The Burning Air (14 page)

26

A
LTHOUGH SUCCESS IS a consuming business, of course I still thought of the MacBrides; for my first few years in London they were a constant background crackle, like static. My initial research was patchy and frustrating; the Internet was still a dial-up dinosaur. However, the
Saxby Courier
became a surprisingly early adopter of the web, with a rudimentary online edition that included every word of the print edition, no matter how parochial. The Cath featured heavily, from stories about the cricket team’s performance to their Christmas carol concert. There was even, to my dismay, an open letter from Rowan MacBride asking bright children from all backgrounds to apply for the Mawson-Luxmore scholarship.

I matched every accomplishment of the family with a parallel achievement. A profile piece about Sophie’s new and glittering career in publishing, hot on the heels of her first-class degree, inspired me to pursue a huge contract with a nationwide chain of gyms. When Rowan was promoted to headmaster, I leased my machines in a spa-hotel group and was able to pay off the mortgage on my flat. Lydia’s name cropped up in the occasional court bulletin and campaigning websites.

At first, the youngest two MacBrides had no online presence, but social networking was a gift. Using a thumbnail photograph culled from an American university website, I set myself up a Facebook account, joined a group called the Old Cathians, and requested the friendship of all its members. More than half of them responded positively: so much for the intellectual elite. When I had a hundred friends of my own, I approached Felix and Tara. He declined; she accepted within seconds. The photographs on screen showed a very different person from the chubby teenager whose bedroom I had plundered. My mother, whose voice was always present in a static hiss all its own, would have quoted Austen herself: “It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.”

Tara was still in Saxby, was single, worked as a teacher at a state primary school, and was mother to a little boy called Jake Owusu MacBride. Kenneth would have been proud of the speed of my mental arithmetic as I thought back to my old game of pushing the needle through the latex.
Jesus.
They grow up so fast . . . Jake was a good-looking mixed-race boy, tall and broad for his age. His father, presumably the boy I’d seen Tara kissing in Cathedral Passage, was nowhere to be found on any friends list. The Cath’s ethos of instilling honor in its pupils had obviously not worked on everyone. Tara’s profile was updated almost hourly, riddled with emoticons and exclamation marks, but I spotted a crosswind of loneliness and vulnerability under the prevailing breeze of happiness.

Sophie was not on Facebook but featured heavily in Tara’s photograph albums. She had married a dark, wiry man whose impressive body hair must have indicated virility, as she seemed to be almost constantly pregnant. The couple was always surrounded by little boys, so many it was as though they were real and running around my ankles, dizzying me. So that was where a first-class degree got you. Through the mutual friendship of Tara’s profile I was able to peer through the chinks into Felix’s. He had shot up and filled out, appeared to go to a lot of costume parties, and worked as a furniture restorer. So that was what had become of my scholarship! I felt my blood turn to boiling oil. The old fixation came roaring back into the forefront of my mind, the volcano’s eruption all the more violent for its dormant years. Those expensive educations, all those advantages, and what had the MacBride children done with them? They had become a teacher, a shopkeeper, and Sophie, the finest mind among them, was little more than a brood mare. How
dare
they waste their privilege? Didn’t they
know
what some people would give to have an education like that?

•   •   •

One September, Tara posted a picture of Sophie’s eldest two, Toby and Leo, standing in front of the school gates, in their crisp green uniforms, all teeth and apple cheeks. Jake wore the Cath uniform proper, his little cousins its miniature equivalent. I enlarged the image, stared at it until the smiling faces seemed to break into mocking laughter that sounded just like Tara’s and Felix’s had years before. That noise echoed in my ears until it seemed to be coming from outside my head. I slammed the laptop closed.

When I could bear to open it again, I created a new file. I made a list of every detail I could gather. Names, ages, addresses (where I could get them), occupations, routines, vulnerabilities. I put them into a spreadsheet, just as, years ago, I had cribbed the details from their wall planner and written it down by hand.

The following January, Rory Allen, a brash, foulmouthed Dublin hotelier and a good client of mine, bought an old Jacobean manor house ten miles outside Saxby with the intention of converting it into a health farm. He wanted to show me around, to brag as much as to entice me into partnership, I suspected. I hesitated; of course I had planned to return to the area one day, but this had forced my hand before I felt ready. Was I strong enough yet, was I rich enough? The weight of my wallet did not provide its usual comforts. But Rory pressed invitation after invitation on me, and he was too important a contact to refuse.

As I clipped the brow of the hill that hid Saxby from the rest of the world, I was astonished by how much the place had shrunk. How could somewhere that small ever have contained all the ambition in me? A little outcrop of houses had sprung up outside the ring road. I remembered Lydia’s campaign against the city’s sprawl; I could not have been more delighted by the violation if I had laid the bricks myself. I orbited the city in a C shape and drove on to the outlying countryside beyond.

The manor house hotel had potential, and I was happy to shake Rory’s fat hand on a deal. It was rush hour when I got back into my car; the traffic announcements said that the Saxby ring road was gridlocked after an accident, and advised motorists wanting to cross the city to travel through it. Cathedral Terrace was unavoidable. My restraining order had long expired but with every revolution of the wheels my nerves stretched a little closer to breaking point. The traffic was slow enough for me to see that the drive was packed with cars and lights were on in every room, but I could not identify the figures in the windows. The years melted away and I felt so young that I doubted my place behind the wheel. The chant started up that had been silent for years: mothermothermothermothermother. Sweat poured from my palms and made the wheel hard to grip; I was relieved when the traffic cleared and I could pull away from the terrace toward the cathedral. Fresh perspiration slicked my brow when it looked as though my route would take me down the Old Saxby Road, but fortunately a new one-way system diverted me down a parallel street.

After that, it got easier, the way things do after the first time. I would have had cause to return anyway. Rory wanted me involved in the design as well as the supply of his fitness suite. I would visit once or twice a month and, until the manor house was habitable, I stayed in a motorway Travelodge. Apart from its location, it differed little from the one I had stayed in on my first nights away from Saxby. It was a ten-minute drive into town, and the perfect base from which to plan my expeditions. I grew bold, shadowing Tara from the meshed gates of Saxby Community Primary to her Monday-night yoga class. I found Felix’s fusty little shop and browsed the decrepit furniture he had apparently restored, both relieved and disappointed when the man behind the tatty counter told me he was out making a delivery. Sophie was too tedious to bother following and Rowan too sequestered—he seemed not to leave the Cath for days on end—but Lydia was the easiest of all, sitting as she still did on the bench in Saxby Magistrates’ Court once a month. The court was a fan-shaped Art Deco building, modern by Saxby standards and rather beautiful. The central lobby was dominated by huge opaque windows bisected by brass crosses, and the courtrooms were lined with walnut. The raised public gallery was unpoliced and either empty or sparsely populated by gum-chewing family members and the odd journalist busy with the staccato Arabic of shorthand.

The first time Lydia took to the bench I got a shock, like touching an electric fence. She had aged well, I thought: her hair was still fair and they all had that very fine white skin that does not fold or jowl but develops only feathery wrinkles that are invisible from a distance. If anything, her eyes had grown even bluer. She was always chair, conferring with the magistrates at her elbows then speaking for them, assuming the importance of the Lord Chief Justice as she doled out fines to speeding motorists and town-center drunkards. Her hypocrisy turned my stomach and filled me with awe at the same time. Once I faked a coughing fit, drawing her eyes up to the gallery. They met mine briefly: no recognition glimmered in hers. Only I knew that her authority and status were undermined by her stupidity, not recognizing her nemesis when he sat in the gods above her.

My long-term plan remained to find and publish her confessions, to destroy her reputation and that of her husband. Perhaps that would have been gratification enough when I was seventeen, had I been well enough to pursue my revenge in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death. But I had changed since then, and my anger had had time to stew. Now it was not enough simply to unearth the truth about my mother’s death and Felix’s education. “The way to hurt any parent is through their children,” my mother had said; well, then, I would pay back the sum of my mother’s pain and mine, with Lydia MacBride’s children as interest. I wanted to take down two generations: like for like.

Public humiliation, the destruction of a reputation, was a hard-nosed bullet, the kind that enters the body cleanly and exits the same way. I wanted a soft bullet, the kind that spins in its trajectory to shred the flesh from the inside. Anger continued to ferment, but it had not yet matured; while the idea of revenge held strong, its nature remained amorphous.

27

OCTOBER 2011

D
EFENDANTS AT THE Magistrates’ Court tended to wear either sports gear or suits, but the girl in the dock was in leather and denim. She was the raw materials of beauty; long, dark cavewoman hair, huge eyes dirty with makeup. Even her cheap, badly cut clothes could not disguise the perfect proportions beneath. She could easily have gotten work at an escort agency, although it was hard to determine her age: she could have been anything between fifteen and thirty-five. She gave her name as Kerry Stone, confirmed her address at a bail hostel, then shrank into silence while barristers played legal Ping-Pong above her head.

She was before the bench on charges of harassment and as the prosecution laid out their case I found myself for the first time being absorbed not by Lydia MacBride but by the legal drama played out on the walnut stage. Kerry Stone had allegedly been stalking a ten-month-old boy called Conor Watson, whose mother had frequented the children’s playground where Kerry spent her empty days. At first the child’s mother had been touched by the extra attention Kerry lavished on her child but the odd gingerbread man had turned into surprise gifts which had turned into offers to babysit and those, when rejected, had mutated into unwanted after-hours visits and hourly telephone calls through the night. Kerry would materialize whenever Conor’s mother took him out of the house, offering to push the pram or take him to the park. In a statement read out by the prosecuting barrister, Mrs. Watson explained that she was being treated for anxiety, lived in fear of an abduction, and was staying in Ireland with relatives until Kerry could be restrained. The defendant’s chin stayed on her chest throughout the prosecution’s speech. I willed her to look up, desperate to see that face again, but she remained slumped even as her own barrister took the floor and entered a guilty plea.

“It is important that the bench is aware of the extenuating circumstances of my client’s offense,” said the barrister. “Kerry has been suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder after losing her own unborn son in a violent attack at the hands of her partner, one Dean Prescott of Saxby, in her seventh month of pregnancy. Prescott is now serving five years for attempted murder; in addition to this loss, the injuries sustained meant that Kerry had to have an emergency hysterectomy. Had she carried her own baby to term, he would have been the same age as Conor Watson.” The defendant put her hands to her face; only the pendulum swing of the huge gold hoops in her ears showed that she was crying. “While this does not excuse Kerry’s behavior, it does go some way to explaining it, and we ask that the bench consider this when sentencing.”

“Has she been receiving any kind of counseling?” asked Lydia with fake concern.

“She has,” replied the barrister. “And she’s in touch with the Women’s Haven, they’re a charity who work with vulnerable women to help them . . .”

“I’m aware of the Women’s Haven, thank you,” said Lydia. She cast her eyes to the gallery. “Is there a representative from the charity here?”

“No,” admitted the barrister. “You know what resources are like.”

“Indeed I do,” said Lydia MacBride. The three magistrates bent their heads together for an intense conference. When they parted it was of course Lydia who spoke.

“We understand that the defendant has no family ties to this part of the country. We note that and that the child’s parents have considered leaving Saxby, their birthplace. In fact, the mother and child are currently staying with family abroad. The welfare of the child is naturally paramount, and so our sentence to you is that a protection from harassment order be made. The zone of the restraining order is to be extended to encompass all of the Saxby district council area.”

What was it with this place and restraining orders? That was typical Lydia MacBride, typical
Saxby
, to throw open the city for the rich and privileged while barring anyone who had not been born into that number. They had barely progressed from the medieval practice of locking the city walls at night.

“Help will be given to rehouse you somewhere else. Ordinarily you would be asked to leave immediately but as the family are not present you have a few days’ grace with this.” She bounced a look off the magistrates at her elbows. “Seventy-two hours should do it. I’m familiar with the charity and know that they have connections elsewhere in the country. I am sure they will be able to find you alternative accommodation somewhere far from the Watsons.” She put down her pen and lowered her glasses. “I
do
feel for you. I am a mother myself, and cannot begin to imagine the pain of the circumstances in which you lost your child. We hurt and feel through our children, even if we never meet them, in ways that those without families can never begin to understand. But the fact remains that you have no relationship with this child, and that although you profess to be fond of him you’re actually causing him considerable distress. It is as a
mother
that I put his needs first.”

Kerry Stone finally looked up. “You
bitch
,” she said. In that second, she became a sister of circumstance, another victim of this woman’s prejudice. I suddenly had to speak to her for reasons that went far deeper than attraction.

Lydia’s glasses went back on. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, but anything more and I will see you back here for contempt of court.”

The public gallery was on a different floor from the main courtroom. As Kerry’s barrister escorted her through a door, I barged my way out of the gallery and descended a curving brass staircase to find them in conversation.

“She’s taken Conor away from me. He was all I had. She might as well have taken him out of my arms.”

The barrister’s voice was stretched tight with forced patience. “Kerry, Conor was never yours. You
know
that.”

“I would never have
hurt
him. I
love
him.” Her eyes narrowed. “I’m going to get her back for this.”

The taut voice snapped. “Kerry! Now you’re really being ridiculous. It takes three magistrates to make a ruling, she was just the spokesperson, and anyway, she’s very compassionate compared to some on the bench. You could have done a lot worse than Mrs. MacBride. Frankly, I think it went well for you. You could have been given a custodial sentence. You didn’t even get community service.”

“Where am I supposed to
go
?”

“You heard the JP, the hostel will give you a hand. Look, Kerry, I’ve got to go, I’m in the family court this afternoon. Good luck with everything, OK?” She squeezed Kerry’s upper arm briefly, then bowled past me, muttering under her breath, “Thank you for securing my freedom, Alison, thank you for getting me off the hook, Alison.” At the door, I saw her wipe her hand on her skirt.

Kerry Stone pressed herself against the court wall and cried some more. I bent my knees so that I was crouching before her.

“All right, all right, I’m going, I’m going,” she said.

I caught her hand; acrylic nails, pink with white tips, had been there long enough for the ragged cuticles beneath to show. “No, I’m not moving you on. I want to talk to you. I think you and I might have something in common.”

She took in my expensive clothes. “You and me?” she said.

“Would you like to go for a drink?” I said.

The wine bar was in a cellar not far from Kenneth’s old flat. Descending the flagstone steps into the area was like going from day to night with no dusk; its darkness was lit with candles in bottles and the nooks of its vaults were filled with ostentatiously cobwebbed barrels. Racked, rare bottles of wine were kept behind bars.

Kerry went straight to the toilet; I thumbed the wine list, thick as a novella, then played safe by ordering a bottle of Moët. I filled my glass first and raised it in a secret toast. My superstitions then, as now, were limited to the little talisman I carry in my pocket, but I could not escape the thought that fate had delivered Kerry to me just when I needed someone.

Kerry came back, face clean. Early twenties, I guessed, or a hard life in its very late teens. Hers were the kind of good looks that peak early. Without care and attention, without prompt intervention, they would be gone before she was thirty.

“Drink this,” I said. “It’ll take the edge off your shock.” She swigged from the flute and held it in her cheeks for a second, like a child drinking cola.

“So what’ve we got in common?” she said, her face as inscrutable as her voice. She lacked the self-consciousness that most beautiful women have. So much the better.

“I’m going to tell you a story about Lydia MacBride,” I said. “Forget what your barrister said, about how it takes three magistrates to make a ruling. I’ve been watching her in that courtroom for a long time, and what she says goes. Nothing she does is an accident.”

For the first time in years I repeated the story I had so often shared with Dr. Myerson. Unlike the Wellhouse staff, Kerry never once told me I was delusional, or that it was a coincidence. I had not felt so listened to since my mother was alive.

“Come back to London with me,” I said impulsively. My heart danced. As when I had laid into Felix, I had that same sensation of being outside myself looking on. “You’ve got to leave Saxby anyway. Why not come back with me?”

“Oh. OK,” she said with a shrug. I attributed her lack of gratitude to the shock.

“I suppose being swept off your feet by strange men bearing Champagne is an occupational hazard when you look the way you do,” I said, although I suspected it was more likely to be half a cider and a bag of peanuts. Everything from the way she held herself to the way she drank suggested she was unused to luxury. I doubted anyone in her past could compete with what I had to offer.

I pulled up outside an estate just inside the ring road. Kerry entered a 1960s tenement and returned in less than a minute. Her life’s accumulated possessions fitted in one of those cheap plaid laundry bags, which billowed like an airbag in front of her in the passenger seat. On the journey back to London we shared more of our histories, exchanged the vocabularies of our childhoods: to her, the world of study and scholarship was as alien as children’s homes and foster families were to me. As we approached the city, conversation gave way to quiet. I had forgotten how companionable silence could be.