Getting Home (33 page)

‘Maybe nothing. The man's not a total fool but he's emotional. I'll keep my eye on him.'

‘Do that.'

Damon Parsons walked along the 31 in the night, facing the oncoming traffic, pretending to shoot out the headlights of every car that passed: p-tchoww! p-tchoww! p-tchoww-eeee! Tonight he was going for tyres. Offside front tyres. When he got one, the car was going to spin out of control across all the lanes, cannon into the central barrier, bounce off it, slew across the fast lane and then maybe a container truck would hit the rear of it with an incredible smash and there'd be glass and metal all over and the speed of the track would take it into a skid right out across the road and it would carry on skidding maybe fifty yards and other cars would hit it and maybe a Porsche would come down the fast lane and the driver would lose control and hit the first car and the Porsche would flip up in the air right over it and crash down beyond and all its windows would burst out. And he would be first on the scene. This could really happen. It was on the police video.

His T-shirt rippled in the slipstream. One car after another whipped up a steady wind. He stopped and held out the shirt to see the wind made by the cars blowing the edges. When he stopped walking he swayed around. He was not very drunk but the rough grass of the roadside was difficult to walk on.

The cars kept coming, howling past one after another after another. The lights shone in his eyes, flash, flash, flash. Damon climbed up on the overpass that took traffic down into Helford and squatted like an ape in the girders. The overpass was as rickety as a helter-skelter. It was supposed to have been a temporary structure but it had been standing for seventeen years. Now the cars were cunning above him: da-boom da-boom, da-boom da-boom, da-boom da-boom. There were vehicles as far as the eye could see in both directions, a dragon of white light roaring out of the darkness before him, behind a snake of red lights crawling into the orange glow of the city night sky.

He lay down on the narrow cold metal and pretended a high-velocity rifle with an infra-red sight. They were accurate to half a mile. With one of those he could get a tyre half a mile out there, out past Acorn Junction near the 46 interchange. If he got a tyre right there on the 46 interchange maybe a tall truck would pile into the crash and topple right over the edge of the approach road and land on its roof and crush a car underneath, and the windscreens would burst out and then more cars would run into that heap of metal. But half-a-mile away he probably wouldn't be first on the scene.

He thought about finding a rock and dropping it on a car below. If you dropped it just right you could get a windscreen but there wouldn't necessarily be a crash because people could just push out the windscreen and keep driving. It was cold. His arms were cold, the girder was cold underneath him. He climbed down.

Along the river it was quiet. Quietness was intolerable to him. In the absence of noise his thoughts got too active and they wriggled around like maggots in a tin and then started crawling everywhere. The more they crawled around the stronger they got. They let things into his mind, things which frightened him, questions that did not have answers, or if they did the answers were too big for him to grasp. Damon could not entertain concepts like what would happen to him, what could happen to him, what he wanted to happen to him. He just did not know. His mind was too shallow, those things could not be packed into it.

In re-hab they asked him those kind of questions, which is why he didn't like being in re-hab. Those people were supposed to be so smart, but he couldn't make them understand that he didn't understand. Every day almost, somebody would sit there with him with that eyebally look they all had and ask him something he couldn't answer and he would sit there saying, ‘I don't know, I don't know,' but they never really got that he wasn't hiding anything or avoiding anything or covering up anything; there wasn't anything to hide or avoid or dissemble. He just didn't know.

In re-hab they forbade you to drink alcohol but he was cool with that. Other people talked about wanting a drink but Damon never wanted a drink. He didn't like the smell of drink or the taste of drink; Coke was better, so something in Coke was what he liked to drink best. He never felt he wanted to sink a beer and smack his lips and wipe his mouth like sheep-shearers in the ads on TV, although he did those things because people seemed to like him doing them, it made them laugh.

Drink was like music, or lights or the noise of people talking. It filled up his head so his thoughts couldn't run around and that was good. The best thing of all for making thoughts behave was to do something scary, because then it was like the light was actually inside his brain making the thoughts lie down and be totally still, as if they were all dead. Running across the road, right across the 31, all six lanes of it, was scary, but Dad didn't like him to do that. Recently, Damon, had worked out that there had to be something you could do which would be so totally scary that the thoughts would actually die, they would lie down and never ever move again.

There was very little water in the river, but it was running fast and the surface of it was crinkled in the light from the cars on the 31. He jumped over the embankment wall and down on to the stones of the dry margin of the riverbed. The stones crunched under his boots. He picked up some pebbles and threw them into the water to make more noise, but the splashes sounded lonely so he stopped doing that and went back to the road and turned away from the embankment up a side street which would probably lead up to the sound and movement of the Broadway.

The street he chose was the right one because his girl was walking down it. She was walking quickly on the other side of the street, so he hurried up and crossed the road to be with her. It was a few weeks since he had seen her last, he was afraid that she had been taken away. Under a street light he saw that she was more beautiful than ever. He could say that to her, it was the sort of thing boys said to their girls. He started turning the words over in his brain, making sure they would come outright. You are more beautiful than ever.

‘You are more beautiful than ever.' There, they'd come out perfectly. She was still walking fast, maybe she was even walking faster. She didn't understand. Maybe she hadn't heard. Damon was half-running, trying to keep up with her. She couldn't have heard him properly. He had to stop her and make her stand still so she could hear him say it again. He put out his hand to take hold of her arm.

I will go like Josephine going to Malmaison, Stephanie promised herself, with grace and dignity because what I'm doing is for the best. Anyway, this is not a retreat, we are not running away. This is the best thing for Max, which is all that really matters. I thought it was the best thing for my son to bring him here but now the best thing is to move out. I can't manage by myself, I'm not clever enough to make the money we need, or strong enough to stand up to the whole neighbourhood. Gemma's right, there's a natural law operating here and I can't fight it.

‘What a pretty garden. I'm sure we'll have your house rented in no time,' vowed the senior negotiator from Grove Estates gallantly, trotting from room to room with a clipboard, trailing her bitter atmosphere of great personal tragedy. Stephanie almost regretted having called her in, but there were only two agents in town and it was bad business not to compare quotes at least.

‘Very popular street, neutral decor, good entertaining space, eat-in kitchen, well-arranged family rooms, nice big garden – we've got half a dozen companies looking for houses like this,' assured the man from Greenwoods on the Broadway, grinning like a fox while he measured the rooms with his electronic gauge. ‘We'll need to see the deeds and the mortgage document if there is a mortgage document. Just a formality, proof of ownership. I'd recommend getting as much of your own stuff out of the way as you can before we bring people round. If a place looks empty people can imagine themselves living there more easily.'

I haven't time to be sad, Stephanie told herself, going back to her desk as soon as he left. Ridiculous to sit here shivering with misery because another family is going to live in your house, For a while, just for a while. Six months. And if Stewart is released tomorrow, then what? You'll have rented out his home.

Stewart would understand that she and Max had suffered also. She reached for a new green crayon. In the past few months she had used up one or even two green crayons a week, drawing in her special symbols for vegetation, little scribbled green circles for plants, big ones for trees.

The doorbell rang. She ignored it. She was not expecting anyone, it would be a Jehovah's witness or a scaled-looking foreign teenager claiming to sell dishcloths for the blind. The bell rang again a fierce sharp shrill that was somehow characteristic. Peering out from behind Max's curtains she saw the dark length of the Channel Ten limousine across the street and Allie standing on her front path looking up at the windows with a petulant frown.

‘Stephanie! Darling! I've only just heard. Poor little Max! Those dreadful Carman boys! Chalice can't stand them, I can't tell you what they tried to put down her dress. I had to come!'

Stephanie found her arms full of Cellophane, tangerine gerberas, ultramarine delphiniums and chameleon-green bells of Ireland, all etiolated and greenhouse grown, lashed into a bouquet and decorated with Pot Pourri's loudest pink ribbon. ‘How lovely,' she said, bemused by the high colour and high charge of emotion which swept them both through the house. ‘You shouldn't have.'

‘Of course I should. You deserve them. More than deserve them. Isn't that the extraordinary thing about tragedy, it's never just one thing? First Stewart and then this. One terrible ordeal after another. Let me hug you, I have to hug you.'

An explosion, a bomb of emotion it was, going off at Stephanie's front door, throwing all her feelings, so recently rearranged in functional little stacks, up to the sky in chaos and blowing the two of them clean through the house and out on to the terrace, where Allie's skeletal arms laced themselves around Stephanie's strong, round ones and squeezed like a giant nutcracker. Then she hauled off to arm's length, and squeezed Stephanie's elbows with her little paws, and glared into her clear green eyes. ‘Tell me,' she urged, ‘how are you coping? How is Max coping?'

‘Fine. Max seems to be fine.' Stephanie put down the bouquet.

‘Stop this, Stephanie, you must stop this. Please, this is your friend asking. Don't say fine to me. You don't have to pretend, I know what you must be going through.'

I don't think so.
To play for time while the dust settled, Stephanie chattered on about Max, noting the film of boredom rising over Allie's bright eyes the longer she talked.

‘But what about
you
, darling?' she pleaded. ‘How are you coping with all this?'

‘I'm not,' Stephanie said shortly. ‘I'm leaving. I'm taking Max away from the whole sick thing. We're going to stay with my mother and I'll rent the house out.'

‘But you can't do that! You love this house!' When excited, Allie had a way of poking her nose forward and rolling up her eyes which made her look like a small pig calling for food. ‘You can't hand this house over to strangers. Why, it's you! It's you and Stewart You can't!'

‘I can't have Max stomped to mush by the Carman boys while Miss Helens stands by and waits to be bought off and the rest of you run around trading gossip about us.'

‘Stephanie!' The hand pressed to the heart again, the big round eyes turned up under reproachful brows, another steal from Princess Diana. ‘I hope you don't think that
I
…'

The fairy dust wasn't working. Allie trailed through Westwick like a comet, a ball of flaming media gas with a trailing tail of glamour, hurtling light years above their dull terrestrial lives. It had been as if she shed fairy dust in all their eyes, making people see her as something fantastic, a kind of Superbeing, a phenomenon. For some reason, she now appeared to Stephanie just as an over-eager, over-expressive, over-made-up little female. Her body seemed not to fill the seams of her coral-pink suit, it flapped around her ribs; her spirit seemed not to fill her face, either. Her grimaces and gestures were over-lifesize but empty.

‘Of course not.' Was that the truth? Stephanie knew her instincts were good. Her instincts said that Allie must at least have been as involved as any of them in slandering her. In fact, her instincts pointed out that Allie was an opinion-former, a pack leader, the first to speak on most topics. Quite possibly she had started the whole thing. Impossible to put that together with this creature pleading friendship. Stephanie's logic fuse blew if she tried it.

‘I'm your friend, Stephanie. I'd never hear a word against you, honestly. People say things but I don't take any notice. I mean, Rachel – I'd never go to her, would you? Be one of her patients, I mean. She's always mouthing off, I couldn't trust her. That's what happens in situations like this, isn't it? That's what makes bullying such an issue today. It's a whole-community kind of thing. You find out who you can trust, who's really there for you …'

She babbled on, probing Stephanie's defences, feeling about for soft spots. Stephanie let herself murmur occasional assents to keep the flow going. She felt confused. She felt tired, in the same way she had done after she got the news about Stewart, muffled in pain, emotionally deleted.

What did Allie want from her? She had cast herself as a friend. Was it the price of this friendship that Stephanie should disclose her emotions exclusively to a woman whose profession amounted to mass-marketing human feelings? This was still Westwick, there was no friendship here, she had seen that demonstrated beyond doubt. Relationships here were expedient, necessary, profitable – or nothing. ‘Allie,' she broke in at last, ‘are you still asking me to talk about this on your show?'