Hope Dies Last

by Deborah Finn

  And Marilyn found herself on her feet; she was walking. She ignored the path and headed straight down the slope towards the playground, slipping a little on the wet grass. As she walked, she pulled the beret on and shoved her hair back inside. It was her most distinctive feature. These last few weeks, while she’d been coming here to watch Ben, she’d got used to hiding it. She walked fast, her eyes fixed on Beth, as if she was being reeled in on a line.

  There were two benches. Beth sat on one and the other was empty. Marilyn sat on the same bench as Beth. She sat at the other end and stared. Beth was frowning slightly as she read. Her nails were manicured. Her skin looked soft and expensively moisturised, her eyebrows neatly shaped. She was older than Marilyn, but she looked younger. Looking at her, Marilyn felt something like hunger. She wanted to touch her.

  Slowly, Beth lifted her head, as if she was aware of being watched. She turned to look at Marilyn. A polite smile was on her lips already, but her face froze when she saw Marilyn’s face. For a moment, Marilyn thought she’d been recognised. She’d imagined this moment so many times, never knowing how it would work out. She’d pictured Beth’s shock; maybe she would be afraid at first. But then they would talk. Everything would come out.

  But she hadn’t been recognised.

  “Sorry?” Beth said, with a little shake of her head. Marilyn was a stranger and Beth’s voice was cold, clipped, as if she was dealing with a sloppy waitress.

  Marilyn felt it like a slap. “You don’t know me?” she asked.

  Beth frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Have we met before?” The look on her face – as if that was so very unlikely.

  Marilyn peeled the beret from her head, let the long red hair tumble onto her shoulders. “What about now?” she said. “Do you know me now?”

  She saw the confusion, and then the realisation. Beth’s eyes opened wide and her hand rose to her mouth. She turned to look at the pirate ship and then her eyes snapped back to Marilyn.

  “That’s right,” Marilyn said.

  Five

  Martin’s chest burned as he ground his way up and over Saddleworth Moor, his bike tyres spinning on the loose grit. He was not quite in his lowest gear; he never went into his lowest gear. It was like some superstition that you had to hold it back, just in case. There was something about the pain that was good. He needed the pain. When people said it was about the views, they were lying. You needed the pain too, or at least he did.

  By the time he got to the top, he felt sick. He pushed the bike aside and slumped onto the rough, springy grass. He gasped as the pounding in his head peaked and then subsided. His thin cycling shirt was soaked through with sweat. As his skin started to cool, he pulled himself up. Desolate scrub-covered hills rolled to an indistinct horizon. The sky seemed huge; the clouds like a fighting armada defending the sun. He stared out and let peace slowly settle on his shoulders. He missed his son terribly. He loved Beth and he wanted her back. But the world was so much bigger than him, so much older than his problems. It helped to be reminded.

  Before going for the descent, he checked his phone. Three missed calls from Beth, three voicemails and a text message. He felt his damp skin prickling. What was wrong? He opened the text message.

  “Where ARE you??”

  He blinked at it. She never cared where he was on a Ben-free Saturday. At least that was the impression she gave. If it was designed to make him feel useless, it worked.

  He went to the first voicemail, pressing the phone hard against his ear. The sound quality was terrible, as if she was in a tunnel. Martin pressed the phone hard to his ear and closed his eyes in an effort to concentrate but he couldn’t make out a word she said. And then a sound like a sob. Was she crying? He clicked onto message two. She was somewhere quiet now and she was definitely crying. Martin felt the hairs standing up all over his body.

  “Martin, where are you? Please answer your phone. I’ve just been round to your flat and I know you’re not there. What are we going to do?”

  He didn’t listen to message three, he pressed the call button. Beth answered on the first ring. And so it began.

  He listened to her voice, trying to make sense of the story. She’d been in the park and Ben’s birth mother was there.

  “What?” he said, over and over again. He just couldn’t understand.

  “Martin please just come home,” she said.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. He screwed up his eyes, calculating how long it would take. “I’ll be there in an hour. Beth, don’t worry. I’ll be there soon. We’ll sort this out.”

  Martin hammered the bike downhill, bouncing off rocks, skittering over gnarled roots, praying not to get a puncture. Why did he have to be here now, at the top of the moor - the one time she needed him? He was thrown off a couple of times and by the time he got to the car park he was muddy, grazed and bleeding. His forearms were trembling. He heaved the bike onto the rack and got into the driver’s seat. He hadn’t even closed the door before he pulled himself back out. He hadn’t strapped the bike into the rack. He took a deep breath.

  “Steady,” he warned himself. The car spat up grit as he span out of the car park. He drove home, cursing the traffic, taking short cuts, ending up in more traffic. His mind raced ahead of him as he drummed on the steering wheel. They had always known this could happen, of course they had. But the last few years it had started to feel like they were home and dry.

  It was ten years ago that Martin had come in from work to find Beth sitting on the sofa holding a baby. The scene looked almost staged, the way she was perched so neatly with her knees together, the baby wrapped up and asleep in her arms. He had glanced behind him and around the room but there was no one else there. Beth’s dark brown eyes seemed almost luminous; her whole body was taut with delight. It was a boy, she said. He was three days old. And he was theirs now. A woman had come to the house. She knew they were hoping to adopt. She wanted to give her baby to people who would look after him properly.

  Beth had told him all this as though it made perfect sense. You want a baby? Someone appears at your house and gives you a baby. He had tried to say that it wouldn’t work, they couldn’t do this. It broke all the rules, for one thing. She had hissed at him then. Rules? What about the rule he broke when he started sleeping around with that girl? That was a vow. How could they get through the adoption vetting with that hanging over them? That bloody social worker would be bound to find out and then that’d be the end of their adoption hopes. No, Beth had concluded, looking back at the tiny sleeping face, this way was much better. This way, he was really theirs.

  Martin had felt like he was talking to a mad woman. Like something had invaded her mind. He was frozen. He didn’t know what to do. She sent him out to get nappies and milk and wipes, and obediently he went to the supermarket in a daze. It would take some time to persuade her, and in the meantime they had to have supplies.

  The baby was awake when he got back. She had him lying on the soft rug, in a nappy and vest. His little bent legs were bicycling and his fingers were curled into tiny fists. Beth was hovering over him and the baby’s dark eyes gravely inspected her face. Martin felt as if something came loose inside his chest, and he knew there was no stopping this now.

  They spent the next few days on the internet, figuring out what to do. In the end, it was deceptively simple. They went to the register office and registered the birth. Benjamin Halton. Mother: Elizabeth Halton. Father: Martin Halton. The doctor was trickier, and for the first time Beth was glad of the oversized practice where you never saw the same doctor twice. It was an emergency placement, she said. The paperwork would catch up. They were so lucky; so few people got to adopt newborns. And it worked. There were queries for a couple of weeks, and Beth brazened it out with NHS call centre workers. Then Ben’s NHS card arrived in the post.

  For the first year, they flinched at any unexpected knock at the door. Whenever he went out with Ben, Martin felt exposed, as though everyone could see his secret,
as though it was stamped on his forehead. But people just smiled, innocently fooled. And slowly, life began to settle down into a new family routine. Martin was amazed at the ease with which Beth lied to her closest friends. It was as though she really had forgotten that Ben was not their son. And in time, there was nothing to forget. Ben was their son.

  They woke at night to feed and comfort him, spent hours on the floor with toy trains and board books. At his first steps, they were as proud as if Ben had invented upright locomotion. They were both damp eyed as they watched him toddle into school on his first day, clinging onto his dinosaur lunchbox with its tiny ham sandwich, a raspberry fromage frais. Beth took him swimming and Martin taught him to ride a bike. They welcomed his friends and let them turn the whole sitting room into a den of sofa cushions. They worried about whether he was learning the right things – to be a good person, to be positive and ready to have a go. Most of all, they loved him. He was their son.

  And now, she was back. Ben’s birth mother was back. What could she want? She couldn’t mean to take him back now. After all these years, he was their son, not hers. Whatever she wanted, he’d see her off. Beth’s voice echoed in his mind. Come home, she’d said to him. She needed him.

  Martin pulled into the driveway of the house, yanked on the brake and jumped out. Since moving out in the summer, he had learned to ring the bell, rather than open the door, but this time he just marched right in.

  “Beth,” he called from the hallway.

  He heard her footsteps through the tiled kitchen, and she appeared in the doorway. She looked so frail, her eyes swollen and red and her hair tumbled around her face.

  “Martin,” she sobbed as she came towards him. He took hold of her, wrapping her into his chest. He could feel her body moving as shivers of crying ran through her. He tightened his arms and let his lips fall towards her hair. His eyes closed. He just wanted to hold her forever.

  “It’ll be OK, Beth. It’ll be OK.”

  Six

  They called it the greenway site, this part of the Hallowfield development, but right now there was nothing green about it. On the architect’s model you could see a curving length of parkland that was stitched through with pedestrian paths and cycle paths linking up the shops, the offices, the cinema, and all of it funnelling into the city centre. But now, it was just a derelict zone of redbrick buildings with broken windows and levelled sites where you could pay to leave your car if you had the nerve.

  For years, Gallagher Holdings had been acquiring sites along this stretch on behalf of investors: old warehouse buildings sandwiched together with grimy shops and a few decrepit houses that belonged in a museum. The old fools living there said they wouldn’t move, but they’d go in the end. There’s only so long you can hold out when no one comes to fix the boiler or the broken windows. They should have taken the compensation they were offered at the start, Gallagher thought. It would have made life easier for everyone.

  Gallagher was standing in front of the biggest of the warehouses, still in his cycling gear, with the bike propped up against the wall. The photographers had disappeared and Steve had called to say the car would be round to pick him up, but Gallagher had told him to leave it; he’d make his way back on the bike. He quite liked the bike, as it happened. He fished in his jersey pocket for the keys and unlocked a heavy metal gate opening into a loading yard. There was a courtyard arrangement with buildings rising up on all sides. On each floor, there were gaping holes that had once been covered by sliding wooden doors. This was where the stuff would have been loaded in and out. Those gaping holes gave Gallagher the creeps. He couldn’t help thinking about being up there, losing attention, taking a step backwards...

  It was gloomy in the courtyard, the evening light already fading. Gallagher pulled out his phone and checked his messages. One from Jango. He’d be there in ten minutes.

  Gallagher opened the message from Marilyn, and read it again.

  “You know what you did. And you’re going to pay.”

  He didn’t have the scrap of paper to check the number but it had to be from Marilyn. Gallagher had a few enemies, but they didn’t send messages like that, like something out of a teen horror movie. He pressed the call button. She didn’t take long to answer.

  “You got my message then?”

  “I did, Marilyn. What’s all this talk about paying? Look, hen, if you’ve fallen on hard times, I can help you out as a friend. How about that?”

  He heard her laugh, then she was silent, then she laughed again. “Oh my God. You’re trying to pay me off?”

  Gallagher rolled his eyes up to the darkening sky, breathed out. He remembered just how much she used to wind him up, tottering about in her high heels, that dumb cow look on her painted face. “Pay you off, Marilyn? You know me better than that. I never pay for anything I don’t have to.” He bent down and picked up a six inch rusty nail from the ground.

  “What kind of money are we talking, Lester? What kind of money makes up for ten years of a life?”

  “Ten years of a life?” Gallagher laughed. “Look, Marilyn, I don’t know what black hole you fell into, but I’m offering you a helping hand. Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that why you called me?”

  “I want you to rot in hell.”

  Gallagher nodded steadily and began gouging out the mortar from between the bricks. “OK, Marilyn. It seems you have a lot of anger. But you’re coming to me as a friend, right? Asking for help?”

  “You’re not my friend.”

  Gallagher closed his eyes. The stupid bitch wasn’t making this easy. “I think it might be better if we meet up and talk this over, don’t you think?”

  Her voice was hoarse. “Meet you?” He could hear the fear.

  “Isn’t that what you want? Face to face, let’s have it out.”

  She was silent for so long that he almost thought she’d put down the phone, and then she spoke. “You’re going to give me money?”

  Gallagher shook his head. It was like dealing with a child. “I can meet you tomorrow. Do you know Philips Park?”

  “By the stadium?”

  “That’s the one. I’m going for a run there. I’ll meet you at 1 o’clock at the lodge, next to the Stuart Street entrance. Don’t be late.”

  “I don’t know...”

  “And Marilyn – don’t try any kind of stunt, OK? Let’s just make this work for both of us.”

  He ended the call and stabbed the nail into the hole he’d gouged. Why now? Why did the bitch have to surface now? As if he didn’t have enough on his mind as it was.

  There was a noise behind him and Gallagher turned to see Jango pulling open the gate. He’d brought that low-life Farren with him. Jango closed the gate and moved towards him with his slow lumbering stride. Jango was big, and his shiny suits were always too tight.

  “Boss,” Jango said. He had the deepest voice Gallagher had ever heard. “What can we do for you?”

  “Jango, Farren.” Gallagher nodded in acknowledgement at them both. He looked at them for a few moments, sizing them up. “This is a bit out of your usual line, boys. I need you to do something discreetly.”

  Farren made a zipping motion across his mouth. “Our lips are sealed,” he said.

  “Right,” Gallagher sighed. Farren was like the reverse of Jango, a little energetic clown, with a squeaky Scouse accent. “What it is,” Gallagher went on, “I’m meeting someone tomorrow. When she leaves I want you to follow her for a bit and see where she goes, where she lives, that kind of thing.”

  Farren gave a low whistle. “MI5!”

  Gallagher ignored him. “If you don’t think you’re up to it, then say so now.”

  Jango moved his big skull side to side. “It’ll be sound. Where’s it going down?”

  “Philips Park. Do you know it?”

  “Great!” said Farren. “I’ll bring me dog.”

  “Your fucking dog!” Jango growled. “No, you won’t! That beast had me ankle last time.”

  �
��It’ll be good though, won’t it? A dog, in the park? It’ll look right.”

  “Until it runs off and starts biting old ladies and kids and that.”

  “I’ll keep her on a lead. She won’t be no bother.” Farren looked hurt. “She’s a good dog.”

  “Look,” Gallagher interrupted. “Dog, no dog, I don’t care. Can you do it?”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “OK. I’m going to meet her by the Stuart Street entrance at 1 o’clock.”

  “Yeah,” said Jango, nodding slowly. “I know where you mean.”

  “OK.” Gallagher looked them over, narrowing his eyes. “No clowning around, alright?” he warned. “Get a few pictures.”

  Jango’s brow lowered. “What if she spots us?”

  Gallagher shrugged. “Just keep following. See what she does.”

  Jango scratched his head. “What if she gets freaked out and calls the bizzies?”

  Gallagher stared at him hard. “Well, you won’t freak her out, will you, Jango?”

  Jango’s head bobbed downward. “No, boss.”

  “Alright, then.”

  Seven

  “Beth, please. Come and sit down.”

  Beth was stalking round the room, all coiled energy. Martin was used to seeing her like this when she was angry, but today it was fear. He led her to the sofa and she didn’t resist, but then immediately she stood up again.

  “Ben!” she called.

  “He’s upstairs,” Martin said. “He’s playing with the Lego. I just went to check on him. He’s fine.”

  “Fine,” she spat out. “Nothing’s fine.” She stared at Martin. “What if she takes him away?” Her face crumpled.

  “She won’t do that, Beth. Please, sit down.” He reached out a hand. Her fingers were swallowed up in his grasp, and he pulled her down beside him. He wanted so much to wrap his arms around her and make her safe. He wanted her to believe in him still, though he had no right to it anymore. He’d been such a fool. He coughed to clear his throat.