‘She was in Tuckbox when I came in. She saw me, I saw her. There’s no way on this earth she won’t be talking to the police at this moment, telling them what a raving psycho I am.’
Eliza is scanning the list of witnesses, double-checking that Nicola wasn’t among those who escaped from the café this morning. Nope.
‘She’s not here. We didn’t know she existed until just now when you—’
‘Of course she’s fucking there.’
‘I promise you she’s not. Do you have an address for her? A phone number?’
‘You know full well I don’t! What’s the point of talking, if you’re just going to lie?’
‘Sam, I’m not—’
‘Jesus Christ, what’s the point? Fuck off.’
‘Sam?’
He’s gone. With a groan, she lets her forehead bang onto the table.
SIXTEEN
Mutesi
So, his name is Sam. They know this now.
He never stops moving: a caged bear, striding three paces, swinging around, three paces back. From time to time he takes a pill out of a foil packet and crushes it in his teeth. She imagines it must be some kind of stimulant.
‘Grandma,’ whispers Emmanuel, ‘why’s that man eating pills?’
She strokes his head, hushing him.
‘Don’t worry. They make him feel better. It will be all right.’
Mutesi has long been a fan of Elton John. She used to listen to him on the radio years ago in Rwanda, but she never expected his music to take on a life-or-death significance. ‘Rocket Man’ is the hostages’ link to sanity. They eavesdrop on Sam’s phone calls in watchful silence. His world is theirs now; his fate is linked with theirs. Once or twice Mutesi catches the voice of the negotiator, a woman who speaks as though she has all the time in the world, absorbing all the emotion Sam hurls at her—yes, even when he tells her to fuck off.
‘They’re stalling,’ he rages, hurling the phone across the room. ‘Fucking lying to me.’
Neil gets up, limping across the room to retrieve the phone. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘Nicola’s pulling their strings.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘She has to be with them!’ Sam turns in a circle, banging his head with his fist. ‘Christ, we were together long enough, she knows me. Why doesn’t she just say, “Okay, I’ll talk to Sam. I’ll go down there and talk to him.” Why? Why?’
‘Why isn’t your ex-girlfriend volunteering to drop in here for a bit of a chat? Hmm.’ Neil lets his gaze rest on the shotgun in Sam’s hand. His lips twitch. ‘It’s a mystery.’
•
At about midday Sam makes a hurried visit to the toilet, taking Neil with him as a hostage. He’s barely out of sight before Abigail is springing to action.
‘Quick,’ she hisses, sliding on her stockinged feet towards the makeshift barricade. ‘We all have to lift these. We can’t drag them, it’ll make too much noise.’
Mutesi and the two other women hurry to help, each taking a side of the nearest table. The children watch wide-eyed from the back corner of the booth. Lily is chewing Roo’s ear. Emmanuel puts his arm around his even smaller companion.
‘Don’t worry, Lily,’ he whispers affectionately, hugging her. ‘They’re going to open the door and let us out.’
The table is one of the biggest ones, solid and unwieldy. They manage to lift and shift it several feet before one leg scrapes the concrete floor with a horrifying shriek, triggering a yell from Sam in the toilet. The next moment the rebels have thrown themselves back into the booth while Sam charges in with Neil behind him. He strides to the barricade, bellowing something obscene as he shoves the table back into place.
It’s all too frightening for Lily. Mutesi sees the toddler’s upper lip wobble, and the next moment she’s demonstrating just how loudly she can scream.
‘I want to go from here, Mummy,’ she wails. ‘Go home!’
Paige cradles her daughter on her lap, rocking from side to side.
‘Please let us go,’ she begs Sam. ‘She’s just a baby. She’s still in nappies. Please, please let us go.’
Sam looks at Lily with his unnerving, intense gaze, twisting a handful of his own hair. He’s stopped shouting. Three paces one way, swing around, three paces back.
Lily is inconsolable for a long time, but little by little her screams become sobs, and then gulps, and then hiccups. Her face takes on a small, blank look. Mutesi’s daughter Giselle used to have that same expression, when she was overtired and needed a nap. They are two tiny girls from almost opposite worlds, decades apart, and yet so much the same. Lily sits with her thumb in her mouth, leaning against her mother’s pregnant stomach, occasionally heaving a sobbing sigh. Mutesi smiles and winks at her. Lily solemnly winks back—though she has to hold one eye open while she shuts the other.
‘She okay?’ Sam asks suddenly.
Paige pulls her daughter closer, glaring up at him. ‘What do you think?’
‘They’d never bother talking to me if I didn’t have you lot with me.’
Abigail swivels on the vinyl seat, eyeing him. The failed escape attempt seems to have infuriated her. Her lips are pursed, her jaw clenched.
‘So keeping us here is all about getting yourself a platform, is it? I’ve got a client accused of GBH and child cruelty—her own baby, just imagine that for a moment—and her trial was meant to be today, she’s been dreading it, and I’ve let her down because you need bargaining chips! Is that fair? You want a voice? Well, I’m her voice. That young mother. There must be better ways of getting what you want than using innocent kids as pawns.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Sam slaps his wounded forehead so hard that Mutesi winces. That has to hurt. ‘It’s me that’s the pawn. I’ve been begging for help since I was eight years old. Nobody wanted to know, nobody’s ever wanted to know. You’re Mrs Privilege! You’re a lawyer. I bet people have always done what you tell them to.’
‘I wish,’ says Abigail.
‘You say jump, they say how high.’
‘Ha! I say jump, they say fuck off.’
Mutesi is sure there’s a creasing at the sides of Sam’s mouth, a lightening in his eyes—a brief glint of a smile—before he turns it into a scowl. It’s the first sign. Fleeting, quickly suppressed, but hopeful. There is a human being in there.
‘Sam?’ she says.
The pacing falters. He’s listening. Now is her chance.
‘Sam, I am wondering. You say you’ve been begging for help since you were eight years old. Is that really true?’
He bends his head, rubbing his face on his upper arm as he paces. He has a gun in his hand, but Mutesi can see the lost eight-year-old.
‘Whatever happened to you?’ she asks. ‘Tell me.’
Three paces, swing around, three paces, swing around.
SEVENTEEN
Sam
He can’t. He can’t tell it. He lives it every day but he can’t tell anyone. The scents of the summer night, the hay, the blue river of lights.
He left his dad in the tractor shed and trotted across the yard to the house, thinking all was well in his world. Apart from stupid school, his life was lovely. Just lovely. Tyndale Farm was a part of him. He was born there. He spent half his life perched beside Dad in the tractor, looking back at the ploughed rows. Sunshine and rain. Clouds billowing on the horizon, white seagulls wheeling on the wind like a cloud of snowflakes. If he lifted his earmuffs he could hear Dad humming songs, hummm, vibrating along with the tractor’s big motor. Pom, pom, pom. That was the sound of safety and contentment and home. When Dad was humming, all was well in the world.
As soon as Sam could talk, they talked. Father and son rambled on for hours and days and weeks and years about everything and anything. Might there be life in outer space, and if so what would an alien look like? Did King Arthur and his knights really exist? How does an aeroplane fly? What’s in a seed? Sam learned ten times more from his dad than he ever did in a class
room.
His parents lived as though they were singing a duet. When he thinks of his mother back then, she’s always laughing herself into hiccups. He feels her warmth beside him on the sofa. To this day he can’t hear that cheery Thomas the Tank Engine tune without a sad echo of happiness.
He’s never forgotten his joy that haymaking night; end-of-term joy that made him jump up the kitchen steps with his feet pressed together—hip, hip, hop, I’m a kangaroo. The mower was mended! Dad was happy! Four more days till the summer holidays! It was a warm evening and the kitchen door was wide open. Mum was sitting at the table doing the farm accounts, wearing her patched jeans and singing along to the radio. He doesn’t remember changing into his pyjamas or brushing his teeth or nosediving into bed, though he must have done all those things, same as he always did, every bedtime.
He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He will never forget waking up.
The tawny owls were hooting. He knew them well, that pair. They lived in the spinney in Sundance’s field; he’d often seen and heard them swooping through the dusk with a whirr of wings. Their descendants live there still.
But it wasn’t the owls that woke him. It was a human voice. Blueness was flashing through his curtains, making underwater patterns on his ceiling. He watched the watery dance, and wondered. Maybe they were the lights of the tractor? Perhaps Dad had got up early to get everything done before the weather changed. Sam’s bedroom window was open. He could smell the night-scented stock Mum had planted in the front garden. Honeysuckle too, and mown hay. A ram bleated down in the orchard beside the house. It was a sleepy sound.
Back in those days, Sam used to do puppet shows in a miniature theatre his dad had made out of some wooden crates. They weren’t good puppet shows but his parents were a very enthusiastic audience. People gave him all kinds of puppets, and he’d built up a collection. The only puppet he didn’t like was a weird one his mother’s sister Monique brought back from a holiday. It was a two-faced doll. One face was a jolly man, with a kind smile and cheeks that stuck out like bright red apples. He looked a nice old guy, maybe Santa Claus without the beard. But when you turned him around you saw his other face—and that gave Sam a fright, the first time. He was a devil with bright red eyes and wicked shark’s teeth, his mouth wide open in a snarling kind of grin as though he were going to eat you. He was evil. Mum said Monique had no children of her own, so perhaps she didn’t realise it could give a wee person nightmares. It seemed rude to throw it away—and Monique would be bound to notice, and would kick up a fuss—so they sat it on the mantelpiece in Sam’s bedroom with all the others, smiling face looking outwards.
And now that puppet looked so, so happy as it turned blue in the flashing lights. Santa Claus was sitting on the mantelpiece, laughing at Sam as footsteps thumped past his bedroom door, as someone who sounded like his mother spoke in a voice that was nearly screaming, as Sam tried not even to blink. He kept hoping to see Dad’s cheerful face looking around the door. Dad would explain why there were strangers in their house at night, and why Mum was nearly screaming. Maybe she’d met a burglar.
After a while the footsteps passed his room again, heading down the stairs. They weren’t running anymore.
When someone finally looked around his door, it wasn’t Dad. It was Mum. Electric light flooded in from the landing behind her. She was wearing a nightie with a cardigan over the top of it.
‘Sweetie,’ she whispered. ‘Are you awake? You need to get up.’ She came into the room and picked his clothes off the floor, the ones he’d dropped there when he went to bed. ‘Just chuck this sweater on over your pyjamas. Dad’s not well.’
He didn’t understand. He rolled off the bed, pulling on his sweater as they hurried down the stairs. He shoved his toes into his shoes at the kitchen door but before he could tie the laces Mum had taken his hand and was running with him towards the car.
‘Where’s Dad?’ he asked.
‘In the ambulance.’
‘Why’s he in an ambulance?’
She started the engine before he’d got his seatbelt on. As she swung out of the yard and into the lane, they saw the flashing lights up ahead.
‘Why’s he in an ambulance?’ he asked again, but she still didn’t reply and he stopped asking because he was afraid of the answer. She drove like the clappers down the narrow lanes. He watched their headlights on the hedgerows, and rabbits scurrying out of the way, and the blue lights ahead of them, and he had this awful sinking feeling in his stomach. Then they were running into the hospital through sliding glass doors. Mum had got a long way ahead of him. He was trying to keep up, scared she’d leave him behind.
The rest of the night was like a whirlpool of weird, horrible things. A hot room with a sofa, magazines, toys and a water cooler that made a glugging sound. A smell that reminded him of the vet’s surgery. Mum hugging him much too tightly. Granny bursting in with her storm-cloud hair all in a mess, rushing up to his mum with her arms held out. Sam had never seen Granny’s hair loose before. There were people who dressed like the doctors he’d seen on television. People saying they were sorry. Sam didn’t know why they were sorry, but it made his stomach hurt when they said it. People giving Mum leaflets and numbers to phone. People saying that Dad had been arrested.
‘By the police?’ he asked.
‘No, sweetie,’ said Mum. ‘Not that kind of arrest.’
All the strange hospital sounds melted into one another. He lay on the sofa with his head on Mum’s lap. She was stroking his hair.
‘I’m not sure whether I want to see him,’ she whispered to Granny. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’ Granny’s voice had a shake in it. ‘Yes. I’d like a little time with him. There are things I want to say. Things I should have said every day of his life.’
‘Are we going to see Dad now?’ Sam hopped off the sofa, feeling perkier. ‘Where is he?’
‘Sweetie.’ Mum pulled him close. He felt wetness on her face.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.
She was trying to speak. She made her mouth into the right shape to say the word Dad, but no sound came out. This frightened him so much that he started needing the toilet. He had to hop from foot to foot.
‘Sammy, Sammy, your dad has died,’ said Granny. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘But he has to get the hay in.’
Granny knelt on the floor beside him, hugging Mum and him together, repeating over and over that she was sorry.
They were wrong! Dad would come alive again, like Baloo in The Jungle Book. He’d smile and chat and everything would be all right. Dad hadn’t had time to get ill and die. He was fixing the mower. He was happy. He’d said, Night, son.
‘But when did he die?’
‘In the night,’ said Granny. ‘His heart stopped while he was asleep. Sometimes that happens even to young people like him.’
‘They can start it up again, can’t they?’
His mother made a sound like a laugh, but it wasn’t a laugh.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he whispered, wiping her wet cheeks with his hand. He desperately wanted to cheer her up. ‘They can start it again. They’ll have a gadget. Like a battery charger thing.’
Granny pressed her fingers over her eyes. Dark blue veins on the backs of her hands. They were the two women he loved best in the world, the two who made things safe. It was terrible to see them crying.
‘I want to find him,’ he said. ‘Where is he? Where is my dad?’
Mum stood up. ‘You’re right, Sam. Come on, let’s go and say goodbye.’
Granny looked shocked. ‘Really—Sammy too? D’you think that’s a good idea?’
‘I don’t know.’ Mum sighed. ‘I’m off the map here, Patricia. A few hours ago Angus was getting into bed, banging on about how he’d fixed that bloody mower. I hardly even spoke to him! I just said, “Oh good, clever boy,” rolled over and went back to sleep. How could I not have at least given him a kiss? I’ll regret that for as long as I live.’
&
nbsp; ‘You didn’t know what was coming.’
They found a nurse nearby. She showed them along the corridor.
‘We’ve got him all ready for you,’ she said, as though Dad was a wedding cake she’d iced, and she was quite proud of the effect.
She ushered them into a white room, only about two doors down from where they’d been waiting. Sam was surprised to discover Dad had been here all the time. The room had a metal basin and plastic chairs. It smelled so strongly of the vet’s that Sam was almost sick as soon as they walked in. He never forgot that smell. It stuck to him forever. Years later he learned that the smell was a combination of death and disinfectant. The nurse pulled back a white plastic curtain, revealing a waxwork dummy. She said they were to take as long as they liked. Then she left.
Dad was there. Dad wasn’t there.
The dummy’s presence filled the room. It was lying flat on its back on a kind of giant ironing board, with a sheet covering its body up to its shoulders, and its face was the colour of Blu-Tack. It had Dad’s hair, Dad’s long feet sticking out the other end. No clothes. Its eyes were closed but its mouth was a little bit open. Dad was handsome and always smiling, but this dummy was ugly and bony and it looked as though it had never smiled. Sam really didn’t want this version of Dad to wake up. It would be a horrible zombie if it did.
Mum was crying softly. Granny whispered, ‘Angus, my son,’ leaned over the dummy and kissed its forehead. Her long hair fell forwards across its chest. Sam watched her lips meet the smooth Blu-Tack, and he smelled that awful smell, and he had to get out of the room.
‘It’s not him,’ he squealed, dragging Mum towards the door by both her hands. ‘Let’s go, let’s go, it’s not him!’
She let him tow her into the corridor. Perhaps she was glad to escape too, because his dad was made of Blu-Tack and reeked of something that wasn’t human. A weight was crushing Sam’s chest, as though he was trapped in the vice in the toolshed. It stopped him breathing. He let go of Mum’s hand and pelted down the corridor, past all the trolleys, into the waiting area with people sitting in rows—but he still couldn’t breathe, so he burst through the sliding doors and out into the car park.
The Secrets of Strangers Page 9
