The Stranding (21 page)
‘It’s like a bomb blast,’ Callista was saying.
Lex hadn’t noticed her come to the door. He looked into her shocked face and felt nothing. He was so detached, so floaty. Surely he should be feeling upset.
He placed the book on the kitchen bench and walked down the hall to the bedroom. The wind had smacked the bedroom door shut. He forced it open and stopped. Glass was scattered all over the room. The bed was soaked. The curtains whipped in the wind and the sea seemed to roar in unchecked.
Numb, Lex stood in the doorway and stared out through the wreckage. He watched Callista wrap a towel around her hand and sweep the shattered glass off the bed onto the floor. She kicked some glass out of the way and dragged the chest of drawers aside where it had toppled against the bed. A drawer fell out and with it a framed photograph, the photo of Isabel. Callista bent to pick it up.
‘Thanks,’ he said, voice hollow. ‘I’ll have that.’
A strange noise huffed out of her as he pulled the photograph from her hand. Her eyes were hurt and angry. She tried to snatch it back.
‘What’s this,’ she said, eyes snapping. ‘A child? Your child?’ She tugged frantically at the other drawers, tipping the contents onto the floor. ‘And what about your wife? Is there a photo of her too? What else are you hiding?’
‘Hiding?’ Lex was suddenly exploding with outrage. ‘Hiding? What about you? You didn’t tell me you were a Wallace.’
‘Is it such a big deal?’ Callista was wild, reckless, struggling with some desperate thing inside her. She felt as if she might throw something.
‘Yes it is, given that this is your grandfather’s house.’ Lex was like granite.
‘What are you saying?’
Something unfamiliar was curling over in him, like a wave breaking. He wished Callista would stop before something snapped in him. There was hammering in his head. The rumble of anger boiling deep within him was pressing to the surface. He tried to hold on, but his voice came out hard.
‘When were you going to tell me?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Tell you what?’
‘Your real name . . . Callista Wallace.’
‘I told you my name. My married name. I wasn’t hiding anything.’
‘Of course you were hiding something. We talked about Wallaces dozens of times and you never mentioned it. Why’s that? Were you trying to woo me so you could win back the house?’
Callista thought she would erupt. ‘That’s a disgusting suggestion. I enjoy your company.’
‘What? Like on the beach the other night, when you ripped me to shreds?’
‘When you were hooking into my father again! What was I supposed to do? Stand by and watch you annihilate him?’
She was backed into a corner, fighting like a cat. And Lex was hot with seething anger. The room was too small for their emotions.
‘I think you should go,’ he said.
But Callista stood firm and defiant. ‘Not until you tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’ he asked, incredulous.
‘About your wife and your daughter.’
Lex glanced at Isabel’s photo and his fury left him. He felt bereft, betrayed, demolished.
‘My daughter’s dead,’ he said, flat and tired. ‘She died from cot death. And my wife blames me. So now she’s divorcing me. That’s about all you need to know.’
He side-stepped past Callista’s shocked white face, through the shattered window and out onto the deck.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Please don’t go.’
But Lex hobbled down the steps.
The nurse was standing on the grass.
‘If the Kombi won’t start, make sure you take her home,’ he said, as he limped towards the heath. ‘I want the house empty when I get back.’
When he returned, the cars were gone and the house was quiet. He was glad of it. He needed solitude, space around him, the cleanliness of empty air. The past twenty-four hours had been too much for him—the storm, resuscitation again, Callista . . .
He went next door to check Mrs B’s house. Things had blown over there too. A corner of the roof had lifted. The old bus had toppled over. The front door was hanging loosely on torn hinges. Out the back, he found the peacock crushed under a sheet of tin, its bright feathers already fading. Of everything, that upset him most.
Sitting on the back steps of his neighbour’s house, tears came from nowhere. He cried for Isabel, for Mrs B, for the peacock, for his house. Even for Callista. There were parts of all of them gone forever.
After he buried the peacock, Lex drove into town to see how others had fared in the storm and to organise a glazier to replace his windows. At the far end of town, the street was clogged with police cars. Lex was sure they hadn’t been there when the nurse drove them home a few hours ago. As he parked the Volvo, he noticed that the front door of the butchery was sealed with yellow tape. He ducked into Sue’s, wondering what was going on.
In the café a cluster of dark-suited strangers was hunched around a table against the wall. Sue was nowhere to be seen so Lex slipped into the kitchen looking for her.
‘Sue,’ he hissed. ‘What’s happening?’
She looked up from the bench, stressed and white.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. Her face melted into tears. ‘It’s been a terrible day, Lex. A terrible day.’
‘What are all these people doing here?’
‘Henry Beck died in the storm. It was an accident.’ She sat down on a stool and wept.
‘What happened?’
‘I found him,’ she said, wiping away tears. ‘I came in early to check the café after the storm and I noticed lights on in the butchery and the back door open. So I went in, to see if there was anything I could clean up for them. Henry was in there, all curled up on the floor with a knife in his stomach and a huge lump of meat hanging over him dripping blood on his head.’ She shivered and wept. ‘I’ll never forget the sight of it.’
Lex felt useless. He didn’t know what to say.
‘I rang the police straightaway,’ Sue said. ‘And they rang Helen.’ She started crying again. ‘I should have rung her myself, but I wasn’t brave enough. I was such a wreck after finding him, you see.’
‘What happened then?’ Lex asked.
‘Helen came down to see him, of course, but they wouldn’t let her in, because the forensic crew was still working in there.’
‘They made her wait?’
She nodded. ‘Poor Helen. They made her wait, and she kept wringing her hands and asking me why they were calling Henry “the body”. Kept asking if that meant he wasn’t Henry any more. That he wasn’t human.’
Lex tried hard not to imagine Helen standing at the door, anxious, terrified.
‘Then they let her in,’ Sue said. ‘And they were all lined up against the wall, you see, because they wanted to watch her reaction so they could tell whether she’d murdered him or not. I knew what they were thinking. Wretched souls. Well, when they let her in, Helen just stood there, holding on to the door. She was so white, Lex, and shaking all over. I don’t know how they could even think she’d murdered him. She walked so slowly across to him, and sat down beside him in that pool of blood, and she pushed the hair back from his face, so gently. It breaks me up to think about it.’ She oozed fresh tears. ‘There was blood all down his face and she sat there picking it off with her fingernails. She was so careful and gentle about it, so as not to hurt him. Lex, it’d tear your heart out to have seen it.’
He patted her arm.
‘Those stupid policemen just stood there watching her,’ she said. ‘They didn’t know what to do. So I pushed my way in there past them all and I took her home. I had to whisk her past her poor son Darren so he wouldn’t get a sight of the blood. Poor boy. He was in the hallway, waiting. He didn’t know what was going on. So I got her past him and I put her in the shower so she could wash herself clean. Poor thing. Then I got the boy to call Mrs Jensen. There was nothing more I could do after that.’
‘What’s happening now?’ Lex asked. ‘Have the forensic crew sorted it out?’
She jerked her head towards the door into the café. ‘That’s what they’re doing in there now. They’ve got their theories.’
‘Like what?’
‘No witnesses, you see. They have to work it out.’
‘And?’
‘They’re saying that Henry was probably out the back sharpening knives, with the side of beef out ready to carve. They reckon a blast of wind bashed the door into the beef and rolled it onto him. Forced him down onto his knife. They reckon he stabbed himself.’
Lex could picture it, even though he didn’t want to.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked.
Sue shook her head. ‘No, she’s got the church around her now, giving her support. That’s where she belongs. With her own folk.’
The funeral was surprisingly large. Lex was amazed at the scores of cars parked outside the church when he drove up in the Volvo. He wandered up the hill with all the other quiet, serious-faced people and found a standing space down the back of the church. Several people he didn’t know nodded at him as they passed. He was surprised and wondered what it meant. Perhaps that was what people did at funerals in the country.
The church was packed. Lex hadn’t imagined Henry to be so popular. He’d seemed such a difficult person, loaded with arrogance and uncomfortable edges. Whenever Lex had bought meat at the butchery, he’d watched Henry lording it over his assistant, glaring at him and waving instructions with hands as meaty as steaks. He couldn’t forget the patronising way Henry spoke to his wife whenever he was ordering her about, and the fear and submission in Helen’s eyes.
Helen was there, of course. She was down the front, stiff and straight in black, with the boy holding her hand. Lex saw her glance over her shoulder at the crowd and then quickly turn back to the front again. There was fear in her eyes. Henry was still in control.
The coffin was polished wood, sleek and expensive. It was long, for a long man. It reminded Lex of Isabel’s coffin. But hers had been white and obscenely small. He’d cried when they chose it. He didn’t want to bury her under the ground, away from the sunlight.
Isabel’s funeral had been big too—huge crowd, tiny coffin. Jilly had insisted on a church service, even though they weren’t religious. Something about concern for Isabel’s soul, just in case there was a heaven up there. She didn’t want to think about Isabel missing out and burning in purgatory. But Lex knew that purgatory was here on earth, being left behind with the terror and the grief. Isabel had only been dead a week and it was already destroying them.
Before the service, everyone had wafted around outside the church, patting him on the shoulder and calling it a tragedy. There were tears, an endless tide of them. The memory of being engulfed by hugs. People gripping him as if they were drowning, when it was really him that was going under. The thought of going into the church and watching that tiny coffin throughout the service had withered him. He didn’t think he could do it. Didn’t think he could sit there knowing that Isabel’s tiny fragile body was lying in there. Already decomposing, no matter how the funeral parlour had tried to disguise it. Death was supposed to be for old people, for people worn out with life, their bodies broken and past their use-by date. Isabel’s life had barely started.
In the church, he’d sat stiff by Jilly. She was a red weeping mess, seeping constant tears. But Lex’s tears were locked somewhere inside him and he couldn’t even reach out to hold her hand. Jilly’s mother had to be the prop for her that day. Provide the support that Lex couldn’t. He ought to have been strong for her. But everything inside him was broken, and without the scaffolding of his meagre self-control he’d have collapsed beneath the weight of a feather.
The service had passed in a blur. Lex remembered nothing of it—none of the soothing words that must have flowed from the eulogy, no recollection of the colourful flowers that must have adorned the church to signify new life and resurrection. All he remembered was the coffin. The shiny white wood, the handles glinting gold, the terrible thought of burying his child deep under the ground.
At the end of the service, he had carried Isabel from the church. When he lifted the coffin from the stand, it was so light Lex thought it might fly away down the aisle, out into the bright day and up into the sky. It would have been better that way. But it ended in the cemetery, with the dull thud of clods of dirt being dropped onto the coffin. Each thud like a hammer battering on his soul. It was as if he were being buried too, the essence of him sealed away in the coffin with Isabel. His heart torn out and interred.
In the Merrigan church, staring at Henry Beck’s coffin, Lex felt his heart back within him now, altered, but somehow regrown, thundering with the stress of memory. He saw the minister step up to the podium—a tall man, imposing in his black suit and white dog collar. Elevated above the congregation, the minister stood with his head bowed while the organ burst lustily into ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. It was incongruous, with Henry’s coffin lying there at the head of the church. Nobody sang. And it was too much for Helen Beck. Lex could see her shoulders shaking while she cried.
After the music faded away, the minister raised his head and hands and his voice poured out over a concealed microphone. The service was lengthy and dry, lots of inane preaching, a touch of fire and brimstone, endless talk of love and forgiveness. Lex eyed the door, wishing he could escape. He had come to pay his respects to Henry, strange though the man had been, but he hadn’t counted on flashing back to Isabel’s funeral and now he was emotionally exhausted and wanted to leave. This was going to be a long haul. But now that the service was under way, it would be difficult to walk out.
