Lullaby (23 page)

Of course my brother chose this very moment to slink out from the kitchen.

‘Blimey,’ he murmured, clocking the still bare-breasted Maxine. ‘What a pair!’ And it was true. They were phenomenal—huge, pink-snouted and proud.

‘Oh piss off, Robbie,’ I said tiredly. He could always be relied on to appreciate the baser things in life. ‘How did you get in this time?’

It was Leigh’s turn to screech. ‘What the flaming hell are you doing here?’ She jabbed him in the chest. ‘Did you invite him in?’ She looked accusingly at me. Naturally he was still staring at Maxine’s boobs, and Maxine was loving it, taking as long as she possibly could to put her lacy bra back on. Gorek scowled at Robbie’s lingering gaze. Deb pushed us all back into the hall and shut the living-room door on the thwarted lovers.

‘Why don’t you go in the kitchen and put the kettle on? I’ll sort these two out.’

‘Yes, well,’ I huffed, ‘I don’t want that bloke here, Deb. I’m sick of this. Please, will you ask him to go?’

In the kitchen I filled the kettle. My hands were trembling. There was a golden glass of very good whisky on the counter, a grease-stained copy of yesterday’s
Sun
spread open on the racing news, bits of cheese and mayonnaise dripping from a half-eaten sandwich. It looked like it had been made from the last contents of my fridge.

‘That’s Mickey’s.’ I pointed dully at the scotch.

‘Yeah, well, he wasn’t here to ask, was he?’ grinned Robbie. At least he’d had his front tooth fixed, I noticed.

Leigh rounded on him. ‘Christ, and you wonder why I’ve got a problem with you, Robert.’

‘Yeah, I do actually, Leigh. Blood’s thicker than water and all that crap, eh?’

I flinched as he echoed my mum’s words from the
other day. Leigh began to unload the shopping, slamming food into all the wrong cupboards. I could tell she didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘So how’s it going?’ Robbie looked at me. ‘Any news?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Mickey’s had a relapse. No one’s seen my son.’

‘Still, no news is good news, yeah?’ he said brightly.

Leigh kicked the cupboard door shut with her stilettoed foot as if it was Robbie’s head. ‘Can you really not come up with anything better than total bollocks?’ she snapped.

Down the hall, the front door slammed shut.

‘I’m trying to be helpful.’ He shrugged indifferently.

‘You’re trying to help yourself, you mean.’

‘Oh yeah? How’s that then? How the hell can I help myself here?’

Leigh snorted with contempt, indicated the unfinished snack. ‘Well, let’s just think, shall we? I’ve been trying to work out why you’ve crawled back, but it ain’t that hard really, is it, mate? You’re nothing but a fucking ligger, Robert, nothing better than that.’ Leigh never swore. ‘You make me sick. Tell him to go, Jess.’

‘Shut up, you silly cow,’ he snarled at her. He knocked back the whisky in one go. ‘I’ll go when I’m ready-or when Jess wants me to.’

I stood helplessly between my siblings while their hatred crackled through the air, catching me the way static lifted your hair. I was shocked by Leigh’s venom, shocked by Robbie’s indifference. I had always been in between these two. Not much had changed, it seemed.

‘What did you want, Robbie?’ I asked quietly.

There was a pause. Leigh’s fingernails drummed a mad rhythm on the worktop as we awaited an answer.

‘Why do I need to want something to be here?’ he asked plaintively. ‘I just thought I’d make sure you were all right. I—I was worried.’

‘I think you should go. For now, at least.’

A flash of lightning cut the sky in half. Guilt rose; I shoved it down. I was getting quite good at that now. No one spoke. Eventually Robbie sighed, pulling his heavy jacket over his torn T-shirt. His eyes were dull, lifeless even. The skin beneath them tired and spent, paper-like.

‘Right. I will then.’

Thunder bellowed overhead. He paused, waiting to see how heartless his sisters really were. Would we let him step into the storm outside? Apparently we would. He grabbed the
Sun
, holding it aloft his greasy head, and ducked out the back door. Slammed it shut so hard I thought the glass would shatter in its panes.

‘Thank Christ,’ said Leigh. ‘I bloody-well hope that’s the last we see of him for a while.’

But as I crossed the kitchen, a shadow fell through the window. Robbie was there again. He mock-knocked, flung open the door and, scooping up the sandwich remains, jammed them in his pocket. I clocked the tattoo on his hand again, only this time I read ‘Jimmy’. Something colourful and plastic dangled down for a split-second, before he shoved it back in along with the bits of bread.

‘Needs must, eh, girls?’ he said, with a cheerful grin. ‘I had an idea, you know, Jess. An idea of how to help.
But if you don’t want to know, well, that’s up to you.’

And then he disappeared, along with the scotch. And it wasn’t till an hour later that I twigged with horror what that plastic thing had been dangling from his pocket. It was a baby’s dummy, bright and plastic, hanging from a ribbon.

Robbie’s mobile was switched off when I tried to ring it. I paced the house with the phone clamped in my hand. This was the time I should finally shop Robbie to the police, I knew—but I wanted to speak to him first, give him one last chance to explain. Then Deb came in, making me jump: but she wanted to talk about Maxine, not Robbie. I thought the girl should go for good now—after all, I didn’t need her any more, did I? I’d been keeping her there since Louis’s disappearance as some kind of link to my son, I realised. If she’d left—well, it would have been like admitting defeat. But now even I’d had enough. Deb convinced me it was best that everyone stayed put while Louis was still missing; she persuaded me that Maxine and I needed to talk.

‘Get some fresh air,’ she suggested kindly, and so we walked over to the pub opposite the pond, and I bought us both a vodka. The rain had finally stopped and at last the air was cooler; the smell of the cut grass so lush and sweet it made me feel quite heady. Or perhaps that was the booze. Maxine was sulky, though she eventually apologised. I sensed that I’d done something to offend her.

‘Why do you tell the police that my boyfriend is so
bad?’ she finally ventured when I pushed her for the third time.

‘Oh, I see.’ I clinked the ice around my glass. ‘Is that why you shagged him on the sofa? To punish me?’

She wrinkled her nose at me. ‘Punish?’

‘You know—to get back at me.’

‘No.’ She shook her head, but I could tell that she was lying. ‘It was just—how do you say? The lust. We couldn’t help ourselves.’

I would have laughed, but I’d lost my sense of humour.

‘Oh, right.’

It dawned on me that Maxine genuinely didn’t understand why I was so upset about the open sex, and I didn’t have the energy to stay angry any more. Perhaps I
was
just jealous of ‘the lust’.

‘I didn’t say that he was bad, Maxine.’

‘If you didn’t say he was bad, why was he arrested?’ Surly, she wouldn’t look at me, picking instead at a scab above her knee. Her skirt was so short I saw her knickers for the second time today. I felt exhausted.

‘Because the police need to question everyone who comes to the house, Maxine. Surely you get that? And at the moment I can’t cope with having strangers around, okay? Not who let themselves into my house, with my keys, and use my things, and especially not having sex publicly, on my sofa. It’s not acceptable, it’s just not.’

‘Okay,’ she shrugged.

‘Until Louis is back I need some—some peace at home. Can you understand? I wasn’t blaming what’s-his-name—’

‘Gorek.’

‘Gorek. I just told DI Silver that he was around, and DI Silver made the decision to take him in, not me.’ I remembered something Silver had said. ‘Anyway, I thought you said you weren’t that keen on him?’

She shrugged again; she really was so Gallic.

‘I am drawn to him. Also, he has a very good job,
non
, at Harrods. He has money.’ Always a prerequisite where Maxine’s men were concerned. I knew that her own family were horribly poor; she had five sisters who were always turning up in London looking for a place to stay. Occasionally they’d arrive at our house, dragging cheap suitcases and plastic handbags up our stairs, short-skirted and bare-legged come rain or shine. I knew they’d grown up in two small rooms in the Calais suburbs where their father worked all hours down on the docks and their mother cleaned office blocks at night. It had always seemed quite obvious that Maxine was on the lookout for the main chance.

‘And he wears the uniform on the door. He is—how you say—
je ne sais pas.
He turns me on.’

I blushed. God, when did I become such a prude?

‘I can’t help myself, though he can be
un peu
—’

‘What?’

‘Like the weather, you know.’

‘Unpredictable?’

‘
Oui.
Dangerous, perhaps.’ She drained her drink, still worrying at the scab on her knee. This time I did smile. I remembered the stack of French Mills & Boon by Maxine’s little bed, the battered
Angelique
novels
too, and I understood that she celebrated what she would call grand passion.

‘But you must not hit me again.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I lost my temper.’

‘It is not the first time,
non
?’

‘I’ve never hit you before. I’ve never hit anyone before,’ I objected fiercely. I was feeling a bit drunk. The baby at the next table started to cry; I wanted to give it a cuddle. Maxine stared at me, then pulled the head right off that scab. A nasty feeling crawled up my spine. ‘You’re not talking about the time when Louis fell, are you?’

When Maxine had first arrived in London, I was in the midst of my worst time as a new mother. Struggling to adapt to Louis and my terror of messing up, the last thing I’d wanted was a stranger in my house, in Mickey’s house, judging me—but he’d insisted I’d needed help. A Norland Nanny maybe, at a real push; a sex-mad French teenager with endless legs and attitude certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. And then, in Maxine’s first week, the day Freddie and Pauline came to visit, I fell asleep with Louis in my arms, and the baby rolled from the sofa onto the floor, and bruised his arm. Side-swiped by the broken nights, sluggish with the constant lack of sleep, firing on no cylinders at all, I was irrational and emotional about the slightest thing. Louis falling was the final straw; the guilt so immense; the fear something much worse could have happened rocked my already unsteady world. In the end it was a kind of paradox—it turned out to be a good thing, forced me finally, irrevocably to accept the sheer scale of my love
for him, to realise the breathtaking ends I’d go to now to protect him. I had to pull myself together before it was too late—and I had really begun to. But still, afterwards, although she had never actually spoken it out loud, I sensed Maxine’s suspicion. Freddie too had eyed me anxiously that day, rushing into the room to find me howling above the sobbing baby—the baby who stopped crying far more quickly than I’d done, who was soon beaming happily at his new admirers while I apologised, shame-faced, to everyone.

‘I didn’t hit him, Maxine. You must know that. I’d never hurt my son. Never. I’d die first. It was a mistake, a complete mistake.’

‘Okay If you say so.’

We walked home in uneasy silence.

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying and failing to reach Robbie, and shuttling between home and hospital, where Mickey still hadn’t stirred. Deb had arranged for me to see Annalise, the copper-haired counsellor, again. I cried bitterly through her box of starchy NHS tissues, and this time I let her hold my hand.

‘I’m trying to keep strong for Louis, but it’s hard,’ I sniffed when I could speak. ‘It’s so hard. I can’t face the thought of–of someone hurting him.’ The thought made me want to scream. ‘What—what if something’s happened to him?’

‘You can’t give in to your imagination,’ she said, patting my arm. I curled my fists to ward off my terrifying thoughts.

‘I can’t bear the thought that I should have stopped this happening. That I’ve let him down,’ I whispered. ‘And I’m frightened of something else now too.’

‘What?’ She peered over her glasses at me.

‘It’s just—my brother. He’s so unreliable. I’m—what if he’s mixed up in this?’

She frowned. ‘Is he likely to be?’

‘That’s what I’ve got to find out.’

‘Do you not think it’s a police matter?’

‘I think I can deal with him more quickly than the police can. He can be a bit—slippery. I don’t want him to do a bunk. That’d be the worst thing.’

I didn’t talk about my secret craving for the silence of the pills again. I wouldn’t give in; wouldn’t bend again. I wouldn’t go the same way I’d watched my mother go.

In bed that night, I stared at the ceiling for ages before I even began to feel like I could sleep. I was racked with indecision over Robbie. If I couldn’t track him first thing in the morning, I knew I’d have to tell Silver about my suspicions. I had to face the truth.

Finally, I started to drift. I saw myself and Mickey lying in the bed, Mickey reading the paper, or the
New Yorker
, me reading some art textbook he’d doubtless raised his eyebrows at. I floated into the morning Louis was born; waking early, my contractions starting, my gasps of shock and pain; the abject terror at what was happening too early coupled with the excitement of being about to meet my baby. Then I saw a three-month-old Louis lying in between us and me finally happier than I’d ever been—still too scared to admit
it in case someone came and took it all away. They say you only know happiness when it’s gone, and I’d felt so very happy and prayed that this time it could stay—

And now I was falling—falling into—

With a shock I was jolted awake again. Despite the warmth of the night, I felt a proper chill; I had a sudden eerie feeling I was being watched. Slowly, I got out of bed and crept over to the window. I peered round the curtain, scanning the road outside, the heath opposite. Nothing, no one lurking. Just a stooped old man in a flat cap, with a fat little dog who was peeing against the postbox. The saplings danced in the new winds the storm had left behind. Despite my sudden fears and the threat of heavy rain again, l left my window wide open and the curtains pulled right back. In my gut, I felt Louis was near. If I left it open, that way I would hear him if he cried.