by Claire Askew
The letter was still in her hand, unballing itself slowly, like the bud of a peony. She found a corner and pulled, until she could see the whole page.
‘You stupid girl.’ She was whispering now. She ripped the letter in half, then in half again, and began shredding it, dropping the tiny strips of inky foolscap into the bin. She shuffled her foot away and the metal lid dropped with a clang.
‘There,’ she said. ‘You did that. Let’s do something else.’
As she turned, her attention was caught by the three green bottles lined up on the worktop: striking, now she noticed them, against the white tiles.
‘No, Moira,’ she said.
Should I be worried? she thought, wandering back into the dining room to look at the shattered glass. I’m talking to myself. As she walked towards the wrecked window, her footsteps began to crunch. The glass was everywhere. In the thin light the carpet looked grey, and the lethal flecks were dusted all over, like ash. She realised that vacuuming this would cripple her hoover – she needed a stiff brush, and maybe tweezers, first.
‘Oh God.’ She put out one hand and leaned against the empty window-frame, fingers brushing the splintery wood beyond.
The house was a shallow U-shape: a double-fronted, detached job that Jackie had done up years ago. The long kitchen ran along the back, with the dining room on one side, the good living room on the other. The dining room was where the family did everything: ate dinner, watched TV. She thought of all the Christmas trees she’d put up in this big bay window – all the times she’d watched as Ryan hung up tinsel and paper angels he’d made in school. No, don’t think about that. How can I stop myself from thinking about that? She stumbled back to the kitchen, the smell of the bin, and the clean white tiles. She picked up the first of the three bottles by its neck: a brick-shaped three-quarter-litre of gin. Somehow, a glass tumbler appeared on the counter, but her hand shook as she tipped the bottle, and the liquid didn’t come.
‘Come on, woman,’ she said, teeth clenched hard.
Gin sloshed into the glass: one finger, then two. When she picked it up, the tumbler’s sides were wet. The tonic in the fridge was flat, but her shaking hands coped better with the plastic bottle, its grippy shape. She wondered about cutting a slice of lime, but didn’t trust those hands with a sharp knife.
‘Cheers,’ she said, and took a long slug off the top of the glass.
The buzz was almost immediate: she remembered too late that she’d eaten barely anything for a week – not since that day, the day of crawling around in the shed, when she’d figured out about Ryan.
‘Sit down,’ she hissed, aware of the policeman on the back doorstep, ‘before you do yourself a mischief.’
The dining room was too grim: she couldn’t handle it. She’d have to go upstairs. As she left the room, she passed the kitchen noticeboard and saw, before she could stop herself looking, the photograph of Ryan she’d pinned there only a couple of weeks ago. It was a photo of him aged ten or so, in the back garden of this house. One jutting hip of the shed was visible behind him. It must have been a sunny day: he was standing inside the ring of a fallen hula-hoop, its white plastic slightly blurred, reflecting the sky’s brightness. He looked like he was standing inside some kind of fairy ring, some force field of protection. He was smiling. No, he was laughing – at himself, his own inability to do the silly thing she’d asked of him. She remembered the moment: trying to catch in a photograph the few seconds where he’d managed to keep the hoop aloft around his waist. She’d been mad for hula-hooping as a child, and told him this was the way his mummy used to have fun. She used to love it when she could make him laugh. It hadn’t happened much lately.
She was halfway up the stairs before she really knew where she was going: in a blur of tears, she’d crunched back out through the dining room and into the hallway. Behind the frosted glass front door, the neon pillar of a policeman. She climbed the stairs, gripping the banister with one unsteady hand, the other still clutching the slippery tumbler.
At the top of the stairs, she took a long mouthful of the stinging gin. It had started to feel warm.
‘Ryan?’
It was habit. It was what she always did.
‘Are you decent, sweetheart?’ Her throat made an odd, chuckling sound. She stood outside her son’s bedroom door and laughed at her own ridiculousness.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Time’s up, I’m coming in.’
But her little charade on the landing – even coupled with the gin – hadn’t prepared her for her dead son’s bedroom. The scene-of-crime officers – Amy had laughed and abbreviated them to ‘SOCO, like so-and-so’ – had torn the room apart. The divan bed had been tipped onto its narrow end, and now obscured the window like a monolith, its mattress stacked against it. The fabric sides had been ripped back so the divan’s cavity could be searched. All the furniture was pulled out into the middle of the room: her face stung with embarrassment at the dust and detritus they’d revealed. The washing basket and drawers from the dresser had been upended, on top of a pile of clean cotton shirts she’d ironed only days before. The computer desk was the only thing that looked wrong in this disaster zone. It had been swept completely clean: every item Ryan had piled on it had been taken away somewhere. The big PC monitor had been there so long that, now it had been removed, the square of wallpaper it had stood against was darker than the rest of the room. She could see the strange residue left all over by the fingerprinting kits. She pressed the light switch, but for some reason, the bulb in the ceiling light had been taken.
Moira skirted into the room.
‘Look at this mess,’ she said, her voice guttering like a candle flame. ‘Makes you look practically tidy, Ryan.’
She sank fast into the leather computer chair, slopping a little constellation of gin across the carpet. Her face was damp. The chair was covered in fingerprint powder – and now, she guessed, so was her skirt. The wallpaper began to swim.
With her free hand, she reached up and slapped herself in the face. The slap landed with a pleasantly wet sound, but she barely felt it. She tried again. This time, a sting. The third time, a little blistering of stars across her vision.
‘Jesus,’ she said, through her teeth. ‘Pull yourself together.’
She sat in the computer chair for a long time. She could feel herself sliding down into more of a crouch – slowly, a millimetre at a time. She realised she was enjoying the sensation. In the quiet, she could hear the paparazzi talking outside: there was no hoarding on this window to dampen the sound. She was surprised – and oddly disappointed – that the few voices she could pick out from the throng were not talking about her, or Ryan, or the shooting. Instead, they seemed to be using that macho code that signalled they were speaking of a forthcoming major sporting event. She tried to follow, but she couldn’t even guess the sport, let alone the occasion. She wondered why on earth they were here, who on earth could think it was a good idea to be paying them. She didn’t think about how long they might stay.
The watery sun fell behind the roof of the house across the street, and the light in the room changed. Vehicles began to pull up at the cordon, a few houses down: Moira could hear their distant chug, the whoosh and slam of their sliding side-doors. These were the TV news trucks, coming with kit and correspondents to broadcast live for the evening audience. Amy had warned her they’d come, and as she’d said it, Moira found herself wishing the front garden was tidier, the downpipes more recently painted. She could hear these new arrivals shouting commands, clinking tripods and the poles of booms. The glass was empty, its sides sticky in her hand. If they were going to broadcast, she thought, then she might as well watch.
She abandoned Ryan’s wrecked bedroom, and walked back out onto the dim, windowless landing. She paused for a moment, peering down the stairs into the hallway. From here, she could make out a wedge of front door, that yellow smudge of the policeman’s neon coat hanging in the panel of frosted glass. She closed her eyes, listening for th
e scrape of a key. As if any minute now, her son would come slamming into the hall, dump his bag and shoes, and – if she was lucky – shout a gruff hello on his way up the stairs. I’m asleep, she thought, and this is just one of those dreams you have, the kind that shakes you enough that you tell it to your friends. A wave of tiredness settled over her, but something in her brain kicked in to flick her eyelids open again as she swayed.
‘Ryan,’ she whispered, ‘sweetheart.’ But behind her, the trashed room was still trashed.
Moira stumbled along the landing to her own bedroom, and found that it had also been searched. More of an effort had been made here to restore things to their natural order, but the room still looked like a high wind had blown through. The chest of drawers had been rifled, its contents unfolded and stuffed back in. The fabric covering on this divan had been slashed, too, though the bed had been returned to where it lived, and the sheets thrown roughly back over it. The TV was still in its corner, surrounded by the prised-open boxes of DVDs, discs scattered on the black ash top of the unit. Moira found the kicked remote on the floor, and switched the TV on.
It took around thirty seconds for the studio newsreader to say her son’s name.
‘The gunman, Ryan Summers,’ he began, and she scrabbled for the mute button, ‘was pronounced dead at the scene.’ Too late. They cut to a picture of Ryan’s face. His last school photo, a few years old now: Ryan in his navy school sweater, the stiff white collar of his shirt sitting wonky in its pilled V-neck. He was smiling, but he didn’t look happy – a handful of years back he’d decided he hated having his photograph taken – and they’d cropped out the sky-blue backdrop so the details of her dead son’s face filled up the screen. The school must have supplied the picture to the police. Ryan looked uncomfortable, she thought, impatient with sitting there. She remembered the fuss they used to have, getting him ready for the school picture. Back when Ryan was little Moira had a friend named Tanya, a trainee hairdresser. She wasn’t very good, but she drove around the city doing cheap haircuts for the kids of friends. Ryan felt an irrational hatred towards Tanya, Moira remembered: he associated her with the hated day of the school photo. She’d turn up in her elderly red Ford Escort and Ryan would spend the next forty minutes being as rude to her as he thought he could get away with under his mother’s gaze. Moira shivered. These past couple of years she’d lost touch with Tanya – she’d finally got a chair in a salon in town. What if the press find her? Moira found herself thinking. Tanya could tell some stories about Ryan: that he was sullen, underhand, manipulative.
‘That’s not who he was,’ she said aloud, to the newsreader whose mute lips were moving rapidly. ‘I know him better than anyone.’ But she realised that meant nothing now. She wasn’t even sure if it was true. She had let this happen, after all. She didn’t want to think about it.
Ryan’s photo came up on the screen again, and Moira studied it through a film of fresh tears. The expression would be read by those who didn’t know him as creepy: they’d think they could see something obviously wrong in his eyes. Moira reached out and touched the screen, her fingertips prickled by static. But Ryan was gone. They switched to aerial footage of the college car park filled with kids and white police vehicles with blue-flashing roofs.
She sat down on the corner of the bed. The curtains had been pulled wonkily shut, and in the gloom the muted TV glowed so brightly her eyes smarted. Photographs of young women began to appear on the screen, in a kind of slideshow: a girl smudged with mud, grinning on a hockey field; a girl in a satin prom dress, wearing a beaded tiara. Moira counted them. They were all beaming, and unbearably beautiful – these were photographs their families had been allowed to choose. Their families. What were their lives like, right now? Did they have police scene guards, crowds of journalists outside their houses? What must they think of her? Moira simultaneously wished she knew, and hoped she would never find out.
The final photograph lingered on the screen longer than the others, and Moira knew without turning the sound back on that they were talking about Abigail Hodgekiss. Her photo was a fancy studio portrait, probably done for her eighteenth, Moira guessed, or perhaps for high school prom. She was wearing coral-coloured lipstick that made her teeth look very white. A fat, yellow locket hung around her neck. She wasn’t the perfect-looking girl that Moira realised she’d been imagining. She had freckles. She didn’t look like the sort of woman men killed for.
Moira felt a flash of anger – blood draining out of her head towards her heart, making her feel faint. She closed her eyes, and saw patterns. What had she done, this Abigail, to Ryan? Ryan, the little dark-haired boy, laughing in the back garden, in the bright ring of the hula-hoop. Surely this girl had hurt him. She’d done something to him that was so bad, he’d become angrier than he’d ever been. There had to be – had to be – a reason.
Moira leaned over, put her face next to the screen. Up close, she could see the million tiny coloured dots that made up Abigail’s eyes.
‘What did you do?’ she hissed, but the fight was ebbing out of her as fast as it had come. When she leaned back, she realised Abigail was small – fine-boned, thin-limbed. Awkward-looking. This girl was weak. Had been. Moira knew she hadn’t done a single thing.
The shot cut back to the slick, grey CGI studio. Ryan’s photo hung in the air to the left of the newsreader’s head. The newsreader’s mouth opened and closed, but Moira was looking at her son. When she’d got that photo, she’d put it in a fancy wooden frame; she knew it was still there, sitting on the bookshelf in the good living room. She should go downstairs and move it. Throw it out, or maybe hide it somewhere for now. In a minute. She’d do it in a minute. She couldn’t move her eyes from the warm pull of the TV.
The phone rang, making her jump. She felt the wave of an old habit run through her, and before she could stop herself, she called out, ‘Phone!’ The extension sat on a small table on the landing outside Ryan’s bedroom door. She’d yell every time it rang, in the hope that one day, he might walk out and answer it. He never did. Now, she thought, he never will.
She huffed off the bed and stumbled back out of the room, onto the landing. When she got to the little cordless phone, sitting upright in its cradle, she saw its low battery light was blinking. The SOCOs must have unplugged it, or done something to it. Taken it apart, maybe, in the search – though why they might do that she had no idea. She picked up, expecting to hear Amy’s voice on the line.
‘Hello?’ she said.
There was a pause, as though the person who’d called hadn’t actually expected to hear a voice.
‘Good evening.’ A man’s voice, with a very mild Scottish accent. ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Moira Summers?’
‘Yes,’ Moira said, and then kicked herself. This could be anyone. But the voice on the other end switched from neutrally polite to positively beaming.
‘Oh, I’m so pleased I was able to reach you,’ the man said. ‘I apologise for disturbing you at home, and at this very difficult time.’
Moira said nothing. Who was this?
‘My name is Grant Lockley,’ the man said. Then he paused again, as though expecting a reaction.
‘I’m sorry,’ Moira said. ‘That name doesn’t mean anything to me.’
‘Oh, that’s not a problem,’ the man said. Indeed, he still sounded pleased. ‘I thought perhaps your family liaison officer might have mentioned me.’
‘No,’ Moira said, ‘Amy didn’t say anything.’
‘Amy,’ the man said. He drew the word out a little, as though saying it while also writing it down. ‘Right. Well, as I say, not a problem.’
‘Can I ask . . .’ Moira reached out her free hand and pressed it against the wall. Her head was swimming with fatigue, and the sour buzz of the gin. Standing up for this length of time was taking its toll.
‘Oh yes, yes,’ the man said. ‘I do apologise. I was phoning you to – well, I was hoping I might be able to ask you a few questions.’
Moira frowned.
‘Are you with the police?’
The man went on talking as though she hadn’t spoken.
‘Firstly, Moira – do you have any theories as to why your son might have done what he did? Is there any reason you can think of that might make sense? I know that’s the one thing everyone wants to know, and if anyone can help us understand, it’s you.’
Moira’s hand skidded down the wall a little, and she staggered to right herself.
‘What is this?’ she said.
‘Did you,’ the man was saying, ‘have any conversations with Ryan, prior to the shooting, that maybe, with hindsight, seem suspicious?’
Moira’s stomach churned.
‘You’re a journalist.’
On the other end of the phone, the man’s demeanour transformed.
‘What did you know, Moira?’ His voice was spiky, louder now. ‘Why didn’t you do something to stop him? Why didn’t you tell the police?’
She let out a small, choked cry. The phone fell from her hand, and hit the landing carpet with a soft thud. From the receiver, she could still hear the tinny drift of Grant Lockley’s voice.
‘The public want to know why Ryan did it, Moira. What are you hiding?’
In a moment of sudden, piercing clarity, Moira reached down and yanked the phone’s cable out of the wall.
Back in the bedroom, it was as though no time had passed. The shooting was still being talked about on the news: the correspondent standing in someone’s garden, the daylight behind him fading. Live from the home of Aidan and Ishbel Hodgekiss, the superbar informed her. The TV was still on mute, but Moira could see that there was some kind of continuity delay, the correspondent’s face impassive and white under his crew’s erected lights. Moira sank onto the bed, her hands shaking. She thought about the talk they’d had – just her and Ryan, in the kitchen, the night before the shooting. She hadn’t mentioned that talk to the police in any of the many interviews they’d put her through. She’d tried to avoid even thinking about it.
‘What did you know, Moira?’ She heard herself repeat Grant Lockley’s words, aloud.
