The meanest Flood (5 page)

‘Yes, but...’

‘It’s quite simple. There’s no doubt that you and Sam went for a walk along Gillygate yesterday with your little dog. Reading between the lines, it seems our employer didn’t go to that other town you mentioned. He was here all the time, especially yesterday. Now, we know that you saw him and we wonder if anyone else can corroborate that, OK?’

Pause.

Geordie said, ‘Oh, yes. I see.’

Celia hung up and dialled another number. ‘Mr Forester, please.’ She waited, shifting the handset away from her ear when the ‘Dam Busters’ March’ kicked in.

‘George, it’s Celia. Listen, Sam’s down at the police station helping with enquiries into a murder. Can you get him out?’

‘I’m on my way,’ the solicitor said.

‘Just a hint of relief in your voice there, George. Does it get you out of something else?’

‘Jocelyn will be arriving in a minute to take me to our dance-class.’

‘And?’

‘I won’t be here.’

Celia smiled. ‘You don’t like dancing?’

‘What I’d like,’ George Forester explained, ‘is Flamenco or Tango, maybe some Salsa, something with passion. But Jocelyn’s into ballroom. I hate it. It’s like eating dry biscuits. Makes me feel as if I’ve got a number on my back.’

‘You should consider rebellion,’ she told him.

She looked at the phone. George Forester was one of those quiet, unassuming men who had become entangled with a woman who wanted to direct every aspect of his life. Freud or Darwin might have found an answer for men like him. Or perhaps the frequency with which the timid latch on to the bullies was a question too far for the founding fathers of modernism?

Celia got her coat and locked the office. She walked around the corner to the taxi stand on St Leonard’s Place and directed the cabby to Angeles Falco’s house. ‘Wait for me, will you?’ she said. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes.’

The cabby reached for the morning’s edition of the
Sun.

‘Celia,’ Angeles said as she opened the door wider to admit the older woman. ‘How lovely, I haven’t seen you for ages.’ She closed the door behind her. ‘There’s nothing wrong is there? It isn’t Sam, is it?’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Celia said. ‘No deaths or broken bones. You can relax.’

Angeles was almost totally blind now but if you didn’t know you wouldn’t have guessed. Not in her own house, anyway. She knew where everything was and she focused her eyes so you didn’t feel as though she was gazing at empty space. She was in her early-thirties with a soft complexion and clear skin; the face of a model and the confidence of a successful businesswoman with a large bank-balance. When Sam had fallen for her he had landed on both feet.

‘Have you seen him since he got back?’ Celia asked.

‘No, I’ve been working all day. He’s coming round this evening.’

Celia shook her head. ‘He might not make it,’ she said. ‘The police have picked him up. I’m not sure what it’s about at the moment - George Forester is on his way round there now - but it seems he wasn’t in Nottingham yesterday.’

Angeles looked surprised. ‘He rang me last night, said he was in a B&B.’

‘That’s right,’ Celia said. ‘He was there for the last couple of days, but the official story is that he was here.’ Angeles smiled. ‘You don’t mind lying for him, do you?’ ^    H

‘I don’t believe in lying, Angeles, and I don’t like people who do. But if Sam Turner tells a lie it’s because it’s closer to the truth than the truth.’

‘Do you want to stay for a drink?’

‘No, thanks. I’ve still got one more job to do. Then I’m going to have an early night.’

The cab dropped her at Sam’s house and she paid the driver. She let herself in with a key from her purse and stood listening in the hall for a few seconds. Nothing. Just the deep silence of a man gone away. In the kitchen she turned off the gas and opened the oven door. The top layer of lasagne was black and brittle. She used the oven glove to remove it from the shelf and placed it in the sink, where it hissed and crackled for a moment.

She shook her head. A grown man and he didn’t even eat properly.

There it was again, that numb feeling on the left side of her head. She reached for the edge of the door to steady herself in case she was about to fall. She’d rarely been ill in her life and had always imagined that she’d die in bed, peacefully in her sleep. Never contemplated any kind of fatal illness or something that might take away her reason.

She’d been astonished when the doctor had suggested an appointment with a specialist. She’d submitted to the X-rays, bitten her lip and grudgingly allowed the technicians to manipulate her, pretended not to understand when they’d avoided her questions. Ridiculous, she thought now, how she had felt impelled to allow them to feel good about themselves. That inexplicable willingness always to please doctors.

But there was that numb feeling and from time to time a shift in the visual plane. ‘This is not something I want you to worry about,’ the doctor had said, rubbing his hands together. ‘There could be a completely reasonable explanation for it.’

Her appointment in Leeds, to get the results of the scan, was in a few days’ time. Until then she’d keep it to herself. No point in starting a panic.

When her dizziness cleared she did a quick recce to make sure the house was secure. She was outside on the street within a few minutes, walking back towards Lord Mayor’s Walk where her own house was. She’d have something to eat and a bath and then she’d get into bed with Gerard Manley Hopkins:
‘Glory be to God for dappled things
...’ But she’d keep her mobile on the bedside cabinet, wait for George or Sam to ring and let her know that he was back on the street.

5

Marilyn was washing herself in the bathroom and taking her lithium, the first dose of the day, to correct the chemical imbalance in her brain cells when her mother, Ellen Eccles, crept into her daughter’s bedroom and scanned the walls. Marilyn had straightened the crumpled playing card and placed it in a frame. She’d hung it on the wall between a promotional photograph of Diamond Danny Mann and a collage of his press cuttings.

The eight of spades, and written across it in red feltpen,
Marilyn Eccles.

Ellen sighed. She hoped it wasn’t going to be a repetition of the business with Jeremy Paxman: listening to
Start the Week
every Monday morning, watching
Newsnight
and
University Challenge,
and waiting for the postman in the morning, expecting a letter from the man.

When she looked at Marilyn’s wall and the photograph of Danny Mann and his press cuttings she wondered why there wasn’t a photograph of her dead granddaughter there. She was confused for a moment because it was wrong of Marilyn not to have a photograph of her baby.

But it was simple, the answer, because there
were
no photographs of the baby. It had been born dead and you don’t take photographs of dead babies. In a way, Ellen thought now, the playing card was a kind of code for her granddaughter. And she wondered exactly what it meant to her daughter, this playing card, the one item in the whole universe that had been handled by both Danny Mann and Marilyn.

The absence of a photograph of the baby was problematic in other respects. Without a photograph people didn’t realize that Marilyn had been a mother. Because she was so small, exactiy one hundred and fifty centimetres, people regarded her as still a child herself. To compensate for her size Marilyn wore a belt with a steel buclde in the shape of a pentagram. Ellen could see the buckle now, dangling from the back of the chair by Marilyn’s dressing table.

She wore anything that had a metallic colour or feel to it. Shoes with buckles, jingling bangles and necklaces, a hair-band in beaten copper and a silver chain on each ankle. Somehow, in her mind, Marilyn associated metal with height. The more metal she could carry around on her person, the taller she seemed to feel.

The pentagram buckle on her belt was something else as well. It was a magical sign, something that might catch the eye of Danny Mann. Marilyn had explained that it was a five-pointed star, the number of destiny. Ellen had shaken her head, it sounded like mumbo-jumbo to her. What Marilyn meant was that Danny Mann was her destiny, just as Jeremy Paxman had been and those other unreachable celebrities and actors she’d attached herself to. The difference with Danny Mann was that he lived in York, only a couple of streets away. The poor man’s life was destined to become a misery if Ellen failed to keep her daughter Marilyn under control.

The lavatory flushed and Marilyn padded along the landing to her bedroom singing,
‘Danny Boy. The hills, the hills are caw-aw-ling
...’

I don’t want you getting fixated on him,’ Ellen said when her daughter came into the room.

‘And I don’t want you snooping in my bedroom,’ Marilyn said. She threw off her dressing gown and stood m front of the wardrobe. She was pear-shaped with surplus flesh on her thighs, bottom and stomach, but surprisingly pert and firm breasts. Her skin was milky-white, dappled and becoming varicose on the back of her legs.

Ellen looked away. She wondered what had become of the small girl she had dragged around for all those years, the pretty teenager with the wide eyes. There was something gross and feral and unknown about this woman’s nakedness that seemed to defy any relationship to her.

‘All the signs are there, Marilyn.’

‘What? What signs? What are you talking about?’

‘Jeremy Paxman.’

‘That was different. He was married, with kids.’

‘And how do you know this magician isn’t married?’

‘I know.’

‘But you don’t, Marilyn. It’s the same thing. You talk yourself into it. You convince yourself. This is going to I lead to more trouble, I just know it.’

Marilyn slammed the wardrobe shut, turning to face her mother. Her naked back was reflected in the mirror on the door. ‘He chose me,’ she said. ‘You were there, I you saw it. He chose me last night. How many women were in that theatre? Come on, tell me, how many?’

‘I don’t know, love.’

‘How many?’ She stamped her foot, a residue of red nail varnish clinging to the nail on her big toe.

‘A hundred... five hundred? But it doesn’t mean...’

‘A thousand more like, maybe more than that. And out of all of them Danny picked me. He took me on the stage with him. I was a star.’

‘Not a star, Marilyn. You see what I mean, how you exaggerate? You have an idea in your head and it gets out of proportion. He needed someone to help with that trick. It doesn’t mean he loves you. It was a card trick.’

‘Fuck you, Mother,’ Marilyn said. ‘I know what this is about, you want him for yourself. You’re jealous that he picked me instead of you.’

‘I’m going downstairs now,’ Ellen said. ‘We can talk about this later, when you’ve got yourself dressed and when you’ve stopped using profane language.’

‘Thank you,’ Marilyn shouted after her. ‘That means I’ve won.’

Ellen went outside to the back garden and lit up a Benson & Hedges, drawing the smoke and nicotine deep into her lungs. She watched the water from the river creeping over the field towards their house. Every day it drew a little closer. If it didn’t stop raining up in the hills they would find themselves marooned one morning. Life had been a battle for as long as she could remember and looked set on remaining so for as far as she could see into the future.

There had been a period of calm when Marilyn married a soldier boy and went to live in a house near Fulford Barracks. Soldier boy helped to train dogs in the art of sniffing out bombs. Ellen felt her life had entered a tranquil patch then and had taken herself off to Scotland to live in a cottage by the Dee, reading books and growing flowers and trying to write.

She would willingly have lived out her last years there, free from the cares of the world.

But some of the soldier boy’s mates had plied a couple of working Alsatians with gin and the dogs had gone mad and attacked him, killing him and consuming most of his face and throat.

So Ellen had said goodbye to Scotland and come home to help her daughter back from the brink of madness. What else was she supposed to do? She was a mother first, a Scot second, a gardener third, and a writer... well, not at all.

But being a mother is not everything. That is one of the great lies that people have told for ages past, and which they still perpetuate. Being a mother can make you feel that you should be everything to your children, to your child, but as you grow older you have to realize that it isn’t true. When they are tiny you might be able to supply their needs, but as they grow they want a wider world.

Marilyn needed sex, she needed an emotional entanglement with a man, a real, loving and mutually supportive relationship, and Ellen couldn’t supply that.

Almost as soon as soldier boy was buried in the churchyard Marilyn was head over heels in love with a Leeds United striker. Irish lad, no more than twenty-two, twenty-three. He had no idea. Not at first.

Ellen blamed herself. She had accepted the seed of the man who was Marilyn’s natural father, knowing that
his
father and mother had jumped together off the Valley Bridge in Scarborough. Her egg had been fertilized by the sperm of a card-carrying screwball. A man who had opened his veins in the bath to save making a mess in the kitchen.