by Joanna Nadin
“Oh, it’s all right. I don’t give a monkey’s. As long as no one’s puking tomorrow. ’Cause if they are, it’ll be you cleaning it up.”
I’m not sure if she’s joking, so I don’t say anything. Just turn and walk up the steps, push open the double doors, feel the blast of hot air and the smell of Irish stew.
The thing is, I want to work. Need to work. For the money, and the monotony. I need to do something. Or I’ll think about Will. And Mum. Be consumed by it. The awfulness and waste of it all.
I scrub tiles until my nails break the thin pink rubber of the gloves, until I can feel the Dettol-rich water soak into my fingertips, trickle up my arm. I vacuum invisible crumbs and cotton threads. And I lose myself in it, and in him.
I’m in Alex’s room, cleaning the toilet, when I hear his voice behind me.
“I never said I was sorry.”
I jump. Look up from the cracked porcelain of the toilet bowl I’ve been wiping to see him standing in the doorway.
“God, I —” I stand awkwardly. “Pardon? What did you say?”
“I’m sorry. About Will.”
I remember now. The locket. I clutch it automatically.
“It was a terrible business,” he says. “Terrible.”
“He drowned,” I say. “I know. I found out.”
“Both of them,” he adds. “Him and that other boy.”
He’s pulling on the bottom button of his cardigan, a wooden toggle, like on a kid’s duffle coat.
I feel cold creep down my spine, like the legs of a spider. “What other one?” I say. Not Jonty. Because he rang. He is alive.
“Found him two weeks later. Two weeks in the water, can you imagine?”
I feel the butterflies coming to life. “Who was in the water?” I ask slowly. “What was his name?”
“His name?” he mutters to himself. And then he bangs the flat of his hand on his forehead. “Can’t remember,” he repeats. “Can’t.” He is pulling the toggle harder and harder, and I think the wool tying it is about to snap. But something else does.
“Who was he?” I plead, the butterflies frantic now. “Who died?”
He lets go of the toggle and looks at me, shock spreading across the creased map of his face.
“Your daddy, Billie. Your daddy, of course.”
IT IS dark when Jonty wakes. Pitch-black. The lights from the fair long extinguished. It takes him four breaths to work out where he is, longer to stand, his brain dulled by alcohol, his legs aching with cold.
He holds on to the railing, keeping himself upright against the wind and his own stomach and head, which will him back down with every second. But he mustn’t listen. Because he remembers now. Remembers what happened.
Remembers the Gypsy boy, Het’s boy, shouting. Remembers Will’s hands slamming into his shoulders. Pushing him. Then the water. The water. He remembers Will, his head going under, then back up, his mouth gaping like a fish. Then he is gone. He stares down into the inky depths. There is nothing there. Just the vastness of the sea. Miles wide and fathoms deep. Did he come out? It is all too blurred, fuzzy at the edges.
His stomach contracts violently and he pukes into the darkness below. Then he wipes his mouth, turns, and lurches home.
In the morning he tells the police what happened. Says the Gyppo pushed Will into the water. Says he had it in for them. Had done for weeks. Says it was over Het. And the baby. That he wanted her to run off with him. Join some Travelers’ thing. Will begged him not to. But the Gyppo wasn’t having any of it.
He says he saw it all. Says the Gyppo hit him, too, knocked him out against the railing. Shows them the bruise on the side of his face.
“Looks to be harder than a fist done that,” one officer says.
“He knew what he was doing,” says Jonty. “They’re all fighters, that sort.”
Carol lets out a sob, and Eleanor, who wishes — hopes — her own boy escaped with just a bruise, lays a shaking hand on her shoulder.
“And you’d stand up in court?” says the other officer. The taller one. “Tell them exactly what happened?”
Jonty nods. Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye.
“You have to be sure,” says Eleanor.
“He is,” her husband snaps. “For God’s sake, woman. He saw it.”
But two weeks later they find him: the Gypsy. Tom. And the morning after, Jonty wakes in a sweat. He has had a dream. A terrible dream, where Tom’s hand isn’t a fist raised in anger; it is an open palm reaching to help. Where Will isn’t pushed; he falls. Where Tom doesn’t fall; he jumps. Jumps in to save Will.
But it isn’t a dream. It isn’t a dream at all.
He goes to his father’s study, closes the door, and with his eyes to the ground, his words faltering, stomach turning, he tells him what he has remembered.
At the grim end, he looks up and waits. Waits for the rage and the fury, for the call to the police, for the sorry confession, and the punishment.
But instead his father says, “It will do no good.”
“Pardon?” Jonty feels that in his shaken state he must have misheard. That he is conjuring up what he has willed, like a rabbit out of a hat.
But it is no cheap trick.
“They’re both dead,” he explains. “There will be no prosecution. The truth cannot save the boy. Let Roger and Eleanor believe the best of William. Let it rest.”
And he tries. He puts the thought away, buries it under his A levels and medical school and his job at the hospital. He stitches new life into people, trying to make up for the two lost ones, trying to hide the truth.
But when he closes his eyes, it pushes its way to the surface, grabs hold of him and pulls him back. To the pier. To that night. And it eats away at him like the blackened cancer he cuts out.
I LEAVE the Laurels with no explanation. No apology. Still in my uniform I walk, through yards and yards, hope after hope, dream after dream. Through every “What could have been,” every face in the crowd that I imagined was him. She must have known, I think. Must have known he was dead. And all these years I’ve wasted my time imagining, waiting to meet this man who is no more than a body. A corpse.
And inside I feel the insects batter. But not in fear now. In rage.
I leave the door open behind me, feet trailing mud and leaves and dog shit along the carpet.
She’s in the drawing room. In some black ball gown, a glass of wine in her hand. Red, like blood.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I say slowly.
“What?” she turns, spilling wine down her dress, drops staining the carpet, oblivious.
“Why didn’t you tell me about my dad?” My words are measured. Cold.
“What?” She tries to laugh it off. “What are you talking about?”
The hollow laughter pokes me, stings me, and I stare angrily at her, breath coming hard now, blood singing in my ears. “All these years . . . you said he was gone. Gone away. And now I’ve found out that he’s dead. That my dad’s dead.”
Her face is ashen now. “Oh, Billie.” The glass tumbles from her hands and hits the carpet as she reaches out to hold me.
And then I know it’s true. I slap her arms away. “What happened?” I yell. “I need to know. I need the truth.”
Mum shakes her head. “I can’t.”
“You have to,” I bawl. “All these years you’ve been lying. Now you have to tell me the truth. Tell me the truth,” I demand. “Tell me . . .”
And I repeat it, banging out the words like a rhythm on a drum, until she puts her hands over her ears and screams out, “He killed him.”
The words plunge into me, a blade. I gasp. “What?”
She claps a hand over her mouth and stares at me in shock. But it’s too late. The secret is out.
I grab her arms, shake her like a rag doll. “What do you mean? Who did he kill? What happened?”
“Billie,” she pleads.
“Just tell me.” I shake her hard again, and I feel h
er go limp.
She looks at me, helpless now. A thing of pity. Hair stuck to her face with snot and tears, her body shaking. She manages to speak through the sobs. “I don’t know it all,” she says. “Just that there was a fight.”
“Who?” I demand. “Who was fighting?”
“Tom — your dad. He hit Jonty, I think.”
“And then?”
She lets her head fall and makes a keening sound, like an animal. “Don’t make me, Billie.”
The noise is pain. And it hurts me, too. But I won’t stop. Can’t stop. “You have to,” I spit. “You have to tell me.”
And she does. “He hit Jonty,” she wails, “and then he pushed Will off the pier.”
The butterflies inside me take flight. I feel them rise in my throat. Pushing out a “No.” But even as I utter it I know it is hopeless.
“I’m sorry,” she cries. “I’m so sorry.”
And we’re both crying. Me propping her up with my hands, but I can’t hold her. Can’t be held.
“How?” I manage.
But she shakes her head. “I wasn’t there. They told me. He told me.”
“Your father?”
She nods. Pulls her head back up so her red-rimmed eyes meet mine. “It was over me,” she says. “The fight. Do you understand, Billie? It was my fault. That Will died. That your dad —”
I’ve heard enough. I let go of her arms and she crumples into a chair, sobbing out more apologies.
But sorry isn’t what I need. Sorry won’t change the fact that Tom wasn’t brave, or just a coward who never wanted kids.
He was a killer.
IT TAKES two weeks for Tom’s body to come to shore. Blue lipped and bloated, it catches in the anchor rope of the Amelia in a harbor twenty miles down the coast from Seaton. At first the owner thinks it’s a dolphin, so pale and cyanotic. But then the tide swells, bobbing the lifeless corpse up to the surface for a second, and instead of fins he sees fingers, and he knows it is a man.
Jimmy identifies the body. Laid out on cold metal in the basement of the hospital, the fluorescent lights tingeing his skin an impossible green, water still swelling his flesh so that he looks less like a man than a monster: the Incredible Hulk. But even through his Marvel disguise, Jimmy can see it is him. Can see where the toy car cut his forehead. Can see the hands that together span three octaves. The mouth that turns up slowly into a lazy smile. The same mouth as their father. As his own son.
A week later they bury the body. And a week after that Jimmy leaves Seaton: leaves his girlfriend, leaves the little boy with the lazy smile, and he doesn’t come back for seven years.
MUM IS balled in the armchair, her arms tight around her legs, her body still shaking with tears. I feel weak with it, too. Dizzy. But I can’t curl up. Can’t give in to it. Because I need to know more. Because she has told me what he was.
But not who. Or why.
And she wasn’t there. So how can she know for sure?
I look frantically around the drawing room. At the books. The files. I pull them off the shelves. Shaking them. Trying to find where Eleanor has hidden the rest of the secret. Where she has buried it. Waiting for a slip of paper to fall out.
But there is nothing. Of course there is nothing. Because it isn’t her secret to keep. Because she wasn’t there either.
But Jonty was. Jonty saw it all. And Jonty didn’t crash his car. Jonty didn’t drown. Jonty called the house just days ago.
Jonty is alive.
And then I see it. See Mum stamping on the answering machine. Broken black plastic shards I swept up weeks since. And something else. The handset on the polished table. Still displaying a signal. Which means . . .
I run to the hall and pick it up and dial 1471 for call return.
The number is local, the same code as ours, as Danny’s. I punch in “3” and listen as the line connects.
“Dr. Lister.”
I falter for a second, thrown by the title. But it is him. The same voice, thick with money and class.
“I — my name’s Billie”— and I am about to say “Paradise,” when I change my mind, remember who I am —“Billie Trevelyan,” I say.
“You’re —”
“Het’s daughter.”
There’s silence. And I’m scared he is going to hang up. That he changed his mind. That whatever he wanted to say to Mum can stay buried. But I can’t let it. I need to speak to him. To see him. “Can you meet me?” I say.
“Of course. I —”
“Do you know Jeanie’s?” I interrupt. “It’s a café on the seafront.”
“Yes. Yes, I do. When?”
And I know he’s expecting a “Tomorrow.” Or “In a week.” But it can’t wait. For either of us.
“Now,” I say. “I need to meet now.”
The café is empty. A SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED sign hanging lopsided in the glass. But the lights are on, and I can hear music filtering out. Not Beyoncé. Guitars. And I feel a surge of relief that it’s him.
I knock hard on the window and see him turn, and turn off the radio. Then, wiping his washing-wet hands on an apron, he walks to the door and unlocks it. His eyes on mine the whole time.
“Billie? What’s going on?”
I fall into his arms, clutch on to him. The only steady thing I have. The only real thing.
“It’s Tom,” I say. “My dad . . . I know what happened.”
I tell him what they have told me — Alex and Mum. The fight. That he pushed Will. That they both drowned. But that Jonty saw it. That Jonty is coming.
He says nothing. Just holds me tight to him, so I breathe through the thick, checked flannel of his shirt, breathe in the smell of sweat and bacon fat, and peace, and love.
And I want time to stop right then. Want the world to end with just this fleeting sense of serenity. But the clock doesn’t stop. The seconds still tick around.
* * *
There is a sharp rap at the door, and I look up from Danny’s shoulder through the glass, pull away from him, and go to answer it.
The man on the other side is tall, still ruddy cheeked and blond, like the photograph. But his face and hair have thinned, and faint shadows show under his eyes.
“Billie?”
“Yes, I — this is Danny.”
Jonty nods at him, then surveys the room. The shabbiness of it. Probably used to bars, I think. Country clubs. Not this. But this is where I feel safe. This is where I belong.
“Do you want tea?” Danny asks.
I shake my head. Can’t drink. Can barely swallow. Jonty reaches in his pocket and pulls out a silver hip flask. “If you don’t mind?” he says.
I shrug, and Danny reaches for a tumbler from behind the counter, hands it to him. Then he turns to head into the galley kitchen.
I feel a wave of panic and blurt out, “Stay.”
But he won’t. “This is family stuff, Billie,” he says. “Private stuff. You need to do this by yourself.”
“But —”
“It’s OK.” He reaches for my hand. Squeezes it tight. So tight it almost hurts. But I need it. Need to know he’s not lying when he says, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Shall we?” Jonty indicates a table. Eva’s table.
I nod, and we sit. Me with my back to the wall, my hands under my thighs. Hiding the tremors that betray how terrified I am.
Jonty doesn’t sit on his hands. Jonty has something else. He unscrews the cap from the flask and pours an inch of whiskey into the scratched glass. I can smell it. Its acrid sweetness. He takes a swig, then sets it down between us, the fingers of both his hands still touching the glass, still holding on. Courage, I think. That’s what it is. That’s why Mum does it. Strength when you have nothing, no one.
“So —”
“Billie —”
We both speak at once. And then fall silent. And I cannot find the words, though a hundred questions are clamoring for attention, demanding answers: Why were they there that night? Why were they ther
e at all? What was he to them? To Mum? How did it start? How did it end?
Jonty can see them. The words, trapped inside me. And so he finds a way to coax them out of their hiding place.
“Why don’t you tell me what you know?” he says.
“Not much. Just . . . that you and Will had a fight with Tom. That Tom pushed Will. And they both drowned.” My voice cracks and he pushes the whiskey glass toward me. I shake my head and instead will the tears back down.
“Who told you that?” he asks.
“Mum,” I reply. “Het.”
“She’s wrong,” he says.
“But she —”
But he holds up a hand to bat away the end of the sentence. He has waited a long time for this. He has to finish.
So he starts.
“They were Traveler kids. Worked the fair. They never liked us and we never liked them. Tom or his brother Jimmy. No reason. Just because of who they were. Who we were.”
He pauses, looks at me to see if I am following. I nod, urging him on. Not wanting him to stop.
“Well, mostly we just stayed out of their way. But then Het — your mum — she started seeing the younger one. Tom. Got pregnant. And Roger and Eleanor . . . They were devastated. And then that night . . .” He trails off, picks up the whiskey again, then changes his mind, sets it down and pushes it away.
“That night . . .” I repeat, prompting him. Desperate for him to continue.
“That night. Billie, I — I told the police that your father pushed Will in. I thought he did. At first. It — it wasn’t like that, though. Will fell. He was drunk. We both were. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
But the apology is drowned by a wave surging inside me. Of hope. Shining hope. And the insects pause in its wake.
“What?”
“Your father didn’t push Will. He dived in to save him.” He looks up and meets my eyes, wide with it, with disbelief. “He died trying to save him.”
I stare at him. “You mean, he didn’t . . . He wasn’t . . .” And though I can’t say the word, I feel the hope turn to relief, feel it flood my veins now, like warm whiskey, like courage.
