The Sick Rose (23 page)

‘I’m not,’ he said, blushing. ‘I
am
sorry that I crept up on you, though.’

‘So how long have you known about my home?’ How could she make him see that it was a secret without making herself desperately defenceless? Paul did not seem to know how heavily the balance of power was weighted in his favour. An older man would have intuited it in a second. A certain kind of man would have exploited it.

‘A few weeks, maybe a month. Although I didn’t know you were the one living here until you gave me a lift the other night. I saw the cans in the car. Doesn’t the smell give you a headache?’

‘No. Does it you?’

‘Dunno. Could be the booze. Doesn’t it get claustrophobic?’

‘It probably would if I worked in an office or a shop,’ said Louisa. ‘Or if I lived in a city. But after a day out in the elements I just want to feel . . . enclosed.’ She supposed that the truth was as good a policy as any. ‘I’m not doing anything illegal.’

‘You’re paying Ingram for the electricity, are you?’ he said, but he was smiling.

‘I like to think of it as in lieu of overtime pay,’ she answered, then grew serious again. ‘I barely use it. This isn’t even Kelstice land. I lease it from the farmer for a peppercorn rent. I paid him up for three years. I don’t see him from one month to the next. Listen, Paul. I’ve never brought anyone connected to the Lodge here, and I’d appreciate it—’

‘But the others must have asked where you live?’

‘Not everyone’s as curious as you. Look, I’d really—’

‘Yeah, all right, you don’t want me to tell anyone. It’s OK, I get it.’ He looked her in the eye, unguarded. She was surprised to find she trusted him. It was so long since she had trusted anyone that it took her a few seconds to identify the feeling.

‘I’m not being funny,’ he said, after a while, ‘but are you on some kind of community service as well?’ She would have laughed if it hadn’t been so dangerously parallel to the truth. She bought time with a question of her own.

‘Why do you ask?’ None of the young people had ever asked her that question before either. In that self-absorbed way teenagers have, it never occurred to any of them that she could have her own grisly history.

‘It’s just that I’m on, like, minimum wage and even
I
can afford a room in a house.’

She did laugh then. ‘I’m not here because I have to be,’ she said. ‘It’s my choice. No one goes into heritage management for the fabulous wealth but I do OK. I’ll tell you another secret – one more can’t hurt – I’m saving up, I have been for years. I’d like a garden of my own, not just to restore and then move on, but to live in forever. A little cottage garden or something like that. Something I can design myself, be really creative, not just recreate something from history. One day somewhere will come on the market and I’ll be able to afford it outright.’ She didn’t mention the more prosaic reason her savings were gathering dust in a low-return, instant-access account – insurance, escape, blackmail. ‘Everyone should have a grand plan. What do you want to be when you—’ She had been going to say ‘grow up’ . . . ‘—after this?’ she tailed off, but the unsaid words hung in the air as though she’d written them on a blackboard.

‘I wouldn’t call it a grand plan,’ he said. ‘But I know what I want to do. I want to be a teacher.’

‘Are you going to university?’

‘I was going to,’ he said. ‘And I will, after . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Everything’s kind of on hold at the moment.’ He was evidently referring to the events that had brought him to Kelstice in the first place. She could no more guess his past than he could divine hers. What could this diffident, innocent young man have done? Who were they sheltering him from? He yawned and burrowed under the covers; a freezing foot brushed against her thigh. At her yelp, he retracted it.

‘Oh God, sorry.’ His mortification at this trespass was touching. ‘I’ll go.’

‘Stay.’ The word was out before she had time to consider it, and she was surprised to find it was the right one. What harm could it do to cling a little longer to the fantasy of Adam? The boy in her bed was clumsy and shy but he was warm and willing and there was comfort, if nothing else, to be derived from his body. ‘Stay,’ she repeated.

His hand was as cold as his foot, but she didn’t flinch when his fingers brushed the dip of her waist. He asked the question with a tentative look and she answered it by rolling her body over his. She kept her eyes open.

Chapter 30

June 2009

One dull, drizzly Friday afternoon, Carl arrived home with such force and speed that for a moment Paul wondered whether he had broken his own front door down. One side of his face was an empurpled bulge, much like Paul’s had been whenever it had made swift connection with a hard surface. The eye that he could still open was wide and white in panic.

‘Where’s Daniel?’ he said, a post-exertion wheeze to his voice.

‘He’s taken Diesel out for a crap,’ said Paul, noticing that Carl was bare-chested underneath his jacket.

‘Listen, get rid of this for me, quick.’ He handed Paul a supermarket carrier bag containing what looked like clothing but felt heavier, as though weighted with a single stone.

‘What is it?’ said Paul, pulling open the bag for a closer look. Carl snatched it back, folded it over itself, thrust it into Paul’s armpit.

‘Just do it, OK? Now!’

Paul took the bag and ran out of the front door. Briefly he wondered about trying to find Daniel but the roared instructions had left no room for curiosity detours. He kept going until he reached the riverbank. The urgency of Carl’s command propelled him through the subway that had been the scene of his childhood beatings. A train thundered overhead. With swollen lungs he reached the footpath on the side of the river. There did not appear to be anyone else around, no kids, not a single buggy-pusher or dog-walker. He turned a full circle to cover his back. To his left the arachnid hoists of the dock hid the horizon; the yuppie flats on the Kent side of the river and the bridge were silhouettes in the mist. His only witness was a single tug on the water. It was high tide, and the rocky black beach was submerged. He drew back his arm and bowled the bundle into the water, hoping it would travel far enough for the current to drag it to sea. Its contents came loose as it flew. The bag blew away on the breeze, and the bloodstained T-shirt caught a breeze and floated gently for a few seconds but the knife fell straight and swift, blade down, into the Thames, piercing the brown foam. His legs felt wobbly, as though he’d run a marathon rather than a mile.

He was afraid of Carl and afraid to be involved with him. It was the first time he had seen, let alone disposed of, evidence of Carl’s life outside the house. At home they only ever got to see the affectionate, loyal side of him but he remembered that the man had been a soldier before he was a father. Paul wondered how many people he had killed, not just during his time in the forces. It was a long while before he felt confident enough to return to the house. When he did, Carl was showing a couple of uniformed policemen out of the front door with a sardonic flourish, a cocky smile and the words, ‘Told you you wouldn’t find nothing, didn’t I?’

Daniel was eating pizza in front of the Discovery Channel, picking little scraps of something off the top and feeding them to the dog.

‘They’ve put fucking anchovies on it, man,’ he said, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Carl opened three tins of beer and shared them out. Before Paul had a chance to drink, he was pulled into an embrace that resembled a headlock Carl might use to throw punters down the stairs at a nightclub.

‘You’re a good boy, you are, Paul. Loyalty, that’s what it’s about . . . I’ve got two sons now. You just think of me as a second father.’ Paul would have physically reeled from the insult if he hadn’t been so aware of the frailty of his neck compared to Carl’s arm. How dare this thug compare himself to his own gentle, funny, dreamy father? ‘There’s a home for you with us for as long as you want it, isn’t there, Daniel?’

Daniel nodded. The dead weight that always seemed to be pressing down on Paul’s chest these days suddenly doubled, as though Carl had just sat his substantial form down beside his son. It was getting harder and harder to breathe.

Chapter 31

May 1989

Shepherd’s Bush was two postcodes away and another country. Louisa looked out of the bus window at the market where the nearest stall sold three pairs of vast knickers for 50p. Strange smells and sounds boomed from the shops. Life here seemed to be lived on the street, and she was conscious of her white skin and her alternative clothes and above all of the
A–Z
that she clutched in her hand, marking her out as a visitor. She turned off the Uxbridge Road and into a maze of side streets lined with Victorian houses, at first imposing townhouses but seeming to lose a storey at each corner until she got to Cedar Avenue. The road was treeless despite its name and comprised two mean low terraces, most of which were pebbledashed, stone-clad or rendered. Number ten had a pockmarked surface, aluminium doors and windows that seemed loose in their rotting wooden frames. She experienced the same tender compassion she had felt when she found out about his cleaning job: no wonder he had wanted to keep her away. She vowed not to let her disgust show, no matter how awful it turned out to be inside. But for now she wasn’t going into the main house; she let herself down the side alleyway, picking her way through overgrown tyre tracks and squeezing past smelly metal dustbins as she followed the music that she could hear coming from the . . .

Well, it was a garage. They could call it the studio all they liked, but the ugly little prefab with its glassless windows was a garage. Inside the . . . would she
ever
be able to bring herself to call it the studio? . . . the concrete floor still bore the oil-stains of a car, and a faint smell of petrol lingered.

They were mid-song and there was no welcome hello, just a nodded acknowledgement of her presence from Adam and a mouthed invitation from Angie to make herself at home. The place was simultaneously damp and dusty and there was nowhere for her to sit but an old-fashioned, high-backed armchair with the seat cushion missing. It was dark, too: the only light came from an industrial-looking spotlight without a stand that had
Hammersmith Odeon
stencilled onto it with thin white paint. They kept trying to balance it on its side to light the stage, but it just rolled back in its round shell. In the end they left it lying on its back so that it threw up light like a volcano, meaning that only the ceiling – corrugated iron, thin wooden rafters – was illuminated, and the band played in darkness.

Adam had been gallingly right: she hadn’t been missing much. Louisa had imagined that it would be like a private show just for her but they hadn’t played a single song she knew. Instead they were working through new tunes in a stop-start fashion, each interval punctuated by technical disputes that meant nothing to Louisa. Adam and Ciaran were having an intense disagreement about mixes and monitors: Adam thought that Ciaran was trying to lose his voice and Ciaran insisted, with diminishing patience, that that was the point of this track, that the vocals were buried in feedback. Ben smirked, using the downtime to paint his nails black. Angie interjected where she could, playing devil’s advocate, but it was clear that the argument was one-sided. Adam’s will was stronger than the rest of them combined, which was as it should be, Louisa thought; without him, what were they? A songwriter and a couple of session musicians. Ciaran seemed physically to diminish as Adam lambasted him. His slight frame was lost in his greatcoat with its breastplate of badges. He’s softer than he looks behind that sloganeering, thought Louisa, and she wondered if his defensive manner was overcompensating for shyness. He still hadn’t made eye contact with her.

‘All right!’ Ciaran threw up his arms. ‘Have it your way. Again.’

She wondered if the antipathy and tension between singer and composer was necessary for their creative process, and whether the music would have been as good if they’d actually liked each other.

At the foot of the armchair was a pond of paper scraps, flyers and tickets, fanzines and photographs. There were tickets from gigs dating back over a year, and a photograph of the band on a fire escape. The other three were dressed in black while Adam wore a white vest and white jeans which ought to have made him look embarrassingly mainstream but which he managed to subvert. Louisa could not believe that such precious records of the band’s early months were lying around so casually; this collection was crying out to be ordered and saved in a scrapbook. If they wouldn’t get round to it, she would: it would be a way of showing them she was on their side, and perhaps it would encourage them to let her in. One of the girls at the market sold beautiful Indian notebooks where the paper was handmade and the covers were black velvet brocade. She had often browsed the stall, liking the feel of the rough, pulpy paper underneath her fingers, but never known what she might fill the books with. Now she had finally found contents worthy of their pages. It would be something for Adam to show his children:
their
children, she let herself think. She smoothed the pieces of paper out, squared them off and slipped them into her Bartram’s where they would be pressed flat. She also found a stack of videotapes of live performances; she remembered Ben saying that they needed someone with a reel-to-reel recorder to make them into one continuous showreel. She could do that too, they had a tape-to-tape VHS player in their sitting room. There was just about room for the tapes in her duffel bag.