No Good Deed

by cass green

  ‘That’s none of your damned business,’ I say, fighting to keep my voice calm because, incredibly, Zach is beginning to drop off. He seems to be getting heavier by the minute, as though sleep is making his limbs sodden.

  ‘Angel!’ Lucas’s voice, however, is a loud bark of frustration that makes me wince, although Zach remains still. ‘What should we do? Should we go?’

  Angel looks at her brother. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not yet …’ and then, ‘So tell us exactly what you heard. In the garage.’

  She crosses her arms and leans back against the sink. ‘And I mean word for word.’

  I take a small quick sip of breath to steady myself. Both sets of eyes bore into me.

  ‘Well, I can’t remember it like a script,’ I say, feigning indignation. ‘But there was an elderly woman …’ I cast around for details of the actual woman who had been in conversation at the till. Will this give the whole story the ring of truth required? ‘And she was really chatty,’ I continue. ‘Going on about the weather and stuff. She kept talking to the man behind the till even though there was a queue and people were getting fed up. I had my eye on the clock because of,’ I pause, ‘because of what you said about a deadline. And I heard her say something like, “Have you heard about that little mite that’s been kidnapped?”’

  I sense Lucas stiffening and my own belly clenches in turn. I force myself to continue, despite feeling like my dishonesty is emblazoned across my forehead in neon ink.

  ‘And then,’ I continue, ‘I couldn’t really hear the next bit but I caught the woman saying something about “Baby Zach”.’ I pause, cringing at how unreal this all sounds, and gaze down at the child in my arms to hide my eyes. Surely it is obvious that I’m making this up? I go on, ‘I only caught that small snatch of their conversation. It was quite frustrating.’

  A silence follows this short speech and my breath tightens in my chest. I maintain eye contact with Angel, even though it feels about as pleasant as placing my hand directly on a hotplate.

  After a moment, Angel lets out a small huffing sound.

  ‘I don’t think she told anyone. I don’t think she’d dare.’ She lets her eyes wander over Zach now, very deliberately, and her implication is quite clear.

  20

  Angel

  Angel goes through to the sitting room, claiming she needs some headspace. She takes Nina’s iPad with her.

  Slumping onto the comfortable sofa, she yawns expansively and rubs her sore eyes.

  What a mess this is.

  The first thing she does is check local news sites for anything she didn’t already know. All this does is make her feel more anxious, so she closes down those tabs and opens Google Maps.

  If she can work out where their grandfather’s house had been in Inverness-shire, it would at least provide her with something to aim for. Trying to locate the house is pointless, she knows this. It would be long sold and it’s not like there was any family there any more. No family anywhere, in fact. It’s just her and Lucas.

  But it’s as good a plan as any, because Christ knows her brother doesn’t seem to have one.

  Angel stares down at the screen, frowning hard. It hadn’t been too far from Nairn, the seaside town. She can remember being taken there by Marianne and Grandad one day. She had been promised that she might see seals. The seals never materialized and it rained.

  She shifts her legs on the sofa and curls them beneath her. It’s so comfy in here. She moves the iPad onto a cushion on her lap and gives a few desultory swipes at the map on the screen. But her concentration has slipped somewhere else.

  She’d worked hard at putting her childhood behind her. Part of her is incensed with Lucas for allowing the past back in. Why couldn’t he just leave it alone? What was it, revenge or something? Was that what made him do this?

  Angel has spent her life covering those memories in a kind of mental plaster that obliterated all the finer detail, while all Lucas has done is chip, chip, chip away. And now everything has come crashing down around them.

  She can’t seem to stop the deluge of memories now.

  She starts tapping her hand against her leg because now – shit shit – she’s thinking about the bloody guinea pig.

  Angel spins round so her feet are on the floor and scrunches her hand into her hair. Her foot bounces up and down as the whole thing plays out in her mind.

  It was the phone call from school that started it. Her teacher – name long forgotten – ringing to say that Angel had been mean to another child in the class and made her cry. She was ashamed of having done it, but it seemed to ease the soreness she constantly carried in her tummy when she hissed mean things about this particular girl, Mallory Foster, who had braces and weird glasses.

  Marianne had been quietly furious and was in the middle of reprimanding Angel when he had come in and demanded to know what was happening. Marianne had tried to play it down, but he had calmly walked across the kitchen to where they kept the guinea pig, Sasha.

  It was Angel’s pride and joy, that guinea pig, and she would often lie on her stomach whispering her secrets as the little sniffly nose twitched and the beady eyes watched her.

  She had barely dared to breathe as he, Daddy as they called him then, even though he wasn’t, lifted the little fat body from the cage, quite gently.

  Then with a sharp twist he had broken its neck and turned to her, calmly.

  ‘If you can’t be trusted not to behave like an animal at school, then you can hardly be trusted to take care of another animal, can you?’ he’d said.

  Even after all these years it makes nausea roil inside her and she reaches into her pocket with shaking hands for her cigarettes.

  Lighting up, she breathes in deeply and tries to slow her thudding heart.

  None of this is helping.

  Angel squeezes her eyes shut and rubs them with the heels of her hands.

  It’s like all this has opened a gate and allowed sewage to gush in.

  She’s seeing her ninth birthday now in bright, vivid detail in her mind.

  Marianne had baked her favourite chocolate cake, but something had gone wrong in the oven, and it had collapsed in the middle. Her mother was full of apologies and she had reassured her the cake was perfect anyway but, inside, disappointment was churning like a muddy soup because that wasn’t the only thing that was wrong about her special day.

  She had specifically asked for a Bop It but had been given some other thing that wasn’t the same at all. But the worst thing was that she had begged for a party at the Teddy Bear House at Hamleys. She’d cried and almost made herself sick, she’d begged so hard. But Marianne was having one of her ‘wobbly’ times – that’s how Angel thought of them – and it just hadn’t happened. She always got like this right after he came back and all the easy things of normal life seemed to go into a different mode, of watching and waiting.

  Now, her mother had a bright, sharp voice, the volume turned just one notch higher than felt comfortable, and her hand shook as she put the candles into the gloopy chocolate icing on the surface of the cake. Lucas was all overexcited and trying to help but he wasn’t putting them in a nice circle in the way Angel liked best. Their mother was laughing at his botched attempt and the sound made the angry monster that sometimes lived in Angel’s stomach start to growl.

  She grabbed the candles from Lucas, who began to cry, as usual. Then the whole kitchen was filled with noise and upset but there was a terrible roar, so loud and terrifying it instantly stilled the chaos, and they all turned to look at its source.

  He didn’t need to shout that often. A look was enough to send everyone scurrying to different rooms as a rule. Angel remembered squeezing her fists closed so her nails dug into the palms of her hands and thinking, ‘But it’s my birthday. Not on my birthday.’

  A vein was pulsing in the side of his head. His hand was clasped around the crystal tumbler of whisky, gripping it tightly so the knuckles on his hands blanched white.

  ‘Shall I t
ell you what it looks like,’ he had said in a low, soft voice, ‘when a child stands on a landmine?’

  He swirled the golden whisky in the glass and then drank it down in one go, giving a small grimace. He lit a cigarette and sucked hard on it in the way he always did, drawing his cheekbones in. People would say he was handsome. One of her mother’s friends used to get all giggly and silly around him but, to Angel, he could sometimes be the ugliest person in the world.

  She’d wanted to cover her ears but she knew better after the last time, when she’d had a smack around the back of the head so hard it gave her a headache all the next day. So she forced herself to listen to all the horrible words spewing out of his mouth like sick, about legs lying in the road that still have a sock and trainer on them, and the blue of intestines when someone’s guts were on the wrong side of their body.

  Their mother had tried to intervene.

  ‘Come on, darling … it’s her birthday!’ she’d said. ‘Can’t we just …’ but he was on his feet, stubbing his cigarette in the middle of the cake then grabbing the back of Marianne’s hair and yanking it backwards.

  ‘The lot of you make me sick,’ he’d said, hissing into her face. ‘You are so ungrateful for the things you have.’

  Angel grimaces and sucks hard on the cigarette. She wishes she had some weed but it probably wouldn’t help when she needs to keep sharp.

  If they can just get far away, her and Lucas, she is certain that things can still turn out alright.

  If only he would trust her.

  She must focus. Make a plan.

  Angel runs through various possibilities in her mind.

  1. Get on a train to Scotland.

  2. Get Nina’s car back – didn’t she say it was at the garage? – and drive there. They’d have to try and disguise the number plate or something.

  3. Get Nina to drive them to Scotland.

  The two things that keep coming up, though, are that the bloody baby can’t come with them.

  And what are they going to do with Nina?

  21

  Nina

  I try to get comfortable on the sofa; Zach curled like a little bug on my chest. I remember sitting in this exact spot with Sam, knowing it was a bad habit and that I should be sleep training him. But it was so easy to nap with him nestling on my chest, even though I got nothing else done for hours at a time.

  My top is damp with sweat where the baby lies. He does feel a bit hot. But I can’t remember whether this is normal for babies or not. All the knowledge of those early days feels locked away in an exhausted, milky past.

  Maybe, if I’d had another child, it would be coming back to me more easily.

  I hadn’t specifically wanted more than one to start with, and nor had Ian. We were happy enough having Sam in our lives. But we hadn’t worked hard at preventing another child from coming along, if it was meant to be. Then it appeared that it wasn’t going to happen anyway. Turned out I had severe fibroids and was told my chances of conceiving again were almost non-existent. This had been surprisingly painful to know, as though there were an alternate universe where I’d been mother to a whole brood of offspring. But I always felt we were a good little unit of three and told myself that things were just perfect as they were.

  Ian had been a good enough father to Sam. But he wasn’t one of those men who relished fatherhood, if that makes sense. I mean, he didn’t take Sam to cricket matches, or organize Dad and Son days. It was always me who went to the playground when Sam was small, or took him to the zoo or to see the Christmas lights on Oxford Street.

  It always seemed as though there would be more time for things in the future.

  But now Ian might have a whole second chance, while I watch my mothering years fade away. I don’t even want another baby, damn it. I just don’t relish having this phase of my life end forever. I may have expressed this very sentiment in an exchange online with Carmen too, thereby giving Angel further ammunition to use against me.

  Beaten down …

  I lean my head back on the sofa, so tired that my neck feels like a thin stem that can’t support the heavy weight it must endure.

  My eyes start to drag closed and a giddy exhaustion comes in nauseating swoops. I force my head up but my eyes are so sore.

  I only need a minute to rest …

  I’m on a beach. Sunlight sparkles off the water like dancing fireflies. Sam is turning cartwheels on the sand. Ian and I are on the kitchen sofa, which makes perfect sense, as we watch our son. He turns and turns. It’s incredible how good he is and I say, excitedly, ‘This is Sam’s thing now. It’s what he does. I can’t seem to stop him.’ My son is turning and turning, until he becomes a small speck on the horizon. But hasn’t he gone too far now? I wake up with a gasp and a sickening lurch in my stomach.

  My heart is jackhammering in my chest and my mouth feels foul. I look around, disorientated. Zach has slipped a little on my chest but remains asleep. It takes me a few moments, though, to process the fact that I’m alone in the kitchen with the baby. I sit up straighter, feeling the sweaty weight of Zach shift, looking wildly around the kitchen. If I could get down the garden, maybe I could find somewhere to hide.

  But how would I get out of here? Angel has the keys to both doors and the kitchen windows are far too small for me to crawl through, especially with a baby.

  It’s hopeless and a moot point anyway, now, because Lucas is in the kitchen again, moving silently across the tiles on his socked feet. He walks to the fridge, then turns and says, ‘Is it alright if I get some more juice out?’

  I almost laugh. He’s like a polite little boy, despite the fact that he has most likely murdered a woman and kidnapped a baby. A sour nauseous feeling ripples in my stomach as I look at his slender hands, one shoved into the pocket of his – or rather Ian’s – trackie bottoms, the other resting on the fridge while he awaits permission. What did those hands do tonight?

  ‘Knock yourself out,’ I say and then, as he opens the fridge and removes a new carton of orange juice, ‘I don’t know why you’re asking permission. It’s not like I have any say in anything, do I? Despite this being my house.’

  He ignores this and walks to the sink to get one of the glasses that have been draining there for a couple of days. He pours a glass of juice and then drinks, eyes closed and his Adam’s apple working in his pale throat as he swallows.

  When he has drained the glass, he rinses it under the tap and places it exactly where it was. Bizarre.

  ‘I can assure you,’ he says, ‘that however badly you think of me, of us, it’s a drop in the ocean in comparison to what I think of myself.’

  I pause and then sigh at this gnomic utterance. How am I meant to respond to that?

  Lucas moves to the bookcase in the corner and picks up a picture of Sam. My body clenches. I want to slap it out of his hand. He studies the picture carefully, as though looking for something important.

  It was taken on a day out to a city farm, when Sam was five. He had found the goats to be insanely funny for some reason. In one of those moments that can never be recreated, Ian had snapped a picture just as one was trying to nibble the cuff of Sam’s sleeve. Sam was collapsing in giggles, his eyes shining and his mouth open, revealing the gap where his two front teeth had recently come out.

  ‘This your boy?’ he says after a few moments.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He looks like a lucky kid.’

  There’s a silence while he looks at the picture again. Can I see the merest suggestion of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips?

  Hesitating for just a moment, I speak.

  ‘What about your mother, Lucas?’ He visibly stiffens. I can see a nerve jumping in his cheek, but I plough on. ‘Is she in your life?’

  He stands stock still. The merest wash of pale sunlight is beginning to spill into the kitchen from the window behind him.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he says very quietly.

  I pause.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear
that,’ I say, then, ‘When did that happen?’

  Lucas takes a shuddery sort of breath and says, ‘When I was ten.’

  God. It’s hard not to feel genuine sympathy for this. No wonder he, and Angel too for that matter, have taken such a wrong turn. Although nothing justifies murder and kidnap.

  ‘That’s very sad,’ I say. Lucas doesn’t reply, but looks down at the picture again.

  My heart pitter-patters in my chest but I force myself to continue down this potentially perilous path.

  ‘Lucas,’ I say. I can tell his thoughts have been far away.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I pause, ‘don’t you know deep down, that your mother wouldn’t have wanted you to do this? You know this situation is all wrong, I’m sure you do. Whatever happened to this little chap’s mother, I’m sure it was an accident. That you didn’t mean for her to be … um, hurt.’

  I’m flailing. But I’m getting through to him because his chest is rising and falling quickly, his breath coming in fast spasms. I press on, ‘I think your mum would want to know that you’ve done the right thing, however difficult the situation has—’

  I don’t manage to finish the sentence because the picture has slipped from his hands and smashed on the tiled floor. Oh no …

  ‘Just stop talking!’ Lucas’s voice booms through the kitchen. He no longer looks like a delicate man-boy who reminds me of Sam. He looks like what he is, a grown man of wiry strength who may have stabbed a woman to death.

  On cue, Zach begins a thin, plaintive wail. A sleepy-eyed, hair-mussed Angel pads into the room now. She has clearly been dozing but is quickly alert as she looks down at the broken glass on the floor and at her brother. He slides down against the surface of the breakfast bar until he is in a desolate knot, wrapped in on himself, arms around his body, rocking on his knees.

  ‘What the fuck is going on in here?’ spits Angel and as she goes to Lucas she almost skids on the broken glass and swears again.