Give me two minutes, I say.
In our house, in our family, I am the archivist. I am the one who can produce evidence to show that we were all here and happy together. But it can be lopsided, this evidence. So, there are loads of photos of Nat as a baby, and plenty of Rosa too, in all situations, all moments of life. Fewer of Jordan and then, as poor Liv was born, they tail off altogether.
I think I have one hazy faraway one from the day she came into this world—and then nothing at all until the one where Lennie is holding her up in the garden of the pub at Blackshore and she is wearing the faded paisley hand-me-down sunhat that all of our kids have worn at one time or other. Also, because Mick took most of the pictures, he is more absent than he should be, too. But not Lennie and Al—they’re in nearly all the pictures. A measure of how much they’ve always been here with us in our lives.
Fletcher is loudly lapping water as I open the little door and start upstairs.
I’m halfway up before I realise Lacey is right behind me.
Sorry, he says softly. Just—wait a moment.
I stop and turn.
It’s just—I didn’t want to say it in there. This photo, it’s going to be all over everywhere, in the papers and on TV and so on—what I mean is, he and the children will be seeing a lot of it—
Oh, I say, thinking how helpless he looks.
It needs to be current, obviously, he says, and it needs to be—well—
How they’d want to remember her?
Lacey takes his eyes away from mine.
Yes, he says, that’s right. Thanks.
That night, the first night of our knowing that Lennie is dead, I sleep a strange sleep of amazement. Amazed that I can sleep at all. Again and again in the blue darkness, the fact of what has happened slips over me. Icy, amazed, over and over again.
That’s what I was most afraid of—of waking up and having to think about it. I can’t. I can’t think about her. I can’t think about the car park.
Livvy sleeps right through. Only the second time ever. I ought to be pleased but it scares me to death. At 5 A.M. I poke her to check she’s still breathing. She is.
Mick brings me coffee. I mention to him about Liv.
He says, For God’s sake, Tess, she’s shattered. Leave her. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.
Enjoy. The word wedges itself in the air between us.
The school is closed while the police make enquiries, but the kids know better than to say they’re glad. They watch TV downstairs while we drink coffee and wait for the phone to ring. If I can just get through the morning without crying, I think.
The man called Mawhinney comes round to have a word with us. They’re making house-to-house enquiries throughout the town, he explains. Though obviously, he adds, he would have wanted to talk to us anyway, because of our relationship with the family.
He says he’s sorry to have to do this when we’re still feeling so raw and having it sink in, but he needs to ask us both exactly where we were on the night it happened—between eleven and, say, eight in the morning.
I blush hot to my hair, but Mick doesn’t hesitate. He takes my hand and squeezes it. He tells Mawhinney that he and I were both in bed.
We were exhausted, he tells him, really shattered. That’s why Tess didn’t go to the meeting. She’s on the PTA and she should have been there but she just couldn’t face it. I wouldn’t have let her go. I think we went to bed at—well at a guess—ten, ten thirty.
Mawhinney listens.
Would that be earlier than usual then?
Mick pinches at his nose with his thumb and finger as he thinks about it.
Pretty early for us, yes.
Something unsaid floats past me. In my hand the balled-up tissue is coming apart with dampness. Bits of it sticking to the sides of my fingers like skin.
Mawhinney turns to me. I can see he is trying to be kind, to make it easy. I wonder if he has a wife and kids at home and if he goes home and takes a beer from the fridge and tells them all about his day.
Is that right? he says and you can see by his eyes what he expects me to say.
Yes, I tell him, yes, that’s right.
Then I remember a sudden, true thing: that I had to stay awake to feed the baby. I tell Mawhinney this, though my heart bangs crazily as I say it.
He listens without much interest.
Oh yes, says Mick just like it’s not important at all, so you did, I’d forgotten that.
I glance down at Mawhinney’s little notebook. He hasn’t written anything down.
We’re bringing her feeds forward, I explain, or trying to anyway.
My voice sounds reasonable. I hate myself.
Why did you say that? I ask Mick once Mawhinney has gone.
He looks up from the floor where he’s kneeling on newspaper and cleaning Rosa’s brown school shoes.
Why did I say what?
About us being in bed at ten thirty?
He goes on dabbing polish in with the cloth, working it carefully into all the cracks and creases. He breathes through his mouth as he does it, his tongue touching the inside of his top lip. That’s what he does when he concentrates. Mick’s good at concentrating. He says that’s how you make the smallest jobs satisfying.
Because we were, he says carefully.
I swallow, taste polish in the back of my mouth.
You were, I tell him. I wasn’t.
He sits back on his heels in an unsurprised yet exasperated way.
Oh for fuck’s sake, Tess—
I wasn’t.
You wanted me to tell him that?
I gaze at him. Sometimes his confidence amazes me.
I thought you’d tell the truth, I say.
Well I was in bed, he says. And as far as I know you were too. As far as I’m concerned I was telling the truth.
He says that but his eyes narrow. He’s angry.
But I got up, I tell him. You know I did. You know I got up.
He says nothing, picks up the shoe.
Don’t you want to know where I went?
He hesitates and I don’t like the look on his face.
You’re saying I should stop you?
No. I don’t know.
You can’t have it both ways, Tess.
He laughs then. He laughs because he knows my position is ludicrous. You can’t make someone want to know things. Just like you can’t force someone to be jealous or upset or aroused. They either are or they aren’t and that’s it. There are no halfways.
But I love him, I tell myself. I do. I would never, never want to be married to Alex—thank God I didn’t stay with him, we’d have been hopeless together, fatal, lethal, always knowing what each other wanted and getting there quicker, wanting it first.
Now, every clock in the house is ticking, but each one says a different time. Mick’s job is to wind them up. He’s the one who likes antique clocks, the noise and the work of them, not me. If it were up to me, I’d have something modern: fierce red digits glinting in the dark.
The thing about Mick is, he thinks it’s clever not to rise to things.
I’m not trying to hide anything from you—
That’s what I tell him, but he shrugs.
I know, Tess. I don’t think you are. It still doesn’t mean I need to know.
It’s your life, he says when I don’t reply to this. Your life, your time.
No, I say as carefully as I can. Don’t you see how maddening it is when you say that? It’s not. It’s our time.
He laughs.
What? What’s funny?
He doesn’t answer, just laughs again. Then turns away and begins the thing of buffing the shoe. He does it hard. Rosa’s feet will shine. Not that she’ll notice.
I went to The Polecat, I tell him. That’s all.
He gives me a quick look.
Fine.
Fine?
Lucky you’re still alive, he says and his voice is small and dull and tight.
He places Rosa’s sh
oes perfectly straight on the mat by the back door and folds the newspaper and stuffs it in the recycling. He recycles every piece of paper in the house, Mick does. Sometimes he recycles things before I’ve had a chance to read them.
I think he’s going to leave the room then, but he doesn’t. He comes over. Holds me for a quick moment.
Let’s not do this, he says. Please, Tess. Not now.
I kiss the bristles on his cheek.
I don’t want to do anything, I tell him.
He sighs.
I thought this was what you wanted anyway, he says. I thought it was the whole point?
What? I say. The whole point of what?
Of everything. Of what you say you want in life?
I don’t know what I do want any more, I tell him.
He pauses and looks at me.
It’s not relevant to any of—this—where you were.
Is that why you lied?
I didn’t lie. I just told them what I knew for certain.
But don’t they have to—look at everything?
He touches my face, my cheek, my jaw. I shiver.
You tell them then.
What?
Tell them where you were.
You think I should?
No. I don’t. Where would it get you? What’s the point of confusing things further. For God’s sake, Tess, I was only trying to help you, keep you clean.
Clean?
Out of it. Uninvolved.
You think I should be grateful?
Don’t put words into my mouth.
Chapter 5
IT TURNS OUT THE CORONER NEEDS TWO PEOPLE TO identify the body—another person, an independent witness who knew Lennie, as well as her next of kin. Bob, her dad, is struggling to get his doctors’ permission to fly over from Philadelphia. But he is eighty-one and frail with a poorly heart and the journey itself will be hard enough.
Mick says he’ll do it—go to the morgue with Alex. At first I try to persuade him out of it. It should be me. He’s never seen a dead person and I have. I cut up plenty when I was training.
Those were strangers, he says. This is completely different.
Is it?
Tess. For fuck’s sake. You know it is.
Anyway, he tells me, he wants to go—he wants to do this for Alex. And for Lennie. He means it, but I am tempted to remind him of how little more than a year ago just the sight of Livvy’s reptilian shadow on the ultrasound almost made him pass out.
When I hear that Lacey is going with them, I feel better. In all these hours, Lacey’s barely left Alex’s side. Mick says that’s the whole point of what he does—to offer continual support, twenty-four hours a day.
When Alex comes and sits in our kitchen—hunched at our plate-strewn, crumb-covered kitchen table still wearing his rough and musty-smelling coat and rolling cigarettes with shaky hands, now Lacey comes too. They make a strange pair—Alex with his pale face and fair unwashed hair and visible grief, Lacey smaller, darker, younger, mostly silent and watching.
Mick says that’s how he’s trained to be—to make himself invisible, so that he doesn’t inhibit any of us, so that he doesn’t intrude. He accepts my offer of a cup of coffee and then just sits there in his smooth, dark London clothes, elbows on his knees, watching us all. Maybe he’s looking for clues. Maybe he’s thinking that by finding out how we all live, he can somehow work out how Lennie died.
He’s not a detective, Mick says.
I say I think he seems far too young to have such a terrible job and Mick agrees.
I couldn’t do it, he says, but I think he’s good. He’s a good guy. I like him.
* * *
Alex tells us that new details have emerged from the post-mortem. He says they suspect the killer used a lino-cutter. He says that Lennie’s sternum was cracked open, her ribs forced apart like the bars of a cage. The vessels that pumped blood from her heart were severed in a surprisingly methodical way, the organ lifted out intact. Though the initial attack was frenzied, uncoordinated, the subsequent surgery on her torso was carried out with chilling accuracy and cool.
The fucker knew what he was doing, in other words, he says.
I take a breath and catch Lacey’s eye. He holds my gaze then looks away.
Mick lowers himself into a chair, his face bloodless.
But how can they possibly be so specific? he wants to know.
The angle and depth of the cut, says Alex simply. He looks at us and shrugs and his voice doesn’t wobble or falter. It just stays exactly the same.
Meanwhile other things have come to light. We know now that her underclothes were partially pulled off. That she wasn’t sexually assaulted. That the bludgeoning to her head was so frenzied that large fragments of her skull lodged in her brain causing extensive haemorrhaging. Which means her assailant would have been covered in blood. It would be impossible, the police say, to inflict those kinds of injuries and on that scale and remain unbloodied.
He probably left in a car. Police say they want to trace the owner of a silver Fiat Uno that was seen on the junction of Hotson Road and North Parade around the time of Lennie’s death. Anyone who knows anything at all should come forward. They appeal again and again for help from anyone who was in the pier end of town on that night.
You wanted my mummy to die, Connor tells Rosa as they sit together on the low, flinty wall at the end of Spinner’s Lane.
Rosa is shocked. She calls him a liar. He calls her a bitch and throws a handful of gravel at her. She throws a handful back and then runs sobbing all the way home, leaving her anorak behind on the wall.
You know he didn’t mean it, I tell her.
He did! Rosa sobs. He did, he did! He called me a bitch!
I know better than to try to hug Rosa, but I touch the biscuity top of her head.
Poor Connor, I say.
He called me a bitch! Don’t you even care?
Rosa—
She pushes me off.
Leave me alone, she says. Get your hands off me. If you’re going to side with him. You only care about him.
I never know what to do with Rosa—she has all of Mick’s surly cleverness combined with the pouchy beginnings of breasts already (and she’s only eleven) plus a frighteningly clear idea of what she expects from the world. Mostly it lets her down.
Sometimes I think we would be closer now if I’d never had Liv. Having another baby made me go down in her estimation. It’s true—she despises me for it.
It’s an alien, she told me when she saw how the baby’s fast-growing body turned my navel inside out. You’ve been taken over.
It’s just all a bit much when you’re her age, Lennie suggested. She’s too young and too old for it. She can’t see what’s in it for her.
I laughed. There were times back then when I couldn’t see what was in it for me either. But Lennie was right. She was better at working Rosa out than anyone else. Poor Rosa. Just as she was learning to do cartwheels and handstands and to make her own body bright and ruthless and elastic, there I was, slow and large and weighed down.
When Liv was born, Lennie gave Rosa a kitten. She named it Maria. She said it was the best present anyone had ever given her.
All I have left of Lennie, Rosa says now as Maria’s warm white weight spills through her fingers.
I tell her that Connor must be very mixed up right now.
Just think of how he must be feeling, I say.
Well, he should think of my feelings, she replies.
You don’t really think that, Rose.
I didn’t want Lennie to die, she says.
Baby, no one thinks you did.
He does. He thinks so—
No, listen darling, that’s what I’m saying. Connor’s eight years old and he’s lost his mum.
Almost nine, says Rosa.
What?
He’s almost nine. And I’ve lost my—friend.
OK. Nine, I say, but that’s a terrible thing to have happen to you. Think of how awful you�
�re feeling. Then multiply it by a thousand.
Rosa stops crying then and grows still and silent. After some minutes she takes my hand and feels my fingers, my two rings, the soft, fleshy pads under my nails. She asks me where Lennie is right now.
The question takes me by surprise.
You mean where’s her body?
Yes.
Well, it’s in a morgue, I tell her carefully. That’s the place near the hospital in Ipswich where they look at her to see how she died.
But they know how she died—
More or less, yes.
Rosa frowns.
So—what—aren’t they going to bury her then?
Eventually, yes of course they are. Or cremate her.
Rosa slips one of the rings off my finger and puts it on her own. This is a favourite thing of hers to do. The ring sits lopsidedly on her thin little finger. She spins it absently round.
Who’ll decide? she says.
It’ll be up to Alex.
Rosa shudders.
I wouldn’t want to be underground, she says. But I wouldn’t want to be burnt either.
You mustn’t think of it like that, I tell her, taking back the ring and easing it onto my own finger. You’re not you when it happens.
No, but—what? Just a body?
That’s right.
Oh, well, I wouldn’t want my body to be burnt or underground then. It’s the same.
It won’t be your body. Because you won’t be you.
But I will be me! Rosa insists. My body is still me—
Not in that sense, not in the feeling sense.
It will be for me, she says firmly.
You can’t possibly know that.
But I do!
No you don’t, I tell her as gently as I can.
Rosa says nothing. Then, Yes I do, she whispers.
I take her in my arms and hold her tight enough to feel the fizz of her heart. She doesn’t fight me this time.
Now Nat knows things. He knows about Lennie’s heart, and he knows she wasn’t shot. He’s heard stuff. At school, in the street. Kids of twelve read the papers. Details are going round. Mick calls him downstairs and shuts the door.
We’re talking about a very, very disturbed person, he says, looking him all the while unflinchingly in the eye as he always does when he’s telling something serious to the kids. A sick person. Someone badly in need of help.
Something Might Happen Page 5
