Post Mortem (13 page)

And that had been the truth. She hadn't necessarily intended to do what he told her, but she had wanted him to stop speaking in code.

‘If it was me . . . I would talk to Hadley and find out what really happened when he was with Farah and you were in the kitchen. It needs to be just you and him and you need to talk bottom line. Then you'll know what to do.'

‘So you haven't submitted the file yet.'

He shook his head. ‘No, I was waiting for you to decide what you wanted to do.'

To decide?
She hadn't quite realized that some sort of decision was expected from her.

‘Be sure of yourself. Don't get yourself in the shit, Lizzie. Or me, for that matter. Have a think and let me know what you want to do. If you want to talk to Hadley, I'll make sure you're posted in a car on a night shift. Until then, you're not working together.'

He swung the car off the slip road and round the feed lane into Paddington station. Her hand was already on the door handle. She was in danger of missing her train. He had to get in for late turn and was now in a hurry. But he reached out and she felt his hand on her shoulder.

‘Haven't you forgotten something?'

For a minute she felt as she did when she made some rookie error, like failing to enter an interview in the custody record. But Kieran was smiling at her. He leaned across the car to kiss her, his hand caressing the back of her neck.

‘Mum's the word, eh?' he said.

The Asian taxi driver who picked Lizzie up at the station needed to unburden himself about his brother's success in investing in the local property market. Lizzie, making muted sounds of approval, tuned him out. How badly everyone needed to be listened to! She had read somewhere that people spent ninety per cent of their time thinking about themselves. Her phone pinged and she ferreted it out from her bag. It was a text from Kieran:
OK?

She texted back:
OK. U?

There was no reply and she put her phone back in her bag. Watching the suburban streets threading out with their PVC windows and waxy camellias in tidy front gardens, she battled an impulse to ask the driver to turn back to the station. She remembered spying through the open door of the kitchen. The window streaming with rivulets of condensed steam. Her mother hissing bitterly at her father: ‘You refuse to do well.'

Too soon the cab was drawing up outside her parents' house. She paid the driver and let herself in quietly with her own key. Before stepping into the sitting room, she stood in the hallway for a moment like a diver slowly surfacing, carefully acclimatizing herself to a different atmospheric pressure.

Her father sat upright in the special chair her mother had bought for him. Tapestried upholstery struggled to hide the chair's nature, but a cable stretching from the back of it to the wall gave the game away. A cushion supported her father's back. All around were the trappings of her mother's efforts to keep him alive. The sliding doors to the dining room were closed on the bed the hospital had provided. Lizzie could hear her mother fretting in the kitchen. She tried to hide her horror at her father's emaciated state. She said, ‘Dad,' and attempted a smile that she felt emerged instead as a grimace.

‘No,' he said, shaking his head at her brief confusion. ‘No, no, don't worry, Lizzie.' He reached out a hand to her. It was skeletal, already mummified. ‘What have you been up to?'

Her mother entered with optimistic tea and cake. ‘Lizzie.' She hesitated briefly as though considering an embrace and then thinking better of it. She began to fuss around her husband, rearranging the cushion behind his back. He was a failing idol, rigid in his chair but still exacting tribute with his skull face.

‘Will you be able to stay the night?'

‘I told you, Mum. I'm on duty tomorrow. Early turn.'

The doorbell rang.

‘That'll be the vicar,' said her mother.

Lizzie could not stifle it. ‘Did you have to arrange for him to come the one afternoon I was here?'

Her mother matched her. She spoke in an angry hush. ‘Your father asked to see him. Be polite.'

The vicar had a thin, drawn face and long-fingered hands. With his dog collar, dark jacket and comfortable crêpe-soled shoes, there was nothing to like about the man: he was no smiling Anglican in a rainbow surplice. Rather there was – it seemed to Lizzie in her temper – an unmerited complacency about him. Like an old copper who had got the job off pat. With the air of a man familiar with the preamble to death in centrally heated homes, he folded himself into one of the armchairs and commented favourably on the aspect across the road to the playing fields opposite.

‘Yes, we bought it for the view,' her mother said, and Lizzie thought of bulrushes and bog land, long gone.

‘The sun sets over the fields,' her father said.

Lizzie said, ‘If you'll excuse me, Vicar.'

As she went to join her mother in the kitchen, her phone pinged again and she saw, with a sudden flash of joy, that it was another text from Kieran:
All good. OK?

Good. Back for early turn tomorrow
.

Her father had summoned her here, closed her within this semi-detached airlock of double-glazing and cavity wall insulation, but soon she would flee this place! Inside her a pocket of reverie was protecting her, a corner in which something was germinating, like a seed uncurling in a dark cellar. Perhaps this would become something more enduring than a one-night stand and the memory of a winding rose tattoo.

Pills were lined up on the side in a plastic container with multiple partitions. Yellows, light blues, cheerful reds. It occurred to Lizzie that someone had invented the specialized container: that somewhere there was a factory that made plastic boxes suitable only for holding different dosages of pills in promising colours. Her mother was tidying an already tidy kitchen, wiping down clean tops, dragging around a seething resentment. Her parents' life together seemed to be run along the lines of a barely concealed competition for moral superiority. Lizzie raged inwardly that neither of them was prepared to shoulder the blame for Eve biting the apple. Her mother's resentment was as threatening as a spark to tinder. Lizzie had a pile of it, a whole woodshed, inside her ready to flame. That's what I am, she thought, I'm an internal combustion engine. You could harness me to the National Grid and cut down on CO
₂
emissions. Hardly a word had been spoken, but somehow she and her mother were already arguing. Lizzie stifled the flames: there would be no fight. Her father was dying.

‘I'm going for a walk until the vicar leaves,' she said to her mother.

She walked out over the playing fields. They were hard and dry, firm underfoot, and she remembered a different time, when there had been marshland, and kestrels had hovered above. Once she had found a grass snake, emerald and jewelled against the new road's fresh black tarmac. It had seemed to her a visitor from a land as foreign as Narnia. And like such a visitor, it could not survive
long in the alien planet's atmosphere. One of the other children prodded it with a stick and it responded with a weary undulation that travelled like tired electricity through its coils.

Her sister had said, ‘Lizzie, run and fetch Dad.'

He had arrived with a perfect understanding of the urgency and lifted the snake into his hands. The children gasped at his bravery. His hands seemed so strong and capable; the snake must now surely be saved. He turned it over and found the injury. ‘The poor thing has probably been hit by a car,' he said. ‘There's nothing we can do.' He had walked towards the longer grass, the children trailing behind him in the lengthening afternoon light. He bent down and placed the snake in a hollow in the earth. ‘Its best chance,' he explained, ‘is to leave it here quiet in the long grass. I want you children to leave it alone.'

He stood sentinel and the children wandered away in search of other activities. They knocked on neighbours' doors and asked for old newspapers for recycling, daring the adults not to believe them. They took the papers up the hill behind the house and set fire to them. In a ditch in the wood the glorious conflagration leapt and soared. The local constable arrived and they crouched in the bushes watching him stamping it out. It was Tracey's dad; he lived in one of the old police houses across the way.

Later, as the sun was setting, Lizzie had gazed out of the window towards the marshland where the snake still lay. Her parents were arguing in the kitchen, behind the half-closed door. Plumes of steam rose from the hob and condensed on the window in streams and pools.

‘Why do you do it?' her mother hissed.

‘Really,
Paki
?'

‘OK, they shouldn't use words like that, but still . . . What one child says to another is not worth adults arguing about. There's a way to say things and the way you do it you won't make any difference.
You won't change anyone's opinion. The only difference you will make is to your own family.'

Lizzie ran out of the side door.

Her mother called out to her, ‘Don't be long. I'm serving.'

She ran across the road and through the boggy field to where they had left the snake. She was at the edge here – the house, with its orange electric light, was a remote outpost, a lighthouse winking on the meniscus of a darkening sea of rippling sedge. She found the snake a few feet away, dead. It seemed an almost wilful act, as though, in defiance of those who had come and invaded this previously remote place, it had chosen to die.

Over the following two years, as the fresh houses settled into the land, the earth had thrown up its treasures like one last offering. Clay pipes, fossils, dead birds; all were cast out. The land was shedding itself of colour and variety. Once Lizzie had wandered by herself the two or three miles down the lane and found the gypsy camp, tucked into a bend in the hedgerow. There were only a couple of caravans. She stood at the perimeter and watched. Catkins were hanging down like lambs' tails. Washing blew in the cold breeze. A child poked about with a stick in a muddy puddle.

The house now seemed peculiarly equal to her in all its different epochs, as though it existed outside time. Perched on the edge of land that had once been tussocky farmland but was now a bland suburban park, it had distilled into something smaller but more intense in her imagination.

Dusk was already drawing in, and against the darkening sky the clouds were washed with crimson light. She turned to study the house, imagining it holding the past, like a shaken snow globe with the snow still falling. But it was the present, and her parents were old and failing. An ambulance was pulling up outside. In the dusk, its lights were preternaturally blue, like strange celebrations.

She could not run fast enough. Still she tried, because that was always going to be preferable to surrendering to the other possibility: that she had spent long hours on the train but her mother had still contrived to cheat her of the moment her father needed her. She was a good sprinter and she concentrated on her technique. Head in line with the spine, chin down. Smooth action of the arms. Hands relaxed, fingers curled. She felt her power, the roll and drive of her feet. Her arms punching. Her lungs sucking in oxygen. The land climbed towards the house. The body might want to give up, but that was when you dug for a bit more strength. The last part of any race was all about being mentally stronger than your opponent. You thought running would kill you, but it didn't. And afterwards you were always stronger than you had been before.

She climbed the bank, still sprinting, to see the ambulance pulling away, its winking lights disappearing along the darkening road.

Her lungs hurt. She leaned over and spat.

Her father was dead before he reached the hospital.

19 APRIL

21

T
he man was heavyset, maybe thirty or forty years old, wearing a parka with a furry hood, paint-stained trousers and trainers. Lizzie didn't know how she had fallen asleep in spite of the cold, but now she was confused and it was hard to wake. The man was standing over her, looking at her. He shook her shoulder and spoke with a foreign accent, Polish probably.

‘You all right?'

‘Mmm.'

‘What you doing here?'

She was trying to get up, but it wasn't easy. ‘Nothing,' she said. ‘I'm going now.'

He reached down and helped her up. ‘You cold. It's OK. I give you lift. You want lift? I go for breakfast. You want I buy you breakfast?'

In his van he took off his parka and switched the heating on full.

He said, ‘You sleep in garage, you need keep warm.'

‘Yeah, yeah. You're right.'

‘Serious,' he insisted. ‘Is serious.'

She ordered the full English – beans, sausages, fried eggs, bacon, bubble and squeak, the works – and tried to warm her hands with a big mug of milky coffee. At first the sounds of the place were distant, but gradually she felt the volume returning to normal. She was able to notice the pictures of footballers on the walls, the large-breasted
woman serving behind the counter. The café, it turned out, was piping hot and smelled of fried meat.