‘King Lear,’ he offered, speculatively.
‘Is that not a bit hard for the younger ones?’
‘We wouldn’t do it with the younger ones.’
‘Then what would you do?’
Tony regarded her more closely. She was trim, neat, with pinched features. She clasped the prospectus for the school tightly between arm and side while she clasped her hands in front of her. She bent a little at the waist. For a moment, Tony had the impression she was a nun, were it not for the two children with whom she’d arrived who were taking turns kicking one another behind her. The elder sibling offered his crotch for the younger to kick, which he did with some vigour.
‘I don’t know. Depends on the class, really. Some Bernard McLaverty maybe.’
She shook her head to indicate she didn’t recognise the name.
‘He’s an Irish writer living in Scotland.’
‘I can see why you’d like him,’ the woman commented. ‘With your accent.’
Tony offered a withered smile, tiring of the conversation and wanting to be home.
‘I’d want Brian to read something challenging,’ the woman decided. ‘He’s very bright.’
Tony remained sceptical, as he watched Brian receive another kick in the balls from his younger brother.
‘I’m sure he’ll fit right in,’ he said.
Once the woman left, they started packing up the books and Tony took the chance to get away early. He went down through the school and out the side door, to avoid meeting any of the senior teachers at the entrance who might comment on his leaving so quickly. It was there that he met Alice again, standing at the bus shelter.
‘Hey you,’ he said. ‘How did you get on today?’
‘It was great,’ she beamed. ‘We got to cut up a rat in Science. I got to take out the guts.’ She laughed with joy at the memory.
‘Are you getting the bus home? I can run you if you like.’
‘No thanks, sir,’ she said. ‘Dad’s coming to get me.’
‘How’s the year gone? Are people still giving you a hard time?’
She nodded. ‘It’s all right. Dad said I have to ignore them. They’ll get tired of it eventually.’
Tony nodded. How many times had he given the same advice, knowing it was rarely true? Bullies were born of weakness, turned to cruelty, just as Seneca had claimed.
Once more, Shauna Laird came to his mind, herself a victim of cruelty. Did she realise, he wondered, in her final moments, that she had been the cause of her own fate, as she had joked in class? Whether she did or not, the thought angered him. She wasn’t entirely to blame; Kelly had been responsible, too.
‘Might be better to lift your foot and hit one of them a boot some day,’ he said. ‘That’ll put an end to it for sure!’
‘I might,’ she laughed, conspiratorially.
They heard a short blast of a car horn and she turned to see from where it had come. ‘There’s Dad. Bye, sir,’ she said, offering him a brief wave, despite being only a foot or two away from him, then turned and ran across to where a red Cortina had pulled into the bus bay at the end of the car park.
Tony recognised the car the instant he saw it, even before Alice’s father stepped out to meet her. His movements were small and precise, his attitude like that of a sparrow.
Alice hugged into him and he returned the gesture, one arm around her shoulder, the other cupping her head momentarily as he kissed the top of her head then directed her round to the passenger side of the car.
Tony felt like the ground had dropped from beneath him. He’d forgotten all about what they had planned, so fixated was he on what Karen had done. Now the reality of it broke on him more forcibly than ever.
The man looked across at Tony as moment, as if aware of his gaze, then climbed into the car himself.
Tony stood, watching, his heart hammering against his chest, as the car pulled out and drove off, Alice’s face spectral through the tinted glass of the passenger window as they passed.
Chapter Thirty-Six
They passed through the village below the woods, the car shuddering from the unevenness of the road surface, pockmarked with potholes and dips. To their left was a pharmacy and shop, beyond that a small, whitewashed pub, the red illuminated T sign affixed to the front the only flash of colour on the building.
‘Stop here would you, son?’ Duggan asked. ‘I want to pick up a few tins before we head in.’
Tony could see Barr playing with the idea of ignoring him, showing no visible acknowledgment of having heard the request. Perhaps he was reluctant to stop again, so near to their final destination. Or perhaps he had tired of Duggan’s demands. In the end, though, whichever it had been, he obviously thought better of it and pulled in.
‘We need to be at the woodland soon if we’re going to have any chance of finding it today,’ Barr said.
‘That’s grand. Will you pop the boot for me; I need to get my wallet from my bag.’
Barr reached down and clicked the button. They heard the catch release behind them as the trunk unlocked.
‘I’ll not be a minute,’ Duggan said, getting out and stretching, stiff from sitting so long in one position. He stood a moment, as if deliberately taking his time, his face turned towards the sun. Then he moved around to the back of the car. They could hear him unzip his bag, could hear his movements, then the sharp thud of the door closing, the car dipping lightly with the slam of the trunk.
They watched as he rounded the vehicle and disappeared into the darkness of the pub.
‘I’m going to see where Uncle Sean is,’ Barr said, excusing himself as he climbed out of the car. ‘Encourage Hugh to get a move on, too.’
‘You’ve been in a different world,’ Karen said, when Barr had closed the door.
‘What?’
‘You’ve been somewhere else since we stopped at Monkton.’
Tony nodded. ‘I’ve been remembered things.’
‘I’ve been trying to do the complete opposite,’ Karen said. ‘No good comes of it.’
Tony smiled. ‘Duggan said the past is another country. He’s wrong. The past feels like it was just a split second ago, like it’s just a shadow, or an echo of what’s happening now.’
Karen nodded, but did not comment.
‘I was thinking about Alice,’ he said.
A shake of the head this time and Karen frowned to signify her failure to recognise the name.
‘She was the wee girl I knew in school. The one who lost her mum before she came to us.’
‘She took her period and you…’
‘Thought of you,’ Tony said, then immediately apologised as Karen blushed.
‘I remember her now. What of her?’
‘I wonder where she is.’
‘She’d be grown up with kids of her own, now,’ Karen said. ‘She was what? Eleven then? She’d be in her forties now then.’
‘I want to imagine her happy.’
‘I don’t… I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘Camus said we have to imagine Sisyphus happy, pushing his boulder up a slope the top of which he can never reach. Even though his situation could never leave him happy, we must imagine that he found some way to deal with it, to reconcile himself with his lot. Like Prometheus did.’
‘You were always too literary for me,’ Karen said.
‘That’s not true,’ Tony smiled. ‘I learned so much from you. Do you remember you made me a mixtape for my birthday?’
Karen smiled. ‘That sounds like something I’d have done. Cheap and nasty.’
‘That was the first time I heard of Tom Waits. “Martha” was on there.’
‘It’s a great song.’
‘It’s a sad song.’
Karen, as if uncomfortable with the melancholic tone of the conversation, turned and looked out at Barr on the phone. ‘Then we must imagine the singer happy,’ she said.
‘Even if he is still in love with Martha?’
‘Even so. I think of you eve
ry time I hear “Wonderful Life”.’
Tony laughed. ‘Now that’s another great song.’
‘We saw him a while back, touring. Black. Before he died, obviously.’
We saw him. She had shared that song, a new memory of that song, with someone else, and in so doing had changed it.
‘We saw Tom Waits the last time he was in Ireland,’ Tony said.
It wasn’t entirely true. Ann hadn’t wanted to go, couldn’t stand his voice. Tony had gone himself and stood at the front, alone, lost in the music.
He’d listened to ‘Martha’ in the car on the way down, on repeat, and was again in Karen’s bed, his head on her breast, the scent of her in his hair and skin, the taste of her in his mouth. He thought of her every time he heard the song, though did not tell her that now; ‘Martha’ had been playing that last night they had been together. Nor did he tell her that he still had the mixtape, saved in a box in his bedroom, even though he no longer had a tape recorder on which to play it. That she had been there, a presence in his room, all the time he’d been married.
‘That must have been special.’
Tony nodded. Waits had not played ‘Martha’ at the gig, though he had played ‘Time’ at the end and, for a moment, listening to it, Tony had felt truly invisible, like he had disappeared into the music, half hoping not to return from it.
He'd thought about the song one day, while he was teaching Shauna Laird’s class ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost. They’d talked about Frost’s comment that sometimes he’d like to get away for a while, climbing away from the earth but knowing he could return. Shauna had nodded when he’d explained what Frost was saying.
‘Like when your ma’s doing your head in, and you want to get away frae her but you don’t either ’cause you’d miss her if she wasn’t there. Everyone must feel like that,’ she’d said.
‘That’s what makes it such a good poem. It’s saying something you always thought but never realised you were thinking and never expressed.’
‘Do you think if he was alive now, he’d be on drugs?’ she asked. to a chorus of laughter from her classmates.
‘He’d not be the first poet to take drugs if he was,’ Tony had joked.
He’d thought of the conversation the morning of her funeral, as he’d seen her for the last time in her coffin. Should he have said something that day in class, something about the dangers of drugs? Or should he have said something when he first saw her in Liverpool Betty’s? Or when he saw her getting up off the toilet floor? When should he have intervened? And would she even have wanted him to? In the end, as he said goodbye to her that morning, he decided that he should have tried.
‘And you’re away again,’ Karen said. He felt a little sick as he was brought once more to the car, to Karen, to Barr standing outside at the door of the pub.
‘I’m sorry.’ He felt himself unbalanced, as the past and present merged, overlapped and separated once more, as if he was compelled to follow memory after memory, down the rabbit hole of his own making.
‘Am I that poor company?’
‘I didn’t sleep last night,’ Tony said. “I must be tired. You’re not poor company at all. I’m so glad to see you again.’
He noticed a flush spreading along Karen’s neck and jawline, before Barr tapped on her side window and, somewhat gratefully, she opened the door.
‘Can some of you speak to him?’ Barr said.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Take a look,’ Barr said. ‘I give up.’
Tony got out and followed Karen to the door of the bar. They looked inside, the room unnaturally dark after the daylight, an effect intensified by the wood panelling of the walls and the chequerboard pattern of the tiled floor. The pub was fairly quiet; a few customers sat at the bar, two women with a baby sat near the entrance and, in the far corner, beneath a gilt-edged mirror, Duggan sat, hunched over a tumbler of whiskey, four cans of Special Brew sitting on the seat next to him.
Tony went in, nodding to the barmaid’s greeting, Karen following behind as they moved down to where Duggan sat.
‘You nearly ready, Hugh? We’re on a tight enough schedule.’
‘Just a last one,’ Duggan said. ‘A wee Scotch for the road.’
He took a small mouthful, held it, as if to savour every aspect of its flavour, then swallowed audibly.
‘I always thought wine tasters and that were talking shit, but you can taste it off a good whiskey. Turf smoke. Oak.’
‘Is that you?’ Tony asked.
‘What’s the hurry?’ he snapped. ‘I’m in no rush to see that place again.’
Tony sighed and looked at Karen. She surprised him by moving across and sitting on the red faux-leather seat beside Duggan, placing her hand on his arm.
‘Are you ready?’ she asked, gently. ‘Or do you want to sit a moment.’
He looked at her, as if only really seeing her for the first time. His eyes glittered.
‘Now we’re here, I’m not sure I am ready.’
‘We can take a minute if you like.’
He considered it for a moment, then lifted the glass and drained it, wincing a little at the burning in his throat as he swallowed.
‘Do you think he’s waiting for us?’
Karen frowned lightly. ‘Martin?’
Duggan nodded. ‘Do you think he knows we’re coming?’
‘I guess it depends on whether you think there’s anything after death,’ Karen said.
‘Do you think your missus knows you’re there? When you visit her grave?’ Duggan asked, looking up at Tony.
‘I think she does. Somehow.’
Duggan nodded, as if this was what he’d been expecting.
‘Let’s get this over with, then,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
‘Just get it over with,’ Tony muttered to himself, sitting in the car at the row of shops opposite the estate where he now knew Alice Hamilton and her father lived.
It was Saturday night. He’d come back from school after 4pm and had wanted to call Karen, to tell her what he had learned. But things had ended so badly that morning, so damagingly to their relationship, that he felt he couldn’t.
He’d felt sick since then, pacing his flat, unable to settle himself for longer than a few minutes, before the thrumming of his body compelled him to his feet and he set off once more, round and round the flat. He’d made beans and toast, convinced himself he was hungry and then thought he’d vomit with the first mouthful.
Alice would be alone. That was the heart of it for him, the thought he could not get beyond. He’d managed from to dissociate himself from the reality of a man’s death by not thinking about the man as a person, by creating some sense that his death would be the corollary for Danny’s. Seeing the doll, the child, had made the man a father, a figure incrementally more real than the faceless officer he’d been up until that point. But now he had a name, Hamilton, and a child, Alice, and a connection to Tony that could not easily be dismissed.
Alice would be left on her own.
Tony could not help but see Karen in the girl: bereft of a father through the violence of someone she did not know, would never meet again; set on a path that led inexorably to this, to targeting others, to becoming a killer herself. Death begetting death, spiralling from one to the next, an unending chain of cause and effect.
His father had been right, he reflected. What good would revenge do? What would the child do without even her father? OK, he wasn’t great at the day-to-day stuff, but Tony guessed he was doing his best, widowed, suffering himself from all he had witnessed in the North, trying to raise a young girl in a strange country. He was empathising with the man, sympathising with his position, all the time making him more real, more concrete in Tony’s consciousness. And, ultimately, what right had he to deprive Alice of a father, fate having already taken her mother from her.
He allowed himself to fixate on that thought, allowed it to ruminate through the evening, for the other line of thought was to
o much for him to bear – that Alice would get in the car with her father the following morning to go to church. Yet, once he allowed himself to even consider that, and the inevitable outcome of it, he could not stop the thought from imposing itself over and over.
He could not dismiss the mental image of the explosion, ripping through the car, tearing Alice asunder. He imagined her sitting in the car, her sleeves balled in her fists, her eyes bright and wild with terror as the first wave rippled the metal work, shredded the plastic moulding of the dash, tore her clothes, her skin, ripped the muscle from bone, splintered and shattered her. The thought made him sick. He thought he would pass out, found his pace doubling as he padded around his flat, his face slick with a cold sheen of sweat.
He drove back out to Foxbar and parked up a distance from the shops, away from the glare of the street lights, in a spot that allowed him a view of the parking area while he remained in shadows. He could make out the house in the distance, in the space between two of the row, which backed on to the main road. The lights were already on in one of the upstairs rooms, even though it was only beginning to turn dark, the sky thickening in the east.
He’d a bottle of water and a Mars bar in the car, which he tried to eat now. He forced himself to swallow each cloying bite of the chocolate, aware he’d not eaten since lunch time and already feeling a little light-headed, as if his blood sugar was dipping. The thought instantly brought to mind Alice, standing in his classroom, her shirt pulled up as she injected herself with insulin. How would she manage without her father? Would her self-sufficiency thrive? Or would she be lost completely, the final thread of stability in her life torn from her?
The Last Crossing Page 17
