The Facts of Life and Death (9 page)

It wasn’t there.

He stood for a moment, staring down at the carpet, then looked at the door and said, ‘Back soon.’

‘How long is soon?’

‘Not long,’ he said. ‘Be a good girl.’

He closed the door behind him and Ruby heard him picking up his fishing gear from the porch. She switched off the TV by pressing the remote-control button as hard as she could.

She’d
been
a good girl and it hadn’t worked.

So she went upstairs and messed with Daddy’s cowboy things.

The cowboy drawer always swelled in the damp, and Ruby got red and sweaty in the wrestle.

Once she’d got it open far enough to reach inside, she put the gunbelt on first, hitching it all the way round to the final hole, which was small and stiff. It was too big for her, but not
too
too big, and if she spread her legs a bit, it would stay on her hips. The holster hung to her knee.

Then the hat.

She lifted out the black Stetson and placed it on her own head like a crown.

The Jingle Bobs were complicated. She couldn’t work them out. She spun the little wheels to make them ring, and decided she’d try them on another time.

Holding the gunbelt up all the way with a casual hand, Ruby waddled splay-legged the few paces to the mirror on the back of the door.

She looked
exactly
like a cowboy. Her bunny slippers spoiled it a bit, so Ruby chose not to look at them.

Her right hand fell naturally to the holster and she felt a jag of disappointment that there was no gun to play with. Sticks were just fine until there was something real to measure them by. In this holster they would have been just sticks. A real holster needed a real gun.

Ruby drew her finger at the mirror. ‘Pow! Pow-pow!’

The hat fell over her eyes with the recoil.

Ruby pushed it back, then tried to catch sight of herself while she wasn’t looking, so she could see how she
really
looked.

Still amazing.

The tip of the fishing rod dipped and danced, but John Trick didn’t see it. He saw
past
it – across the pale-grey sea to the vague hump of Lundy Island on the fuzzy horizon, and beyond that to a more distant place, while the crabs made merry with his bait …

As a child, John had rarely gone to primary school, where he’d been relentlessly teased about the scars on his face. And when he had gone, he’d learned to lash out first and let the other kids ask questions afterwards – if they still had teeth that weren’t a-wobble in their heads.

But then – on his first day at big school – he had seen Alison Jewell.

She had hit him like measles.

He hadn’t stopped fighting, but he had gone to school every possible day for the next four years just to see her – just to occupy the same space. Now and then, he and the other boys would shout inappropriate things at her in a bid to make contact, but he never had the courage to say anything
real
, because she came from Clovelly, and he’d heard that her mother was a doctor.

Her
mother
!

Even though he’d barely spoken to Alison in all the time they shared a classroom, just enough of that unexpected schooling rubbed off on John Trick that by the time he left he was taken on as an apprentice welder at the shipyard.

John remembered the early mornings when he got up in the dark and felt like a man. Riding his scooter through the lanes, the indicator clicking loudly in the night, to join the other men. They’d start with nothing but their hands and a plan and they’d build a ship. Every day they welded and moulded and fabricated their own lives; their own pride; their own futures. They talked and they shouted above the noise and they told dirty jokes and laughed whether they were funny or not. They arrived together and they left together, bonded by clocks and hard labour.

With his first pay packet he’d got just drunk enough that he’d caught a bus to Clovelly, banged on doors until he’d found Alison Jewell’s home, and asked her to marry him.

She’d laughed.

‘I didn’t even know you liked me,’ she’d said.

‘I don’t like you,’ he’d told her. ‘I
love
you.’

Alison had frowned – as if she couldn’t understand how someone who looked like him could ever love someone who looked like her – and so he’d leaned in and kissed her with tongues, and then pushed her down on to her bed under her Take That poster. Her parents were downstairs, so she’d tried to shove him off, but she hadn’t tried
that
hard, and he wasn’t so drunk that they couldn’t seal the deal.

Happy days.

He’d wanted to tell the whole world, but Alison said it was more fun if they kept it a secret, and was careful not to let on at school or anywhere else. She’d barely even let him
see
her, let alone have sex again – that’s how much fun she thought their secret would be – but they couldn’t keep it a secret for ever.

Ruby had seen to that.

At first John couldn’t believe his bad luck. Getting Ali pregnant on their very first time! But, as it turned out, a baby on the way was like a proof of purchase for a girl he would otherwise never have been able to afford.

Alison’s father had hit the roof. Gone
through
the roof. He’d actually cried. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so insulting. And the more pissed off Malcolm Jewell got, the more obstinate he’d become. Mr Jewell had demanded an abortion – what he called ‘Taking care of it so we can all get back to normal’ – but Alison had refused point blank. Even John had been surprised by how vehement she’d been about wanting to marry him – and moved by how much she loved him.

For the first time in his life, he’d felt he had the upper hand. Alison was
his
now. She was having
his
baby and
he
would call the shots – and if that meant a register office and a suit from Oxfam, then so be it. Her father could rage and her hoity-toity mother could cry and moan all she liked, but John had taken pleasure in telling them both that he was not one for charity.

‘It’s not about
charity
,’ Rosemary Jewell had said in her squeaky, sneaky, pop-eyed way. ‘It’s about
tradition.’

John Trick snorted and snapped open another can. Tradition, bollocks; it was about
possession.

Nine-tenths of the law.

They’d married in Barnstaple register office, with Alison in a plain blue dress and her mother sobbing throughout. He hadn’t even told
his
mother. She’d made her own choice years before, and it wasn’t him.

When he’d kissed the bride, she’d cried and whispered into his mouth, ‘Thank you.’

It seemed a long, long time ago, and lately, even nine-tenths didn’t feel like enough.

In the slow drizzle of the beach, John stared into the shimmering gold of his cider and thought about possession. Possessions were difficult things. Other people liked them too, and would take them from you if they could.

Alison’s parents would like to take her from him, for starters. They
still
thought she was too good for him. He tried only to see them at Christmas, but he could tell that was true in Malcolm’s stiff handshake and the way Rosemary touched his good cheek with hers – dry and distant despite the contact. They gave Ali money in secret – he knew that. Not just for her birthday and Christmas, but at other times too. She tried to hide it from him, but he had eyes. He’d found the receipt for the groceries they could not afford; noticed the new jeans Ruby was wearing before her old ones had even gone through at the knees. They were trying to buy Alison back, to control her with money, to loosen his hold. They must have thought they had a shot at it, ever since he’d lost his job.

As if losing his job had made him less entitled to his own wife.

And they tried to buy Ruby too, even though she was more
his
than anything had ever been. Last birthday they’d bought her a bicycle – pink, tassled, and the silliest gift you could buy for a child who lived squeezed between a hill and a cliff. Malcolm Jewell had spent hours puffing up and down the hill behind Ruby, holding on to the saddle, and with his face as red as his thinning hair. Ruby never rode the bicycle now, John was pleased to note, but buying it had been disrespectful to him.

And the worst of it was, Alison
let
them disrespect him and then
lied
to him about it. He could always tell – the way she tucked her hair behind her ear.

And now something strange was going on too. Something to do with the big glove, and those new shoes that were too high for either of them.

Alison lied to him about money. Now – for the first time ever – he wondered what else his wife might lie about.

And he wondered who the shoes might
really
be from.

Or for.

THERE WERE TWO
things Donald Moon hated above all – liberals and litterbugs. They were the same thing, really. Without liberals there would
be
no littering. Nor much crime at all, Donald figured, because without liberals, those found guilty of any crime would be locked up so fast that their feet would barely touch the ground.

And at the head of that queue, if Donald had his way, would be the litterbugs.

Donald had once owned seventy acres of clifftop along the coastal path, and had spent half his life picking up plastic bags and bottles so that his lambs wouldn’t choke on them, and the other half glaring through binoculars, hoping to catch someone red-handed in the act of dropping contraband. He never did – the stuff seemed to drop itself! – but he never gave up.

Donald and his wife Marion had kept a hundred endangered sheep until he’d finally had to admit that he had become that most endangered breed of all – a small farmer in a world where livestock was just another product, like cardboard or biscuits. Each year it got harder and harder, and when his income finally became an outcome, Donald sold sixty-five acres to a neighbour and ninety-seven sheep to other doomed enthusiasts. He turned his remaining five acres over to vegetables and fruit to save on the shopping bill, and used his last three Leicester Longwools to lever his way into a part-time job at The Big Sheep in Bideford. Tourists flocked there to watch sheep shows and sheep shearing and even sheep races, where sheep competed in the Sheep Grand National, with straw-bale jumps and little knitted jockeys on their backs – all as though sheep were exotic beasts in a woolly circus.

Once his sheep and his land were gone, there was nothing to stop litter becoming Donald’s primary focus. He would roust the stout Marion every weekend to traipse across North Devon armed with pointed sticks for spearing paper or hooking Tesco bags out of hedges. They wore matching Day-Glo vests for safety, and carried big green waste sacks for the cans and the plastic that people flung randomly around the countryside, and the disposable nappies laid carefully in lay-bys – as if they would soon be dealt with by some kind of state-funded poo patrol.

Donald was on his way home from work that Saturday when he saw the newspaper in the lay-by into Abbotsham.

Newspapers were Donald’s
bête noire.
An entire village could be ruined by a copy of the
Sun
and a stiff breeze. Lurid headlines flapping in gutters, flattened against hedges, fluttering up trees. Paper tits dissolving to porridge in the rain.

So, even though the light was almost gone from the sky, and even though it had rained all day and his overalls were damp against his thighs, Donald Moon did a U-turn and pulled over.

This newspaper was the
Daily Mail
, which was even thicker than the
Sun
and, therefore, potentially even worse. Already the
Coffee Break
insert had escaped and spread itself across a field gate twenty yards away.

Donald picked up the main section, then went after the rest. When he got to the gate, he could see in the dim light that
Coffee Break
had already come apart, and that several pale pages were now dotted about the wet grass of the field beyond.

There was nothing for it. Now he had seen it, he had to do some thing about it. Donald muttered under his breath and climbed the gate.

In the half-dark he dropped to the ground on the other side and landed on something that rolled under his boot. He slipped to one knee, while the other leg twisted away from him at an angle that made his eyes water.

Donald was not a swearer by nature, but he couldn’t help himself, and he was surprised to find that – contrary to what he’d always claimed in company – it actually
did
make him feel better.

Finally he got his breath back and blew tears out of his nose between his finger and thumb.

Then he peered down through the gloom to see what it was that he had trodden on.

It was a woman’s face.

WOMAN
’
S BODY DUMPED IN LAY-BY.

Miss Sharpe had read the
Gazette
right there, outside the newsagent’s.

The meagre report underneath the giant font consisted mostly of caution and police-speak. The police wouldn’t say who she was or how she’d died. They wouldn’t even call it murder. Yet. All they were doing was asking anyone who’d seen a woman hitching a lift between Bideford and Northam to contact this number. There was a photo of a five-bar gate and a field beyond it.