The Uninvited (18 page)
She breaks off and takes another big swig. Something’s bothering her. And she seems slightly drunk. Did she have another drink after I left the bar? An image hurtles back to me: Freddy aiming his catapult at Kaitlin’s heart. And its signature noise:
zoooshhh.
‘Has he been violent?’ My own question startles me.
Her face reddens. Her neck too. The necklace glows white against it. ‘How did you know?’
I shrug. ‘A guess. I’ve barely spoken to him since I moved out. What did he do?’
‘He attacked a teacher. He threw a flint at her in the playground. She was badly hurt. It was . . . pretty shocking. Five stitches.’
As she speaks, I find myself staring at her necklace again. Those shapes: bones. Vertebrae. Knuckles. Something like that. I made a printout. A4. Sunny Chen’s suicide note is in the side pocket of my laptop case. I reach for it and open it. I pull it out and when I see the thing confirmed I feel instantly sick and shove it back. I help myself to another swig of whisky and bang my glass down too hard, so that some of it spills out. Stephanie wipes it with her napkin. I make a mental
ozuru
, and then another. I feel the horrible swoop of vertigo. I’m overloaded. And still too hot. There’s no breeze here. Not even a breath of wind.
‘Hesketh, who on earth gave you that bruise?’ She is looking at my arm.
‘Jonas Svensson. In the hospital. He grabbed me.’
‘But those aren’t adult finger-marks. What’s going on? Are you OK?’
No. I am not OK.
I clear my throat. ‘Where does your necklace come from?’
‘Hesketh, you’re changing the subject.’
Can’t she see this is urgent? ‘I said, where does it come from?’
She sighs, then reaches up and fingers it. ‘Do you like it?’
‘That’s irrelevant. I need to know exactly where you got hold of it.’ She’s smiling. Doesn’t she realise I am incapable of making small talk? She leans forward, as if to divulge a secret. But I know the answer before she says it. Of course I do. Even so, I feel my chest tighten when I hear it confirmed.
‘Hesketh, what’s the matter?’ I pull out the piece of paper again from my laptop case. It’s crumpled at the sides. I flatten it out on the table and spread it out in front of her so she can see it properly. But she doesn’t look. She needs to. She should. ‘He’s so clever with his hands,’ she’s saying. Then she stops and sees what I’m showing her. ‘What’s that?’ She looks puzzled. ‘How – did Freddy draw it?’ She picks it up. ‘But it’s ink. Freddy doesn’t use ink, does he? And this hand-print here, how could he—’
‘Freddy didn’t do it. Do you remember Sunny Chen?’
‘The Taiwan whistle-blower.’
‘He left this for his wife before he killed himself.’ The sheet starts trembling in her hand. With care, she sets it down on the table between us and shifts back in her seat, as though the paper is contaminated. ‘His wife insisted he couldn’t have done it. The hand-print’s too small to be a man’s. Can you see that this pattern here matches your necklace? Exactly?’ I point to the spiked circle.
She clears her throat and begins to fiddle with the clasp at her neck.
‘Help me here, will you?’ I can hear the panic. She wants to get rid of it. She can’t do it fast enough. ‘Please. Just get it off me.’
She bows her head, and I reach over. It feels very intimate to look at the nape of this woman’s neck. This might be a place that Kaitlin has kissed, while cupping Stephanie’s breasts from behind. The place an executioner’s blade would target for a clean kill. The clasp is the classic kind, a metal one which locks on to a plain ring. Freddy cannibalises Kaitlin’s old jewellery for beads and fastenings. I undo it and free the necklace. It weighs surprisingly little. Papier mâché. Of course. Not the pulp variety, but small shreds of paper glued on in layers. Freddy has tiny fingers, like the claws of a bird. The workmanship is accomplished, even for him. Most of the paper is plain white beneath the varnish, but looking closer I can see a few yellow streaks of a different texture. It’s origami paper. The shapes – you can’t really call them beads, though that’s their function – are reminiscent of skeletal fingers, connected by a length of nylon fishing line. I lay it on the table next to Sunny’s suicide drawings.
There’s no doubting it. The configuration is the same.
‘There’s no way Freddy could have got hold of this and copied it?’ asks Stephanie. ‘I mean, that would explain—’
‘Not unless you gave it to him.’
‘But I’ve never seen it before.’
‘Did you look at the Chen file?’ I ask.
‘I read your report, that’s all. But it didn’t mention this.’
‘No. I hadn’t seen it. Not then. And when I did, I didn’t know what it meant. I still don’t. When did he give you this?’
‘Last month. For my birthday. On the twenty-second.’
‘That’s before Sunny Chen died. It’s before he even exposed Jenwai.’
‘And what about this eye?’ she points.
‘I don’t know.’
‘And this hand-print?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can’t you hazard a guess?’
‘It might mean stop.’
‘Stop what?’
I slam my hand on the table. ‘I don’t know!’
I’m getting overloaded. Stephanie must be too because she just says softly, ‘Jesus, what’s happening here, Hesketh? What the hell’s going on?’
And once again I don’t know. I rock and rock.
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
Kaitlin’s house, built in 1910, is part of a classic London terrace of faded red brick off Fulham Palace Road. The front door is the same French Grey I painted it when I moved in. But the metal containers with trailing ivy and miniature box trees are new, and the blinds have been replaced by curtains. I arrive at 11.16, fourteen minutes earlier than agreed. I’ve been staying at an airport hotel in London since my return from Dubai two nights ago, so I’ve brought my suitcase with me. It’s Wednesday 26th September. Temperature, fifteen degrees centigrade. Moderate to light winds. They’re shuffling branches, stirring up dust, making litter dance.
Freddy must have been looking out for me because I don’t even need to ring the bell: as I approach, he throws the door open wide, yells ‘Hesketh!’, launches himself at me like a monkey, and clings. ‘Freddy K, Freddy K, Freddy K,’ I laugh into his hair. He feels heavier, more substantial than last time. I get a surge in my chest, not dissimilar to pain. Wellbeing. I am
bien dans ma peau.
I carry him through the narrow entrance hall into the kitchen and sit him on the table to take a better look. I inhale the old-fashioned floor-polish smell of Kaitlin’s house. A brand called Pledge. My mother used it. The boy’s mop of dark curly hair is the same, but his face has altered subtly: its angles more defined, its planes cleaner, and there’s a sprinkle of freckles on his nose, the colour of muscovado sugar.
‘Hi Hesketh.’ I swing round. Stephanie’s paler than ever. ‘Kaitlin’s visiting her mum at the hospice. She’s gone all day.’ I have no idea what she has told Kaitlin about my visit. It’s an irrelevance. ‘Why don’t you guys go through to the living-room while I heat us up a pizza?’ Before I left Dubai we had a short, practical conversation about how to proceed with Freddy. The strategy we agreed on: food; Lego; questions.
‘Hey, Hesketh. Come and see what I can do,’ says Freddy. And he’s dragging me through to the living-room to show me his ‘nearly’ headstand on the sofa. He makes ten attempts, each of which requires a star-rating from me, on a scale of one to six. Then he’s perched on the back of a chair almost doing the splits and holding forth in his sparky, energetic way, flexing the power of being a boy aged seven. I’d forgotten his grasshopper mind, the eccentricity of his questions. If I had to decide between being tied to an ant’s nest and being stuck in a giant spider’s web what would I choose? Can people microwave themselves?
The Kawasaki rose I made for Kaitlin when I moved in has disappeared from the alcove by the mantelpiece. But it’s easier than I anticipated to function within the new parameters.
‘If you stuck your hand in a volcano, you’d get a ninth-degree burn,’ he’s saying a little later, through a mouthful of pepperoni pizza. ‘From the lava. It can kill you. And it’s glow-in-the-dark. Sometimes red and sometimes orange and then it’s blue at the edges. Blue fire. You can get that.’ He reaches for another slice and does the archaeopteryx voice. ‘
Huloo, Froodoh, wooda you lika anootha slooce of poopporoni pooza. Yos Ploz
.’ Then he throws back his head and laughs at his own entertainment: a throaty, dirty laugh. He spills his juice; Stephanie mops it up without complaint. His flow of speech is directed largely at me.
‘Did you bring me a present then?’
‘As a matter of fact I did. Guess where it is.’
‘Up your bottom. Jokes. Suitcase,
duh
.
Foonk-you-fonk-you-fank-you!
’
Soon we’re at work on a Lego cruise ship. Principal colours: red, white, blue, beige and grey. It has a swimming pool, a tennis court and a mini-golf course. On the top deck there are ranks of solar panels, a wind turbine and a helipad. Under my tutelage, Freddy has learned the importance of studying the instruction pamphlet before beginning a job like this, and of arranging the small plastic bags containing the different elements in the right order. But he likes to improvise. It’s secretly a pirate ship, he insists. So we need barrels of explosive. Weapons. Rigging. A flag. Potted palms. He has a box of Lego pieces from which to add to the basic template. Occasionally, we look out of the window and check the sky for changes. Today there are the flattened cumuliform elements that characterise stratocumulus. I’ve long been trying to teach him the scientific terms for clouds, but Freddy prefers his own. Bacon rashers. Popcorn. Fuzzaluzz. Double blob. Mega-poo. Ha ha ha.
‘It’s an ark,’ he tells Stephanie as she comes in and settles on the sofa opposite us. It has new cushions. There’s also a lamp I don’t recognise and a rug whose weave I identify as West Moroccan. There’s more feminine clutter than when I lived here. ‘Look.’ Freddy points to the animals he has lined up ready to board the vessel when it’s complete. Plastic farm animals, mostly, scuffed from over-zealous play. But also llamas, lizards, wolves, vultures and a giraffe. A few dinosaurs. ‘Hey Steph, is there anything else to eat?’
‘What do you want?’
‘
Crosps! Crosps! Crosps!
’
‘Hmm. The thing is, they’re for treats,’ she says. ‘I don’t think Mum would like that.’
The deep voice again: ‘
Moom’s not hoyah. So gov me som crosps.
’
‘If you want something, what do you say?’ She wants to please him more than she wants to please Kaitlin. That makes sense. She already has Kaitlin.
‘I say,
ond som jooz. Ploz
.’
A moment later she’s setting a packet of crisps and a glass of orange juice in front of him. ‘
Foonk-you-fonk-you-fank-you.
’
Outside, a police siren wails, and he mimics it:
weew-weew-weew-weew!
then tears the packet open and starts feeding himself. They’re cheese-and-onion flavour.
Stephanie nods at me.
Now.
I start rocking very gently, gearing myself up.
‘I’ve got a story for you, Freddy K,’ I say.
‘Cool,’ he says, shifting closer. He likes my stories. Maybe he thinks I make them up. But I never do. I would be incapable of it. Stephanie is sitting very still.
‘A man called Sunny Chen spotted that some people were breaking the rules at work. So he told on them. But then he died. Just before he died he did some drawings.’
‘Cool. Is he good at drawing?’
‘You can decide for yourself. I’ll show you them.’ I’m about to open the folder when he says suddenly, ‘So did he say “AAAAGH” when he fell in the machine?’ Soggy crumbs fly out as he speaks. The smell stings my nostrils. I put the folder down.
I ask, ‘What did you say?’
Freddy grins. ‘Did he die like this?’ He reaches for a little red Lego figure in a white hard hat and holds it up in front of his face between finger and thumb. ‘I’ll be the machine.’ Then quickly he tips his head back, opens his mouth, still full of half-chewed crisps, and drops the little figure in. It happens almost too fast for me to register. Stephanie’s face is rigid, but she draws in a sharp breath as Freddy pretends to chew on the Lego man, making loud eating sounds. I just watch him and rock. ‘Mmmm,’ he says. ‘Delicious. Nice crunchy bones.
Nyca-crooncha-boonz.
’
Then he spits out Sunny Chen with some saliva and pieces of crisp and licks the salt from his lips.
I need to make some
ozuru
. From the corner of my eye I can see the little Lego figure in a pool of spittle, with blobs of mashed crisp attached. When Stephanie speaks I can hear she’s struggling to keep her voice level.
‘Freddy, how do you know how Sunny died?’
He shrugs. ‘I just do.’
She glances at me.
Now you
. Still rocking, I say,
‘And then after that, another man died. In another country – Sweden.’ No reaction. ‘Do you know where Sweden is?’
