All Bones and Lies (20 page)

‘Oh, thanks a million, Colin! Trying to help her drive me nuts?'

‘Nuts!' Tammy took to screaming. ‘
Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!
'

Defeated, Colin swung the child down from the counter. Hurtling across the room, she grabbed at the snowstorm. ‘I want to hold it! Let me hold it! My turn!'

Colin rushed over to pull her away. Holding her by the shoulders, he told her firmly, ‘Not till you're sitting safely and sensibly right back on the sofa.'

A clever move. At once she stopped struggling and, turning her back on her frazzled, tear-stained mother,
dived headlong into the leaking cushions. Swivelling around, she held out both hands, imperiously wriggling her fingers. He prised the snowstorm from Mel's trembling fingers, and carried it over. ‘There's a rule,' he warned, holding it just out of reach. ‘You have to
whisper
.'

Tammy nodded gravely.

‘You see, she's so small and delicate and dainty that she can't hear you unless you whisper,' he said, to reinforce the point. Then he turned back to Mel. Lowering himself to his heels, he asked her softly, ‘Isn't there
someone
who could help? What about your family?'

She took the tissue he was offering and roused herself enough to say, ‘If I had any sort of family, do you suppose I'd be mouldering away in this dump?'

‘Well, what about—?' Tactfully he nodded towards Tam, absorbed in whispering to the spinning nymph. ‘You know,' he said. ‘The other Lavender.'

She stared.

‘I mean,
Ventura
.'

She twisted the tissue to shreds. ‘Him? All he's interested in is getting me back.' She pointed. ‘See?'

Taking it for permission, he picked up the nearer of the cards.

‘“With all good wishes for a better year, from Hermione”?'

‘Not that one. That's the bloody social worker.'

He felt a stab of nausea. On his last birthday he'd had no cards at all. But that was only because Dilys had been away at a conference, and his mother had forgotten. If any had arrived, they would at least have been from family.

Desperate to find some means to cheer her, he peered in the other.

‘“
Come back! Alexi
.” Well, that's good.'

‘Good?'

‘Nice this Alexi bloke loves you enough to tell you he wants you back.'

‘
Loves
me?' It was more of a bark than a laugh. ‘He doesn't love me. I expect all that's happened is that his foul moods and bad temper have finally driven away my rotten, untalented replacement. I bet the only reason he's sent that is because he's desperate to get a halfway decent act back on the road before the circus management give him the heave-ho.'

Knowing a Tam-sized chunk of his own loving, beating heart was now in hazard, he forced the words out.

‘It can't be that, or he'd just advertise for another partner.'

And now he'd done it. She was furious. ‘Oh, yes? A lot you know about it! Just advertise!' Words failed her, and had she, he sensed, not feared a fresh batch of howling from Tammy, she might very easily have slapped him.

Instead, she turned her back. To be conciliatory, he reminded her, ‘He did at least remember that it was your birthday. And you must
matter
to him. You are Tammy's mother, after all.'

She couldn't have looked blanker. ‘So? Tam's the bloody
problem
, isn't she?'

‘But if this bloke's her father—'

‘Which he's
not
!'

My God! The hours that he'd wasted envying him! How stupid could you get? But no more stupid than the man himself, this oiled, muscled idiot who, offered a choice of Mel and Tam together, or neither, would seem to
be sailing very near the option of ending up with an empty life.

‘I just don't understand.' He watched her rubbing at her tear-streaked face, and, like some soft-hearted hunter loosing a wire to let some desperate trapped creature go, felt obliged to add the words he knew might cause all his own happiness to fly from his grasp. ‘Most of the circuses I've inspected have had plenty of small children. If everyone's strictly careful to adhere to the rules, then, with a very few added precautions, there's no reason to think—'

Seeing her lip curl, he wrapped up hastily. ‘And there are nets.'

Again, that fierce hauteur. ‘Nets? Oh, yes! Thanks to you meddlers there are nets all over. But you can still fuck up. You can still make a fool of your partner.' Tipping her head, she launched into what even Colin could tell from a meeting of moments was the poorest of imitations of Alexi: ‘“Is no good, Mel. Having child around will take the mind off.”'

She let out an almost equally abrasive snarl of contempt in her own right. ‘But really the bastard's just deadly jealous I had a fling, and Tam's not his.'

Even allowing for nameless foreign influences, the response seemed old-fashioned.

‘But if you're
that
good—'

‘I
am
that bloody good!'

‘It seems so odd, then. To send you away.'

‘Send me away?' The dark eyes blazed. ‘That arsehole wouldn't work a proper set with me, and so I
left
.'

My God, he thought. Look at her. So alive. Alight. Could he have got it wrong? Could everything he'd so
unthinkingly taken for a mother's self-sacrifice – trading the glitter and danger of the highwire for down-to-earth safety nets for her young daughter: a nearby health clinic, regular nursery attendance, and even the freedom from watching the only parent she knew miss a man's grasp by a hair's breadth and spiral down through air – could all of it prove to be something quite different? Something in which the child herself was incidental – almost an accident, like her own birth? All this depression, all these whey-faced looks, the unwashed dishes and the dismal, unimaginative diet on which no growing creature ought to live . . .

Could it be possible they all boiled down to one enormous Artiste's Sulk?

So hard to judge. And hard to judge her harshly. Who, after all, would choose to live on a planet bulging with fudgers and shrinkers like him? The world cried out for passion. That is why people queued for circuses:
Ex pulvere, lux et vis
. Put a trapeze artist and a council officer in the same show, and there'd be no bets which way the audience would be looking at the moment the lights dimmed.

No, he thought, staring. It was unfair to think that someone from a circus should share priorities from a drabber world. Souls who could fly through air, despising nets strung under them by bureaucratic little fusspots like him, should be offered some leeway. No one would buy a ticket to watch him test seals on a canteen fridge. Hundreds would sit on chilly benches, risking piles, to see the soaring wizardry of her glimmering spirals.

Give the poor girl a chance. Instead of standing there
watching her spirits fade, he should stretch out a hand. She was only a fish out of water. If she'd gone belly-up downstream from some foul overflow or some unauthorized industrial drain, he'd be out of his van in a moment to help her. Getting her away from this dump for a day or two might lift her spirits.

Though, with someone so prickly, it was best to tread carefully . . .

‘So where's this circus of yours now?'

Close to mind, that was quite obvious. ‘Bridlington this week. Then up towards Whitby.'

‘Not too far to go for a few days.'

She gave him a very sour look.

He panicked. ‘During the refurbishment.'

‘The
what?
'

Oh, why not? If it helped.

‘The refurbishment. Did you not get your letter? Some of these flats are being redecorated very soon.' Oh, there'd be hell to pay with Hetherley and his workforce. And out-of-order billing going on for years. But it was worth it. Just the excitement of telling so many whoppers in a row made him feel a foot higher. ‘I'm afraid I was rather naughty when the order came round, and put you and Tammy right at the top of the list.'

‘I'm being painted? Soon? You mean, like next week or something?'

Next week? Christ! Forget Hetherley's workmen. But he could chase up that little old fellow of Perdita's. Pay him the earth to drop whatever he was doing, and smarten up the flat a bit. Maybe get in a cleaner. Anything to help the poor fettered creature through a few more grounded months.

‘It could well be as soon as that. And you should really think about getting away for a few days. It's never wise to have a child around when there are workmen in a property. All those tools lying about. And nasty paint fumes.'

She didn't look convinced.

‘He did invite you,' he reminded her.

‘He didn't mean for the
weekend
.'

God, she was touchy.

‘Maybe not. But you could see other friends. And I'm sure even Alexi can put up with seeing someone else's child around for one or two days. She's very winning, after all.' He jerked a thumb towards Tam, who'd done his argument the good favour of falling angelically asleep on the sofa. ‘And she'd enjoy a circus. Look how she loves her poster. No, you'd be far better off away.'

Choosing the phrase ‘better off' was a mistake. Mel asked him sourly, ‘Oh, yes? And how am I supposed to get Tam all the way to Bridlington? Carry her?'

‘No problem.' He fished out phrases from a thousand mind-numbing council memoranda. ‘Your extra-domiciliary expense docket' – that sounded good – ‘will have to be ratified anyway by our department. So if you planned to be away, I could give you the cash instead and deduct it at source. There'd be no problem.'

Diving into his wallet, he counted out notes on the table. ‘That's thirty, forty—'

‘Bridlington . . .'

He raised his head. She was gazing across at Tammy, shifting in sleep. Between the chubby fingers, the magic flakes swirled. The pearly skater was defying gravity, still
in her effortless pirouette, as the tiny world settled again sideways around her.

Then Mel, too, suddenly was in full spin. ‘I know.
You
take her.'

‘Me?'

‘Why not? She thinks you're wonderful. And you are good with her.'

He shook his head. ‘Impossible.'

‘Please, Colin! Only for a night or two. It would make everything so much easier.'

She didn't mean the travelling, he could tell.

‘No, really, Mel. I'm sorry.'

She was begging now. ‘She could still go to nursery. And, if you got stuck, your sister could help you. Didn't she even share a house with some sort of nurse person?'

‘I'm afraid they're not very friendly any more.'

She was already looking round, as if to decide what to take. ‘But you could still phone her for advice if anything went wrong. And nothing would.'

Dizzy with fright, he told her, ‘My mother's not well. I have to go round every night, and stay quite late.'

Even to him, it sounded so lame and unconvincing that he was shocked, a moment after saying it, to realize that it was the truth.

‘Well, take her with you! You could both stay there, and I could—'

‘No!'

He felt as if he'd pushed her over.

The sullen mask of discontent dropped back on her face. ‘Oh, sorry I even
asked
.'

‘No, honestly. It's me who's sorry.'

‘Oh,
please!
'

Embarrassed, he made for the door. ‘In fact, I'd better be getting round to my mother's now. Today happens to be her birthday as well.'

It was clear just how much credence Mel attached to this. ‘Of course it is. Goodbye. Thank you for coming.'

Her eyes fell on the money on the table, but, furious, she neither offered it back nor turned away, so he could easily step forward to fetch it.

‘That's quite all right,' he burbled, shuffling backwards till he tripped on the box with the toaster. ‘I had to come by. We had a couple of reports about vandals taking pot shots at some of the hall sprinklers.'

It was another glib excuse that, once out, struck him as the truth.

‘I'll take a look at them on my way out.'

‘Yes, you do that.'

And, inasmuch as it is possible to check a sprinkler as you hurry past, blind with embarrassment, that is what he did.

This time, he found his mother on the wicker seat beside the shower. Again he had the sense of confronting a stranger. ‘Hello,' he said, frightened he'd startle her. Skipping the lecture on not leaving the doors unlocked so anyone who happened to be passing could step in and murder her, he held out his present. ‘Happy birthday.'

She took the fat wrapped lump. ‘It feels so
heavy
.'

The words might have been an echo, but whereas Mel's were bubbling with excitement, his mother simply sounded critical. Giving him one of her tired, watery
smiles, she peeled off one layer of rustling rainbow tissue, and then the next. Uncovering yet another, she rolled her eyes up in that gods-give-me-patience way she'd used to squeeze discomfort out of him all his life. He didn't flicker, knowing from long experience how all these little drives to petty cruelty were nourished, rather than allayed, by any signs of his weakness. To his surprise, for once it proved no effort. Seeing her yet again so very differently, in this strange place, on this strange chair, he found himself, too, feeling oddly detached, capable of interpreting these almost involuntary flashes of contempt and disapproval as nothing personal, just her own greedy victim's way of acting as if each chance she missed to make a meal of upset or of disappointment would, like a dropped stitch, mar the overall design of the long tapestry of her life.

‘By the time I get down to this present, I'm going to be far too exhausted to enjoy it.'

Strange thing to do, though, when you came to think. To poison everything. Force yourself, as Dante put it in that chunk of the
Inferno
that Mr Ashcroft made him learn when he got so mad at him for forever being bullied, to be ‘sullen in the sweet air'. Dante hurled those who wilfully lived in sadness into a mud pool. He, Colin, would be kinder. ‘Don't you fret,' he wanted to console his mother. ‘I understand at last. All these past years, you've never really been at war with me and Dilys. All these attacks on others have really been digs at yourself, and we've only been stand-ins.' Could he explain to Dilys? Would she understand? For suddenly it seemed to Colin that, after a lifetime of guilt that stemmed from neither
his sister nor himself having the faintest inkling of what it was their mother had been needing, at last they could change things. Surely there must be time. And the sooner the better, because bad character was its own worst punishment, and old age judgement on the life you'd lived.