by Adam Baron
I could sympathize with that. I knew how that felt.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I left the Portman Club with Sir Peter Morgan’s cheque in my pocket. I didn’t have any qualms about taking it; I’d done what he’d asked me to do which, after I thought about it, was a more important service than I’d initially realized. I’d helped him to atone. I deserved the money. I banked it and did some sums and figured that I could afford to take a couple of weeks off.
During those two weeks I avoided buying a paper and I turned the radio off whenever the news came on. There was only one story, which I knew only too well, and even if the press had got all the facts, which I doubted, it would never be anything more than that; a. story. No matter what words you use to describe a thing, words that are measured or those that are lurid and sensationalist, all you really have is words. Pictures don’t help either; they’re fictions too. I had entertained so many scenarios in my head about what had occurred with Edward Morgan and his brother that I didn’t trust the final one, the one the world was busy putting together. I didn’t read the papers just as I wouldn’t go to a public execution. I now knew what the order of events had been without needing to be told again, and what did even they tell you about what really went on inside people? It was all just speculation, with varying degrees of malicious joy. I didn’t need it.
The weather was cold and clear. I walked in the park and got over my cracked ribs and saw my face slowly reappearing in the mirror. I had a few drinks with Nicky but I never stayed late. I went to the gym, driving down there past the kids who were still on the corner like carp rising for the bait seconds after one of their number has been yanked away. At the gym I took it slowly, working out lightly and spending some time on the bike. Each time I went down there I saw the young boy, who never acknowledged my presence nor ever chatted to anyone else in the gym. He just concentrated on his business, whether it was curling a dumbbell or working with the rope. Sal told me that he was coming along well. He was focused, she said, and committed. Watching his set face and his narrowed eyes as he laid hell into the bag, I think I knew what he was focusing on.
I watched the dust grow on my answerphone and left the machine on. Sharon called me a couple of times but I didn’t know what to say to her so I didn’t pick up. Charlotte Morgan called to tell me that she was not going to go to the papers about her affair with Lloyd now that she knew he wasn’t involved in her husband’s murder. I’d guessed that she wouldn’t and as much as I would have liked to see Lloyd’s career take a serious knock I was relieved for her. Charlotte told me that she had, however, decided to invest in the vineyard Lloyd had mentioned though not in partnership with the MP, but with her accountant, who thought the investment very sound now that it wasn’t tied to a failing concern. Lloyd was close, apparently, to putting a deal together himself, and was apoplectic to discover that he’d been gazumped by his former mistress. Revenge, it seems, is a dish best taken with a glass or two of English table wine.
I plucked up enough courage one morning to call Dominic Lewes’ mother and arranged to meet her in Grimsby the next day. I drove up and we had coffee in a Little Chef on the outskirts of the city. She wouldn’t hear of me apologizing for my part in her son’s death, even though she now knew exactly what had happened.
‘You didn’t make him hate himself enough to go out and sell himself for drugs,’ she told me. ‘I know who did that.’
I told her about the times I’d seen her son and also the timetable I’d found in his room after he’d been killed. It didn’t even begin to penetrate the cloak of sorrow she wore round herself.
‘There is one thing though,’ she said, as we were getting ready to leave. ‘One thing which I like to think of. The police told me that this animal was due to strike again, that it was longer between murders than before. I like to think of the young man who he didn’t kill because he got my Dominic. I like to think of a normal young boy with something to live for. I picture him sometimes, laughing with his mates or holding hands with someone special. He’s a nice boy with a happy life. He doesn’t live the sort of life Dominic did. When I imagine him sometimes I’m even glad it happened to my Dominic and not to him. He goes home and sees his parents at the weekend. He’s happy. Dominic was never happy.’
* * *
I still didn’t call Sharon. I just didn’t know what to say to her. Every time I thought of her the images which played out in my mind were too much and I shut them down as soon as I realized I was thinking of her. After the first week the images were almost constant and I either walked them off or tried to dissolve them in Irish whiskey. One evening the phone rang and it was Trish, the woman I’d met at Nicky’s when he’d conned me into going down to meet him. She asked me if I wanted dinner and I thought it might take my mind off things so I said yes, and we went to a new place on the Liverpool Road. Trish was a vivacious, attractive woman and we got on well together. She was also very interesting to talk to, something which I had completely failed to notice the first time I had seen her.
We chatted about this and that until the conversation eventually came round to families. I found myself telling Trish all about mine, about Luke and what had happened to him. I think I was a little drunk and I wound up telling her all about Sharon too and the night we had spent together. How bad I felt about it but how I couldn’t stop a million different thoughts rushing round in my head. Trish nodded to herself as though something I was saying made sense.
‘I could tell there was someone,’ Trish said. ‘When we were together. I could tell you weren’t really into it.’ I started to protest but she shook her head and laughed. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind. It was just that I could tell you weren’t really up for it, but you couldn’t think of a polite way to say no.’
Trish asked me what I was going to do about all of it. I told her that I didn’t know. We had a long talk and at the end of it, after we’d left the restaurant and I’d walked her back to her car, she looked at me and smiled. She got in but before she drove off she wound her window down.
‘I think you know what to do,’ Trish said.
And suddenly, I did.
I stayed up that night and read all the poems that were in the file Sharon had given to me. I still hadn’t looked at them. I couldn’t stand the idea of knowing what my brother’s thoughts were. Not after what had happened between me and his fiancée. Even before. Something in me had been aware for some time of feelings towards Sharon which were out of place, and it was horrified of them and scared of how my brother would feel if he knew. So I had avoided his thoughts and tried to view him as simply an inert piece of flesh, the subject of pity and remorse, to be visited and sanctified. I’d been far more cowardly than Sharon had. I’d talked about football matches and skiing as a way of avoiding the truth of what was going on. She had confronted her feelings and decided to be brave enough to go with them, to admit what we both knew: that we had become very close to each other. I couldn’t face up to that because if I did I would also have to admit that Luke was irrevocably gone, that my brother was alive in name only. I could only ever love Sharon if I could first accept what she already had accepted and I had always turned away from knowing. That Luke was dead.
In the morning I drove out to the hospital. I sat next to Luke for ages, all day in fact, and I spoke for hours nonstop, telling him everything I felt about him and everything I felt about Sharon. I held his hand, pressing his grey knuckles hard against my forehead, occasionally soaking his palms and his wrists with my tears, the first time I had ever done so. I told Luke how sorry I was about what had happened to him. It was not the first time I had told him this, and I never did it from a knowledge of rational blame, but this time I felt more sorry than I ever had done before. I was now aware of what Luke’s life had been like before he was attacked. I knew what he had given up. He had not only cast off his own life so that I could keep on living, he had also given that life to me. I held on to Luke’s hand and begged for some sort of si
gn from him, a word to show that he understood what I was about to do. I waited for a long time before realizing that, though I had the chance in my life to know a happiness greater than I had felt possible since that night four years ago on the Westway, there was one thing I would have to do without for ever. I could ask for my brother’s blessing until I was blue in the face, but he would never be able to answer, or to give it to me. Not now, not ever.
Eventually I kissed Luke’s cold dry lips and said goodbye to him, and then to Hazel, who smiled at me fondly. I smiled back, feeling strangely elated. I drove back into London, all the way nursing a smile which seemed to be growing within myself, opening out inside my body like a huge orchid. A latent sense of guilt fought to stem it but the flower was too strong. I drove quickly, amazed and self-conscious about the way I was feeling, until the car was parked outside Sharon’s building in Ladbroke Grove. It was dark by now and when I looked up I could see a light behind the curtains of Sharon’s flat.
I hadn’t told her I was coming. I sat in the car for five minutes, enjoying the expectation, the almost physical knowledge that I was about to see her. Her face was alive before my eyes but there was nothing I could do about that now, even if I wanted to. The orchid inside me had grown so huge it was trying to break through my ribcage. I wondered what Sharon was doing up there: reading a law report or Marie Claire. Or maybe she was with another man, the lover I had suspected. I didn’t care. I was going up there, whatever the outcome was.
Simple as that.
As I reached for the door handle a poem came into my head; one of Luke’s poems. The poem was about Sharon. It was about how Luke couldn’t write about her, because she destroyed his centre, made him feel like a child, how his faculties had dissolved into a rush of sentiment he couldn’t express without sounding ridiculous. But how, at the same time, he couldn’t stop writing about her, even if he knew he was sounding stupid. It was one of my favourites in the collection because it was so fresh and honest. I remembered the ending:
She’s sweet as a wish
and soft as a prayer
and the sun hides out in her golden hair
when the moon saw her face he decided to take early retirement
and I love her more
than a sailboat loves the water
I couldn’t argue with that.
Acknowledgements
This book was written with the help of Jason Baron, Marcus Baron, Beverley Cousins, Naomi Delap, Dr William Drake, Lisanne Radice and Andrew Watts. General and essential encouragement came from the rest of my family, as well as from Lucy Barker, Jane Gregory, Alan Samson, Vicky Tennant and a girl I met on a beach in Portugal. Heartfelt thanks to one and all.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Pan
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Adam Baron, 1999
The moral right of Adam Baron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591610
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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