Playing for the Ashes (69 page)

“I’ll show
you
a deal,” Derrick snarled,
fli
pping his head up into Mr. Friskin’s face.

The solicitor didn’t so much as
fli
nch. He said quietly and with utterly polite reason, “Ms. Cooper, make a decision for us, please. Who would you like to handle your son’s case?”

Jeannie said, “Der,” in admonishment. “Let Jim be. Mr. Friskin knows what’s best.”

Derrick dropped Jimmy’s arm like it was made of slime. “Stupid bugger,” he said. Spittle from the first word hit Jimmy’s cheek. The boy winced, but he didn’t lift a hand to wipe the spittle away.

Jeannie said to her brother, “Go on up to Stan. He’s been puking like a drunk since Jimmy went off.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her older son raise his head at that, but he’d lowered it again by the time she turned to him.

Der said, “Yeah. Right,” and cast a sneer at both Jimmy and Mr. Friskin before he trudged up the stairs, shouting, “Stan! Oy! You still got your head in the toilet?”

Jeannie said, “Sorry,” to Mr. Friskin. “Der doesn’t always think before he blows off.”

Mr. Friskin made noises like it was an everyday thing to have the uncle of a suspect breathing in his face like a bull that was going for the matador’s cape. He explained that Jimmy had handed over his Doc Martens at the request of the police, that he’d allowed himself to be fingerprinted and photographed, that he’d given them several strands of his hair.

“Hair?” Jeannie’s eyes went to the matted mess on her son’s head.

“They’re either matching it to samples from within the cottage or using it for DNA typing. If it’s the first, their specialists can do it within hours. If it’s the second, we’ve bought ourselves a few weeks.”

“What’s it all mean?”

They were building a case, Mr. Friskin told her. They didn’t have a complete confession yet.

“But they got enough?”

“To hold him? To charge him?” Mr. Friskin nodded. “If they want to.”

“Then why’d they let him go? Is that the end of it, then?”

No, Mr. Friskin told her. That wasn’t the end. They had something up their sleeves. She could rest assured that they would be back. But when that happened, he’d be with Jimmy.

There was no chance the police would talk to the boy alone again.

He said, “Have you any questions, Jim?” and when Jimmy slung his head to one side in place of reply, Mr. Friskin handed Jeannie his card, said, “Try not to worry, Ms. Cooper,” and left them.

When the door closed behind him, Jeannie said, “Jim?” She reached for the Tesco’s bag and took it, laying it on the coffee table with deliberate care as if it contained pieces of hand-blown glass. Jimmy stayed where he was, weight on one hip, right arm moving to clasp left elbow. His toes curled against the floor like his feet were cold. “Want your slippers?” she asked him. He lifted a shoulder and dropped it. “I’ll heat you some soup. I got tomato with rice, Jim. You come with me.”

She expected resistance, but he followed her into the kitchen. He’d just sat at the table when the back door opened with a screech and Shar came in. She closed the door and stood with her back to it, hands reaching behind her to hold on to the knob. Her nose was red and her specs were smudged in big half circles along the bottom. She gazed at her brother, wide eyed and wordless. She gulped and Jeannie saw her lips quivering, saw her mouth the word
Dad
but fail to say it. Jeannie nodded her head in the direction of the stairway. Shar looked as if she meant to disobey, but at the final moment when a sob burst from her, she fled the kitchen and hurtled up the stairs.

Jimmy slumped in his chair. Jeannie opened the tin of soup and dumped it into a pan. She set the pan on the cooker, fumbled about with a knob, and failed on two attempts to produce the required flame. She muttered, “Damn.” She knew that this moment with her son was precious. She understood that the slightest glitch in moving this precious moment forward might be all that was required to demolish it entirely. And it couldn’t be demolished. Not until she knew.

She heard him stir. The chair pushed on the lino. She said hastily, “Got to get a new cooker sometime, huh?” to try to keep him with her. And, “It’ll be ready in a tick now, Jim,” when she thought he would leave. But instead of leaving, he went to a drawer. He brought out a box of matches. He lit one, held it to the burner, and produced the flame. The match burnt down between his fingers like it had done on Friday night. Only unlike Friday night, she was closer to him, so when the flame sizzled down the wood to his skin, she was near enough to blow it out.

He was taller than her now, she realised. Soon he’d be as tall as his dad. It didn’t seem that long ago that she’d been able to look down into his upturned face, even less long ago that they were eye to eye. And now she lifted her chin to see him. He was only part boy and larger part man.

“Cops didn’t hurt you?” she asked. “They didn’t mess you about?” He shook his head. He turned to go but she grasped his wrist. He tried to pull away. She held
fir
m.

Two days of agonising were enough, she decided. Two days of inwardly saying,
No I won’t, no I can’t
, had gained her no information, no understanding, and more than that, no peace of mind. She thought, How did I lose you, Jimmy? Where? When? I wanted to be strong for all of us, but I only ended up pushing you away when you needed me. I thought if I showed how much I could take the hurts of what happened and not fall to bits, the three of you’d learn to take the hurts as well. But that’s not how it was, was it, Jimmy? That’s not how it is.

And because she knew that she’d
fin
ally reached a degree of understanding she’d not had before, she found the courage. “Tell me what you told the police,” she said.

His face looked like it hardened, round the eyes first, then the mouth and the jaw. He didn’t attempt to pull away again, but he directed his attention from her to the wall above the cooker where for years had hung a framed piece of needlepoint. It was faded now and spotted with grease, but you could still read the words that scrolled across the green-and-white background of cricketers and wicket:
The match ain’t over when the over is over
, a joke-present for Kenny from his mother-inlaw. Jeannie realised she should have removed it long ago.

“Tell me,” she said. “Talk to me, Jimmy. I did things wrong. But I did them for the best. You got to know that, son. And you got to know that I love you. Always. You got to talk to me now. I got to know about you and Wednesday night.”

He shuddered, so strong it felt like a spasm went from his shoulders down to his toes.

Tentatively, she firmed her grip on his wrist. He didn’t pull away a second time. She moved her hand from his wrist, to his arm, to his shoulder. She ventured a touch against his hair.

“You tell me,” she said. “You talk to me, son.” And then she added what she had to add but didn’t believe for a moment and didn’t know how to begin to accomplish, “I won’t let nothing hurt you, Jim. We’ll get through this somehow. But I need to know what you told them.”

She waited for him to ask the logical question:
Why
? But he didn’t. The tomato soup sent up wafts of fragrance from the cooker, and she stirred it without looking, her eyes fixed on her son. Fear, knowledge, disbelief, and denial all thrashed inside her like food gone bad, but she tried to keep them from showing on her face and from echoing in the tone of her voice.

“When I was fourteen, I first started messing about with your dad,” she said. “I wanted to be like my sisters and they messed about with blokes regular enough so I thought why shouldn’t I do the same, I’m as good as them any day of the week.” Jimmy kept his gaze on the needlepoint. Jeannie stirred the soup and went on. “We had our fun, we did, only my dad found out because your auntie Lynn told him. So Dad took off his belt one night when I got home from messing with Kenny and he made me take off every stitch I was wearing and he beat me proper while the family watched. I didn’t cry. But I hated him. I wanted him dead. I would of been glad if he’d dropped on the spot. Maybe I would of done something myself to help him along.”

She reached for a bowl from the cupboard. She ventured a glance at her son as she ladled soup from the pot into the bowl. “Smells good, this. You want toast with it, Jim?”

His expression was something between wary and confused. She wasn’t describing it like she wanted to, that mix of rage and humiliation that made her for a single blind instant will her father to die a thousand times. Jimmy didn’t understand. Perhaps because their rages were different, hers a brief firestorm, his a single smouldering coal that burned on and on.

She took the soup to the table. She poured him milk. She made him toast. She laid the meal out and gestured him to it. He stayed where he was by the cooker.

She made the only remark there was left to make, one she didn’t believe, but one she had to persuade him to accept if she was ever to know the truth. “What matters is what’s left of us,” she said. “You and me, Stan and Shar. That’s how it is, Jim.”

He looked from her to the soup. She motioned to the bowl welcomingly and sat at the table herself, in a place that would put her opposite him should he decide to join her. He wiped his hands along the seams of his blue jeans. His
fin
gers curled.

“Bastard,” he said conversationally. “He started fucking her last October, and she kept him running round proper, she did. He said they were just friends because she was married to that rich bloke, but I knew, didn’t I? Shar would ask him when he was coming home, and he’d say in a while, in a month or two, when I know who I am, when I know how things are. He’d say don’t you worry about nothing, luv. But all the time, he meant to have her when he could. He’d put his hand on her bum when he thought no one was looking. If he hugged her, she’d rub up against his cock. And all the time you could tell what they really wanted which was for us to be gone so that they could do it.”

Jeannie wanted to stop up her ears. This wasn’t the recitation she had been seeking. But she forced herself to listen. She kept her face blank and said to herself that she didn’t care. She already knew, didn’t she, and this portion of the truth could not touch her further.

“He wasn’t Dad any longer,” Jimmy said. “He was only in a twist about her. She’d phone and he’d be off to sniff her up. She’d say leave me be, Ken, and he’d punch his fist into walls. She’d say I need or I want and he’d rush right there, doing whatever’d make her happy. And when he was through with her, he’d—” Jimmy stopped himself but kept staring at the soup, as if he saw the history of the tired affair playing out in the bowl.

“And when he was through with her…” Jeannie spoke past the spear-pain that she’d grown to know well.

Her son gave a derisive snort. “You know, Mum.” He finally came across the kitchen and sat at the table, opposite her. “He was a liar. He was a bastard. And a bleeding cheat.” He dipped his spoon into the soup. He held it at the height of his chin. He met her eyes for the first time since coming home. “And you wanted him dead. You wanted him dead more ’n anything, Mum. We both know that, don’t we?”

OLIVIA

F
rom where I’m sitting, I can see the glow of Chris’s reading light. I can hear him turn pages every so often. He ought to have gone to bed long ago, but he’s reading in his room, waiting for me to finish my writing. The dogs are with him. I can hear Toast snoring. Beans is chewing on a rawhide bone. Panda came in to keep me company half an hour ago. She started off in my lap, but now she’s curled on the dresser in her special place—on top of the day’s post, which she has rearranged to her liking. She pretends to be asleep, but she isn’t fooling me. Every time I flip another sheet of the pad, her ears turn my way like radar.

I lift the mug from which I drank my Gunpowder tea, and I examine the speckling of leaves that managed to escape the strainer.

They’ve arranged themselves into a pattern that resembles a rainbow overhung with a bolt of lightning. I touch my pencil tip to the lightning to straighten it, and I wonder what a fortune teller would make of such a combination of auspicious and inauspicious signs.

Last week when Max and I were playing poker—using dog kibble to make our wagers— he set his cards facedown on the table, leaned back in his chair, and running his hand over his bald pate, said, “It’s a dunghill, girlie. No doubt about that.”

“Hmm. Precisely.”

“But there are distinct advantages to a dunghill, you know.”

“Which I imagine you’re about to reveal.”

“Used properly, dung helps
flo
wers grow.”

“As does bat guano, but I’d rather not roll around in it.”

“Not to mention crops. It enriches the soil from which life springs.”

“I’ll treasure that thought.” I moved my cards about, as if a new arrangement would change the single pair of fours to something better.

“Knowing when, girlie. Have you thought about the power of knowing when?”