Careless In Red (49 page)

The kettle clicked off as the water came to a boil. When Eddie turned to fetch it to the table, Ben went to him. He heard his mother murmur shush and shush another time. But he found that comfort unnecessary now. He approached his father, one man to another. He said, “I wish things could have been different for all of us. I love you, Dad.”

Eddie’s shoulders bowed further. “Why couldn’t you shake her off?” His voice sounded as broken as his spirit.

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “I just couldn’t. But that’s down to me, not to Dellen. She can’t bear the blame for my weakness.”

“You wouldn’t see—”

“You’re right.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Still?”

“Yes. That’s my personal hell. Do you understand? In all these years, never once did you have to make it yours.”

Eddie’s shoulders shook. He tried and failed to lift the kettle. Ben lifted it for him and carried it to the table where he poured the water into their mugs. He didn’t want the coffee; it would keep him awake that night when all he wanted was indefinite sleep. But he would drink it if that was what was required of him, if that was the communion his father wanted.

All of them sat. Eddie sat last. His head looked too heavy for his neck to bear, and it fell forward, his chin nearing his chest.

“What is it, then, Eddie?” Ann Kerne asked her husband.

“I told the cop,” he said. “I could’ve tossed him from the property, but I didn’t do that. I wanted…I don’t know what I wanted. Benesek, I told him everything I knew.”

The restless night that followed thus had a twofold source: the coffee he’d drunk and the knowledge he’d gained. For if his conversation with Eddie Kerne had at least gone some way towards burying some of the excruciating past between them, that same conversation had resurrected another part of it. For the remainder of the day and into the night, he’d had to look at that part squarely. He’d had to wonder about it. Neither was an activity in which he particularly wished to engage.

Set against the rest of his life, one night should have been insignificant. A party with his mates, and that was all. A gathering he wouldn’t even have gone to had he not just two days earlier had the courage to break off with Dellen Nankervis yet another time. He was thus morose, his life a thing that he believed was in tatters. “You want cheering up,” was his mates’ recommendation. “That wanker Parsons is having a party. Everyone’s invited, so come with us. Get your mind off the bloody cow for once.”

That had proved impossible, for Dellen had been there: in a crimson sundress and spiky sandals, smooth of leg and tan of shoulder, blonde hair soft and long and thick, eyes like bluebells. Seventeen years old and with the heart of a siren, she’d come alone but she hadn’t remained so. For she was dressed like a flame, and like a flame she drew them. His mates were not among them, for they knew the trap Dellen Nankervis presented: how she baited it, how she sprang it, and, in the end, what she did with her prey. So they kept their distance, but the others didn’t. Ben watched until he could bear no more.

Palm curved round a glass and he drank it. Pill pressed into his hand and he took it. Spliff placed between his fingers and he smoked it. The miracle was that he hadn’t died from everything he’d ingested that night. What he had done was welcome the ministrations of any girl willing to vanish into a darkened corner with him. He knew there had been three; there may have been more. It hadn’t mattered. What counted was only that Dellen see.

Take your fucking hands off my sister had brought a sudden end to the game. Jamie Parsons was the hot-voiced speaker, acting the part of outraged brother—not to mention gap-year brother, wealthy brother, traveling-the-earth-to-the-hot-spots-of-surfing-and-making-sure-everyone-knew-about-it brother—discovering a lowlife nonce with his fingers in his sister’s knickers and his sister shoved up against the wall with one leg lifted and loving it, loving it, which Ben had foolishly, loudly, and in the presence of everyone in hearing distance declared to be his real crime once Jamie Parsons had separated them.

He’d been summarily and with no delicacy tossed out, and his mates had followed, and as far as he had ever known or dared to ask, Dellen had remained behind.

“Christ, that bloody wanker needs sorting,” they all agreed, up to their eyeballs with drink, with drugs, and with resentment towards Jamie Parsons.

And after that? Ben simply didn’t know.

He ran the story through his head all night, after returning to Casvelyn from Eco-House and Pengelly Cove. He’d got back round ten, and he’d not done more than pace the hotel, pausing at windows to look out at the restless bay. The hotel was quiet, Kerra not there, Alan gone for the day, and Dellen…She was not in the sitting room or the kitchen of the family quarters and he looked no further. For he needed time to sift through what he remembered and to differentiate it from what he imagined.

He finally entered their bedroom at midmorning. Dellen lay diagonally across the bed. She breathed a heavy, drug-induced sleep, and the bottle of pills that had sent her there was uncapped on the bedside table, where the light still burned, as it had likely done all night, Dellen too incapacitated to turn it off.

He sat on the edge of the bed. She did not awaken. She hadn’t changed out of her clothing on the previous night, and her red scarf formed a pool beneath her head, its fringe fanning out like petals with Dellen its centre, the heart of the flower.

His curse was that he still could love her. His curse was that he could look at her now and, despite everything and especially despite Santo’s murder, he could still want to claim her because she possessed and, he feared, would forever possess the ability to wipe from his heart and his mind everything else that was not Dellen. And he did not understand how this could be or what terrible twist of his psyche made it so.

Her eyes opened. In them and just for an instant, before awareness came to her completely, he saw the truth in the dullness of her expression: that what he needed from his wife she could not give him, though he would continue to try to take it from her again and again.

She turned her head away.

“Leave me,” she said. “Or kill me. Because I can’t—”

“I saw his body,” Ben told her. “Or rather, his face. They’d dissected him—that’s what they do except they use a different word for it—so they kept him covered up to his chin. I could have seen the rest but I didn’t want to. It was enough to see his face.”

“Oh God.”

“It was just a formality. They knew it was Santo. They have his car. They have his driving licence. So they didn’t need me to look at him. I expect I could have closed my eyes at the last moment and just said yes, that’s Santo, and not have looked at all.”

She raised her arm and pressed her fist against her mouth. He didn’t want to evaluate all the reasons why he was compelled to speak at this point. All he accepted about himself was that he felt it necessary to do more than relay antiseptic information to his wife. He felt it necessary to move her out of herself and into the core of her motherhood, even if that meant she would blame him as he deserved to be blamed. It would be better, he thought, than watching her go elsewhere.

She can’t help it. He’d reminded himself of that fact endlessly throughout the years. She is not responsible. She needs me to help her. He didn’t know if this was the truth any longer. But to believe something else at this late hour would make more than a quarter century of his life a lie.

“I bear the fault for everything that happened,” he went on. “I couldn’t cope. I needed more than anyone could ever give me and when they couldn’t give it, I tried to wring it from them. That’s how it was with you and me. That’s how it was with Santo.”

“You should have divorced me. Why in God’s name did you never divorce me?” She began to weep. She turned to lie on her side, facing the bedside table where her bottle of pills stood. She reached for them as if intending another dose. He took up the bottle and said, “Not now.”

“I need—”

“You need to stay here.”

“I can’t. Give them to me. Don’t leave me like this.”

It was the cause, the very root of the tree. Don’t leave me like this. I love you, I love you…I don’t know why…My head feels like something about to blow up, and I can’t help…Come here, my darling. Come here, come here.

“They’ve sent someone down from London.” He could see from her expression that she did not understand. She’d strayed from Santo’s death at this point, and she wanted to stray further, but he would not let her. “A detective,” he said. “Someone from Scotland Yard. He spoke to my father.”

“Why?”

“They check everything when someone’s been murdered. They look into every nook and cranny of everyone’s life. Do you understand what that means? He spoke to Dad and Dad told him everything he knew.”

“About what?”

“About why I left Pengelly Cove.”

“But that has nothing to do with—”

“It’s something to look at and that’s what they do. They look.”

“Give me the pills.”

“No.”

She made a grab for them anyway. He held the bottle out of her reach. He said, “I didn’t sleep last night. Being in Pengelly Cove, talking to Dad…It brought everything back. That party at Cliff House, the drink, the drugs, groping in the shadows and who the hell cared who saw if things went further? And things did go further. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. Ben. Please. Give me the pills.”

“You’ll go away if I do, but I want you here. You need to feel something of what I feel. I want that from you because if I don’t have that much…” What? he wondered. If she couldn’t give him what he asked of her now, what would he do that he hadn’t already tried and failed to do in the past? His threats were empty, and both of them knew it.

“Death asks for death in the end, no matter what we do,” he told her. “I didn’t like Santo surfing. I believed that surfing could lead him to where surfing had led me and I told myself that was my reason. But the truth was that I wanted to take from him the core of who he was because I was afraid. It all came down to my believing he had to live the way I live. I as much as said, Live like a dead man and I’ll love you for it. And these—” He gestured with the pills. Dellen tried to snatch them, so he whipped them away and rose from the bed. “These make you dead as well, dead to the world. But in the world is where I want you to be.”

“You know what’ll happen. I can’t stop myself. I try and I feel like my skull is pounding.”

“And it’s always been that way.”

“You know that.”

“So you get relief. From pills and from drink. And if there are no pills and if drink doesn’t work—”

“Give them to me!” She, too, rose from the bed.

He was near the window, so it took no effort. He opened it and spilled sedatives down the side of the building, into the muddy border where springtime plants languished, waiting for sun that was long in coming.

Dellen wailed. She ran to Ben. She beat her fists against him. He caught them and held them.

“I want you seeing,” he said. “And hearing and feeling. And remembering. If I have to cope with all of this alone—”

“I hate you!” she screamed. “You want and you want. But you won’t find someone who’ll give you what you want. That person’s not me. It never has been and you won’t let me go. And I hate you. God, God how I hate you!”

She tore herself from him and for a moment he thought she meant to dash from the room and scrabble in the mud below them in order to rescue her fast-dissolving pills. But instead she went to the cupboard, where she began yanking clothing from within. It was red upon red, crimson, magenta, and every point in between, and all of it she threw in a heap on the floor. She was looking for the one that said the most, he thought, like the crimson sundress on that long-ago evening.

He said, “Tell me what happened. I was with Parsons’s sister. I was doing what I could do to her, what she’d let me get away with, and that was a lot. He found us together and he threw me out. Not because he cared that his sister was about to get stuffed in the corridor of her parents’ house in the midst of a party but because he liked feeling superior to everyone, and this was another way to do it. It wasn’t a class thing. Or even a money thing. It was a Jamie thing. Tell me what happened between you once I left.”

She continued throwing her clothes on the floor. When she’d finished with the cupboard, she went to the chest. Here she did the same. Knickers and bras, petticoats, jerseys, scarves. Just the red of it all until the clothing was pooled round her feet like the pulp of fruit.

“Did you fuck him, Dellen? I’ve never asked about any of them specifically, but this is the one I want to know. Did you say to him, ‘There’s a sea cave on the beach where Ben and I go for sex and I’ll meet you there.’ And he wouldn’t have known we were finished, you and I. He would have thought it a good way to sort me. So he’d meet you there and—”

“No!”

“—he’d fuck you like you wanted. But he’d taken some of the drugs on offer—weed, coke, whatever else was there…LSD…Ecstasy—and he’d mixed them with whatever he was drinking and once he’d done what you wanted him to do, you just left him, passed out cold, and deep in the cave, and when the tide came in the way it always comes in—”

“No!”

“—you were long gone. You’d got what you wanted, and what you wanted had nothing to do with getting stuffed and everything to do with getting revenge. And what you reckoned was that—Jamie being Jamie—he’d be the one to make certain I knew he’d had you the very next time he saw me. But what you hadn’t reckoned was the tide would get the better of your plan and—”

“I told!” she screamed. She had nothing more belonging to her to throw onto the floor, so she reached for the bedside table’s lamp and she brandished it. “I talked and I told everything I knew. Are you happy now? Is that what you’ve wanted to hear from me?”

Ben was rendered speechless. He wouldn’t have thought anything could have robbed him of words at this point, but he had none. He wouldn’t have thought there were any surprises left from his past, but that was clearly not going to be the case.