Some Kind of Fairy Tale (9 page)

“Hello, Richie,” says the man with the lined face. His voice is very gentle. It’s so gentle it scares the fucking liver right out of me. A gentle copper. Really, I want to shit. “I’m Dave Williams. Are you all right?”

I look at my lawyer. She just clamps her teeth together like a horse and stares back at me. “Yeh,” I say. “Yeh.”

“They treating you okay?”

“Yeh.”

“That’s good, because I don’t want anyone to give you a hard time. We just want to get to the bottom of things.”

“Right.”

“Richie,” he says, and the lines corrugate deeper on his brow, “we’re pretty much sure we know how it happened.”

“How what happened?”

“Look. I’m going to be dead straight. It really is better if it comes from you.”

“If what comes from me?”

The big fat fucker suddenly coughs and leans forward, fingering his collar again like he might want to rip it off his neck. He says nothing.

“Richie, I want to help you.”

“Who are you?” I say.

“I told you, Richie. I’m Dave and I’m from CID. You know what CID is, don’t you?”

“You think I’ve done something to her, don’t you?”

“We have her bike, Richie. It has your fingerprints all over it.”

I look at my lawyer like, Is this a joke? She just makes a little nod, encouraging me to answer. I go cold and then I feel a wave of heat roll over me. “Well, that would be because I ride it with her all the time.”

“You have a car,” says the fat copper, looking at me for the first time. He has an incredible, high reedy voice for such a fat bloke. He sounds like he’s nine years old, except there’s menace in his voice. “Why would you need a bike?”

“For cycling,” I says. “And by the way, I gave her the bike. It was my bike and I fixed it up for her and gave it to her. The chain was always coming off. It would have my fingerprints on it, wouldn’t it?”

The other one, Dave, the sad one, leans in. “We know she was pregnant.”

“What?” I say. “What? How could you know that?”

“Was it your child she was having, Richie?”

“Is having,” I say. “Is having. How do you know that?”

“Her pregnancy was confirmed by her GP.”

“Thought that was confidential,” I say to my lawyer. “Wasn’t it?”

“How old was Tara?” says the fat one. He can’t say his R’s. He says
Tawa
.

“Have you found her?” I ask.

“Can I have a word?” my lawyer says to the policemen.

D
AVE, FRIENDLY
D
AVE, DEAD-STRAIGHT
Dave, sad Dave, my mate Dave, steps outside with my lawyer, leaving me with the uniformed bobbie and the incredible hulk still fingering his collar. Only now he’s looking at me with dead-fish eyes. He sniffs. Then he does it again. Sniffs. Like he’s telling me he can smell something.

After a moment they come back in. Sit down again.

Dave says, “Richie, you must have known that Tara was under the age of sexual consent, which is sixteen in this country. But for the moment, for the moment, I’m quite prepared to let that go. I want to make things easy on you and I can guess how hard things have been for you.”

“What things?”

“Were you the father, Richie?”

“I thought doctors weren’t supposed to reveal confidential information,” I say.

“In situations like this, it’s different.”

“What is this situation?”

“For God’s sake!” says the fat one with his squeaky voice. Then he actually wipes his own spittle off his own black trousers.

“Richie, we know you had a lot of very angry rows with Tara. We also know that you have a pretty hot temper.”

“Violent temper,” says the fat one.

“No.”

“We’ve got information about your violent temper. We found some records about a case in which you badly beat up a young man in a disco pub.”

I turn to my lawyer. She’s busy scribbling. She’s not behaving like the lawyers you see on TV. “Why are you here?” I shout. “You’re saying nothing!”

The lines crease even further around the copper’s face. He looks incredibly depressed. “Richie, I’m going to say something now in front of these other people and it shames me to have to say it. Things happen. Some years back, Richie, I used to take a drink. Not anymore, but I did then. One night I went home drunk. I’d been married for twelve years and I had three lovely children. My wife and I got into an argument.”

My lawyer stops scribbling, and she looks up at him.

“That’s all I remember, I swear to you,” says Dave. His blue eyes are burning into me. “Then in the morning I woke up and I found my wife sitting at the kitchen table. Her face was a terrible mess, Richie. Puffed and swollen. Split lip. Two black eyes. I don’t remember anything about it, Richie, I swear to you now as God is my judge.”

I look at him. He’s leaning forward and gazing deep into my
eyes, like he wants to look right into my soul and back again. His eyebrows are raised. I look at my lawyer. I glance at the fat cop, and at the uniformed cop. They are all looking at me, and their eyes, all of them, are like water swirling down a drain.

And for the first time I think: Did I do it? Did I?

I
s there something wrong with our aunt Tara?” said Amber.

“What do you mean by ‘wrong’?” said Genevieve.

Genevieve, Amber, and Josie were baking a chocolate cake in the kitchen of The Old Forge. Zoe was out with her white rapper. Jack had got bored shooting rats and was now trying, from a distance of twenty yards, to ignite matches suspended by string on an outhouse door.

“She squints and pulls faces.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“And her skin hangs off her like there’s too much of it. And she wears dark glasses indoors.”

“She’s certainly very slim. Wish I was.”

“And Zoe says she only looks fifteen and there must be something wrong with her.”

“You’re spilling that. Pay attention.”

“And she does this,” Josie said, half closing her eyes and moving her head from side to side while affecting a smile.

“Stop being mean, you two. I thought she was very kind and sweet to all of you.”

“And she smells funny,” said Amber.

“Oh, that’s patchouli oil. I used to wear that. Now, stir.”

O
UTSIDE
, J
ACK WAS STILL
trying and failing to ignite matches from a distance. When he inspected the damage he found that the pellets were embedding themselves in the soft old wood of the outhouse door. It all looked a bit of a mess. He thought he might have to reckon with his father about that. Then he thought he could maybe get his penknife and dig the pellets out of the wood before his dad got back from walking in the Outwoods.

Jack was no great fan of hiking. His parents had taken him walking in Charnwood Forest many times over the years, dragging him up Beacon Hill or pushing him through Bradgate deer park, mostly in freezing weather. Before Jack could walk, Peter or Genevieve would carry him in a papoose-style backpack. He could never understand the appeal of walking without having a place to get to. He’d once argued with his dad that it was a bit like jumping with no fence or obstacle in front of you, or running when there was no pressing need to get anywhere fast.

What’s more, the strange unresolved landscape of Charnwood Forest spread too many shadows. He had an early memory, or, rather, the memory was so early he wasn’t sure if it was only an infant dream. Or a memory of a dream. Anyway, in the memory or the dream, he was strapped in the papoose, facing backward as Genevieve strode through the woods. The rocks around were formed of gleaming dark blue slate, sliced and cracked into fine layers, so he assumed the scene was Swithland Woods, a place he’d been force-marched through many times later in his life.

His father had been slightly ahead, carrying sister Zoe. There were creatures looking at him from behind the blue slate rocks; they pointed their fingers and smiled cruel smiles. He felt safe in his mother’s papoose but was still afraid of the creatures. He was only just old enough to talk. He’d tried to make a sound but he was almost mesmerized by the creatures stirring in the wake of
the family’s passage. He knew intuitively that if he had been able to alert his mother or his father, the creatures would be able to disappear.

He’d recounted this experience to his mother many years later. It was Genevieve who had put the idea in his head that it must have been a dream. She’d suggested that no one could remember something that had happened when they were only two years old. But Jack knew that if it was a dream, it was a full-color dream. And it had stayed with him: an uneasiness, a low breathing that seemed to exude from the soil and the volcanic rock of Charnwood.

He didn’t hate the place, but he never felt at ease there, either.

Jack decided to take a few more potshots at the matchsticks before giving up for the day. Anything was preferable to staying in a house full of sisters. He took up a position closer to the door and sighted the rifle. He knew that to ignite the match he had to graze it, not hit it center-punch. Not that his shot was good enough to accomplish the latter. But he sighted the air rifle on the match and tried to hold it perfectly still before squeezing the trigger.

Before he fired, something moved at the periphery of his vision. It was a blur of red rust at the bottom of the garden, a furry thing, half hidden behind a shrub. He knew instantly it was a fox. Foxes visited the garden every evening, eyeing the chicken coop. Sometimes you could see a fox calmly scrutinizing the coop and its occupants like it was a mathematical problem that could be solved by patient application and attention to detail.

The thing moved again, creeping through the bushes. Jack swung his rifle, quickly sighting it, and fired.

The tiny slug hit its target. There was a brief flurry of earth and fur as the thing made a leap. There was a moment of writhing, and then stillness. His dad had told him that his 1.77 slugs weren’t big enough to kill a fox, but Jack slipped down from the garage roof and ran after his target in hope.

At first he couldn’t find anything. Then he spotted his kill. A dilapidated wooden fence surrounded the property, and he saw a ball of ginger fur brushed up against the base of the fence. It wore a little red collar.

“Bugger bugger bugger fuck.”

He squatted beside his kill. It was a pretty ginger cat. Its eyes were wide open and it lay still. Jack tried to poke it.

“Fuck bugger fuck bugger.”

It was a neighbor’s cat that he’d seen in the yard once or twice, a sweet thing owned by the elderly lady who lived a few doors away across the street. Jack felt his stomach squeeze. He could see where the pellet had gone in the head. There was also a tiny clot of blood in the cat’s ear. Why did he have to suddenly be such a good shot?

He stared back at the house. He didn’t think anyone could have seen what had happened. He held his head in his hands, trying to ward off a deep thrill of shame. Then he recovered, got up, and walked back to the outhouse to open the pellet-studded door. Inside he found a garden spade.

Returning to his kill, he dug a hole in the earth as deep as he could, but after just a couple of feet he hit clay that made the spade ring, as if it was iron. He put the cat in the shallow grave. He thought about taking off its red collar but decided against. Then he covered the dead cat with loose soil. He scattered a pile of dead leaves over the grave to disguise his handiwork.

He returned to the outhouse, put the spade away, and went back inside the house.

G
ENEVIEVE WATCHED THE BOY
kick off his boots at the door and hang his jacket on the banister post of the stairs.

“You okay, Jack?” she shouted, still busy with the girls and the cake.

“Yep,” he said, swinging upstairs.

She hadn’t meant
Are you okay?
She had meant:
Gosh I’ve hardly seen you for three days
. But his answer had told her that he wasn’t okay. She gazed at the spot on the stairs where he’d been, as if his imprint or a ghost of him was still there.

“Are you sure it is Aunt Tara?” Amber said.

“Why on earth do you say that?”

“Well, I heard you saying to Daddy that she should be nearly
your age. And she’s not. So it can’t be her, can it? She’s not old enough, is she?”

“Don’t be so silly. Of course it’s your Aunt Tara.”

And Genevieve picked up the cake in its baking tin and put it in the oven, which had been warming.

H
e also had a great way of listening. It was as if everything I said to him was important. Counted for something. And it was like that with everything he said, too. Nothing lost, or loose. We rested there amid the bluebells with our heads leaning against the moss-covered stone and with the lark twittering in the infinite sky, and it was as if time didn’t shift.

No one came or went. Usually on a lovely day such as that there would be several people strolling in the Outwoods, but today none passed by. I didn’t even think it strange.

“A lovely girl like you,” he said, “you must surely have a boyfriend.”

“I do. But he doesn’t make me happy.”

“Why’s that?”

“He thinks more of his music than he does of me.”

“But I love music and music makers. You could have a worse fellow than that, you know: one who makes music.”

“I don’t know about that. I think they just like to have the girls look at them. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“It is for me. I want to be somebody’s special person. I don’t want to be with a man who looks at other women.”