THE BEGINNING 25 страница

He had stood outside the King’s Head as Ronan headed off to the Tube station and a nice girl who made soup, whose presence in his life had given him a whole extra dimension, and he knew he could not go home to an empty flat, surrounded by boxes, the chill breath of its next owner in his lungs.

It took six rings for her to pick up the phone. And then he heard someone screaming in the background before she actually answered.

‘Gem?’

‘Yes?’ she said, breathlessly. ‘LEO, DON’T YOU THROW THAT DOWN THE STAIRS.’

‘Does that offer of spaghetti bolognese still stand?’

They were embarrassingly pleased to see him. The door of the little house in Finsbury Park opened and he walked in through the bikes and the piles of shoes and the overloaded coat rack that seemed to extend the entire way along the hall. Upstairs, the relentless beat of pop thumped through the connecting walls. It competed with the cinematic sounds of a war game on some kind of games console.

‘Hey, you!’ His sister pulled him to her and hugged tight. She was out of her suit, wearing jeans and a jumper. ‘I can’t even remember the last time you came here. When was the last time he was here, Phil?’

‘With Lara,’ came the voice from down the corridor.

‘Two years ago?’

‘Where’s the corkscrew, love?’

All was noise and chaos. The kitchen was filled with steam and the smell of garlic. At its far end two clothes-horses sagged under several loads of washing. Every surface, mostly stripped pine, was covered with books, piles of paper or children’s drawings. Phil stood and shook his hand, then excused himself. ‘Got a few emails to answer before supper. You don’t mind?’

‘You must be appalled,’ his sister said, plonking a glass in front of him. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess. I’ve been on late shifts, Phil has been flat out and we haven’t had a cleaner since Rosario left. All the others are a bit pricey.’

He had missed this chaos. He missed the feeling of being embedded in a noisy, thumping heart. ‘I love it,’ he said, and her eyes scanned his swiftly for sarcasm. ‘No. Seriously. I love it. It feels …’

‘Messy.’

‘That too. It’s good.’ He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and let out a long breath.

‘Hey, Uncle Ed.’

Ed blinked. ‘Who are you?’

A teenage girl with burnished gold hair and several thick layers of mascara on each eye grinned at him. ‘Funny.’

He looked at his sister for help. She raised her hands. ‘It’s been a while, Ed. They grow. Leo! Come and say hello to Uncle Ed.’

‘I thought Uncle Ed was going to prison,’ came the cry from the other room.

‘Excuse me for a minute.’

His sister left the pan of sauce and disappeared into the hall. Ed tried not to hear the distant yelp.

‘Mum says you lost all your money,’ said Justine, sitting down opposite and peeling the crust from a piece of French bread.

Ed’s brain was desperately trying to marry the awkward, reed-thin child he had last seen with this tawny miracle who stared at him with faint amusement, as if he were a museum curio. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Did you lose your swanky flat?’

‘Any minute now.’

‘Damn. I was going to ask you if I could have my sixteenth-birthday party there.’

‘Well, you saved me the trouble of a refusal.’

‘That’s exactly what Dad said. So are you happy that you didn’t get banged up?’

‘Oh, I think I’m still going to be the family cautionary tale for a while.’

She smiled. ‘ Don’t be like naughty Uncle Edward. ’

‘Is that how it’s being pitched?’

‘Oh, you know Mum. No moral lesson left unlearnt in this house. “You see how easy it is to end up on the wrong path? He had absolutely everything and now …”’

‘… I’m begging for meals and driving a seven-year-old car.’

‘Nice try. But ours still beats yours by three years.’ She glanced towards the hall, where her mother was speaking to her brother in low tones. ‘Actually, you mustn’t be mean about Mum. You know she spent all of yesterday on the phone working on how to get you into an open prison?’

‘Really?’

‘She was properly stressed about it. I heard her telling someone you wouldn’t last five minutes in Pentonville.’

He felt a pang of something he couldn’t quite identify at his utter ignorance of his sister’s efforts on his behalf. So deep in self-pity had he been that he hadn’t considered how others would be affected if he was sent to prison. ‘She’s probably right.’

Justine pulled a lock of hair into her mouth. She seemed to be enjoying herself. ‘So what are you going to do now you’re a family disgrace with no job and possibly no home?’

‘No idea. Should I take up a drugs habit? Just to round it off?’

‘Ugh. No. Stoners are so boring.’ She peeled her long legs off the chair. ‘And Mum’s busy enough as it is. Although, actually, I should say yes. Because you’ve totally taken the heat off me and Leo. We now have so little to live up to.’

‘Glad to be of help.’

‘Seriously. Nice to see you, though.’ She leant forward and whispered, ‘You’ve actually made Mum’s day. She won’t say so, but she was really, really pleased you came. Like, embarrassingly so. She even cleaned the downstairs loo in case you turned up.’

‘Yeah. Well. I’m going to make sure I do it more often.’

She narrowed her eyes, as if she were trying to work out whether he was being serious, then turned and disappeared back up the stairs.

‘So what’s going on?’ Gemma helped herself to green salad. ‘What happened to the girl at the hospital? Joss? Jess? I thought she’d be there today.’

It was the first home-cooked meal he had eaten in ages, and it was delicious. The others had finished and left, but Ed was on his third helping, having suddenly reacquired the appetite that had disappeared for the last few weeks. His last mouthful had subsequently been a little over-ambitious and he sat there chewing for some time before he could answer. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘You never want to talk about anything. C’mon. Price of a home-cooked meal.’

‘We split up.’

‘What? Why?’ Three glasses of wine had made her garrulous, opinionated. ‘You seemed really happy. Happier than you were with Lara, anyway.’

‘I was.’

‘So? God, you’re an idiot sometimes, Ed. There is a woman who actually seems normal, who seemed to have a handle on you, and you run a mile.’

‘I really don’t want to talk about it, Gem.’

‘What was it? Too frightened to commit? Too soon since the divorce? You’re not still hankering after Lara, are you?’

He took a bit of bread and wiped it around some sauce on the plate. He chewed for a minute longer than he needed to. ‘She stole from me.’

‘She what?’

It felt like a trump card, laying it down like that. Upstairs the children were arguing. Ed found himself thinking of Nicky and Tanzie, placing bets in the back seat. If he didn’t tell somebody the truth he might actually explode. So he told her.

Ed’s sister pushed her plate across the table. She leant forwards, her chin resting in her hand, a faint frown bisecting her brow as she listened. He told the tale of the CCTV, how he had pulled out the drawers of the chest to move it across the room, and how there it had been, sitting on some neatly folded blue socks – his own laminated face.

I was going to tell you.

It’s not how it looks. The hand to the mouth.

I mean it is how it looks but, oh, God, oh, God –

‘I thought she was different. I thought she was the greatest thing, this brave, principled, amazing … But, fuck it, she was just like Lara. Just like Deanna. Only interested in what she could get out of me. How could she do that, Gem? Why can’t I spot these women a mile off?’ He finished, leant back in his chair, and waited.

She didn’t speak.

‘What? You’re not going to say anything? About my poor judge of character? About the fact that yet again I’ve let a woman screw me out of what’s mine? About how I’m an idiot on yet another count?’

‘I certainly wasn’t going to say that.’

‘What were you going to say?’

‘I don’t know.’ She sat staring at her plate. She registered no surprise whatsoever. He wondered if ten years of social work did that, whether it was now ingrained in her to appear visibly neutral whatever shocking thing she heard. ‘That I see worse?’

He stared at her. ‘Than stealing from me?’

‘Oh, Ed. You have no idea what it is to be truly desperate.’

‘It doesn’t make it okay to steal someone else’s stuff.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But … um … one of us has just spent the day in court pleading guilty to insider trading. I’m not entirely sure that you’re the greatest moral arbiter around here. Stuff happens. People make mistakes.’ She pushed herself upright and began to clear the plates. ‘Coffee?’

He was still staring at her.

‘I’ll take that as a yes. And while I’m clearing the plates you can tell me a little more about her.’ She moved with a graceful economy around the little kitchen while he talked, never meeting his eye. She had her thinking face on. When he couldn’t think of anything to do other than sit there with a slack jaw, Ed got up and helped her put the plates into the sink.

She pushed a drying-up cloth towards him. ‘So here’s how I see it. She’s desperate, right? Her kids are being bullied. Her son gets his head kicked in. She’s afraid it’ll happen to the little girl next. She finds a wad of notes at the pub or wherever. She takes them.’

‘But she knew they were mine, Gem.’

‘But she didn’t know you.’

‘And that makes a difference?’

His sister shrugged. ‘A nation of insurance fraudsters would say so.’

Before he could protest again, she said, ‘Honestly? I can’t tell you what she thought. But I can tell you that people in tight spots do things that are stupid and impulsive and ill thought-out. I see it every day. They do idiotic things for what they think are the right reasons, and some people get away with it and others don’t.’

When he didn’t reply, she said, ‘Okay, so you never took a ballpoint home from work?’

‘It was five hundred pounds.’

‘You never “forgot” to pay a parking meter and cheered when you got away with it?’

‘That isn’t the same.’

‘You’ve never exceeded the speed limit? Never done a job for cash? Never bounced off someone else’s Wi-Fi?’ She leant forward. ‘Never exaggerated your expenses for the taxman?’

‘That isn’t the same thing at all, Gem.’

‘I’m just pointing out that quite often how you see a crime depends on where you’re standing. And you, my little brother, were a fine example of that today. I’m not saying she wasn’t wrong to do it. I’m just saying maybe that one moment shouldn’t be the whole thing that defines her. Or your relationship with her.’

She finished the washing-up, peeled off the rubber gloves and laid them neatly across the draining board. Then she poured them both a mug of coffee and stood there, leaning against the sink unit. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I just believe in second chances. Maybe if you had the litany of human misery trudging through your working day that I do, you would too.’ She straightened up and looked at him. ‘Maybe if it were me I’d at least want to hear what she had to say.’

He couldn’t think of a reply.

‘Do you miss her?’

Did he miss her? Ed missed her like he would miss a limb. He spent every day trying to evade thoughts of her, running from the direction of his own mind. Trying to dodge the fact that everything he came across – food, cars, bed – reminded him of her. He had a dozen arguments with her before breakfast, and a thousand passionate reconciliations before he went to sleep.

Upstairs in a bedroom a thumping beat broke the silence. ‘I don’t know if I can trust her,’ he said.

Gemma gave him the same look she had always given him when he told her he couldn’t do something. ‘I think you do, Ed. Somewhere. I think you probably do.’

He finished the rest of the wine alone, then drank the bottle he had brought with him, crashing out on his sister’s sofa. He woke sweaty and dishevelled at a quarter past five in the morning, left his sister a thank-you note, let himself out silently and drove down to Beachfront to settle up with the managing agents. The Audi had gone to a dealer the previous week, along with the BMW he had kept in London, and he was now driving a seven-year-old Mini with a dented rear bumper. He had thought he’d mind more than he did.

It was a balmy morning, the roads were clear, and even at ten thirty, when he arrived, the holiday park was alive with visitors, the main stretch of bars and restaurants filled with people making the most of rare sunlight. Others were walking, laden with bags of towels and umbrellas, to the beach. Well-dressed children skipped past the open-air restaurant with the outdoor pizza oven or dragged reluctant parents towards the covered pool. Tubs of seasonal flowers punctuated the pavement with perfectly laid-out, gaudy displays. He drove through them slowly, feeling irrationally furious at the sight of them – at this sterile semblance of a community, one in which everyone was in the same income bracket and nothing as messy as real life ever intruded as far as the perfectly aligned flower displays. He drove slowly past them all into the residential sector and pulled into the immaculate drive at number two, pausing to listen to the sound of the waves as he stepped out of the car.

He let himself in and realized he didn’t care that this would be the last time he came here. There was just a week left until he completed on the sale of his London flat. The vague plan was that he would spend the remaining time with his father. He had nothing planned beyond that.

The hallway was lined with boxes bearing the name of the storage company that had packed them in his absence. He closed the door behind him, hearing the sound of his footsteps echo through the empty space. He walked upstairs slowly, making his way past the empty rooms. Here and there he saw evidence of the storage men’s efforts: a stray roll of packing tape or an offcut of bubble wrap. But essentially the whole house was packed and otherwise empty. Next Tuesday the van would come, load the boxes and take them away, until Ed could work out what to do with his stuff. That was the problem with owning more than one property: what did you do with spare sofas, spare beds, when you were struggling to see how you would fit one lot into a one-bedroom flat?

Right up until then, he supposed, he had ploughed resolutely through what had been the worst few weeks of his life. If you had looked at him from the outside you might have seen someone grimly determined, sucking up their punishment. He had put his head down and kept moving on. Perhaps drinking a little too much but, hey, considering he’d lost a job, a home, a wife, and was about to lose a parent, all in a little over twelve months, he thought he could have argued that he was doing okay.

And then he spotted the four buff envelopes propped up on the kitchen work-surface, his name scribbled on them in ballpoint pen. At first he assumed they were administrative letters, left by the managing agents, but then he opened one and was confronted by the filigree purple print of a twenty-pound note. He extracted it, then pulled out the accompanying note, which said simply, ‘THIRD INSTALMENT’.

He opened the others, tearing the envelope carefully when he reached the first. As he read her note, an image of her sprang, unbidden, to mind and he was shocked by her sudden proximity, by the way she had been waiting there all along. Her expression, tense and awkward while writing, perhaps crossing out the words and reworking them. Here she would pull her ponytail from its band and retie it.

I’m sorry.

Her voice in his head. I’m sorry. And it was then that something started to crack. Ed held the money in his hand and didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t want her apology. He didn’t want any of it.

He walked out of the kitchen and back down the hall, the crumpled notes clutched in his hand. He wanted to throw it all away. He wanted never to let it go. He felt as if something in him was about to combust. He walked from one end of the house to the other, backwards and forwards, trying to work out what he needed to do. He gazed around him at the walls he’d never had a chance to scuff, and the sea view that no guests had ever enjoyed. He had never felt at home there. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt at home.

The thought of it: that he would never feel at ease anywhere, belong anywhere, was suddenly overwhelming. He paced the length of the hallway again, exhausted and restless, still overcome by the feeling that he should be doing something. He opened a window, hoping to be calmed by the sound of the sea, but the shouts of the happy families outside felt like a rebuke.

A free newspaper sat folded on one of the boxes, obscuring something beneath. Exhausted by the relentless circling of his thoughts, he stopped and absentmindedly lifted it. Underneath sat a laptop and a mobile phone. It was such an unlikely sight that he had to think for a minute to work out why they might be there. Ed hesitated, then picked up the phone, turning it over. It was the handset he had given Nicky back in Aberdeen, carefully hidden from the casual view of passers-by.

For weeks he had been fuelled by the anger of betrayal. When that initial heat dissipated, a whole part of him had simply iced over, become glacial. He had been secure in his outrage, safe in his sense of injustice. Now Ed held a mobile phone that a teenage boy who possessed next to nothing had felt obliged to return to him. He heard his sister’s words and something began to open up, almost audibly, inside him. What the hell did he know about anything? Who was he to judge anyone?

Fuck it, he told himself. I can’t go and see her. I just can’t.

Why should I?

What would I even say?

He walked from one end of his empty house to the other, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floors, his fist tight around the notes.

What kind of a fool would forgive?

He stared out of the window at the sea and wished, suddenly, that he had gone to jail. He wished that his mind had been filled with the immediate physical problems of safety, logistics, survival.

He didn’t want to think about her.

He didn’t want to see her face every time he closed his eyes.

He would go. He would leave here, and get a new place, and a new job, and he would start again. And he would leave all this behind. And things would be easier.

A shrill noise – a ringtone he didn’t recognize – shattered the silence. His phone, recalibrated with Nicky’s preferences. He stared at it, at the rhythmically glowing screen. Caller unknown. After five rings, when the sound became unbearable, he finally snatched it up.

‘Is Mrs Thomas there?’

Ed held the phone briefly away from himself, as if it were radioactive. ‘Is this a joke?’ he said, putting it back to his ear.

A nasal voice, sneezing: ‘Sorry. Awful hay fever. Have I got the right number? Parents of Costanza Thomas?’

‘What – who is this?’

‘My name’s Andrew Prentiss. I’m calling from the Olympiad.’

It took him a moment to collect his thoughts. He sat down on the stairs.

‘The Olympiad? I’m sorry – how did you get this number?’

‘It was on our contacts list. You left it during the exam. I have got the right number?’

Ed remembered Jess’s phone being out of credit. She must have given the number of the phone he’d given to Nicky instead. His head dropped into his free hand. Someone up there had quite a sense of humour.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, thank goodness. We’ve been trying you for days. Did you not pick up any of my messages? I’m calling about the exam … The thing is, we discovered an anomaly when we were marking the papers. The first one contained a misprint, which made the algorithm question impossible to solve.’

‘What?’

He spoke as if reciting a well-worn series of statements. ‘We noticed it after the final results were collated. The fact that every single student failed the first question was a giveaway. It wasn’t picked up on initially as we had several different people marking. Anyway, we’re very sorry – and we’d like to offer your daughter the chance to resit. We’re doing the whole thing again.’

‘Resit the Olympiad? When?’

‘Well, that’s the thing. It’s this afternoon. It had to be a weekend as we couldn’t expect students to miss school to do it. We’ve actually been trying to reach you all week on this number but we got no response. I only tried you the one last time on the off-chance.’

‘You’re expecting her to get to Scotland in … four hours?’

Mr Prentiss paused to sneeze again. ‘No, not Scotland this time. We had to take the space available to us. But looking at your details I see this might work out better for you, seeing as you live on the south coast. The event is scheduled to take place in Basingstoke. Are you happy to pass the message on to Costanza?’

‘Uh …’

‘Thanks so much. I suppose these things are only to be expected in our first year. Still, one more down! I only have one more entrant to reach! The rest of the info is on the website if you need it.’

An almighty sneeze. And the phone went dead.

And Ed was left in his empty house, staring at the handset.

40.Jess
Jess had been trying to persuade Tanzie to open the door. The school counsellor had told her it would be a good way to start rebuilding her confidence in the outside world, as long as she was in the house. She would answer the door, safe in the knowledge that Jess was behind her. That confidence would slowly stretch to other people, to being in the garden. It would be a stepping stone. These things were incremental.

It was a nice theory. If Tanzie would only agree to do it.

‘Door. Mum.’

Her voice carried over the sound of the cartoons. Jess was wondering when to get tough with her on the television-watching. She had calculated last week that Tanzie now spent upwards of five hours a day lying on the sofa. ‘She has had a shock,’ Mrs Liversedge had said. ‘But I think she’d feel better sooner if she was doing something a little more constructive.’

‘I can’t answer it, Tanze,’ she called down. ‘I’m standing here with my hands in a bowlful of bleach.’

Her voice, a whine, a new development these last days: ‘Can’t you get Nicky to open it?’

‘Nicky’s gone to the shop.’

Silence.

The sound of canned laughter echoed up the stairs. Jess could feel, if not see, the presence of whoever was waiting at the door, the shadow behind the glass. She wondered if it was Aileen Trent. She had arrived uninvited four times over the last two weeks with ‘unmissable bargains’ for the children. She wondered if she’d heard about Nicky’s blog money. Everyone on the estate seemed to know about it.

Jess yelled down, ‘Look, I’ll stand at the top of the stairs. All you have to do is open it.’

The doorbell rang again, twice.

‘Come on, Tanze. It’s not going to be anything bad. Look, put Norman on the lead and bring him with you.’

Silence.

Out of sight, she let her head drop down and wiped her eyes in the crook of her arm. She couldn’t ignore it: Tanzie was getting worse, not better. In the last fortnight she had taken to sleeping in Jess’s bed. She no longer woke, crying, but crept across the hallway in the small hours and simply climbed in, so that Jess woke beside her with no idea of how long she had been there. She hadn’t had the heart to tell her not to, but the counsellor said pointedly that she was a little old to do that indefinitely.

‘Tanze?’

Nothing. The doorbell rang a third time, impatient now.

Jess waited, her ears trained on the silence. She was going to have to go down and do it herself.

‘Hold on,’ she called wearily. She began to peel off her rubber gloves, and then she stopped as she heard the footfall in the hallway. The lumbering, wheezing sound of Norman being tugged along. Tanzie’s sweet voice entreating him to come with her, a tone she only used with him these days.

And then the front door opening. Her satisfaction at the sound was tempered by the sudden realization that she should have told Tanzie to tell Aileen to go away. Given half a chance she would be in with her black bag on wheels and straight past her, settling herself on the sofa and her ‘bargains’ spread out on the living-room floor.

But it wasn’t Aileen’s voice she heard.

‘Hey, Norman.’

Jess froze.

‘Whoa. What happened to his face?’

‘He only has one eye now.’ Tanzie’s voice.

Jess tiptoed to the top of the stairs. She could see his feet. His Converse trainers. Her heart began to thump.

‘Did he have some kind of accident?’

‘He saved me. From the Fishers.’

‘He what?’

And then Tanzie’s voice – her mouth opening and the words coming out in a rush. ‘The Fishers tried to get me in a car and Norman bust through the fence to save me but he got hit by a car and we had no money but all these people sent money to us because of what Nicky wrote and then the vet let us off half the bill because he said he’d never met such a brave dog.’

Her daughter. Talking as if she wouldn’t stop.

Jess took one step down, and then another.

‘He nearly died,’ Tanzie said. ‘He nearly died and the vet didn’t even want to give him an operation because he was so sick with infernal injuries and he thought we should just let him go. But Mum said she didn’t want to and that we should give him a chance. And then Nicky wrote this blog about how everything had gone wrong and some people just sent him money. Well, lots of people sent little bits of money. For no reason. And we had enough to save him. So Norman saved me and people we don’t even know saved him, which is sort of cool. But he only has one eye now and he gets really tired because he’s still in recovery and he doesn’t do very much.’

She could see him now. He had crouched down, and was stroking Norman’s head. And she stared at him as if she couldn’t tear her eyes away: the dark hair, the way his shoulders fitted his T-shirt. That grey T-shirt. Something rose up in her and a muffled half-sob came out so that she had to press her arm against her mouth. And then he looked up at her daughter from his low position and his face was deadly serious. ‘Are you okay, Tanzie?’

She lifted a hand and twisted a lock of her hair, as if deciding how much to tell him. ‘Sort of.’

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28