Survival of Thomas Ford, The (11 page)

Jack and Jimmy McCallum were sitting in the Subaru, at the edge of the high woods overlooking the city.

“Is that not a wonderful view, boy?” said Jack. “That’s development see? Twenty years ago that town was a piss-pot. In twenty years time who knows what it could be? Would you not like to be part of that, Jimmy? Building up the place?”

Jack turned to look at his son. Shreds of bloody skin were peeled back here and there from Jimmy’s cheek where the pebble-dashing had got him. Jimmy didn’t look back at his father. Jack sniffed.

“You were so clever at school eh? That’s what I don’t understand, Jimmy. Your mother was just too soft with you. She indulged you. There’s a price to pay for things like that and now we’re all paying it.”

“What price?”

“I don’t know, Jimmy. But maybe that wee lassie of yours knows.”

Jimmy felt like he was sinking.

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me any details.
Eh?
”

Jimmy swallowed.

“Eh?”
shouted Jack.

He slapped Jimmy’s cheek. He held up his hand to slap him again. Jimmy cringed. Shreds from his bloody cheek had come off onto Jack’s hand and were glistening in the sunlight like grated rubies.

“I should pound your face in, Jimmy. I’ve never really done that. Maybe it would get through to you. Nothing else did. But this is business, boy. You’re my son. What do you think I’m working for, my old age? I’ll probably just fall over on a site one morning and that’ll be it. It’s all going to be yours boy. But it’ll be a man I leave it too, not a boy. This lassie Lorna comes to me and says,
I know something terrible that Jimmy’s done, Mr McCallum
. I’d offered her a job before she even says that Jimmy. But no, she wants to go into business for
herself
eh, mangey little Council house cunt. And she wants the McCallums to front up cash for her first deal.”

“Cash?” said Jimmy.

Jack shook his head.

“She wants paying son. Paying for not grassing about whatever it is you’ve done. I wouldn’t mind paying. But the paying never ends you see boy?”

Jack slapped his palm down on top of Jimmy’s head in an almost loving gesture. Jimmy’s black parrot plumage of hair was ruined.

“Why do you no comb your hair forward Jimmy like normal people?”

Jack sighed.

“She said she was going to grass?” said Jimmy.

Jack sat back in his seat and focused on the view.

“That’s what she meant,” he said. “She wants to be an entrepreneur. Can’t blame her. Who doesn’t nowadays? So anyway, son, tell me what it is you’ve done.”

Jack looked at Jimmy’s sly eyes.

“No boy,” he said quietly, “don’t make up something that you’ve done. Tell me what it really is she’s got on us.”

Jimmy tried to make a face that would look like he was racking his brain, trying to imagine what it could be.

“Right, out of the car.”

Jimmy didn’t move.

“Out Jimmy.”

Jimmy opened his door and pushed it. The late afternoon air had a wonderfully clean smell. A warm breeze filled the Subaru. Jimmy stepped out of the vehicle. He was standing on brown earth. He heard his father opening the driver’s door, then he saw his father’s white-haired head rise as he stood. His father started to walk round the front of the Subaru.

“Look dad, I don’t know what the fuck she must have been on about. She’s mental. I think she should maybe see a psychiatrist eh?”

Jack shook his head.

“You’re a stupid wee bastard, Jimmy. I’ve put up with you and I’ve tried with you.”

“Come on dad, you were saying eh, that all your work’s for me eh? What’s the point of always clubbing fuck out of me all the time eh? It doesn’t make sense man.”

“You’ll no cooperate Jimmy. You never would. I give you the opportunity like, drive you up to a nice place, ask you nicely, and you tell me shite.”

“I’m no telling you shite!”

Jimmy opened his eyes and the sea was below him like he was falling from a plane. He was terrified. There were grey whales in the sea, hundreds, families of them. He felt sick. No, that was the sky up there, not the sea. He was here on the ground, looking up at the sky. That’s what was happening. The grey whales were just clouds. There was pain and then disbelief. Jimmy realised he had been knocked out for the second time that day. Outrage filled his cells as he closed his eyes again.

He felt Jack’s shoe jab his shoulder.

“Come on, son, stay awake. This is all for your own good. You don’t need that wee lassie running around knowing stuff about you, any more than I do. You’ve got to grow up, Jimmy. Tell me what she knows and then I’ll know how to take care of her, see?”

Jimmy opened his eyes again. He saw his father’s upside-down face high over him like God. He got up and leaned on his left elbow. There was grass there, shifting in the wind, and a dandelion just by his elbow, quivering on its stalk.

Jimmy looked at the dandelion for a long time. Then he said,

“We were just out for a drive by the loch. That’s all it was. But I overtook this lorry, just before a bend. And a car came round the corner. Do you remember in the papers, that crash, out by the loch, that woman who died? That’s all it was though, we were just out for a drive.”

Jimmy shook his head. The dandelion seemed to vibrate now in the sunlight.

“That’s all it was,” said Jimmy again. “Honest to God, dad. I know the woman died. Aye, I know. But it was all just an accident.”

Robert Ferguson was still lying on the kitchen floor. His balls throbbed and sent regular electric pulses up his abdomen to his brain. The nausea was a bloated sea that he kept sinking down into, then rebounding upwards from. He hadn’t vomited. He didn’t know that he still couldn’t move until he heard his mother’s key in the front door. Then he tried to move and the electric pulses became galvanic surges that threatened to make his head detonate in a rupturing blasted charge that would leave him vegetabilised there on the laminate flooring. He drew in a thin breath as though through a miserly straw, then blew out the air loudly. He heard his mother enter the hall and the rustle of plastic bags. She walked into the kitchen and past him. He heard her put bags on top of the work surface. She turned to open the fridge door, then she saw him.

“Robert! Robert!”

“It’s alright. I fell.”

His voice was a wet gurgle.

“I’ll get an ambulance love!”

He felt her hand on his neck.

“No! I’m alright. Just let me alone a minute.”

“Robert!”

“Let me alone!” he screamed.

He heard her feet leave the kitchen and go into the hall. He heard her pick up the phone. He dragged himself into a foetal position. It felt like one of his balls was connected to his abdomen with a piece of string and that if he straightened himself the string would pull the ball up into his belly. But he got to his knees and crawled until he could see her at the phone.

“Put the fucking phone down! I’m alright I said!”

He saw her blink. Then she put the phone down. She stood looking at him for a few seconds.

“I fell,” he said. “I just knocked something. My balls. On the chair. But I’m feeling better. I don’t want an ambulance, I just want to rest.”

“Alright love. Lie down there. I’ll get you a pillow.”

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. Jimmy’s dad had said that Lorna had gone to him and said she knew something about Jimmy. That was it all over then. He could try killing himself maybe, overdose his medication. Or go on the internet, find something more sure to do the job. If he just hadn’t been in the car with Jimmy. Once he’d gotten in the car, it was all written in stone somewhere what would happen. There was no free will after that, only fate. Robert didn’t feel strong enough to live with the consequences of falling foul of fate. He already wasn’t strong enough just to live normally, day by day, not without the medication to keep him calm and steady. None of it seemed fair. The only way out would have been to have gone straight to the police about Jimmy, the day after the accident. Robert frowned. But he could still grass now. Yes, grass now. It sounded like Lorna had only half-grassed to Jimmy’s dad, told him only half of the truth or even less. Jimmy’s dad obviously hadn’t known any details.

Robert closed his eyes and saw the car coming round the corner and the two heads above the bonnet. He focused on the female head in his memory. It was the female head, the dead one, that mattered. Robert might owe a huge debt to the man, Thomas Ford, but the major debt was obviously to the woman. His presence, his silence, his complicity. But it had been an accident, part of his brain started to say…

No, the silence had not been an accident. Robert had felt the evil dust in the silence. He had stayed longer and longer in the shower each morning, to try to shift that unshiftable sensation of the evil dust on his skin. But the dust was beneath the skin, somewhere deep.

No, luck was not with them. The universe hadn’t done one of its errors of ommission, not over this debt. Robert could hear the gears and chambers of the universe’s engine, rolling terribly towards him out of the future.

“Mum! Mum!”

He heard her feet running on the hall carpet.

“What?”

She was breathless.

“There’s something I want to tell you about,” he said.

Lorna was sitting in Thomas Ford’s garden. Her ankle was near the first of the large pink rocks. Sunlight reflected off the rock, making the edge of her ankle seem to glow pink. The high fence and hedges gave total privacy. Lorna couldn’t remember the last time she was outdoors and felt that total privacy. She started to worry and try to think back. Maybe she had never felt it before. In the countryside, yes. But not here in the city. This garden in the city was like a machine for escaping the city.

She looked back toward the house. She could see Thomas Ford sitting on the sofa in the living room with a frozen, stunned expression showing at the side of his face and in the angle of his head. She looked up at the roof, the bedroom dormer windows. She would like to go up there soon, but for now it was pleasant here in the garden.

The only thing spoiling the view was the two sets of muddy footprints trailing round the side of the house and up to the patio doors. She stared and tried to tell Robert’s prints from Jimmy’s. Robert must have the bigger feet. She wondered for a second if that meant he would have the bigger cock. That little bird was still bouncing and hopping around the garden. Maybe it lived here then. Maybe Thomas or Mrs Ford had been feeding it. Lorna looked around the garden, hoping to see a bird-table to complete the idyll but there was none. Still, maybe they used to throw it scraps and now Thomas is home and he has forgotten to start feeding it again.

The bird bent over and jabbed mercilessly at a worm.

Thomas sensed the bird’s jerky movement with the edge of his left eye. He wasn’t consciously aware that it was a bird out in the garden that had moved. His brain might have taken it to be Lorna out there making some predatory passes at the air. What the girl was trying to do here was beyond belief, but there was something refreshing about it. After all the indirect suspicion Thomas had felt for weeks, from doctors, nurses, police, Lea’s parents, news announcers, journalists, here was someone being straight with him, in her own way. That’s not to say Thomas felt comfortable having her out there in his garden like this.

Thomas blinked. He was afraid too, he realised. Afraid to know the identity of the driver of that red car. What would he have to do once he knew the man’s name? Now that the mystery could be solved, Thomas felt nostalgia already for the days of ignorance. But the girl could be lying. She might know nothing.

Thomas got up and walked through the patio doorway, out into the garden. He passed Lorna and went up to the edge of the high, brown fence. He stood and looked over it, at the clouds, keeping his back to her.

“How do I know you’re not just making all this up?” he said.

“I’m not.”

“How do I know?”

“Do you remember the driver’s face?”

“Aye.”

“Well, you’ll recognise him then, won’t you, if I lead you to him?”

“I don’t know if I want to see him again.”

“That’s fine too, Thomas. Just let me know and I’ll go to the driver’s father and he’ll pay me to keep quiet anyway. See, I can’t lose Thomas, that’s why I came here.”

“Maybe I do want to see him,” said Thomas.

“Then you see him, after you pay me.”

Thomas looked down and laughed.

“I’m no joking Thomas. If you want to know who he is you have to pay me.”

Thomas turned to look at her. Her brown hair was being blown against her shoulders, bouncing in a light wind that found its way round the edge of the house.

“Anyway, there’s more to this than you’re realising Thomas. I didn’t want to say but, those footprints outside your window there, that wasn’t kids or burglars. That was the driver and the passenger, they came round here to scope you out last night man. They might have even come to do more than that, but they bottled it I think, shat themselves and backed off.”

“Now you’re just making it up,” said Thomas.

“Am I? I’d no be so fucking sure if I was you. Twenty minutes after he was in your garden that driver was in my bed, Thomas, telling me about the day of the accident and how he’d just come from your house.”

Thomas stared at her eyes. Perfect little green circles with clear white borders. There was a cant of realism in the eyes. He felt himself believing her.

“So it’s no just a question of do you want to find this lad Thomas, this lad is on the hunt for you.”

“Why?”

“Why! Because you’re the only living witness to him causing death by dangerous driving eh? And don’t forget the passenger. He’s a quiet lad, but, to be honest, I don’t think he’s all that stable a character either. Both those boys are waking up sweating Thomas, thinking you’ll identify them. They shited last night and left you alone but that doesn’t mean it would always go that way.”

Thomas remembered getting up from the kitchen floor last night. There had been a moment when he had sensed that someone was behind him, in the garden. Then the footprints today. Kids or burglars hadn’t quite made sense. This crazy story was making pieces fit together.

“Aye, you’re starting to take me seriously now eh, Thomas? That’s OK. I’ll even throw in the passenger’s name free, once you’ve paid for the driver.”

“Pay you how?”

“You know how. A house. A home. One or the other or both. I told you.”

“You’re not getting my house Lorna.”

Thomas laughed.

“It’s either that or you move me into your life,” she said.

Thomas shook his head.

“These boys could be back here tonight, Thomas, and just stick you in the back of a van and drive you off into the hills and no-one would ever even find the body. They’re at snapping point now I think.”

“Maybe I’m at snapping point.”

“Aye, maybe, but the difference is they know what direction to snap in. You don’t yet. I could be in a manky hospital operating theatre this afternoon, Thomas, wiping detergent over surfaces. Not to save people from getting infected, no, just to keep some manager’s arse safe until the next inspection. After the inspection, they’ll just let the dirt come back. Everyone’s like that, Thomas. You keep things clean only as much as you can afford. Only enough to stay safe.”

“And you think I’d be safer with you here then?”

She looked over at the hopping bird.

“You’re safer already Thomas. Now that you know about the danger. Thanks to me. Do you ever feed that bird, Thomas?”

Thomas looked round at the bird.

“No. Lea used to sometimes.”

“We should put out some nuts or fruit for it, Thomas.”

“There’s nothing in the house.”

“Well, let’s go to that Tesco’s at the bottom of the road then. We need some food in. So does that bird, if it’s used to being fed here.”

Thomas shrugged. In a way he would have liked to be alone. In another way, this was better.