East of Innocence

by David Thorne

  I am trying to lay stripes in the lawn, passing first one way and then another, keeping the gaps even, the lines straight. I can look up and see the window of my mother’s room but nothing further, but I know that, if she is awake, she will be watching me. It is hot and I am wearing only a T-shirt and shorts; the day is stilled by the heat so that, when I stop the mower, the silence is almost total. I feel marooned in a place with no time, where the outside world has ceased to matter. I wonder how long it can last.

  My mother’s nurse is a tight-bodied Pole who refuses to smile at me and I am not even sure whether she understands who I am and why I am here. She is checking my mother’s drip when I enter the room and she darts a hostile look at me from dark eyes made more alarming by her tightly pulled-back black hair; I am tempted to stick my tongue out at her. Mrs Latimer has given me flowers, fuchsias from her garden, and I walk past the nurse and put the vase on top of one of the machines. The nurse tuts and takes it off, puts it on the bedside cabinet. She bustles about and walks out and I say to my mother, ‘Was it something I said?’

  ‘Agata does not like the routine disturbed,’ my mother says. She is looking well, better since her dialysis and her face has almost a glow to it. ‘She is a good girl, but I think she would also have made a fine Nazi.’

  I lean over and kiss her. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Feeling? Daniel, I feel like I could dance. Do you dance?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really?’

  ‘At all. Imagine if I step on somebody’s toe.’

  My mother laughs, looks me up and down. ‘So big.’

  ‘And ugly.’

  ‘Oh no. Oh, Daniel, you must never think that.’

  I flick the flowers with the end of my hand, do not reply.

  ‘I used to dance. In Romania. Of course it was peasant dances, we were not allowed any decadent influence. But here, I went to dance classes. I learned the quickstep.’

  ‘I play tennis.’

  ‘Tennis?’ My mother looks at me and laughs softly, runs out of breath and has to take some moments to recover. ‘I am sorry, Daniel. You do not look the kind of person who plays tennis.’ She stops as if worried that she will cause me offence, but the idea of my playing tennis clearly tickles her and she laughs again. ‘In the little white shorts? Oh my God.’

  I smile. ‘I was pretty good. Still am.’

  ‘I would have gone to see every game,’ she says. ‘I would have argued with the other mothers. “My Daniel is best. Hush your mouths.” Like that, every game.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ We are both smiling but of course it does not last, because rushing in behind the words comes the usual tidal wave of lost years and regret. Yet we continue to look at each other frankly; there is no hiding our pain. It is allowed, in the open, acknowledged. This is something we share, our pragmatism.

  ‘You never went back. To Romania.’

  ‘Why? Imagine the shame, Daniel. Leaving my parents for a better life, coming home a whore.’

  ‘No.’

  My mother laughs. She laughs easily, though over her lifetime she should have laughed more. ‘Oh please, Daniel. It is in the past. And anyway –’ and here I see something in my mother which I have not seen before, a mischief which is entirely without inhibition ‘– I was no good. At being a whore. I was better at the quickstep.’ She pauses, shakes her head in private amusement. ‘And I was terrible at the quickstep, also.’

  ‘I would have danced the quickstep with you,’ I say, but even as I say it I realise how mawkish it sounds.

  ‘No thank you, Daniel,’ she says. ‘I care too greatly for my toes.’

  I stay at my mother’s side for three days, and during that time I believe that she shows signs of improvement. Mr and Mrs Latimer are kind to me and I feel welcome, even though their daughter doesn’t come to visit. My mother and I talk, and I watch her sleep, and she gazes at me whenever she is awake as if I am a temporary, miraculous visitation that could disappear back into the ether at any moment. And in some ways she is right; though I am happier here in the safety and security of the Latimers’ home, at some point I have to leave, to go back and face my demons in Essex. Rosie O’Shaughnessy has parents who have as little idea of what ultimately happened to her as my mother did about me; I cannot leave them to suffer in ignorance any longer. And Baldwin will not keep any longer.

  My mother smiles when I tell her that I have to go but her smile is belied by the tears that fall down the sides of her thin head as she looks up at me from her bed. But she regains control and nods quickly and as I bend down she puts an arm behind my head and with more force than I believed she had she pulls me closer, covering my face with quick kisses. I stand up and smile and walk away and there is nothing in the world I would rather do less than close that door behind me.

  29

  I HAD PHONED ahead and when Xynthia Halliday opens her door she is dressed in a satin shift with a headband to which feathers are attached; she looks as if she is about to go on stage in a play set between the wars. She smiles when she sees me and before I have the chance to say anything she says, ‘So? How was she?’ I do not answer and after a couple of seconds her face loses its light and she suddenly looks nervous, though she tries to hide it.

  ‘What am I thinking? Come in, come in. We’ll sit down and talk. Come in.’

  She makes way and I walk past her into her living room, the ranks of photographs still silently charting the success and wonder of her early, pre-Halliday years in theatre. I stand in the middle of the floor and she smiles, though without the brightness of before; she knows that something is up.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Okay.’ She fidgets with her neckline, running a finger inside it. ‘Well. You found her.’

  ‘She thought I was dead.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Principally because you told her I was.’

  Xynthia doesn’t say anything, sits down. She looks at the wall opposite as if it is showing her past. She sighs sadly.

  ‘She came back for you,’ she says. ‘She wouldn’t see sense.’

  ‘It wasn’t sense, her wanting to find her son?’

  ‘No.’ A flash of anger. ‘No, Daniel, it wasn’t. What would Vincent’ve done to her, if he’d found out?’

  ‘Why would he care? Wasn’t his son.’

  ‘It wasn’t about you. He… So she had a son. Do you think Vincent would have cared about that? She was back, after he’d sent her away.’

  ‘He sold her.’

  ‘And why? Because the alternative was to get rid of her another way. Listen.’ She smoothes her shift over her knees. ‘As far as Vincent was concerned, she’d made him look stupid. Carrying on with your father, getting knocked up, when she was his property. Now she’s back, rubbing salt in. You can’t see the danger she was in?’

  ‘So you lied to her.’

  I see the anger in her eyes again. ‘You were a fucking baby, Daniel. You had your life in front of you. Marcela, she was in danger. Right then and there. She wouldn’t listen to reason, so I had to make her give up another way. Yeah, I lied. Best thing I could’ve done for her. I still believe that, even now.’

  ‘You sentenced me to a life without a mother. What gave you the right?’

  ‘Oh please.’ She waves a hand. ‘Stop being so fucking selfish. At least she’s still alive. Look on the bright side.’

  I came to Xynthia’s door brimming with righteous anger but I can feel it evaporating, leaving only a hollow feeling where it had been. I look at Xynthia’s defiant face and I know that, at the very least, she felt like she had done the right thing. She called me selfish and perhaps there is some truth in that; I resent her for consigning me to the uncaring hands of my father, robbing me of the chance of happiness. But perhaps it had been the right thing to do. Certainly, she felt it had been, and I know Xynthia Halliday. She is not a bad person. I sit down opposite her, elbows on my knees, look down at her worn carpet.


  ‘I’m so sorry, Daniel,’ she says softly. ‘I used to watch you, you know. At school. You looked so sad, so lost. It would break my heart.’

  I look up at her. ‘She was happy to see me,’ I say. But she doesn’t hear me, lost in the regrets of her past.

  ‘Poor, poor boy.’

  As I drove back to Essex, I had watched lightning stabbing down on to the flat country as a cold front swept in to do battle with the occupying heat that had been sitting sullen and heavy over the land for a month or more. Thunder-heads miles high, their edges backlit by the red dying sun, loomed over me as I drove through fat raindrops falling slowly and ominously on to my windscreen. From time to time I would lift my little finger and regard the stump, which my mother’s nurse had taken the stitches from; it was shiny and traced with red lines but already it was less angry than it had been. But my anger, my feeling of having been violated by a man as close to evil as I had ever experienced, was as strong as ever. As I thought about Baldwin, my hands gripped the wheel with such force that my shoulders ached, lost in visions of vengeance, which, if I was to be honest, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to carry out.

  I had picked up the discs that Terry had copied from a man who called himself Frank and whose rustic appearance in a chunkily knitted sweater and rubber boots was belied by his suburban Essex accent. He lived in a stone building in the middle of the countryside on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales and I found him down a rough track, two lines of baked mud with withered yellow grass growing down the middle, which scraped the bottom of my car as I bounced down the ruts. Terry had not told me his story but I had got the impression that Frank was a man with a complicated past, and that he would not be returning to Essex any time soon.

  Frank was waiting for me and he came out of his house, if you could call it that, before I had the chance to knock. He had a long grey beard and did not seem pleased to see me.

  ‘You Daniel Connell?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Got a call from Terry. Says it’s okay to give you this.’

  He was holding a carrier bag, which he pushed out at me as if it contained pornography he did not agree with.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ he said belligerently. ‘Just take them and do what you have to do. And don’t say where you got them from.’

  I wondered about his story and what it was he had run from, but I had had enough of hard-luck tales. Terry, Xynthia, Billy Morrison, Rosie O’Shaughnessy, even my mother; I seemed to have been swamped by a steady stream of undeserving victims and tragic figures, with the result that Vincent Halliday and Baldwin were both out gunning for me. I am a solitary man and thinking back over the chaos of the past weeks I wondered how I had managed to attract so much attention. Certainly, I did not believe that I had gone out actively looking for it; instead, it had been brought to my door by a procession of needy supplicants. Yet I was carrying the entire burden, and it was not a role I had asked for or that I relished. I should have been at my mother’s side; instead, I was about to go up against one psychopath in Baldwin, and one borderline case in Vincent Halliday.

  I took the bag from Frank and headed back for Essex and whatever awaited me there.

  Before I visited Xynthia, I had stopped at Gabe’s; I had not spoken to him for weeks and when he opened the door he looked as if he had spent that time drinking with the abandonment of a terminal alcoholic. His face was puffy and I believe it was the first time I had ever seen him unshaven. The drinking seemed to have made his eyes even paler than usual and he stood with one arm against the frame of the door as if it was all that was holding him up.

  ‘So the bottle won.’

  ‘Only the first round.’

  ‘You going to ask me in?’

  Inside Gabe’s house there was little evidence of his internal disorder; a decade in the Army clearly instilled a discipline that even weeks of hard drinking could not shift. Everything was in its place, washing up neatly stacked on the draining board in his kitchen. I sat down and he made coffee, then he asked me about my mother and I told him everything. As I spoke, his look of hostile indifference changed and his eyes softened; underneath his self-loathing and regret, he still had time for other people. Not a lost cause yet. He asked me about Baldwin and I told him about Terry and the copies of the discs he had made.

  ‘You can stay here, if you like. Keep out of his way.’

  ‘Thanks. But I’m not running anymore. He wants me, he’ll find me at home.’

  ‘Daniel, this isn’t a fight you need to have. Let the police take care of it.’

  ‘They will. But I’m not hiding.’

  Gabe looked at me and eventually nodded, took a drink from his coffee, the cup’s rim covering his eyes. ‘Your funeral,’ he said from behind it, the subject closed. Tough love and short shrift; that’s all you can expect from Gabe.

  Now that Xynthia’s secret is out, that she told my mother that her only son was dead to prevent her running up against Halliday, she opens up to me. She tells me about life with Halliday, about the exciting, glamorous early days of cocktail parties and Ladies’ Day at Ascot and sun-soaked weeks on strangers’ yachts. But those days were as ephemeral as a four-month West End run, and soon the reality of Halliday emerged; the temper, the psychological abuse, the suspicion and, behind it all, his business. Drugs, blackmail, violence and, worst of all, women.

  ‘Them days,’ says Xynthia, ‘there was this fucking daft idea that criminals were like Robin Hood or something. Like we were part of the counter-culture somehow. It was the drugs, mostly, like because we were doing them, and so were the bands and the dropouts, like somehow we shared something. But that lot didn’t have a clue. Scratch Vincent and you wouldn’t find a good-time guy. Scratch Vincent and he’d put you in a hole in the fucking ground.’

  She walks to a cocktail cabinet and pours two small glasses of a sweet brown liqueur that I do not recognise but drink out of politeness. The effort of bending down and pouring makes her breathe heavily but she holds up her glass and says, ‘To a life of fucking regret.’ I smile but feel uncomfortable and, as she drinks and stares unhappily, I look around her cramped living room and her photos and realise that those few years, before the dream went sour, were probably the only good years of her life.

  ‘You want to know, want to really know about Vincent Halliday? I’ll tell you about Vincent fucking Halliday.’

  I leave Xynthia’s flat after two more glasses; I’ve had enough of the sweet liqueur and dark, grisly revelations she is increasingly drunkenly spilling to me and, besides, I now know enough for what I have to do. I drive home through heavy rain and air that is turning cooler by the minute. Once there, I wait for the end of the thunderstorm. And for whoever is out there, looking for me.

  30

  I AM AT the place where Rosie O’Shaughnessy was found, a clearing in a stretch of woodland next to a long straight B-road, which sweeps beneath overhanging trees through Epping Forest into the Essex countryside. It is quiet and I have a sense of foreboding that I cannot place; I do not believe in residual energies or spirits or ghosts, but standing in the cool shade I have a sensation of gathering, malevolent forces, which has me turning in a circle, looking into the darkness of the trees for what, I do not know. I hear a noise and a flurry of birds break cover somewhere in the murk and I am so spooked that I almost turn and run.

  But I came here for a reason; I hold my ground. I am not a sentimental person but I have felt, over the past weeks, some kind of connection to Rosie, despite barely having spoken to her when she was alive. I have carried the secret of her death with me; I have done my best for her. Now I am standing where she was killed, where her life was taken away by arrogant men who believed they were above the law. If there is a place where I can pay my respects to an innocent, lively, vital young woman who deserved many more years of life, this is it.

  There are still some ragged strands of yellow police tape attached to trees and trodden into the undergrowth and
, although I am not sure of the exact spot where Rosie’s body was found, this feels close enough. I sit down with my back against a tree and think back over the events of the past few weeks, the people I have encountered and the tawdry stories I have heard. Terry Campion, Billy Morrison, Vincent Halliday, Baldwin, my mother; all part of the cycle of criminality and brutality that lies barely hidden underneath the surface of my neighbourhood.

  It is cooler today, a wind blowing a chill through my shirt; the temperature has dropped ten degrees in one day and the leaves on the ground are cold to the touch and I shiver against the bark of the tree at my back. Where I am sitting, it is gloomy, the sun beyond the massed branches hidden behind low white clouds, and, although I hear the noise clearly, it is some time before I can make out who, or what, is approaching. My skin prickles in dread and I cannot stand, cannot run. From behind a stand of bushes I can make out the shape of a figure emerging from the dark of the trees, and as it gets nearer I see a face with a strange metallic semi-circle around its bottom half; the face is stained brown and green and only one eye looks at me, the other hidden behind some kind of plastic cover. The figure picks its way robotically over branches and roots and I stand up, the better to see exactly what it is. The skin on my scalp tightens in atavistic horror as I first irrationally think I am witnessing the emergence of some kind of grotesque man-made ogre from the forest’s innards; then I realise with a sudden clarity who it is and I think, with a different kind of horror: I created that.

  ‘Hello, Gary,’ I say. The last time I had seen him he was barely conscious on the floor of the workshop underneath the arches; the damage I have done to him is dreadful. He looks at me through his one good eye with a desperate hatred.

  ‘You’re a fucking dead man,’ he says, the semi-circle of metal moving up and down with his lower jaw. This close I can see that it is attached by thin pins, which sprout from the flesh of his chin and jawbone and his entire face is horribly bruised and discoloured. That must have hurt.