The Sick Rose (24 page)

Adam’s pager started to bleep, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and insistence.

‘Oh, Adam, how many times have we asked you to turn that thing off during rehearsal?’ pleaded Ciaran. Adam ignored him and pretended to tune his bass. His mouth creased at the corners; he was enjoying Ciaran’s rising annoyance. Eventually Ben picked it up. He looked at the message, then at Adam, and said, ‘
Her
?’

The constricting feeling in Louisa’s belly was back, as though it had never been away. It was unsettling how near the surface the old suspicions were. She studied Adam for signs of guilt and saw only that his features went blank.

Ciaran’s reserves of patience were finally exhausted. ‘Can you please tell the members of your harem to leave you alone during rehearsal?’ he snapped, as though Louisa wasn’t there, or perhaps because she was.

Adam walked, with a slowness that must have been deliberate, to the window ledge where his pager rested. He moved nearer to the spotlight, the better to read the message, and when he did, he blinked and swallowed.

‘What is it today?’ said Ciaran. ‘Got someone pregnant again? Given someone the clap?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Adam. From his jacket pocket he retrieved a bright green Phonecard and flexed it once or twice as though deciding whether to use it.

‘What’s wrong, Adam?’ said Louisa from her place in the shadows.

He answered without looking up at her. ‘I’ll be back in a bit.’ Louisa stood up, but he said, ‘I’ll be quicker on my own.’

Angie and Ben sent a couple of nervously sympathetic glances in her direction but did not speak to her, which was a good thing: her voice would have broken if she’d had to reply. Louisa tucked her knees under her chin and listened to the others twiddle about with a riff as though nothing was wrong. It seemed like hours before Adam came back. When he did, he looked like his own ghost, his complexion the colour of granite. He was more inscrutable than ever but it wasn’t the contrived deadpan of before. It was enough for even Ben to break through the irony barrier.

‘Jesus, Adam, what’s happened?’

‘Nothing,’ he said into the microphone, then withdrew from it as though surprised. ‘Nothing important, anyway,’ he repeated in an unamplified voice. ‘My dad died this morning.’

Louisa stood up. All three band members held out their arms to him, exchanged matching horrified looks and then dropped them.

‘Adam, we don’t have to carry on if . . .’ began Ciaran, his voice saturated with pity and something else – guilt for the way he had spoken to him earlier, no doubt. Adam looked at him so fiercely that for a moment Louisa was genuinely worried he was going to hit him, and Ciaran took a step back.

‘I told you, nothing to worry about,’ said Adam. ‘I just want to sing. Come on. Where were we? We haven’t got all day.’ And he started to sing in a voice that never wavered once. If you closed your eyes you would never suspect anything had happened; he was note perfect. It was only if you looked at his face and saw that terrible blank expression that you would know something was wrong.

They did not go to his room afterwards; he wanted to go back to the mews. It gratified her that he needed her at such a heightened time. ‘When’s the funeral?’ she said. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘It doesn’t matter, I’m not going.’

‘Oh,
Adam
.’

‘Why are you making such a fuss? I haven’t seen him for four years, I wasn’t ever going to see him again, so what’s changed since this morning?’

Louisa had a sudden vision of herself, Miranda and Leah at her father’s funeral, all dressed in black and crying behind veils. Tears brewed at the thought and she hoped it wasn’t a premonition. Elvira knew a woman like that, who foresaw deaths. Maybe she was becoming psychic.

‘But won’t you want to be there for your mum? She’ll
need
you. You can have her back in your life again, with him out of the way.’

‘She made her choice between me and him years ago,’ said Adam. ‘She can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. Or heaven. Don’t look like that, she’ll be fine. I’m sure he’s saving her a seat.’

Chapter 32

July 2009

He made his phone calls in the secret locations from which he used to phone Emily, the wheelie bin port or the empty lock-up with the door hanging off. It was a long time since she had accepted a call from him and he was aware that he was chasing her out of habit now. Even if he could engineer a reconciliation, the relationship would never be as pure and perfect as it had been before he had gone with Gemma. Daniel had seen to that. The only benefit was that without Emily he was free to go wherever he liked. His new secret phone calls were to the Clearing people, the service that matched leftover university places with those who hadn’t got the grades to go to their first choice of college, or people like him who were trying to get a place at the last minute. They told him that there was little they could do without his results but sent him some preliminary paperwork which he passed off as a bank statement when Daniel asked why he was suddenly getting so much post.

There were only weeks until the start of the university term. In the meantime, he longed to get away, but where could he go? He was the only child of only children. His only surviving grandparent, his Nanna Seaforth, had followed her second husband to Australia where, according to Natalie, she drank all day and sunbathed until her skin looked like Spam, bright pink and mottled. Contact with her had petered out a couple of years ago. He had only his mother, but she was in no fit state to host him; the last time he had called, Troy had picked up the phone and filled in the gaps between her chirpy assurances that everything was going well. The latest drugs she was taking were making her ‘mad, hairy and fat’, said Troy, ‘all crying and slamming doors’.

Paul knew that the sanctuary he craved would not be found with his mother. Troy was still out of work, as Natalie would not let him do anything that involved chemicals and confined spaces, and his skills were almost impossible to apply within those restrictions. Paul took comfort at least from the fact that Troy must love his mother very, very much to go through all this for her. Briefly he toyed with the idea of going inter-railing or taking himself to Ibiza for the summer, but pitching up in a strange place solo and having to seek out company was not his style. He told himself there was no point making a dent in his savings when university would give him all the new experiences he needed. He had nearly £3,000 stashed in the building society now, surely enough to live off for a year, and in the time he had left he could put away another five or six hundred.

He tried not to think about what Daniel would do without him. At a level of almost inaccessible depth, he still felt guilty about abandoning him. With the end in sight, his boiling anger had begun gently to recede. It was always there, but Paul turned it down to a manageable simmer. Daniel had, after all, been his protector for five years and a threat for a matter of weeks. They continued to work at night, defiling industrial estates and street furniture along the estuary and into the Essex countryside. On the rare occasions Daniel noticed Paul’s silence he put it down to the loss of Emily with platitudes like ‘She just wasn’t the right one for you, mate.’ Paul concentrated on work and money, taking extra care now that his dream of becoming a teacher was a step closer.

‘We’re expanding into lead,’ said Daniel, which made Paul think of frozen water in a pipe.

‘Oh?’

‘The problem with lead is that you need a team to make it worth your while. We’re selling ourselves short taking only what we can carry. With two men on the roof and one on the ground we can double the amount we take, easy.’ There was a knock on the door. ‘That’ll be him now.’

Through the peephole Paul saw a thin face and a torch of hair. ‘
Him
?’ he whispered, in incredulity. ‘I haven’t seen him since . . .’ The memory of the party still smarted.

‘I’d forgotten he even existed, to be honest. He was in the Warrant Officer the other lunchtime with my dad. He’s working the door at Boulevard with him.’

Boulevard was the biggest nightclub on Southend seafront; Carl had recently started the notorious Saturday night shift. Its bouncers were legendarily corrupt and violent. No careers officer could have made a better match.

‘I think he’s calmed down a bit since school. And my dad seems to think he’s all right, so . . . let’s call it a trial. If he doesn’t fuck it up, we’ll bring him in.’

Hash strode into the house on long, wiry legs. He hadn’t filled out much since school but he seemed to have condensed, packing more muscle onto a slim frame than most men twice his bulk carried. Diesel growled and Paul gave him an appreciative pat.

‘It’s a proper bloke’s house, this,’ he said, eyeing the drinks fridge. ‘Your dad not in?’

‘He’s working,’ said Daniel. ‘And so are we. Come on, let’s go.’

They stopped off at the scrapyard to offload the previous night’s spoils, a wrought-iron gate they’d found propped against a wall. It was eleven o’clock at night but Gavin was still there, mug in hand, greeting them as casually as if it were the middle of the afternoon. Paul wondered if he ever went home. It was quite easy to imagine him sleeping in one of the old bathtubs, warmed by the furnace.

‘Nice,’ said Gavin. ‘I can sell this on as architectural salvage. I’ve got a woman from Brentwood wants some Victorian chimney pots, if you ever see any lying around.’

Hash introduced himself to Gavin by name, something Daniel still hadn’t done despite the frequency of their visits. He asked Gavin what else he was in the market for in a loud, obvious sort of way. He’d missed the point about Gavin, that you never did anything directly, that it was all about the subtleties.

‘These boys’ll tell you what you need to know,’ said Gavin. When Hash’s back was turned he mouthed to Daniel, ‘Where’d you get him from?’

‘That place was brilliant,’ said Hash, when they were back on the road. ‘How d’you know about it?’

‘My dad put me onto it,’ said Daniel.

‘Your dad’s well cool,’ said Hash. ‘If I had one I’d want him to be just like yours.’

Hash’s fatherless family were infamous even by Grays Reach standards. As well as Hash, his formidable mother had half a dozen daughters, all of whom had inherited her red hair, the genes of their various fathers evidently in timid recession.

‘Is he seeing anyone? Because my mum—’

‘Hash, I’m trying to concentrate on driving.’

‘Oh, OK.’

White lines flickered in Paul’s peripheral vision as Daniel recounted his rules of theft to Hash. He regurgitated Paul’s own imperatives about road signs and added some that adhered to his own strange and arbitrary moral code; Catholic churches, for example, were fair game because the Pope was a Nazi and all the bishops were paedos but Church of England ones were off limits. Hash listened with rapt respect.

‘Is that for real, that stuff about Catholics?’ he said. A mad wish rose within Paul that Hash could take over his job as Daniel’s reader. He still had time to train a replacement before his flight to university.

‘Swear to God,’ said Daniel. ‘I read all about it.’ Paul felt hope implode. Of course Daniel had picked up the information the same way he learned everything else, from a television documentary. For Hash to become part of their inner circle of petty theft he would have to know the truth about Daniel’s illiteracy. Daniel himself would never volunteer that information and for Paul to do so was out of the question.

‘Why don’t you just get a sat nav?’ said Hash. ‘Save all this map reading.’

‘It’s Paul’s job,’ said Daniel. ‘He likes doing it.’

They went through a narrow Victorian arch that cut through the high embankment of a train tunnel. There would only have been room for one car at a time, the signs with the red arrows telling them that they had priority over oncoming traffic. On the other side of the bridge they came to a stop. Paul peered into the darkness; there was nothing but a steep bank. Daniel’s eyes were raised to the heavens, their whites glistening as his pupils retreated almost up and under his lids, and he was smiling. Paul’s own eyes climbed up to where an overhead wire scored the navy sky. There was a greenish glow on a pole that looked like a traffic light, but what would a traffic light be doing on a—

‘Oh, no,’ said Paul. ‘Oh, mate, no.’

A few weeks back, Gavin had mentioned that railway signal boxes were a great source of copper wiring if you were brave enough to go and get it. Paul had googled it and learned that a boy their own age had suffered seventy per cent electric burns after trying something similar in the north. He had refused to have anything to do with it.

‘Oh
yes
,’ said Daniel.

Without warning, Hash took the slope at a run, letting out a long whoop like a football cheer.

‘Shut up, Hash,’ said the other two in unison. It wasn’t until faced with Hash’s amateurishness that Paul realised how professional he had become. He followed them over the fence. The track itself was a shimmering, humming strip of steel. It was two o’clock in the morning now. Paul knew that the last train for Shoeburyness had left Fenchurch Street a good two hours ago, and the last train from the coast to London earlier than that, but it was still unnerving. There was a yellow sign warning
Danger of Death
and picturing a man with a lightning bolt running through his body. You didn’t have to be literate to know what that meant but he read it aloud anyway for Hash’s benefit as well as Daniel’s; the redhead was hopping from foot to foot like an excited child. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be any great loss if Hash was zapped out of existence. Paul had a pleasant vision of Hash experiencing a violent but (crucially) bloodless death, his lanky body thrown into the air by a rogue arc of electric current.