by Kate Dunn
“No, it’s fine. It was an accident.” Rapidly, he filled his mouth with sharp-edged pieces of black chicken, allowing time for his words to settle and register with them both.
Tyler’s face was suffused with sympathy.
“She tripped.” He tackled the salad, forking up endive, an artichoke heart, some roasted pepper, a few ribbons of carrot, whatever he could find. “On the stairs. She was carrying a heavy bag…” He tailed off, contemplating the casual tragedy of his narrative, a version which would let Michael off the hook, wishing with all of his heart that it could have been so.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s obviously very painful…”
“She fell and the case landed on top of her. Her neck was broken.”
Tyler swallowed, then reached for her glass, which she held by the stem but did not pick up. She kept a grip on it, twisting it between her fingers, forming an agitated vortex in the wine.
“It was very quick. That’s what the post-mortem said.”
“That must be such a comfort for you.”
“Comfort?” He wasn’t sure whether he said the word aloud or not.
“And for your son…” Sensing she was on dangerous ground, but not how dangerous, she knocked back a mouthful of wine. She chased some chicken round her plate. She broke off the end of the bread.
“My son, yes. Yes, for him, too.” He couldn’t eat any more.
“You don’t have to, you know – talk.”
“No, I want to.” He blinked in surprise at himself. “Most people don’t ask.”
“Well, I’m asking.”
There were traces of herb mayonnaise on his plate, which he drew out into an abstract design using the tines of his fork. “Have you got kids?”
“No-ooh–” What began as a quirky smile never quite made the grade; it slipped and flickered, faultily. “No, I don’t have.”
He sat making tiny spider’s webs out of mayonnaise, sticky constructs that allowed him to say nothing.
“Should have done, would have done, but it never – right person, wrong time / wrong person, right time – it never happened.” Arriving at the far side of her explanation, she went a little slack. She leaned her elbow on the table, leaned her head in her hand. “Phew!” She fanned herself, although the air was growing cool.
“It’s not too late,” ventured Colin gallantly.
“It is way, way, way too late.”
He rested the fork on the plate and folded his arms. For a few moments he made a careful study of the varnish on the saloon door, staring at the brittle glaze. He thought that when their trip was finished – at the very idea his skin prickled as if a cold breeze had blown across it – he would re-do all the varnish on the Dragonfly, make it his project for the autumn, seal himself up inside his shed and really set to work.
For the first time ever, he found himself dismayed at the prospect.
“It must have been very hard for your son.”
Colin pressed his lips together. He lowered his head; he could have rested it in his arms and wept. “We’re not on good terms, my son and I.”
Across the river, the lights in the kitchen of the hotel boat went out.
“That sure is tough for you.”
Colin nodded. “We were close when he was a boy.” He was conscious of the strange octave his voice had found, “Very close.”
She leaned on the table, her arm within touching distance, the hairs on it standing softly in the cool air. Without saying anything she stretched over and folded some hardened wax back into the candle flame, so that it melted all over again.
“I was closer to Michael than I was to my wife. Maybe that was the problem. She left me for another man…” Part of him was aghast to be sharing his private humiliations, but he was beyond being able to help himself. He shook his head. “She took him with her. When she left.” He glanced in her direction. Her face was partially lit by the diminishing light of the candle flame, her eyes lost in shadow. “What brings you here? On your own”
For a moment her smile filled the little pool of light, before collapsing softly. “My ever-loving husband left me for someone fifteen years his junior when she told him she was pregnant. Not much of a body blow there. Hardly a setback at all.” She drank some wine, regarding him over the rim of her glass. “We had our own business, importing kit houses from Sweden. We built our own first – that’s what gave us the idea. God, I loved that little house–” she broke off and leant back out of the reach of the candle flame. All he could see was the shape of her, the darkness denser where she sat, with her arm still cast across the table. He watched the movements of her hand, fidgeting. “But I couldn’t stay in it, not after – not when–” She drank more wine. “He – they – bought me out, bought my share of the business.” With her thumb she scratched at a pearl of wax on the table, so that it flaked over her nail. “I’ve always been a bit of a pyromaniac,” she observed disparagingly to herself.
He reached across, imagining for a single wild moment that he might net her hand within his own – the quick flutter of their fingers touching – but at the last second he finessed it; he pulled at his earlobe, he pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose then remembered he wasn’t wearing them.
“I wondered if I might buy a picture?” he asked, to cover his discomfort, clearing his throat. “That’s partly why I came over.”
She contemplated him for a moment and then shook her head, “They’re not good enough. I do them for me, really. Kind of you to offer, though.”
There was a long pause. “I’d better get back to my granddaughter, I suppose…”
“What you are doing with her is so wonderful,” her words were soft with sentiment, “You’re doing real good. And, you know, however things work out between you and your son, I’m sure this trip will mean something to him.”
He concentrated on not clenching himself up into a bitter knot.
“And I really appreciate you sharing your–”
“Chicken?” he suggested, hoping she might change tack.
“–your story–” the momentum of her laugh caught up with her, “–and your chicken.”
She jumped up, so he had no option but to stand up too and he tried his best to crack open a smile, but inside he felt a fraud because he hadn’t shared the half of it; he had hardly shared anything at all.
They walked together to the top of the gangplank and she stood on tiptoe and brushed her cheek against his own, wings of a dragonfly, the feel of a woman’s skin after all this time.
“Good night,” she said, the aftertaste of laughter still in her voice.
“Thanks for a great evening,” he began to reverse his way down the gangplank. “And I’m sorry – about what happened.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“But I am – all the same.”
“Good night…” she called again.
~~~
When he returned to the Dragonfly, Amandine was on weary sentry duty at the cabin door. Tucked into the Velcro fastening on her paw was a torn off piece of paper.
“Colin is very nice to Delphine and Delphine is very nice to Colin.”
He read it several times and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. He took off his sandals and left them outside on the deck, crawling his way backwards through the hatch. Twisting himself into origami folds, he slipped out of his clothes and into his sleeping bag. He lay on his back, staring into the darkness for a couple of minutes, then fished her message out of the pocket of his shorts. It was too dark to read it again, but he kept hold of it, admiring its even-handed statement of fact, then he put it safely on the shelf above his head.
~~~
He couldn’t sleep. He lay on his side, his back, his other side. He studied the interior of his eyelids, trying to hypnotise himself with the different, veiny patterns that materialised.
When the cathedral – or was it the abbey? – clock struck two, Colin wriggled into his clothes once more, crept o
ut of the cabin and set himself up on the bathroom locker with his feet propped up in the kitchen, the chiselled blocks of the quay at his back. The barbecue was relinquishing the last of its warmth and poking around among the coals he found some that were still serrated red and lit his one cigarette of the day, the one he should have had earlier in the evening.
Grimly, he smoked and smoked, only removing the butt from between his lips to flick the ash before he took another drag and after a while his thoughts returned to the photo album on the shelf above Delphine’s bed. He didn’t want to pry, but the prospect of what it might reveal exercised him: picture after picture reamed with unwritten stories; the archaeology of Michael’s life. He reached into the cabin.
It felt as bad as reading someone else’s letters and he sat for a moment with the album heavy on his knee before he opened it. The spine of the book cracked like a rifle shot as he turned the first page and Delphine stirred and the abbey clock – or was it the cathedral? – struck the half and he almost put it back where he had found it. He turned one page and then another, while the tobacco burned unsmoked until there was more ash than cigarette, ash which cooled and fell, covering a picture of the three of them, father, mother and daughter, in cindery dust.
In the end, although he studied Charlotte, he could find no signs of her complicity. He scrutinised a snap of her smoking – he tossed his own cigarette into the river – in another she was peering at the camera over some huge dark glasses, then drinking the last few drops from a bottle of mineral water. On the beach without her props, her red gash of a mouth gone, her pale skin freckled with sun and wind, she looked so ordinary: an ordinary mum, slightly self-conscious at having her picture taken. He couldn’t see her as the siren to her own doom.
The album’s transparent adhesive film had bubbled up from the picture in places. He ran one finger over it, pressing it down, but it wouldn’t stick. Charlotte’s face looked up at him, enigmatic and unchangeable, and he found he couldn’t meet her gaze.
He ran through the story he had constructed: his son was an impressionable and inexperienced youth traduced and manipulated by a sophisticated older woman who used him for her own childbearing ends before she dumped him. He ran through it again. At the very worst, if Michael was guilty, which he couldn’t be, it was a crime of passion, anything, rather than his boy standing vengefully at the top of the flight of stairs, with his arm raised to strike…
For the first time ever, he felt a twinge of doubt.
The river stilled, the night leaned in close and Colin shoved the album to one side and then straightaway retrieved it, leafing through it, studying picture after picture to try and understand: Charlotte happy, Charlotte and Delphine mottled and shivering after a swim, Delphine and Michael on their bikes, Charlotte looking bored, Michael waving from a window, Charlotte paddling on a lilo, Delphine eating an ice cream, Charlotte combing her hair. They seemed like a perfectly happy family. Where did it all go wrong?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Laroche did sign up for a literacy course, sneakily, and Michael only found out about it when one of the kangas mentioned the unlikeliness of the fact as he came to collect him and escort him to the class. He raised his eyebrows at Michael as he went through the door and it only occurred to him afterwards how bulked up he looked. Remand prisoners could wear what they wanted and he was testing that one to the limit: sweatshirt, hoodie, scarf. More than you’d strictly need for the precarious season when summer threatens to spill over into autumn.
Two hours later and he was back, whistling.
They observed a silence while the kanga slammed the door and locked it and then removed the key.
“What did you learn, then? You kept that one very quiet.”
“Ssshh,” said Laroche, noisily. He unwound his scarf. “Fuck me, it’s hot.” He unzipped his hoodie and shrugged it off. “I learned,” he said, “that money can buy you whatever it is you want.” He elbowed his way out of his sweatshirt and there hanging from a strap around his neck was an inflated bag of the sort that comes in a wine box, a silver one with a plastic tap. “It’s me birthday,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “let’s party!”
“What on earth–?”
“A little bit of finest lap. Want some?” he lifted the strap over his head and laid the bag reverently on the table.
“Where did you get that?”
“Got it in Education, wotch you got me started on.”
“What’s it made of? Is it wine?”
“Wine?” Laroche scoffed. “It’s a hundred percent certified moonshine, made from carpet fluff, or whatever the lads can get their hands on: potato peelings, used tissues, it all goes in oink oink. Fetch us that glass.” He nodded in the direction of a clear plastic tooth mug, clouded with spit and toothpaste. “On second thoughts…” he went bouncing onto his bed and lay back. “Chuck it over.” He nodded at the bag, which Michael passed him. “Let’s get the fade on!”
Laroche poured some alcohol directly into his mouth, shortening and lengthening the stream of it by lifting his arms until it overflowed, trickling along his cheeks and into his ears, down his neck, into the pools of his collar bones. His white face flushed and he started to splutter and sat up. “Man oh man thass the bomb diggedy! Wanna try?”
Michael eyed the dripping sack of hooch. He was primed to refuse, to sit at the table and do a crossword, to write a letter to – somebody, his lawyer, somebody. He bit his lip. “Well, just a taste, then.”
“Have a day off from yourself,” said Laroche, handing him the bag. “Just this once.”
~~~
In the end, Michael had about a fortnight off from himself – at least that’s what it felt like. He lay on his bed as the room gently repositioned itself around him, gathering speed.
“What’s it made of again?”
“Fuck knows,” said Laroche, dreamily. “What gets left down the plug for all I know – best not to ask. Works, though, doesnit?”
It worked so well that Michael thought he might already be going blind, until he realised that it was mid-evening and the light was fading. “I don’t know when I was last this pissed.”
There was what passed for silence in the remand wing of a prison: hollering, the occasional raw shout; outside in the neighbourhood a car alarm was sounding. Michael floated in and out amongst the noises.
“My W.I.F.E. – as in Wash. Iron. Fuck. Etc. – is going to call the kid Marianne. Whaddya make of that then? She’s going to call the kid we both know isn’t mine after my ol’ girl. Woss the game?”
He surfaced briefly. “Maybe she is yours?”
“Tell us another,” Laroche belched. “Not according to my sums, leastways.”
“Maybe your sums are as ropey as your writing was. Maybe you’re scared because the sums are right.”
“Fuck off. I ain’t scared.”
“If you want to be the baby’s dad, then saying so makes it so.”
Laroche rolled his head to one side and looked at Michael. He closed one eye, trying to focus, then half-closed the other; open, close, round and round, chase, chase.
“If you say something often enough it gains currency. If your,” Michael hesitated, “wife,” he said delicately, “is offering you a line–”
“I wish she was. Bit of charlie now would go down nicely.”
“–then take it.”
“More red-eye?” Laroche squirted some alcohol into his own mouth, but he was having trouble with the tap; fumbling, misfiring; then he seemed to be having trouble with the bag as well, mastering its almost empty shapelessness. “Aw fuck it. Trousered anyway. Woss the point.” He was sprawled across his bed, but he seemed to slump further. “Be a crap dad anyway, in ’ere. What kind of dad would I be?”
Michael tried to wrestle with the answer, but his tongue was like wire wool and his mouth was dry and the blood was turning to rust in his veins and he’d never missed Charlotte more than he missed her at this moment, never missed her more, and because sayin
g something makes it so – “I loved her.”
“…You’re malcolmed…” mumbled Laroche “…yer sappy one…”
“I did though; I really, really loved her. She wasn’t always easy to love, but I did.”
“Wotch you love about her, my old drinkin’ bud?”
“I loved the fact that she was different. She wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met. It took guts to set up house with me, when everyone was being so negative about her living with a younger guy. I do believe she loved me, for a bit, and I loved her because of that.”
“Sorry, run that past me again…”
“It wasn’t always easy, but it was worth it.”
“Yer gets back wotch you put in – ha ha,” Laroche gave a guttering laugh. “Didn’t have you down for a toy boy, mind.”
Michael lay looking up at the ceiling, following the cracks in the paint work, making continents out of them, the warmth from the liquor ebbing. He turned on to his side and the room slung itself after him. He felt sick and curled up on his bunk, trying to block out the world. He let his eyes fall shut. “Is it really your birthday?” he asked thickly.
“Nah.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Colin awoke the following morning, when Delphine prised his eyelids open with her finger and thumb.
“Breakfast in bed,” she announced, passing him a mug of orange juice and a chunk of stale bread plastered in jam, which under her acute gaze, he felt obliged to try, at least.
“I’ll save the rest for later,” he said, brushing the crumbs from his sleeping bag. There was no escape from the orange juice, which was fizzing slightly from having been in a hot locker for too many days. She sat on the opposite bunk, monitoring his progress.
“What shall we do today?” she asked, when he had finished.
“What would you like to do?” He was about to add, mechanically, after you’ve apologised to Tyler, but he realised the real apology, the one that mattered most, was being made there and then.
“Swim,” she said without hesitating. “Amandine is very good at swimming and it’s going to be hot.”
