Blind Date (19 page)

“Nasty,” he said. “Horrid.”

“Do you think so? D'you know, you could be right. Clever fella, you damn well are right. What the fuck did they do wrong with such a nice stone?”

He felt it again with his eyes still closed, thought about it. He was always flattered when an adult swore in his presence: it made him feel accepted.

“They fenced it in,” he said, finally. “With ugly stuff. Don't know what it is. A nice stone should have something to make it look nicer, instead of something to poke an eye out. I think, anyway.”

Audrey thumped the table in delight, just hard enough to make the cups, the pens and the tissue paper littering the solid surface vibrate slightly.

“You are absolutely right,” she yelled. “You clever little fucker!” Then she lowered her voice, pretending not to see him blush.

“So why was Gran romping round the attics, then? Oh gawd, look at Donald; hovering. He likes semaphore.
What he means is what kind of disgusting, bad for us food, do we want? If you give him two fingers it means, get whatever you like. Go on, give him two fingers, he loves it.”

Matt gestured, obscenely and violently: Donald tapped his own head and departed.

“She threw out the hedgehog,” Matt said after a pause. “Out the window. Straight out. Yjumph. Plump, out you go. Plump. Fucker.”

“Was he hurt?”

Matt shuffled in Donald's chair. He replied with diffidence.

“No. I don't think so. It walked off, anyway. But I thought he might be.”

“Which was why you were shouting, I suppose. Here, hold these.”

He opened his eyes and found himself with a handful of garnets. A small handful: six carob seeds of something. He made them warm in his palm, although they were warm already. He threw them from one palm to another; three or four fell to the floor, rolled on the dusty carpet. Matt was testing her and she did not move: she wasn't going to scold him for clumsiness. He heard her next question as he bent to pick up his own litter.

“So why was Gran going batty in the attic, then?”

“Oh, she does it from time to time. Looking at Mummy's things. Father used to do it, too.”

“Are they mad, or what?”

“Nope. She just thinks that whenever I've been naughty, I've gone up and looked at Mummy's things. Her toys and stuff.”

“And do you?” Audrey asked, swallowing a lump in her throat.

“Not any more,” he said simply.

They were silent for
a minute. He played with the stones recovered from the floor, sorry for having let them fall.

“They've been through those things, so many times,” he complained. “Ever since we moved. And Granny found a letter. To Mummy, from Grandpa, in Mummy's writing case. She kept it in her handbag for ages.”

“And you read it, I suppose,” Audrey suggested carelessly. He shook his head.

“Couldn't read the writing, could I? I pinched it one day, showed it to Aunty Lizzie. She read it to me and told me to put it back. Slushy stuff. To my darling girl, I leave everything I have and all my love, something like that.”

“You remember it well.”

He was becoming restless. Audrey watched Donald's slow progress towards the front door of the shop with a mixture of exasperation and relief.

“Well, I do, remember it, ‘cos Lizzie said it just showed how everyone loved Mummy. Everyone.” He emphasized the last word, as if challenging her to deny it. Audrey patted his hand.

“Yes they did, darling. Everyone. But did Grandpa have anything to leave?”

He shook his head. “Nope. But granny thinks he did. Something hidden.”

He had a momentary suspicion of her, thinking she might be joining the ranks of all these others who were always asking questions of him. And suddenly he felt claustrophobic, blood rushing to the head. He wanted to be out of here and onto the beach, cool his feet in the water, throw stones, find crabs. He was never lonely by the sea, even though he was slightly afraid of it. But he had sulked through lunch and no-one had forced him to eat it, because Granny was sorry for shouting at him: he was hungry and Donald was bringing
greasy sausage rolls and ice cream shaped like a rocket, the kind of food banned at home.

“We missed you, boy,” Donald said, “We've got a bit job for you. Has she been swearing at you? Tell her to fuck off,” and everything was all right again.

N
ot all right later though. Sated from this impromptu teatime, the sea had lost its allure but he still did not want to go home. He was supposed to sleep at Dad's house tonight and Matt did not like Dad's house. It was neat and tidy, like a classroom at the beginning of the day, so that any trace he left of himself was startling obvious. Living between two houses, he was often confused, forgot where he was supposed to be, sometimes deliberately. The more self-sufficient he was, the happier they were, and also the more concerned. He made up the existence of friends, but when
they
, meaning Granny and Dad, questioned him closely as to who these friends were and from which families, the edifice of their pretended existence crumbled. Before Lizzie had come home, they had tried to find him friends. There was a lout of a boy, who had been dumped on him one afternoon in spring, a boy who never wished to leave either the television or computer screen. They had argued, mildly, punched one another once, Matthew inflicting the greater damage, to his own surprise, and parted with indifference. Matthew saw him now, around the town, with his own gang, avoiding him as a person not even worth bullying. Then there was the girl they had found for him. “Play with Cathy, Matthew, there's a good boy.” He hadn't minded Cathy, but he had managed to make her cry.

He had brought her to play in the steep-sided graveyard with its view of the sea. Matthew knew every inch of these streets: he had either hidden
or searched in every corner and he was fond of the graveyard because it was the most untidy place he could find. The environs of the church were beautifully groomed, but the sloping graveyard was difficult to keep and the grass grew long around the older graves. Matthew had made Cathy struggle to read out the legible descriptions and guess how the people had died, especially the children. He had showed her his mother's grave, which clearly unnerved her as much as his suggestion of a game of hide and seek in such a place. He had shut his eyes and counted to one hundred, slowly, obeying the rules with rigid fairness. She had run away.

He had told Lizzie about that, and she had laughed, but by that time Lizzie was his companion so he did not need friends and they had stopped trying to find them for him. It was when Lizzie went out in the evening, he worried. He had waited for the sound of her car coming back, followed her once or twice.

He had waited for her on the night of her birthday, when she went to the pub. Saw the man standing on the other side of the road, not quite hiding, but sort of avoiding the lamp light. Matt had felt foolish all of a sudden, realizing Lizzie would not be pleased to see him; then realizing that he knew this man, although at first he couldn't quite remember from where, until he got home and thought about it. He had seen this man standing by the fire in their London house, ages ago.

And now, there was the same man strolling through the churchyard, looking like any old tourist lost in admiration of the mellow stone walls of the tower. Matthew did not know why his instinct was to run. Ordinarily, the presence of another person would not have prevented him from lying down in the graveyard and letting the long grass tickle his nose, because after a while, anyone who might have noticed went away. He was not afraid of people, merely indifferent: it was they
who avoided him. And although no-one had ever asked him and he had not volunteered, even to Lizzie, his sight of this dimly remembered man, he knew in his bones that there was a connection between the man's presence on Lizzie's birthday and Lizzie's absence for so many weeks afterwards. “She got run over,” he had been told, and the sheer terror induced by her absence made him ever more silent. “She got burned by a nutter,” he had been told more tersely at school, and then, once she came back from hospital, curiosity had turned quickly into relief, ‘cos having her captive where he wanted, stuck in one room, from which she could not move for a long, long time was best of all. He had overheard enough, despite their elaborate precautions, to know that she had not been hit by a car; everything in Budley went too slow, for a start, but everyone said it was all over: the person to blame was far away and everything was going to get better. He had let himself believe that, too.

The man saw him. He looked different in this setting: smaller. He was very clean with thick hair and sunglasses and he reminded Matthew of someone off the telly. Like all the other people who used to visit mum, he was never mentioned because Daddy would not like it. Thick hair, a lot of the stuff, even though it was short: He remembered that: a lot of hair for a smallish man.

“Can you tell me how I get into this church?” the man was shouting as he moved closer. The tone was pleasant, even though they were too far distant for conversation.

Matthew wanted to run, but he was suddenly, horribly unsure of the direction he should take. Uphill, downhill, which house? So he stood still, politely, and let the man catch up, which he did by breaking into a jog so elegant it did not seem to disturb his clothes; soft polo shirt of blinding white, khaki cotton slacks held with a
brown leather belt, partly hidden by the sweatshirt tied loosely round his waist, his feet noiseless in canvas shoes. Taking off his sunglasses as he ran those few steps, halting without effort, addressing Matt as loudly as if he were deaf, but grinning nicely.

“So sorry, to shout like that … Do you know this church?”

The man gestured to the church towering above them, as if he might possibly be referring to something else. There was no glimmer of recognition in his smile. Matthew nodded. He stood with his arms akimbo, legs wide apart, trying to look streetwise. The violence of his nod made his hair flop into his eyes: that was intentional, too.

“Well, how does one get in? It's locked. Only I want to look at the tower.”

“Why's that, then?” Matt ducked his head and scuffed the loose pebbles of the path with his toe. One of the stones glinted: it distracted him for a portion of a second, no longer.

“Because I
do
,” Mr. Handsome said impatiently, his eyes moving to the ground and back in the direction of the church. “I suppose all these church towers are the same, aren't they? All the same, but I still want to know.”

Load a crap, whatever he was saying.

“You best ask vicar. He live naaxt door,” Matt mumbled, adopting a Devon slur which was not his own, pointing vaguely and with less emphasis than the man had pointed. He had no idea where the vicar lived. And then he skipped away, out of reach, but it was really a flight. Humming as he skipped, to make it look careless and rude, dumpy dump dum, he skittered down the path, hoping he looked like someone with something on his mind. Out of sight, he paused, looked back, sauntered, plucked at a daisy from the bank in case he
was still, somehow, visible; felt a berk until he started to run. Proper heart-in-throat running, without direction.

Michael Jacobi looked after him. All boys looked the same, but he watched this graceless specimen with regret. He had once been a boy, like that. Released, like a coiled spring, into air like this and encouraged to get dirty. Get covered in soil, that meant, not quite the same as actually being dirty. He had found his first, real friend: run a little wild with a local lad, got into trouble, or what passed for trouble, then. Stealing might still spell trouble now, he supposed, although no-one thought to punish a magpie and his own awareness at the time had been roughly similar.

It had been no more than a conviction that he had a right to pretty things.

He remembered that house: No children, no dogs. As if they were all the same. A newly invented rule for Mother and he, bundled out, as if they were rabid.

He looked back at the tower with impatience. Of course they were all the same and his desire to understand the architecture of the church died as soon as the attempt to see inside was thwarted. It had been a secondary ambition in any event. He had come to look at a grave, and he had done that, noticing with some satisfaction that it was now being tended with pragmatic, rather than daily attention. No more fresh flowers, but a gravel-filled plinth, planted top and bottom with two miniature rose bushes in full bloom. So, Emma did not require much weeding: she was memory now, rather than tragedy.

Michael strode downhill into the town. Work had brought him to Exeter: compulsion the rest of the way. But it was a long way for such a small errand. The high street was full of traffic, marking the five-o'clock exodus of bodies from the beach, cars moving slowly, full of complaining children. Outside the antiques
shop, the old couple were about the purposeless business of carrying indoors all the junk they had put outside. They moved with the languidness of age and patience, rather than exhaustion. There was never any hurry or suddeness about anything they did: he remembered that. Except when he walked into the bowels of the shop, and touched the old lady on the shoulder as she stooped by her desk.

“Excuse me,” he said. She jumped, turned with her arm extended, ready to slap, almost hitting him, glaring at him with her bright green eyes, suddenly a cat rather than an apple-cheeked senior citizen. He retreated a step: he had been too close and it was only when there was three feet between them that she allowed a smile to reassert itself. The old man came lumbering up from behind, coughing warningly. He seemed to be in possession of a large, weighty pan.

“I'm so sorry,” Michael said, the apology, as always, automatic, whipping off the glasses with a practised gesture. “I didn't mean to startle you. I thought I might have missed you and I've got an urgent errand. You wouldn't happen to have anything with a ruby in it, would you? For my mother?”