‘If you know you can’t afford a 1.2-million-pound house, then why were you looking at one?’ Mum says, as if she’s caught me out with a particularly clever logical manoeuvre. She shakes her head from side to side slowly, rhythmically, as if she intends to carry on for ever, as if I’ve given her more than enough cause for eternal anguish. In her mind, I’ve already bankrupted myself and brought shame on the family. She has the capacity to enter a dimension that’s inaccessible to most ordinary mortals: the ten-years-into-the-future worst-case scenario. It’s as real to her as the present moment; so vivid is it, in fact, that most of the time the present doesn’t stand a chance against it.
‘Don’t you ever look at things you can’t afford?’ I ask her.
‘No, I certainly do not!’ Conversation over. Like the metal clasp of an old-fashioned purse, clipping shut. I should have known. My mother never does anything apart from the most sensible thing. ‘And nor should you, and nor would you, unless you were tempted, and considering mortgaging yourself up to the hilt for the—’
‘Mum, there’s no way they’d get a mortgage for that much,’ Fran chips in. ‘You’re worrying about nothing, as usual. They won’t buy that house because they can’t. In the current climate, Melrose Cottage would sell for maximum three hundred thousand, most of which would go back to the Rawndesley and Silsford Building Society. Even if Con and Kit put in all their savings, no lender in their right mind would let them borrow over a million quid.’
It makes me want to scream that my sister knows as much about Kit’s and my finances as we do. When she says ‘savings’, she has an exact figure in mind – the correct one. I know about her and Anton’s money in the same way: their ISAs, their mortgage, their exact monthly income now that Anton has stopped working, how much they pay in school fees for Benji (hardly anything), how much Mum and Dad pay (almost all of it). ‘I don’t know why some families are so cagey about all things financial,’ Mum has been saying for as long as I can remember. ‘Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?’
When I was twelve and Fran ten, Mum showed us the blue pocket-book for her and Dad’s Halifax savings account, so that we could see that they’d saved four hundred and seventy-three thousand pounds and fifty-two pence. I remember staring at the blue handwritten figure and being impressed and somewhat stunned by it, thinking my parents must be geniuses, that I could never hope to be as clever as them. ‘We’re always going to be okay, because we’ve got this money as a cushion,’ Mum said. Both Fran and I fell for her propaganda, and spent our teenage years hoarding our pocket money in our savings accounts, while our friends were blowing every penny they had on lipstick and cider.
‘If you think your mother and I are going to lend you money so that you can live beyond your means, you can forget it,’ says Dad. In his and Mum’s eyes, living beyond one’s means is on a par, ethically, with tipping small babies out of windows.
‘I don’t think that,’ I tell him. I wouldn’t ask my parents to lend me a hundred pounds, let alone a million. ‘I wouldn’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove even if I could afford it ten times over and there were no other houses in the world.’ I stop short of explaining why. It ought to be obvious.
‘Do you really think my hypothetical extravagance is what we ought to be talking about? What about the dead woman lying in her own blood? Why don’t we talk about that instead? Why are you all avoiding it? I did tell you, didn’t I? I could have sworn I told you what I saw on Roundthehouses, and about the detective who came round—’
‘You didn’t see a dead woman on Roundthehouses or anywhere else,’ Dad cuts me off. ‘I’ve never heard such a load of twaddle in my life. You said yourself: when Kit came to look, there was no body. Right?’
‘That’s what you said,’ Mum adds nervously, as if she fears I’m a loose cannon, likely to change my story.
I nod.
‘Then there was no body – you imagined it,’ says Dad. ‘You ought to ring that copper and apologise for wasting his time.’
‘I’m sure if I stayed up until goodness knows what time of night, I’d start hallucinating too,’ Mum contributes. ‘I keep telling you, but you never listen: you need to look after yourself better. You and Kit both work too hard, you stay up too late, you don’t always eat properly . . .’
‘Give it a rest, Mum,’ says Fran. ‘You don’t do yourself any favours. Come on, Benji, open your mouth, for Christ’s sake. Big wide mouth!’
‘Do you think I imagined it, Fran?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Not necessarily. Maybe. Three chocolate fingers, Benji, if you open your mouth and eat this yummy . . . That’s right! Bit wider . . .’
‘What do you think, Anton?’ I ask him.
‘I don’t think you’d have seen it if it wasn’t there,’ he says. I’m considering leaping out of my chair and throwing my arms around him when he ruins it by adding, ‘Sounds like someone’s idea of a practical joke to me. I wouldn’t let it worry you.’ As answers go, it’s only a fraction less dismissive than, ‘I can’t be bothered with this – it’s too much effort.’
‘You shouldn’t be looking at houses in Cambridge at any price,’ says Mum. ‘Millionaires’ Row or . . . Paupers’ Parade. Have you forgotten what happened last time you went down that route?’
‘Mum, for God’s sake!’ says Fran.
‘At least there was a reason last time – Kit being offered a promotion.’
Which he couldn’t accept, because I ruined everything for him. Thanks for reminding me.
‘Why now, all of a sudden?’ Mum pleads, adopting what’s probably her favourite of her many voices: the frail, reedy warble of a broken woman. ‘You and Kit have got a thriving business, a lovely home, you’ve got all of us right on your doorstep, your sister, lovely Benji – why would you want to move to Cambridge now? I mean, if it was London, I could understand it, with Kit working there as much as he does – though heaven knows why anyone would want to live in such a noisy, scruffy hell-hole – but Cambridge . . .’
‘Because we should have moved in 2003, and we didn’t, and I’ve regretted it ever since.’ I’m on my feet, and I’m not sure why. Did I plan to storm out of the room? Out of the house? Mum and Dad stare at me as if they don’t understand what I’ve just said. Dad turns away, makes a breathy, growling noise I haven’t heard before. It frightens me.
Why do I always ruin things for everybody? What’s wrong with me?
‘Hooray! Benji ate his broccoli!’ Anton cheers, again through a pretend loudspeaker, apparently oblivious to the invisible strings of tension stretched tautly from one end of the kitchen to the other. Maybe I am suffering from a disease that makes you hallucinate; I can see those strings as clearly as if they were real, with unspoken threats and glowing grudges hanging from them like Christmas decorations.
‘Benji’s the champion!’ Anton bellows, as Fran waves the empty fork in the air in triumph.
‘Benji’s five, not two,’ I snap. ‘Why don’t you try talking to him normally, instead of like a low-budget children’s party entertainer?’
‘Because’ – Anton continues in his false booming voice – ‘it’s only when Daddy talks like this and makes him laugh . . . that he eats his broccoli!’
Benji isn’t laughing. He’s trying not to gag on the food he hates.
Anton’s impermeable jollity makes me want to scream a torrent of insults at him. The only time I’ve ever seen the mildest of frowns pass across his face was when a Monk & Sons customer referred to him as a house-husband. Fran quickly corrected her in a way that sounded forced, learned by heart. I made the mistake of repeating the story to Kit, who instantly developed a Pavlovian response to hearing Anton’s name: ‘Anton – not a house-husband, but a personal trainer taking an open-ended career break.’
‘Low-budget!’ Mum pounces on the phrase. ‘Of course, you’re high-end now, aren’t you, with your 1.2-million-pound house?’
‘Completely unaffordable 1.2-million-pound house,’ Fran is
quick to say. It bothers her that Kit and I are better off than she and Anton are, though I’m not sure she would admit it to herself. It’s been worse since Kit left Deloitte and we started our own business. If Nulli came a cropper, Fran would be sympathetic, upset on our behalf, but also relieved. I’m certain of this, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove a lot of things at the moment.
Fran and Anton live in a cottage called Thatchers that’s smaller than my house, and closer to my parents – almost directly opposite Thorrold House, across the green. Like Melrose Cottage, Thatchers is a two-up two-down, but the kitchen is no more than a tiny strip at one end of the lounge, and the bedrooms are in the thatched roof and therefore triangular, difficult to stand up in. As it happens, Anton and Fran suffer hardly at all from a lack of space – effectively, they have lived with Mum and Dad since Benji was born. Thatchers, which they persist in referring to as ‘home’, is empty almost all the time.
Why does nobody ever point out how crazy it is to have an empty house just standing there? Crazier than looking at houses in Cambridge on the internet. Crazier than considering moving to one of England’s most beautiful, vibrant cities instead of spending the rest of your life in Little Holling, Silsford, with its one pub and its population of fewer than a thousand people.
‘Ignore Connie, Anton,’ Mum says. ‘She’s clearly taken leave of her senses.’
‘She can make it up to me.’ Anton winks at me. ‘Extra babysitting, Con, yeah?’
I try to smile, though the prospect of any more babysitting makes me swell with resentment. I already babysit for Benji every Tuesday night. In my family, if something happens once and goes well, it’s only a matter of time before someone suggests that it ought to become a tradition.
‘One choccie finger, two choccie fingers, three choccie fingers!’ Fran is hamming up her dealings with Benji now, to demonstrate her support for Anton and his silly voices. She’s on his side, Dad and Mum are on each other’s, and nobody’s on mine. Suits me fine; anything that makes me feel less like one of the Little Holling Monks has to be a good thing.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my senses,’ I tell Mum. ‘I know what I saw. I saw a dead woman in that room, lying in a pool of her own blood. The detective I spoke to this morning is taking it seriously. If you don’t want to, that’s up to you.’
‘Oh, Connie, listen to yourself!’ Mum says sorrowfully.
‘Don’t waste your breath, Val,’ Dad mutters. ‘When does she ever pay attention to what we say?’ He lifts his right arm and studies the table beneath as if he expects to find something there. ‘What happened to that cuppa you were making?’
‘I’m sorry, but it makes no sense, love,’ Mum says to me in a hushed voice as she refills the kettle, shooting guilty glances in Dad’s direction, hoping he won’t notice her continued willingness to engage with the daughter he just dismissed as not worth bothering with. ‘I mean, you only have to think about it for two seconds to realise it’s a non-starter, don’t you? Why would anyone put a murdered woman’s body on a property website? A murderer wouldn’t do it, would he, because he’d want to hide what he’d done. An estate agent wouldn’t do it because he’d want to sell the house, and no one’s going to buy a—’
‘Except my eldest daughter,’ Dad announces loudly. ‘Not only my daughter – also my book-keeper, which is even more worrying. Oh, she’s more than happy to mortgage herself into penury to buy the gruesome death house for 1.2 million pounds!’ I don’t know why he’s glaring at Benji as he says this, as if it’s his fault.
‘Dad, I don’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove. I can’t afford to buy it. You’re not listening to me.’ As usual. What did he mean by the book-keeper comment? That he’s afraid I might steal from Monk & Sons? That my profligate tendencies are likely to bankrupt the family business? I’ve never done anything but a brilliant job for him, and it counts for nothing. I needn’t have bothered.
And now I’m thinking like a martyr. Don’t they say all women turn into their mothers?
Tell them all you’re leaving Monk & Sons. Resigning. Work full-time for Nulli – that’s what you want to do, isn’t it? What is it about these people that makes it impossible to say what you mean and do what you want?
‘You’re contradicting yourself,’ I say to Dad. ‘If I imagined the body, then it’s not a gruesome death house, is it?’
‘So you do want to buy it. I knew it!’ He thumps his fist down on the table, making it rock.
‘The vendor wouldn’t do it,’ Mum burbles to herself, wrapping her burned hand in a piece of kitchen roll while she waits for the kettle to boil. ‘Presumably he or she wants the house to sell as much as the estate agent does.’
‘Please stop cataloguing everyone who wouldn’t put a dead body up on a website, Mum,’ Fran groans. ‘You’ve made your point: no one would do it.’
‘Well, if no one would do it, Connie can’t have seen it, can she?’ Mum nods triumphantly at me, as if that ought to be the end of the matter.
Why do my family always make me feel like this? Whenever I talk to them for any length of time, I end up wriggling in discomfort, desperately searching for a pocket of air as the oxygen is slowly squeezed from the conversation.
I can’t bear to be around them any longer. Nor can I stand the thought of going home to Kit, who will ask me how it went, and laugh as though at a sitcom when I bring it to life for him, as he will expect me to, as if I am a comedian and my family entertaining and harmless, joke-fodder. There’s only one person I want to talk to at the moment, and although it’s a Saturday, it’s also an emergency.
Is it? Are you sure?
When was I last sure of anything?
I pull my mobile phone out of my bag and leave the room. Mum shouts after me, ‘You don’t have to go into another room. We won’t listen.’
‘And the ridiculous thing was, I nearly didn’t do it. I found myself thinking, “But it’s not a real emergency – you’re not bleeding to death, or hanging from a cliff by your fingernails. Save your permission to ring in an emergency for a life-or-death situation, don’t squander it on this.’ But why not? I mean, it is a life-and-death situation: the woman I saw had been murdered – she must have been. And why did I decide it was a once-only thing and that after I’d used up my ringing-in-an-emergency allowance, it would be gone for ever? Would you be angry if I rang you outside working hours in a few months, or even years, if I was unlucky enough to feel as bad as this again?’
‘Are you noticing the words you’re choosing?’ Alice asks. ‘ “Saving”, “squandering”?’
No, I didn’t notice. Admitting as much would be too depressing, so I say nothing. When I first started to see Alice, the long silences unsettled me. Now I’m used to them. I’ve grown to like them. Sometimes I count how long they last: one elephant, two elephants, three elephants. Sometimes I go into a kind of trance, staring at the clear glass beads that run along the bottom of the cream silk blind, or at the pink butterflies chandelier.
‘Why did you tell your family about seeing the woman and the blood?’ Alice says eventually.
‘Kit asked me the same thing. ‘‘Why tell them?’’ he said. ‘‘They’ll give you a hard time and make you feel a hundred times worse.’’ I knew he was right, but I still went round and put myself in the firing line.’
‘You often describe your parents as suffocating.’ Alice remembers every word I have uttered in her presence since we first met, without the help of notes. Maybe the pink butterflies are hiding some kind of recording device. ‘Why did you go round to be suffocated, on no sleep and after the worst shock of your life?’
‘I had to tell them. A detective came to interview me. It was . . . too big to keep from them, too important. I can’t be involved with the police and hide it from my family.’
‘Can’t?’
No secrets between people who love each other. I’ve had it drummed into me all my life. I’m not sure it’s possible to explain that sort of programming to someone who ha
sn’t experienced it.
‘Yet you’ve kept quiet about the other big, important thing in your life at the moment,’ says Alice. ‘The problem that’s been preoccupying you since January.’
I laugh, though I feel like crying. ‘It’s not the same. That might be nothing. It probably is.’
‘The dead woman you saw might be nothing, if you imagined her.’
‘I didn’t. I know I didn’t.’
Alice takes off her glasses, drops them in her lap. ‘You didn’t imagine what happened in January, either,’ she says. ‘You don’t know what it means, but you didn’t imagine it.’
‘I can’t tell Mum and Dad that I’m afraid Kit might have a whole other life that I don’t know about,’ I say, loathing the sound of the words. ‘It’s just not an option. You don’t understand. I might have changed my surname, but I’m still a Monk. Everything in the Monk family is nice and normal and happy. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a rule. There are no problems, ever, apart from Benji not eating his sodding broccoli – that’s the worst thing that’s allowed to happen. It’s out of the question, absolutely forbidden, for there to be anything weird going on – really bad weird, I mean. Weird funny is okay, as long as it makes a good anecdote.’
I wipe my face, try to compose myself. ‘The only thing worse than bad-weird is uncertain. My parents don’t accept ambiguity of any kind – literally, as soon as it dares to make an appearance, they show it the door in no uncertain terms. And, yes, I said that deliberately. Everything Mum and Dad do, they do in no uncertain terms. Uncertainty is the enemy. One of the enemies,’ I correct myself. ‘Change is the other. And sponta-neity, and risk; there’s a whole gang of them.’
‘No wonder your parents are scared,’ says Alice. ‘You said it yourself: they’re being persecuted by a gang.’
Lasting Damage Page 8
