The Sick Rose (25 page)

‘Danger of death my arse,’ said Daniel. ‘That’s the tracks. We’re only nicking a bit of signalling wire. It’s not like we’re stealing the brakes or anything. Just a few commuters a little bit late for their office jobs. They’ll probably be
grateful
. They’ll probably go home and go down the pub.’

‘Come on, Paul,’ said Hash. ‘Play with the big boys.’

Paul felt the familiar surrender of his own will to Daniel’s and hoped that Hash didn’t think it was because of anything he’d said. He held the torch while Daniel jemmied open the signal box door. Even Hash must have been able to see that Daniel didn’t know what he was doing; he pulled at the box’s multicoloured intestines with no clear intent. Paul felt a very faint vibration beneath his legs. Seconds later a black engine yanked past a string of windowless carriages, like a ghost train ferrying the dead, so close and so fast that it made their hair fly and their ears ring. All three of them lost their nerve and their footing at the same time and went rolling down the hill of the embankment, arms and legs colliding, giving Paul as sure a hiding as if he had been beaten with an iron bar.

‘I can’t believe we’re leaving empty-handed,’ whinged Hash, when they were back on the road.

‘One of the most important things about this business is knowing when to call it a night,’ Daniel told him, his voice heavy with condescension. ‘My father taught me that.’

‘Your dad’s well cool,’ said Hash again. His tumble hadn’t knocked any of the nervous energy out of him. He was making everyone tense. On the outskirts of Grays Reach, they pulled up on the kerb outside a service station with an all-night garage and sent Hash in to get some crisps and sweets for when they got back.

‘Is he coming back to ours, then?’ said Paul.

‘Is he fuck,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m waiting till he’s in the shop and then I’m gonna leave him here.’

But Hash didn’t make it into the shop. He paused by the driver door of an empty, dark grey Peugeot, showroom-shiny, and tried the handle. Paul watched in sickened fascination as he opened it up and grabbed something from inside, then turned and ran back to the boys’ Volvo, shouting ‘Go, go, go!’ like something from a TV show. The street revolved around them as Daniel executed a powerful three-point turn; he screeched away from the petrol station at speed that made Paul feel he’d left his internal organs behind.

‘Got you a sat nav, mate,’ said Hash.

‘I know, but there?’ said Daniel. Paul could tell he was only just managing to keep a lid on his anger. ‘That’s my local garage! You don’t shit on your own doorstep!’

‘It’s yours,’ said Hash, but the swagger was gone from his voice. He handed the little black box with its wire tail to Paul. ‘We can use it next time we go out.’

‘Next time? I tell you what. Don’t call us, Hash, we’ll call you.’

Finally Hash was silent. When they got back to Grays Reach, he dragged his feet across the courtyard and disappeared into a tunnel between two houses. Paul wondered if he knew the extent to which he’d blown it, for both of them.

Up in bed, Paul tried to read but the words on the page seemed crooked and close, like Chinese characters. He was still awake when Daniel came up. Diesel jumped off Paul’s duvet and onto Daniel’s.

‘He’s a fucking liability. That thing with the sat nav, what was that all about? He’s like a little kid.’

‘I dunno,’ said Paul. ‘Couldn’t you, like, train him up or something? What if I can’t come out one night?’

‘Why, where are you going?’ Paul sensed Daniel sit up in bed.

‘Nowhere, nowhere. But what if you want to drive out, not for work, just to see a girl or something. You don’t want me everywhere you go.’

‘Don’t I?’ said Daniel. Is it because he wants me with him, or because when I’m with him, he knows where I am? thought Paul.

‘You can always use that sat nav,’ suggested Paul.

‘I can’t programme it, can I, you prick?’ said Daniel in triumph as well as anger.

‘I didn’t think. I’m sorry, Daniel.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Daniel, laying a hand on Paul’s arm like a pardoning priest. He did not remove it and Paul listened to the slowing breath and felt the deadening of the weight until he was sure that Daniel was asleep. Only then did he pick up the hand by the wrist and place it on Daniel’s bare chest. He fancied that he could still feel it: every time he was about to drop off to sleep, he was jolted awake by a phantom touch, but every time he looked over to check, all of Daniel’s limbs were where they should be.

Paul resigned himself to another sleepless night. The only reason the situation was tolerable, the only reason he had not had some kind of nervous breakdown, was that an end was in sight. Soon he would be at university, off to start a new life for himself. He had nightmares that night about being imprisoned in a cage made of lead and gilded with copper and aluminium.

Chapter 33

November 2009

He learned to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of life in her caravan. Aware that he was essentially her guest, he tried to carry his weight, taking over the heavier jobs. Maintenance of the three panels on the side of the caravan, the ones that opened to reveal the electricity socket, the gas supply and the tank for the chemical toilet, became his responsibility. The gas was easily changed, especially now she had switched to an odourless kind, the chemical toilet was only gross the first time, but the electricity was a perennial problem, forever coming unstuck at the mains. Reconnecting it meant a fifteen-minute traipse back to the cabins, and he always forgot to pull down the trip switch that cut the electricity off; if you reconnected without pulling the trip, the power surge blew the fuses in the light and the kettle, and you had to go back to the cabins and reconnect it again. He made a big fuss about it, but he didn’t really mind. It felt reassuringly masculine. These were the kinds of jobs that his father hadn’t let his mother do.

Louisa never stopped growing things. It was as though she had to have her fingers in the earth to function. As well as working in the garden all day, they worked at weekends in the tiny vegetable plot alongside her caravan, pulling up carrots and swedes and leeks that she threw into a slow cooker and made into soups and stews.

‘It’s funny, I never thought about growing stuff before,’ he said. ‘You just get used to seeing everything come out of a packet.’

‘I don’t suppose I gave it much thought when I was your age either. I was a real city girl. I’d have concreted over every blade of grass in the country if I could have.’

‘But you hate concrete! You said that people who pave over their front gardens should go to prison.’

She laughed. ‘Ah, but that’s me
now
. I told you, I wasn’t like that when I was younger. Well. There was one garden I loved . . . but even that was planted in concrete.’

He wondered what had happened to change the way she thought. Spending time with Louisa was changing the way he looked at everything; it was as though he saw the earth from the ground up, rather than the sky down, for the first time. He wondered who had done the same for her, what the experience had been that had turned the teenage Louisa into the woman he knew, and he wondered if it was to do with the way there sometimes seemed to be a screen of glass between them.

He finally admitted to destroying her rambling rose one day when he found her tracing its dying tendrils with a look of sorrow on her face. Now that the wild flowers around its base had died he could see the full extent of the damage he had caused. The plant had been almost completely severed just above the root. Its naked stems, which should have remained green all year round, were so dark brown they were almost black. She snapped off a brittle shoot; it was hollow and dry. Thorns fell off it like needles from an old Christmas tree.

‘It’s had it,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry, that was me,’ he said. ‘I broke it when I climbed the wall, the first time I came here. Don’t worry, I’ll plant a new one for you.’

‘That’s sweet, but it won’t work,’ she said. ‘The soil will be rose-sick.’

‘What’s that?’

‘When a new rose is planted on the same spot as an old one, you get a sick rose; it doesn’t bloom and it’ll probably die. No one really knows why, but it’s not worth replanting. I’ve seen it happen lots of times.’

‘It makes sense, in a way,’ he said. ‘You can’t expect something that beautiful to bloom twice.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said. A change came over her face, as though something obvious had finally dawned on her. ‘I never thought of it like that.’

Paul didn’t buy her a new rambling rose, but he did buy her a rosewood chess set whose board was carved with an intricate floral pattern that he thought she would like. It was nothing special, only a charity shop find – he had checked his bank balance at the building society and been horrified at the crater his new lifestyle had blown in his savings – but he had never bought a present for a woman who wasn’t his mother before, not even Emily, and he was nervous about giving it to her. The moment he eventually picked was a darkening weekend afternoon. They were in bed together, the faltering electric bulb and the blinking oil lamps bathing them in a flickering cinefilm light.

‘I got you a present,’ he said, drawing the package out of his bag. ‘To say sorry about your rose.’

She unwrapped it and ran her fingers over its carved surface like someone reading Braille.

‘It’s beautiful, I love it,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how to play.’

He was shocked. ‘What was the point of your posh school if they didn’t teach you to play chess? You’ll be telling me you didn’t walk around with books on your head next.’ She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘I’m only teasing, it’ll be nice for me to teach you something for a change. Not that I’ve played against anything other than a computer for years.’

Wrapped in blankets and throws, they sat cross-legged opposite each other and balanced the chessboard on their knees. He instructed her carefully, enjoying the process of handing down information and the flush that crept over her lips while she was concentrating. For the first few games he tried to lose and won, but as she got the hang of it, the challenge became genuine.

‘Checkmate,’ she said suddenly, childishly pleased with herself. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

Paul studied the black pieces ringfencing his white king.

‘Bloody hell, you are as well,’ he said. She leaned across, her bare arm gleaming, and deposed his monarch with a flick of her fingertip.

‘Do you forgive me? ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Trusting fool,’ she smiled. He traced a line from her wrist to her neck, let his hand cup her chin.

‘I’d forgive you anything,’ he said, without really knowing where the words had come from. She didn’t move her lips, but her smile dimmed somehow.

‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said. He felt the mood shift. The look in her eyes mystified, excited and frightened him. He had clearly hit a nerve, although he didn’t know how or why; but he did know, with sudden but absolute certainty, that she was wrong. He meant it, he meant it twice, the words were doubly freighted with meaning.

By pre-empting forgiveness on his own part he was paving the way for the terrible confession he had yet to make to her, and he also wanted to show her what she meant to him.

‘I mean it,’ he said, his other hand reaching out to thumb the petal-soft skin on the inside of her elbow. Louisa flushed, took both of his hands and held them in her lap.

‘Sweet boy,’ she said, pushing his hair away from his brow and putting her thumb on his lower lip. Tell her now, whispered a voice inside his head, look at her, she’ll understand, but he lost his nerve and resorted to humour.

‘Who are you calling a boy?’ he said, pulling her free hand underneath the chessboard and into his lap. She smiled and took his cue; he wondered if he would ever take for granted the other things she could do to him and the things he was allowed to do to her. The chessboard and all the pieces were thrown off the bed. Kings and queens, knights and bishops, rooks and pawns all rolled across the floor, a scattered court.

Chapter 34

December 2009

The diggers arrived, navy blue machines that perched on the edge of the car-park plot like giant insects. Ingram gathered everyone together and made a big announcement about the power of Louisa’s cajoling, and how it boded well for the grant application. Paul felt a surge of something warm and sweet when Ingram said her name and identified it as pride. He winked at her across the sea of hardcore and mud that divided them and, after a brief glance around to check that no one was looking in her direction, she made a suggestive gesture, her tongue probing the inside of her cheek, then resumed her previous expression of cherubic innocence. Paul let out a shocked, delighted laugh that he had to cover up with a cough.

There was a surreal interlude while everyone stood before the diggers in admiration, like a bunch of Edwardians oohing and aahing over a motorcar. ‘Isn’t it thrilling?’ said Demetra, who was wrapped in fuzzy, sludge-coloured wool.

It was the first time he had seen her for weeks; he had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to her since Carl’s phone call had come, but it had to sound casual in order not to raise the alarm, so he couldn’t have made an appointment.

‘Demetra, does anyone apart from you have access to my file?’ he asked.