The Burning Air (28 page)

56

K
ERRY SHADOWED THE men on the short journey to the cottage, and Rowan kept to himself the superstitious conviction that Matt would not be there when they arrived. It was not that he doubted Matt’s death, rather that so much had shifted in the last few hours that it would barely surprise him to learn that ghosts were real. But there he was, on his back as they had left him. The lantern cast a white aureole around his hair. From this perspective his face appeared intact, his profile perfect. I ought to have recognized that face, thought Rowan again. I ought to have
divined
it.

Stooping to a crouch, Rowan rolled Matt onto his front so the mash of his features could not be seen. He did it carefully, almost as one might roll over a sleeping child one did not wish to wake. The body rocked to a standstill and Rowan was suddenly possessed by the urge to kick the lifeless form all the way down the garden like a football. He overrode the impulse; in these grotesque circumstances it seemed more important than ever to set an example to the younger men.

“Right,” said Felix, wiping his hands on his jeans then rubbing them together. “Let’s get it over with. Who’s going to take the head end?”

“We could just take him by the feet, and see how that works,” suggested Will. “Rowan, maybe you could bring the rest of the stuff.”

Rowan took the slimy bat, holding it gingerly by the neck. The cooled blowtorch he placed in his jacket pocket.

Felix and Will took a boot each and dragged the body facedown over the heathery earth. Rowan picked up the electric lantern and lit their way, but the others were clearly struggling, and every time Matt’s head passed over a tree root or rock it bounced at the neck. A foretaste of bile rinsed Rowan’s mouth.

“This won’t do,” he said. He shrugged—what was more blood on his jacket?—wedged the bat under his arm, and the three of them switched to a wheelbarrow arrangement, Felix and Rowan taking an armpit each, Will with a foot in each hand. They fell into careful step. It was in a similar formation that the three of them had carried Lydia’s coffin into the crematorium. Jake had been the fourth pallbearer. The memory was searing.

“Dad, you’ve stopped,” said Felix. “Come on, we’re nearly there.”

When they reached the garden, the incline forced them to carry the body at an angle, head lower than the feet. The slope took one last sharp dip before leveling itself out, and as Matt’s body was upended at a tilt of forty-five degrees, the contents of his trouser pockets emptied themselves. Silver, brass, and copper coins rolled across the grass and lay glinting like treasure trove. Rowan made a mental note to retrieve them after the initial task was done.

At the edge of the trenches, he wedged the lantern into the crooked elbow of a pear tree. Will dropped into the widest, deepest part of the ditch. He was over six feet tall, and the ditch came up to only his elbows. “How do the boys get in and out of this?” he said, feeling up and down the smooth walls. “We’re going to need to dig deeper, by a good two feet.”

Felix passed Will a shovel, then jumped down with another one.

“Dad, maybe you could get to work filling in the rest of them?” said Felix. “Backfill it with compost and if that isn’t enough we can start digging into these banks.”

Rowan peeled off his jacket and hung it on a branch. Within half an hour he had shoveled every leaf, twig, and branch in the entire compost heap, as well as the remains of the bonfire and some rubble from the side of the wood house. The trench was still only half full. By that time, Felix and Will had finished digging to the required depth and were free to help him loosen the solidified piles of earth all over the garden.

Rowan was grateful for the physical demand, channeling all his anger and fear into the shovel, turning great clods with every action. His jersey came off, his shirtsleeves were rolled. Within an hour, Will was bare-chested, his sweat turning to vapor. The men worked in silent complicity, culpability settling more evenly over each family member every time the earth was broken, every time the soil was spread.

•   •   •

A sudden flare and a
woof
broke the silence. All three men started and turned toward the source of the light. Kerry stood before a sputtering makeshift bonfire, Rowan’s own coat around her shoulders, blowtorch trained on the black hold-all and a pile of clothes like an empty Guy.

“Tara said to burn his stuff,” she said. “You should put his phone on here. Or at least wipe it. He was going to record you, when you said about—” She stopped herself mid-sentence, looked at Rowan, realized she had almost given the game away. Rowan felt sick; what did she know? What had Matt told her? Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to say it, or she wasn’t going to say it yet.

“I think it’s in his inside pocket, in his jacket,” she said. Rowan unzipped Matt’s jacket, felt warm flesh between the ribs as he fumbled for the telephone. It was the same make as his and Will’s and a little red icon on the screen told him that it was thirty-five minutes into a voice recording. Whatever Matt had been planning to record, he had inadvertently captured the sound of his own death.

“Want me to wipe it?” said Kerry. Did she think he was stupid? He might not understand how young people could broadcast this kind of thing around the world in seconds, but he knew that they could and they did. He did not hand the phone to her but bowled it underarm, straight onto the fire, where it was noisily consumed in a crackle and a spark.

Kerry tossed the cricket bat after it. At first the flames danced over its surface, caramelizing the blood before starting to consume the wood. The light it created made her face no less inscrutable. Rowan’s heart sank. The problem of Kerry was looming larger as the morning approached. What were they going to do with the girl? She could not maintain this ridiculous pretense of being on their side forever. Was Felix supposed to keep her with him for the rest of her life? She yawned and rubbed her eyes in a gesture that reminded him of Charlie.

“I’m going to get her out of the way,” said Felix. “Kerry, go to bed. Come on.”

Again holding her hands behind her back, but in a looser lock this time, he led her into the house through the kitchen. The light went on in Felix’s bedroom window, a yellow square in the roof that gave no view of the interior.

“What’s the point of having her out of the way if she’s watching us?” said Will.

“What can she see that’s worse than what she’s already seen?”

Felix returned a couple of minutes later. Rowan peered at his son for signs of softening but if anything Felix’s face was set harder than before. “She’ll keep until the morning,” said Felix.

“What if she does a runner in the night?” said Will.

“I wedged a chair under the door handle,” replied Felix. “She won’t be able to get out without making a hell of a noise.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out the keys to all their cars. “And this is just in case she
does
manage it. I wouldn’t put anything past her after this. I should’ve known, shouldn’t I? I should’ve
known
that someone like her would never go for . . .” His voice fractured, and his head dropped into his cupped hands.

•   •   •

The trenches were completely filled, bar one six-by-six-by-two-foot cavity. They threw him in as they had dragged him, facedown. One of his boots came off in Rowan’s hand, pulling the sock with it, leaving his foot bare.

“I can’t . . .” began Felix.

“Yes you can, old boy,” said Will. “We all can.”

“Thanks,” said Felix ruefully. “But that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say, I can’t believe this is the boy who kicked my eye in.”

For the first time Rowan really connected the cooling empty flesh of Matt’s body with the child he had known. Of course he had known it, had known on some level from the moment he had seen the name on Kerry’s driver’s license, but now the emotional realization caught up with the intellectual understanding and the aftershock was as great as the first tremor.

Soon all that remained visible of Matt was a single pale round heel, a full moon that diminished to a crescent and was then totally eclipsed as the turned earth covered it. Rowan wished he could throw his own memories in after it, seal them underground forever.

When the trench was level with the garden, they went over it all with their shovels, trying to make it look natural.

“I think that’s as good as it’s going to get,” said Will, throwing his spade down.

It was far from satisfactory. The deep clay had become mixed in with the surface loam. The foundations of the old house were as clearly demarcated as they had been when they were ditches. To Rowan’s guilty mind it was an obvious grave.

“The kids won’t be happy,” said Felix. “What are we going to tell them in the morning?”

“I’ve been threatening to fill them in for years,” said Rowan. “I don’t know, we’ll tell them there was a landslide or something. Leo’s quite into landslides at the moment. It’ll settle eventually.” It wasn’t the younger boys’ reaction that concerned him but Jake’s. If only grass could grow overnight, if only the garden could be restored to innocence, if only Jake could be convinced upon waking that it had all been a terrible dream.

Will examined his hands and said, “Out, damned spot.”

Rowan looked up sharply but Will wasn’t trying to be funny. “I know this changes everything. This changes me, this changes us, the family . . . but I can handle it. I’m strong. I’m an adult, I’m already fully formed. But what the hell is this going to do to Jake? What does this mean for him?”

“This—what we’ve done here, I mean—should go some way to showing him that we share the blame,” said Felix. “Well, blame’s not the right word. That we share the consequences. I think it’s less ‘Out damned spot,’ more ‘I am Spartacus.’”

He smoothed the surface of the earth with his boot. “I keep thinking about all these moments when it could have gone the other way, you know? Like what might have happened if the police had been a bit more probing, or what if we hadn’t all gone into the cottage.”

“Or if I’d made the call properly the first time around,” said Will.

Felix took the blame like a baton. “Or, let’s face it, if I’d never got off with Kerry in the first place.”

Or if I had given a different child a chance, thought Rowan.

“What did Matt mean by saying you had something awful to tell us about Mum?”

Lying to the police had been desperately inadequate preparation for lying to his son. Rowan was grateful for the cover of darkness. He was caught; if Felix challenged him, Rowan felt he would break down, and if Felix believed him, it would be a pane of glass that must stay between them forever.

“I’ve no idea. He was just trying to get a rise out of me. He’d have said anything. Come on. You know your mother. She wasn’t a dark-secrets sort of person.”

“No, of course. That’s one of the few things we
can
rely on.”

Felix let his spade fall to the earth.

•   •   •

In the mudroom, Felix and then Will took off their clothes and bundled them all into a garbage bag in accordance with Tara’s instructions. It was the first time Rowan had seen his son naked for about fifteen years. It paled in comparison to the terrible intimacy that bound them all now.

“I’ll take the downstairs shower, if you want the one upstairs?” said Felix, taking a clean, if threadbare, towel for himself and handing another to Will.

“Sure. Thanks,” said Will. “Shit, Fee. Have you got to share a bed with Kerry now?”

“I suppose so,” said Felix. “I have to share a room, at least. I need to make sure she stays put.”

Rowan waited alone in the mudroom until the stilling of the pipes and the ceasing of footsteps overhead told him that the young men were both in their beds. He heard the horror-film creak of Felix’s bedroom door. Doubtless he would take the floor while Kerry had the bed.

Rowan removed his own clothes and wrapped himself in the last towel. In the garden he threw them, and the black bag, onto the smoldering fire. He lurched up the stairs, cold enough now for gooseflesh to sleeve his arms. In the family bathroom he had a shower so hot it gave him pins and needles.

He walked the corridor in the merciful dark. Below him, the grandfather clock struck half past five. It must have been thirty years since he had stayed awake this long—even by Lydia’s deathbed, sleep had come to him in five-minute snatches—and he wondered how long this buzzing, manic energy would last. Tara had said she would never sleep again.

He did not turn his bedroom light on, felt under the pillow for last night’s pajamas. He lay flat on his back under the blankets for a while, and then with a crack and a whoosh, the internal dam broke in Rowan’s memory and he could hold back history no longer. He closed his eyes and let it flow.

After Felix’s attack, Rowan had been equally crushed by the frustration of not being able to press charges against Kellaway and desperate to understand what could make someone react so violently to a disappointment that dozens of children had borne with dignity. He had known that he must learn to live with the first emotion but to appease the second, he had visited the annex of the library that housed the Mawson-Luxmore applications going back thirty years. If he was entirely honest, he’d failed to remember much about Darcy Kellaway’s interview. The examination paper had been more memorable, an unusual sensitivity to poetry discernible even through the rather stilted and archaic language of his essay. Rowan had in any case strongly suspected that the key to Kellaway’s outburst lay not in the boy’s spoken or written words but in the documents attached to the application. For the first time in his tenure as admissions tutor, he had taken out the accompanying file. He was surprised by its heft, and transferred it from hand to hand before opening it. He had
always
made a point of ignoring the letters that accompanied the children’s applications, preferring to judge the child by the performance on the day rather than risk being swayed by the persuasive prose of a good prep-school master, or be prejudiced by the inexperience of an inner-city primary schoolteacher against a child from a less privileged background. But the heft of Kellaway’s file had suggested something more than the usual record of achievement and letter of recommendation.