Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (26 page)

I rose and went over to stand a couple of feet behind her. I had this urge to put my hand on her neck, her beautiful neck, to run a finger into her hair. All manner of thoughts, of things I wanted to say, built up like fizz in a soda bottle, trapped at the stopper, the desire to release the pressure immense. “Yes. I can see. It’s very nice,” I said.

“I picked this room for you.”

“Thank you.”

“You do like it, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I? It’s perfect.”

Perfect, like you.

“The weather’s getting worse, though,” she said. “It might last a few days. So I suppose you might not get to see the ocean, not until it passes over. See? It’s all grey. You can only just see the hills in the distance.”

I could not bear to think of Ruby and Max together. The image clouded my vision despite all attempts to wipe them clear. “I never guessed that…” I began.

“Why did you come?” she asked suddenly, turning to face me. Either her face was reflecting the dull light from the window or she was dreadfully pale.

“Because he invited me.”

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I’m beginning to realise that,” I returned. “It’s not easy, you know.”

Her features softened and something of the Ruby from my past swam in her eyes. “It’s not easy for me too, believe me. He never told me you were coming. Imagine how I felt. How I feel.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. How did you feel?”

Then her expression iced over. “You shouldn’t have come here. It was a mistake. I’ll try and arrange for you to leave as soon as possible.”

“Are you OK?” I ventured, faintly alarmed at her anxiety.

She might have been about to say something. I’ll never know. She looked to the doorway and my eyes followed hers. The security guard met my gaze, and then put a finger to the brim of his cap in salute. He smiled and then sauntered out of view.

“I’ll see you in a while,” said Ruby, passing me by and leaving me alone in my room. Sighing, I turned to study the view out of my window. The sky was almost black, and the distance had indeed been scrubbed away leaving behind a greasy, grey residue, and from somewhere deep inside this dreary cloud I could make out the booming of the waves beating the ancient rocks. The wind threw rain at the windows with the same sound as if someone had tossed rice at them. I decided to open them. Why, I don’t know. To clear my fogged brain, I suppose. I tugged at the latches for a few moments before I realized the windows had been locked in some way.

To protect valuables, I surmised.

*  *  *  *

Quite understandably my mood had not lightened by the evening as we sat down to our meal.

On entering this strange building I had experienced an unaccountable thrill, and up till my meeting Ruby again I had actually begun to look forward to my stay. Now my spirits had taken a plunge into the icy depths of depression. My poor emotions were as much in turmoil as the sea outside, and I didn’t know whether to feel anger, embarrassment or self-pity, any one of these feelings taking hold without warning until one of the others knocked it from its perch, as if a brawl was going on in my head for total control.

And my surroundings didn’t help, sitting as I was in a pseudo-Edwardian dining room, with gilded mock gas lamps, dark and looming oil paintings of long-dead notables peering down at us from the walls, a log fire blazing in the mouth of an ornate white marble fireplace, and the three of us sitting around a long, deeply polished table that had the patina of real age on its surface and was laid with elegant silver and delicate porcelain and china, as if we had been transported back a hundred years and we had cast off our mundane, modern guises.

It was all at odds with how I was feeling, this sense of the unreal, the false. If this meeting had been under any other circumstances I should no doubt have stormed out, leaving some of my pride intact. But this was no ordinary circumstance. I was aware I was playing a game of sorts, Max’s game. That’s the perverse thing. The fact was I had somehow ceased to be the me I knew. I was this other guy, knocking back wine, sitting in his luxuriously appointed time capsule far removed from the rest of blundering humanity. I was a voyager in a theme park where anything goes and nothing of your previous life that you’d willingly abandoned at the gates mattered at all till you picked it back up again, like dirty laundry, on leaving. Only it
did
matter. I was fighting with this overwhelming desire to throw off my drab previous life and enjoy what this place had to offer. I was fighting so bad my head throbbed with it.

And the weather had indeed worsened, as Ruby had predicted. Every now and again I would anxiously lay down my knife and fork as the wind and rain battered at the walls and windows. I had never before heard such a sound, such an awesome beating like the pummelling of fists, and I had the uneasy impression that at any moment the entire house would be ripped from its foundations and flung over the cliffs into the fuming sea, carrying us with it. Through the corner of my eye I saw Max smile at me. Ruby’s meal had somehow soaked up all her attention for the past three quarters of an hour.

“I’ve known it get far worse,” Max said. “It can sound as if hell itself is knocking at the door.”

“Is that intended to make me feel better?” I said.

He raised his wine glass and took a sip. “I take it as a sort of lesson – just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, things get worse. Nature does that, you know. Surprises you. Never take it for granted. It’s like a sweet little kitten one minute, and a ruddy great tiger the next that’ll rip you to pieces as soon as look at you. Sitting here in the midst of it, it gives you a certain buzz, don’t you think?”

“I’m buzzing,” I replied, forcing in another mouthful. I had no appetite. For anything.

“Ruby doesn’t like it too much. That not right, Rube?”

“In small doses,” she said, darting him a meaningful glance.

I caught sight of the security man flitting past the doorway. I couldn’t be certain why, but his presence disturbed me. “Why the guards, Max?” I asked. “Expecting Raffles?”

“They give me a sense of security,” he said, laughing at his little pun. Then he shrugged. “I guess they’re like my own private army. I always had a hankering to be king of the castle. All the king’s men, and all that.”

“So who else lives here? I mean, there must be others. A chef by the looks of it,” I remarked, poking a lump of meat with my fork. “Does he miss Paris?”

Max laughed. “I think there might be a compliment under there somewhere. Yes, there are others. Of course there are. A place like this doesn’t run itself. I just keep them locked away when I don’t need them, in my dungeons. It’s what all warlords do.” He drained his glass and refilled it. As he did so the electric lights dimmed alarmingly, then crept slowly back up to full power. “She tries every time,” he said, “but she’s not succeeded yet.” He picked up on my unease and here he offered a smile. “If the generator goes down we’ve got another backup. And, I add, it hasn’t gone yet.” He raised the full glass to the window. “Hard lines, old girl. Must try harder. There, I’m sounding like old Mr Walton, aren’t I? Must try harder you lazy so-and-so. Remember Walton, Collie?
Mr
Walton? Ruby never had Mr Walton as a teacher, did you? Only the boys. Only us poor male sods. Ain’t that right, Collie?”

I nodded. “Yes. Only the boys.”

Ruby looked at me uncertainly. I couldn’t be sure what she was thinking. Every time I took in her face I was visited all too painfully by past memories. I was incapable of halting them. And every word I ever said wrong to her, every threat, all the sad episodes I’d spent many years reviewing during my self-enforced isolation, over which I’d picked and sorted like the bones of some dead animal, all of it came back and threatened to choke me with its attendant guilt and remorse. This was agony. How could I make small talk? This woman had been my wife once. And she’d never stopped being my wife. Not to me.

“Did you ever tell Ruby about the coconut?” he asked.

“Sorry?” I returned, snapped back from my bleak thoughts.

“The coconut. Surely you must remember Mr Walton’s coconut.”

I scratched my eyebrow, a little puzzled. “Oh, yes, of course I do,” I said. “As plain as day.”

“And you never told Ruby?”

“Sorry, no. Should I have?”

“No, no! We’ll not tell her now, shall we?” he said, smirking. “We’ll keep it just between us, eh?” He fingered a point just above his forehead, on the hairline.

I nodded, curious as to why he should bring up the affair of the coconut. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, not one I could look back at with any degree of humour. The passage of time had done nothing to make it even remotely funny. And, judging from Max’s face, he thought the same. So why he brought it up was a mystery. His gaze lingered on me for a moment or two longer, but if he intended to carry deeper meaning along with it, it was lost on me.

However, he did set my mind to wandering back to our youth, and in the silence the image of Max clambering over the garden fence came back to me as bright as if the episode played right there in front of me, unfolding exactly as it had all those years ago.

We were boys again. And Max was being Max.

“Max!” I whispered. “You can’t!” I did not attempt to screen my obvious sense of alarm. “It’s stealing!”

He sneered in contempt, poised to drop over the other side of the wooden fence. “How can it be stealing? He doesn’t want it.”

“We shouldn’t even be going into his yard,” I added. “That’s trespassing.”

“Gimme a break, Collie. It’s not as if it’s the railway lines or anything. It’s only Walton’s back yard. No sign up, is there? No sign up saying ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’, eh?”

“What do you want to go in there for anyway? It’s nothing but a crummy old birdhouse. Let’s go.”

I could see my pleading was having no effect on him. It was only six months or so after his run-in with Walton and the blackboard full (or not so full) of maths questions and Max had simmered like a pan on the boil all that time. He was out to get even, though he never quite admitted this. Looking back on that day, Max wasn’t being particularly vindictive; all he’d planned to do was steal the half coconut that Mr Walton had hung out for the birds, and I had agreed to the escapade more because I’d never ever seen a coconut, let alone eaten one, and my curiosity was whetted. But I was always a coward, and even though I’d committed my support as far as the base of the fence, I had second thoughts just as soon as Max eagerly clambered up the palings and looked set to drop down. This was getting serious, I said to myself, expecting Z-Cars to come hurtling around the corner and nab us red-handed – or coconut-handed.

“I’m going!” I hissed urgently.

“Coward!” he said, and dropped over the side. I heard him rustling in unseen undergrowth. It fell worryingly quiet.

     “Max!” I said. No reply. “Max, come on, let’s go home, please.” I was rooted to the spot, afraid to leave my friend, afraid to stay in case Z-Cars, or their near equivalent, arrived with sirens blaring and lights flashing. In the end I launched myself over the fence, looking far more ungainly in the attempt than Max. I almost fell on top of him. My voice was shrill and shot through with panic. “This is stupid! I don’t want any stupid coconut anyway! It’s all stupid!”

He pointed, and through the gaps in a clump of waving campanula stems we saw the half coconut, swinging pendulum-like and enticingly from a piece of string. It hung beneath the bird table, turning ever so slightly to reveal its pristine white flesh. I held my breath. It didn’t seem so stupid anymore.

“What do they taste like?” I asked.

“Like Bounty bars, I guess.”

I sucked in a breath. A Bounty bar was a rare treat anyhow, but this was coconut in the raw, and I imagined the sweet taste on my tongue, building it up into something wonderful. “So how’re we gonna get it?” I asked, sure he had a plan, my eyes fixed on this treasure and perhaps learning at that moment that more sins are committed through the tongue than anywhere else.

“You watch the door and window,” he said. “I’ll make a dash and climb up the pole, then drag it off. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds.” His voice was laced with confidence, and my own grew from it.

We shook hands, as if going into battle, nodded knowingly at each other and then I patted him on the back and he was off, running at a stoop past the palisade of rose bushes, across the narrow stretch of lawn. In a few seconds he was on the tall pole, shinnying up it and reaching out for the coconut. But it did not come away as easily as he’d predicted, being tied on securely, and it resisted his ardent tugging. In the end he grabbed at it with both his hands, leaving hold of the pole and hanging on to the coconut, swinging with his feet nearly twelve inches off the ground.

Something had to give. It was the birdhouse.

I watched in horror as the entire birdhouse, pole and all, tilted and then crashed down amongst a bed of wallflowers, Max falling with it, nuts, seeds and pieces of stale bread raining down like manna from heaven. The crude wooden house itself, coconut attached, bounced away onto the lawn and I was reminded of Dorothy’s house from
The Wizard of Oz
. Max rose in an instant, clutched the coconut to his chest, which remained fixed obstinately to the birdhouse. He yanked at the thing, his face red with the effort, but the string held fast. I stood upright, and was about to move to help him, when at last it came free and he lifted the trophy high above his head, the string wriggling beneath it like a dead snake.