Getting Home (45 page)

‘Your mother wouldn't by any chance be part of some media conspiracy, would she?' he asked, feeling ridiculous. The arctic silence at the end of the telephone banished the feeling immediately.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' Topaz ordered.

‘Because I happen to know that Chester Pike of Magno has been sniffing around a certain Channel Ten TV crew and asking questions about why they were out at Oak Hill.'

‘We could ask you some questions about Oak Hill,' was the vitriolic response.

‘It's not my show any more,' Ted said, feeling sad and happy simultaneously. ‘They threw me out last week. But that's not why I called. I just called to warn you, if you needed warning, which of course you may not. I do care for your mother, you know. I

wish her success, I really do. Give her my love, will you, Topaz?

Goodbye now.'

Rain fell in Westwick with regret. Drops fell lightly but intently from a pale pewter sky, bringing down the first serious fall of leaves of the season and inviting the community to contemplate the inevitable succession of life, death and rebirth.

The rain falling through the cherry trees on New Farm Rise made the empty street glisten. It chuckled into the gutters and streamed through the drains and caused Stephanie Sands to adopt a completely untypical expression of cynicism as she belted her son into the back of the Cherokee at 5.30 am.

Max removed his cute yellow sou'wester and placed it gravely on the seat beside him.

‘You will need it later,' she told him.

‘It's weird,' he replied with sleepy confidence.

‘You have to walk to school today, remember?'

‘Uh.'

‘If it's still raining, you'll get wet.'

‘Uh.'

‘Your hat will keep the rain off.'

‘Can we go now?'

The air was humid and warm. The earth, even the sour, poisoned, paved-over earth of Westwick, smelled fecund. It was the season for the
pousse d'automne
, the most crucial growth period of the year when plants silently and invisibly reached their roots further down into the ground and reasserted their hold on life.

Mildew had tipped the shoots of the
Souvenir de la Malmaison
with its deathly white dust. The leaves were wrinkled, brown-edged and falling early; her rose was sick. Stephanie did not even consider that she could be out back spraying and mulching when the rain

stopped; today she was taking a more radical attitude to cultivating

her garden.

Half a mile away in Maple Grove the rain dripped relentlessly through the mighty branches of the old trees. At the corner of Church Vale and Grove End a front door opened and Moron stomped unhappily down the front path. After him came his master.

Ted Parsons pulled the hood of his sweatshirt firmly around his face and tied the drawstring under his chin. The raindrops stung his bare hands as he opened the gate in his picket fence and stepped into the street. Under the half-naked trees the downpour was less vigorous. With Moron following at a sullen trot, he jogged forward towards the church, picking his feet up over the fallen leaves.

Lately, Ted had taken to interviewing himself. Ted Parsons, the godfather of Maple Grove, talks about the legacy of Jackson Kerr. ‘What first brought you to Westwick?' he would ask himself, the imaginary microphone alert for his reply.

‘Harrier Homes,' he would reply. ‘I owe it all to Harrier Homes.'

There was a joke about Harrier Homes: which is the odd one out – AIDS, herpes, gonorrhoea and a Harrier Home? The answer is gonorrhoea, because you can get rid of it. A Harrier Home would typically be bought new by a dewy-eyed couple, upwardly mobile from the working classes, who knew no better than to be reassured by its impressive portfolio of guarantees and design awards. In twenty years, when their children were grown, the guarantees would have expired, the awards would be forgotten, the paint would have peeled, the plaster would be cracking off the walls and the foundations shifting like Irish dancers; the Harrier Home would be as worthless as a dwelling could be.

After twenty-five years the couple approaching retirement would discover that the major investment of their lifetimes had been a turkey and resign themselves to rejoining the disadvantaged. They would cut their losses and sell, usually to another developer, who boarded up the property and waited until the majority of the estate was derelict before buying out the obstinate few resolved to die there and sending in the diggers. Harrier Homes extended the principle of built-in obsolescence to bricks and mortar. After thirty years, it was cheaper to knock them down than fix them up. Ted had been brought up in a Harrier Home, watching his father dedicate his meagre leisure hours to painting warped timbers and filling cracks in the walls which eternally reopened.

At the church, man and dog swung smoothly along the Broadway, heading for Alder Reach. It was many months since Ted had considered any other route. There was no sign of life at the Kwality Korner Store. It was 5.56 am.

At Alder Reach the Lieberman house blazed with light. In the kitchen, the cat scooted in through the cat flap and left a trail of muddy pawprints on the floor from the kitchen to the stairs. Topaz, careful of her charcoal worsted interview suit, removed them with a mop.

‘Fucking weather,' Gemma announced. She was moving her wind chimes into the fame and public life quadrant of her house, which fell over the fireplace in what had once been the sitting room. ‘Have you got an umbrella, Flora?'

‘Why can't I come?' Flora demanded. ‘I can easily ride over after I've dropped the little ones off. It's not fair.'

‘No, it isn't,' her mother agreed, ‘but it's the way it has to be. Molly's too young. Somebody has to make sure all the children get up and get dressed and get their breakfast and get to school and get to grow up and get a life. Normally, that's my job. Today I have to save the world, so I am delegating the job to you. You should be honoured.'

‘Huh,' her daughter replied. ‘I don't see you getting much honour for it.'

Approaching the Lieberman house, Ted decided that running with his hood up looked wussy. With a little difficulty he untied the drawstring and let the hood fall. He ran his fingers through his hair, so it would slick back aerodynamically instead of getting plastered all-ways to his skull. Rain trickled down his neck and tickled his backbone. Behind him, Moron plodded onwards with his head down and his tail hanging, water running in rivulets off his coat.

Ted saw the lights at the Lieberman house from way off, and the Sands girl's Jeep, and the Sands girl herself with her little boy in a yellow raincoat going into the house. Lest anyone should think he had a particular reason to be on Alder Reach, Ted chose to ran on the opposite side of the road to the Lieberman house. He kept his head up and facing forwards, trying to peek into the illuminated windows as he passed, but saw nothing except the hazy, sulking shape of Flora on the window seat.

In Maple Grove, Allie Parsons looked in her dressingroom mirror and saw a woman in her prime. Her complexion was smooth, pink and glowing – laser treatment every year from now on; it worked and it solved that problem of what to do in the summer. No more puffiness around the eyes, either, thanks to the new radionics diet analysis which said she needed more magnesium and selenium but could eat all the yeast and dairy products she liked.

You're irresistible, she told her reflection. It's God's own truth, you always get what you want. You wanted Rod Fuller, and you've got him, and what an absolute trophy the dear boy is turning out to be. You wanted Stephanie Sands sobbing on the sofa, and in three hours'time that's just what you'll have. You want a primetime show – lunch with The Boss tomorrow, his invitation. It speaks for itself. Irresistible. Congratulations, my dear, you
are
a star. She reached for her sunscreen. Very important to protect the new skin. Pale as Gwyneth Paltrow, that was the look for now.

On the 31, the snake of city-bound vehicles glowed by the light of half a million headlamps; half a million windscreen wipers plied across a quarter of a million windscreens. In the back of a viridian Volkswagen camper sprinkled with painted five-petalled daisies, with the name
New Green Army
stencilled on its sides, the windows were steamy.

‘OK,' demanded Crusty merrily, ‘who prayed for rain?'

‘We did,' answered fourteen robust voices.

‘Well just because it worked this time, don't you shamans start thinking you're anything special, OK?'

After more than an hour of crawling forwards at a speed slower than walking pace, the camper reached the Helford interchange, where it turned off and took the road for the river frontage and the Channel Ten studios: A second camper followed it, and a seriously overloaded Citroen 2CV, and a further procession of rusted, dented vehicles reconceived in colours well beyond the scope of the manufacturer's paint chart.

Along the river, Ted crossed to take shelter under the willows, then crossed back because the trees were already almost leafless and their huge roots breaking up the path made the paving slabs lie crazily; he didn't want to turn an ankle. Ten years ago, of course, he'd have jumped over the cracked slabs with joy, glorying in his strength and agility. Suddenly it had become amazingly easy to twist a foot.

‘So Harrier Homes brought you to Westwick, Mr Parsons?'

‘Yes, indeed. My first job in the property business. I was a surveyor for Harrier Homes.'

In those days, Harrier Homes had three designs: the Adam, the Washington and the Smythson. The Adam had pillars at either side of the door, the Washington had a pillared porch over the door and the Smythson had no pillars but long windows with broken pediments over them.

Now, as in those days, Harrier were the most successful residential builders in the country. Their target market were the young couples culturally unprepared for property ownership, whose parents had been productionline workers or machine operators or labourers, living careful, hard lives in rented homes. The young found themselves living differently; with clean hands they filled out credit applications for personal computers and named occupations in customer service and client care.

When the first of their 1.8 children arrived, they turned their attention to the full-page advertisements for Harrier Homes. Trees on the streets meant security to them, pillars meant class and property itself meant wealth, part of the arcane process of acquiring advantage in life, that trick which their parents had never mastered but which they were sure would come to them easily with a little practice and changing times.

At twenty-one, Ted Parsons would have been relieved to get any job at all and when Harrier Homes accepted him he could hardly believe his luck.

‘Well done, son,' his father blessed him, ‘I'm pleased you've found an outfit to take you on.'

‘Well done, dear,' his mother concurred, with the tilt of her head and the rueful smile she usually deployed on hearing news of a death.

‘Their stock dropped a couple of points last week,' commented his sister, freshly married to a market analyst. Unlike his sister, Ted had done badly at school and at that point in his life shared his family's relief that he was not unemployable. Having the close horizon of his youth, all other considerations were unclear to him.

In a detestable little two-tone Ford he scampered around the fringes of the city looking for sites. He scanned town plans and zoning laws and, anxious to impress and be promoted, he. read widely on megatrends and demographic prophecy. Being lonely much of the time, he would talk to anyone in a bar or a café, and learned at least as much from those conversations as from his professional studies. One day he went to a place called Fuller's Eyot at Helford, where the roofless shell of a once-elegant riverside villa stood beside a rotting warehouse, the dismal sight reflected in the scummy surface of the water.

From a distance, Fuller's Eyot was tempting. The following year a new bridge was to be built and the 31 upgraded from four lanes to six. By accident, rather than transport planning – a question which the city fathers were reluctant to address least they lost their official cars – the little orbital railway connected Helford directly to the heart of the business district in twenty minutes. The Helford Picture House had just become a shopping precinct and thanks to a major settlement by Polish immigrants in the forties there were junior and senior Roman Catholic schools of good reputation. In the neighbouring area of Westwick, he noted a synagogue, sports fields and a little park with a lake and a pseudo-Parisian bandstand, much decayed but still charming.

Ted drew up a list of pros and cons and made only one entry on the negative side. The river was still tidal at Helford and, geographically speaking, about a third of the area, including Fuller's Eyot, was below sea level. At spring tides ducks paddled above the sagging jetties. Another decade of global warming and the site would go the way of Bangladesh. ‘Pity.' He shook his head, regretfully and crossed the list through. ‘And people have lived there for hundreds of years.' The report damning the site as prone to flooding and uninsurable was already dictated when he left the office on Friday night.

The rain pocked the calm surface of the river and bounced off the flat roof of a houseboat. As he passed, a male figure appeared on the deck, followed by a child. They wore matching blue cagoules and scurried down the gangplank with their heads down, making for an old Toyota. Ted had never realised that people actually lived with children on those things. Surely it was a dangerous place to bring up a child?

At 6.57 am the security camera on the 31 recorded the breakdown of a Land Rover with a horsebox behind it. The vehicle was in the slow lane. Police cars arrived at the scene within five minutes, and directed the traffic around the obstruction while awaiting a tow truck.

The driver of the Land Rover and her companion went around to the doors of the horsebox. What happened next was not clear to the camera. What it recorded was a horse suddenly loose on the highway, and the two women running after it with outspread arms. The homeless youth who had been sitting out of the rain in the girders under the overpass jumped down to help them, but their efforts to restrain the animal only seemed to put it in the mood to party. Soon it was cantering up and down the hard shoulder, throwing bucks energetically to either side, out of control.