The Invisible Ones (23 page)

“Don’t need to say it. Saw it with my own eyes.”

Her eyes seem to have got larger still. She’s very, very angry, too. I wonder whether she’s going to admit it and say something like “Don’t you understand, Ivo’s your real father.”

I wait. Nothing would surprise me.

She doesn’t say that; instead, everything goes very slow, like in an
action film when something explodes. Everything is crystal clear: I can see every molecule of her reddened face in amazing microscopic mega-vision. I see it coming, but I can’t do anything about it, because I’ve gone very slow as well.

Mum hits me, a proper hard slap on the face with a wet, soapy hand, right on the cheekbone. It doesn’t hurt much, but it’s shocking. She hasn’t hit me for about five years. It makes me twice as angry as I was before. From red-hot to white-hot. And it makes me glad, because now I’m allowed to be as bad as I like.

I smile, feeling water and soap suds slide down my cheek, run under my shirt collar.

“What would have happened if I hadn’t come home just then?”

Whack.

Backhand. This time I feel the ring on her middle finger connect with my ear. Blood whistles and roars in my head like the crashing surf in
Big Wednesday
.

“No wonder you weren’t worrying about where I was.”

Whack.

She’s losing control, just brushed my cheek, fingertips, with no power in it. She looks like she’s about to cry, her cheeks all mottled red and white, her eyes screwed up and glittering.

“Get out! Get out!”

She yells it in a funny deep voice, all hoarse, and, feeling bad and glad and volcanic and terrible, I crash against the table so hard that it sends glasses sliding onto the floor—Good!—and go.

It’s raining. I don’t care. How could she throw me out when it’s raining? She shouldn’t be allowed to be my mother. All the other trailers have their curtains drawn, so very little light comes out. Mum is probably thinking that I’ll go to Gran’s for a cup of tea, or Great-uncle’s, but I won’t. That would be too easy for her. I’m going to go, like she said.

But first I break into Ivo’s trailer. He’s in London with Christo, seeing the doctor. I break the window in the door with a stone. I don’t hear a sound. I don’t feel a thing. I kind of hope I cut my hand doing it, but I
don’t. I could pour with blood and not feel pain right now; nothing can stop me. Inside, I close the door, draw the curtains, and turn the place over.

I am ruthless. Thorough. Mr. Lovell would be proud of me.

Why? I don’t really know. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I have no more than the haziest idea—something that might give me a clue to the disappearance of Rose? Something that might prove Ivo is my father? I have no real conviction that he did anything to Rose. I have no more than the vaguest hunch about the other thing. But I want to punish him. For carrying out a crazy exorcism and making me know about it. For being in my trailer with Mum. For making her touch his face like that, and then lean over the counter, crying.

For making me hate her.

I’ve never broken into someone’s place before. Never stolen anything. It isn’t really me; it’s the volcano that does it. (I am the volcano.) Am I bad, because I do a bad thing? If I find something that proves a crime, does that cancel out the bad and make me good? In the end it doesn’t seem to matter. I do find something, but it isn’t evidence of a crime. Women’s private things—a bit disgusting—but why? Is it left over from Rose? Why wouldn’t he throw them out? Or . . . is it something to do with Mum? It’s not proof of anything, really.

And then, at the back of a cupboard in the kitchen, behind some cleaning stuff and old cloths, I find a tightly tied poly bag. It looks like rubbish. We never keep rubbish inside the trailer—you put it outside, where it won’t smell. But I think of what Mr. Lovell said—that you can find secrets in people’s rubbish—and this bag is pushed right to the back of the cleaning cupboard, where no one would want to look. I undo it, careful not to tear the plastic, and then . . . I find myself pressed against the opposite wall in revulsion. The women’s things aren’t left over from Rose, for here is one—used. A dark, dry stain. The metallic smell hit me before I jumped back. It’s so
mokady
it’s untrue. It makes me
mokady
, too . . . Did I touch it? This is something a man should never see or hear about. It has the power to make him unclean. I’m shaking. But still,
I have to put it back in the bag, and tie it up, and push it back in the cupboard.

It’s not proof of a crime, of anything really wrong. It’s proof that they’re lying to me. What else could it be? Not a crime. But breaking into Ivo’s trailer that night is the worst thing I have ever done. It is the thing I most regret.

29.

Ray

By now it’s after six, and everyone else has gone home. We hang around for another hour, in case Ivo decides to return, but there is no sign of him. Gavin’s secretary calls local casualty departments, but no one answering Ivo’s description has been admitted. I don’t know where he parked his van, and Christo makes no response that I can understand when I ask him, so in the end I have to phone Lulu. She is, after all, a blood relative, and she has a phone. And she’s the nearest. Luckily, she’s also in.

“You’re where?” I’ve just explained the situation, rather succinctly, I think. “You’re with Christo? In Harley Street?”

“Yes. And Ivo’s disappeared. A family member needs to be with him. He’s got to go to hospital. Great Ormond Street. You know—the children’s hospital.”

A silence.

“I’m supposed to be going to work in twenty minutes.”

“I’m really sorry. I just didn’t know who else to ring. I’m not a relative, so . . . someone needs to be here, you know, to give consent. You need to sign something.”

I think I hear a sigh of capitulation at the other end of the phone.

“And you’re sure Ivo’s not coming back? He must do!”

“He’s been gone over three hours.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“So you’ll come?”

Gavin is a star. He hangs on until Lulu arrives, which takes more than an hour; then he explains what he thinks should happen. I keep thinking that surely Ivo will walk back into the clinic with some reasonable-sounding, contrite explanation. But he doesn’t. Finally, Gavin ushers us out and hails a taxi. He rolls his eyes comically when I say I owe him one. I can’t think what I could do for him. Spy on his wife for nothing, perhaps.

I fetch my car and drive back to find Lulu and Christo waiting on the pavement. Christo seems calm, despite the turmoil around him. Lulu is tense. For the first time, she isn’t wearing heels. I checked as soon as she arrived: plimsolls, sensible shoes for saving people’s bacon. We’re very polite. Neither of us mentions our last meeting. Now we’re back on a professional footing. And yet she and this strange, pitiable boy are in my car, accepting my help. I am of some use to her, after all. In some ways, it’s more intimate than any dinner could be.

I explain how we have come to be here in the first place, how Ivo excused himself to go to the bathroom and never came back. Gavin had just asked him to provide a blood sample.

“I suppose we should thank you for doing this for him.”

She doesn’t sound grateful. I shake my head.

“Do you know if he had a needle phobia? That’s what Gavin thought it might be.”

She shrugs.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you any idea where he might have gone?”

“Maybe he’s gone home.”

“Can we get in touch with Tene?”

“Not directly. Might be quickest to drive down there. God . . . How could he leave Christo there on his own? This family, I swear . . .”

She’s sitting on the backseat with Christo leaning against her. Her arm is around him. Rain slicks the streets as we head for the children’s hospital, blurring lights into smears of color on the windows. I watch the two of them in the rearview mirror. Lulu looks out the window. Her lipstick looks darker in this light; it makes her seem different, unfamiliar. Christo is looking back at me in the mirror—pool-dark eyes wide, his face shining like a pearl. Lulu said she hasn’t seen him for nearly three years, so can he really remember her? He would have been barely four years old. Perhaps he would be this tranquil with anyone. Perhaps, in his mind, Ivo is still with him. Perhaps he knows exactly where his father is.

“I just hope you get to find out what’s wrong with him. That would be something, wouldn’t it? Then maybe they can help him.”

Lulu smiles absently but doesn’t reply. With a foolish jolt I remember that, whatever the illness is, she too may harbor it, slumbering in her veins. What did she say before—that it affected only the men of the family? Does that mean it’s one of those things that can be carried by women, like a poisonous gift? The ability to give life and take it away in a single transaction.

From the shadowy safety of my driver’s seat, I steal glances at her. Blue-white cheek. Dark, slanting fringe. One eye flickering with reflected lights. I see the ghost of a dark vein that goes down the side of her neck, before disappearing under the collar of her blouse.

The blood beneath her skin.

A couple hours later, I’m driving down the motorway, following a red river of taillights heading southwest. A soothing flow of bright red corpuscles streaming down a nether vein of the night. I don’t think she really expected me to offer, which is why I did, earning a smile, first of disbelief, then of genuine, astonished gratitude—my prize for the night. I imagine
her relating this to a friend (but not a disabled male friend): “I don’t know where we would have been without Ray. He even drove down to Hampshire in the middle of the night to find Ivo. Can you imagine? I’d have been lost without him . . .”

Of course, she probably doesn’t call me Ray.

The rain comes on again, harder than before, then harder still, and the wind gets up, scudding and punching against the car as I near Bishop’s Waltham. The streaming tarmac shimmers like blood under the brake lights.

Why, tonight, do I keep thinking about blood?

30.

JJ

Like the climax of a film, it’s throwing it down when I leave. I don’t care. In fact, at first, I’m so hot that it’s a relief to feel cool water pelting my skin and hair. I’m not wearing a coat. If I had been, I’d probably have taken it off so that I could be even more righteously wronged and they would be even more sorry. Although, by the time I’ve crouch-run past the trailers, keeping close to the trees, it’s dark, anyway; the only light comes from the swooping headlamps of passing cars, and they don’t care that I’m there, if they see me at all—I’m not thinking of anything. Other than that I’m getting out of here and as far away from them and their dirty secrets as I can. Is this what Mum was talking about—that thing I can’t possibly know? I see her stranger-face, red-eyed, hot, shamed, and I hate myself for what I said. But she told me to get out. She said that.

I jog along the verge of the main road, but there are too many cars around, dazzling me with their headlamps. One car blares its horn exactly as it goes past—they probably think it’s funny—and I nearly have a heart attack. So I head off down the little narrow road called Swains Lane, which is pretty unused this time of night. There’s a fair old wind stirring the tops of the beeches that arch over the lane and make it into a tunnel, and rain splatters down between them. Under the trees there’s a churning
sound everywhere, a roaring, as though the countryside is being stirred by a giant hand. It hides me; it drowns my gasping breaths that are almost sobs. I have to slow to a walk now and again just to get my breath back, but as soon as I have it and my heart has stopped trying to burst out through my ribs, I have to run on.

About halfway down Swains Lane a funny thing happens. I see a parked car at the end of the lane, where it joins the bigger road that leads back toward the industrial estate. There are no lights on inside the car, and there’s no one in it, and yet there are no buildings in sight. I can’t think who would have left their car there on a night like this. Just for the hell of it, as I go past, I put my hand on the door handle and press the trigger. And it opens.

After looking around to check that there’s no one coming, I sit inside for a minute out of the rain and imagine I’m a totally different person who knows totally different things. Who doesn’t know what I know. Who hasn’t got old trainers with holes in, that squelch. Maybe I’m a twenty-five-year-old man with a wife, and I’m about to go home to her. Maybe I’ve been to the races today and won thousands of pounds. I haven’t yet planned what I’m going to do with all the money; that is a pleasure I have to look forward to, along with telling her about my win. The money’s on the seat beside me, a roll of notes snug inside a red rubber band—I’ve seen them, passed from bookie to pocket. How happy she will be. My wife who looks like Katie Williams, with honey-colored hair.

It would be nice to stay in the car—maybe curl up on the backseat, hide under a dry checked blanket, and go to sleep. Maybe wake up hundreds of miles away. Far away, with a new name. But there is no blanket.

I open the glove box. There’s nothing inside but a map, a notebook with some figures in it that don’t seem to mean anything, and a tin of those bullet-hard travel sweets: the sort that have a disk of paper on top of them and are meant to stop you from getting carsick when you’re on a long journey. Suddenly I’m starving, so I cram a handful of the floury sweets into my mouth and put the tin in my pocket. Icing sugar dusts my fingers; water floods my mouth with lemony black-currant sweetness.
There’s a windscreen scraper in the door compartment, and I take that as well, just for the hell of it.

Then there’s a strange noise outside. I whip around, heart jammed in my throat, pumping painfully, pins and needles in my feet and hands. I get out of the car and run off, convinced that someone has seen me and will yell at me or is leveling their gun sight on me from the shadows.

But no one runs toward me out of the woods. No one yells. No one shoots. No one is watching.