The Burning Air (12 page)

21

JANUARY 2000

“
A
N APPLE?”

She shook her head.

“A soldier of toast?
Dry
toast?”

Another shake.

“A little bit of egg?
Please
.” In desperation I named one of my secret foods. “What if I made you herby chicken?”

“No!”
she said with such vehemence I wondered if she was on to me. I swallowed, hard.

“What about sushi?” Her expression changed and I knew she was considering it. “What about just a bit of sushi? You know, salmon the way I did it last week, sliced really thin. No dressing or anything, just lemon juice. Not the rice. No fat on it at all.”

She nodded. “Yes. I think perhaps I could manage a mouthful of that.”

“Stay right there,” I said, unnecessarily. Her world had shrunk to a path between our bed and the bathroom.

Our local shops didn’t do fresh fish, or not the kind you could make into sashimi, so I had to walk to the new Tesco on the other side of the city. The round-trip would take me the best part of an hour, but I didn’t mind. To buy food that she would swallow and keep down I would have walked to London on bare feet.

The air was crisp and the city was calm. The snaking plume of my breath led me via Cathedral Green. I glanced up at the terrace but didn’t linger, unsure when the new supermarket closed. I needn’t have rushed: a sign on the door said that it was open twenty-four hours a day. Something about the infinite possibility of this made me optimistic enough to buy a multipack of four yogurts as well as the slab of fish; my haul had a promising heft in my hand.

I crossed the green for the second time as the clock struck nine. This time I did take a moment to check in on the MacBrides. I had given up even the pretense of honoring my mother’s obsession, but after all this time I still felt bound to them. In fact, the longer my mother stayed angry at them for having “stolen” my education, the angrier I grew that they
hadn’t
. I wanted a peg to hang this hatred on.

Only Lydia seemed to be in, reading a book in the sitting room, a glass of white wine on a side table. I couldn’t see her anymore without remembering what she had written. I tried to purse my lips over my teeth.

The cool quiet night provided the perfect acoustics for the scream. It seemed to be coming from behind the terrace, perhaps the very spot where I had attacked Felix. The next thing I knew, a hooded figure shot through the gap in the terrace, a spilling bag tucked under its arm, cleared the street in three strides, then disappeared into the dark shrubbery of the Green. I bent down like anyone would have to see what had been dropped; it took a few moments to identify the plastic triangle in my hand as the sheath for the blade of a knife; the words “Kitchen Devil” were etched on one side.

I don’t know who raised the alarm but there was a squad car there in what seemed like seconds. The noise summoned a few of the residents to their steps with murmurs of “Oh, dear lord” and “Not again” and “What’ll it
take
for them to install bloody CCTV in that passage?” Among their number was Lydia MacBride, still with her book in her hand.

I let the sheath fall to the ground, and prepared to run, turned on my heel and found myself at eye level with the polished silver buttons of a police uniform. The number on the officer’s shoulder was 089.

“Darcy Kellaway.” He retrieved the sheath and put it in a plastic bag. “Where’s the rest of the blade?”

“It’s not mine!” I said. “I just picked it up to see what it was. The person running off dropped it.”

“Let me guess, hooded top, couldn’t see anything in the dark, average height?” said PC089.

“Yes!”
I said indignantly. “The top had a sort of orange piping around it. I can’t be the only one who saw.”

“I saw what happened,” said a soft voice to my left. I turned to see my savior and looked directly into the blue eyes of Lydia MacBride.

Recognition was mutual and instant. Anger lit her up. I recognized her expression; I had seen it on my own mother’s face and I had known it from within, too. I could feel the heat of her hatred, as clear in person as it had been expressed in her diary.

“I didn’t see anyone but you,” she said, her tone entirely without inflection.

“No!” I said.

How could she lie like that, so coolly? It gave new credence to my mother’s theory about my exclusion from the school, and guilt for doubting her burrowed its way up through my fear.

“Thanks, Mrs. MacBride. Would you be prepared to come down and make a statement to that effect?”

“Oh, yes.” Now her lips were twitching as though trying to suppress a smile.

“You’re lying! She’s lying! You can’t have seen me do anything because I didn’t do anything. You’re only out to get me because I—” I stopped myself just in time. They both raised their eyebrows. Lydia MacBride lost her battle with her smirk.

“Yes?” said PC089. “No, didn’t think so. Darcy Kellaway, I am arresting you on suspicion of aggravated street robbery. You do not have to say anything . . .”

“Please, I’ve got to take this to my mother,” I said, waving the carrier bag of salmon around. “She needs to eat, she’s starving.”

The policeman rolled his eyes. “This is Saxby, not Ethiopia.”

“But you’ve seen her,” I said, then realized that of course that had been years ago, when she was in relatively good health. I appealed directly to Lydia MacBride.

“Please, please don’t do this, it’ll kill her,” I said, unsure whether I meant the stress or the starvation, but she had already turned her back on me. “It’ll kill her!” I said as the heavy cuff was slipped on my wrist.

In the short car journey to the police station, my very real terror could not quite cover a stirring of anticipation for the moment when Lydia MacBride would be arrested for perverting the course of justice. Underneath the worry about my mother’s distress, I was already nostalgic for the moment I would tell her what had happened.

I half expected Lydia to be waiting for me at the police station, wearing handcuffs that matched my own, but the holding area I was bundled into was empty except for me and a custody sergeant in owlish glasses.

“How old are you?” she asked in an accusing tone, as though my age were an indicator of guilt.

“I’ll be seventeen on my next birthday,” I replied.

“Fuck’s sake, you look about twelve. They must’ve known you was underage. They’re supposed to give me notice if I need to call in an appropriate adult.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling then turned back to me, speaking slowly, as though to an idiot. “You’re a
ju-ven-ile
. That means . . .”

“I know what juvenile means.”

“We need to get a grown-up to sit with you while we read you your rights and that. D’you live with your mum?”

“I told them all this! My mother’s not well, she couldn’t come out.”

“Dad?”

“Get my uncle.” I dictated Kenneth’s number. “Tell him to tell my mother where I am, I don’t want her to worry about me.”

From the slamming car doors outside I deduced that the cells were alongside, or perhaps underneath, the yard they had brought me into. I was bundled into a cell painted a lurid yellow that existed nowhere in nature, and left there. Where was Kenneth?

The hot greasy stench of processed food curled through the hatch and my treacherous taste buds secreted saliva.

“Room service,” said a voice, and a cardboard box was posted through the hole. The label said
WOOD FIRED PIZZA.
The contents looked like a slick of phlegm hacked up onto a bloodied medical dressing. I tried to push it back but the hatch could only be opened from the outside. When, after an age, the door finally opened, the figure behind PC089 was not Kenneth in his sports jacket but a fat middle-aged woman in a
salwar kameez
.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll explain it all to you.”

“Who is this? Where’s my uncle?”

“Who?” said PC089. “Oh. Right. No, we couldn’t get through to him. Zima’s a social worker.”

But if Kenneth wasn’t coming then that meant my mother didn’t know where I was. Perhaps they would let me call her; she might be worried enough by now to pick up the phone, and I could come up with a little white lie to give her peace of mind until I could make it home with the vile, wonderful truth about Lydia MacBride.

“I need to call my mother, right now.”

“All right, dear,” said Zima.

Somewhere outside a door clanged. PC089 was called away, spoke in urgent whispers, then came back into view. “I’m sorry, I’ve wasted your time,” he said, but he was talking to Zima, not me.

“Is anyone going to tell me what the
hell
is happening?” I said.

“Turns out you were telling the truth,” said PC089. “We found the victim’s credit cards on someone else during a subsequent arrest. Batten down the hatches, they’re bringing Ricky Jinks in now,” he said to the custody sergeant, who rolled her eyes.

“Again?” she said.

PC089 turned back to me. “You’re released without charge, this time.”

Now the opposing emotions were relief and rage.

“I presume that your next arrest will be Lydia MacBride? The eyewitness who placed me at the scene. Let’s see, there’s wasting police time, bearing false witness. I know that the rest of her family are corrupt to the core, but
she
’s the worst of the bloody lot.”

PC089 bent to my level. I could count the pores on his nose. “Don’t even think about it. I would take the word of any member of that family over you, every time. I don’t know what you’ve got against them, but I haven’t forgotten what—”

We were interrupted by a commotion, a gate opening, and more uniformed officers came in with the handcuffed form of the man in a black hooded top with an orange trim.

“Ricardo! Welcome back,” said the sergeant.

“Get to fuck,” said the man who could only be Ricky Jinks. He was a eugenicist’s dream, with that peculiar flat dead face that those born into poverty and stupidity seem to share. I shivered to think that I had been bracketed, even temporarily and in error, with someone like this.

“Can we offer you a lift back?” said the sergeant, picking at the scabs of my unwanted pizza. “All the stretch limos are busy but we can drop you back in a squad car.”

“Sarcasm is the refuge of an unoriginal mind,” I said.

“Charming!” she said. “I can see
you
get your manners from your mother.”

I stopped. “How do
you
know what my mother’s like?”

“I spoke to her earlier, didn’t I? When I couldn’t get through to your uncle?”

“How did you get her number?”

“I rang directory enquiries.”

“But we’re not in the phone book.”

“I’m being sarcastic, aren’t I? Must be my unoriginal mind. I’m a
police
officer. How’d you think I got the number? It took like a million rings for her to answer, and when I told her where you was and what you was in for, she hung up on me.”

I pictured my poor mother in that room, the ringing telephone that would to her have been as stressful as a battering ram, the summons to the station that she would not have been able to obey.

I ran back to Old Saxby Road, the city flashing past me, the buildings rapidly becoming younger. I was through the street door in seconds, didn’t bother with the lights, found footholds on the cluttered stairs by instinct and memory. Light oozed through the keyhole.

“Mother, it’s me!” I said as I let myself in.

She lay on her back on the floor, her right hand a claw upon her breast. Her outdoor shoes with their unmarked heels were paired at her feet and her old coat lay on the bed, picking up where my imagination had left off and mutely relaying the sequence of events—the telephone call, the terror, the impossible attempt to leave the room, the weak heart admitting defeat on her behalf. I dropped to all fours, touched the hollow of her cooling cheek. And then it is as though a blackout blind was pulled down over my eyes; I remember nothing more, and have only the words of others for what happened next.

22

K
ENNETH TOLD ME that he had arrived back from two glorious days at the Cheltenham racecourse to find his answering machine flashing red with a dozen messages. The first few out of the concatenation of a dozen conflicting summonses were left by my mother, followed by a couple from social services, then a handful from the police who had custody of me, and finally the same police officers with their imperative tone subdued. Saxby Police Station seemed to be the common factor, so he had wheezed his way there, and after much argument with confused officials, they were able to redirect him to the Intensive Care Unit in the secure wing of the Wellhouse. There I lay sedated on an intravenous drip, suffering from posttraumatic shock, severe dehydration, and chronic malnutrition.

The nothing people had apparently ignored my screaming, but it had been loud and prolonged enough to raise the students over the road from their sloth. They had called the police and an ambulance, who escorted me to the Wellhouse, where I was held under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act.

After a week or so—and here, returning memory begins to dovetail with the accounts given to me and at last I can begin to trust the story again—I was taken off the drip and moved into the secure ward proper, which was not a single ward as such but rather an entire wing, with segregated dormitories and showers but communal living, counseling, and educational spaces that I was expected to share with various casualties of society ranging from the addicted to the insane.

At first speech was difficult. The word mothermothermothermothermothermothermother looped in my head like tinnitus. It was impossible to drown out but with practice, over the weeks, I learned to accompany it with normal speech, the way a pianist’s right hand plays the treble and the left the bass. When I had regained my articulacy I used it to explain to anyone who would listen that the MacBride family were as much to blame for my mother’s death as if they had collectively gripped the hilt of a knife and stuck it between her ribs. Time and again I told my inscrutable psychiatrist, Dr. Myerson, the whole story. I explained how the scholarship had been stolen from me, choked on my guilt when I confessed how I had doubted her, shared the irony of my new awareness that now, in the light of Lydia MacBride’s deception, my mother had been right all along.

“And
why
do you think an entire family would want to persecute you and your mother?” she asked.

I saw my necessary omissions like Vaseline on the lens of my story. And besides, the secret of what I had done to Felix was irrelevant, given that it had all begun with them.

“I wish I knew,” I replied.

When I wasn’t in conversation with Dr. Myerson, I was obliged to take part in an excruciating practice called Circle, which consisted of the inmates sitting in a horseshoe of plastic chairs, sharing their moods and their progress, crying and drooling. If this was group education, I was glad once again to have been homeschooled. One of the education inspectors who used to visit us had told my mother that the biggest drawback of my education was that I did not get to mix with others. Would my life at the Cath have resembled this, living cheek by jowl with strangers, no privacy, the drip-drip-drip of small talk preventing clear thought? I had never before had to interact with more than two, occasionally three, people at a time, and in Circle I felt like a novice juggler trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at once.

To avoid meeting my fellow patients’ eyes, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. I liked the view out onto the hospital lawns, trimmed above with the quaint cityscape of the Cathedral Quarter; the sight of the spire was reassuring even if the bells were out of earshot.

My new next of kin came once a week: Kenneth was ill at ease in the communal lounge and at each visit he brought bad news where other relatives brought grapes. The first bulletin was that the council had already taken over our rooms on Old Saxby Road, and that in the event of my recovery it was to Kenneth’s flat I would be returning. A couple of weeks later, he dropped the bombshell that the coroner’s report had been filed and that an inquest had found the cause of my mother’s death to be a massive cardiac arrest, probably the result of chronic anorexia nervosa. The next time we met he told me that my mother had been cremated without me. “We had the funeral,” he said. “I didn’t know what was for the best, how long you were going to be ill for. I’m so sorry, kid. Up at the crematorium. It’s nice there, in the rose gardens. I’ll take you there as soon as you’re up to it.”

I didn’t need a municipal rosebush to remember my mother by; I carried her blood in my veins and my mind too was a vessel that she had filled with everything she knew and everything she believed. The energy with which I had loved her had warped into hatred of the family who took her from me. The longer I was incarcerated the grander my retributive fantasies became; they began as face-to-face confrontations with Lydia MacBride and escalated until I was burning down her house with her family locked inside. But the more I pressed the truth upon them, the more entrenched the medical staff grew in their belief that I was in the grip of delusional psychosis. The freedom necessary for my pursuit of justice seemed a long way off.

In fact, liberty was handed to me not by one of the medical staff but by a lumbering alcoholic called Steve with whom I had established a kind of mealtime symbiosis. What I couldn’t finish, he would happily shovel down.

“Are you eating that?” he said one lunchtime, and speared a perfectly circular fishcake from my plate without waiting for my answer. I toyed with the salad in my mouth, letting a single lettuce leaf turn to velvet and dissolve against the flat of my tongue.

“What’s up with you, anyway?” he said.

“I’m just so frustrated, stuck in here. There’s so much I’ve got to do outside, and I’m not getting anywhere.”

“Why don’t you just tell them what they want to hear?” said Steve.

“Because all I’ve got is my word against theirs. If I back down, then I’ve literally got nothing.”

“Suit yourself,” said Steve. “Are you going to have that custard?”

A while later, when my case came up for review. I decided to “recover.”

It cost me to betray my mother, but eventually I asked Dr. Myerson if I could see her death certificate once more. She smiled into her clipboard and, two days later, brought me a photocopy of the certificate, which I pretended to study, deliberately staring so hard at the words that they swam and blurred. A few days later I told her that I accepted that my mother had died of natural causes. “I’m a bit embarrassed about all that stuff I said before. I don’t really believe that the MacBrides killed her,” I said. “I don’t suppose I ever did, really. I was just looking for someone to blame. I’m sorry I threatened them. I’d never do anything like that, not really. I feel a bit foolish, to tell the truth.” The words burned like bile but I knew that my mother would understand and approve; if ever there was a case of the end justifying the means, this was it.

For weeks, I repeated variations on this theme every day. It was a triumph over the brainwashing process; rather than override my certainty that Lydia MacBride was my mother’s murderer, it ring-fenced it. Every time I said the word “MacBride” I hardened against the family a little more. Every time I retracted my threats, I saw myself marching straight from the Wellhouse to Cathedral Terrace and picking up our confrontation where it had left off.

After seven weeks of false statements, I was diagnosed as having had a single extended psychotic episode from which I was in full recovery.

“Good news, Darcy,” said Dr. Myerson. She swigged from the bottle of mineral water she always carried. “You’re ready to go home. There are a couple of conditions, of course. The first, which is standard practice, is that you come and see us as an outpatient every day for the first couple of weeks. And the other is that you’ll have to keep your distance from the MacBride family.”

“What do you mean exactly by keep my distance?” I asked, my elation punctured.

“You made some very serious threats against the family, Lydia MacBride in particular, when you first came in here,” she said. “The family have requested that a protection from harassment order be granted against you. A restraining order, to you and me. You’re not allowed to go within fifty meters of their home, or of them.”

My mouth dried out.

“But you said I was
better
! I am better! How many times have I told you I didn’t mean it, that it was just the grief talking?”

“For what it’s worth, I agree with you,” said Dr. Myerson. “But this is out of my hands, it’s a police matter. And if you’re better, it shouldn’t matter, should it?” Was she trying to trick me?

I was not foolish enough to voice my conviction that the minute I was released from the Wellhouse, the MacBrides would contrive to turn up wherever I was, thus forcing me to breach my order—and I didn’t doubt that Lydia would brief her magisterial cronies to impose the harshest of sentences on me.

“No,” I said, my lips cracking as they parted. “No, I suppose not.” My desire for revenge did not dim, but they were doing everything they could to reduce my opportunities. The prospect of retribution seemed as remote as passing through the solid stone of the old city walls.