The Sleeping Season

by Kelly Creighton

  ‘Can I help you folk?’ the man called out.

  We walked towards each other.

  ‘Police from the North,’ he said. ‘This to do with the young lad’s father?’

  ‘Shane Reede?’

  ‘Yes, Shane.’

  ‘Is Mr Reede about?’

  ‘He isn’t. Saw him just earlier. Said he was heading home.’

  ‘Can we take your name, sir?’ Linskey asked.

  ‘Cahal Cleary.’

  I shone my torch to the side of him to see his face better. It was heavily pockmarked at each temple and ribbed his cheekbones.

  ‘Mr Cleary, do you mind if we ask you a few questions?’ Linskey asked.

  ‘Haven’t you seen Shane yet?’ he said.

  ‘That’s what we’d like to talk about,’ I said.

  Cahal Cleary was a man about sixty. He wore dark jeans and a plaid shirt, like Greg in his down time. Bald on top like him too.

  ‘Come hither,’ he said and took the lead. ‘I was expecting you might call here, but then you didn’t.’

  ‘News has reached over the border?’

  ‘Naturally, with this child alert thing.’ He tucked his torch under his elbow, the light off, took a bundle of keys out of his pocket and rifled through them, directing me to shine my light on them with a nod of his head. He found the key he had been looking for and shook it into the lock.

  ‘This can be a bastard at times,’ he said, the metal grating as he turned the key.

  He let us in and led us into the kitchen, where he turned on a light. There were dried boot prints across the floor and the fresh prints from Cahal’s own mud-encrusted shoes. I scanned the room for a smaller set of feet.

  ‘I’m the landlord,’ he explained. ‘But before I bought the house from Issy Reede – Shane’s grandmother, God rest her soul – I’d have always had a key, me living next door and all.’

  ‘Which direction do you live?’

  He pointed downhill to the house we had passed with the visitors’ light glaring outside.

  ‘Mr Cleary, you said you saw Shane. How long has he been staying here?’

  ‘I saw him earlier. I’ve been up here a couple of times since I saw the boy on the news.’

  ‘Do you know him – River?’

  ‘No, I’ve never seen the young’un so. But it said youse were looking for him and that his dad’s name was Reede, that youse were trying to get in touch with him. I said to my missus, Bernadene, that’s our old lodgers – Shane Reede and Bronagh Shaw. The house was actually in her name, Bronagh Shaw. They must have split up after a year or so. I offered Shane to buy the house from me, to keep it in the family. He said that he had a young’un in Belfast. I knew that’s where he moved to a few years back, but I’d never seen a young’un here. Don’t like to ask questions.’

  Cahal took a cigarette from the packet in his back pocket, flipped open a zippo and lit up.

  ‘Why don’t you ladies go and have a look about?’ he offered. ‘There’s the barn too. It might interest you. I’ll go back down to the house and put a pot on the stove. You’re welcome to get a cuppa to warm you back up.’

  Cahal walked out, a bloom of smoke trailing him. ‘Mind bringing my keys back down?’

  ‘We will, Mr Cleary,’ Linskey said.

  We gloved up, then walked through the house. It smelled of mouldy cheese and mouse shit and was plainly not lived in. All the bedding was starchy and primped; the rooms had an undaunted thirst for daylight, their heavy curtains trailing the floors. There were cobwebs around the light fittings and in every corner; fluff banked up the sides of the skirting boards. Our presence was stirring the dust only for it to resettle on our clothes and skin and hair.

  Linskey gave me a sticky smile. ‘It doesn’t look as though River has been here,’ she said.

  After we searched the cupboard spaces and under the beds for a teddy or a child’s forgotten toy, or the kind of thing we weren’t anticipating, we gave up and turned all the lights out. I wondered why Cleary hadn’t had the electricity stopped when the house had been lying vacant.

  Outside, the grass had grown in tufts. We entered the broken-beamed barn, heard the flap of bats above and shone our torches at the tidiness of it all. There was nowhere River or Shane could be hiding there, or that Shane could be hiding River.

  We took the car back down to Cleary’s house, which had a similar layout but was cleaner and warmer, with fresh October air coming in the UPVC windows that had been left on the latch. Bernadene Cleary segmented a tiramisu and set it in front of us. Linskey took a slice with her tea; I took the tea alone. Linskey used low blood sugar as an excuse to eat rubbish. She was getting podgy and resentful of me for not joining her. Everything was happening to Linskey and Linskey only. Even if I were two stone heavier than her, which wouldn’t be hard with our height differences, Linskey would have said it was okay for me, that I could carry it. I was getting a bit fed up with her personal observations.

  ‘He dropped in this afternoon, Shane did,’ Bernadene said. She was quite a striking looking woman. Her hair was cropped and peppery brown and she was tall and lithe. She would have been called a tomboy in her youth. ‘Shane stayed in the house last night. He told me he was down to see a friend he hadn’t seen in years.’

  ‘Who was the friend, do you know? Did he say?’

  Bernadene considered her husband who was pulling a seat out to sit facing us.

  ‘Shane didn’t say,’ Cahal replied, as if he could feel her gaze. ‘His friend had needed surgery of some sort and he was worried he wouldn’t pull through.’

  ‘So it wasn’t Bronagh then, but a man?’

  ‘Bronagh lives in England. Yorkshire. I still forward the odd bit of mail. Well … I used to until she put a letter in the post to thank me and let me know that it was all rubbish and that I’m to bin any more that comes.’

  ‘Do you have her address – or the letter?’ I asked.

  ‘You think she took the boy?’ Bernadene asked.

  ‘They just need to cover everything. Correct?’ Cahal said.

  ‘Shane was telling us all about this friend – the man and the surgery,’ said Bernadene, ‘and Cahal was trying to tell him about the boy, to see if it was the same boy, this River Reede, and if he knew or didn’t.’ She stole off to the side of the room to write down Bronagh’s address for us.

  ‘Did he know, by then, about River’s disappearance?’ I asked.

  ‘When I was giving him his mail – cos we get the odd letter for him too,’ Cahal explained, ‘“Shane, did you see the news. This young’un called River Reede in Belfast, missing since Monday?” He looked at me strange. I thought he didn’t hear me, then he said, “Belfast, you say?” and I said, “Yes.” Then he said that he’d left his mobile at home and could he use the house phone. Then he called his ex-wife.’

  ‘We didn’t even know there was an ex-wife,’ Bernadene said, handing me Bronagh Shaw’s address. ‘Don’t people surprise you?’

  ‘His grandmother never told you?’

  ‘She had dementia.’

  Linskey left half of her cake and took out her notepad to write down a few sporadic notes. ‘Shane phoned Zara …’ she said.

  ‘Dunno the woman’s name, but when he got off the phone, he was white as a ghost and a bit unbalanced, for sure.’ Cahal nodded at the corner of the kitchen counter. ‘He was gripping that. I told him he shouldn’t drive.’

  ‘He didn’t look right.’ Bernadene nodded.

  ‘Did he say he’d spent the weekend with his son at all?’

  ‘No, said nothing about that. Just said the police had been at his work looking for him and he had to let them know he was on his way home.’

  ‘He didn’t arrive home,’ I said. ‘We waited for hours.’

  ‘Oh dear, I hope he’s okay. He tore off,’ said Bernadene. ‘Shane was driving with his emotions. Didn’t I say that, Cahal?’

  ‘And he still stays up there, in the other house?’ asked Linskey. She got a nod
from Bernadene. ‘Is Shane paying rent?’

  ‘Well, no, he hasn’t since he left in February. The girlfriend left first, in December. Then him, a coupla months later. But he still had a key and said he’d let himself in and knew I wouldn’t mind because he was only visiting, seeing how it was an emergency, he said.’

  ‘The property’s been vacant for more than six months, is that right?’

  Now Cahal did what people do when they are no longer out giving other people’s information: he turned defensive. ‘Shane shot straight off towards the North,’ Cahal said, deftly fielding the question. He stood up, placed his hands in his pockets.

  ‘See,’ Bernadene said, shaking her head softly, ‘I told him to get everything turned off and shut down until the building works start. It’s getting flattened.’ She swept her hand across the table. ‘It’s a wedding present for our son when he gets married in January. We want to give him and his new wife the land.’

  ‘Not the house?’ Linskey asked, looking up, squinting while her vision readjusted.

  ‘They want to build their own home. He’s an architect, our son, young Cahal. Studied at your Queen’s.’

  This made me smile, as if Linskey and I, being from the North, which they were practically a stone’s throw from living in themselves, had some ownership of the university. Young Cahal an architect. Like Jason. The smile died on my face.

  ‘I’ve a son studying there myself.’ Linskey smiled, and her and Bernadene shared a motherly moment. I imagined Greg’s wife with her girlfriends and the women at the golf club doing the same thing.

  ‘You have to respect the property while it’s there,’ said Cahal, playing with the loose change in his pocket. ‘Until it’s gone and rebuilt it’s a place full of memories. Issy’s memories.’

  ‘He’s sentimental about that kind of thing, Cahal,’ said Bernadene. ‘Big Cahal. He likes to go up there and look around, tries to picture where everything is going to be for Cahal and his wife, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. His face had become as vague as frosted glass.

  ‘And Shane was driving what type of vehicle?’ I asked.

  ‘A jeep.’

  ‘Was there anything memorable about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On the back?’

  ‘No, it was a black jeep. Maybe I never saw the back.’

  Just then I received a message in my earpiece. I took my personal radio from my coat and spoke into it. Then I turned to the Clearys.

  ‘I need to call the station,’ I explained and stepped outside. The sky was like melted tar over the house, a sphere of stars stuck to it. They almost looked bright enough to see by.

  ‘There’s been a sighting of a young boy matching River’s description, Sloane,’ the Chief told me. ‘The person he’s with is an older man with long brown hair in a ponytail. They’re on the Stena Line heading for Birkenhead and are going to be met on the other side.’

  Chapter 20

  It was bizarre the dream I had when I got home from Monaghan.

  I was in Charlotte’s house. She was making a tiramisu. She set sparkling sponge fingers into the base of a cake tin, then poured an espresso out of a Starbucks’ cup over it. She was in the living room, baking on the top of a chess table like the one we had clubbed together to buy for Father when he retired.

  Then the dream flitted to the kids, who were all playing. I was sitting on this beanbag on the floor; I had Timothy in my arms. He was stiffening his body, silently laughing at an episode of Timmy Time on the TV; his siblings were getting rowdy. When I looked up to shush them, they stalled their horseplay just long enough to sing ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star’, spraying the lyrics into the air; then they came to kiss his face – the two bigger boys, the two girls. Timothy’s galactic brown eyes were toing and froing on his lax face. His teeth seemed too small for him.

  There was a green puffa jacket tied to the curtain pole and a draught blew through the room. Charlotte suddenly said, ‘I’m going to put this in the fridge’ and she left me.

  The big kids were gone and a window was smashed in. The curtains feathered as they lifted and billowed. Then the full moon breathed in on Timothy and he stood up, a moonmark on his forehead like a silver thumbprint.

  He spoke, defying the odds of his profound disability. He toddled across the room, then climbed the curtain like a monkey and reached for the green puffa jacket, tugging at its arm. He turned to me and said, ‘Harry, tell them I’m cold.’

  I put my hand in my pocket and something bit my fingers: teeth; tiny teeth. When I put my hand to my mouth I found all my own were gone.

  These words were going through my head when I woke: sometimes the reeds are ashamed of the river.

  I had fallen asleep on the sofa without a duvet. I hadn’t heated my apartment in days and it was freezing. My hands were so cold they were on fire.

  I sat in the half-light that spilled through the curtainless window, wanting to talk to Greg.

  There were times I could. Like when we went away together to his house on the Algarve and had behaved like a proper couple, though we shopped separately and only ate in restaurants outside of Guia, not unless he wore his baseball cap. It became a running joke: I had packed a fake moustache and glasses and I came down to the pool wearing them.

  One night I couldn’t sleep. I watched Greg lying in bed under layers of suffocating cotton, half lit, half dark.

  ‘Come back to bed,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder what’s happening back home,’ I said.

  I was wondering if Jason had realised that I’d left yet. Not that I’d taken much – only what was mine, what he had no use for. I had told Charlotte I was going away with friends. I had told Father I’d call him in a couple of days. I didn’t have to say where I was headed. I had no one to answer to any more.

  ‘Darlin’, what did you say?’ Greg asked.

  He always called me darlin’. I’m sure it kept everything easy. No names to confuse.

  He turned on his bedside light, high up on the wall, a determined light crowning the top of his head. There, in that room, I could have loved Greg, or at least pretended for the weekend that I’d taken with him in honour of my pending divorce.

  I fetched us breakfast and carried it on a tray like a brimming ash-pan back to the bed, but Greg had insisted that we ate at the table. He opened his box of cereal, a cloud of dust, almost invisible, puffing into the air. Grapefruit squirted in my mouth. That’s when we had the conversation, the one and only serious one.

  ‘Do you want kids?’ Greg had asked, sweeping his spoon to his mouth.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Do you want more kids?’

  ‘I’m long done and two is enough,’ he said taking a sip of his coffee. I was almost close enough to taste the dark bitterness of the Robusta beans.

  ‘I thought you were offering.’

  Greg laughed. ‘No, no, no,’ he said in his deep Ballymena accent.

  I could see the way his face was going, the shape it would be when he was even older, his nose broken from the accident he’d had as a kid that also left a pleasing laddered scar under his chin.

  I knew how naff it sounded, but I said it anyway. ‘I want to take that love I would have given to a child and give it to myself. I know most people don’t understand that, but it’s my life.’

  Greg lifted my hand and held it. ‘Good for you,’ he said, his eyes unblinking under thick black brows that needed to be groomed.

  Sometimes I had no idea what he was thinking, no idea where he really came from, what type of family. He had an elderly mother; sometimes she was why he couldn’t see me. But that could have been a lie. I knew first-hand how good he was at telling them, how he was unemotional and in control and liked things wrapped up neatly so he could understand them before he could move on. When he told me I was beautiful, he may as well have been saying I was reliable. To him they seemed to be the same thing.

  I was not an unwise girl to Greg. He cared for me in a way, even
if it wasn’t something typical in a relationship. But it wasn’t a typical relationship. He had no words he used to hurt me. I knew he never would. Most importantly, he wanted my respect. My admiration meant something to him. Greg fully understood the meaning of things. He was able.

  ‘Do you think we’ll do this again?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d like to,’ I said.

  I watched him noodle his little sachet of honey onto granary toast, take a bite, seeds caroming off the table. I knew we weren’t in a hotel, but I was still tempted to put all the soaps in my bag before we left as if they were complimentary. Of course I didn’t. Nor did I leave my bra under a pillow for his wife to find. But I was growing insanely jealous of her, even though everything of hers that I wanted, I had. In doses.

  I knew I could never return there. It was hers. But I knew I couldn’t go back to my old house either, not even when Jason was at work, even though I was curious to see what I’d been left with.

  My phone went off. I slammed my hand on it to silence it. It might wake someone on another floor. Chief Dunne was calling.

  ‘Sloane,’ he said, ‘two things.’

  ‘Good news and bad news?’

  ‘Not exactly. The man on the ferry was a dead end.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said, picturing some poor man being stopped getting off the boat with his son, who turned out not to be River. Naturally, my mind had sprung straight to Sandy Hammitt when I’d heard the description of the man with the ponytail. There had been a light sense of relief between Linskey and me on the way back to Belfast from Monaghan: it was possibly over; River was safe.

  ‘What’s the other thing?’ I asked the Chief.

  ‘Raymond Marsh has collapsed and died at home.’

  Chapter 21

  Zara sighed hard. She poured a glass of milk and drank it.

  ‘Do you mind me having a glass of water?’ I asked.

  ‘You usually refuse.’ Zara opened the fridge where there was no sign of breast milk.

  ‘I haven’t restocked on water filters,’ she said fetching a clean glass from the rack, still soapy at the rim.

  I troubled her for an ice cube, remembering a book about baby food and chapters on breastfeeding I had once read out of boredom when babysitting for Charlotte. I hadn’t wanted to turn on the TV in case it drowned out Timothy’s breathing on the monitor. And I vaguely remembered Coral saying that she froze her milk when she went back to work, but that could be a cartilage of memory twisting itself the way of my wanting it to.