The Red House (21 page)

I picture my baby self in a doll box; on a store shelf; on a catalogue page. Anything to put off the obvious image that’s trying to form in my mind. My breath comes out in strange sudden bursts that someone might mistake for laughing. ‘What name is that?’ I ask, socially, jovially, and the question is on the loose with no hope of grabbing it back.

‘No.’

I’ve said it too loudly. Gwen shushes me. We don’t want Dora to hear. She’s still upstairs, sleeping.

I face the wall. My bad hand is quivering; it does that when I get tense, something to do with my shoulder and the way I compensate, not the original injury. I say it again: ‘No.’

Gwen is seated, looking intently at the soggy teabag at the bottom of her cup. ‘I’ve decided, Morris. I have an appointment scheduled for today.’ She’s whispering. We’re listening for Dora, but that works in both directions: Dora can hear us. Earlier, we’d used the boiling of the kettle to cover our words. Now, the sink tap.

‘No,’ I repeat. ‘Horrible to lose a friend, but I won’t allow her to lose her mother.’

‘‘
Allow
’?’ Gwen says, turning in her chair.

‘What did the doctor say to you? It’s not right if he manipulated your emotions.’

‘Of course not!’ Apparently, the doctor had been eager, but ‘not inappropriately so’, Gwen insists. She’d taken him aside and volunteered her matching blood type; he’d looked her up and down to declare her roughly Fiona’s size. Those two, plus determined willingness, are the three most important factors of a match. ‘He wants to find a way,’ she concludes. ‘We all do. Don’t we?’

I shake my head. ‘No, no, no, Gwen. Don’t try that on me. Wanting something doesn’t mean I’m willing to pay for it. What if something happens to you? Something now, during the operation, or years from now, from some complication. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’

She says quietly, so quietly that the rush of the water almost hides it from me, ‘It’s not up to you.’

I close my eyes. ‘I know it’s not. I’m begging you. Please don’t. It’s dangerous. It’s noble and all, but what if …?’

‘It’s not noble!’ she hisses. ‘It’s not for Fiona. It’s not for her mother. I’m doing this for Dora. She’s been mixed up in a horrible thing against her will and if I can make it any less horrible, I will. She feels guilty. She thinks she’s partly responsible for her friend dying. She will carry that for the rest of her life. If I can take that load off her, I will.’

The washing-up bowl in the sink is filling. Cups float and bob; water glides over the edge. I splay my hand on the water surface, feeling it push up against me, and push gently back. ‘Gwen, I can’t do without you. Dora can’t do without you. We can’t risk losing you. Please.’

She joins me at the sink, stands behind me, wraps her arms around my waist. She rests her head on my back. ‘It’s a little risk. A little one,’ she assures me. ‘I want to. I can give this to her, Morris. I can give Dora some relief.’

I turn inside her embrace, squeeze her in return. My hands make the back of her blouse wet.

We’re both different now, from when we started out. We’ve both lost our former jobs, Gwen to Dora growing up and me to my hand.
No, not my hand,
I remind myself. The post-traumatic stress is more to blame than the physical injury.

Young me had fallen in love with young Gwen. Now older – not ‘old’; I spare us that insult – older Morris and older Gwen need to meet each other, get to know each other, and love each other all over again. My end is easy; she’s got the harder job, trying to see something, anything, still in me.

She rubs her forehead against my chest. ‘If they find me to be an acceptable candidate, they’ll need to do it quickly. Today. The doctor had been urgent about that. Fiona isn’t going to last much longer.’

I nod, slowly, my chin tapping the top of her head.

She pulls back, and grips my shoulders: ‘We won’t tell Dora. I don’t want her to get her hopes up. I may not be acceptable.’ This is the second time she’s used that word.

‘You’re acceptable. You’re perfect. There will be no complications. I need you to stay safe.’

‘I know how you feel. I was married to a policeman, remember?’ She means it as a gentle joke, but it punches me in the gut.

‘Now what are you married to?’ I forget to keep my voice down. The drain must be blocked; water slides over the top of the sink. I push her away as it slops onto the floor. I turn off the tap and slap my soaked trousers.

Dora’s watching. We’d had no warning; she must have
floated down the stairs. She’d heard the last thing I’d said, and seen me push Gwen away. I try to reassure her with a hug; I’m wet, though, and she steps back from me.

Jesse barks. She’s outside; must be a bird. The kitchen timer brays. It wasn’t even supposed to be on. The room feels electric from Dora’s entrance, from her tension, and from the reaction she provokes in us, her skittish parents.

‘Dora, sweetheart, I have to go out. Look after your father.’ Kiss on her head; tousle of hair. That used to be a joke, which is why Gwen said it, reflexively.

I wince.

‘We get to spend the day together,’ I announce to Dora cheerfully. We both hear the garage door open. Gwen’s on her way out. ‘She’s interviewing solicitors,’ I fabricate, to forestall any questions, but that is something that we’ll need to do, and soon. Things could move quickly, especially if Fiona dies.
That’s another gift to our daughter,
I realise.
If Gwen saves Fiona, Morgan Davies may let go of her grief-fuelled accusations.
I wish I could be the one to cut out an organ and spare Dora. My blood isn’t a match, though, so Gwen gets to be the lamb.

Dora says nothing. She sits at the counter and pours yellow flakes into a bowl.

‘Milk?’ I offer, bending to get it from the fridge.

Dora shakes her head. She doesn’t bother with a spoon, either. She reaches in with two fingers and feeds herself one bite at a time. ‘I want to go to the hospital,’ she says.

‘Are you ill?’ I ask first, instinctively. ‘Have you taken something?’

She shoots me a perfect teenage glare. ‘No. I want to be near Fiona.’

My second worry is that she’s heard more than we realised and that she knows that that’s where Gwen is going. ‘I don’t think that that’s a good idea. Mrs Davies—’

‘This is all Mrs Davies’ fault! If she hadn’t been horrible, if she hadn’t put up cameras and bars and forbidden Fiona to walk or shop or ride her bike, then it wouldn’t be like this.’

Or would it?
Dora doesn’t know for sure why Fiona did it to herself. Maybe she did it just because helping Rowena, as kind as it had been, was too much to bear. ‘Let’s do something distracting,’ I offer, ‘far away from hospitals. Anything you like.’

‘I’d
like
to go to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,’ she says slowly, as if I’m dull. At this age, it’s not like I can say ‘Legoland’ or ‘London’ and make it all better.

The water is still all over the floor. I unwind an entire roll of paper towels, not wiping, just laying them in long, overlapping rows, like bricks. My face is just at the height of Dora’s dangling feet as they twist round the legs of the barstool.

I give in.

I delay enough that Gwen will be already ensconced in an MRI machine or laid out on a table with electrocardiogram wires taped to her chest, somewhere deep in the building. I steer Dora straight through the front doors to the food court. I buy drinks.

‘Are you and Mum getting divorced?’ she asks, as I place the cups on the table.

I spill my Coke. It spreads out all over the table, and we have to push our chairs back, and sop it up with tiny napkins. When we’ve done our best, we move sideways
to a new table, and I answer her. ‘No! That’s crazy. What made you think that?’

‘Isn’t that why she’s seeing a solicitor?’

I almost say, ‘
What solicitor?
’ ‘No,’ I actually say, ‘We need a solicitor for you. Just in case,’ I add, seeing her go pale.

She nods. She sips. ‘Dad, what’s it like to be arrested?’

I groan. ‘No, sweetheart, we don’t need to talk about that.’ I’ve arrested people, bad people. I’ve arrested people who beat people, people who killed people who had begged to live.

‘We might need to talk about that.’

She’s right.
‘If it happens, I’ll be next to you. They’ll caution you. You know that, right?’

‘That’s when I’m told that I don’t have to talk, but if I have a good reason for what I did, I shouldn’t withhold it.’

That’s an interesting way to phrase it.
‘Did you have a good reason?’ I ask, quickly, as if I might trick her into letting something new out.

She wrinkles her nose, disgusted, indignant. ‘You think I did something?’

‘I don’t think you did anything,’ I backpedal.

She keeps pushing: ‘Then why were you asking?’

‘You said “have a good reason”. That’s not quite what’s in the caution. It’s what the caution can effectively refer to, in certain circumstances, and I just wondered if maybe this was … one of those circumstances.’ I shake my head. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. This is the thing you have to understand about parents. You can say anything to me. I know that you think that it’s the worst insult in the world that I’ve just asked you if you lied, but … you’re allowed to have lied to
me. You can lie to me and you’re still my daughter, forever. You can tell me that you were meeting your teacher in that barn, or that you helped Fiona on purpose, and none of that will change that you’re my daughter. Teenagers lie sometimes, and do other things.’ I shrug. ‘So maybe you lied. It’s a question. It’s just a question. It’s not a …’ I consider various words. ‘It’s not a
test
.’

She’s nodding along with all of it, and wiping her nose. ‘I haven’t lied about anything. But I’ll tell you if I do. If I lie to you, I’ll tell you, I promise.’ She laughs, and snorts, and blows her nose in one of the little napkins. Then, ‘Do you ever lie to me?’

My nodding and smiling freezes. ‘What? No.’
It’s not a lie that you don’t tell a child everything. There are things that they don’t need to know. That’s not lying.

‘Do you lie to Mum?’ Her eyes are steady on me.

I don’t hesitate. ‘No. I don’t lie to Gwen.’

‘I know you go to that woman’s house sometimes. When you walk Jesse.’ Dora stirs her Fanta with a straw. ‘Do you tell Mum that?’

I lean back in my chair, hands behind my head, elbows out, eyes up to the ceiling. Amazing, all those pipes and ducts that must slither around up there, between floors. ‘Aw, Dora. You got me. It’s not what you think.’

Dora looks hot in the face. ‘Does Mum know?’

‘No. No.’ Now my hands are on the table again, fiddling with a napkin that has my full attention. ‘Dora, I’ll tell you a secret.’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want any secrets.’

‘All right, not a secret. We’ll tell Mum later, together. We’ll
show
her.’

‘Show her what?’

‘It’s a good thing. Dora …’ But I see someone behind her, and don’t finish.

Dora turns. It’s Chloe, and her new partner. They’ve come in through the big revolving front door. From the lift they choose, they’re apparently heading for Fiona’s room.

‘Dad, I promised I wouldn’t lie. I have to see Fiona. Chloe’s taking Mrs Davies somewhere to talk, and I could just—’

‘No.’

Dora stands. ‘I was going to tell you that I needed the toilet and just go. But I said I wouldn’t lie so now I’ve told you what I need to do. Don’t stop me just because I’ve told you the truth.’ She says it all in one breath. ‘Truth’ comes out in a whistly squeak.

I wrap my good hand around her wrist. ‘Sit down, Dora.’

She wrenches her arm away. ‘Don’t grab me!’

Heads are turning. I let go. ‘Please sit down,’ I say carefully.

She sits. ‘Fiona is dying,’ she hisses. ‘She’s going to die thinking her grandmother was a murderer who lied to her and used her. Her mother’s no help. She’s angry enough to blame Rowena for anything, without any understanding of what that’s doing to Fiona. I need to tell her the truth – that Rowena was maybe trying to help somebody, not hurt them – and Fiona can help prove that. If we can find out who the woman was, and why she was there … A pregnant woman with a midwife, isn’t it obvious? Fiona will want to help. What she remembers could fix everything.’

Those last two words linger. The amount of
‘everything’ that can be fixed by solving an old crime is actually fairly small.

Dora figures that out herself and amends her assertion: ‘Feeling like you’ve done something bad is awful. I know, because that’s how I feel. If you could prove that Erik Keats was a bad man who was actually going to hurt me, wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you do anything to take away that I killed an innocent person who was only trying to help? That’s guilt, Dad. It’s the worst thing in the world. It’s heavy and awful and I feel like I can’t even breathe through it, that’s how thick it is. I want to take it off Rowena. I want to take it off Fiona.’

She doesn’t add herself to the list, but her desperate eyes put her on there. She stands to go, but I press my hand on hers and ask her to wait. ‘Just wait, a minute, please. I need to tell you something.’

She sits.

I cough. I rub my face. ‘Your mother and I don’t lie to you, but sometimes we don’t tell you everything. That’s as it should be. That’s how parenting works, though you’re old enough now that there’s less that we’re supposed to keep from you.’

Her arms are folded across her chest and she’s half turned, but listening.

‘Time may not be running out the way you think. If Fiona lives, then you’ll have all the time in the world to tell her the truth, to get at her memories, to help change how she sees what she did. If that were true, then we could go home, right? We could sidestep Morgan Davies today, a day when it isn’t reasonable to expect her to cope, a day when she is understandably lashing out at everyone who
was near her daughter when she did what she did. You want to protect Fiona, I understand that. I need to protect you. Do you understand that?’

‘The last person who tried to protect me ended up dead. You’re sure you want to give it a go?’ she spits. ‘Maybe Erik Keats was somebody’s dad. Is he? Do you know? Did Chloe tell you? Did he have a wife, or a best friend, or a dog who hasn’t eaten in days because Erik Keats is dead now, because I killed him?’

You would think that in a hospital the sounds of crying or arguing or struggling wouldn’t stand out the way that they do everywhere else, because surely people in hospitals share the pain of sickness and imminent loss. But every person in this room must have been a doctor or a nurse or a visitor to someone with a new baby, because no one seemed to understand that being in a hospital means that you are either sick or dying or that someone you love is sick or dying, and that it is perfectly reasonable to cry and argue and struggle and push the table hard at your dad. No, everyone in this room turns to look at me and Dora, and she covers her face and adds that table-shove to the list of her sins. ‘Besides,’ she says. ‘Your “what if” is bullshit, because Fiona
is
dying, and we can’t stop it.’