The Heart Broke In (39 page)

‘Bec’s pregnant,’ said Alex.

Dougie lay back on the pillow. He bit his lip and swallowed. ‘There’s a turn-up,’ he said. ‘Can they tell whose it is?’

‘It’s harder with brothers. But they can do a test.’

After a while Dougie said: ‘Don’t do a test. You want to be a father? Be one.’

Alex listened for noise from the street, or other parts of the hotel; there was none. They were lucky to have found a quiet room. He stared at the light shining down on the curtain from a sort of horizontal box. What was it called, that box? He could spend as long as he liked staring at the curtain now. The folds pleased him and he didn’t have to talk.
Catastrophes are holidays
, he thought.
Not part of normal time
.

‘This is like Scout camp,’ said Dougie. He’d rolled over on his side and his eyes were bright and boylike. ‘I hated that.’

‘What you did,’ said Alex. ‘You didn’t think you were paying me back in some fucked up way, did you?’

Dougie lay back and didn’t speak for so long that Alex thought he’d gone to sleep. Then he said: ‘Hey maths boy. In a bullshit card game that looks complicated but is just like tossing a coin, what are the odds of getting the same result nine times in a row?’

‘Five hundred to one,’ said Alex.

‘Seriously? I never would’ve put it that low. If it was you
you’d know the odds,’ said Dougie. ‘You’d know the house always has an edge and if you were a gambler you’d know when to quit.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘Bank your winnings, brother. Quit while you’re ahead.’

The day after calling the Moral Foundation to betray his sister Ritchie started telling people that he was running again, as if he’d been a great runner, when he’d only ever trotted a few miles a couple of times a week. His assertion that he was running again was taken as a euphemism for the intention to live a materially and spiritually purer life, to drink less, to work harder and to be kinder to others, and he did, indeed, make the pronouncement in exactly that spirit. But having declared he was running again he had no choice except to run. He got up in the dark, before Karin and the children, put on trainers and a tracksuit and a hi-viz vest and jogged out into the cold, heavy silence of the English countryside in winter. All he could hear was the sound of his own breath, the soles of his trainers striking the grit at the edge of the road and the occasional sinister rustle from the hedgerows or gurgling from an invisible watercourse.

He ran for half a mile, then walked, sometimes stopping altogether to rest. He stood panting with his hands on his sides, breathing in the smell of rotting leaves. Cars announced themselves by the glow and fade of their headlights far away on bends and rises, like miniature moons rolling up and down the crooked lanes, giving Ritchie enough time to start running so that when
they passed they would see him moving powerfully and confidently along through the dark. By the time he reached the first village east of Petersmere it was light. Old people waved to him from their gardens and he waved back. He didn’t know them and he wondered if they recognised him from TV or whether, driven from sleep in the early hours by the mysterious conditions of the old, they had a lonely yearning for community.

Ritchie didn’t know if Karin had noticed the restoration of his contentment, but he wanted her to be unsure what drove him. He didn’t like the amount of time she was spending with The What; he didn’t like the thirty-date tour they’d lined up for spring. His love of the music they were making didn’t seem to him to contradict the hostility he felt towards his wife over her leaving home for the best part of two months. He didn’t notice that as soon as he’d betrayed his sister his love for Karin reverted to the wary, questioning, competitive condition that had prevailed before Val Oatman first threatened him.

It was on Ritchie’s mind, when he trotted homewards on Saturday morning, that the next day his sister, who had no idea she’d been exposed, would be the victim of Val’s revenge. It hurt him but the pain was outside, not inside as it had been before. Ritchie had found it so easy to absolve himself of treachery that he was no longer conscious of the absolution. It seemed to him to be chance that he’d become the bridge between Val’s desire for vengeance and what he now thought of as Bec’s promiscuity. He’d hated having to nominate a lawyer but when the lawyer called to tell him he’d read through the certificate of immunity from the Moral Foundation and as far as he could tell it offered a watertight guarantee that the MF wouldn’t make public anything they’d found or might in future find out about his private life, he felt safe.
Louise and Nicole could still tell what they knew but one and a half years had passed since he’d seen or spoken to either of them. Ritchie decided that next day, when Bec woke up to the harshness of the world, when she was introduced to the reality that the media only ever canonises you in order to damn you harder later, he’d help her. She’d call him in a panic, asking him what she should do, and he’d calm her down and tell her it wasn’t the end, that people would forget.

Back at the house he was making himself a fry-up when a text message came from Bec. Unaccountably she was at the cemetery where their father was buried.

At Brakesborne. Dad’s memory pulled down. Horrible. Come now
.

Ritchie didn’t want to meet his sister on the eve of her downfall. He called her and she didn’t answer. Surely, he thought, she could deal with the vandalism of a gravestone herself? But Karin insisted that he go.

The cemetery was in Dorset. The last time he visited had been with Karin and the children. He remembered Karin swooping on Ruby at the graveside, lifting her up and carrying her off to a line of trees at a run so the infant wouldn’t pee on hallowed ground. He remembered watching his daughter’s little bare legs swinging from side to side as Karin ran away from him and Dan, thinking that if his daughter was being stolen it would look like this, and feeling foolish (he’d called himself an agnostic then) because his father’s name on the gravestone and the presence of a box with his father’s bones underneath it made him feel that his father was watching him. As he remembered, he remembered more. Karin and he had fought in front of the children, exchanged bitter words, so
bitter that Dan had walked away, not wanting to hear, and in Karin’s snatching up of Ruby, besides bodily necessity, there
had
been a kind of taking away, an anger against him; and he’d been there by the gravestone, alone with his dead father, looking at his son stumbling off in tears in one direction, his wife and daughter running into the distance in the other, and had felt alone, cut off in a fragment of the present while the future fled from him and the past went dark.

There was a car in the parking bay in front of the churchyard when Ritchie arrived. The ground rose in a gradual slope from the road towards the church at the far side and when Ritchie passed through the lich-gate, beyond the screen of yew trees, he could see the graves paraded in ragged tiers, but couldn’t see Bec. He wasn’t getting a signal on his phone. He walked up the gravel path towards the church, remembering how hot it had been on the day of the funeral. There were sweat patches under the armpits of the Marines carrying the coffin. He’d watched Bec’s pale, serious, wondering face and felt a need to protect her and his mother. He held her hand, even though he thought the Marines would reckon it weak and sentimental, and she’d looked at him in surprise.
Yes
, he thought,
you never imagined I’d do that, did you
. His poor little sister! Not so much older then than Ruby now.

Bec stood in the shadows in the church porch, shivering. She watched Ritchie’s big silver car pull in next to her little red rental, heard the slam of the door and saw Ritchie lumber through the gate in a heavy black coat and red scarf.

Ritchie couldn’t see her. She watched him leave the path and walk slowly across the grass to their father’s grave, turning his head from side to side. He stopped in front of the tombstone, squatted down and took his right hand out of his pocket
to stroke the white marble tablet and run his fingertips across the heads of the flowers Bec had left there. He looked over his shoulder, stood up and took a step towards the church. Bec came out and he stopped and she walked towards him. She kept her hands in her pockets.

He reached out to hold her shoulder and moved to kiss her and she stepped back. An unfamiliar hardness in Bec’s eyes made Ritchie hesitate to ask about the undamaged memorial stone.

‘I can’t see anything wrong with it,’ he said. He gestured back at the grave and pressed his hands together. He tried to speak cheerfully. It came to Bec as a frightened smile and she wondered if some instinct was prepping him to beg for mercy even before he knew what she was going to say.

‘Do you remember who’s buried there?’ she said.

Perhaps
, Ritchie thought,
she’s had a nervous breakdown?
He asked her if she was all right.

‘You didn’t answer the question,’ said Bec.

‘You’re being silly,’ said Ritchie, trying to touch her again. She twisted away but kept her eyes on him.

He said wearily: ‘Dad’s buried there.’

Just before Bec spoke, it seemed to her that she had an array of words to use against her brother that were both cruel and just. The moment she opened her mouth, she was reaching blindly for anything. She said: ‘You have no honour.’

She thought she’d found a weak word to attack him, an obscure, old-fashioned word. In twenty-first-century England honour was not in play. But the four words darkened Ritchie’s vision and pressed a fistful of cold needles into his heart. The words of the poem by their father’s executioner came to him and he understood them.
The clapper jings the sky
.

‘Tell me what you mean,’ he said. The coldness of his voice and eyes reminded Bec of Val’s transformation on the night they had broken up.

‘You betrayed me to Val,’ said Bec.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Ritchie.

‘You told the Moral Foundation that I slept with Alex’s brother.’

‘Listen,’ said Ritchie slowly, exaggeratedly enunciating his words and pointing his finger at Bec, ‘I did not denounce you to the Moral Foundation. I’d never, ever do that to my own sister, it’s outrageous to suggest I would, and I want to know who slandered me by telling you so.’

‘How can you lie to my face?’ said Bec. ‘Were you born a liar, or did you become one?’

‘What gives you the right to talk to me like that? Didn’t you hear what I just said? I did not snitch on you. Why do you have to be such a sanctimonious, patronising bitch?’

Bec took a step back, as if she’d been struck.

‘Well?’ said Ritchie, trying to hide his surprise that he’d called his sister a bitch and wondering how it could be erased from the record. ‘Who’s been telling these lies about me?’

‘You never called me that before,’ said Bec. She pointed at the gravestone behind Ritchie and he followed her finger. ‘I can see Dad’s name, right there, while you call me that.’

‘I won’t have you spreading this slander.’

‘Please stop,’ said Bec, resting her aching forehead on her hand. The tears trickled between her fingers. ‘I know you’re lying. I know what you did.’ She looked up at him. ‘I heard you. I heard every word. Val played me the tape. I heard you dial the number, and key in the code, and tell Val that I slept
with Dougie, and tell Val that you didn’t have any pictures. I heard you telling Val that he’d tortured you. I heard you crying.’

Ritchie stared at his sister till her outline burned and jumped. ‘Val,’ he whispered. How he would love to kill him! He saw how he would hurt Val if he were in front of him now, how he would grab his ears and yank his face down onto his uprushing knee, breaking his nose, then hook his fingers into his eyes and fling him across the graveyard before charging down on the blinded, whimpering demon to kick, kick, kick his soft body with his boots, breaking through bone, tearing flesh and organs, making blood gush.

Hands were pulling his coat. Why couldn’t they let him kick, kick, kick?

‘That’s someone else’s grave,’ Bec was saying. ‘You’re going to kick it over.’

Ritchie collapsed onto the ground. His right foot hurt. He sat on the grass and pulled up his knees. He had kicked a hole in the toe of his right boot, kicking some dead fucker’s gravestone. He started unlacing the boot.

‘He tortured me,’ he said, without looking up. ‘He’s evil.’

‘What do you mean, he tortured you?’ said Bec. ‘How? Why didn’t you tell him that I slept with Dougie to get pregnant?’

‘Have you told other people?’ said Ritchie.

‘Alex and Dougie, so far.’

‘Not Mum?’

‘Not Mum, yet.’

Ritchie pulled off his damaged boot and bloody sock and regarded his mangled big toe. A fresh dose of rage swilled into him and he beat his fists on the grass, clenched his teeth together and growled like a dog.

‘Why did you betray me?’ said Bec. ‘What do you mean,
he tortured you? Did he tie you to a chair and hit you? Was he going to kill you?’

‘Worse,’ said Ritchie.

‘Worse than having to choose between giving up an informer and being killed?’

‘Dad’s got nothing to do with this. That was a war.’

‘All life’s a war if you make it one.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘You’re such a coward.’

‘I nearly died!’ shouted Ritchie. ‘I hung myself. I only just managed to get my head out of the noose. It was your fault. You made me feel worthless. You made me feel that I wasn’t a good man.’

Bec squatted down close to Ritchie and said softly: ‘Maybe you’re not a good man. Maybe you’re a bad man. Have you considered that?’

‘I am a good man!’ said Ritchie. ‘I’m a good man, I’m a family man, I love my wife, I love my children, and I’m not letting you or Val or any police or lawyers tear us apart.’ He stared at Bec. A brilliant idea came to him.
I’m always brilliant under pressure
, he thought. ‘This is what he wants!’ he said. ‘What we’re doing now, this is what Val wants. It’s his revenge, on you, for what you did to him. He wants to destroy you and me and everyone around us. He wants us to fight and break up and hate each other. He’s evil, pure evil.’

‘This isn’t about Val,’ said Bec. ‘It’s about you. You haven’t told me. Why did you betray me? Your sister? And Alex, your friend?’

‘I didn’t betray him. You did. You slept with his brother. I didn’t make you do that. I had nothing to do with it. If you hadn’t slept with him none of this would have happened.’

‘Why did you betray me?’

‘I’m a good man,’ said Ritchie. ‘Look, I think my toe is broken.’

‘I’ll have to ask Karin,’ said Bec, getting up and striding off down the hill. Ritchie tried to go after her, telling her to wait. Atrocious pain shot up his leg from his foot and he fell over. ‘You can’t tell Karin,’ he shouted. He clutched his leg and screwed up his eyes against the pain, which had spread to his side when he fell.

An idea came to him. Relief bloomed and he realised he was strong and safe.

Bec came back. He could see her legs, dimly. He couldn’t bear to raise his eyes any further.

‘You can’t tell Karin,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because then she’d leave me and take the children with her, and I’d lose the show, and maybe …’ he winced. ‘I think now I’ve cracked a rib as well.’

‘Maybe what?’

‘Go to prison.’

‘For what?’

‘You know how the Moral Foundation works. They get people to stitch each other up by trading in secrets.’

‘What have you done?’

‘You know that in Thailand, the age of consent is fifteen?’