Next of Kin (21 page)

The photographer was loving it. Zoe had never worked with him before but had marked him down immediately as flash on account of his custom-built Hasselblad and lizard cowboy boots. He called her darling, as if they'd known each other for ever, had worked on a hundred shoots together before, but he never looked her in the eye, she noticed. She did what she was told, setting up tripods and huge dull gold reflector discs and taking light-readings, but she wouldn't speak to him. One of the girls in the quartet, a thin viola player with dead straight black hair like a curtain, caught Zoe's eye and winked.

The studio, in a dingy street off High Holborn, was completely white, ceilings, walls, floor, with long white blinds that could be pulled down to obscure the angles. The four girls inside their fragile cage looked as if they were suspended in space, as if the cage might indeed be hanging somewhere outside the known world, in some removed fantasy. Zoe had been into the cage to arrange the folds of their dresses, so that the shadows fell as lushly as possible, and the satin caught the light, and had felt that there was a different atmosphere inside, an atmosphere that was more than just an illusion. Those girls had been very clever in choosing their cage; it gave them mystery and it gave them power. Zoe, crouching outside it holding a huge, light nylon reflector, looked back at the viola player and grinned.

‘Turn your faces towards me,' the photographer said, ‘and your eyes to the side, and when I say “Now!” flick your eyes towards me, right at me, right into the camera. Give the camera all you've got.'

At this moment, Zoe thought, while we're in here giving our all to four girls in fancy dress, there are people out there selling newspapers and lottery tickets and going through litter bins and gazing out of office windows and counting the half-hours till lunchtime, till end of office time—

‘Now!' the photographer shouted.

—and there are kids in school and people getting into lifts and aeroplanes and picking up telephones and we're poncing around here with all this kit and a Hasselblad—

‘Brilliant,' the photographer said. ‘Brilliant. You babes have it. What it takes you
have.
But I need it one more time. Faces to the camera, eyes to the left a little. Mouths a little open? Relax those lips, relax; let me see the teeth, just a glimpse of teeth.'

—and while we're doing this, Gareth is probably mucking out the cubicles in the barn and Robin's out somewhere on the farm and Velma's in the kitchen spraying air freshener everywhere; Mountain Pine, her favourite—

‘Hold it up, darling, would you?' the photographer said to Zoe in quite a different voice. ‘As you were? No, darling, no. As you
were
. Now, girls, now, my lovely girls, I want your instruments between your knees, legs spread. Let's see some leg, let's see it.'

I bet, Zoe thought, tilting the reflector so that a warm glow lit the girls' faces from underneath, I bet none of this lot have ever touched a cow. I bet they don't think about cows. I bet they just put milk in their coffee and never think about where it came from, about how cows live, who looks after them. I'd like a cow to walk in now. I'd like her to come straight in and just stand there and see what they'd do, see if the cow made them look stupid. The cow wouldn't look stupid, she'd just go on being a cow—

‘Darling,' the photographer said, ‘can you concentrate? Can you please just give us a fraction of your attention?'

Zoe looked at him. The girls in their cage, holding their instruments lightly between their spread legs, looked at Zoe.

‘Perhaps,' the photographer said, sensing a chance for point-scoring, ‘perhaps you'd like to share your thoughts with us? Would you, darling? Would you like to tell us all what you were far away thinking about?'

Zoe didn't blink.

‘Cows,' she said.

Later, in Judy's flat, eating a baguette stuffed with salad out of the long, thin paper bag in which she had bought it, Zoe decided she would get another three days' work from the agency that had given her the string quartet job, and then she would go down to Tideswell. Three days' work on top of what she had earned this week already would pay the rent and her bus ticket. Her mother hated the way Zoe regarded money, hated her short-term view of what she needed, wanted her to put money by, to make for herself some small security, even if only a few hundred pounds.

‘What for?' Zoe said. ‘What'm I putting it by for? I might be dead tomorrow.'

Zoe's mother put money by for things, for washing machines and a video recorder, for a nest of occasional tables, for a microwave oven.

‘Then you've got them,' she'd say to Zoe. ‘Then they're yours,' meaning that possessions were somehow a defence against insecurity, evidence of existence in a world where invisibility of some kind, nonexistence, threatened at every turn.

‘But I don't want them,' Zoe said. ‘I don't like them. I like
not
having things, I like being able to move about. Maybe,' she'd said, in the last conversation of this kind with her mother, ‘maybe I'm naturally a wanderer. A nomad.'

Nomad was a new word for Zoe, a new idea. Robin had used it to her. He said that nomad had been one of Caro's words, that she had believed herself to be one, to be a person who would always be a traveller in essence, a person you couldn't settle even if outwardly you thought you had. Zoe liked that idea, had turned it over in her mind and looked at it as one might a shell or a pebble in one's hand, especially at Caro's grave. That fascinated her. Why should a nomad, of all people, seek the final refuge of someone who identified themselves ultimately by a particular place, a place in the end as specific as 6 feet of earth? It seemed to signify a contradiction in Caro, but then, Zoe reflected, she was learning fast about contradictions, about how inconsistencies dwelt in everyone and flung them about and made it impossible to expect anything from them except what they chose to hand you at any given moment. Look at Judy, loud in condemnation of her childhood at Tideswell, yet touchy and jealous of Zoe's interest in the farm and her father. Look at Zoe herself, urban through and through, steeped in the knowledge and landscape of the streets, and now fascinated by the complete opposite, by the rooted inevitable ways of the countryside where weather and season presided like gods. Like
bad
gods, Zoe thought now, retrieving a slice of cucumber from her lap, gods that don't want to help, but want to test you. Joe's death had made her think that and she'd thought a lot about it. And about Robin. Robin was the age, roughly, that Zoe's father would have been, if he'd lived; yet Robin wasn't like a father. Perhaps he wasn't for the simple reason that he wasn't Judy's physical father, but only her father by legal arrangement and so part of him had never been exercised by blood fatherhood, as part of Zoe's father had, or part of Joe. It had kept Robin separate, hadn't it? Not exactly undeveloped, but full of potential still, like someone young, someone who still had lots of basic things to do with their lives, with themselves. And didn't that make Robin a bit exciting, a bit unconventional, a bit, well, a bit capable of something he hadn't done yet, but might? Fathers were one thing; men who were fatherhood age but not actually fathers were something else.

Zoe opened the last 3 inches of the baguette and peeled out the sliced vegetables, rolling them into a damp parcel inside a lettuce leaf and cramming them into her mouth. Had Robin envied Joe for having kids? Especially Hughie, with farmers still so stuck in their ways about what girls were good for? And if he had, Zoe thought, chewing, had he just got on with his envy like he got on with milking and mowing and making silage? She stood up, crumpling the paper bag in her hand. A shower of breadcrust crumbs fell onto the floor and the scuffed toes of her boots. Maybe nobody had ever asked him. Maybe, in that funny world where everything seemed so practical and necessary, nobody ever discussed anything that wasn't central to the sheer business of farming. Maybe, Zoe thought, treading crumbs into the carpet on her way to get a drink of water from the kitchen, nobody had ever told Robin that it was OK to have feelings, that everybody had them and nobody should be afraid of them. And if nobody had ever told Robin that, perhaps it was time someone did.

Harry lay on his side, his teeth in a glass of sterilizing solution on the locker beside his bed, and stared out of the window. He could see the long brick wall of Stretton Hospital punctuated by neat windows at regular intervals, and the tops of a row of pink cherry trees that marked the edge of the visitors' car-park. Beyond that he could see the grey tower of a financial services company building and the Victorian spire, encrusted with pseudo-Gothic crockets and finials, of the parish church of St Mary the Virgin and a few roofs and wall-angles and, in the far distance, the peering crane-like floodlights of Stretton Football Ground. It was an ugly view, despite the cherry trees. He didn't like it. He didn't like looking at bricks and mortar. He wanted to be at home. If he had to be in bed – and he couldn't see why he had to be in bed, he was only tired, for God's sake – he'd like to be in his own bed, thank you, with its view of sky and trees and the 10-acre field Joe had left for set-aside this year, where the partridges were nesting.

He wasn't ill, after all. Observation, they said, they were keeping him in for observation. There was nothing to observe, was there? Nothing he couldn't have told them, if they'd asked, but they didn't ask and he wasn't bloody going to volunteer anything. When he'd gone off the night of Joe's funeral, he hadn't meant anything, hadn't intended to do anything, he just needed to be out there, where he and Joe had done things together and where something of Joe still lingered, he was sure of it. He'd been asleep when Robin found him, tucked under the lee of a hedge and sleeping like a baby. He couldn't remember much after that except how angry they all were, especially Dilys, about the mud on his suit, the rip in his jacket. He'd been in his chair in the kitchen while they all shouted at him, and he'd gazed at them all as if he hardly knew them. It occurred to him that it didn't actually matter if he didn't know them. In a minute, Joe would come in and explain. Joe would tell them why Harry had been under a hedge with his eyes shut wearing his best suit at ten o'clock at night.

Now, lying in his hospital bed and looking at the weather-vane on St Mary's steeple, he knew Joe wasn't coming. Dilys came, and Robin came, but Joe wasn't coming. Not now. He supposed he'd known that all along, at some level, but not believed it, like knowing you're going to die some day but not believing that either. The thing was, Joe shouldn't have died. Joe was Harry's son, and fathers died before their sons, didn't they, so that they never had to be without them. The loneliness of Joe not being there, of being without Joe, was something Harry couldn't look at yet except in tiny glances, appalled. It was easier to look at the cherry trees and the grey office block. You could at least hate them. You could hate them for being the wrong view, for not being what you wanted to look at. You could hate them for being town, not country. You could hate them, above all, for being there still, when Joe wasn't.

‘You five?' Gareth's Eddie said. He sat at the kitchen table at Tideswell Farm wearing a ‘Batman For Ever' T-shirt and a sun visor of green transparent plastic.

Hughie said nothing. He stared at his plate on which Eddie's mother Debbie had put a scattering of potato crisps and a cold sausage like a dead finger.

‘Hughie?' Lyndsay said gently, promptingly.

‘Three,' Hughie hissed. Seal was on his lap, under the table. Hughie gripped him.

Eddie rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

‘Three?
Three
? I haven't been three in
years
.'

‘One,' Debbie said.

‘I'll be five come July. July the 13th.' He flipped his visor up. ‘Don't you forget.'

Debbie said to Lyndsay, ‘Take no notice. It's the age gap that does it, with Kevin and Rebecca being that much older.'

‘I got a football,' Eddie said to Hughie. ‘Gary Lineker signed it. What you got?'

‘A cricket bat,' Hughie whispered.

Eddie collapsed sideways.

‘Cricket?
Cricket
? Only nerds play
cricket
.'

‘That's enough,' Debbie said. She had been anxious about this meeting, but her anxiety had been dispelled by the sight of Lyndsay looking so fragile, so drained, so vulnerable, Debbie said later to Gareth, like someone who needed looking after, who was ill. Yet when Robin had asked Debbie to come to the farm, because Lyndsay needed to get out of the house, needed a distraction, and this was all he could think of to divert her just now, Debbie had been very doubtful.

‘What'll I say?' she'd said to Gareth. ‘What'll I do? I mean, she's kind of like the boss's sister-in-law, isn't she, I mean what do I say to her? I can't – well, I can't talk about him. Can I?'

‘Take Eddie,' Gareth said. ‘Eddie's never stuck for something to say. He'll be company for—' He stopped. He'd been going to say ‘For Joe's little lad'. He said, ‘For their kid. For their boy.'

‘What you got there?' Eddie demanded, pointing a sausage at Hughie. ‘What you got on your lap?'

Hughie bowed his head.

‘It's a seal,' Lyndsay said. ‘It's company for him. Have you got something for company?'

‘Nah,' Eddie said scornfully.

‘Not Panda?' Debbie said to him. ‘Not Pink Panther? Not Sonic the Hedgehog?'

Eddie glared at her. He put his sausage down and got off his chair, hitching his jeans up round his skinny waist.

‘I'm going home.'