Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (18 page)

“You know, Mr Walton, you really must stop smoking in bed like you do.” Connie held up an ashtray with its little island of grey ash and crushed butts. That same light-hearted reproachful tone and look on the face.

And like a child he felt his cheeks burn. Mr Walton. Big, heavy, built like a brick wall, rugby-playing Walton. Blushing before this mere scrap of a woman.

She dusted the bedside cabinet and his eyes played over her, this beautiful and perfectly formed Venus with a duster. She looked up. “Aren’t you going to work, Mr Walton?” They both looked at the bedside clock. “You’ll definitely be late now.”

He shrugged his answer. Damn work! Damn those scruffy starlings! What did school matter?

She shook her head at him as she walked up to him with the ashtray in her hand. “You’re such a funny thing!” she said, coming up to the seawall that was his bulk and which prevented her from going any further. She cocked her eyebrow, meaning, ‘Excuse me, Mr Walton, I wish to pass’ – faint irritation in the movement.

But then he did something he knew he shouldn’t ever have done.

He grabbed her arms, wrapped a meaty hand around each, the bands of his fingers easily encircling the soft white flesh. “Connie…” he said. But then realised what he’d done, and regretted it.

She struggled to free herself, tiny shrugs, her expression one not of fear but bewilderment. “Mr Walton, what do you think you’re doing?” Ash floated from the lip of the ashtray and trickled unseen to the carpet.

“I…” he faltered. But it was too late. Her body had tensed, was pulling from him, trying to extricate itself from his grip, a certain panic evidenced in her quick movements, and all the while her slender fingers refusing to let go of the ashtray. He couldn’t release her, because what must she think of him? He had to hold her, to tell her he’d made a mistake, that he’d only been thinking of Jean and that he missed her so, so much. Missed his captain.

“Mr Walton! Let me go!”

Fear in her voice now.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I don’t…” He fastened his hands tighter around her arms. “Wait…Listen!” His voice rose just a tad too high, instilling more fear in her. She dropped the ashtray, and they were heedless of the soft clunk it made on the carpet, or of the ash that smeared the white bedcover. I can explain, he thought. Let me explain everything. About the loneliness. Do you know how this house feels – so large, so empty? But the words never came out. Instead he became angry when she didn’t stop her fighting, and his cheeks flushed red, a blush but not a blush. “Keep still, for God’s sake, woman!” he bellowed, as he bellowed all day long at school. And her face grew very white and afraid.

No, don’t be like this, he thought, don’t fear me.

It was he that was afraid, as he had been back then. His face that had grown pale. He was gripping the arms of Jean as she lay on the bed dying. Don’t leave me, Jean, he said, as if holding on to her might just prevent her from slipping into death. Don’t you dare go away. Don’t desert your post now. I couldn’t go on without you, Jean. What would I do?

“Jean!” he shouted.

And Connie struck out with her foot, which caught him firmly on the shin. He yelled out in pain and released her. The next moment he felt her presence waft by him as if she’d been nothing more insubstantial than the wind, and she’d gone before he could find it in him to utter another word. But his anger didn’t subside. It grew. Because of what he’d done, what he’d spoilt, because of who he was and all the bad things he was and ever had been.

He turned up at school. Eventually. Very late. He picked up his chalk and scratched away at the blackboard till it was filled with maths questions, his fury perhaps making them a trifle too difficult for the young boys, but not caring all the same. This task concluded, aware that the class were sitting in rigid silence, receptive to his foul mood and taking warning from the hyperborean atmosphere, he returned to his fortress of a desk and sat behind its protective palisade, his glowering face scanning the rows of wary children like a burning searchlight. They set about answering the questions, pens dipping into inkpots and scratching over paper. Pounds, shillings, pence, halfpennies. Added, subtracted, divided. And, except for this mouse-like scratching, total silence. That and the thunderously loud music of his thoughts beating discordantly about his head.

His face settled upon Max. Connie’s child. Max, Max, Max. And he felt his fury rise at the sight of this youngster who was staring at the blackboard with a combination of confusion and consternation. Fury because he saw her – saw Connie – in his face. And he saw his foolish mistake played out all over again, when he did the stupidest thing and let emotion take control.

Because he was a bad captain and couldn’t take command of his ship. Not without her.

He rose slowly from his desk, and his anger rose with him. The boy didn’t even have a pen or pencil in his hand. Wasn’t even attempting to answer the damn questions. Who did he think he was? The little…

“Problem?” he said, the voice rumbling like distant peals of thunder on a clear, sweltering summer day.

*  *  *  *

For all that it is my prison, it cannot be denied; Eilean Mor is a beautiful island. But it wasn’t always my prison. I clearly remember seeing it for the very first time.

There is something eternally fascinating about them. About islands. Is it because they stand alone, isolated, the way people are, each one of us beset by the troubled storms of our lives, tiny, shrunken, huddled against that which is larger than all of us? The Vikings believed the world was an island, a slain giant’s eyebrow sticking up from the sea surrounded by a thrashing sea serpent that caused the storms and tides. I’m touched by that simplistic view of the world. It’s not much different for us today, I guess. The Viking world was an island; we’d all like to shrink our world to an island. We all dream of being a Robinson Crusoe, drawn to the idea of the deserted beaches they serve up in travel brochures, held on all sides by sticky, tropical isolation.

There must have been a little of this imagery smeared indelibly on my mind, for I stepped into the boat as if I’d been stepping into church for a wedding, a tiny knot of excitement in my stomach, the heaviness of impending solemnity, the feeling of something larger than me pressing down from the overcast sky, as if the scudding clouds were the high, vaulting arches inside a cathedral.

When I first saw the island of Eilean Mor bobbing darkly on the swaying horizon, sitting in a foaming white sea froth that fumed at the rocks which formed its ragged black necklace, I thought of the slain giant. I felt the bow of the boat being punched by the green-blue waves, the craft shuddering as if in pain; I felt the slap of icy sea spray across my raw cheeks, trickle down my wet hair and blur my vision; I felt awed by the fact that I was a tiny nothing sitting in a steaming cauldron, and I thought of the sea serpent.  Gulls were being swept along as if they were pieces of white confetti tossed into a gale, snatched quickly away and forced to ride the wind, their flailing wings looking as if they might twist off altogether, break away and plunge them into the sea below. It made me want to cry, because it was all so very beautiful, so huge and terrifying, and I was but a speck in a world that would not keep still, was caught up in a cyclone of water and air. And Eilean Mor was a giant. A beautiful dead giant. I did cry. I released a few tears, but the pilot of the boat wouldn’t have noticed, because my face was so wet, and so was his. He looked as if he’d been crying too. Crying in the rain. Everyone has to cross the water one day. You get through your storms, I thought, and then you find yourself. You find your island. You find you. Everyone has an Eilean Mor tucked away inside them. That’s what I thought. But I grew terrified when we came closer, and Eilean Mor tore itself out of the ocean, craggy and spiked, and appeared like a massive black rent against the cold uniformity of the grey sea and sky. It’s not a giant at all; it’s a tear, a gash, and I’m going to fall right on into it. The boat’s going to flip over the edge. The end of the world.

But that was a long time ago. Now that same island is my prison. Who would have thought that?

I can still see the very tip of the eyebrow, however. Above the exercise yard walls. There had been snow or frost on it, but it had melted, replaced by greens and blues and browns. It looks like a bruise, I thought. Can eyebrows bruise? I was staring at the mountain because it stopped me from staring at Wise. He’s frightening me these days, standing there on his own, a tiny spatter of hate against the lichen-dappled stone wall. I walked around the walls, losing the sight of the mountain at times and having to look at my shoes for fear of looking at Wise. But his gooey eyes sort of snapped away at my attention till I had to face him. That’s when I noticed – really noticed – how different his face had become. Not physically, you understand, not altered as if he’d had a nose job, or a chin tuck, not that kind of difference. It was more underneath, seeping thickly beneath the skin, oozing up into his eyes. I knew he wanted me to go over to him. Here, boy, they said. Over here. There’s a good boy.

His right fist was clenched. Tight into a hard white ball. It wasn’t cold that caused him to do that, I thought. The snow had melted from the giant’s eyebrow, so it wasn’t cold. It might be anger, and that held me back for a moment. But his face didn’t show anger, and so his hand couldn’t show it too. I purposely aimed my walk so that we would come within a couple of yards of each other. Engage tractor beam, Mr Scott.

“Wait,” he said as I came up to him, about to pass, and so quiet I thought I might have mistaken him saying it. Thought it was only my own head telling me to wait. “Wait,” he said again, as he noticed how I halted but rocked on my feet as if about to set off again. I could see his eyes were darting around in his sockets as if he had no control over them. He was looking for something. I guess, from the way they jiggled so much, even he didn’t know where the secret cameras were. We both knew they had to exist. A little of his power drained away from him till he stood there like a battery that’s almost dud, when I knew he was as unsure as me. I think I smiled. Or maybe I thought I smiled. Smiled smugly in my head. He’s even got you spooked, I thought. You may watch me, beat me, lock me up, but you’re just like me really.

Wise comes over to me and starts to make out as though he’s searching me for something, like they both do now and again. But he isn’t doing anything of the kind. It’s half-hearted. Taps instead of thumps. No shoving. No making me feel small like a piece of paper that’s all crumpled up and ready to be blown away on the wind. He just pushes me away with his forefinger as if to say ‘all done, you can go now’; but his eyes, they tell me something different. They look towards my pocket, fast, darting there and back again. A camera would miss it, but I’m up close.  I know he’s put something in there. Morecambe did it once or twice. A piece of chocolate or chewing gum. But I can’t feel anything this time. It’s as if he’s grabbed a fistful of air and shoved that into my pocket. It’s a sick joke, because air is free in more than one sense of the word. I can’t make my mind up what’s going on, but I know it doesn’t look good. He isn’t Morecame. He’s Wise, and I hate Wise. The way he lashed into me with his baton he could have killed me. He’s like a spring ready to go off, a rattrap, big, sharp, steely and ugly. He isn’t Morecame. But he’s put something in my pocket, and that’s disturbing. Morecame knew I liked plain chocolate better than milk. Wise could have killed me.

In my room I did my best to hide myself away from the mirror, tucked myself as far into a corner as I could get. My hands rummaged round in my pocket and clasped hold of a piece of paper. A small piece of paper. No chocolate. No gum. I drew it out unfolded it and read Wise’s thin scrawl.
‘Next time you’re in the yard, pretend to have a stomach pain. At centre of the yard. Eat paper’
. I scrunched the paper up into a small ball and popped it into my mouth. It took some time to wet it and chew it to a pulp before I could swallow. I remember Steve McQueen doing it in
Papillon
. He was on an island too. Got away with coconuts strapped together, eventually. No palm trees or coconuts on Eilean Mor.

I don’t know why I destroyed the evidence by eating it and yet write about it now in my manuscript. If they take this paper away from my desk to read it Wise is in trouble. But I don’t care. He could have killed me.

Why the hell should I pretend to have a stomach pain? Nothing would please me more than to see Wise in trouble. I’ve even thought of leaving this page open on my desk. Look, guys. Look at what Wise is doing. Naughty boy!

But Wise’s expression nibbles away at me later on in the dark. It’s the same one as mother wore when she looked at me as if to say, ‘that’s it. There’s no more can be done. He’s going to die. Your dad’s going to die.’ The words never left her lips, but they didn’t have to. Wise was saying it all over again, as if he’d been there in the hospital and seen my dad with all those tubes sticking out of him, and the machines bleeping away like a metallic heart, a surrogate beating, because his own heart was thin and used up.

And all that kept filling my mind was dad and his allotment, not dad and the tubes. The way he piled his care and attention into it, just as he piled in the horse manure, shovelfuls of the wet, steaming stuff tipped from his rusty old wheelbarrow. He laboured at it for weeks. “Dig for victory,” he’d say to me, and I didn’t know why, but smiled when he smiled, and I tried to whistle like he did but it came out as air and spit. I helped him plant the carrots, the potatoes, the beans, my knees caked with the damp soil. I helped him plant the flowers because he said it would help with pollination, and sat wrapped in their thick, comfortable smells, reading my comics and listening to the sounds of birdsong and the blade of his spade slicing into earth. I lugged water from the tap, spilling most of it down my little legs, and poured it religiously over the first rows of green feathers that poked their heads tentatively above the warm soil, and I was as excited and expectant as he. “Think of all the dinners, son!” he said. “Just think of all those dinners!”

And I remember his disappointment when he tugged up a carrot and all that popped out was a fat stump with holes bored in it. Small, perfectly round holes, that made it look as if the carrot was hollow, as if you might just squeeze it and it would crumple in on itself as easy as anything. I had never seen him so sad, except when his brother died, my Uncle Geoffrey. Each and every one of them was a pathetic little deformed stump that he tossed onto a pile that grew steadily larger. “I can’t understand it,” he mumbled, looking as if he was embarrassed to face me directly. “Did it by the book, and it still hasn’t…” In the end he gave up on them and left them to go to seed. Nothing turned out like he expected, so he abandoned them all, and each of the green children he’d lavished so much attention on was left to wilt and die. Row upon row of miserable yellow leaves, like parched tongues stretched out on the soil. “That’s it,” he said one day. “It’s all over.” And he locked the shed up for good.

That’s it. It’s all over. Mother never spoke the words, but I knew what her eyes meant.

That’s why I knew I’d have stomach pains when I next exercised, because death was involved. It was death that was under Wise’s skin, which transformed his face so. It might have been my mother looking at me from inside Wise, as if she’d been there just beneath his stubbly chin, sitting under his pockmarked cheeks flecked with red veins, as if she’d been peering out of his skull through his eyes.

That’s it, Philip. It’s all over.

*  *  *  *

It’s been a few days since Wise gave me the cryptic note, and I’ve calmed down a bit. I tell myself that it’s all been imagination and that the note-thing never really happened. I even do my best to ignore it. I visualize taking a huge eraser in both hands and scrubbing away at the image of Wise’s face till he gradually disappears, every little of him, like the maths questions on Mr Walton’s blackboard. And that works for a time. But I sense he’s coming back. The eraser’s not working properly.

Things get to you in this place far easier than they do on the outside. Still, there’s an urgency whipping my mind into a frenzy. I must go up a gear. I have to move on faster. It is easy to be drawn into thinking that this could go on forever, thinking that as long as I have this manuscript to write then things are going to be OK. I don’t like to contemplate the end of it, because it’s like coming to the edge of a cliff and looking down. Nowhere to go from here. Nowhere but down.

The feather burns. I can feel it warming up through my shirt pocket. It’s telling me in a hot breath to hurry up and finish this damn thing then we can get on with the business of breaking free. Remember freedom? Remember how you used to crave it? What’s gone wrong? And I want to answer that I need to lock up the shed for good; throw my tools in and slam the door on them. I’m too tired with it all.

But I’ve got to move on.

*  *  *  *

“An’ I look, an’ I say, Connie, you don’t look good. What’s dat on face? She hide it, but I see it. Big bruise on cheek. Mr Radunski, she say, just give me dem pork chops. All mad, like. I give ‘er chops, but I tell ‘er she best see doctor wid dat bruise. Connie, I say, go to buddy doctors wid dat bruise, an’ she just grunts like pig at me, as if I stupid, or sumtin. What I know about bruises? I want to tell ‘er it not walking into side of de door dat done it, but I just tell ‘er to see doctor. Such a pretty cheek all puffed up an’ bruised like dat.”

Mr Radunski shook his head slowly. Mrs Radunski was sitting by the fire in the back room, foot tapping agitatedly; I could see her craning her neck to watch us through the open door, and from her stony expression she knew the subject matter, almost as if she’d primed up Mr Radunski to grab me and relate it all as soon as I stepped in from work. What they thought I might do about it, I couldn’t guess. I hadn’t seen Connie for ages, or Bernard for that matter.

“It was probably the door that Connie walked into, causing her bruising, Mr Radunski,” I said. “If you leave it open…” He looked doubtful. “I know Bernard,’ I defended. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He’d even give it a leg up to a pile of shit, I thought.

“I not say it is Bernard,” Mr Radunski said, though I noticed he flashed a glance at the mended window. It was a long time ago, but he seemed to flinch as if a piece of coal might still come hurtling through. He danced awkwardly from foot to foot. “She ‘ad big mark on wrist, too,” he said. “That the door as well?”

I shrugged. The thought of Connie going through what she felt sure she’d escaped caused my stomach to flutter. But what could I do? “It’s their life,” I said. “I can’t interfere in it.” I heard Mrs Radunski sigh heavily. There was something more significant to that outpouring of air. Mr Radunski sensed it too, as if it had been a prompt of sorts, not a sigh.