The Sick Rose (30 page)

The hands that had been outstretched flicked upwards at the wrist, and she pushed.

He made contact with the bonnet of the car. At the moment of impact, Louisa felt a strange detachment take hold, as though she were watching fictional events unfold on a screen. He looked like a big black spider tumbling over the braking vehicle. She noticed that the car was a convertible and thought, that’s good, that shouldn’t hurt too much; he’ll survive that, she thought, as he tumbled across the soft roof; and then, as his head hit the asphalt with a crack, she thought, oh, no, he might not.

His left cheek was pressed against the ground and his face was entirely obscured by his hair. The shape of his body was all wrong: his legs looked like they were on backwards. His right thumb stuck up as though hitching a ride. He was entirely without motion. The driver brought the car to a sudden, screeching halt fifteen yards away, then reversed until he was a car’s length from Adam’s body. The man who half-climbed out of the driver’s seat was youngish, with a loosened tie and pink eyes. He was close enough for Louisa to smell the booze on his breath and he had a manic, coked-up look around the eyes. She was already starting to think of him as the Other Man, her anonymous partner in crime.

‘Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,’ said the Other Man. He saw Louisa then. His expression was one of horror, panic and self-preservation, or was he only mirroring her own? For the few seconds their eyes connected there seemed to exist a moment of complete, pure complicity between them. He was gone as quickly and as noisily as he had arrived, and she was alone with Adam for the last time. She would have gone to him, but across the street, a light went on in a window. Someone opened it and a man’s voice made a wordless expression of shock. Louisa reflexively jumped back into the shadows, hiding herself between two parked cars as another car rounded the corner. The new vehicle was a shabby navy Ford Sierra and it drew to a halt in front of Adam’s crumpled body. The driver, a skinny, handsome black man around Adam’s age, got out and started jabbering in an unidentifiable foreign tongue. The
A–Z
on the dashboard and a windscreen sticker gave his profession away.

‘I’ll be right down,’ shouted the man from the window and then, over his shoulder, ‘Marina, call 999.
Call 999
!’

The minicab driver was rocking on his heels and looking up and down the street. The man from the window reappeared in his doorway, ran down the steps and bent to crouch over Adam. Louisa was rooted to her gloomy hideaway.

‘It wasn’t me,’ the minicab driver said to the man.

‘I know it wasn’t, you fool. Out of the way, let me have a look.’

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘No, I’m . . . I’ve done a first aid course,’ said the man. ‘Can you move, please, you’re blocking the light. Where’s that bloody ambulance?’ He alternated between blowing into Adam’s mouth and pumping his chest. The man’s breathing was noisy and deliberate, as though making a pantomime of respiration would force Adam to do the same. He picked up Adam’s wrist. He shook his head. His fingers travelled to Adam’s beautiful neck and pressed down in three or four different places.

Little yellow boxes of light appeared in windows up and down the street. Doors opened. The woman called Marina came down her front steps in a red velvet dressing gown, carrying a towel and a bottle of mineral water. ‘They’ll be here in two minutes,’ she said.

‘I don’t think he’s got two minutes,’ said the man. ‘Oh, shit, Marina, I can’t find a pulse. He’s dead.’ He carried on performing the procedure nevertheless.

Louisa thought distractedly that she ought to be the one to give him his last kiss. A small crowd gathered around Adam, the man she would forever think of as the man who declared death, the taxi driver and Marina. Concerned voices and the hum of the Sierra’s engine masked Louisa’s footsteps, and nobody was looking in her direction. She crept backwards into the recess of the night, which she threw over her like a cloak. She did not run. She walked with a calm, even gait along Cromwell Road. An ambulance and a police car streaked past her, lights on, sirens off. The two vehicles chased each other like a pair of boy racers. Their pursuit was futile; the drunk driver was long gone, she had gone and so, in every sense that mattered, had Adam. They could drive as fast as they liked; they were already too late.

Chapter 39

December 2009

Paul hung back while Louisa queued at the ticket window. She kept giving him nervous glances and he hoped the smiles he bounced back were reassuring. This was the first time he had been with her in any context other than Kelstice. She had more formal clothes on than her usual uniform of fleece and jeans; a dress that wrapped her up like a present, and over that an expensive, tailored coat of dark blue wool teamed with black suede boots with heels like knitting needles that clicked when she walked; he had been impressed when he saw her dressed up and had insisted on carrying her, with much laughter, from the caravan to her car so that she wouldn’t muddy her boots. In the strip-lit reality of Leamington station the clothes made her look older,
other
. She wore make-up too; it settled in faint creases around her eyes he hadn’t noticed before. She had told him that sharing her secret made her feel eighteen again but she looked twice that today. The difference in their ages charged towards him and punched him in the stomach.

A fat white hexagon of snow blew in from the platform and settled on her shoulder, a guiding star on a navy night.

‘It’s evens for a white Christmas,’ said the man in the ticket office.

When they passed through the barrier he had to show the guard his Young Person’s Railcard. The photograph had been taken when he was sixteen, when he was just starting to grow his hair out. He looked like a mushroom. Louisa looked at it, said, ‘Oh, sweet Lord,’ and had one of those wild giggling fits she only got when something wasn’t actually funny.

‘I should never have told you,’ she said as the train clattered through a greeting-card landscape of naked trees and spooling white mist. ‘I’ve ruined it.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Paul. It was true, up to a point. He had lived with the Scatlocks long enough to know the difference between a good person who did a bad thing and a person who was bad to the bone. Her confession in the greenhouse had come as a shock, but only for a minute or two. His reaction had been one of disbelief, chased by indignation on her behalf and anger at the dead man. This was the fourth terrible thing in his life, after his father, and Emily, and Ken Hillyard, and each time there was such a revelation the impact was a little less devastating. At this rate, he’d have a heart of stone by his twenty-first birthday.

She reached for his hand. He took it but put his scarf over it so that other people wouldn’t see the gesture. He was acutely aware of what they must look like. If someone mistook her for his mother, which newly seemed possible, he was afraid it would ruin her for him forever.

There was a brass band playing at Marylebone station, a huge, real Christmas tree and holly and ivy and lights. A young woman with tinsel in her hair was throwing up into one of the clear plastic bags that served as litter bins. Bodies thronged the concourse, making Paul nervous. It was as though Marylebone was the portal linking his recent life at Kelstice with his past life of Daniel and Carl and policemen and trials. It made everything at Kelstice seem dreamlike. Who had he been kidding?
This
was the real world.

‘I wish you had a mobile,’ he said as the band barrelled into ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’. Suddenly her not having a phone was another unappealing symptom of the generation gap.

‘We’ll still talk,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you. It might be a bit weird if you ring me at Miranda’s.’

He nodded. Keeping their relationship secret from everyone at Kelstice was a habit so deeply ingrained that evidently they were both to keep it from their families too. ‘If I don’t pick up, it’ll be because I can’t, not because I don’t want to.’

Paul’s ticket to Goring had a built-in Travelcard that allowed him to cross London. He turned towards the entrance to the Underground.

‘Honey, I don’t do the Tube,’ she said, in a voice he’d never heard before; arch, cynical, impatient. ‘There’s only one way to survive in London, and that’s by spending money.’ She headed for the taxi rank. He didn’t recognise this urbane woman with her confident edge. It seemed to him that a hardness went with her clothes and her make-up. Her confession had not seemed to tally with what he knew of her character but it was easy to believe that this new Louisa – or was it the old one? – was capable of anything.

The queue of snow-dusted black cabs was long but moving swiftly.

‘I was thinking,’ said Paul, although he hadn’t been, the words tumbled out unexpected and unrehearsed.

‘
Oh
?’ It sounded like a warning.

‘Why don’t I find out what happened next?’

‘Next after what?’

‘What do you think? After he . . . after you left him there?’ She winced but didn’t say anything. ‘You said yourself you never looked into it. What if I found out what happened to the Other Man?’

‘Oh,
yes
,’ she hissed. ‘Hi, I killed my boyfriend but I want you to find out if someone else went down for it. I can just see that making a private detective’s day.’

Paul tutted. Couldn’t she see he was trying to help her? ‘Not like that. On the internet.’

‘You can really do that?’

‘I’ve got nothing else to do, have I?’

‘What if I don’t like what you find out?’

‘At the moment you don’t know, and it’s killing you.’

‘There are worse things than not knowing,’ she said. ‘Me
knowing
was how all the trouble started.’

A red-faced taxi driver broke into their conversation. ‘Do you want a cab or what?’

Paul kissed her goodbye through the window and was surprised to find tears pricking his eyes. It was not so much a parting as a severance, and the effort of it took him by surprise. Of course she was snappy, London made her nervous and hadn’t she opened her heart to him, hadn’t she put her life and liberty in his hands? As the taxi pulled away, he heard her voice instructing the driver that under no circumstances was he to travel through Kensington but to cross Westminster Bridge and go down through Wandsworth. He hoped that she would be all right without him.

Down in the Tube carriage, he felt lost and hollow. The train came into the weak winter daylight for a minute or two as the tunnel receded at High Street Kensington and there was a corresponding lucidity in his thoughts. Their ages were only numbers. After everything she had told him and despite his creeping doubts, it had never once occurred to him to be afraid of her. He wondered whether this was faith or stupidity, which were, when you thought about it, two of the cornerstones of love.

Chapter 40

January 2010

How the hell were they going to have twins in a house this size? If he was them, with two children on the way, effectively homeless and with neither of them working, he would be terrified. His mother and Troy, however, were walking around with dumbly beatific smiles on their faces, touching each other whenever they passed, which was a spatial inevitability as well as a demonstration of affection. There wasn’t room to move in this house. If you wanted to go up the stairs and someone was coming down you had to double back on yourself and go into the living room to let them pass.

Before last autumn, Paul had only slept under three roofs in his whole life, not counting holidays – their first house, the house in Grays Reach and then Daniel’s – and now here he was sleeping somewhere new every month, the standard of accommodation and comfort going slowly downhill every time, from 45B to Louisa’s caravan and now this. He was sleeping on the sofa – if you could call it sleeping, and indeed if you could call it a sofa. It wasn’t a soft couch like the one in their old house or even a leather one like the Scatlocks’ but a padded bench with lace doilies draped over the thin wooden arms. It was a foot too short for him to be able to stretch out properly, so he would wake most mornings at around four with cramp in his legs. He missed Louisa’s big pull-down bed and her two duvets and the way she threw out heat like a furnace.

Troy’s mother, who made him call her Mrs Ball, got up at six every morning and put the television on at a volume that made the water in her fish tank jump. She was a pinched, morbid little woman who wore dull gold sleepers that pulled her earlobes so low you could see daylight through the holes. She aroused in Paul something like the opposite of desire: if Louisa was someone whose body he couldn’t get enough of, he couldn’t get far enough away from Mrs Ball. She flicked between two television channels that showed seances and ghost hunts and fortune tellers. She was always on at Natalie to come with her to the spiritualist church; every time she returned she had tales of someone ‘coming through’ from the dead, usually Troy’s father or one of her many deceased friends. Although Paul no more believed in psychic powers than he did Father Christmas, there was something unnerving about the way she looked at him, as though she knew what he was thinking. Daniel had had the same knack; if they looked at you for long enough you’d find yourself blurting out your secrets.

He forced himself out of the house every day even though the coastal air was a knife to his skin. The first day he tried to go for a walk along the shore the freezing salty wind blasted his face so that he had red marks on his cheeks and eyelids like sunburn; it hurt to blink. Even the beach was boring, nothing but identical pebbles and replicated groynes as far as the eye could see. If you walked for half an hour you arrived in Worthing but that was little better: half the shops in the town centre were empty and the rest sold comfortable shoes and nan-shaped clothes. Old women seemed to outnumber old men by about twenty to one and everything about this edge of England was geared towards their needs. Paul had never seen so many ramps. You could go for miles without encountering a single stair. He took to sitting in pubs on his own in the afternoons, savouring cheap pints in the kinds of chain pubs that did two lasagnes for £6 and were frequented by, yes, old women. He even tried to persuade Troy to join him for an evening drink.