Something Might Happen

by Julie Myerson

  A psycho? Nat asks a little too eagerly.

  Well, psycho’s a silly word they use in the movies, Nat. Real life is mostly a lot more boring and nasty and banal. But if by psycho you mean someone who is so inadequate that they get some kind of kick out of killing someone in this terrible way, then yes I suppose so, a psycho.

  Will he get life? Nat asks. Swallowing.

  If they catch him, Mick says, yes, I’m pretty sure he will.

  I bet Alex wishes there was the death penalty, Nat says, and his eyes bunch up in sympathy. I bet he wishes this was in America.

  Mick looks at him patiently.

  Not for a sick person, Nat, he says. It’s not right to kill a sick person.

  It’s never OK to kill, right? says Nat and this time he looks at me.

  Never, I agree.

  Nat pauses and fiddles with a rubber band he’s picked up off the table.

  But what if they don’t catch him? he asks, stretching the band between his fingers.

  This time Mick looks at me.

  They’re going to try very hard to catch him, I say.

  Do you think he’s upset? I ask Mick, once we hear his feet thudding back up the stairs.

  No, he says, getting himself a drink out of the fridge.

  What? Not at all?

  Not especially, I don’t think so, no.

  He roots around for a beer. They’re all at the back. When he has it, he grabs the bottle opener, rubs it on his jeans, looks at me.

  I think he’s just put it away.

  Oh.

  Don’t worry, he adds. It’s perfectly healthy.

  Is it?

  Not everything has to be talked about, Tess.

  He tilts his head back and sips as if nothing was wrong. I look at him.

  Really? I say, I’m surprised. You never used to think that.

  Didn’t I?

  No.

  Are you sure you know what I used to think? I mean, you always assume you know what I’m thinking, he says more gently.

  Do I?

  I bite my lip.

  I don’t mean to—assume things, I begin, then I backtrack. Anyway, don’t you assume you know things?

  I don’t think so.

  You don’t? Of course you do.

  Mick shrugs, puts the beer down on the table.

  I don’t know. I don’t give it much thought. I mean, I don’t think like that. I get on with life instead.

  He says it like that, as if it’s perfectly normal and true, but there is a kind of pain and tension in his face as he says it and it occurs to me that, for perhaps the first time ever, there is pain between us, too. Why? I don’t think it’s about Lennie, not really, I don’t think you can blame that. No. I actually think it’s about us—him and me and how we are together.

  Later, when I let it back into my head, the idea shocks me. I decide it cannot be true. It must just be that all the grief and shock has got mixed up and seeped into our feelings about each other. If someone you care about dies violently, it infects everything. Anyone would agree with that.

  I know what Lennie would say about this. Don’t be stupid, she’d say. You’re going through a difficult time, that’s all. Don’t generalise or say or do things you’ll regret. Just hang on in there and wait for it to pass. Because it will. It’ll pass.

  A man rings from the coroner’s office. For a chat, he says. He apologises for disturbing us, but explains that he is supposed to take Mick through what will happen that afternoon at the morgue—how much he’ll see, what it will be like, etc.

  Mick takes the phone and walks slowly into his study and shuts the door. He’s in there for a few minutes. When he reappears, he looks tired. He tells me that the man said that only Lennie’s face will be visible, that the rest will be covered by a sheet.

  There aren’t any marks on her face, he says. Nothing visible apparently, not even any bruising.

  He stands there and looks at me and scratches at his arms.

  Was it supposed to make me feel better, do you think? he says.

  I don’t know, I say.

  I mean, couldn’t Lacey have told me all that?

  Would you have asked him?

  He sighs.

  I don’t know. I mean, maybe not.

  Later, when he’s gone, I take the chance to cut Rosa’s toenails. She makes such a fuss that I am forced to bribe her with a bag of Doritos.

  What do you want to do, Rosa yowls as I grab her slim, white foot and prop it on my knee, torture me?

  Yes, I say to shut her up.

  Even though it’s only five—way too early to drink—I pour myself a glass of wine, a big one.

  You never cut the boys’ nails, Rosa complains as she crams her mouth with Doritos.

  How do they get shorter then? Tell me that.

  Rosa giggles.

  What d’you think happens? You think they just drop off?

  It’s discrimination, she says happily. You just want to get me.

  I smile and drink my wine in big, quick gulps, feel my edges soften. Rosa wipes bright orange Dorito dust from her mouth and onto her jeans. She sneaks a glance at me as she does it. Normally I would shriek at her, but I don’t, I barely notice. I feel strangely untouchable, as if I’ve slid sideways into someone else’s life. It’s a good feeling. After some moments, I leave the room and walk upstairs.

  I put Liv down and curl up on the sagging, Marmite-stained kids’ sofa with Jordan. We watch Tomorrow Never Dies and I let him zap forward to the action bits, even though this is something he’s not normally allowed to do. You either watch the whole of something, Mick always tells the kids, and watch it properly, or you do something else useful instead.

  This, apparently, is how Mick got somewhere in life and it’s a position that, on the whole, I agree with. So Jordan can’t believe this waiving of the rules.

  Are we being slobs? he asks me hopefully.

  You bet.

  Do you like Bond?

  I love it.

  No. I mean him—James Bond? Do you actually like him?

  He’s great, I say, and, exhilarated by my attention and approval, Jordan turns and pats my face tenderly. His fingers smell of heat and cheese.

  I love you, Mummy, he says.

  Yeah, yeah.

  You’re so beautiful—I mean, you look so young.

  I laugh.

  I mean it—you only look about thirty-five, he says and I kiss the soft skin next to his eyes where the freckles spill over so enthusiastically you can’t believe he will one day be a man and shave and have serious, grown-up thoughts.

  Mummy needs another drink, I tell him and he pauses the video so I can go to the fridge to replenish my glass. But he rewinds a little before he pauses it. He doesn’t want me to miss anything.

  In the kitchen the windows are black and battered with rain. The fridge is white, the wine bottle yellow and cold. I put my hands on it, feel the chill. It goes straight to my heart.

  When I return, Jordan is kneeling up on the sofa, waiting.

  What would you do if a baddie came in now? he asks me urgently as I set the wine down on the carpet and he unpauses the film. He watches me, watches my face, waiting to see what I’ll say. On the screen, a Chinese girl is swimming underwater (again), black hair waving in the gloom.

  I’d call the police, I tell him.

  Yes OK, he says impatiently. But what if they didn’t come?

  They would, I say—surprised that Lacey’s serious face slips into my mind—they would come.

  But, he insists, I mean, what if something happened to them on the way?

  Oh Jordan—

  Or if they didn’t hear the phone?

  There are people whose special job it is to answer the phone, I tell him. So if you dial 999, of course they answer and they come.

  Hmm, he says, more or less satisfied.

  But he’s missed one of the fights—they shot at the Chinese girl when she came out of the water—so we have to wind back. As he holds
the remote up and concentrates on the screen, I slip my arms under his and feel the snap of his little chest, the warmth of his neck, his baby hair.

  You smell like a rabbit, I tell him.

  But he’s not listening, and before I can stop it happening, the room blurs and tears come.

  By the time Mick gets back I’ve got Jordan into the bath. Then climbed the stairs to watch the sun go down over the creek from Nat’s shambles of a room at the top of the house.

  It’s a violent, chemical sunset—smouldering as if something poisonous has been chucked across it. The colours are sharp and exhausting—or is that three glasses of wine on an empty stomach? Just watching it takes the breath out of me. I watch for a long time. It feels like the first time I’ve looked properly at anything since Lennie’s death.

  After that I sit down and try to feed Liv, but she’s in a wriggly, fed-up mood. Maybe I shouldn’t have had the wine. And soon after, there’s the sound of the front door, keys dropped on the shelf. My heart sinks.

  He comes in bringing with him the smell of outside, plumps heavily down in a chair with his jacket still on.

  Well, he says.

  I wait and he looks at me.

  Well?

  He was wrong.

  Who was?

  Him. The guy who phoned.

  Oh.

  Yeah. I mean her face was clean, but—

  I feel the blood creep down my body.

  But what—?

  Yeah.

  He takes a breath, pauses, blinks hard.

  Oh darling, I say.

  He is not exactly crying. He takes a breath, a gulp, covers his eyes.

  What he omitted to tell me, he says in a strangled voice, is that the top of her head is fucking well gone.

  No—

  He doesn’t look at me.

  There’s nothing there, Tess.

  You could see?

  Mick shuts his eyes and the blood rushes to my head.

  There was a sheet over it, he says, but yes, you could see.

  Liv begins to cry. I try to put her back on the nipple, teasing her mouth open with my fingers. But a curdled lump of milk slides out of her mouth and down into my bra, making everything wet and cheesy.

  I grab the cloth.

  I’m sorry, I tell him.

  What do you mean? It’s not your fault.

  Look, I begin.

  He pushes both fists into his eyes.

  Don’t always try to make things better, he says, I mean it, Tess. Leave it, OK?

  OK.

  We sit in silence for a moment. The room swerves. My bra is cold and damp against my skin. I feel a little sick.

  Have a drink, I tell him. I did.

  I did, I think, and it worked.

  Clearly, he says.

  We watched a whole Bond film, I tell him, Jordan and me, all the way through.

  You’re drunk, he points out.

  Yes, I agree—and I hold my baby tight and close my eyes and the room whistles brightly and then just fades away.

  Chapter 6

  OUR TOWN IS SURROUNDED ON THREE SIDES BY marshes—Bulcamp Marshes, Angel Marshes, Tinker’s and Woodsend and Buss Creek. Now they’re beauty spots where birdwatchers go, but a long time ago, people drowned there. There are all sorts of stories.

  Ellen Bloom aged 20 months, beloved daughter of Chad and Susannah, stumbling down the mud flats after dark. Rosa once found Ellen’s little stone, strangled by ivy and splattered with lichen, in the graveyard at St Margaret’s.

  Or, the young man who forced himself on a local girl and then tied a brick around his foot and drowned out of shame. Or the girl who, rushing to see her secret lover, took a fatal wrong turn and was sucked down like a leaf. Two seconds of bad luck and your life closes over your head.

  The most recent is poor Anne Edmondson’s son Brian. Many in the town still remember him. A clever lad and keen sailor, all set to read engineering at Leeds University. The plaque’s inside the church. Brian John Edmondson aged 17 years and a good swimmer. Departed this life August 10th, 1958. No one knows why he just went out there one still summer night and drowned.

  People say that if you drive down the old Dunwich Road at night and dare to stop the car and turn off the engine, you’ll hear things.

  Oh yeah? Alex and Mick say when Lennie and I come home and tell them this. You mean the fucking owls and wind in the trees.

  I used to laugh too. Until Roger Farmiloe who pumps the petrol at Wade’s garage told me he’d heard crying out there. So had his dad. And his uncle Peter too—fifteen years in the Merchant Navy and would laugh in your face if you said you believed in ghosts, Roger said. And yet.

  In fact many brewery workers and darts players, farmhands and van drivers, people who you’d think might scoff or know better, have wound down their windows on dark nights and been so scared that they’ve driven back into town in a blazing hurry and refused to go back, not even if you paid them, or so they’ve all said.

  Yes, says Mick, but after how many pints at The Anchor?

  None, I reply. Roger said his uncle Peter was stone-cold sober.

  This cracks him up.

  That’s harder to believe than all the fucking ghost stories put together, he says, laughing.

  Lennie’s death is good for trade, with both police and reporters in town. Both hotels are immediately full and the coffee shops, delis and snack bars have queues forming outside at lunchtime. Linny’s The Outfitters even considers opening up the room at the back and laying on some kind of cold, takeaway food, something it has not thought of doing since back during the summer of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in seventy-six.

  Even Somerfield runs out of bread and meat halfway through the week and has to be restocked. And The Griddle stays open till seven each evening serving its famous cream teas and exotic ice creams, instead of closing as it normally does at half past five, though Ann Slaughter is heard to complain that Mei Yuen’s next door starts frying at five and the smell puts people off their tea.

  The photo that I gave to Lacey appears on TV as well as on the front page of the papers. I think Mick took it on holiday in France a couple of years ago when we all went away together and liked it so much we thought we’d always do it except we didn’t, we never did it again.

  In it she is wearing a striped pinkish T-shirt and she’s smiling and screwing her eyes up against the bright sunshine and her hair is that little bit longer, strands of it caught in the wind across her face. She’s not tanned—Lennie was too fair to tan—but she looks well and happy, standing there next to her boys. Of course the papers cut Max and Con off—they wanted just Lennie. So there she is, oblivious, alone and smiling.

  And suddenly, there she is, all around us, even in Curdell’s newsagent’s on the High Street. It’s too much for some people, to see her beaming out at them like that from the racks. Too close up and personal. One or two get all shaky or have a little cry when they go in to buy cigarettes or their lottery ticket. Some mums won’t even take their kids in the shop but leave them outside instead, by the fishing nets and buckets and spades and windmills, next to the Wall’s Ice Cream sign that flaps in the wind in the place where people usually tie their dogs.

  On the Friday I go back in to work. Though everyone understands why I’ve been postponing appointments, I can’t leave the clinic shut for long. I have a number of older patients who rely on me.

  It smells cold in there—we have a constant problem, with the damp. I turn on the heating and water the plants, stuff some towels in the washing machine and turn on the computer to look up the appointments. As it crackles into life, I realise that Lennie’s e-mails from just a few days ago will still be on it. Not wanting to see them, I go straight into the diary.

  I’ve been there about twenty minutes when there’s a knock on the door at the front. It’s not the door we use. Patients come in through a side door in the alleyway they call Dene Walk. I lift the front blinds and see that it’s Lacey. Surprised, I indicate to him to go r
ound to the side.

  Sorry, he says when I open the door in my white coat, jeans and clogs with my woolly jacket still on top, I should have phoned—

  No, no, I say. It’s OK.

  Have you got a moment?

  He looks past me into the room. I step aside to let him in.

  As I apologise for the cold and explain that the heating system’s old and takes a while to get going, I feel myself blushing. If he notices, he doesn’t show it.

  You work alone here?

  I’ve done less since the baby. There used to be a partner. But he left and went back to London. Making tons more money there.

  You’re busy?

  I shrug.

  There’s enough to keep me going.

  No, he says, I meant—today.

  Oh, I say, colouring furiously again. No one’s in till this afternoon—I mean, I cancelled all the earlier appointments this week. It’s the first time I’ve been in—since—

  He nods.

  I just came in to get things—organised.

  I offer him a chair and he sits, looks around him.

  What’s the smell? he asks me.

  I frown and sniff.

  Oh. I don’t know. Lavender? I use a lot of oils.

  He looks at me.

  Do you? What for?

  Massage, I tell him. Soft-tissue work.

  He seems to think about this. And then, I’m sorry, he says. About the other day. The morgue.

  Oh, I say, it wasn’t your fault.

  Was he OK?

  Just upset, I tell him. What about Al? I haven’t seen him.

  Lacey looks at me.

  Eucalyptus, he says.

  I feel myself smile.

  The smell—

  Yes. Quite probably.

  Just then Liv gives a gasp from under the desk. I normally put her down on a small mattress on the floor behind the filing cabinets.

  Lacey laughs in surprise.

  You’ve got the baby down there?

  I laugh back and squat down to pull her up against me. She smells hot and fusty, of sleep and piss.

  She gazes at Lacey and then she smiles. So does he.