by Karen Perry
Karen Perry
* * *
COME A LITTLE CLOSER
Contents
June 1: Leah
2: Anton
3: Hilary
4: Leah
5: Anton
6: Leah
7: Anton
8: Hilary
9: Leah
10: Anton
11: Hilary
July 12: Leah
13: Hilary
14: Anton
15: Leah
16: Hilary
17: Anton
18: Leah
19: Anton
20: Leah
21: Hilary
22: Leah
August 23: Anton
24: Leah
25: Hilary
26: Anton
27: Leah
28: Hilary
29: Anton
October 30: Hilary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Karen Perry is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Your Closest Friend, Can You Keep a Secret?, Girl Unknown, Only We Know and The Boy That Never Was, which was selected for the Simon Mayo Radio 2 Book Club. She lives in Dublin with her family.
Nobody sees him. A small boy cutting a line through parked cars towards the green. He is alone and, from a distance, there is nothing extraordinary about him. Nothing to draw attention, nothing to cause alarm.
Heat shimmers above scorched grass although it is not yet noon. The air is filled with noise – laughter, the sound of a child’s temper tantrum, a mother admonishing him. Coloured flags flutter on lines of bunting strung between the streetlamps and trees of Wyndham Park. By mutual agreement, all dogs have been left at home and the occasional muffled bark reaches them. There is the bleat of a distant ringing, music from a beat-box, a crowd of teenagers sitting cross-legged around it. Two barbecues have been set up in the middle of the green – big ones, Weber, top of the range – and the men take turns flipping burgers and browning sausages, discussing the football.
The adults have split along gender lines, the women making a ring with their deckchairs, sipping from paper cups. A younger woman – a tenant of one of the basement apartments on the east side of the park – slips off her shirt to reveal a black bikini top. She lies stretched out on the grass some distance from the others, the soft hills of her breasts rising above the mound of her ribcage. The men glance over, and the women’s talk drops.
Perhaps it is because of this distraction that they don’t notice the small solitary boy coming out of Number 14, the plum-coloured heavy door closing behind him. They don’t notice his steady pilgrimage towards them.
One of the mums has brought face-paints with her, and a queue of children has formed, waiting to be transformed into cats and lions and butterflies. She is painstakingly sweeping black paint – tiger whiskers – over a child’s cheeks, when the little girl’s eyes widen, the pucker of a frown appearing on her brow.
‘You all right, sweetheart?’
The little girl opens her mouth to answer, eyes still fixed on something in the distance, but she doesn’t get a chance to speak.
A scream rises from the crowd followed by an instant hush while everyone looks around. Mothers scan the green for their children. Teenagers look over with casual disinterest. Only the rhythmic blare from the beat-box disturbs the air.
‘Jesus,’ a man says, as the boy steps towards them.
It’s as if he’s dropped out of the sky.
Small and slight, no more than six years old, his bare legs and arms and the insignia on his Batman T-shirt are smeared with blood.
The meat sizzles on the grill, beginning to burn, but no one cares about that now. The park continues to bake in the sun, a hot wind blows through the trees, but everything else is different. They stare at him aghast.
He does not appear to be injured or in pain, and yet there is blood on his legs, on his bare feet. He looks up at the men, his eyes heavy-lidded and staring at them, as if from behind a pane of glass, screened off in his own world of terror. He raises his little hands, the blood already caked into his fingernails, turning rust brown.
‘Help me,’ he says.
JUNE
* * *
1
Leah
When they turn the corner on to Wyndham Park, Leah instinctively squeezes Jake’s hand. Excitement, a shimmer of nerves, goes through her as they hurry along the pavement. Jake’s hand gives an answering squeeze and, without having to say it, she knows he feels it too: how unbelievably lucky they are.
The flat they have come to view is in the basement of Number 14 and, from what they understand, it is theirs if they want it. Two days have passed since Jake’s breathless phone-call. Leah had been at work, going through the painstaking bureaucracy of filing a patent for one of the firm’s regular clients, when he had called with the news. Some guy Jake had met through a work colleague was looking for tenants to occupy the basement flat in his father’s house. Although it hadn’t been lived in for some time, it was spacious and clean, and the rent was cheap for the area.
‘What’s the catch?’ Leah had asked, an instinctive wariness rising inside her.
‘There isn’t one!’ Jake had said, laughing like a delighted schoolboy, and she had found herself caught up in the slipstream of his excitement, his infectious optimism.
All day, the heat in the city has been stifling. But here on Wyndham Park the air holds a rarefied coolness, the houses caught in the pinkish glow of early-evening sunlight. From the nearby courts come the pocking sounds of tennis balls being struck. The distant drone of unseen traffic comes from the main street beyond. Dogs bark and strain on their leads, sniffing around the oaks and sycamores, the chestnut trees that punctuate the green, while kids scoot over the asphalt that splits the park in two. Leah takes it all in – the park, the noise, the lush greenness of summer – and feels an unfamiliar jolt of happiness.
Fourteen Wyndham Park East. She turns the address over and over in her head, feels it humming hopefully inside her as they walk quickly, their footfall sounding on the pavement.
The owner, Mark, is leaning on the railings outside the house. He plucks the cigarette from his mouth as they approach. ‘All right, mate?’ he asks Jake, the two of them shaking hands.
‘Yeah. Good to see you. Mark, this is my girlfriend – Leah.’
Mark doesn’t shake her hand, merely nods at her. She’s too excited – too grateful to this man – to take offence. He’s tall and thin, as Jake described, mid-twenties, slightly stooped, as if trying to diminish his height. Despite the heat, he’s wearing a scuffed leather jacket over a black T-shirt, jeans that hang low from his hips, greyish Converse trainers that might once have been white. It brings their own more formal clothing into sharp relief. Both she and Jake have dressed up for the occasion, as if it were an interview they were about to attend, not the viewing of a flat.
His scruffy clothing aside, there’s something dark and serious in the quick glance Mark gives her and she sees that he’s attractive in a raffish sort of way. Long eyelashes. Liquid green eyes.
The men talk about work and their mutual acquaintance – Ian – the vital link in the chain that led Jake and Leah to Mark and this house. As they talk, Leah’s attention drifts, her eyes drawn to the house. One of the terraces flanking three sides of the park, it has all the imposing grandeur of the age in which it was built. Sash windows, a fanlight in a sunburst pattern, stone steps leading up to the threshold. The front door is painted a deep purple, the paint peeling in places, but Leah can imagine that at one time it was bright and glossy, the brassware shining bright.
Jake is giving an account of all the weeks they’ve spent looking, the dispiriting queues they’ve joined o
utside houses in Ranelagh, flats in town, only to be knocked back again and again.
Mark nods, staring down at the pavement where he’s dropped his cigarette butt, crushing it beneath his trainer. It’s clear he’s not really interested. He probably has no understanding of how odd this feels for Leah and Jake, turning up outside a building with no line of people forming, knowing that without ever having set foot inside the place, it’s already theirs. Or maybe he’s embarrassed by their presence here on the street, awkward about the arrangement made between them. Leah is surprised by the feeling that comes over her now of something illicit passing between them – as if the agreement that’s been reached is unlawful or underhand. She glances across at the houses on the opposite side of the street – the long row of sash windows, intermittently open to the evening air. The last house is smaller than its neighbours – a newer addition, perhaps, more modest in scale. For just a second, she thinks she sees the ghostly oval of a face peering down at her through an upstairs window. But then she blinks and her vision clears, revealing only a blank space, the swathe of a curtain half hidden from view.
‘Right, then. Shall we go in?’ Mark asks, before turning and taking the run of steps that descends to the basement at a clipped speed, Jake and Leah following.
It’s different down here. There’s a dank smell in the air, and the long shadow cast by the path and stone steps lends a chill. Mark fiddles with the lock – it’s clearly one that requires a knack – and, for a moment, Leah and Jake stand there, watching him tugging and probing with the key, then casting their eyes around at the broken concrete beneath the window, the rise of brackish moss up the wall to the sill. One of the window panes has a fine crack running through it. Her optimism begins to dip. But then Mark pushes open the door and they file in after him, Leah’s eyes trying to take it all in at once.
Mark is brisk as he leads them through. ‘Bathroom. Bedroom. Living area,’ he announces, with a perfunctory air, while opening doors on to these rooms.
Quickly, she glances into the small bathroom, tucked into the space beneath the steps that lead up to the front door of the main house – cramped but clean. Then the bedroom at the front with an unmade double, the new mattress still encased in plastic wrap, a small wardrobe standing open, a rug, pattern faded, laid over bare wooden boards. The living area is at the back, a large space dominated by French windows opening on to a patio, a hint of the garden beyond in the skirting of lush greenness above the patio wall.
‘What’s in here?’ Leah asks, opening a door to the side, which reveals a small dark room.
When Mark flicks the light switch, it illuminates a space hardly big enough to fit a single bed.
‘It can be Matthew’s room,’ Jake says excitedly, running his hand over the walls as if considering what colour to paint them.
‘Who’s Matthew?’ Mark asks.
‘My seven-year-old. He lives with his mother, but he stays with me sometimes.’
As Jake says this, Leah feels Mark glancing at her with new interest. She can tell he’s making fresh calculations about her and Jake, about their relationship. She wonders how much he knows about them, what Ian has told him.
Jake is checking the little window at the far end to see if it will open. It makes a cracking sound as it unsticks. She watches him as he stands back, his eyes busily travelling over the room, and she knows he’s making silent designs – Matthew’s bed there under the window, a chest of drawers here by the door, some posters on the walls, balsawood aeroplanes dangling from the ceiling, a shelf for Lego master-builds skirting the wall. She knows that he is reconstructing the place in his mind, a room for his son that will be cosy and welcoming – safe – and there’s something so guileless about him, the obvious need he has to shelter and protect his child, that she feels her heart constrict with love for this man, for the depths of warmth and need within him.
‘There’s no drier, I’m afraid,’ Mark says, drawing their attention back to him, ‘but you can use the washing line in the garden.’
He opens the French windows, and a waft of warm air comes in, carrying the scent of lavender and grass. They follow him outside, taking the opportunity to glance at each other while his back is turned in a bid to gauge their reactions to the place. Jake raises his eyebrows, the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, and Leah meets it with her own look of approval. She knows they share the same thought: that this is more than they had hoped for. It’s true that the flat is somewhat starved of light, and it has an empty feel of neglect from having been unlived in for some years. But it’s spacious and quiet, and the neighbourhood is far better than anything they’d hoped for. Compared with the long list of cramped and dingy flats they’ve traipsed through over the last few weeks, it seems generous and opulent in comparison.
‘So this here is yours,’ Mark tells them, indicating the patio that has been carved into a space tucked between the garden wall and the steps that lead down from the big house. ‘It doesn’t get that much sunlight, to be honest, but it’s a place to sit in the evenings, I guess.’
‘Would it be all right if we put a barbecue here?’ Jake asks.
Mark shrugs and says: ‘Knock yourselves out.’
He’s already turned and stepped up on to the grass, so Jake leans in and whispers to Leah: ‘He’s really selling this place, huh?’
She smiles and digs him in the ribs, but he’s touched on something that she’s been feeling too: the sense that Mark is not altogether happy with the situation. He’s already a few yards away into the garden, which is overgrown and nettled, a tangle of briars strangling whatever shrubs are there.
‘So the washing line is down here. You can hang your laundry, but otherwise keep to the patio, yeah? The old man is fussy about his garden.’
Leah sees Jake glance around at the tangled mess with a sceptical air but he is too polite to comment, and she says to Mark: ‘Your father? Does he live upstairs?’
‘Well, kind of. He’s been away for a while, but he’s coming back now.’
‘Has he been travelling?’
‘Mmm.’
‘And your mother?’
‘No. She died when I was a kid.’ His gaze swivels away from her to Jake, and he says: ‘So? Do you want to take it?’
‘Absolutely!’ Jake replies.
‘Cool.’ The two men shake on it.
They are discussing the rent, the setting up of monthly payments, but Leah is distracted, her sights drawn to the upper windows of the house, momentarily wondering at the occupant upstairs. Ivy creeps across the rendered wall, snaking into the corners of the windows, which are smeared with dust. There’s something lonely about the thought of the widower living there alone. And another thought chases that one: Did Mark’s mother die in this house?
‘Leah?’ Jake asks, and her attention snaps back to him. ‘Are you coming?’
She follows Jake through the French windows. As agreed, Jake hands over their deposit as well as the first month’s rent – an envelope of cash that Mark casually pockets without checking it first. It comes to her again: the feeling that this arrangement between them is somehow underhand, wrong. Mark’s manner unsettles her in a way she cannot put her finger on. She says nothing, just watches as he hands Jake the keys.
‘May as well take these, then.’
‘We can move in straight away?’ Jake asks, excitement again in his voice.
‘Sure. Why not?’
Then Mark turns to go, striding out into the little hall. Before he reaches the front door, he stops, remembering something. ‘One last thing. That door.’ He points to one in the hall that neither Leah nor Jake had spotted. ‘It connects to upstairs. It’s locked on both sides, so you needn’t worry.’
‘No, right. Of course,’ Jake says.
‘He’ll keep to himself anyway,’ Mark adds. ‘He won’t bother you.’ And something about the way his eyes catch hers gives her pause. ‘Right, I’ll be off. Call me if there’s anything.’
And then he’s g
one and it’s just the two of them alone in their place.
‘Why do you suppose he doesn’t live here?’ Leah asks, as they listen to Mark’s footsteps on the pavement above.
‘Dunno. He probably has his own place. His own life.’
She thinks again of the look in Mark’s eyes, the quick flash in them before he averted his gaze. ‘It just seems odd, that’s all,’ she remarks. ‘Perhaps they don’t get on – father and son.’
‘I’m not really bothered about their filial bonds,’ Jake says, not unkindly, as he comes to her.
His arms go around her and she feels herself being gathered up, drawn in. Feels the tender press of his lips against hers. The kiss lasts, and she feels all the hope and love and possibility within it. The difficult weeks are over. They are home.
‘Happy?’ he asks softly, his eyes searching out hers.
‘Happy,’ she tells him, and he grins with satisfaction, the now-familiar smile that transforms his face, lights him from within – the smile that drew her to him, the smile that broke down her barriers and finally let love in.
‘We should celebrate,’ he tells her. ‘Stay here.’
‘Wait! Where are you going?’ He’s already heading out into the hall.
‘There’s an off-licence around the corner. I’ll get some Prosecco. Back in a sec.’
She hears the door close after him, and then Leah is alone in the flat, hugging her arms around her chest, walking slowly through the rooms, taking it all in.
Their first home together.
She is twenty-six years old and feels as if her life is finally starting.
In the solitude of the flat, she can hear the echo of her footfall. Her fingertips trail over the walls, the doors, absorbing the feel of the place, registering all its newness, its unfamiliarity. This is her home now. Hers and Jake’s. She can feel safe here – a conviction that both warms and steadies her.
