The Sick Rose (41 page)

‘Did you nick my mum’s phone as well?’

‘Silly bitch left the van door open,’ he confirmed.

Bloody Troy and that stupid orange van, marking his mother out as a target. The sickening thought of Hash’s fingers all over her handbag, touching that photograph, was quickly eclipsed by another, more urgent worry. Carl might have taken Hash into his confidence. He might have told him Louisa’s story and then they would be back to square one. He tried to think of a sly way to phrase it but in the end could only come up with the clumsy, exposing:

‘What did he tell you about when he came up that first time?’

‘Nothing,’ said Hash but that didn’t mean anything; he was a born liar and he had as good as said he had nothing left to lose. ‘He didn’t want to involve me. He was
protective
of me. He treated me like a son, and you went and killed him.’

‘I. Didn’t. Kill. Him.’

‘Bollocks. If it wasn’t for you, would he have been up here?’

‘You’re the one who sent him!’

Hash might have thrown a few punches but Paul was a more experienced receiver of violence than Hash was a giver. The muscle memory of an early youth spent dodging fists aided him; he dropped to his haunches just in time to hear Hash’s fist whistle past his ear. The trajectory of the wasted blow threw Hash off balance and he hit the concrete in a perfect pratfall. Coins and keys, wallet and phone and a flick knife all fell out of his pockets on the way down. He scrambled to pick up his scattered possessions. Paul got to the knife first and made sure the blade was tucked in before hiding it in his fist. Crouching, Hash was vulnerable; the dog was tethered too tightly to come to his defence, if indeed Hash was the one he recognised as master. If Paul was any sort of man, he thought, he would knock Hash out now, kill him, extinguish this terrible resurrected threat and drag the body back to Louisa, who would know exactly what to do. But he was a runner, not a fighter, and they both knew it.

He had to get back to the safety of the caravan without Hash watching him go. As he made to run, he trod on a little plastic key, clearly part of the litter from Hash’s pockets. He would have kicked it into the gutter, anything to delay or distract Hash, but something about it looked familiar. He stooped to retrieve it; Hash let out an involuntary yelp that was an alarm call to Paul. He studied it, knowing, it was familiar but not sure why. It wasn’t a normal door key, it was more like something from Troy’s tool kit, or something that operated a machine or bled a radiator or opened the gas box outside his mother’s—

Gas box. It was the key that opened the cap that covered the gas canister on the outside of the caravan. Hash had been to the caravan.

‘But how did you . . . ?’

His answer was tethered and growling beneath the lamp-post. Of course Diesel would have led him straight there. The stupid dog, who had slept in his bedclothes, whose memory and senses were sharper than many humans’, would have recognised his scent and chased it across the countryside. Paul balanced the key on his open palm. He felt as though he were holding a grenade with the pin pulled out.

‘Hash, what have you done?’

Paul remembered Hash’s victory sneer from school.

‘Taught you a lesson.’

Reserves of strength and speed that had not come when his father was dying, that had not come when Daniel killed Ken Hillyard, or when Carl turned up, came now. Paul sprang across to grab Hash by the collar of his jacket and shake him so hard that he actually heard his teeth chatter. The dog looked confused, torn between two masters. ‘What have you done to the gas? Louisa’s in that caravan!’ He let him drop.

‘Who’s Louisa?’ said Hash. He had gone still and white, moving only to bite a blood-abandoned lip.

‘My girlfriend! It’s her home.’

There was a rigid silence which Hash eventually broke with a whispered, ‘
Shit
.’

Paul ran up the ride. He was newly, acutely aware of the length of his legs; he had not known until now that they could stretch so far, or carry him so quickly. His feet touched the ground only briefly; it felt more like flying than running. He had been wrong to think that each disaster lessened the impact of the next. The clean, perfect terror he felt now was the sum of all his previous fears. She would be there now, waiting for him, a slow leak of gas sending her to sleep or worse. The smallest spark could start a fire and Louisa’s caravan was a tinderbox of matches and candles, lamps and oils and books. Depending on how long ago Hash had been there, a light switch might do it, boiling the kettle might do it. He stumbled and fell twice, the second time heavily. Something gave in his ankle but the analgesia of fear allowed him to continue, gaining rather than losing speed. The ruin loomed and vanished in seconds, the cabins whizzed past in a blur like the view from a train window. He was like a dog himself, sniffing the air for signs that something terrible had already happened.

The gate had been double-latched. His fine motor skills had temporarily been sacrificed to the gross; his fingers struggled with the familiar catch as though it were a complicated puzzle, like that ring she wore. There was no time to cajole the latch; he took a step back and, remembering only at the point of contact that he was using his bad ankle, kicked the gate as hard as he could. The rotten, splintering wood gave and the gate fell forwards like a drawbridge, leaving only the swinging iron hinges hanging on to the crumbling brickwork, flinders of wood still in their clutches.

There she was, alive and lovely, her back framed in the narrow doorway of the unlit caravan; she was wearing her coat, and looked as though she had just returned from somewhere. He wanted to wilt with relief, he wanted to collapse on his injured ankle and lie on the ground, but he allowed his eyes to flick briefly to the gas cap and saw that it was ajar. First he had to get her away from that caravan. He called her name and she whipped around. For a second she looked at him as though he were a complete stranger; then, when recognition came, it was freighted not with love but panic.

‘Louisa! Don’t go in! It’s not safe!’ he said in a voice that seemed to rise from his toes. She ignored the falsetto siren and disappeared through the opening. ‘Get out of the van! LOUISA!’

But she stayed inside. His eyes were used to the dark and he could see her shadow moving inside; still, he barely believed what he saw as she flapped about with swift, agitated movements, bending down and standing up again, as though she were hiding something, as if anything could ever be hidden away in a space that small. All the while he was calling her name. What could she be doing that was so urgent she ignored his screams? He shouted one more warning, feeling his voice go as well as his ankle, but she remained busy inside, leaving him only one option. Wincing with pain, he covered the remaining ground in Olympic strides. By the time his shoulders were in the doorway she was standing in her usual place at the foot of the bed, oil lamp before her, matchbox in one hand, matchstick in the other, poised to strike. He whispered his last ‘No’ as she brought the sulphur tip to meet the phosphorous.

A ball of blackening orange flame guzzled metal and flesh, paper and oil. The boom of the explosion and the noise from the fire were heard for miles around, but the ash fell in silent flakes, like snow.

Epilogue

July 2012

Elaine drove along the uneven lane smoothly and without hesitation. The Big Freeze had been two years ago but its legacy of potholes remained on these country B-roads. On days like today, conceived, planned and executed without his consultation, he felt she was being capable
at
him, that her competence was designed to highlight his own shortcomings. He kept his eyes on the road not because he was navigating – Elaine was doing that, from memory – but because if he took his eyes off the horizon for one minute motion sickness would strike. He was sick of being sick in front of his children.

‘Here we are,’ she said.

The tumbledown gatehouse had been restored but not with brick; it had been domed in glass and wood, a giant, ultramodern cloche protecting the ancient ruin. It had had its old role restored; a woman smiled in the open window and took their money in exchange for stickers that gave them the freedom of the site.

‘Twenty quid to get in?’ he said as the car scaled a shallow hill and entered a perfect gravelled oblong of parkland. ‘And me on benefits. It should be free to people like us.’

‘Well, the kids were free, so that’s something. And I suppose they’ve got to make money somehow,’ said Elaine, her reasonableness as grating as her competence. The boys had the back doors open before she had finished parking and were out, stretching their arms above their heads and churning the gravel with their heels. ‘Please don’t kick off today,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I just thought we could all do something
nice
for once. And history’s the only thing Jonah’s shown any interest in all year.’

‘Sorry,’ he forced himself to say. ‘I’m not feeling too good today.’ It was one of those days where he felt he had one headache on top of another, rival sources of pain in different parts of his cranium, competing to see which would be first to split his skull.

‘I know, love, but try, for the kids. For me?’ She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and he saw how tired she was; not his kind of tiredness, the wired, edgy aftermath of a sleepless night, but the exhaustion of years of marshalling a husband and two sons.

‘Of course I’ll try. It’ll be fine.’ He reached into the glove compartment and popped two pills out of a blister pack. He swallowed them dry with the practised peristalsis of the chronically medicated.

It was the first day of the school summer holidays and the place was thronged with families with the same idea. Jonah skipped along the ride with its spindly trees and proudly showed his sticker to the steward at the main entrance. When he was given a worksheet and some coloured pencils he turned around and faced his parents with an expression of unreserved glee that was bittersweet to observe. It would not be long before this engaging little boy became a sullen teenager like his brother. Jonah was eight now. Elijah was thirteen and three years into an awesome sulk. He was behind them now, sauntering deliberately and playing music out loud on his phone.

‘Eli,
not here
,’ hissed Elaine, scarlet with embarrassment. ‘I
told
you.’

He watched his eldest son with the usual mix of wonder and jealousy and was bewildered again by the people who claimed to enjoy living vicariously through their children. Watching Elijah grow up, grow strong, grow beautiful, aroused no pride, only bitter, toxic envy. And it would get worse. In five years’ time Jonah would be a teenager too and there would be two of them under his roof, getting off with girls, staying out late, taking drugs, all the good stuff that he had been told he had done to excess in his own youth.

Did Elijah understand that there was a direct correlation between his behaviour and the pain in his father’s head? The tight iron band around the temples was winning out over the dragging ache at the point where his head met his neck. He reached into his pocket to check that his emergency painkillers were there. Just touching them made him feel better. Reluctantly the boy plugged himself back in.

‘This is spasticated,’ he said. ‘I’ll be over in the corner,’ but the parental hand that grabbed him roughly by the shoulder had other ideas.

‘We’re doing this as a
family
,’ snarled his father, loudly enough that a catalogue-perfect blond family, the real thing, turned to stare.

‘Whatever,’ said Elijah, but he was clearly shaken. Elaine gave him a look that was part mortification, part reproach.

The garden itself was only two years old and its immaturity was obvious, a barrier to the sense of history the place was clearly designed to evoke. A great deal of planning must have gone into it but many of the intricately planted bushes and shrubs were still gappy and short. It felt more like a suburban garden centre than the brochure-promised journey into the past. It was richer in scent than sight. The smells came in bubbles; when you turned a corner you sniffed a new one, as dramatic and discrete as though you were entering a new room with different coloured wallpaper. Some of the smells were strange to him, many familiar, like the box and the stock they grew in their back garden, and one was unwelcome: the bobbing purple antennae of the lavender released that cloying perfume that had always made him uneasy, for reasons that remained comfortably just out of his grasp.

Jonah had obtained a wooden sword from somewhere and, worksheet forgotten, was charging along the paths of sand that glittered like gold between the regimented beds. He chased Elijah, who was trying to pretend it wasn’t funny. Elaine took his hand: they followed their sons up the staircase and into the shell of Kelstice Lodge. The brickwork reared up on all sides, dark and damp and soothing. He pressed his temples against the cool stone; instantly the pain subsided and he loosened his grip on the blister pack in his pocket. Together they climbed to the viewing gallery, another sensitive wood-and-glass creation that sat happily with the crumbling brickwork and afforded snatched scenes from glassless windows. From above, the garden made perfect sense. Red, yellow and white flower heads bobbed, softening the sharp angles of its geometry. The artificial had been made to seem organic.

Jonah the warrior led them back down to the centrepiece of the garden, a fountain of marble and granite. The design was the kind that must have been classical even then: stone men and women shrugging off marmoreal togas and holding great stone balls above their heads. The innovation was all in the water, which arced and criss-crossed in the dead centre. The effect was oddly futuristic.