Fly in the Ointment (23 page)

Perhaps too deeply. Now, I look back and almost can't help being amused to think that Joshua Omulolo found that slip of paper with the neatly pencilled list on it on the exact same day that Trevor Hanley asked me to marry him.

‘Why me?' I'd asked. ‘I thought I was supposed to be too cool a customer for you.'

Trevor had gone bright red, and done his usual trick of pawing the carpet like a guilty twelve-year-old. ‘Oh, well. You know.'

‘No. I don't know.'

He seized my hands. In his great paws, they felt
like little birds. ‘Yes, you do, Lois. Please don't muck about. We've wasted so much time already. Just say yes to me. You know that we'll be happy.'

I did, too, thanks to the recent visit from that smug charmer George. So I said yes. Now everyone was happy. Obviously I couldn't share the thought with Trevor or his father, but I did feel as if some gloriously technicoloured play had worked its way through to the final act. Everything had fallen out perfectly and all of us were at last revelling in our just desserts.

And then the phone call came.

Trevor and I were in bed. ‘I won't take that,' he offered, but as his arm was already reaching out towards the bedside table I thought I might as well be gracious. ‘No, no. Perhaps you'd better.'

Relieved, he put the phone up to his ear. ‘Hi, Dad.'

I suppose I knew the call concerned me just from the way that Trevor shifted the phone from that ear to the other. One moment I could hear the chirruping of Mr Hanley's voice, the next I couldn't. Though Trevor didn't seem to move away from me in bed, I felt a distance, and Trevor himself spoke only in monosyllables. ‘Yes . . . Now . . . No.' Oh, and the care he took not to let his eyes slide round to meet mine! I knew it was bad.

Indeed it was. A barely credible run of rotten luck
when you consider that just one tiny thing falling out differently could have stopped the disaster in its tracks. If Ainsley Forsyth plc hadn't been suspected of minor VAT fraud and had their files marked up for special attention by one of the department's auditors. If Joshua Omulolo had only been a little busier that day and actually worked through lunch instead of idly picking up that stupid list of credits and debits that fell out of the file in front of him while he was eating his sandwich at his desk, and idly wondering what it could mean. But then again, if Mrs Omulolo had not been five months pregnant, her husband might not have been keeping his eyes peeled for prospective names. And if Janie Gay's mother and I had had the sense to call our children by names a little less striking, then Joshua Omulolo's attention might not have been drawn to the article in the paper that made such a big deal of the fact that Malachy Henderson's wife Janie Gay had drowned in the very same canal as her husband, and on the anniversary of his death.

All very striking.

Without that sheet of paper (neatly entitled ‘J.G. – Pros and Cons' – what
was
I thinking of?) I would have definitely been home and dry.

But as it was, the game was over.

‘FIVE MINUTES,' THE
police officer had said, and made it clear she meant it by standing stolidly in my bedroom doorway while I was gathering the few things I'd need. Seizing a moment when she turned her back to answer a shout from downstairs, I tugged down Malachy's glass prism – hung in the window only a few weeks before to sprinkle dazzling rainbow promises of peace and happiness around the room.

A fitting seal on things, I'd thought, to show the world was back in place.

When we came downstairs, Trevor was standing watching. I asked the officer, ‘Mind if I give him a hug?'

‘Don't make a meal of it,' she warned, and didn't see me dropping the prism in his pocket. I knew he'd keep it safe. He kissed me briefly on my nose as if I
were a child before they took me off. Once at the station, I did my bit to try to shift the blame. ‘All I know is that she went off to see some bloke called Wilbur.'

Naturally they knew the name. Out of a sense of covering all bases, they put a tail on him, and snapped up more than enough evidence within a week to feel obliged to charge him. I couldn't help but feel some satisfaction – a second bird killed with my little stone? – but in the end it proved small comfort. The way of the world is such that Wilbur's drug-dealing was judged so petty – and dealt with so fast – that he was out again before my own trial. (I saw him sneering from the gallery, and when my sentence was announced, the man had the nerve to whistle his approval.)

I wasn't going to confess. Doodling a list of pros and cons for someone's death does not make you a killer. Still, thanks to Stuart's all too successful disappearance all those years ago, suspicion mounted. Information filtered in. (Even that bloody wig-maker woman remembered my face.) There are more cameras about than you would think on streets and in video-store car parks. The evidence stacked up about my visit to the bridge. I argued forcibly enough that people go to visit their children's graves. Why shouldn't I have chosen the anniversary of his death
to go back to grieve at the place where I'd poured my son's ashes? But I was on a losing wicket. Stuart was somehow dug up, and though I don't believe his whole intention was to show my black heart and sheer implacability, he didn't help. ‘Yes, it was Lois who threw Malachy out on the streets . . . No. That's right. Lois never visited her mother when she was dying . . . Yes. It is true that Lois didn't attend her funeral.'

Well, thank you, Stuart. Thank you very much.

During the week in which that bitch of a prosecuting counsel kept flapping that bloody wig in the jurors' faces and letting rip about my capacity for secrecy and my pure cunning, I felt obliged to offer Trevor back the ring he'd given me. ‘I will admit,' he said, ‘that Dad has spent a good deal of time this week warning me I might regret saying the words “till death do us part” to a homicidal maniac. But shall we just press on? See how it goes?'

As any fool could see, it wasn't going to go well. And sure enough, after a quite insultingly short time out of the court discussing the matter, the jury trooped back in and they pronounced me guilty.

Trevor was calm enough about the news. ‘Eight years, my sources suggest. So, Lois, if you behave yourself in clink you might be out in six. Shall we just wait and see? And if you still fancy the idea when you
come out and I'm still ploughing this long and lonely furrow . . .'

Frankly, I think he is amused by the idea of marrying a jailbird. ‘When we get married,' he tells me on visits, ‘you'll have to promise never to take me on any walks near the canal.' Once, just as the warder was looking at her watch in that determined fashion, I asked him what his father had to say about his plans and he was decent enough to look me in the eye and tell me outright, ‘If I am honest, Lois, right from the start, Dad has been far more upset about the fact that my eye fell on someone too old to give me children.'

I made a face and shrugged. ‘We could adopt.'

After, when I was in the queue to get my revolting supper, one of the other girls who'd had a visitor that day asked me, ‘What did you say to set that bloke of yours laughing so hard he nearly fell off his chair?'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Nothing much. We were just talking.'

‘What about?'

I gave it a little thought. And then I answered, perfectly honestly, ‘We were just talking about how sometimes in life you can get second chances. And sometimes you can't.'

The other brick is Mrs Kuperschmidt. She couldn't be more disapproving if she tried. But all her training leads her to follow guidelines. (‘Sarah, your doing that is what fetched me up in here!' as I say bitterly.
‘So you had damn well better keep it up now!') The rules say Larry's interests must come first, and since I'm definitely the most consistent emotional attachment in Larry's life, she's swung things so he gets regular visits. Guy brings him in. We have a laugh. Larry gets spoiled to death by all the prison officers and volunteers in the creche. I think he likes the prison, and Guy appreciates the fact that having to bring him to such an out-of-the-way spot twice a month means that he gets to use my car.

And Mrs Kuperschmidt was a real gem about my father's death. She knew I couldn't give a toss, but she still sent one of her brilliant read-between-the-lines notes as good as telling me which tack to take in my request letter to the Governor, and also hinting that there would be others present to make the effort worthwhile. So I was granted permission to go to the funeral. Trevor was there. And Guy and Larry. And Sarah herself. Once we'd spilled out into the crematorium grounds, it turned into a party. (No one was going to waste time grieving for that mean-spirited old goat.) It was so lovely to be out under trees, and see green distances instead of gates and walls.

I sidled up to Trevor. ‘Did you bring it?'

‘Would I forget my orders?' He reached into his pocket and drew out Malachy's prism. He had
polished it until it shone. The small length of invisible fishing wire I had attached to it when Malachy was little now had an added length of silver cord.

I looked around for Larry. As usual, he was mucking about with Guy, playing some jumping game around the graves. I called him over.

‘Here.' I gave him the prism. ‘Hold it up, sweetie.'

It caught the sun. Larry was staring into it so hard he didn't notice what was happening across his clothes and mine.

‘Look at your woolly.'

The movement he made in glancing down set rainbows swaying. He stared, entranced. Did he remember it? Did he remember anything? We never asked. He never said. All that was obvious was he was
happy
.

I felt pride bursting out of me and I reached out to set the prism spinning just as Malachy used to do. The sprinkles swayed and danced.

My grandson's eyes met mine. ‘Is it for me, Lo? Can I keep it?'

‘Oh yes. It's yours.' I took the little swan-shaped hook I'd made in metalcraft out of my bag and handed it over. ‘Your dad will hang it for you.'

I turned to Guy. ‘You'll fix it in his bedroom window for him, won't you?'

Guy grinned. ‘Sure, Lois. Nice for him to have a keepsake from his da—'

He broke off just in time. Not that I think Mrs Kuperschmidt was close enough to hear, or that it might have set Larry thinking. After all, the child is only seven. But there are things best left unsaid and there'll be time enough for all of that when Larry's older. Right now we're all a whole lot safer sticking with a fiction that suits us all.

I think that Sarah Kuperschmidt was quite surprised at my good spirits on the journey back. ‘Usually, even the tiniest taste of life outside can be unsettling.' I won't make the mistake of putting things this way to the parole board, but I did try to explain how I never minded going back inside after these rare trips out because I honestly thought that, though things had turned out strangely, they had turned out well.

‘Balanced,' I told her. ‘Almost biblical, in fact. A life for a life.'

For I did feel that, through my lack of courage and attention, I'd let one child go to the bad. But then the very Lois who'd emerged from that was the same Lois who had grown the wit and guts to save another. Don't things even out?

She was appalled by the suggestion, I could tell. And so I hastily pretended I hadn't meant it. Just a
flash of black wit. I was so sorry. And the moment passed. She's a kind woman or she wouldn't visit me.

And so we made our way towards Security. ‘Now don't forget,' she took the trouble to whisper in my ear before they led me off towards the wing. ‘Next week, before the parole board. You are
sorry
, right?'

Yeah. Right.

THE END

Fly in the Ointment
is Anne Fine's seventh novel. Her first was the critically acclaimed
The Killjoy
, which was runner up for the David Higham Prize for Fiction.
Taking the Devil's Advice
and
Telling Liddy
have both been adapted for radio. The
Observer
referred to her novel
In Cold Domain
as ‘a glorious tirade against the grind of motherhood' and the
Evening Standard
described
All Bones and Lies
as ‘splendid, clever, cruel and funny'. Anne Fine's work has been translated into over thirty languages. She has two grown-up daughters and lives in County Durham.

For more information on Anne Fine and her books, see her website at
www.annefine.co.uk

THE KILLJOY

TAKING THE DEVIL'S ADVICE

IN COLD DOMAIN

TELLING LIDDY

ALL BONES AND LIES

RAKING THE ASHES

and published by Black Swan

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk

FLY IN THE OINTMENT

A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552774673
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN: 9781407083926

First published in Great Britain
in 2008 by Bantam Press
a division of Transworld Publishers
Black Swan edition published 2009

Copyright © Anne Fine 2008

Anne Fine has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted inwriting by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.