliced into his hand. It stung like hell but he was not about to let this prize go; it looked a good three-pounder. He held it firmly and found a rock to bash its head. A beauty.

  It had rained lightly after lunch, but now the sun had returned and the wind had dropped, stilling the water. There would be no more fish today, so it was time to head home.

  Force of habit made him gut the four fish at the lake edge; he threw the mush back into the water to nourish the others that had fared better today. He could have done the gutting back at the house, as now there would be no more tuts of disapproval from Grandpa. His heart sank as he remembered his loss; it stung more than his hand ever would. He cleaned the fish, wrapped them in a cloth and popped them into his bag along with his lunch box and flask. He washed his hands and packed away his rod and collapsible stool. As so often happened when he was out on the lake by himself, he found himself shivering, sensing that he wasn’t alone. He looked around sharply, but shook his head when no one was there.

  It was Grandpa who’d taught him to fish, though it had been many years since the old man had been able to come down here with him. Zachary’s earliest memories were of sitting on a boat, passing Grandpa pieces of cockle or prawns to feed onto his hooks, and learning how to slice a fish from the anus up to the throat without catching the bowel. He imagined the old man’s lifeless body on the pathologist’s slab, being gutted from throat to anus, and he wondered if the surgeon would miss the bowel.

  The image came back to him; it never left him alone, and it was always accompanied by the smell.

  Shit dripping onto the carpet.

  Grandpa’s lifeless body.

  Trying to support his legs thinking him still alive, in with a chance. Revulsion. Loss.

  His tongue.

  It had taken a while for Zachary to realise that the screams were his own: shouting for Brian.

  The interminable wait. Brian running up the stairs, Linda sobbing when she arrived at the house. Finally the thud as Brian had cut Grandpa down.

  Why?

  Everybody who’d ever meant anything to him was dead. Memories of his mother played in his head on a canvas he’d created as a child. Those shapes were two-dimensional, but the ones of Grandpa were not.

  He’d seen his grandpa laugh. He’d also seen him cry, but it was the chuckle of an old man who everybody said was reclusive and strange that would remain with him. He knew better. He knew the love that had resided in his heart, a love that had enveloped him as a boy, and then a teenager, and then a man.

  The pain was visceral.

  The weekend had been a blur of police and forensics, apart from when he’d gone fishing, and then he’d been able to clear his head and find some escape; some solace. But always the same questions plagued him.

  He’d overheard Linda talking to Grandpa about money, and Zachary also knew well the pain he carried because of his grandmother and his mother. But Grandpa had survived this long without them. He waited until I was old enough to cope. People said suicide was cowardly, but Zachary knew they were wrong. If only he’d walked into his grandfather’s study an hour earlier; even ten minutes earlier.

  He’d yet to find out if he’d be able to stay at Wasdale Hall. Linda and Brian talked frantically about who from the noble and far-reaching past of the Fitzgerald legacy still survived. Zachary wasn’t aware of Grandpa ever mentioning anyone else, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  He cared little. It wouldn’t irk him greatly to move on. He might have to drop out of college, but he’d pretty much done that already. He could find work elsewhere; any farm in Cumbria would employ a strong, healthy lad such as him, with his knowledge of fell and dale, and the wildlife therein. As long as he could stay close to the lake and mind his own business, he could supplement his existence with fish, deer, game and hedgerow plants. And he’d continue to paint.

  Linda and Brian were worried about their own futures, of that he was sure. If only Grandpa had married Delilah, then Zachary would now be heir and rightful owner, and in a position to give the pair security. But he knew the world enough to understand legitimacy and nobility, and how important one was for the other.

  His young brain, though witness to the worst of what people could do to one another, struggled to comprehend why, and that brought him to the other question burni
ng in his head: why was Grandpa’s safe missing? Yet more police were expected to dig and delve around, asking more questions, and Zachary sighed as he got into the Land Rover to head home. They’d enjoy a supper fit for an earl tonight, and then they’d wait for the lawyers and vultures to tell them their future.

  Chapter 13

  Delilah had given birth to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac.

  It was a punishing labour. Her contractions had plagued her all through the night, and Xavier rushed round like a terrified hen about to be slaughtered. It made Delilah more anxious.

  ‘Xavier, please calm down!’ she’d said. His hands shook, and he willed her to get into the car so he could drive her to the Penrith and Lakes Hospital.

  ‘I knew we should have gone to London,’ he said.

  There had been talk of delivering the twins by Caesarean section, but Xavier would have none of it.

  ‘Well I’m here now, so we’ll have to be satisfied. Everything will be all right,’ she soothed him.

  At 3 a.m., she could take the pain no more, and she finally allowed him to help her to the car. She heaved her huge body, ravaged by pregnancy, into the Land Rover, and Xavier drove like a lunatic.

  ‘Xavier!’ Delilah shouted breathlessly. ‘I assume you want your children born alive!’ It made no difference, and Xavier swung the car round the lanes to the A592. The roads were deathly quiet. It was a good time of year to give birth, or so said the ward sister. September was the busiest time.

  It was Delilah’s idea to have music. Xavier propped her upright – or semi-upright – as they were escorted to a birthing suite. She no longer cared who examined her, or where they prodded.

  ‘Eight centimetres dilated,’ the sister said. ‘Nearly there,’ she added, and smiled at Delilah, who now gasped for air in between contractions. She’d never felt pain like it. Her abdomen tightened like a vice around her pelvis, knocking the wind out of her, and she held her breath. The music helped a little, but it irritated Xavier.

  ‘It’s better if you breathe,’ said the sister.

  Delilah was given a mask and sucked at it hard. Her body was drenched in sweat and she didn’t know whether to sit up or lie down. The sister kept looking between her thighs, and Xavier eyed her with suspicion. But the pain prevented her from scolding him further.

  ‘Can we turn that damn thing off?’ he said. The sister looked at him and then to Delilah.

  ‘Shut up, Xavier.’

  The twins were born naturally, ten minutes apart. Delilah was exhausted, and Xavier was ushered out of the room. She needed to sleep, and to eat.

  Strikes and IRA bombs plagued the Callaghan administration, inflation crippled the country, the Yorkshire Ripper slew prostitutes, Marc Bolan and Elvis died, and Queen sang ‘We Are the Champions’, but neither Xavier nor Delilah cared.

  ‘Oliver and Trinity,’ Delilah whispered when she woke up. Not even the forlorn realisation that her stomach was disfigured and her breasts were the size of balloons could distract her from her babies. They sucked hungrily, and she gazed at them. Xavier daren’t touch her as he watched her feed his children.

  ‘Come here and sit with me,’ she said. He perched carefully on the bed. He hadn’t expected this. He’d been in control of everything that touched their lives for so long, and now he simply didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Hold them, Xavier,’ she insisted. Initially he could only manage one at a time, but soon he got the hang of holding both together.

  They stayed at Wasdale Hall with their babies, in a cocoon of extra waiting staff and so much help that Delilah felt stifled. Xavier didn’t even smoke around them, and he insisted that she remain in bed, until, fed up and bored, she wandered out into the sunshine with the twins sleeping in their Silver Cross coach.

  From day one, they were inseparable. They snuggled up together, sucking each other’s thumbs, and they cried together, ate together and learned to sit up together. They couldn’t be parted, else they would wail and fling their arms around until reunited. Delilah suggested allowing them to be left to cry, but Xavier gave in to their every demand. A father for the first time at fifty-five, he became terrified if the twins made an unusual noise, or if they didn’t wake up when they were supposed to.

  The parties stopped for a while.

  Delilah grew more bored and stifled. At first she put it down to the novelty, and explained away Xavier’s obsessive nature over them. He wouldn’t allow the children to be alone, and he hung about the nursery, dismissing the maternity nurses and their opinions built on years of experience: he knew better. He was always there, checking to see if they were warm enough, or if they had eaten the right amount. One by one, the nurses walked out.

  ‘Leave them be, Xavier!’ Delilah grew more and more exasperated with her lover – the father of her children – as he became increasingly paranoid and gripped with fear lest something happen to the twins. He sacked five nannies who in his opinion took unnecessary risks.

  Delilah tried to placate him and make him see that they weren’t dolls to be cosseted and cooed over; they were growing toddlers, strong and wilful, and that was a good thing. Delilah didn’t want precious darlings; she wanted bright, strong characters, like her lover had once been.

  But nothing could appease him. With the twins becoming the new focus of his life, he followed them everywhere, and Delilah watched him. Matters came to a head when Xavier couldn’t find them one day. He looked stricken, and his brows sat high on his large forehead. He banged his fist on the table.

  ‘They’ve gone to the lake to play,’ Delilah told him calmly. She was growing tired of his overprotection.

  ‘On their own?’ He was horrified.

  ‘Of course not on their own!’ Delilah screamed back at him. ‘Trudy is with them.’ Trudy, their seventh nanny, had a gold-plated reputation and a library full of references, but nothing was good enough for Xavier. He ran to the lake, panting like an old man, screaming for his children.

  He found them in the water, because that was what they loved to do. They frolicked and squealed as they played, until their father called them in. Trudy rolled her eyes, and resigned three weeks later.

  Neither child understood why one would have a lake at the bottom of one’s garden and not play in it; it didn’t make sense. And neither child could understand why their father was so angry with them for having fun. And so they learned to keep secrets.

  They made up codes for certain activities, and Delilah and the subsequent nannies were complicit, all tired of the straitjacket Xavier had made for them. Delilah grew distant and out of love.

  By the time the twins were teenagers, it had become a part of their fibre: making up stories and scenarios to avoid detection. By the time they were adults, they were very good at it indeed.

  Chapter 14

  Sophie’s eyes twitched as she slept fitfully. The skin on her eyelids quivered as she withdrew from deep sleep and into the period before waking when the brain’s movie camera went into overdrive, creating ten-dimensional neon kaleidoscopes of colour and action.

  She was sitting on the top of Loadpot Hill with Hannah. The love between them burned with an intensity that almost woke her. Almost. They huddled underneath the blanket they’d packed, jumpers acting as barriers to the damp cold trying to seep through from the dewy ground. Their breath came in clouds and mingled together as it hung in the air in front of their faces, facing east as they waited for the sunrise.

  This was what they’d come for. They’d just been waiting for the perfect clear night. The stars, which only twenty minutes ago had spread across the black sky like thousands of spilled crystals, were dimming as the sun made its way around the planet and brought daylight to Europe. The canopy keeping them safe slowly disappeared and made way for an endless sky of orange and grey.

  She wore Hannah’s blue Jack Wills sweater, which was too big for her and covered her hands with the excess material. The wind dropped and a silence descended that was so pure they could hear their own breaths.
Hannah fumbled around in the bag and produced a silver hip flask; she sucked from it greedily, then passed it to her lover. Sophie gulped at the liquid, which burned at first but then softened and generated gentle heat that warmed her face. Her cheeks contrasted with her white hair, which, even contained by her woollen hat, blew in the rising and falling breeze. She pulled a strand from her mouth and passed the flask back to Hannah.

  They sat in a cocoon – or that was how it felt – under a rock face, protected from the wind when it came, perfectly wrapped on all sides by nature, except to the east, where the orange and grey sky was slowly turning to dark blue and purple. Then, as if someone had poured molten rock onto the horizon, a blob of bright silver spread across where the land met the sky over Yorkshire.

  They smiled.

  Hannah delved into the bag again and pulled out two Snickers bars, and they gobbled them hungrily, relishing the sweet caramel and salty nuts. Ullswater lit up as the rising sun cast enough light down the valley to pick out the glistening reflection of the surface. Up here, they didn’t have to fit in, they didn’t have to follow anybody’s social media account: their latest live videos on Instagram or their stylised moody selfies on Snapchat. Up here, they could forget about what society expected from them and imagine a different life, far away from everything.

  The rock fall was unexpected.

  At first they didn’t understand what was happening, as Hannah lay on the ground, blood gushing from her head. They weren’t high up, and they weren’t on an unsteady ledge, so the event puzzled them and disarmed their senses.

  Sophie woke up.

  Her waking brain opened her eyes automatically, but she shut them tight again as fast as her muscles had levered them wide. She didn’t want to see what she’d become used to in the dingy room. It wasn’t the cold that was the worst; it wasn’t the dark, and it wasn’t the pain in her stomach as she craved food. It wasn’t her cracked lips that yearned for water. It wasn’t even the fact that she had no idea if Hannah was alive or dead.