I looked around the farmhouse kitchen, so similar to my own, and wondered if I could swallow a cup of coffee made there. The smell was worse than the bin bags outside could be on the hottest day: a mixture of cooking oil, mouldy cloths, rancid food, and—I was sure of it—urine. The sink was piled with dishes, but not this morning’s dishes and not yesterday’s. These were weeks old, maybe months old, dried out and crusted, discs of brown in the glasses and humps of moss in the bowls and on the plates. Then at some point the sisters had given up on dishes altogether, because on the worktop nearest the kettle and microwave there were plastic packs of paper plates and polystyrene cups, and on the floor underneath there was a bin bag full of used ones.
“Lovely,” I said. “Black, no sugar,” thinking that boiled water and a polystyrene cup couldn’t do me much harm.
“Sit down,” the woman told me, turning away. She filled the kettle, edging it expertly under the dishes in the sink, which must have been nudged to either side purely to let the kettle fit there. I looked around. There was a table against the far wall, away from the fireplace, and a chair at either end of it. But one chair was covered in newspapers and the other had a pile of washing over the back of it, dried stiff there, sour smelling and black in its folds. That left the couch by the stove. There were two spaces on it; two small, bottom-shaped holes between the piles of magazines and ashtrays, the half-emptied carry-out trays and the wine bottles filled with a sludge of wet cigarette ends. Both ends of the couch were stained dark in the seat area, but I chose the one without the bright crusted stain on the back rest.
“There’s no biccies,” said the woman, who must be Rain Irving, handing me a polystyrene cup and sitting down. “Sue eats everything that doesn’t move when she’s like she is. Can’t keep a meal in the larder.”
“How is she?” I said. “Sue.”
She nodded. “Thank you. It is Sue these days. And Rena. And she’s as dry as a nun’s crack.” Between the laugh and the hot coffee, she set off on a bout of coughing that left her red and spluttering. “Christ,” she said, taking another drag, “I need to pack these up. That’s what I need to do.”
“Not easy,” I said, nodding as if I would know. I’d never had so much as a puff in my life.
“Not the right time,” said Rain/Rena Irving. “Sue’s good and off the ’done. Now she’s off the booze too. Next I need to get off the booze, and then when we’re both straightened out, we’ll see what we can see about the fags.”
“’Done,” I said. “Methadone?”
“We’re absolutely bloody brilliant at getting off it,” said Rain. “And absolutely bloody hopeless at staying off it.”
“You’re very cheerful,” I said.
She gave me an odd look then. “Who did you say you were?”
I wasn’t proud of it, but I thought this woman, with the life she was living, wasn’t going to put my cover story under the microscope and find it wanting.
“I’m a friend of Cloud’s,” I said. “I only just heard that she’d passed away, and I wanted to come and give you my condolences.”
“A friend from where?” said Rain. “Not from the Bridge if you call her Cloud.” I blinked and said nothing. “Germany? London?”
“London,” I said, thinking that was safest. “What bridge did you mean?”
“The Bridge To Wellness in town there,” said Rain. “So you’re a pal from London days. I don’t remember you. What happened to you?” She gave me an up-and-down look as she asked.
“Happened to me how?” I said, trying not to bristle.
“You’ve piled on a bit of lard there,” she said. “Or weren’t you one of the girls?”
“A prostitute?”
Rain cackled with laughter again and the cough that followed sounded like a thunder clap. Then she raised her eyes as a creak sounded overhead. “Ah, Christ, I’ve woken Sue,” she said. “No, not a proz, a model.” She shook another cigarette out of a packet that was lying amongst the papers and tissues on the couch and then offered the packet to me. I shook my head.
“I wasn’t a model,” I told her. “I was a neighbour.” She squinted through the smoke at me as she lit her fag.
“At the Battersea flat?” she said. “Why don’t I remember you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we met. I don’t remember you either.”
She pulled in a long drag of smoke and then let it go in a thin stream. Towards the end she made biting motions with her jaw as if she was trying to form smoke rings, but the stream just carried on.
“You wouldn’t know, from seeing me now,” she said. She leapt to her feet and went over to the window. Under the windowsill was a deep shelf, and she pulled a file out from it. “See,” she said, handing it to me. It was made of black velour–covered card and was tied shut with a black ribbon. I undid the ribbon and let the file fall open.
“Wow,” I said. “You were—I mean, that’s a lovely photograph.” The girl in the picture was wearing nothing at all except a length of draped chiffon. She was lying along the back of an ornate velvet settee with her neck twisted so that her face was full-on to the camera. There were the enormous eyes, the cheekbones made even more extreme by careful shading, and the full pouting mouth from before lost teeth and too many cigarettes had turned it mean and sunken.
“You look beautiful,” I said, turning it over and moving on to the next one. It was a close-up, a headshot. Her hair was pulled straight back and her face looked bare of make-up, although surely it couldn’t be. “Absolutely beautiful.”
“That’s Claudie,” she said, in a cold voice. “Who the hell are you?”
Twenty-Six
I could hear the footsteps coming along the passageway to the kitchen door, and just for a minute I considered running. Then, coughing and clearing her throat as though she’d just swallowed a fly, the third Irving sister, Sun—Sue, now—arrived.
She was very different from Rain. The dark hair was the same and the dark eyes, but hers looked as small as currants in her face, and her cheekbones and jaw line were long gone in a thick padding of pale, doughy flesh. She plodded across the kitchen—I could feel the floor jouncing under my feet with her steps—and stared dully at me.
“Who’s this?”
“Good question, Siouxie Sue,” said her sister, passing over her half-smoked cigarette. “She was making out she was an old friend of Claudie’s, but I busted her.”
“I’m going to level with you,” I said. “I’m not an old friend of Cloud’s.”
Sun interrupted to say, “No shit,” but I ignored her.
“I’m an old friend of Stephen Tarrant. Stig Tarrant. He was at Eden with you.”
Both sisters drew their breath in so sharply that it hissed over their bottom teeth.
“We don’t talk about that place,” said Sun.
“We don’t think about that place,” said Rain. She went over to where the table was and tipped the dried-out clump of washing onto the floor, then brought the chair back over to the stove and sat in it, back to front, like in Cabaret.
“I understand,” I said. “But I need to talk to you about it. I know Cloud—Claudie—killed herself.”
“She didn’t kill herself,” said Sun. Her sister had handed her a polystyrene cup only half full of coffee, but her hand was shaking so much that it spilled onto her arm, soaking into the cuff of her dressing gown. She raised the cigarette to her lips and sucked on it as if it was oxygen and she was drowning.
“Claudie muddled her drugs,” said Rain. “She was on a heavy script. Stupid doctors. The addiction clinic gave her one thing and her thyroid clinic gave her something else. Then her GP wrote her up for sleeping tablets. We could have sued them.”
I wasn’t supposed to know better, so I said nothing. If it made things easier for her sisters, why would I argue?
“Did she die here?” I asked. The sisters
glanced at each other, and again it was Rain who answered. I wasn’t sure if she was the elder of the two, or the natural leader, or if she was just in better shape.
“She died at home, yes. It was a rough time for all of us, and she died.”
I nodded. I thought I understood her. She didn’t mean that Cloud dying made it a rough time. If I was interpreting the glances and the stilted words right, what the sisters weren’t saying was that Cloud had died and the other two were too far out of their heads to notice for a while. I wished I could tell her that I wasn’t judging, that I’d never judge anyone for not coping very well. Then I decided the best way to show them what I thought was to trust them and show them they could trust me.
“Do you remember April Cowan?” I said. “She died on Monday. I’m surprised the cops haven’t been to ask if you’ve got an alibi.”
Rain coughed. “We were here together,” she said. “Bloody useless alibi, but not as useless as our cars. If we wanted to commit a murder, we’d have to do it with a taxi metre running.”
“And April’s not the only one,” I said. “Jo-jo Jameson. Alan Best, Nathan and Edmund McAllister. They’ve all gone. None from natural causes.”
Both sisters stared at me, their family resemblance stronger than ever with their eyes wide open that way. I glanced down at the file still on my lap and the face of the third Irving sister staring up at me.
Again Rain spoke first.
“And Mitchell,” she said. “He was first, all those years ago.”
“Don’t, Rena,” moaned her sister. “I can’t stand it.”
“I’d be really grateful if you’d tell me what happened that night,” I said. “It maybe sounds crazy, but I think it’s connected.”
“Of course it’s not crazy,” said Rain. “Of course it’s connected. How could it not be?”
“I can’t stand it,” said Sue again, getting to her feet. “I’m going back to bed. I’ll take a couple of bye-byes and get some sleep. I can’t be here when you’re talking about it. I’ve got to go.” She blundered off, kicking over her coffee cup on her way. Rain looked at the stain spreading on the lino, seeping into the scores and scratches. She fished a newspaper out of the pile on the couch and dropped it over the puddle, stamping it down with her heel.
“It wasn’t a good night,” she said. “Bad energy from before we even got out there. That whole place had bad energy. The old bat in the farmhouse with her Baskerville hound, that useless bloody teacher that cared more about the trees than the kids. Making us hack up old pews full of nails to fix a bridge instead of just buying some planks. She made this one kid, Van the Man Morrison, go and apologise to a tree for tying a Tarzan rope to it and rubbing a bit of its bark off.”
“She sounds like a nutter,” I said.
“Anyway,” said Rain. “We went camping in the woods. It was the midsummer Solstice, I think.”
“May Day,” I said, and she clicked her fingers at me.
“That’s right,” she said, “May Day. The Beltane. Quite a dodgy night for spirits and no way we should have been out there on our own.”
“And Miss Naismith didn’t come to check on you, did she?” I said.
“Naismith!” said Rain. “That’s her. What a cunt she was. Making out she was so worried about us and all that.” I tried to keep my face neutral, but I’m sure my cheeks coloured. “She was jealous of us, of course.” Rain nodded at the file on my knee. “Keep looking through it. We’re all in there. Claudie’s on the top because we’ve been looking at her. But all three of us got our portfolios. Look and see.”
So, as she spoke, I leafed through the pictures in the folder. They were beautiful, all three of them. Rain had always been the slightest—like a pixie—and Sun had always been the largest of them—a Valkyrie—and Cloud was the Goldilocks sister, the one not too big and not too small, who was just right. Her face, her body naked, her body in clothes—every picture of her was perfection.
“So what was the story again?” Rain was saying. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. Naismith was supposed to come and check on us and we were going to ask if we could go inside. But she didn’t come, and so we were stuck there. No torches and no moonlight to see by because of the clouds. That’s right, I remember now. But she locked the gate. She wasn’t completely useless, because at least she locked the gate and we were safe inside the grounds, right?”
“And what happened?” I said, prompting her. “You all snuggled down and went to sleep?”
“One kid left because his guts were bad,” said Rain. “That was quite early on. And then Jo-Jo and Moped started daring Van to go and sleep all alone in the haunted chapel. But that was after.”
“After what?” I said.
Her eyes misted over and she took two long puffs on her cigarette and stubbed it out before she answered. “After we had finished telling ghost stories and we’d eaten our supper and got in our sleeping bags,” she said. “Jo-jo and Moped started in on Van. They were always at him.”
“Bullying him, you mean?” I felt a flash of sympathy.
“Taking the piss,” said Rain. “Bursting his bubble. Daring him to go to this place we all thought was haunted. Van—I wish I could remember his real name—anyway, he was a complete prick. A real arsehole. You wouldn’t believe him unless you knew. He dressed like something from a golf club even when he was a kid, and he talked like a bloody bank manager. Honestly, he was just such a complete wanker that it used to drive Jo-jo and Moped nuts. They were good kids—a good laugh, good pals, no harm in them—but nobody could be in the same room as Van Morrison and not want to kick him.”
I felt as if I had had a bucket of cold water thrown over me. I thought about Duggie, when I first met him, about how he dressed so smartly and how mature he seemed, serving on committees and playing golf. I thought about how lucky I felt to be chosen by him; Gloria Harkness, plain as pudding as my mother used to say. And suddenly twenty years of nonsense just sloughed off me and my eyes opened.
I had thought he was popular because he bought drinks for people and loaned his van and always stood laughing at the bar. But the truth was that no one could stand him. He had to buy drinks and lend vans to get anyone to put up with him, and he stood at the bar because no one ever wanted to share his table.
My mum and my sister fell for it, but not my dad. He didn’t give his permission for Duggie to marry me, and he tried to get me to say I didn’t want to. And I hadn’t said I did want to. I had never said yes until we were standing in the church and people had travelled and paid for hotel rooms and new outfits and it was too late.
But why did he want me? All of a sudden I knew that too.
I was easy. He didn’t have to try with me. I was so grateful and loyal and stupid, I suited him down to the ground.
Until we made Nicky. I almost gasped from the pain of it. After Nicky, I wasn’t easy anymore. Nothing was easy. Duggie hadn’t left us because his grief was unbearable; he had left us because there was absolutely no reason for him to stay.
At last I looked up. Rain Irving was watching me with a curious look on her face.
“So Van took the bait,” I said.
“Off he marched, bouncing on the balls of his feet.” She was right. He did! “And we were just glad to be shot of him for a while. Glad not to have to listen to him. We were just about sleeping, Cloud, Sun, and me—all zipped into two sleeping bags made up together like a double bed. Then we heard someone moving and giggling. It was Moped. He said he was going to give Van a fright, pretend to haunt him. He wanted Jo-jo to go, but Jo-jo was too tired and cold. We should have gone back when we had the chance, you know? It might have been May, but it was bloody freezing.”
“So Moped went to the little … chapel, you said. Where Van was?”
“And that’s the last anyone ever heard of him. I tried to stay awake for him coming back, but obviously I failed because the next t
hing I knew, Van was there, shouting. Saying Moped had disappeared.”
“Disappeared from where?” I asked. “From where Van was? From the chapel?”
“No,” said Rain. “He never made it that far. Van hadn’t seen him at all. He just came back, saw that Moped was missing, and woke us all up to go and find him.”
“So you’re saying Moped fell off the bank when he was trying to find his way to the huttie?”
“Yeah,” said Rain. “Only that doesn’t really make any sense, because the huttie—that’s what we called it! The huttie. It was much closer to where we were camping than where the bridge and the Tarzan swing were. And if Moped got close enough to hear the waterfall, he’d know he had missed the huttie and he’d turn back. I don’t see how he can have got close enough to fall in.”
“Unless he was running. If he was panting, he might not have heard the water. He might not have had time to stop.”
“Why would he be running?” Rain said. “He’d be creeping along trying to be quiet so Van didn’t hear him.”
“What if he was frightened? What if he’d heard something that scared him?”
“Mope didn’t believe all that,” she said. “That’s how come he didn’t mind creeping about the woods all on his own in the first place. He didn’t believe in ghosts and monsters.”
“I wasn’t thinking of ghosts,” I said. “Or monsters either. I was thinking about someone who was there and shouldn’t have been. Someone who might have come in a car.”
Rain frowned at me, trying to dredge up memories that were buried deep under years of sorrow.
“That’s right,” she said. “One of the kids said there was a car. I never heard it. Or maybe I heard it and then we decided … I can’t remember the story. Wait! I never heard it and the gate was locked, so it wasn’t true, right?” She lit another cigarette and rubbed a hand roughly across her eyes as if to wipe tears, although I couldn’t see why that—out of all things we’d been speaking about—would upset her.
“No car?” I asked.
The Child Garden Page 21
