Accidents Happen (9 page)

She dug her elbow into his rib.

He shifted his weight to release it. ‘Really. I just don’t think it’s a good idea.’

Kate tried to sit up. ‘You’re not serious?’ she asked.

He shrugged, sipping his beer and continuing to write. ‘I’ve just got a bad feeling about it.’

She threw her hands up. ‘Says the man who’s bought a car that looks like a penis.’

He pinched her harder, and carried on sketching.

‘What do you think about all this, Sass?’ she said, as her sister-in-law wandered outside to the garden from the kitchen, waving a camera.

Saskia settled herself on Kate’s thighs gently, and leaned back.

‘Don’t know, don’t care. Look. . .’

Hugo and Kate peered forward to see the image of themselves, with Kate laughing at her own joke, and Hugo trying to hide his grin.

‘
You were laugh-ing!
’ Kate sang childishly.

‘Right. That’s it. Both of you, off,’ Hugo grunted, pushing off the combined weight of his wife and sister. ‘I’m not sitting here being harassed. What time is your film?’

‘Half eight?’ Kate and Saskia said in unison, checking with each other.

‘Right. I’m going for a quick drive in my penis car then.’

That had been the summer, five years into their marriage, when she had finally emerged from the darkness of her parents’ deaths. The year she knew who she was again without their solid mooring on the planet. She was turning thirty, finding renewed strength in the idea of a new decade. Even broaching the idea of another baby, now Jack was starting primary school. Hugo had stopped tiptoeing about her, trying to make something better that could not be made better. With unspoken relief on both sides, they had found their way back to the easy rudeness of old. She had even made a risqué joke about the way she’d been after her parents’ death, knowing her parents would not have minded. Knowing they would have just been overjoyed that she was starting to heal. It was over, the joke said to Hugo. He and Kate could finally move on.

Kate looked at the photo closely. The contours of her body and Hugo’s ran into each other, without borders. What had it felt like to be that physically intimate with another person?

Her eyes drifted to the baby magnolia tree. They had never planted it, of course. Four hours later, Hugo had been dead.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said to the photo. But the low resolution of the camera had blurred the sharpness of Hugo’s pupils, robbing her of the chance to interpret some peace and understanding in his eyes.

What would he say, anyway? Tell his mother to keep her nose out of Kate and Jack’s business? Or would he stand beside Helen as her ally? Would his face say that he now realized his mother had been right in that brief moment in her hallway all those years ago, when she first met Kate? She had been correct to be disappointed: Kate had proved to be a failure after all. Fallen apart in a crisis. A terrible mother to Hugo’s son.

At one time, Kate would have known, of course. Years’ worth of Hugo’s reactions and opinions, she had discovered after his death, had been safely wired into her head, ready to draw upon in his absence. It had been a comfort. But that was from another time; already he was five years younger in this photo than she was now. Those reactions and opinions belonged to then, not now. Hugo had never seen an iPad or a Twitter page. He had belonged to a different time. He was disappearing from her view, like a man overboard in the wake of a ship.

Kate dropped the photo on the desk and looked at the clock. Nearly eleven.

Jesus.

Biting her lip, she glanced at her work schedule on the wall. David needed her funding proposal for his new renovation project in Islington by next week. She had to get out of here or she would never start work.

Kate jumped up. Flinging back her chair, she grabbed some papers and walked downstairs, pausing to lock the gate with the new padlock. Checking that all the windows, and then the inner doors, were locked manually downstairs, she grabbed her bag, turned on the alarm and left, double locking the front door.

Without meaning to, she glanced up at the strong sun that had now moved to the front of the house. Should she drive or cycle? Statistics about road accidents began to swarm around her head. Mixed up in them were half-remembered percentages to do with air quality and skin cancer.

• 90% of skin cancers are caused by direct sunlight.

She caught herself, and pinched her palm hard with her other hand.

‘Shut up!’ she growled, bringing Jack’s shocked, bloodied face from this morning into her mind.

Forcing herself to ignore the numbers, she marched down Hubert Street, towards the hub of east Oxford.

Helen’s words returned to her. ‘The next time I ring Social Services it will not be anonymous.’

Nobody could help her. She had to do this by herself, and it had to start now.

Magnus heard the front door bang next door. He looked down into Hubert Street from his upstairs window. The skinny woman, Kate, was going out again.

He picked up his camera and took a quick shot of her from behind.

Skinny, but not bad-looking. Dark hair, thick and lustrous. She even had the upturned nose like the girls from home.

It was her face that was a put off. Miserable. In need of a good cheering-up.

He shut up the laptop that had been delivered to Kate’s house last Tuesday and turned it off. It hadn’t been difficult. He’d just accessed her emails, noted when the new laptop was due, then lurked outside her gate in a baseball hat without his glasses, till the delivery van came, then pretended he was coming out of Kate’s house when the man asked for someone to sign for it, and used an indecipherable signature.

It was a good computer, this one. Better than the one he’d stolen two weeks ago from her house, along with the email password she’d so ‘cleverly’ stuck on a sticky note beside it on her desk. She’d upgraded. He might even keep this one, instead of trying to sell it.

Talking of which . . . better check she was really going out and not just popping in to see a neighbour. He watched out of the window till the woman reached the end of Hubert Street, counted fifty, then bounced down the worn stair carpet, pulling on his black T-shirt from yesterday, enjoying being reacquainted with his own pungent smell. The kitchen was empty. It smelt slightly of damp – not that that bothered him.

‘Hello?’ His shout echoed around the cheap units and into the hall, where piles of post for former student tenants lay in messy heaps.

No one replied.

Luckily, the other students were out. Not that they spoke to him anyway. The short one with the sharp face had complained just last night about him singing drinking songs when he arrived home at 2 a.m. No one knew how to have a good time in this bloody town.

Magnus went out of the front door and walked up to Kate’s house to check it was empty. He rang the doorbell, twice, ready with a fake question about the rubbish collection day. No answer.

Good. Quickly, he returned home and lumbered up to his bedroom.

He shut the door and locked it, just to be sure, then went to the heavy wardrobe that stood against the wall he shared with Kate’s house, and moved it, grunting, a shoulder against the edge.

It travelled with a deep scraping noise across the laminate floor, leaving a fresh new grey skid mark on top of a previous faded one.

In front of Magnus was a hole in the wall, just above the skirting board, a metre wide by half a metre high. A scouting trip to steal the first laptop five months ago had told him the best place to do it.

It had taken him three days to create, chipping away the mortar with a rock hammer when both households were out, and taking out the bricks carefully one by one. As always, before entering the hole, he double-checked with a prod the metre-long, ten-centimetre-square piece of wood that he’d inserted under the top of it, which in turn rested on two more vertical wooden lintels that sat either side of it. The support didn’t budge, still solidly supporting the weight of the bricks above it. He nodded, pleased.

In front of Magnus, on the other side of the hole, was a piece of MDF. He had painted it white to blend in with the wall next door and inserted across the hole with two clips. Carefully, he unclipped it and pushed it into the empty space beyond, then turned it diagonally and pulled it back through the hole.

In front of him now lay a gap into the bottom of a fitted wardrobe, which was presently covered in shoes and boots. There was a shelf just above his head.

Magnus pulled the shoes out of his way, lay on the floor, put his long arms into the hole and pushed the wardrobe doors ahead of him open. As usual, there was a thud on the carpet in front of him. Then he put his head through the hole and pulled his body after him, into the wardrobe, then out through the open doors on the other side. There was just enough room, with a few centimetres either side.

It was a tight squeeze but he did it.

Magnus pulled his big body into all fours, then stood upright, dusting off a scattering of mortar dust from his shoulder.

He stood the electric guitar upright again from where it had fallen, and surveyed Jack’s bedroom.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kate was trying. She really was, as she stomped across the back-streets of east Oxford towards Cowley Road. But the numbers wouldn’t leave her alone. They buzzed inside her ears, their collective high pitch almost as unbearable as the house alarm this morning, as they screamed one of her most commonly used statistics at her: the one she reminded Jack of all the time when they crossed roads together:

• You have a 45% chance of dying if you are hit by a car at 30 miles per hour.

At every kerb. At every road crossing.

Listen to the figures, a voice said in Kate’s head. It’ll make you feel better. Let them in, and everything will be OK. You’ll be back in control. Safe. Calm.

Clenching her fists, Kate double-checked at each junction, till she emerged from a side street into the bustle of Cowley Road.

At least there were people here, sights to distract her.

She lifted her eyes to the shimmering minarets of the mosque and the inert mothers in front of it in the playpark, grabbing a few seconds’ rest on benches as their toddlers ran around. She stared hard at the O2 Academy announcing a gig by a band she vaguely recognized from long ago. She dodged the crowds with their carrier bags from Tesco and stared in the windows of a guddle of restaurants offering everything from South American to Indian to Thai.

Concentrate, she thought. Concentrate on the menus. Chicken masala, pimientos piquillo, steamed mussels with chilli. Don’t think about numbers. Be normal. Be normal like those two girls walking along in vest tops, hands flying as they exchange stories of the night before. Like the man in the jester’s hat cycling down the pavement, whistling, hands not touching the handlebars. Like the elderly lady remonstrating with her Jack Russell for peeing on a bin.

Kate blinked hard, her eyes feeling the strain of all this staring and glaring in their vain attempt to distract her brain from the numbers. The sun was raw on her face, burning her pale skin, blinding her.

A terrible desert-thirst grabbed her throat.

Kate coughed. She felt a flutter in her chest.

And then, without warning, she simply came to a stop.

She just stopped.

Right on the pavement, with no warning.

Her feet were stuck. Rooted. Refusing to move.

Kate put out a hand, frightened, and grabbed a doorframe. She leaned into the wood.

Her eyes settled on a small patch of dirt by the doorway.

She looked around and saw that it was alone on the swept pavement. The patch looked like road dust mixed with mud from shoes and old chewing gum. It was ground-in year-old grime, jammed into a corner, where doorframe met window frame. Too hidden to be cleaned by the owner or swept away by the street cleaner.

Nasty and stuck and horrible.

The perfect place for her.

As Kate stared at the patch of dirt, a nagging thought entered her mind. Just a whisper.

What if she could never get a grip on the anxiety? What if she could never shake off this sense of impending danger for her and Jack? Of being cursed? What if Richard and Helen really took Jack from her?

Kate shook her head in despair. They would give him everything; there was no doubt of that. Love, reassurance and fun. But Jack would never be able to stand up to Richard like Hugo did. He would never escape. He would become like Saskia, trapped forever in the gravitational force of Richard Parker’s world.

The thought of losing Jack filled Kate with such grief that she clutched her stomach and bent over further.

What if she couldn’t stop it, though? Was it just inevitable that she would lose him now: Hugo, her parents, Jack . . .

Kate stood there, head hanging, exhausted with trying to ward off a monster she could never see.

‘Are you all right there?’

Kate jerked her head up.

A girl looked at her, concerned.

Kate realized the girl’s head was peering out from behind the doorframe on which Kate was leaning. She saw a sign. It was a cafe she didn’t recognize.

‘Can I get you some water?’

Kate shook her head. ‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’ Beyond the glass door was a simple, white-walled room, with wooden tables.

‘Do you do coffee?’

‘It’s a juice bar, I’m afraid.’

The girl’s skin was make-up free and flawless, apart from a few freckles. She had long legs under a black mini-skirt and a white blouse. Her shiny auburn hair was twisted into a thick ponytail that hung down one side of her chest. Her smile was so friendly that Kate wanted to follow the girl inside. She wanted to leave behind the patch of dirt and the thoughts of losing Jack.

The cafe smelt fresh and sharp inside, like citrus fruit. Only one table was occupied, by a man with a pierced nose holding hands with a girl with pink hair. Pop music played over the speakers. A blackboard menu announced a variety of juices with names such as Superfruiter and Detox-alula.

‘We’ve just opened so there’s a special of 50 per cent off a juice of the day’ the girl said brightly.