by Kate Dunn
“Are you alright?” He let his face tip sideways so that he could look at her. A sprig of clover partially obscured her profile and there were moments when he could smell its sweetness and moments when it eluded him, when it was diluted by the fleeting fragrance of standing water and earth.
“For someone who’s just been dumped – in every sense – I’m doing real good.” She had concluded her examination, “No bones broken – I guess that’s something.”
He levered himself up and hunched forwards, hugging his knees. He could hear dark shades in her voice as she began to speak.
“I’d kind of assumed that I was the one who wasn’t a people person, but you seem to be in a different league altogether. Was it something I said?”
Beside the canal was an old farm with a circular tower at one end. Broadleaved trees leaned close, framing a picture of that could have come straight from a child’s storybook. The only thing missing was a beautiful girl at the highest window, letting down her hair. Colin gazed at it and sighed.
“I’m sorry. I must have seemed rather – abrupt.”
“Abrupt? More like incomprehensible…”
“I wanted to talk to you, to try to explain, but it’s not very easy when Delphine is…” his eyes strayed to his granddaughter, who was wandering down the tow path with her head bowed, kicking at stones. “I have – responsibilities…”
Tyler sat up. She studied her watch, gazing at the second hand sliding round, though she didn’t seem to be curious about the time. She tilted her wrist so that the glass face caught the light, casting tiny flashes into the air, signals which he couldn’t read. “I understand that.”
“I don’t think you do–”
“Well, pardon me, I’m sure.”
“I don’t think you can – understand.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “You couldn’t.”
“Try me,” she responded crisply.
“Anyway, I thought it was you who said that what happened between us was just a thing,” he observed, attempting to head off his own explanation at the pass.
She peered back over her shoulder at Sabrina Fair and he had an intimation of how little it would take for her to stand up and brush the grass from her shorts and then walk away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been quite–” he had to search for the word, “Quite – straight – with you. I’m sorry.”
She turned to face him; there was a terrible fatigue in her action. “You don’t say.”
“No,” he swallowed.
Although her head was tilted at a sorrowful angle, as she spoke her words hardened as if, exposed to the air, they had bonded into something tough and translucent, something resinous. “I have this kind of vague recall that I also said how important it was for us to be clear and honest with each other. Am I dreaming, or did I say that?”
He hung his head. He was loathe to speak. He sat there as the silence turned caustic, until he could feel all of its corrosive properties at work. He bit his lip and looked away, his eyes seeking out Delphine. She seemed to be lost in some tracking game, crouching low at the base of the round tower, her movements elaborately stealthy.
“If you’re going to tell me that you already have a girlfriend, or you’re going back to your wife, I’d rather hear it straight, so shoot–”
On the brink, beyond beating about the bush any longer, Colin said, “My son is on remand for murder.” There, it was done. He felt vertiginously, dangerously light.
“Jesus!” Tyler’s eyes flicked wide. She stared at him for a moment, her mouth opening “But–” she looked as though he must somehow be mistaken.
“The trial is in a few weeks. He’s pleading guilty, so it will only be a formality.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Who? Who did he–?” She broke off and as her gaze swept over Delphine, who was still on safari along the old farm wall, he could see her answering her own question.
“Her mum didn’t fall,” he said.
They could have been sitting on different continents, so far apart they seemed.
“It’ll be all over the papers soon,” he went on reluctantly. “I’m hoping his legal team will get the charge reduced to manslaughter: a crime of passion.” He felt sadness like a sharp blade drawn along the length of him.
“Why?”
He covered his face with his hands as if he were bathing it in water, as if all of this could be washed away.
“Why did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I’ve asked myself a hundred times, over and over, and I just don’t know. Charlotte was leaving him–” He shook his head, trying to blot out a mental image of his son with arm raised, a static picture in which the blow never fell. “But the boy I knew, my son, couldn’t – Michael wouldn’t…”
A silence like lead encased them both.
“It makes you question everything you thought you knew,” he said, in grief.
“Yes…” Tyler was motionless and yet alert, as if listening to some distant and indecipherable sound. “I guess…”
“I should have told you. I know I should have told you. I should never have allowed myself to–”
“To what?” she asked tensely, “To fuck me?”
“To get involved…” he said, flinching, “But you were so lovely…”
“Jesus!” she exclaimed and he braced himself for the tirade to come, but it was her tenor of regret which floored him, of lost opportunity and disappointment. “I’m not lovely. I wish I was. I’m just me, an ordinary person who deserved to be treated with some respect and told the truth.”
“I was frightened that you might walk away.”
She didn’t answer. She was a study in quietness.
“And there was Delphine to consider. In a sense the story wasn’t mine to tell…” She darted him a sceptical glance and he went on, more truthfully, “I didn’t want you to think badly of me…”
A small, wry sound escaped from her. “I might have walked away,” she said, thinking the matter through, “but when I’d had a chance to, I don’t know, sleep on it – whatever – I might have turned round and tiptoed back…”
“But you won’t do that now?”
She pressed her fingertips to her temples, “I’m not getting this. I’m just not getting this. Yesterday morning, in that oh so polite, oh so evasive way you Brits have made your own, I had the distinct impression that you were giving me my marching orders, and now–” she turned to him, her palms raised in incomprehension, “What’s the story, Colin? What’s the plot? Because I can’t figure it out. Can you shed some light here for me?”
“The plot’s a little bit complicated. I’m struggling myself. It involves a middle-aged man and a needy little girl and a boat not much bigger than a matchbox. I didn’t know my granddaughter until we came on this trip. Sometimes I think I hardly know her now, but what I do know is that she depends upon me, even if she doesn’t always like me very much.”
“I think she likes you,” she said, pulling at a frond of grass, the high note as she slid it from its sheath catching the sadness in her voice.
“And then you came along. You’re just about everything I’ve ever wanted. But your timing is rubbish, because of what has happened to Michael. Because of Delphine.” He allowed himself to look at Tyler’s face, her eyes that were green or grey, according to the light. “I thought for a few heady moments that I could have it all.” He looked away. “Life isn’t like that though, is it?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It can be. It’s up to you.”
“I wasn’t a very good dad. I tried to be, but–” He could remember the feeling of Michael’s slight hand in his as if he were holding it now: that trusting, confidential grip. He closed his fingers over nothing, over thin air. “And I haven’t got off to a great start as a grandpa, but that is something which I can put right.”
“I’m not sure where that leaves us…”
He didn’t answer.
“Isn’t it weird how we protect ourse
lves from what we most want?” she whispered. “In some ways I’d have liked nothing better than to be… well…” she couldn’t finish. “There we go…” Awkwardly, she rose to her feet. “I hope it goes well for your son. I really do. And I hope that you and Delphine…”
Colin stood up. All he wanted was to press rewind – actually, this isn’t what I meant, this isn’t how I wanted it to be. I want to have my cake and eat it, too. He studied his T-shirt, examining the weave of the cotton. “I do like you. It isn’t that I don’t–”
“Best not go there,” she rebuked him softly.
For a moment they stood there, looking out over the canal, neither of them knowing how to leave. From the corner of his eye he saw Delphine, her trek over, sprinting towards the Dragonfly. She leapt onboard and started rummaging in the kitchen locker. When she realised he was watching her, she slammed the lid down and sat on it, beaming insouciantly.
“You ought to go–” said Tyler, following his gaze.
He bit his lip. There was something he wanted, more than anything: to kiss her, just once, to say goodbye.
As if she could read his thoughts, she lowered her head.
“At least let me lift the bridge for you…” was all he said.
She hesitated and her mouth moved fleetingly – the mirage of a smile, nothing more than a shimmer in the heat.
“Tyler–?”
But she hooked her arm behind her head and then turned and walked away.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Laroche said, out of the blue, that when he was six he saw his stepdad hang his mother over the banisters by her ankles till her teeth rattled, and without thinking Michael said that he once saw his dad hit his mum around the face.
That shut them both up for a bit – the sum total of an afternoon’s conversation.
Looking back, Michael could remember his mother from when he was young – her brisk hands swooping down from on high and wiping his mouth, the wrap of a hot towel around him after bath time, her standing in the kitchen doorway and bursting into tears at the end of a wet afternoon, the birthday cakes she whisked up: the football pitch, the circus, the guitar, the skateboard: elaborate creations that reflected his every passing interest. She made him a star chart for his reading – he might try that on Laroche who was making heavy weather of The Monstrumologist. She lay on the floor and they played with his garage by the hour: wheeling the blue car up three stories and down again, up three stories and down, filling it with petrol, taking it to the car wash. He always had the red car, but the routine was the same.
He could remember her dried up and dying, but he didn’t remember much in between. It was his dad he was trying to get to, elbowing her out of the way. When people talk about what hurts them most, they smile; they don’t look sad. He’d noticed that. He remembered his mum smiling, the contraction of her gaze as he hurried to go fishing, or off to football. He could remember the breathless radiance in her face when he first saw her with Étienne, and the complete understanding he had of what was coming.
She gave him a choice when she went to France: you can come with me or stay with Dad, it’s up to you, and he was so overwhelmed with guilt at the wringing relief he felt because she’d said he could stay with his dad, that he stammered in a rush he wanted to go and live with her.
He remembered one dirty morning lying late in bed with Charlotte in her flat, when they had only just got together and were thirsting for every kind of knowledge of each other. He was trying to explain the situation to her: how he’d ended up in France, the awkward wreckage which his parents had created.
She lit a cigarette and for a while the two of them watched the slow dissipation of smoke into the room, the pale convolutions catching the sliver of light through the curtains, drawn against the midday sun.
“I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to forgive them,” he was tentative, wanting her to know about him, nervous about telling her.
She leaned on one arm, sweeping her last exhalation up and away. “Mon petit Chéri.” He felt her beautiful French words rather than heard them, on his skin, in his hair; her voice like smoke tangible in the air. She trailed her fingers over his chest as if she might write something there, things which could not otherwise be said.
“Charlotte–” her name twisted out of him. He was convulsed with wanting her, wanting everything about her, all five senses of her: touch, smell, taste, sight, sound.
“If you don’t forgive you can’t forget,” she said, “and you’ll have to carry the past with you always and the weight of it will become très lourd.”
Uncertainly, he moved to kiss her and she caught his face in her hand and he could feel the grip of her fingers, the urgent grip, “and you will never be free.”
He ducked his head. He was way out of his depth, deliciously, terrifyingly. She leaned across to stub out her cigarette and he felt the graze of her against him as if she had burnt his skin. He was consumed by her. The last thing he wanted was to be free.
Michael looked up at the barred window, at the drain pipe on the hospital wing with its slick of green algae. He should have listened to her. He felt the glint of a migraine in the corner of his vision, like the half-seen slap to his Mum’s face, the sight of Charlotte crashing down the stairs.
There was silence in the cell, brief and rare.
“About this kid,” said Laroche. “If I agree it’s mine – wot then?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They ascended the Sardy lock staircase in the glazing heat, sixteen locks in three kilometres and nowhere to stop, with the sun coming at them from that end-of-summer angle which inveigles its way under fishing umbrellas put up for shade, and the brims of hats. The two itinerant lock keepers who accompanied them looked like extras from the film Deliverance (too much leather and too many chains for Colin’s liking) but the lock keepers’ cottages had exhibitions of sculpture and pottery and – oh Tyler – watercolours to keep them diverted as they climbed up and up and up.
He was starving by the time they reached the top. “I’m famished!” he panted, hammering in a stake for them to moor to.
“What is famished?”
“Hungry.”
With that, Delphine bolted from her place on the bathroom locker to the kitchen locker in the twinkling of an eye. She sat down and crossed her arms and then as an afterthought she crossed her legs as well. She became absorbed in looking at the view.
“Aren’t you?” Colin chucked the mallet onto the grass. “I could eat a horse.”
She half-turned her head. She didn’t look at him.
“What about it then? Bread and cheese? Fried egg – I wouldn’t mind a fry up? What do you think?”
“It’s too hot.”
“Bread and cheese, then.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, I’m ravenous – shift over.”
She darted him a glance. “Perhaps we could have an ice cream, at the next village?” She spoke airily, although there was a little seam of anxiety stitched into her voice.
“This is the next village.”
“I won’t bother then…”
“Or maybe a cheese omelette. That would be just the ticket.” He climbed back on board, “Now, if you wouldn’t mind parking yourself over there…”
Delphine took a deep breath. “Did you say tunnels? The other day? Did you say we’d be going through some tunnels?”
“Yes. Move over a sec, will you? You’re sitting where I need to be.”
“I’m really interested in tunnels–”
Colin regarded her with the first twinge of misgiving. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead and blew upwards so his exhalation cooled his face and wondered if the heat was getting to her, too.
“Does it say anything about them in the book?” she asked avidly.
Taking some grandfatherly license, he scooped her up under the arms and sat her down on the bathroom locker. “Excuse me,” he managed not to call her young lady, as he suspected that might irritat
e her, but she sounded irritated in any case.
“Colin!” she bounced back up, but he already had the kitchen locker open and was lifting out the Primus stove.
“Keep your hair on,” he said, that’s what he said as he noticed that the lid of the Tupperware box they kept the cheese in wasn’t properly shut, but as he wanted to get the remains of the Gruyère in any case, he took the whole thing off and there, laced round and round in neat coils, was a small, snub-nosed brown snake.
“OH MY HOLY GOD!!” An extraordinary yodelling sound escaped from him and he almost let go of the box, as if it had become too hot to hold, making the snake rear up in alarm, but Colin reared higher and far more swiftly: he retrieved the box with the snake half out of it and threw it as far away as he could up the bank.
“Hector!” wailed Delphine, scrambling off the boat, stumbling over the mooring line so that she floundered into the shallows. She recovered herself, her arms windmilling, slipping in her wet flip-flops, and went skating up the slope. “Petit Hector–”
Colin was gasping for breath. Convulsively, he kept brushing at his shoulders and neck, swiping here and there as if serpents were seething all over him. He could feel the cool ooze of them winding down his arms and under his T-shirt and kept picking up his feet, capering painfully as if the deck were writhing with them. He shuddered. He tried to marshal his breathing: he made himself inhale and exhale with deliberation, but he couldn’t help himself, his head whipped round to look behind him, his flesh crawling. Inhale and exhale. He gripped his knees, bending like an athlete, overwhelmed.
“Colin–”
His head snapped up, “Don’t come near me with that–” he couldn’t say the word – he didn’t even like the shape of it written down.
Delphine had the Tupperware box in one hand and the lid in the other and she gestured with them, using them as evidence. “See what you have done! No Hector. See–? I cannot find him anywhere.”
Colin was merely trembling by now. “Well, thank God for small mercies.”
As she advanced towards him, brandishing the box, he took a step back and then another. When he felt the bathroom locker against his calf he jumped. “DON’T come any closer – let me see first.”
