Suddenly, losing control, she shouted at them: ‘And I feel just the same. I can’t forgive him for not taking me with him. So get out of my house and leave me alone.’
Back in the car, Rachel and Jack avoided looking at each other.
At last Jack said, ‘Sorry Boss. I messed that up.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘we both did. Poor woman, what’s going to happen to her now?’
‘We’ve got to get that bastard Kevin Miller for something,’ Jack Reid said. ‘His fingerprints are all over this, but we’re absolutely hog-tied.’
They drove off and Forester Close itself seemed to take refuge in uneasy silence. The street lamps came on as the light began to fade in the late afternoon, but the Close was deserted.
Then a car driven at high speed turned off the main road with a squeal of brakes. It swerved, and came to a stop outside the Henson house.
Dave Byrne, Helen’s deserted husband and a frequent and unwelcome visitor at Terri and Helen’s, got out of the car and opened the boot. He made no effort to hide what he was doing; in fact, he looked about him as though defying an unseen audience of spies.
He took a bucket out of the boot, then scrubbing brushes and cans of spray paint. Carrying them, he went round the back of Terri and Helen’s house, though there was no sign of either of them being there.
In a few minutes, he came out of the front door of Number Five with the bucket full of steaming hot water.
Alice Bates, watching from her front room, could see the steam rising. She thought, Helen must’ve given him a key. Terri won’t like the idea of Dave coming and going as he pleases.
Alice felt a small thrill of excitement, anticipating ructions later between Terri and Helen.
Dave Byrne, having climbed over the wall dividing Number Five from the Henson house, started to clean off the daubed messages from the wall of Number Four. He scrubbed the front door, too. He seemed to be using a wire brush; the door paint was coming away. He got rid of the ugly words, but the bare unpainted patches were almost as unsightly. Dave had thought of that. He used the spray paint he’d brought with him to cover where the graffiti had been.
The paint didn’t quite match the original colour, but almost.
Alice thought, Perhaps it will when it dries. Then Dave threw the water away into the side of the road, packed his gear back into the car boot, and drove off.
Alice watched the foam from the dirty water flowing away down the hill. If only the harm that those words had done could be washed away so easily, she thought.
SEVENTEEN
Bert Pearson was waiting for Mark when he came in from the milking. Bert had been waiting for some time, since he came back from his lonely wanderings in the fields at lunchtime, and he was impatient to get over with the confrontation he must have with his son.
Mark, taking off his boots at the back door before he came into the kitchen, was surprised to see his father there. ‘What you doing still here, Dad?’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t be here if there weren’t something that’s got to be said between us,’ Bert said.
Two hours ago he hadn’t expected to find what he had to say difficult. But now, faced with his son’s plainly contemptuous hostility, and unsure about how he could explain what he had to say, Bert wished he could put it off until another day.
But he had to do something to break up Mark’s relationship with that tart from the housing estate. His efforts to point the police towards Kevin Miller to show Mark the sort of family Jess came from, seemed to have come to nothing. There was only one thing for it, Bert told himself; he had to have it out with his son face to face.
Mark went to the sink and washed his hands.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘If you’ve got something to say, you’d better spit it out.’
‘You know what this farm means to me, don’t you, son?’ Bert said. He couldn’t look at Mark, not talking like this about strong feelings.
‘Not enough to make you pull yourself together and pull your weight running it,’ Mark muttered. He couldn’t look at his father’s face, either, he was too embarrassed. It was worse than Bert trying to discuss his mother’s withdrawal from him, what he’d call a man-to-man talk. Mark was always afraid his father was about to do that.
Bert pretended he hadn’t heard what Mark said. He tried again. ‘You know it’s always been the best thing in my life that you came in with me? You know how much that means to me, don’t you?’
Mark guessed what was coming. Bert was going to warn him off Jess. Someone who’d spoken to his father must have seen him with her and told the old man about it. Or maybe one of Mum’s friends had seen them together and told her. He thought, whoever told Mum must’ve put the fear of God into her to make her speak to Dad about it.
Mark didn’t want to talk to anyone about Jess. He wanted to tell his father that he had always felt the same way as he did about the farm and the land, but that he had his own way to make in the world and some day soon, if things didn’t change, he was going to have to break away so that he could do that, Jess or no Jess. He knew that if his father said anything about Jess, he would have to defend his relationship with her. And once he did that, the thing would become something it wasn’t. What he had with Jess was exactly the relationship he was looking for at the moment. The last thing he wanted was to be pushed into choosing between her and the farm, and that was what would happen if his father didn’t back off. Mark knew only too well that if the thing was presented in those terms, he would have to choose Jess, not because his feelings for her necessarily justified his choice, but because he had to assert his right to make his own decisions.
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Dad,’ he said. ‘Leave it. It’s not what you think, just drop the whole subject. You don’t have to worry. It’s time you were in bed, you know?’
‘But I’ve got to make you understand . . .’ Bert said. ‘We’ve got to stand up for our . . .’ He paused, trying to remember the big word people used. ‘Our heritage,’ he said at last and then paused again, embarrassed that in the heat of the moment he had used such a pretentious word. ‘People like that Miller family are out to destroy us,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to make me understand, Dad. I do understand. I know what I’m doing.’
Bert spread his hands in a helpless gesture, knowing that he had no way of communicating with Mark in this mood.
‘I’m off out, Dad,’ Mark said. ‘Good night. Mum said she’d be back early tonight.’
Bert heard him laugh as he shut the back door behind him and went out into the yard.
Bert heaved a sigh of relief. At least he’d tried to talk to the boy.
A while later, in an old field shelter originally built for two pensioned-off cart horses to spend their declining years, Mark pulled away from Jess and started to drag on his clothes.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter with you? I’m only just getting started.’
Playfully, she buffeted him with her impressive breasts, but he put his hands over them and pushed her gently away.
‘Not yet, Jess,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’
‘Talk?’ she said, looking puzzled as though talk were a sexual deviation she hadn’t heard of yet.
Mark laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about you and me.’
Jess sat up, suddenly serious. She thought, this is it; he wants us to escape together.
‘I’ve a bit of money saved,’ she said.
She was thinking, Alice must have money stashed away in that house of hers. No one poor could live in a place like that. Alice certainly doesn’t spend it, Jess told herself, she always wears the same clothes, she’ll never miss it. Why should an old woman like that need a lot of money?
Mark didn’t know what she was talking about, suddenly mentioning money as though that had something to do with what he had to say to her.
‘What do your parents think of us going out?’ he asked.
Jess looked at him in amaze
ment. Had he forgotten how Kevin and Nate and their gang had hunted the two of them that night they’d gone to make love in the shed among the bushes at the back of Alice’s house? She was still finding shards of glass down the back of the pickup’s seat.
As though Mark read her thoughts, he said, ‘I don’t mean your moron brothers, I mean your mum and dad.’
‘Same as Kevin does, I suppose,’ Jess said. ‘Best they don’t know anything about it.’
‘But if I met them?’ Mark said. ‘You know, if you took me to your house to meet them? Once we got talking to each other . . . ?’
‘They’d hate you. They don’t want to know you. They hate you because they think your lot are all snobs or hicks, that’s enough for them,’ Jess said.
She was thinking, Over my dead body you meet them. There’s a limit to the number of times Kylie calls me Mum and I can make a joke about her being mixed up and not being able to say Jess. As if, she says Jess all the time, it’s one of her noises.
Mark didn’t say anything. He seemed unconvinced. Jess decided that the best form of defence was attack.
‘Come to that, why don’t you take me home to meet your mum and dad?’ she said.
Not on your life, Mark thought, they’d turn her out of the house. He tried to tell himself, it’s not that I’m ashamed of her, or of them, but I don’t want to be part of the way they’d judge Jess if they met her. And then he thought, I am ashamed; I’m ashamed of what Jess would know about me, meeting them; and what they’d be able to tell about me if they met her.
‘It’s no good, you’re from the new houses,’ he said, ‘they’d just hate you on principle.’
‘But why? We don’t do them any harm.’
Mark couldn’t begin to explain. It wasn’t something that could be explained, really. He remembered the day he’d met her, those two louts scaring the bullocks and leaving the gate open and her clinging to him, terrified, in her ridiculous red high-heeled boots. He knew from the start he couldn’t explain to her. If he tried to tell her how he felt about the farm and the animals, she’d never understand.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they feel threatened by all the people moving in, and what that means. They used to be free, in control of their own lives, and then there’s all the stuff that comes with masses of strangers moving in you know; government interference, rules and regulations, restrictions, that sort of shit. Nothing stays the same.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Jess said, ‘we don’t give a toss what those old villagers do.’
‘That’s part of the trouble,’ Mark said, and he felt suddenly very sad. ‘We know your lot have no idea what they’re doing to us.’
‘What’s with this “us”?’ she said, and moved closer to him. ‘The only us that matters here is you and me. What does it matter what they think, they’re well past it. It’s what we want that counts.’
Mark gave up. There was no point in talking any more. All that mattered this minute was the way her hot wet mouth felt on him and the taste of her on his tongue.
She broke off to look up at him. ‘D’you love me, Mark? Tell me you love me,’ she said in a voice hoarse with lust.
‘I love you, girl,’ he cried, ‘Oh, I love you.’
EIGHTEEN
Terri and Helen were having supper together. Nicky had gone up to her room to do her homework, and the house was quiet.
Terri said, ‘Did you tell Dave I wrote that letter to the Millers?’
Helen looked flustered. ‘What letter’s that?’ she said. Terri wasn’t fooled; Helen was playing for time.
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know,’ Terri said. She was impatient with the little-girl way Helen always tried to deflect criticism. Terri resented being cast as the bully.
‘God knows what made you write it anyway,’ Helen said. ‘He didn’t do anything to that baby; he just picked her up when she fell down.’
‘All men are the same,’ Terri said. That was it, as far as she was concerned.
‘Anyway, I didn’t say anything,’ Helen said. ‘I didn’t tell anyone you wrote it.’
Terri said, ‘So why would an outsider like your ex-husband do a thing like that? Why should he care about a bit of graffiti, he doesn’t live here.’
‘Why are you making it into such a big deal?’ Helen said, sounding irritated. ‘After all, do you want to live in a street daubed with that kind of filth? Someone had to get rid of it. Think of Nicky.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Terri said. ‘What Dave did by cleaning up that graffiti was a deliberate act of criticism of me. He was making it obvious he thought it was my fault Dr Henson did what he did.’
‘Oh, darling, that’s rubbish. You know it is. Why should Dave even know about Dr Henson?’
Helen was still irritated. She didn’t like talking about Dave to Terri. She let her irritation show as she said in a voice full of weary disinterest, ‘Oh, Terri, what makes you think it had anything to do with you at all? It’s far more likely Dave didn’t want Nicky faced with those kinds of words at her age. He is still her father, after all.’ Helen paused, then went on, ‘If anything, it was more likely a way of getting at me if he goes for custody. He can say this isn’t a proper place to bring up a child, when he has to protect her by cleaning up that muck.’
‘What muck’s that?’ Nicky had slipped into the room without either of them noticing.
Terri was annoyed. It was frustrating that she and Helen could never even have an argument without Nicky butting in with her child’s self-centred interpretation of everything they said. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
Then she saw Helen’s face and knew that she’d said the wrong thing again. Helen seemed to have no qualms about Nicky being privy to anything that Terri considered confidential between them.
‘No,’ Helen said, ‘there was nothing secret about it, darling. We were talking about the ugly graffiti those people painted on the walls of Number Four.’
‘That wasn’t people,’ Nicky said, ‘that was Kevin Miller and me and Jess. We did it. We all did.’
‘We?’ Terri said. ‘We?’
She caught the child’s shoulder and turned her to face her. She was shocked.
‘What do you mean, “we”?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you had anything to do with it?’
Nicky pulled away from her and went to her mother. She glared at Terri and put her hand in Helen’s. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said. ‘You told me Terri wrote that letter warning Jess’s mother about that old child molester. I thought you’d be pleased I wanted to help make him suffer.’
Helen smiled at her. She said sweetly, ‘But Dr Henson was innocent, darling. He didn’t hurt Kylie, it was a mistake. You do understand that, don’t you?’ Helen sounded as though she wasn’t convinced at all of Dr Henson’s innocence.
‘We were only supporting you,’ Nicky said defiantly to Terri. ‘It wasn’t us who got it wrong, it was you.’
Helen was placatory. ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ she said, ‘but what happened to Dr Henson was a tragedy for poor Mrs Henson, wasn’t it?’
Nicky wanted to make peace with Terri. Life was much easier when she and Terri weren’t at odds.
‘I s’pose you only did what you thought was right,’ Nicky said, sounding like a prim little old lady. ‘It’s sad he killed himself, but nobody forced him to. And surely it’s better this way? An old man at the end of his life doesn’t compare with one innocent child’s life ruined by a paedophile. There must’ve been reasons why he didn’t want to go on living. I’m surprised he didn’t take that wife of his with him.’
Terri asked herself, why does she always sound like someone reading a political manifesto? She’s thirteen, for God’s sake. Where does she get the things she comes out with?’
But she smiled. She was glad that she and Nicky were friends again.
NINETEEN
Earlier in the day it had stopped raining and now the clouds had rolled back to reveal a mass of stars. Alice thought how stark everything
suddenly looked outside. There was a full moon, and already the grass on the verges and in the Henson’s front garden glittered with frost.
Before she went to bed, Alice took one last look out of her living room window. Now black ice covered the gardens and the street with a diamond sheen in the moonlight.
There was no wind and the scene was as still and dead as an old photograph. This was Forester Close as Alice wished it always was, quiet and peaceful and empty of people. There was an old-fashioned quality about the night here that comforted her. The daytime reeked of the twenty-first century and Alice felt discomfited and out of place; at night she was part of a formal order imposed by darkness.
But as she looked out at this wintry scene, Alice caught a movement in a parked car. She gripped the windowsill for support.
She recognized Dave’s battered Ford. His was the only car she knew with a roof-rack piled with what looked like builders’ equipment. When he first started to visit Helen, Alice had put him down as some kind of jobbing labourer. More recently, it had crossed her mind that he was sleeping rough in the car while he tried to get Helen to take him back. But she wasn’t sure, she’d never seen him.
Now he was parked across the street from Terri and Helen’s house. Against the glow of the street lamp, Alice could see him hunched in the driving seat.
He must be going to meet Helen, Alice thought. They must have planned a romantic assignation where Terri can’t interrupt them.
As she watched, Dave got out of the car and took some kind of bag off the roof.
Then he jumped over the front wall of Number Five and disappeared round the side of the house.
Dave disappeared for so long that in the end Alice gave up and went upstairs to bed. I’m happy for them, she thought, it’s for the best. If Helen goes back to Dave it’s good for Nicky. They can be a proper family again.
Before Alice undressed, she took one last look out of her bedroom window. The moon had moved behind the house, and now black shadows made geometric patterns across the gardens and the street.
A Nice Place to Die Page 11
