Survival of Thomas Ford, The (12 page)

Jack McCallum was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Subaru. He tapped the steering wheel with a finger. He had read about the Ford crash in the newspapers of course. Something about it had never quite added up. Now Jack had found out that the anomaly in the equation was his own boy. Yes, it would be enough to bring everything down. It was worse than anything he’d been imagining since the girl came to his office. First Jimmy would go down, then Cathy would follow. In the centrifugal fallout from that, Jack wasn’t naïve enough to think he could survive himself. And if he went down, McCallum Homes and the future went down too.

Jack couldn’t let that happen. If that happened then men like Lanski would fill the gap, evolve from foremen into entrepreneurs like the fulfilment of some terrible Darwinian prophecy.

Just like this girl, Lorna, was trying to achieve the evolutionary leap from cleaner to entrepreneur, in one afternoon. Jack couldn’t allow it. He had worked too hard and long.

“So you thought the only way out was to kill this man, Thomas Ford, eh Jimmy?” Jack said loudly.

His voice carried over the grass and earth, going into Jimmy’s ear. Jimmy was still leaning on an elbow, staring dully at his father in the car.

“Come here!” growled Jack.

Jimmy took a deep breath, levered himself up from the ground in stages. He limped over towards the Subaru. He tripped on a hard root, embedded among the dandelions. When he reached the vehicle he leaned his face, his cheek, on the metal roof.

Jack turned and looked up at Jimmy’s armpit.

“You still think that’s what it’ll take to make us safe, Jimmy? Killing the man?”

“I don’t know dad. It’s all fucked.”

Jack shook his head. He grinned.

“No, boy, it’s no all fucked yet. No yet. But safety’s harder to buy than you think, boy. Oh aye. I’ve had the same problem on the sites for years. You’ve got to balance safety with expediency, profit. And you’ve got to take risks sometimes, for the sake of the future. The girl will have to go too, Jimmy. You can see that eh?”

Jimmy sniffed.

“Eh?” said Jack again.

Jimmy nodded, without taking his cheek off the roof metal.

“And that lad, Robert, him too,” said Jack. “He’s weak, Jimmy.”

Jimmy closed his eyes and saw a broad, narrow black slit.

“He might have told his mum,” said Jimmy.

“Aye?” said Jack. “Her as well then.”

Jack held the Subaru steering wheel in his hand. He looked out the windscreen, at the beautiful view, and imagined himself driving round a corner like Thomas Ford had done, to be suddenly faced with Jimmy’s head above a red car bonnet. It stuck in Jack’s brain for a moment like an indigestible plant; the idea of his son’s head being the last thing some poor woman saw. Jack had been at Jimmy’s birth, against his better judgement, some whim of Cathy’s. He had seen Jimmy’s head coming out into the world, already covered in a little carpet of vertically spiked black hair. Now he was talking to his son about murdering people. Where did the time go? Jack hadn’t murdered anyone for years. He’d thought that was all behind him.

“Is there anyone else, Jimmy?”

“No.”

“You didn’t tell your mother did you, Jimmy?”

Jimmy took his cheek off the Subaru roof. He looked down at the edge of his father’s right eye.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Good,” said Jack. “Good. Well, it’s just a matter of deciding who to start with then, isn’t it?”

Robert was still lying on the kitchen floor. One of his balls was still sending out regular pulses of complaint. His mother was hunched forward in her chair, frowning at the laminate floor.

“See mum? I need to go to the police, tell them everything, before Lorna does.”

“You can’t risk going to the police, Robert. You’d never survive even a week in jail.”

“But if I tell them everything, make a deal, I wouldn’t go to prison over it.”

His mother was shaking her head.

“I don’t think that girl intends going to the police, Robert, or she’d have just done it. She wouldn’t have gone round to Jack McCallum if she meant to go to the police. Oh, she’ll threaten to go, aye. But only until she gets Jack to pay up. She came here before she went to Jack. That was her checking the story, wasn’t it? Do you think she’d have done that, Robert, if she ever intended going to the police herself? No.”

“Do you think?”

“It’s the safest bet for us, Robert. You going anywhere near the police could be the one thing that gets you in trouble now.”

She shook her head.

“Why did you have to keep hanging around with that boy? I told you what he’s like.”

“I know. But I thought we were friends.”

“A friend wouldn’t leave you in all this trouble, Robert. Or lying on my kitchen floor like that. And his dad coming in here too. I could never stand Jack McCallum, Robert. None of the folk in our class at school could stand him. He was always fighting or bumming off about what a big man he was. Even when he was fucking eight years old.”

Robert felt frightened, hearing his mum swear. His mum never swore.

“And anyway, Robert, who’s to say you were in that car at all? Where’s the evidence? Jimmy’s word? Thomas Ford seeing you for a second? Hearsay from some blackmailing hospital cleaner? No, you just keep your mouth shut about it, Robert. And never admit a thing, not to anyone, never again.”

Robert’s mum stood up. She sniffed.

“I’ve got to get this kitchen cleaned up, Robert. Are you going to stay there on the floor, or do you want to try crawling through to the living room? The Rockford Files is on ITV3. You like James Garner. Go on. I’ll bring you in a herbal tea. You’ve got to try to calm down, Robert, or you’ll just make yourself ill over all this and then it won’t matter if you’re in prison or where you are.”

Robert twisted to the side and found that he could lie comfortably on his belly. He tried to get to his knees but that invisible string from his ball to his stomach drew too tight and he couldn’t stand up. He got back down on the floor again. His mum was right. It was easier to crawl on his belly to the living room.
 

Mrs Ferguson stood alone in the kitchen and watched her son crawl along the carpet until he turned left and started to disappear into the living room. She kept staring at her son until, finally, his heels vanished from the hall. Then she stared at the place where the last heel had been until she heard the television being switched on. She walked across the narrow kitchen and stood at the sink, staring out into the garden. Jack McCallum. His stupid taunts and bullying had spoiled half of her childhood. She hadn’t been the only one, oh no. And if she had been a boy, well, she had seen the kind of treatment Jack McCallum could dish out at school to the boys he didn’t like.

Then one day Robert had started hanging around with Jack McCallum’s son. Jack and Cathy’s son. Marie had been in school with Cathy too. Cathy had always been a nice, quiet girl. No-one had understood what she saw in Jack McCallum. But then Jack’s little housing empire had started to flourish on the high hills around the town. A lot of girls must have thought twice then, about saying no to Jack back at school. Marie had never regretted saying no, though. Even if it had led to years of abuse from him and his little gang.

Marie bent over and started emptying a bag of shopping. The image of Robert in Court or in a prison visiting room flashed across her eyes for a second and she felt dizzy. If only Robert’s father was still here. George could have put a stop to Robert’s association with Jimmy and none of this would be happening now. But George was dead and gone, his body never recovered, somewhere at the bottom of the North Sea after a helicopter crash that wiped out a full crew of oil workers on their way out to a fortnight shift on the rig.

It made no sense to Marie.

Men like Robert’s dad dying so young, while a man like Jack McCallum grew fat on housing profits. Jack had grown so rich so fast there had even been a TV documentary about him a few years earlier. Jimmy had been young then but Marie still remembered him on the TV as a wee lad following his dad around the building sites.

It had been funny, seeing Jack and Jimmy together, like different sized clones almost, even then, except Jack’s hair already white.

Now nothing about the McCallums was funny any more, or could ever be again. Marie grabbed the fennel out of the plastic bag and stuffed it roughly against the back of the fridge shelf.

Lorna put her fork through a halved tomato and looked across the table at Thomas Ford.

“I’m no used to this, Thomas. Sitting at a table and that, to eat like.”

Thomas raised eyebrows.

“No?”

“I always eat in front the TV. Habit eh? Shovel it in and stare at some story.”

“We could take it through to the living room if you want.”

“No.”

Lorna shook her head. She took a sip from her glass.

“No,” she said. “I don’t mean I don’t like it.”

She smiled at him. It seemed to Thomas her eyes bulbed out and there was a strain in her as she looked back at him. Maybe she was finding it harder than she thought, carrying out her crazy plan. Thomas preferred to illustrate characters like that, the ones who had big ideas but not enough nerve to sustain the necessary action. He would draw them with that same strain in their eyes.

“My wife and I had problems here, Lorna. It wasn’t a fairy tale marriage by any means. Especially not the last eighteen months. But I did love her.”

Lorna nodded. She looked down at the dark-wooded table top.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, though, Thomas. It’s not my business.”

“She was very ambitious, Lorna. Nothing satisfied her for long. I suppose I got frustrated at that sometimes. Well, I know I did. I wished she could just relax and enjoy what we had here. Tension crept in and just wore us out I suppose. But I think we were on the mend and we could have worked it all out. If the accident hadn’t happened.”

“Life’s always like that though, do you not think?” said Lorna. “Always throwing something at you. I was headed for going to college or maybe even university, then my mum died when I was fifteen. I wasn’t right in the head for years after.”

“Was your dad not there for you?”

Lorna shook her head as she chewed on a slice of cucumber.

“No. He was never there for us. I never even met him, except as a baby but I can’t remember that. Anyway, I’ve no idea where he is now. He could be dead. He was an alcoholic. My mum wasn’t like that though. She took good care of me. But she had cancer. At first she never even told me that’s what it was. She was always just tired. I knew something was wrong. She only lived two months after she told me what it was.”

Thomas nodded.

“Is your mum and dad alive, Thomas?”

He shook his head.

“No. When I married Lea, it was a bit like her mum and dad, Alan and Jean, became mine too for a while. But that was the honeymoon period. Alan soon started seeing my faults and letting Lea know.”

Thomas waited for Lorna to ask him what his faults had been. She just looked at him so he said,

“My mum was good to me too, and my dad. My dad was a train driver. My mum stayed at home.”

“You don’t have any brothers and sisters?”

“No. Have you?”

“Nah. It was just me and mum. Now it’s just me.”

“You must have a boyfriend.”

He saw her blush and he grinned.

“So how would that work, Lorna? You wanting to stay here with me and your boyfriend too?”

Lorna felt confusion. It was the first time she didn’t know what to say next. She looked down at her plate. She blinked, then looked back up, directly at Thomas.

“It’s him,” she said.

Thomas frowned and leaned back in his chair.

“The driver?” he said.

Lorna nodded. Her cheeks were still blazing with hot blood. Her eyes seemed hot too now, like an animal just snared, or just escaping a snare.

“I fucking hate him, Thomas. I didn’t really know, not until today, how much I hate him. He can be a laugh, and it’s not like he’s ever really done anything terrible to me, but...there’s some part of me that, like, he makes my skin crawl, part of me. Part of me likes him, fancies him, but there’s always something fucked up about it. I feel like I might not ever get rid of him unless I really properly get rid of him. Like, he needs flushed down a toilet or something. That’s how I feel.”

Thomas knew suddenly that something inside himself was getting tugged towards her. It was a tide within him, a wave starting up and moving inevitably in her direction. He knew she must be seeing it in his eyes. She didn’t look away. He reached his hand across the table and put it over her hand which was by her plate. His mouth was open and he could hear his own loud breathing in the quiet room. Her cheeks were still bright red. Her hand was hot against his palm. She turned her hand over so her palm met his palm.

“I don’t really think there are accidents,” said Thomas. “I hated it at the hospital, every time they said ‘the accident’. Lea used to believe everything is just accidents, coincidence. But I don’t see it like that.”

“What do you see?”

“There’s patterns to things. Like, here you are and I’m glad you’re here just now. And you know who he is. You know who made Lea go into the water. And you want rid of him. I want rid of him too. I see him in dreams. Him and his mate beside him. Above the red bonnet. I hate him a lot more than you ever will. The police and the hospital and Lea’s parents, they think killing’s an accident, or else they think it was my fault and I’m lying about the red car. And your boyfriend thinks killing’s a game or a sport maybe.”

“I don’t really know what he thinks,” she said. “Not really.”

Thomas laughed.

“I’m not really sure I ever knew what Lea was really thinking.”

Lorna sniffed.

“No, it’s no like that. Your wife at least wasn’t mental, Thomas. Jimmy...”

Lorna shut her mouth. She swallowed. Her cheeks blazed.

“You better go and put your face in cold water, Lorna. Jimmy eh? I wonder how hard it would be for me to find him now. Still too hard maybe. But I don’t know. I know where you work, easy to find out where you live. I could ask your neighbours about Jimmy.”

Lorna shook her head.

“My neighbours know nothing about me.”

Thomas shrugged and smiled.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, Lorna. You can stay here if you want to. I don’t mind the idea at all. Lea’s parents might find it very strange, and the police when they find out, but I like the idea. I’ll need a lot more than his first name. If I’m going to fix this little bastard properly I’m going to need to know everything about him that you know. So tell me.”

“No, I says before, you’d have to get a document drawn up legally, entitling me to this house, or you’d have to marry me. I wasn’t joking.”

“Neither am I joking, Lorna. Tell me about him. Then you can stay.”

Lorna frowned and sat back heavily in her chair. She grinned suddenly.

“You’ve got nothing, Thomas. A first name. It’s nothing. I can still go to his dad and he’ll give me a house just to shut me up.”

“His dad has a spare house?”

“He has money.”

Thomas felt a sharp stabbing sensation in his chest. He nearly panicked, expecting the pain to return fully the next second. He breathed in deeply. Then out slowly. Lorna watched him.

“Are you alright?”

Thomas nodded.

“Aye. But we’ve got to stop arguing about all this.”

“Thomas, if you can’t cope with arguing, you’re no going to be able to cope with handling him, are you? I said he was mental, but I didn’t say he wasn’t hard.”

“Hard?”

Lorna nodded. It was the one quality in Jimmy that couldn’t be denied, an elemental toughness. There was a solid core at the centre of all his bullshit. That was the trouble with him. That was why you had to watch what you did to him.

“His dad’s hard too,” she said. “See Thomas? You’re up against so much here and you don’t even know it. Jimmy wants rid of you in case you can ever identify him. But if Jimmy’s dad finds out then you’ve got even more to worry about. His dad would never let this, or anything, fuck up their lives. Your only chance, and my chance, is to fuck up their lives first. Really.”

Thomas looked at the green eyes. Saucer circles of honest intent drilling back at him over the table. Yes, he’d like to draw her. It was almost worth all the trouble and agony, what had already been and what was still to come probably, just to have these moments sitting with her. He had realised her quality at the hospital, watching her as she moved among the forest of metal beds, emptying bins, picking up used Lucozade bottles. For a brief moment he compared her to Lea. The thought shocked him, something sacrilegious in it.

“Fuck up their lives first,” said Thomas. “I like that. Except it was him that fucked up my life first, and Lea’s.”

“Aye, well you don’t know him like I know him Thomas. He can do a lot more if he gets the chance. This time last night they were standing out there in the garden Thomas, looking in the fucking window at you eh?”

Thomas turned his head toward the patio windows and looked out onto the shadowed garden. The bird was still there, hopping around. It seemed wrong to Thomas, the bird being there so late.