Summer Lies Bleeding

by Nuala Casey

  ‘Talk about what?’ Paula sits up and turns on the hot tap, adding more scalding water to the already full bath.

  ‘Come on, Paula,’ says Stella, stepping into the room. ‘What’s the matter?’ She moves Paula’s clothes from the lid of the toilet seat and sits down, folding her arms across her chest.

  Paula lies down in the steaming water and sighs deeply.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, her voice a near whisper. ‘It was just a bit of a shock, I guess.’

  Stella nods her head, though there is something about the way Paula is staring into space that makes her think there is more to it than she is letting on.

  ‘It’s a big step,’ says Stella. ‘We’ve always known that and it’s your body that has to go through the pregnancy, having people poking and prodding you. It can feel like your body’s not your own anymore. I love you. You know that don’t you?’

  Paula doesn’t answer, she just keeps staring straight ahead as though trying to find the answer to whatever is worrying her in the blue flowery pattern on the tiles.

  After a couple of minutes of silence, Stella stands up.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Let’s have a drink eh? You’ve been abstaining for months, your body should be in peak condition by now. How about I pop downstairs and get a bottle of champagne, we can toast the baby, the soon-to-be conceived baby. What do you say?’

  Paula looks up at her. Her face is red with the heat of the bath and she looks tired.

  ‘If you want a drink, you have one. I don’t feel like champagne,’ she says.

  Stella walks towards the bath and kneels down on the floor by Paula’s face. She runs her fingers through Paula’s wet hair and gently kisses her mouth.

  ‘Come on, angel,’ she says. ‘Let’s have a night off, eh? A night off worrying about the baby and about work and stuff. We deserve a break, it’s been so long since we just relaxed together.’

  She kisses Paula again, on her forehead, her nose, the crook of her soft, damp neck and she hears Paula sigh with what sounds like pleasure. ‘It’s a beautiful evening out there. I’m going to book us a table in the garden and we can have a long, leisurely dinner. Come on; for old times?’

  Paula smiles the ghost of a smile. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Book it for seven though, won’t you? I’ll have to dry my hair and get ready and I’ve got to send a couple of emails first.’

  ‘Excellent,’ says Stella. ‘I’ll go and do it now and I’ll pick up a bottle of champagne and two glasses, okay?’

  Paula rolls her eyes at her playfully. ‘Okay, but get me a packet of Twiglets as well will you? I can’t drink on an empty stomach.’

  ‘Twiglets and champagne,’ laughs Stella. ‘You’ve always been a classy girl.’

  She ducks as Paula throws a damp towel at her.

  ‘Ha,’ she cries. ‘Bad shot. Right, I won’t be long. And you should get out of that bath now, you’re in danger of turning into a prune and that is not a good look.’

  She hears Paula snort as she walks across the living room towards the door. If only they could always be as light as that. It seems like happiness and frivolity only come to them in snatched moments.

  Why isn’t this enough?

  Stella turns the question over in her head as she walks down the stairs to the restaurant. She thinks of Dylan O’Brien and all the questions she wants to ask him when they meet. In the car on the way down those questions had been clear and concise; now her brain is fuddled with images of babies and nervous receptionists and at the heart of it all, the feeling deep in her stomach. The guilt that she is deceiving Paula; that she has come here for her own selfish reasons.

  Is it wrong to want to be a person in her own right; not simpy an appendage to Paula’s world? And if she is capable of deceiving Paula like this, of going behind her back and taking steps to create a whole new future then what hope do they have?

  She tries to push her worries to the back of her mind as she opens the door to the tiny, darkened restaurant and heads towards the bar, hoping with all her heart that tonight will be different.

  *

  Mark sits on the bed holding the black bag on his lap. He had staggered back to the hostel like a drunken man and lain on the bed for half an hour until he got his breath back. He had felt her presence in that alley way, she was there, she was all around him. As he kicked that rubbish he thought he could smell her perfume wafting on the air – Calvin Klein’s CK One – the sharp citrusy scent mingling with the rotten eggs and decaying vegetable peelings. It was there for a split second hovering above the mound of rubbish like a mirage. She was still there, he thought as he navigated the back streets of Soho, sweating in his thick sweatshirt. She was trapped in that manky alley way. His father used to talk about the dead soldiers, the ones who had been killed in battle and how you could feel their presence, their energy all around you. Restless spirits he used to call them, unable to find peace, trapped in the places where they had died. His father said that because they had been struck down in the height of battle, all that energy, all that adrenalin just got sucked into the ether and remained in the atmosphere like some opaque gas. Zoe is a restless spirit, he knows it, she’s trying to tell him something. All those weird dreams he’s been having lately, it’s a sign, a message from her. It’s not about that druggie bastard, he’s dead now, no, it’s a sign that he has to act, act now.

  He slowly unzips the bag and takes out the long, thin canvas package. Putting the black bag to one side, he carefully removes the shotgun from its slip and holds it in his hands. He strokes the cool metal tip, runs his fingers along the wooden stock and smiles to himself as he thinks about the first time he held a gun in his hands.

  It was his granddad, Ernie Bradshaw, who taught him how to shoot. When Mark’s dad died Ernie had moved in with them, thinking that the children would benefit from having a man around. His wife Sadie had died when Mark’s mother was a little girl and Ernie had brought his daughter up single-handedly in their tiny terrace house in Redcar. He was still a relatively young man when he moved in, fifty-five and as lithe and fit as he had been in his twenties. He soon settled into the ground floor flat with its tiny patch of garden and neat, pretty hanging baskets, lovingly tended to by Mark’s mother.

  Mark was twelve years old when his grandfather took him out to the moors to watch his first grouse shoot. In the three years since his father’s death, Mark had grown inward; barely speaking, communicating only in grunts and shrugs of his shoulders, emerging from his bedroom to go to school and eat his meals then retreating when both were finished. Ernie thought the lad could do with some fresh air, or at least that was what he told his daughter when she waved them off.

  They drove in Ernie’s ancient Ford Escort up to the Cleveland Hills and the wild expanse of the Ferensby Estate. Ernie’s father had been a gamekeeper on the estate in the thirties right up until the outbreak of the Second World War and he used to take his young son out with him, pointing out the pheasants and the partridge, the kestrels and woodcocks. But it was in the cloying heat of August that the estate really came into its own, when car loads of titled gents in tweed jackets strode across the moors in search of grouse.

  The Glorious Twelfth, Ernie told Mark, was as big a deal as Christmas Day to him as a child. Young Ernie used to walk behind the men and play paper, scissors, stone with Lord Ferensby’s son, a skinny red-head they called Harry, though he had been christened Henry Edmund De Vere Ferensby, the future sixteenth Lord Ferensby. A bond formed between the two boys that was to endure over the years, it survived the War when the estate workers marched off to fight Hitler and didn’t return; it survived Harry’s time at Oxford and Ernie’s apprenticeship at the steel works, and when the old Lord Ferensby died and Harry took on the title he let Ernie come and join in the shoots on the estate. Ernie’s father had suffered a stroke in the early sixties and spent the rest of his days in a nursing home. He never saw his beloved moors again and Ernie wanted to keep the tradition going, wanted to keep his father�
��s spirit alive by trekking up to the top of those moors each weekend, swapping the thick sulphurous heat of the steel works for clean northern air.

  Mark had come out of himself after that first shoot and though he had not been allowed to use a gun that day, he had watched the men take aim and fire at the birds, watched the way they treated their shotguns with reverence, drying and cleaning them after a shot, keeping them safe in the crooks of their arms like sleeping babies. The next time they went Mark had been allowed to be a beater, alongside Ernie, and he felt his weak lungs expand as he beat the heather with a stick and watched the grouse rise into the air as though they had been hypnotised. The noise of the gun as it released a cartridge was like a great clap of thunder and Mark watched as it scattered into the air like a fan, hitting its target with one clear shot.

  After that Mark would bombard Ernie with questions. When would he be allowed to use a gun? Would he teach him? What type of gun did his dad use? Ernie had smiled at the lad’s interest though his mother had been concerned and asked Ernie not to wave his guns around in front of little Zoe. She was only six then and a curious little thing. So Mark and Ernie would retreat to Ernie’s room with its gun cabinet and pictures of grouse and pheasant hanging on the walls. Ernie dressed for the countryside at all times – green wax jacket, wellies, his tweed cap – and he subscribed to The Field magazine which he would read out loud to Mark’s mother as she sat trying to watch Coronation Street. ‘Oh Dad, will you be quiet,’ she would say, straining her neck to hear the television. ‘I’m not interested in bloody gundogs.’ His mates in the pub called him The Squire; he liked that, he liked the fact it set him apart from the dead-eyed men he had worked with. He had the countryside in his bones and it had saved him from the despair a lot of his co-workers had fallen into when the steelworks closed down. He would throw test questions at Mark over the dinner table. ‘Right lad, at what point do you release the safety catch?’ ‘You release it at the moment you fire,’ Mark would answer, his voice deadly serious. ‘That’s right lad, not a moment before. Safety is the first rule of a civilised shoot, remember that and you’ll not come a cropper.’ Ernie had been strict about obeying the country code – after all he was a friend of Lord Ferensby, not some scally up from the smog for a jolly. ‘Respect earns respect, son,’ he used to say. ‘Close the gate, stick your litter in your pocket till you get home, keep your dog under control …’

  Ernie had taken Zoe’s death badly. He had sat in the armchair in front of the window, looking at the thick net curtain, not moving, not speaking. If he hadn’t blinked every so often you’d be forgiven for thinking he had stopped breathing. When Mark popped round to see his mam and Ernie on a Saturday morning, he would find the old man in the same position. ‘Tell you what, Grandad, shall we have a drive up to Ferensby today, see if there’s owt going on?’ But the old man would shake his head and carry on staring at the curtain with the same intensity as he had once lined up a shot. Almost a year later he was dead. Heart attack was what was written on his death certificate but they all knew his heart had given up long before his death, it had stopped the day he was told his granddaughter had been murdered and though he had lived for a year after that, his spirit had left his body and he had sat by that window waiting for oblivion.

  They scattered his ashes on the Ferensby Estate on a crisp June morning while kestrels circled overhead and a line of tweed-clad gentleman bowed their heads in respect for the passing of The Squire. Lord Ferensby had organised tea and cakes in the Hall and Mark had stood and looked around at the assembled men and women – workers from the estate mixed with peers and real-life squires. Lady Ferensby was deep in conversation with Frank Ludlow, Ernie’s best friend from school who was battling emphysema and could only speak in a near whisper. Ernie would have liked it, he would have thought it a fitting send off, a respectful one. When his will was read, Mark discovered he had left him his shotgun. He had taken out the yellowing papers that stated that the gun was licensed to one Ernest George Bradshaw of 24a Mackenzie House, Eston, Middlesbrough. He had left strict instructions for Mark to look after the gun, to remember the safety advice he had instilled and to enjoy the moorland as he had enjoyed it. ‘Return to it when you can, son’ he had written on a little piece of notepaper. ‘And think of me every Glorious Twelfth.’

  Every year on the anniversary of his death Mark would visit the estate, breathe the cool air and say a little prayer for Ernie. He thinks of his granddad’s ashes circling the air like a grouse in flight, an eternity flying across the place he loved. Ernie’s soul will be at peace, Mark is certain of that. Now it is up to him to let Zoe rest in peace, he can feel Ernie’s voice in his ears as he holds the gun in his hands, telling him about respect and decency and doing the right thing. ‘Don’t take the safety catch off until the moment you want to shoot; not a moment before.’

  The words reverberate around Mark’s head as he returns the gun to its slip and places it carefully back into the bag. Not a moment before.

  As he slides the bag back underneath the bed he hears a loud thudding on the door. Who the fuck is that, he thinks as he rearranges the covers and walks across the room. Before he gets to the door whoever is out there bangs it again, harder this time. Mark’s mouth goes dry. Have they sussed him? He looks up at the ceiling, looking for a hidden CCTV camera. Of course this place will have security cameras, Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks. The door thuds again, but this time a woman’s voice calls out.

  ‘I know you’re in there, cause I saw you come home.’ It’s an American voice, vaguely familiar. ‘I just wondered if you fancied a beer.’

  He opens the door tentatively and sees her standing there – the girl from this morning. Liv. She is holding a carrier bag in her arms. It looks heavy. She smiles at him and he notices that she has applied some make-up, her eyes look darker, more defined and her lips have been painted a deep red. She holds the carrier bag towards him. ‘Beer and potato chips, I’m such a Canadian! Wanna join me?’

  Mark hesitates. He really should tell her to go away, but then he thinks about Zoe, about those lonely final hours, the smell of that alley way. If he is honest, he really doesn’t want to be by himself right now and he would love a beer.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But it better be decent beer, none of your Canadian rubbish,’ he laughs. The girl smiles as she edges past him into the room and empties the bag out onto the chair. ‘You will be pleased to know that I have six cans of Boddingtons, is that British enough for you? When I heard your accent I thought you might be a draught bitter man. My dad was from Manchester and it was the only beer he would drink.’ She takes a can and hands it to Mark then picks out one for herself. ‘Cheers,’ she says, raising the can in the air. ‘Happy Tuesday!’ She opens her beer and sits down on the floor, crossing her legs like a yogi.

  Mark smiles as he cracks open his can and takes a deep swig of the thick brown liquid, feeling the alcohol seep into his veins. Then he wipes his mouth and sits down on the floor next to Liv. ‘Happy Tuesday,’ he says.

  16

  Kerstin’s feet feel raw with pain as she walks up the familiar street. She had fled wearing her worn out pumps, her ‘house’ shoes, little more than slippers really; certainly not the best footwear for speed-walking the two miles from Chelsea to St James’s.

  She had run towards the Embankment after fleeing the estate agent; running in no particular direction just on and away from the man and his clipboard and the thin trickle of blood on the laundry floor. But she had fled empty-handed; her bag and money, her phone and all her cards were back at the flat and she couldn’t go back there now, the body will have been found, the place will be swarming with paramedics and police. Panic had driven her on, like some kind of weird drug pushing her towards an invisible finishing line and then she had remembered the money. She always kept cash in her drawer at work, for emergencies she had told herself, but she had been thinking of lost wallets, leaving present collections, trifles, not real emergencies; not this.

&
nbsp; She stops outside the elegant, stone and glass building and waits before stepping into the revolving doors. She can see Roy, the security guard through the window. There is a man with him; he looks official – police? Her heart feels as though it has dropped like a stone to the bottom of her stomach. The evening light is shining into the window, obscuring the man’s face from view, she can only see the dark outline of his body, bending over the desk looking at Roy’s screen – the CCTV monitor.

  They are looking for me, she thinks, as she steps away from the doors. But what choice does she have; without money what can she do?

  She approaches the door and sees her reflection in the glass. Her hair is still damp from the shower and she has no makeup on. She has never been to work with a bare face and wet hair, and the damp under her fingers makes her feel dirty. She pulls her hand through her hair, trying to pull it straight then counts to seven before pushing the revolving door.

  As she walks in the two men look up. Roy, the security guard, recognises her and smiles.

  ‘Late start?’ he chuckles.

  ‘No,’ she says, trying not to meet the eyes of the man in the dark suit. ‘I’ve just forgotten something. I don’t suppose you have a spare entry fob, do you? I’ve left mine at home.’ She wonders if Roy notices the fear in her voice, her shaking hands, as she holds them out to receive the fob.

  But Roy looks nonchalant and barely looks up as he gives her the fob. As she walks towards the stairs, she hears the other man say something about Biata and her shoulders relax. They are talking about the cleaner, the Polish woman who is supposed to arrive at 5 a.m. each morning. Kerstin remembers there had been talk that she was arriving late, that the meeting rooms were still full of discarded papers cups and trays when clients arrived at eight-thirty. The man is looking at the CCTV to implicate the cleaner not Kerstin. Thank God, she thinks as she climbs the stairs.