Something Might Happen (3 page)

Yeah, yeah, says Max, ignoring him.

Just normal milk, says Connor, looking anxious. No lumps.

I love these boys. I love them just about as much as my own—my Nat, my Jordan, my Rosa, my Liv. When they were
born, I was the third person in the world to hold them—after Lennie, after Al.

Connor pulls up his T-shirt with a basketball player on and looks at me.

Look, he says.

What? Look at what?

At this.

He stretches backwards. So skinny I can see right through him—through to the blood that threads between his little snappy
bones. Nipples so tiny, like an afterthought that you can’t believe in. A network of pale blue and mauve. Goose pimples.

You’re cold, I tell him. Haven’t you got anything to put on? Where’s your pyjama top?

I don’t like it, he says. And I’m not cold.

He stares at me and shivers, still holding up the T-shirt. He has got it, all of Lennie’s whiteness—her creamy skin and hair,
a real, milky blondeness you think you can taste on your tongue.

Connor, I say, what am I supposed to be looking at?

This, he says, indicating a small, scrubby mauve tattoo on his breastbone. Already coming off.

And this—

Pulling his elbow round to show me the snake tattoo curled there, It’s not real, he says. It soaks off.

He rubs at it, frowning.

Wow, I say. Great.

It’s from a comic.

The Beano
, supplies Max, mouth spilling cereal.

Has Jordan got one? Connor asks me.

Um, I don’t think so.

Jordan’s too old for
The Beano
, Max informs him.

Shut up!

Mum’s getting a real tattoo, Max tells me, keeping his eyes on my face. On her bum.

Connor whips around, to see if he means it.

She is! Max insists, laughing now. Connor relaxes and his eyes rest on Liv.

Why’s she here?

Because she’s too little to leave behind.

He gazes at her thoughtfully. Like Lennie too he has no eyebrows—just a ridge of white-blonde hair. And where are the others?
he says. Where’s Jordan?

At home asleep, I tell him. Why aren’t you asleep? It’s dreadfully early.

Something made me wake up, he says. I don’t know what.

Liv makes an upset noise and I pull her out of the seat and lay her on a blanket on the floor. It’s not the cleanest—stained
with old Ribena and covered in dog hairs. Liv lies there, almost happy for a second, then suddenly and inexplicably not so
happy—kicking, fast and angry and breathless. Building to a wail.

I pick her back up and she pants furiously, rescued from herself.

I want Mum, says Connor.

Shut up, says Max in a vicious monotone.

Shush, Max, I say, be nice.

I’m not nice, Max says.

I do, says Connor, I want her. Where is she?

Sweetie, I say and touch his head.

I joggle Liv up and down to keep her quiet. Every time I stop she takes a breath, ready to cry, so I joggle her again and
the breath subsides unhappily.

Max gets up and windmills the air with an extended right arm, practising his bowling technique. After that, he hops around
the room on one leg, hugging himself, the sleeves of his pyjamas stretched right down beyond his wrists.

OK, I say, do you want to see what’s on TV?

No, says Max.

Can’t you go now? asks Connor with a little wail in his voice. Can’t Mummy get up?

Didn’t you listen? She’s not here you stupid fat moron, Max tells him, lunging suddenly and shooting a hand from a flopping
sleeve just long enough to pinch him hard on the thigh.

Quickly, Connor slams his hand into Max’s face. The TV remote control falls to the floor and the casing splits off.

Now look what you’ve done you little bastard, says Max.

He’s not allowed to say that, says Connor.

He looks at me to see what I’ll do and then when I do nothing he begins to cry and so does Liv.

OK, I tell them, I’m going to sit down and see if I can feed Liv. Who wants a chocolate biscuit?

They’re for Saturday, Connor says helplessly.

Never mind. I’m in charge. Have one now.

What, in the morning? says Max, eyes fixed on my chilly, half-bared breast. But he gets the packet and helps himself to one
anyway.

Outside, the sky is losing its thickness and blackness. Soon, if you were to go upstairs and stand in Lennie and Alex’s wide,
bare bedroom you’d be able to make out the two rigid funnels of smoke rising from the Harriman’s Brewery.

Mick rings. Behind his voice are all the ordinary sounds of our house: Rosa shrieking, Fletcher barking, Nat shouting at him
to shut up.

Mick shouting at them to be quiet.

What’s going on? he says. I tell him I don’t know.

Where’s Alex?

You mean you haven’t heard anything?

No.

I take a breath. It’s hard to know what to say with the boys listening. Mick knows what I’m thinking.

Don’t, Tess, he says, it’ll be OK.

Silence. Max is screwing the Yoyo wrappers into a hard, green foil ball.

Shall I come and get the boys, then? Take them all to school?

I don’t know—I begin.

I’ve got to take this lot.

I don’t know, I say. I mean, should they go to school?

Come on, he says, of course they should go. What else are they going to do today?

I catch Max’s face watching me, then turning to see if he can flick Connor on the back of his head with the ball. Livvy begins
to cry: a slow, spiralling wail.

In his heart, or so he tells people later, Alex already knows. It can happen. That the usual rules melt away and you just
find you know things. Facts queue up and slide, unasked, into your head, ears, heart.

Or, maybe it’s true. Maybe Lennie’s pain and dying does somehow get to him across the car park, over the tangly dark of Bartholomew’s
Green and down into Spinner’s Lane. Or, more likely, is it just that when the worst things happen, time isn’t the same any
more? It twangs and collides and you can’t any longer tell the hot and dirty moment when you knew from the clean, sweet, cold
one when you didn’t.

Alex’s father killed himself when he was twelve and Alex was the one who found him there on the landing with the inside of
his head pouring black stuff on the carpet. He always holds this fact up as a blanket—a protection against anything else happening.
You can see why. Shouldn’t he be safe now? Hasn’t he had the worst? Hasn’t he?

Alex is in the police station for a very long time. The longest hour of his life, he tells people later. Finally two police
officers come to find him. One is called Mawhinney.
He’s not from here—that’s how he knows it’s serious. He’s a black-haired, slightly European-looking man with big thick wrists
and straight dark hair poking up beneath the collar of his shirt. A funny name, he’ll remember it. It’s about to be dawn but
the air still holds the cloaked-off smell of night. Dim and quiet. Despite that, in the black conifer between the police station
and Flook’s newsagent’s next door, a single blackbird is singing its heart out. Alex keeps hearing it, poor fucker, coping
with the whole dawn chorus alone.

Slowly, through the tiny square of window, the light grows less dirty, shrubs and telegraph wires get more distinct. Alex
remembers this. He tells me later that he remembers every detail of that room, that place, every sound, every smell. As if
his body is on high alert: unable to stop itself from taking everything in.

And he is sitting at a table and smoking. And he hasn’t touched his tea which tastes horrible, of the machine, but he has
a pack of freshly opened cigarettes in front of him.

I keep trying to give up, he tells the duty officer behind the desk. And then something happens and I start up all over again.

The officer thinks what a nice fellow Alex is. Just an ordinary chap, friendly and approachable. A good guy—the type you’d
lend money to, or trust with your wife and kids. He’ll remember this fact later, when friends ask him about this terrible
night, this terrible case. How can there be a God, for Christ’s sake, he’ll say, when the worst things always happen to the
most decent people?

If Alex could think at this moment, he might be thinking the same. Instead, Oh God, oh God, he goes when he sees them coming
in, Mawhinney and the other one. Oh, he goes, oh God, oh Jesus Christ.

Mawhinney holds out his hand—a forthright hand, used to facts and upset and awful things. Alex quickly stubs out his cigarette.
Holds himself very still.

He wishes they didn’t have to tell him what he already knows.

No, he says. Touching the suddenly foreign-feeling skin of his cheeks, face, eyes, with his hands (the hands that already
feel cut off from him, like the hands of another person), No, please God no—

The words make little sense though he understands every one of them. Your wife. Has suffered. Some sort of violent attack.
Has not survived.

Has not. Suffered. Violent. In a different order, the words might not spell the end. No, says Al. Please God no—he says it
again several times.

One of them puts a hand on his arm and Alex lets him, even though he doesn’t like being touched by strangers and especially
not by men.

He asks if they could light him another cigarette. The younger one grabs the pack while the older one—Mawhinney—keeps his
hand on him. And though he can barely take the cigarette when it is held out to him, so badly are his hands shaking, still
he somehow manages to smoke it in long, trembling gasps.

* * *

Mick comes by with the dog and the kids. Everyone shouting, leaves lifting, trees bent over by the wind. The sky is white.
Jordan has no coat on, just his frayed school jumper.

I ask him where his zip-up fleece is and he shrugs in a shivery way. Mick thinks I fuss too much but I hate the idea of my
kids being cold. Jordan is nine, a year older than Connor, but just as thin. All our boys, Lennie’s and mine, are thin. Rosa
and Liv, on the other hand, are padded and rounded—big girls with a layer between them and the world.

Look at him, I say to Mick. He’s freezing.

Mick stares at me and doesn’t seem to take in what I say.

He is, I say. He’s shivering.

Yesterday was warm for October, but not last night and not today. Here at Lennie’s, even with the gas fire on it’s not enough.
I’ve just turned the heating right up.

Fletcher is pulling and jumping and trying to get the lead in his mouth. It’s what he does. Mick loops the lead over the gatepost
and yells at him to sit and stay. Louder than usual. The dog looks upset and sits and then straightaway gets up again, happy,
expectant.

There was no bread! Rosa bursts out. For the packed lunches!

That’s enough, Rosa, Mick tells her.

I was only saying—

Shut up, he says.

Rosa scowls.

I mean it, he says. Do I have to say it again?

I tell Rosa to shush. The sun shoots out and sends a wet, piercing light up over the brownish lawn, the path, the bins.

Mick—I say, but he doesn’t look at me.

I’m taking Max and Con to their gran’s, he says.

OK.

Suddenly Max is there at Mick’s elbow. What? Aren’t we going to school then?

That’s right, boy, says Mick. He touches Max gently on the arm, but looks down at his keys.

Why? says Max. What’s going on? Where’s Dad?

Why is he missing school? Are we all missing it? Jordan asks quickly.

No, says Mick, Not you. Look, you lot—

Why not? asks Nat immediately.

What? Oh great, snaps Rosa. So they get to miss school and we don’t?

She folds her arms and looks horrid.

Mick turns and fixes her with a terrible stare and her eyes turn furious.

Just give me a reason why that’s fair, she demands.

You shut up right now or I’ll give you more than that, says Mick.

Watched by all of us, Rosa bursts out crying. Mick looks like he’s about to hit her but he doesn’t. He does nothing. Lets
his hands drop to his sides. Rosa thinks she’s won.

Happy now? she asks him through her tears.

Mick and I look at each other.

What’s going on? I ask him.

He says nothing.

You better tell me, Mick, I say.

He touches his face.

Come on, let’s go inside, he says.

The bin men find her. The dawn refuse collection. Pitch dark at first, then grey sea, bleached early morning sky. Seagulls
wheeling and squealing and hanging, steadying themselves in the air over the same piece of ground.

She is lying on her front, one arm under her, the other thrown out, concealing the worst of her injuries. That’s what we are
told. That she is still wearing her red satin shirt and cardigan but her jeans and pants have been pulled right off one leg
and caught around her right ankle. That though there is no sign of her having been assaulted, her sanitary pad, with its modest
brown smear of blood, is lying there on the concrete next to her.

My knees feel weak as water. All the muscles that normally hold me up have lost their zip, their strength. Mick tells the
children to wait in the garden. He knows they won’t venture out of the little wooden gate. Somehow we walk together over the
hall mat, him ahead, him taking me. Our feet slip a little, moving over paper—letters that have come for Alex and Lennie.
We don’t pick them up.

What? I ask him. Mick, please tell me, what?

I can smell his body, the worry on him, the heat. His face is dark with whatever it is.

He pushes me into the sitting room and shuts the door.

I think I say please. Or tell me. That’s what I say: Tell me, Mick. As if it was that easy.

And my teeth are shivering in my head, like I’m so cold I can’t hold my jaw still, which is silly really. And even the ends
of my fingers have gone hot and fizzy. I’m afraid.

He takes my hand. His own fingers are cool.

At first they think (or hope) she might be drunk or asleep—though, even at the height of the season, drunks, and especially
ones with their underpants ripped off, are unheard of in this place. Then they see that the visible arm is too long and all
splayed out at the wrong angle. And in the same moment they realise that the dark puddle in which she lies half submerged
isn’t mud as they thought, but blood.