Something Might Happen

by Julie Myerson

  Amber?

  No.

  I take the pale brown stone from her. The wet makes it pretty but as soon as I wipe it on my jeans it dulls.

  Too heavy, I tell her, you know that. Amber’s light.

  Amber’s a type of plastic, Rosa says.

  Right.

  My kids are obsessed with finding amber on this beach. Not that they’ve ever found any. The only person who has is Mick. Mick, who rarely looks, yet once casually picked up a honey-coloured, translucent lump the size of a 10p piece—only to lose it again through the hole in his coat pocket. The children have never forgiven him.

  Rosa holds her brown stone up to the light. Weighs it in her hand.

  It’s quite light, she says hopefully.

  The sea is dull. Then sun comes out, glitter rushes across its surface and everything turns yellow. Then back to dirty as the shadows fall.

  The shadows on the beach get longer, colder. I pick up my bag.

  Look, I warn her, you mustn’t go telling people about this. Not Bob for instance. It might upset him. And the boys—you won’t tell Max and Con, will you?

  Oh, Con knows, Rosa says quickly. Con’s seen her too.

  Oh Rosa, I say, come on—

  He has! Rosa wails. Oh, how can I get you to believe me?

  As a baby, Rosa was the quiet one. She’d lie in her cot and fix on something motionless like the curtains or the sun coming through the blinds and just stare and stare. Then suddenly she’d chuckle, as if she’d just seen something extraordinarily funny that none of the rest of us could see.

  Now she’s crying, from frustration and anger.

  She’s not here, I tell her as gently as I can. She’s gone, Rose. You know that. Lennie isn’t coming back, not ever.

  She doesn’t look at me but she doesn’t argue either.

  It’s not fair, she says, still feeling the weight of her stone.

  That’s right, I agree. It’s not.

  She chucks the stone away so it lands with a plick in the shingle, immediately indistinguishable from all the others.

  Chapter 14

  LACEY PULLS UP BESIDE ME OUTSIDE PARSONS’ TEA ROOMS, in full view of most of the High Street. He winds down the window. He looks tired and cross and his hair is all sticking up.

  Can you come for a drive? he says.

  What, now?

  Yes, he says, I really need to get out of this place.

  It’s a cold and blustery day. I know that Alison Curdell is watching us, standing on the steps of the post office and twiddling her hair. Next to her the sign saying Antiques & Curios blows over, caught by the wind.

  I’ll have to phone Mick, I tell him.

  He passes me his mobile as I get in and clunk the door shut. The car has dark red leather seats and smells of sherbet or something acid and familiar like that. There’s a white paper bag of sweets open on the dashboard.

  I didn’t know you had a car, I say. I mean here with you in town—

  It’s not my car, he says.

  Oh.

  Mawhinney arranged for me to borrow it.

  What shall I tell Mick? I say.

  I don’t know, he says without looking at me. Don’t ask me. Tell him whatever the fuck you like.

  I bite my lips and look at all the numbers and symbols on the phone. What shall I tell Mick? Suddenly it seems like a question I’ve been asking myself all my life.

  The answerphone is on. I tell him a lie—to do with Maggie Farr and Polly Dawson and some tins of something.

  I ask Lacey how to turn the phone off and he takes a hand off the wheel and does it for me. A click. I watch his fingers, long and quick. I know how to turn a phone off. I just wanted to see him do it.

  What? he says.

  Nothing.

  Why are you upset? I ask him.

  I’m not.

  You are. I can tell you are.

  Oh, he says, I’m just a bit fed up that’s all. It doesn’t matter.

  As we drive up to the A12, I watch the hedges speeding past the window, the skeletal cow parsley, the flattened leathery dead thing in the road. Brownish fur, bit of dark red blood. Once an animal, now a part of the surface you drive over.

  So, Lacey says, the funeral’s on Friday.

  That’s right, I agree. But you know, I’d rather talk about something else.

  On a table by the road someone has made a sign saying Fresh Veg. There’s a bunch of carrots and a marrow. Also some purplish-pink chrysanthemums in a black bucket.

  Fair enough, he says.

  I think he seems angry with me. Then I think if he was, he wouldn’t be asking me to come out with him. Then I think, this is madness, what am I doing, coming out with him?

  At the crossroads, Lacey waits to give way and then turns a sharp left. Lorries shoot past on the other side, heading for Lowestoft or Yarmouth. On my left the marshes stretch, black and wet, and from the right comes the sweet pong of Blythburgh pig. Put British pork on your fork, the signs say. Signs that reduced Jordan to tears of disgust the first time he saw them.

  I hear they’re bringing in new staff, Lacey says. On the investigation. An attachment from the task force.

  What’s that mean, then? I ask him and he shrugs.

  It doesn’t mean anything really—just some fresh blood. But anyway, I think Mawhinney is a bit pissed off.

  Really?

  Yeah. He takes things personally. I think he genuinely thought he had something on Darren Sims.

  But he doesn’t?

  No, Lacey says, Darren’s not involved in this.

  You’re sure? I ask him and he flicks me a look.

  Are you? he says.

  Yes, I say. Yes. Of course I am.

  At the turning to Blythburgh, Lacey stops and puts his hand on the indicator.

  Which way? Left or right?

  I’m in charge?

  Yes.

  Left, then.

  He turns so sharply that the wheels make a noise on the verge. A van behind hoots to complain.

  Where are you taking me? he asks.

  I laugh. You’ll see.

  Where?

  Just a place I know. A funny place. You’ll like it.

  But then before I can say anything else, he pulls in at the side of the road by the sign for Toby’s Walks and stops the car.

  I know this place. Two centuries ago or something, a young girl was murdered here. It’s in the guidebooks—long enough ago for people to find it exotic, exciting. Now though it’s a nature reserve, with walks mapped out and little signs for where the marshes are, and benches for picnicking. A lot of birdwatchers come here. They say in spring you can hear the first nightingales if you’re lucky.

  I stare ahead at the vast black conifers and bracken. If you listen hard there’s always a gentle tick-ticking. I don’t know what it is—just the sound that the forest makes, the forest floor.

  Why have we stopped? I ask Lacey.

  He doesn’t look at me.

  I don’t know, he says, I’m sorry.

  I laugh, but only because I’m nervous and I don’t know what else to do.

  I’m lost, he says. He says it with a serious face but when I dare to glance over at him, he says, No, not like that. I mean, lost in other ways.

  You know what I mean, he says after a pause.

  Don’t say things like that, I tell him.

  What do you want me to say then? he asks me. I mean it. What do you want to talk about, Tess?

  I don’t know, I say.

  The truth is I can think of nothing to say that would be right.

  He says, Do you want to talk about how much I like you?

  I take a breath.

  About how I can’t sleep or work or think or do anything that isn’t about finding out how I can next see you?

  No, I whisper, not that.

  He doesn’t smile.

  Well, what then?

  I don’t know. But not that.

  I look at him—at his face with its pale skin and dark
eyes, the sharpish nose, the arrangement of features that aren’t anything much at first glance, but for some reason get better the more you look at them.

  He shrugs.

  I’m only doing what you said, he tells me.

  What?

  What you said you had to do. Spending time and waiting for it to wear off.

  Oh.

  Except it won’t, he says. You know that. My feeling for you isn’t like that. It won’t just go.

  Oh God, I tell him, I shouldn’t have come.

  He puts both hands on the steering wheel.

  I would have made you.

  Would you?

  Yes, I would.

  I keep thinking he might touch me but he doesn’t. He just keeps both of his hands on the wheel.

  I don’t know anything, I tell him. I mean, what to do, what to think—

  You’re in a difficult position, he says quietly, because you want to please everyone.

  I think about this.

  Is that what you think?

  I don’t know, he says. I’m finding it hard to know what I think either.

  He winds down the window. There are pops, creaks and rustles in the bracken. Animal sounds. A magpie flashes black and white in the clearing ahead.

  A girl was murdered here once, I tell him.

  Is that what they say?

  Centuries ago. It’s supposed to be haunted or something.

  Oh, he says. Haunted by what?

  I don’t know, I say. A ghostly girl in white?

  Lacey laughs and after a moment so do I.

  As we drive up into Westleton, he has to slow for a brown pheasant which picks its jerky way across the road and into the hedge. A sign by the side of the road says, Apples And Kindling For Sale, £1.20 a Bucket.

  I decide to tell him about Rosa and Jordan and Connor and how they say they’ve been seeing Lennie.

  Yes, he says slowly, Alex told me that.

  Don’t you think it’s weird?

  He rubs his eyes and then smiles.

  I think it’s that daughter of yours. She has a big imagination—

  You think so?

  Huge.

  I think about this—about Rosa. The Rosa-ness of her.

  It’s funny, I say. When you first have kids, you think you know what their limits will be, how they’ll turn out.

  Do you? he says.

  I mean, you know they aren’t you, that they’re their own people. But you don’t really believe they’ll have all this energy and thought that is nothing to do with you.

  He smiles.

  Your Rosa certainly has that.

  What?

  Energy.

  I look at him.

  Yes, I say, she does, doesn’t she? And it’s nothing to do with Mick or me. Sometimes we can’t control it at all. It’s a force of its own.

  An alien force, says Lacey, and smiles again.

  Yes, I say quite seriously, an alien force.

  After a moment or two he says, She had a big thing about Lennie, didn’t she?

  It’s raining slightly and the road ahead of us turns dull.

  Yes, I say. She did.

  The bookshop is in an old chapel with a corrugated roof and dense thickets of nettles and brambles growing on either side. Opposite is a post office and general store combined, where you can buy shampoo or stamps, painkillers or home-made coffee & walnut cake.

  In the shop window, among all the ads for Bed & Breakfast and babysitters and stuff for sale, is a Suffolk Constabulary poster with Lennie’s face on. I don’t have to look at it, I already know what it says. It gives details of what Lennie was wearing and carrying on that night. I know these details now by heart: jeans, a red satin shirt, a silver bracelet, a soft, dark red leather clutch bag with a yellow smiley face sticker (stuck on by Con and never removed) on it.

  Unlike the post office, the bookshop is always open. Always open and always deadly quiet except for the twitter of the starlings that nest in the roof. Inside, old books are piled everywhere and in all directions—on the floor, up to the ceiling and up each and every wall, some of the piles so high you feel they might curl right up over the arched ceiling and come creeping down the opposite wall.

  Other stuff is also piled almost to the ceiling, tin boxes, broken chairs, old bedspreads, spider plants spilling over.

  Lacey looks around him.

  You like books? he says.

  Yes, I say, I do like books. Do you?

  He says nothing, just laughs to himself.

  Some are stacked in formal glass cabinets, others crammed into cardboard boxes that are in their turn balanced on old wooden step ladders or spilling out of metal filing cabinets.

  There’s quite a bit of handwritten labelling and a system of sorts. Health, cookery, DIY, crime, history, France, Egypt and nature studies. And religion and philosophy and fiction, as well as Rupert Bear and sci-fi and 60s TV programmes. On the dusty brick walls are strange canvases of twisting, fleeting figures and shapes, all done in oils, many of them for sale.

  Up in the area that you might call the till—though certainly nothing like a till is in sight—is an upturned Carr’s biscuit tin and a broken wooden spoon. And next to it, a felt-tipped sign done on corrugated cardboard: Bang With Stick On Tin For Attention.

  Shall I bang? Lacey asks me.

  No! I whisper. Don’t you dare.

  The owner doesn’t seem to be around. He never is. There’s no one else in the place at all and no sound except for rain coming down outside. Or maybe it’s inside as well, for some kind of creeper grows through the upper windows which seem to be pretty much wide open to the elements. Above our heads, bare light bulbs hang, attached to strings at different levels.

  I undo my coat.

  Have a look around, I tell him.

  OK.

  I’m going to fiction, I say. I think he might follow me but he doesn’t. I glance back and see he has picked up a book and is leafing through it already.

  Hey! he calls softly after a moment or two. Tess! Come over here.

  He’s not where I left him. Following his voice, I make my way between birdlife of East Anglia and Norwegian cookery. He is in the furthest corner of the shop, a little book-lined room all of its own, with a metal step ladder on wheels and a stack of empty cardboard boxes in the corner.

  Look, he says. Come here.

  What? I say softly.

  He’s holding a book in his hands.

  This, he says. Looking at me and waiting.

  I stand there, too hot now in my coat.

  What? I say. Look at what?

  Here, he says. Come here.

  And I move right over to him. The book is small and heavy and old, with a shiny tassel of a bookmark.

  I hold out my hand.

  Let me see—

  But he doesn’t give me the book or pass it so I can look. Instead he puts it gently down and reaches forward and opens my coat. Pulls it wide open and holds it by the stiff wool lapels—and pulls me closer.

  No, I say, laughing and resisting.

  Yes.

  No, I say more seriously. You mustn’t.

  Oh, Tess—

  I can’t do this.

  You’re not doing anything. I’m doing it.

  I look up at the shelves. A sign above me says, Miscellaneous Theories.

  He doesn’t let go.

  Are we in Religion? I ask him.

  I feel him looking at me—at my shoulders or my neck or my face.

  I blush hard.

  Why are we in Religion? I whisper as he pulls me closer still and I smell the unfamiliar smell of his breath, see the shadows on his skin, the way the hair brushes his ears.

  It’s the quietest, he says.

  Oh.

  I put my face near to his neck. A pulse is banging there. I’ve done it now, I think.

  But the whole place is quiet, I tell him.

  I know, he whispers and he puts a hand on my head, pulls me to him, but this bit’s the quietest.


  His skin is warm.

  I’ve never done this, I say as I feel the worry and the confusion of it and the mixed-up swish of both our bloods banging against each other.

  Why? What are we doing? he says.

  I don’t know.

  Afterwards, we go around the corner and stand by the duck pond and watch the ducks. There’s a bench and a weeping willow and a wire-mesh litter-bin. We stand right next to each other, but don’t touch.

  Ducks love the rain, I say.

  Yeah, says Lacey.

  I realise I’ve never been here without my kids. I’ve never stood on the edge of this pond and not had to grab the hood of some child or other to stop it falling into all that weedy water. I’ve never in all these years with Mick pressed my face into the neck of another man.

  Mallards are paddling up with their bright legs and eyeing us beadily.

  Oh, I say, I wish we had some bread. We should have brought some.

  You don’t really think that, Lacey says.

  No, I agree.

  The rain is pelting down very hard now. I shiver. I’m terrified but I don’t know what of.

  I’m going to kiss you, Lacey says quietly. Not now, but later. Don’t say anything because I’m going to do it whatever you say.

  My heart swerves.

  Not here, I tell him quickly. Don’t do it here.

  But I don’t say what I should: don’t do it at all.

  When I get home, Alex is there with Mick. Nat too, sitting at the table and refusing to eat.

  Hi, Mick says.

  He says it perfectly calmly. Maybe he hasn’t noticed how long I’ve been gone. Alex just looks at me. He looks stoned.

  Liv is wriggling on Mick’s lap. Sockless, the front of her sleeper damp with dribble. I can see from her frantic face that she’s been fretting for ages. As I reach out for her, she cries loudly in a sorry-for-herself way.

  Sorry, I tell Mick, undoing my shirt.

  I don’t know what you’re apologising for, he says.

  For being so long.

  You got wet?

  I can feel my hair wetting my shirt, my shoulders.

  It’s pouring.

  And you’ve been out in it.

  Yes.

  Alex laughs. I shove a damp breast pad in my pocket, feel the dragging sensation deepen as Livvy sucks.

  Smell this. Nat thrusts a spoonful of yoghurt in my face.

  Why?