The Burning Air (25 page)

51

R
OWAN TASTED SALT on his upper lip. Three voices were in frantic competition with the roar of the torch. Tara begged Matt to turn off the flame. Sophie screamed for Edie, over and over again. Felix shouted Kerry’s name. Even Rowan, in the midst of it all, had to struggle to distinguish the words. To anyone outside the cottage, to anyone on the other side of the flame, the screams must have been wordless animal noise.

It was impossible to see what was happening behind Matt, only that he kept flicking brief glances over his left shoulder. Once the back of his head stayed in view for two full seconds.

“Now!” said Rowan, gripping Felix’s forearm, but before Felix could reply, “Now what?” Matt was watching them again and the torch was trained in their direction. Sophie scrambled to her feet and made a suicidal charge toward the flare but the heat threw her back as though it had picked her up and flung her. She too was learning that mind over matter only goes so far, that the body will resist mortal danger independently of the heart’s desire.

Then, for an instant, Kerry’s face appeared behind Matt’s left shoulder, two black eyes that glittered in a wan oval. The image was gone before Rowan could begin to believe in it. Had he really seen her? Had any of the others?

“Kerry?” shouted Felix.

“Kerry!” said Matt, his voice sharp with imperative.

“Edie?” cried Sophie. “Did she have Edie?”

Matt craned his neck to the left, but he was looking in the wrong direction. Light poured over his right shoulder to reveal Kerry, a pace or so behind him. Her image shimmered in the heat, but Rowan could see the state of her; there was black smut on her cheekbone and a dead leaf was caught in the nest of her hair. And there, nestling into her neck, was Edie, or a rolled blanket that promised to contain her. A wordless prayer whispered its way through Rowan’s veins. He glanced at Matt; he was still looking the wrong way, but as long as he was holding the blowtorch they could not dare to take advantage.

Kerry pulled the top of the blanket down, slowly and deliberately, to reveal by the lantern’s dazzle the shining white dome of Edie’s head. Time ceased to play out slowly and stopped altogether. The only sign of urgency was the frantic pulse of the baby’s fontanelle. Rowan felt his own heart rate keep pace with it and could not allow himself a second of relief. Kerry’s expression was a terrifying void that made it impossible to guess what her game was. Could she be showing them the child safe and well to reassure them, or to taunt them before taking her away or harming her?

Rowan sensed a change in Sophie beside him and knew that she had seen Edie too; she emitted longing so strong that one could almost see it, like the trail left by a sparkler.

Don’t say anything, Rowan silently willed his daughter. Don’t tell him where Kerry is. Please do not point him in the direction of the child. The voice, when it came, was Felix’s.

“Kerry, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there. Take the baby and get the fuck away!”

Rowan barely had time to curse his son before Matt whipped his glance around, managing to keep his weapon trained on the family even as he reached his free hand behind his back. With his body in the way, the light was no longer in their favor. The dark scuffle was disguised by flame and the MacBrides were a captive audience of the monstrous shadow play before them.

All Rowan could be certain of was that Kerry was not quick enough for Matt as he grabbed the girl by the neck and banged her head hard on the stone doorjamb. Now time distended itself as in slowed-down footage of crash test dummies floating through the windshield. Kerry slid down the frame with a slowness that would have looked deliberate and mocking had it not been for her eyelids flickering closed and the livid red mark on her forehead. It took a fraction of a second that lasted for years for Matt to pluck the bundle from Kerry’s loosening embrace and hoist it onto his shoulder, inches from the flame. The baby opened her eyes, saw the fire, and gave a delighted smile, as though nothing in the world could be more charming than a deadly jet of flame inches away from her skin. She put her fingers in her mouth and sucked them, mesmerized. Kerry lay across the threshold like a heap of rags, her face pressed into the earth. Was she still alive?

“Oh my God. What have I done?” said Felix, too low for anyone but Rowan to hear.

“Matt, please,” said Tara in that same pathetic voice. “Just let me have Edie and then we can sort this out.” Rowan saw the layers in Tara’s face: love, hate, anger, fear.

“Shut up! Don’t move!” Matt ordered. Kerry stirred and his boot pressed firmly on her neck. “That goes for you, too,” he said. Her body bucked reflexively then stilled obediently.

Rowan watched his children. Felix squinted into the flickering shadows beyond Matt. Sophie’s gaze never left Edie. Tara was focused entirely on Matt.

“Babies are
heavy
,” said Matt, shifting under Edie’s weight, momentarily sending the flare up to the ceiling again. Rowan found himself assuming the starter’s position from his old athletics days, ready to pounce; immediately, the finger of flame was trained on his chest. “Do your children know about their mother? I mean, do they know what she was really like, underneath the community service and the do-gooding and the honors and all the rest of that hypocritical
shit
?” Matt’s voice rose to a shriek. Edie raised her own voice in sharp discord and the torch’s trajectory became haphazard. “I mean, are you going to tell them or shall I?”

Of
course,
thought Rowan. What else could he have wanted? His last thought as he cleared his throat to speak of the insignificant thing that would rewrite their history, was to thank God that the grandchildren were in bed, that at least none of them would ever know.

Rowan braced his feet against the floor. Should he preface the truth with a disclaimer about how much Lydia had loved them all? They already knew that, but it seemed important to remind them before he began.

“Come on, spit it out,” said Matt. “Or I’ll have to do it for you.”

Rowan felt his mouth working, but no words issued. It was as if his vocal cords had been sliced through. He tried again but was frozen awake in the familiar dreamscape scenario of the silent scream.

Matt’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “The thing about your mother . . .” he began.

A pale, oblong shape seemed to move through space as if of its own accord, its grace belying its speed and the strength of its impact on Matt’s temple. The blowtorch went out. Matt swayed, backward, forward, to the side. Felix took a fullback’s dive to intercept the falling baby just as her head was about to hit the ground. The blowtorch slipped from Matt’s hand and thudded onto the cottage floor before rolling into a dark corner. Matt swayed to the side, his legs gave way, and he collapsed, his body landing crossways over Kerry’s. The object rose back up and came down on the same temple, this time shattering the skull it had dented on first impact. The noise was at once soft, like rotten fruit hitting the ground, and hard, like the breaking of a branch.

Jake let the weapon drop and examined his palms with the wince of someone who has just caught a fastball he didn’t see coming. Rowan’s old cricket bat lay at his feet, the Cath school colors banding its neck and a proud rosette of blood on the willow.

52

F
ELIX PLACED THE screaming Edie into her mother’s trembling arms. Sophie unwound the swaddling and inspected the little fingers individually like a midwife checking a newborn. The blanket was woven through with twigs and patched with mud but the child herself seemed incongruously clean and mercifully unmarked. Her clothes were spotless and her white hair looked as though she were straight from the bath; the only sign of neglect was a dangerously bulging nappy. Sophie pressed her nose into Edie’s cheek, speaking in tongues through tears; her hair, loose and messy, covered both their faces. A reverent silence fell. Rowan watched, humbled by the perfect fit of them. He allowed himself briefly to cherish the illusion that this longed-for moment was a truly happy ending. But when Sophie unbuttoned her shirt to feed Edie, he was forced to look away and the spell was broken.

Tara pushed past, vaulting the heaped doorstep, and ran over to Jake, who stood staring straight ahead with his hands at his sides like a lead soldier. Tara clamped her arms around his unyielding body. “It’s going to be fine, we’ll get through this, it’s going to be fine,” she said in a hysterical tone that grew less convincing with every shrill repetition. How was it going to be fine? How was
anything
ever going to be fine? Jake’s stature might have been that of a man and his pose the rigid stance of the military but his face was a little boy’s and when he spoke, even his voice seemed to have regressed to its preadolescent pitch.

“He was going to hurt Edie. I couldn’t let him, I had to stop him.”

“It’s going to be fine.” Tara started up again. “It’s going to be fine. I promise, Jakey, it’s going to be
fine
. It’s going to be fine.”

Rowan wondered if they would have to slap her face.

“Jesus
Christ
,” said Felix. Rowan followed his gaze to the cottage door and saw that the dark mass on the ground was starting to shift and stir. Instinctively, he kicked around in the dark for the blowtorch. His toe found something metallic that rolled a little on contact. He bent to pick it up and touched the nozzle; the heat seared his fingertips and he dropped it, somehow managing to swallow his swearword. Felix had not gone for a weapon but to the lantern, which he trained on the doorway. The pain in his fingertips all but forgotten, Rowan let out a low moan of horror.

Kerry was crawling out from underneath . . . oh dear
God
 . . . she was crawling, with intense effort, out from underneath Matt, shrugging off his weight and dragging herself onto the old path, where she lay in a
C
-shape. Her hair was clotted and her forehead was smeared and her cheeks were freckled with blood.

“Felix . . .” she began, and stretched out her arms, whether to Felix or to the baby it was impossible to tell.

Felix crouched to Kerry’s level, took her by the wrists, and pulled her to her feet. For a sickening moment Rowan thought he was going to kiss her. The look on his face was one of hurt but underpinned by something else, something more terrifying in this context than anger. Surely Felix’s reservoir of love for Kerry had been abruptly and permanently drained by everything they had just found out? Surely it was shallow enough for that? She tried to place her head on his chest but to Rowan’s relief, his son recoiled. The bones of Felix’s knuckles gleamed white in the dark as he made his fingers into handcuffs and held her at arm’s length. He was keeping her away from Sophie, who was only feet away on the cottage floor, eyes closed, unaware of or unable to deal with anything other than her daughter. Kerry mouthed the words
“I’m sorry.”

Rowan turned his attention to the horrible, necessary task of examining Matt. He stooped over the prone figure. Matt was facedown and apparently motionless; Rowan watched his torso for the involuntary movements of the lungs. The rib cage appeared entirely still but Rowan would not have been surprised to find that through sheer force of will Matt could have held his breath for minutes on end. Rowan was aware of fervent hope bubbling inside him, but could not have said whether he wished that the boy were dead or that he had survived. He felt for a pulse at the wrist and had confirmed what he had known since the second impact.

“Have I knocked him out?” asked Jake. The horror on Tara’s face told Rowan that she knew too. Standing on tiptoe, she put her hands over his eyes the way she had when he was little and something scary came on television. Rowan levered his hand under Matt’s shoulder and rolled him onto his back. From behind him came a sexless cry. The top left quarter of Matt’s face was missing. A shattered mosaic of bone was meshed in his sticky hair and the blood that had poured from his nostrils was laced with a pearly white ichor. His mouth gaped, the tongue obscured by what looked like a black mess of tar. No cloud of breath issued from it.

“Is it bad, Grandpa?”

Rowan’s instinct was to buy a few more seconds of his grandson’s innocence with a lie, but he had to rise above it.

“Jakey, he’s dead.”

Jake screamed into Tara’s shoulder; her whole body seemed to absorb the sound.

“
Good
,” came Sophie’s voice from inside the cottage. She got to her feet without breaking the baby’s latch and stood in the doorway. “Too bad you didn’t get
her
as well.” Anger had distorted Sophie’s features from sweet Madonna to vicious thug. She took a step toward Kerry and spat in her face. Saliva hit Kerry square in the eye but she did nothing to wipe it away. He saw Sophie twitch as though she wanted to strike Kerry, but that would have meant letting go of Edie, and Rowan had the impression that it would be weeks, months, before even the briefest of separations between mother and child took place.

“I can’t breathe in here,” said Sophie, putting a muddy forefinger into the sleeping baby’s mouth to break the seal. She pulled up her bra cup and wrapped Edie into her coat. “I need to get her home, I need to get clean. I need to get away from all
this
. Dad?” She put out her hand. Rowan took it. She negotiated the slippery ground around Matt and stepped over his body with an expression of detached care, as though crossing a stile or a cattle grid.

Only Kerry and Felix remained inside the cottage. Rowan had absolutely no idea what they were going to do about Kerry. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she kept saying to Sophie, to Felix, to Edie, to all of them. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Rowan was almost vibrating with anger at Kerry, and the thought was inescapable that if it had not been for Jake, if he had been on his own, the temptation to send her the same way as Matt would have been real and dangerous.

Her professions of remorse meant nothing and anyway, it must soon dawn on her that the balance of power had just tipped in her favor. The criminal had turned witness the second Jake had struck. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whimpered. Her repetition was its own echo in the tiny space.

“Shut
up
!” said Felix, and then to the rest of them, “
Shh!
What’s that noise?”

The voice in the mist was unidentifiable until the repeated word became clear.

“Sophie!” came Will’s voice.
“Sophie!”

“Will! Edie’s here! It’s all right, she’s here!”

“Oh, thank Christ,” said Will. “Keep talking, will you, and shine a light if you’ve got it. I haven’t got a torch, I can’t work out where you are.”

All of them cast their torches into the branches but nobody spoke.

“What’s wrong? Is she hurt?” said Will. “Talk to me, Soph.”

“She’s fine,” said Sophie. “She’s fine, she’s perfect . . .”

Only those of us who know everything, thought Rowan, can hear the unspoken “but.”

There was a scuffle of footsteps on the other side of the ridge and Will emerged, shielding his eyes.

“Turn off the bloody floodlights, let me see her!” The torches were lowered. “Oh, sweetheart, oh,
Edie
.” He wrapped his wife and daughter in a crushing embrace, then pulled away to repeat the same process of examination that Sophie had carried out in the cottage. “She’s OK,” he said, appearing to count her miniature fingers. “
Is
she OK? She
is
OK!” He brushed Sophie’s tearstained cheek, leaving an earthy thumbprint on her skin. “Are
you
OK?”

Sophie nodded. Will laughed, evidently mistaking her silence for relief.

“Look, we’d better get back to the barn. I waited until I could see them coming over the hill and then I came up here.”

“Who?” asked Sophie.

“The police, of course. I told them about Matt’s phone not working, and Kerry, all that. That’s what I’m saying, we’ll have to go down now so they don’t arrive at an empty house. They’re just a minute or two away.”