Survival of Thomas Ford, The (21 page)

Thomas Ford was standing in the darkness of the trees, staring out of his remaining eye at the moonlit features of the bird-faced man in the clearing. The man’s nose was unmistakable. It was the nose of a parrot or cockatoo, not a human nose.

Thomas Ford could see the blanketed form at the man’s feet. For moments, Thomas thought it was Lea under the blankets, then he remembered again that it was Lorna, the cleaner from the hospital, it was her there on the ground.

The molten, volcanic pain where Thomas Ford’s eye had been would not let him concentrate. But he remained still and silent, watching.

The bird-faced man seemed older now, far older than he had been in that second of memorised life, the snapshot deposited in Thomas Ford’s brain, the image of the face above the red bonnet in the sunlight by the loch that day.

The silver moonlight made the man’s hair seem white, not black. It almost seemed to Thomas now that this could be a different man. He watched the man bend and take hold of one end of the blankets. The man started to drag the body through the silver-lit clearing. Thomas had no doubt that it was a body being dragged and that it was Lorna’s body. The only doubt was about this man being the man from the car. But it had to be the boy from the car. He had imagined the age wrongly then, or was perceiving it wrongly now. No wonder the police had never found the driver, if that second of memory could be so mistaken. The man was dragging the body towards the next area of thick-branched darkness. They were going to vanish in a moment, the bird-faced man and the blanketed woman. Thomas Ford felt frozen, inert, as though he himself was captured now in a snapshot and being studied by some great eye far above. He felt himself the most unreal thing in the forest night. He looked up at the moon. It seemed real still, more real than himself, or the bird-faced man, or the blanketed woman. Thomas Ford let his eye blink as he gazed at the moon. When his eye rolled down again the bird-faced man and the blankets were gone, disppeared into the trees. Thomas Ford’s lip began to quiver. He almost spoke aloud as though there was someone beside him to hear.

He lifted a foot and placed it on the dead leaves ahead.

Jack McCallum bumped and tugged the girl’s body through the trees and darkness. He should never have trusted that fucking Pole. It had been a great error. Jack squeezed his fists tight around the blankets and pulled with renewed power. Maybe he could stand to lose the boy and Cathy. Maybe he was underestimating himself when he thought McCallum Homes would necessarily go down if Jimmy and Cathy went down. Certainly there was no room for weakness now. There were positives and negatives, after fifty years of life Jack knew that was all there was to it, more or less. You just had to emphasise the positives as long as possible. Take away the Pole, Jimmy, and Cathy, take all of them out of the equation, and maybe McCallum Homes and Jack McCallum himself could still prevail.

Jack laughed quietly. It was bullshit. He was going down and he knew it. You also had to be a realist. Well, Ok then, he’d take this little cunt with him.

Jack pulled her blanketed body hard over the big, rough tree-knot that marked the edge of the next moonlit clearing where Poppy’s grave and the girl’s freshly-dug hole were waiting.

“Here you go then,” said Jack. “It’s a nice spot. Good drainage. You’ll get the sun in the afternoon and nice nights like this. There’s an old owl over there and the cats will come to play. You’ll be fine here, lassie. Maybe I’ll come to see you now and then. Depends how things work out. You’ve certainly churned things up, Lorna. No telling how all the pieces are going to land after what you did, I won’t pretend it’s not so.”

Jack kicked the centre of the blankets hard.

“You awake Lorna?”

He kicked again. The girl gave forth a muffled cry.

“You think you can destroy lives and just walk away?” shouted Jack.

He kicked again.

“No! No! No! By fuck no!”

Jack kicked her four times, to punctuate his declamations. He paused and raised a thick hand. He swept the hand through his hair. In the silence Jack heard the light wind whistle. A rustle and crackling of twigs came from the trees nearby. Jack rubbed at the rough beard on his chin. There was no time to take her out of the blankets. He had to try to find Ford. Even if it was hopeless he had to try. He imagined his boy with a knife in him and blood coming out. Tears came to Jack’s eyes. He bent his legs and crouched low by the tilled earth of the girl’s grave. The wind mixed with the smell of the fresh ground.
Oh Christ help me oh christ I’m sorry for it all please don’t take my boy away

From inside the blankets, Lorna heard Jack McCallum moan like a whale torn from the ocean. She hadn’t heard a sound like that since the day her mother had told her about the cancer. Her mother had told her very calmly. But then, after a silence, her mother had broken into pieces, like the remains of her tiny, thin body had been blown and scattered by a secret wind and, from her mother’s mouth, Lorna had heard that same hopeless sound. Now she heard it through the blankets and, for a second, it nearly eclipsed her own terror.

Thomas Ford stood, staring, transfixed by the sight and sound of his enemy crouched by the hole in the earth. The sound the man was making was the sound Thomas Ford had been waiting to hear now for weeks from inside himself, the sound that had failed to materialise inside himself. His own agony had not welled up into anything so definite and powerful. Thomas’ heart heard the call of Jack McCallum’s low, plaintive moan and echo-ed it. Thomas almost nodded his head in agreement with the noise, all other details of these circumstances forgotten for a long moment. He walked out into the moonlit clearing and let himself be seen. Jack McCallum went silent instantly. Lorna heard the moan choke off suddenly. Jack McCallum stood slowly. He didn’t recognise Ford. He saw a broken figure, almost naked in the moonlight. It could have been the ghost of any of them. Jack couldn’t tell which. He had expected for a long time a visit from the ghost of one of those he had buried here on the hill. Jack nodded and grinned. Thomas Ford saw that this was not the boy who had driven the red car by the loch. So like him, and yet not him at all. Thomas Ford felt cheated in the silver light from overhead. His eye widened. On the ground, Lorna writhed suddenly. The blankets rippled and shifted like the surface of a stream.

“Which one are you?” said Jack.

He had forgotten Thomas Ford completely now. The old ghosts were far more real to Jack. He hoped it was Shandlin. He had hated Shandlin.

“Shandlin?” said Jack. “Is it you, Shandlin?”

The wind was a cold pain against Thomas Ford’s bare shoulders. Lorna heard Jack’s muffled voice through the blankets. She stopped moving. She couldn’t make out the words.

“You
bastard
!” she screamed from the blankets.
“You bastard!”

Thomas winced at the scream. Jack McCallum stepped towards the blankets and kicked heavily at their centre. Lorna screamed again, wordlessly.

Jack watched the bare-chested figure in the moonlight, as though waiting to see what it would do about him kicking the girl.

“What are you here for?” Jack shouted at the figure. “Eh? Come on! You must have something to say! What’s your business back here Shandlin eh? What are you going to do? What are you going to do?”

Jack spat on the blankets.

“You’re nothing!”
Jack screamed.
“Nothing! None of you! Nothing!”

Jack breathed heavily. Thomas Ford listened to him pant. The wind seemed to blow harder for a moment. Thomas Ford remembered going through the windscreen of the
Toyota
, up into the loch’s waters. He remembered knowing he was leaving his wife behind in the car to die. It felt like the ice of the loch was all round his skin again as he stood still and let the wind blow on his back.

“I knew I was leaving her,” he said, quietly, through his broken teeth.

“Eh?” said Jack.

“I knew she would die.”

Jack turned his head in the moonlight, like a dog listening to some strange signal.

The Subaru was coming up to the blind corner where Thomas and Lea Ford’s car had left the road and gone into the water.

Even in the moonlight coming through the windscreen, Lanski could see how pale Jimmy’s face had become now.

“Careful going round this bit,” said Jimmy. “That’s it there, where she went in the loch.”

Lanski saw the badly repaired stone wall, the jagged irregular edge where the
Toyota
had ploughed through.

“She had a beautiful head, man,” said Jimmy. “I saw her photos later, in the papers, but I remember her head like, above the blue bonnet, just for a second in the sunlight eh…that’s how I remember her, man, and she was beautiful.”

Lanski licked his upper lip. Jimmy said,

“I’d have loved that eh, having a woman like that, that’s the kind of woman I’d like man. You could see the quality man, the beauty, even just in a second when she was about to die eh?”

Jimmy whistled weakly and shook his head.

“Aye, Thomas Ford was a lucky man.”

“And the girl?” said Lanski.

Jimmy turned to look at the Pole. Lanski waited, then turned to look back at Jimmy.

“The girl,” said Lanski when he saw the boy’s vague dreamy eyes. “The girl your father took from Ford’s house tonight?”

Jimmy’s eyes widened as though he was waking up slowly.

“Oh, that’s Lorna, I told you, my girlfriend like. She’s a cleaner, up at the hospital. She works with a lot of Polish lassies up there man.”

Jimmy turned his head away. He faced the road again. The Subaru was approaching the edge of the village.

“It’s two right turns here,” said Jimmy.

“I know.”

“I feel awful funny now, Lanski. Like I can’t keep awake eh? Is that me dying you think?”

Jimmy laughed.

“Dying,” he said again.

He blinked.

“I didn’t want to do any of that eh? Back in the town. Robert was my friend. I always liked his mum too. But all the pressure like, it wouldn’t stop building. And it was Robert like, who came in the living room with that big fuck-off knife. I knew he was going to open me up eh? But he was always a good lad. Then his mum went for me too eh? Fuck’s sake. You know yourself. Sometimes there’s no choices.”

Lanski did indeed know. He took the second right turn off the main road. The Subaru entered the long straight stretch approaching the foot of the hill. For the second time that night, the Subaru headlights carved at the darkness like a blowtorch sculpting a path through hard, black ebony. The night’s final shape was still unknown, undecided. Lanski felt the war going on right then, between light and darkness. It was in each twitch of the steering wheel as the four-wheel drive crunched against the rough road. It was a heat in his own spine, just above the tail-bone, where it met the driver’s seat.

“I think I am dying though,” said Jimmy. “I’ve never felt like this before. It’s like being really hungry and tired but I don’t want food. It’s like I’m hungry for something else.”

Lanski barely heard Jimmy’s voice as he swerved the Subaru far to the left, taking its nose through the parking place opposite the Chalet Reception building.

“You going for the hill eh?” said Jimmy. “Good luck man! It’s more like going into space than driving eh?”

Jimmy laughed and put his fingertips up on the dashboard in front of himself as Lanski brought the car round in a broad curved sweep. The Subaru’s wheels bit into the track. Its nose tilted upwards outrageously.

“Whooooooooooooooo!”
went Jimmy.
“I am the GANDOLFINI!”

The Pole fought the hill with his wrists and his foot, while the boy screamed.

Thomas Ford and Jack McCallum craned and twisted their necks in synchronised reaction. They looked far downhill at the bobbing and jerking headlights. The vehicle’s dull whine was distant, insect-like, not yet significant.

“Don’t be thinking that’s the police come to save you,” said Jack quietly. “No, that’s my man in my car. My boy will be there too.”

Jack smiled.

“You’ll wish you stayed dead when they get here,” said Jack. “Whoever you are.”

Thomas Ford kept his eye on the distant headlights.

“See that vehicle move?” said Jack. “People laughed at me, man, getting a Subaru. They expected Jack McCallum to get a nice four-wheel Merc for going round the building sites. But I knew what I was doing. That hill down there’s littered with abandoned vehicles, but no that Subaru, it does its job. That’s all that matters in the end eh?”

Jack waited for Thomas Ford to turn his neck and look at him with that swollen eye. Thomas Ford only watched the distant bouncing headlights coming up the hillside. Jack sniffed.

“We lived up here, for two years. I was going to build a house. But I never did. I should have. It’s a wonderful place.”

Except for the ghosts
, thought Jack in the silence at the back of his eyes.
The ghosts like you.

“There’s cats all over here. I brought them,” said Jack. “But you’ll know about the cats. They’re wild.”

The blankets on the ground jerked and squirmed again. Jack grinned.

“She’s wild too eh? She’s come to the right place. Jimmy had good taste in that at least.”

Thomas Ford turned to look at Jack McCallum.

“Jimmy,” said Thomas Ford’s broken mouth.

Jack looked at him strangely.

“Do you know my boy?”

Jack frowned.

“You’re only Ford aren’t you?”

Jack laughed.

“I must be going mad. I thought you were Shandlin or one of the others. I forgot to think about you there, Ford. You’re Ford’s ghost then. I see now.”

Thomas Ford’s eye stared in the moonlight.

“You’re still just a fucking ghost, Ford,” said Jack. “It doesn’t make you any less a ghost, you just not having done the dying yet. What matters is like I said, how it all ends up. The order of the events won’t change a thing. You can be a ghost now instead of later, I don’t mind.”

Jack kicked the blankets.

“Like this bitch. I’ve dug her hole. Soon I’ll plant her. But she’s already dead. Like yourself.”

Jack smiled.

“See Ford, you’ve been dead for weeks if you think about it right. Since the moment my boy’s car sent you into the loch. That was you dead then. It’s all just been confused until now. But I’ll see you right.”

Jack bent over and pulled Lorna’s blankets in the direction of the hole in the ground.

“Want to give me a hand with her?” said Jack.

Thomas Ford watched the bird-faced man drag the girl’s body across the earth. It was true that he had felt like a ghost since the day the car went into the water. The bird-faced man bent and embraced the long, blanketed form of the girl. Inside the blankets Lorna struggled, but her arms and legs were trapped too tightly by the folds of cloth. The bird-faced man lifted her off the ground. It looked to Thomas Ford like a weird dance. He felt an intruder, to be seeing it. He wished it would all stop without him having to do anything. He looked away from the man and the blankets. He looked down the hill at the vibrating headlights. They were doing a beautiful dance too. As Thomas Ford watched them out of his eye he heard a heavy thud behind himself. He didn’t turn to look. He heard the unmistakable sound of a shovel being stamped into loose earth. He heard Jack McCallum breathe deeply and grunt as he turned his torso and dropped the first drizzly splash of loose earth on the blankets. It seemed such an old sound to Thomas Ford, as though he had heard it every day of his life. In reality he had only been to three funerals.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. In the sure and certain hope…

Thomas turned to watch Jack shoveling the earth onto the girl. Thomas had missed Lea’s funeral. He had been asleep at the hospital. They called it a coma but it was just being asleep. It was only different to being asleep when you tried to wake up. Thomas had been trying to wake up ever since. He was still trying. The shovel bit into the earth with such a harsh sound.

“I thought I saw gas one day up here,” said Thomas Ford. “It was the day Lea died. I saw a butterfly too, a white butterfly. I saw it again tonight. The gas and the butterfly.”

Jack McCallum didn’t appear to be listening. He shovelled earth steadily onto the blankets, taking care to distribute the first layer evenly, from the girl’s head to the girl’s toes.

“I knew I was leaving her in the car,” said Thomas Ford.

He laughed bitterly and bent his neck. He looked down at his bare feet. He shook his head.

“We’d been arguing for months. Two years. It was no good I suppose. But I loved her. Except I swam through the windscreen and left her.”

Thomas Ford raised his eye and stared at Jack McCallum’s bent shoulders.

“If I really loved her I wouldn’t have left her, would I?”

His single eye blinked. Jack McCallum paused in his shovelling. He looked up at Ford from where he stood in the girl’s grave. He jabbed his shovel deep into the pile of ground that was level with his belly. He rested his forearms on the shovel handle and looked pensively at Ford out of dark, soft eyes.

“I love Cathy and my boy,” said Jack McCallum. “But I’ve always had the feeling it would have shown I loved them better if I did leave them. I’m not good to them. I’m not good to anybody.”

Jack shrugged and raised his eyebrows. Thomas Ford saw Jack lift his foot in the grave and place it on the thin layer of earth that ran the length of the girl’s blankets. Jack’s foot seemed to pressure down on where the girl’s chest would be.

“Take this one here eh?” said Jack. “She turns up at my office this morning, telling me something’s up. I’d have been happy to co-operate with her, you know that? I even offered her a job. I could understand she was fed up with that cleaning job up at the hospital so I says to her, hey, come and work for me Lorna! That was me trying to be good to someone, see?”

Jack spat on the earth beside his foot.

“And look how it’s ended up. All because she was greedy. People think I’m a greedy man myself, but that’s no it, no, I’ve just been working for the future, that’s all it was.”

Jack looked down.

“Aye, OK, that’s maybe all this lassie was doing, trying to lay something down for her future, but…”

Jack looked up at Ford.

“The mistake she made was she tried to steal it from
my
future eh? That was the fucking mistake.”

Jack wrapped his fists round the shovel handle again. He pulled it out of the mound of earth, shifted it to the side, then drove the blade deep into the pile. He pulled back the new scoop of dark earth and flung it across the now almost buried girl.

The buzz of the Subaru’s engine was getting louder in the distance.

Jack twisted his torso to stare downhill at its tiny, bobbing headlights.