Pig Island (36 page)

Which was how we came to spend the whole of the next day on the edge of our seats, waiting for the day to crawl across the sky and be over. Thinking that if we could get past his birthday we’d be OK. Which is all very fucking funny, all a fuck-off laugh at my expense, when you consider that by the time his birthday was over it wasn’t Malachi Dove I was thinking about. I’d forgotten to give a shit about him, and where or how they were going to find his body. Because by the night of his birthday the only thing I was thinking of was Lexie and how come it had worked out that she was dead. Of septicaemia. Nine-thirty on 25 September. Age: thirty two.

Part Three
LONDON
FEBRUARY

Oaksey
Chapter 1

There were ten empty Newkie Brown bottles lined up on the bog seat. Ten. I lay in the bath staring blankly at them, trying to work out how long it had taken to drink them. I couldn’t talk myself into getting out of the bath and all the way over to the toilet, but I needed a piss—had needed one for the last twenty minutes, so I could have been here for, what? An hour? Two?

It was four months since Lexie died (‘Sepsis,“ the consultant had said. ”She would have been vulnerable to sepsis from the moment she was admitted and I find it difficult to believe you weren’t warned of the possibility’) and I suppose it’d be fair to say I’d let myself go. I didn’t know if I was more depressed that she was dead than I was depressed Dove had won, after everything. Every time someone found a corpse in Scotland, bones mashed into the side of a rock or something bloated bobbing like a dirty tarpaulin in the sea, they thought it was Dove’s body. But it wasn’t. I’d thought he was going to be easy to find. So I’d been wrong about that too. Some days I thought I knew the answers, others I knew I didn’t.

On the floor my mobile rang. I dropped my hand over the side of the bath and grabbed my jeans, shaking them until the phone fell out of the pocket.

“Are you supposed to use mobiles in the bath?” I asked the phone, staring at it. The display said:
Finn. Answer
? ‘I don’t know. I mean, will it kill me if I do?“ I opened the phone. ”I’m in the bath,“ I said. ”This could kill me.“

“Fucking great,” he said. “It’s two in the afternoon, you’re in the bath and I’m sitting staring at an empty in-box. Was expecting fifteen thousand words and a synopsis by nine this a.m. At the latest. Instead I’ve got six slush-pile manuscripts and a Ghanaian asking me to ship money into his bank account.”

I didn’t answer. I’d been dragging my feet, waiting for Dove’s body to pop up before I committed to a book deal. But I knew I was losing it: a lot of what had happened out on Cuagach had already been released—the public knew about the pig corpses, the gargoyles, what life in the Psychogenic Healing Ministries was like. Two ex-members had already signed publishing deals for their stories. The story, the whole purpose behind the last six months, was slipping through my fingers.

“He’s dead, Oakes. Dead. Can you hear me?”

I lifted my foot out of the water and studied it. It was pink and wrinkled into magnified folds, like the skin on a baby rat. I tried to turn the hot tap on with my toe, but it wouldn’t budge.

‘
Oakes
,“ Finn snapped. ”Can you hear me?“

I pushed the tap harder. When that didn’t work I changed my strategy and stuck my toe up it instead. I looked at it for a moment or two, then laughed. I was thinking about an old film where a plumber comes into the bathroom and finds some blonde or other with her toe stuck in a tap. I laughed again, liking the way my voice echoed off the walls.

“Oakes, you are weirding me out here. You’re laughing. Can you hear yourself?
Laughing
.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I’ve got my toe in the tap. It’s funny.”

There was a long, cold silence. “Joe, you can sit there laughing because you’ve got your toe in the fucking tap, but out here in the real world there are articles every day about what happened on Cuagach—something only this morning about his Mexican wife, Asunción. She died on the mainland two years ago, did you know that?”

“Yes. I knew.”

There was a moment’s silence. I stared at my toe. Even more like a rat now. A rat with its nose up a tap.

“Oakes, you’re hurting for money, am I right?”

I pulled my toe out, letting my foot splash into the water. “Yeah,” I said dully. “You’re right.” I’d gone a long time without a paycheck. My syndication-agency accounts stood at zero. Worse, when I got back to London I’d discovered the hole Lexie had got herself into without telling me. She’d run up an overdraft of over three K on our joint account, paying her therapist seventy quid a pop. There was a P45 in the mail, too, from the clinic. Another part of her life she’d forgotten to mention.

“And then,” said Finn, “yesterday I hear how some hack from Glasgow is auctioning
his
story. Reckons he’s interviewed some of the major players in the police
and
the clean-up crew out on the island. Says they let him inside the temporary mortuary and what he’s saying is there’re photos.”

“I’ve got pictures from the mortuary,” I said coldly. “I told you already—‘

“I know, but that was
more than four months ago
.”

“Yes. And in those four months I lost my wife.”

Finn sighed. “I’m sorry, I really am. But you’re acting like you’re on some fucking candyfloss cloud floating across the sky. Now, listen. I’m going to tell you what to do.” I could hear him switch off his computer and swivel round in his chair. “First, get me those words. Don’t worry about Dove, just do it. Then I want you to talk to that kid.”

“Kid?”

“The one who pulled the video hoax. The one arsing around with the devil suit. He’s important to the story. Did you speak to him yet?”

I hesitated. I looked at the winter sunlight making stars of the condensation on the window. Angeline was out there in the garden. She’d come down to London with me, waiting until they found Malachi’s body and the probate began. I knew it was a mistake. I’d given her the front room with the fold-out guest futon, the one printed with the bright orange flowers that Lexie had been nuts about, and she stayed in there day after day, the door closed tight, coming out only to cook or to go into the garden. She spent hours outside, digging and planting vegetables, sometimes even in the dark. But most of all she spent time watching me. She would sit at the kitchen table, her chin in her hands, and stare at me, like she was expecting me to say something. It’d got so I didn’t look at her. I knew if I did I’d have to go into a part of my head I didn’t want to open.

“Well?” Finn said. “Have you got an interview with the kid? Without an interview it comes across like you’ve taken your eye off the ball. It comes across sloppy.”

“Then you know what?”

“What?”

“That’s probably because I am sloppy. In fact, you know what? I’m so sloppy that right now I’m pissing in my bath-water. It’s gone cold, so I’m pissing in it while I’m talking to you.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “No, you’re not. Don’t talk sick.”

“I am.” I closed my eyes, relaxed my muscles and the urine leaked out of me across my thighs. “Told you.”

“Jesus, Oakes. What’s happening to you? What’s happening? You’ve got to pull yourself together …‘

I dropped the phone on the floor and lay back in the bath. The condensation hung like teardrops from the ceiling—the whole bathroom was soaked with steam. No wonder it’s cold: the bathroom is stealing my heat, I thought, and suddenly I was crying. I was trembling and crying and holding my hands up to my face, shaking my head and crying like a baby. I got up, sobbing angrily.
You just pissed yourself, for fuck’s sake. Where’s this going to end
? I unplugged the bath, turned on the shower and stood under it, exhausted, self-pitying sobs jerking out of me while the cold water rained down on me and the pissy water disappeared down the plug-hole between my toes.

Chapter 2

Me and Lex had lived in that house just off the Harrow Road for almost four years. The Victorian semis round there all had driveways and side entrances and were highly desirable, according to the local estate agents, who kept poking their leaflets through the letterbox. But I knew my house let the neighbourhood down, with its peeling windows and the cellar stuffed full of crap the previous owner had left: paint pots, kitchen tiles, a rusting old fridge-freezer I’d never had the guts to open. When me and Angeline got back from Scotland in December—after four months of the house being locked up—you could smell the cellar coming up through the floorboards. The first thing I did, while she put on the heating and swept dead flies from the windowsills, was go down there and open the door to the garden just to let some air in. That was five weeks ago and I hadn’t thought about it again. I’d opened it and never got round to closing it.

It was Tuesday. The day after Finn called. I sat under the diseased old apple tree, hunched against the cold in my thin sweater, and stared at the cellar door, trying to find the energy to get up and do something about it. In the corner of the garden Angeline was forking over the hard clay, her breath hanging in the air. When I came out to the garden to be with her like this we almost never spoke, and in spite of the small sounds of her breathing and the fork clicking against a pebble, a silence had come down over the garden that felt like it belonged to the darkest part of winter. If this had been the weekend the neighbours would be out in the alley that ran along the bottom of the fences, wheel-barrowing bags of mushroom compost and topsoil down to their gardens, but today the neighbourhood was deserted. We were the only people outside and all the windows looking down at us were blank sockets, bare branches reflecting back from the panes.

Angeline worked intently, jamming the fork into the ground, making small grunts, occasionally stooping to pull out a root or a piece of stone and throw it into a pile. She wore a scarf, mud-congealed boots and a thick hemp skirt. Her hair had grown in, very dark and curly. Whenever she bent, the extra limb strained against the fabric of the skirt in shadowy outlines.

“What?” she said, straightening up. The work and the cold had brought the blood to her face and against the stony colours of the garden her skin was vivid. She pushed some stray strands of hair back into the scarf. “What’re you staring at?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’re staring at me. What’s wrong? You know what’s under my coat—you saw it—so why are you staring now?”

I let all my breath out at once. My pulse began to move a bit. So today was the day we were going to talk about it.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You saw it, but you’ve never once said what you really think.” She was flushed now. Her knuckles, where she was pressing the fork into the ground, had gone white. “Joe? What did you think? Of my twin? My twin?”

I stared at her, not blinking. I couldn’t answer. Just couldn’t get a single word out. I didn’t know what I thought. I’d read Lexie’s letters. I’d spoken to Guy Picot and somewhere I had a vague idea I’d dealt with it, fitted it somehow into my head. But I was finding good ways of not thinking about it. It was locked away somewhere. Just locked in a place I didn’t want to go.

“Well?”

I stood, avoiding her eyes. I crossed the frozen ground to where the wind had opened the gate to the alley just a fraction, so a section of shingled ground was visible through the crack. I waited for a second or two, wondering if I could say anything. Nothing came to me. I pulled the gate closed, kicking a stone against it to jam it there. I looked at the gate, at the stone wedged at the bottom, then turned back to Angeline.

“You know something? You know when I’ll feel better?”

“No. When will you feel better?”

“When they’ve found your dad’s body.” I went and closed the cellar door and stood, brushing my hands off, looking up at the featureless blanket of cloud above us. “But I suppose you know that already.”

In the kitchen I opened a bottle of Newkie Brown and sat at the table. Outside it was getting dark and the clouds had that heavy look, like they might start spitting out hailstones any minute. I sat on the chair, upright, my hands on my knees, my heart thudding. I tried to read the paper. But I couldn’t. On the wall the clock was ticking dead loud.

After about ten minutes the door opened. At first I thought it was the wind, but then she came in, bringing rain and dead leaves. She didn’t see me sitting there in the dark. She stopped on the mat and stamped the mud off her feet, so hard you’d think she was pissed off with the floor. She levered one boot off with her heel and was about to start on the other when she realized I was there. She froze, one boot on, one off. Her eyes rolled round to me.

“What?” I said, guilty of being in my own kitchen. “What?”

She shook her head. She began to say something, but instead closed her eyes and suddenly she was breathing very fast and hard, like she was ill. Then all these tears came out of her eyes and dribbled down her face and on to her chin.

“Oh, Christ.” I was on my feet next to her, not knowing what to do. I kind of patted her shoulder cautiously, not leaving my hand there for too long. The way you’d pat an animal you thought might bite. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I really am.”

She turned away from me so her face was against the wall, put her hands over her ears and just cried and cried, like she was crying for everything that had ever happened to her. We stood there, me kind of shocked, useless, without the guts to put my arms round her; her with her forehead pressed into the wall, her shoulders jerking up and down.

‘When’s it going to be over, Joe? When?“

“When’s what going to be over?”

“This. This—this …‘ She could hardly get the words out, she was trembling so much. ’
You’re paralysed, Joe, just paralysed, and I don’t know why. I mean, you read the letter. You know what she did
.”