Tree of Hands (16 page)

Barry felt his face colour. It was one of those blushes you feel rising in a tide, turning your face brick red. He touched his burning cheek. Leatham didn't seem to expect an answer. He was satisfied with Barry's blush. He sat back and folded his arms.

Dowson said, ‘I'll put my cards on the table, Barry. We're not trying to trick you. Honesty is the best policy, don't you think?'

It was at this point, Barry always remembered, that the penny dropped. At this moment, for the first time, he understood that they thought he had murdered Jason. All these questions, these and the questions they had asked him on previous occasions, were not to establish Jason's movements or learn where he might have gone or what he might have done, but to make him, Barry Mahon, confess to the murder of Carol's child. A sweat broke out on his body and turned cold on his skin. He was not afraid, only horribly shaken and indignant. He found he was gripping the table edge in front of him in the way a man might when he intends to overturn it.

They thought he had murdered Jason. He stared at the policemen in dazed silence.

‘We haven't found Jason's body,' Dowson was saying. ‘Maybe we never shall. Maybe when we do find it it'll be too – well, let's just say it'll be too late in the day for us to see what we know is on that body. Marks, Barry, bruises, scars.'

Beatie Isadoro. Was that what she had meant when he and Carol met her in the street?

‘Now Mr Leatham just called you a nursemaid and I'm not going to press that, I'm not in this game to make you look a fool, but just for the convenience of the word, let's say you were a nurse to young Jason over the past five or six months. Nurses get aggravated sometimes, don't they?
It gets too much for them like it does for anyone else and that's when they have to lash out.'

‘I never laid a finger on him,' said Barry. ‘I never touched him.' And nor had anyone else. He thought of Carol's sufferings at the hands of Knapwell. As if, after that, she would dream . . . ‘He used to fall about and hurt himself,' he said. ‘He was always falling over and he fell off things. He gave himself a black eye back in the summer walking into a key sticking out of a door lock.' Carol had told him that. He could remember the circumstances clearly, a heatwave it had been and he and Carol going swimming up the council pool. He'd gone up the road to get milk and beefburgers and baps to make their lunch and when he'd got back Jason had had this swollen eye starting to go black even by then.

‘Funny how some kids are accident-prone and some aren't,' said Leatham. ‘Very funny. It's always the kids that get taken into care, they're the accident-prone ones, they're the ones that are a mess of cuts and bruises, not to mention broken limbs. Now I don't think either of my boys has ever had even a minor accident. Funny, isn't it. It makes you think.'

It didn't make Barry think. He hadn't the faintest idea what Leatham was on about. He was smarting, burning, at the unspoken accusation against him. Dowson began asking again about his movements on the Wednesday afternoon and, truculently now, Barry told him all over again how he had been to the cinema to see
The Dark Crystal
. He was prepared to tell them the plot of
The Dark Crystal
but they didn't want to know, they said he could have got that from seeing it the day before or the day after. Had he kept the half of his ticket?

‘I didn't keep it. Why would I?'

‘You tell us, Barry. It'd make a difference if you'd kept it.'

Barry didn't answer.

‘The way things are,' said Leatham, ‘it looks a lot more likely you never went near the cinema. You walked home
down Rudyard Gardens and found Jason sitting on that wall. It wasn't the first time he'd been dumped in the street, was it? Dumped in the street waiting for some hit-or-miss arrangement for picking him up. It looks like you found him and put him in that chariot of his and wheeled him off somewhere. Home maybe. Or maybe you took him into Lordship Park or out on the Marshes. What did he do, Barry? Go too far? Rile you too far? Start screaming and wouldn't stop? Did you stop him, Barry, and did you go too far?'

He hadn't been afraid of them – ever. In his total innocence, he knew they couldn't touch him. But he was insulted. He felt himself withdraw into a bitter offended silence they perhaps interpreted as guilt. At five-thirty, they let him go. By that time, no doubt they too had had enough and wanted to get home themselves. He would have liked to have walked back to Winterside Down but they insisted on taking him by car. Hoopoe and Black Beauty and the boy with the nose ring were in Bevan Square, bikes at rest round the
Advance of Man
sculpture. They watched the police car go by with Barry in it. Spicer was going in at his gate with a sack of rabbit food, weeds he'd pulled up out on the Marshes. In her widow-white sari, Lila Kupar, who no one ever spoke to and who never spoke to anyone, looked up from washing window sills and stared. It was never dark at Winterside Down; the overhead lamps brought it an endless unearthly daylight.

They could have put two and two together from the next day's papers anyway. There was a bit on the front page about a man being all day with the police helping them with their inquiries. That in itself wouldn't have been sufficient, but those reporters had made it follow quite a long account of how Mrs Carol Stratford waited in suspense day after day in the home she shared with twenty-year-old Barry Mahon. Then it said the man helping with inquiries was twenty and local and in the building trade. Barry winced. He bought the paper at the newsagent's in Bevan
Square and he sensed Mr Mahmud, the newsagent, and his pretty daughter with her long black pigtail looking at him with more than usual interest.

The police came for him again next day. It was Saturday so he was at home. Down at the station they hammered at him again. Had the cinema been crowded? Half-empty? Fewer people than that? How many people? Had he smoked? Which side of the cinema had he sat on to smoke? Barry answered calmly, he didn't have to invent anything, and when he couldn't remember, he said he couldn't.

They asked him if he had a bad temper. What did he think about corporal punishment? Did he think it possible to discipline a child without smacking it? Barry answered mechanically. He was wondering why he should be the only man to suffer this inquisition. Perhaps he wasn't. Perhaps they had had Ivan, Maureen's husband, down here for questioning. Perhaps they had questioned Jerry and Louis Isadoro. They hadn't got into the papers, though, as helping police with their inquiries . . .

There was another man in Jason's life. Had they asked about him? Had
they
asked Carol who he was? Barry wanted to shout at them: Jason's got a father! He nearly did. In the end he couldn't bring himself to do it. Loyalty to Carol, respect for her, stopped him. He suffered their questions, answering yes or no, sometimes not answering at all. In a curious way he had lost interest, just as on the previous day he had lost fear.

This time he walked home. Carol had gone out. There was a note from her though, with two crosses on it for kisses, so he had not to mind. He tried to watch the Ipswich–Arsenal match on television but he couldn't concentrate, he could only think of one thing. A fellow-feeling for Dave – something he had never experienced before – made him pick up the framed photograph and study it closely. Dave looked so happy, smiling and carefree. Within a month of that picture being taken, he was dead, his body mashed in the wreckage of his truck on a Croatian mountainside. Barry found it hard to imagine him
and Carol and Tanya and Ryan as one happy ordinary family. He didn't know why but he couldn't imagine it, he couldn't see Carol as part of it. Yet Carol said that was how it had been. And afterwards? How had she handled her life afterwards?

The children had been taken into care and she had been on her own. Only Carol was too beautiful ever to be on her own for long. Who had taken Dave's place? Barry hardly knew what he would prefer, a hundred or just one. He found himself wondering what went on in her mind when she was alone, what thoughts were passing through her head now, for instance, as she walked somewhere window-shopping or sat in the pub having a drink with Iris and Jerry. If he thought of Jason so much, her mind must dwell on him all the time, on Jason himself as he had been last week and also on how he had been as a baby, at his birth, and in the months before his birth. It must be so. Barry knew that if he were a woman, if he were Carol, he would think like that. And how could he judge others' ways of thinking except from his own way? She must think of when she first knew she was going to have Jason and about the love-making that had led to that. Perhaps it was because she thought of those things that they were less close than they had been.

On an impulse, he wanted to make a good evening for them. He wanted to get her thoughts back for himself. Wine, he decided, and a chicken to roast, he could do that all right, he could make them a real meal for a change. Going out of Winterside Down by the main exit he saw no one he knew. It started to get dark very early, especially when the sky was overcast as it had been all day. People were coming back from the last shopping of the week, laden with heavy bags. By the time he came back with his own bags, the yellow lights had started to come on.

A half-formed idea of going to talk to Maureen brought him back this way, along Winterside Road to the canal and the Chinese bridge. He passed Maureen's house, he didn't even pause at the gate. She wouldn't tell him, she probably
didn't know, and anyway it was Saturday and Ivan would be home. On the bridge a fresh sample of graffiti had appeared –
Chicken Rules
– done in red aerosol. Barry thought he ought to know what it meant, he was young enough, but for all that, he had grown too old to know. The canal water was very clear today. You could see the pebbles on the bottom, the cans and broken bottles.

The motorbike boys had assembled on the Winterside Down side of the bridge. They weren't supposed to take bikes on to the path, still less across the lawns, but who was going to stop them? There were deep tyre marks in the green turf. Hoopoe was wearing new leathers of kingfisher blue.

One of them – he thought it was Nose Ring – called out something as he passed by. That was all. He came over the bridge and they didn't try to stop him, they didn't molest him in any way, but as he passed, Nose Ring called out something he couldn't catch. It was the first time that had happened. He knew they called out dirty things to girls and others sorts of things to pensioners. He had heard Blue Hair say to Mrs Spicer when she wore her tight trousers, ‘For an old woman you've got some good arse.'

But that they should pick on him who was of their own sex and generation – that narked him almost as much as the police getting at him. He hadn't caught what Nose Ring had said and he didn't want to know. But he felt their eyes on him as he walked the path between the green lawns. Their eyes, that in the past had glanced indifferently at him or even with tolerance, with acceptance, he now felt gazing with the same contempt he had noticed they had for others. Hard words and hard looks did you no harm, he thought. There were lights showing in the backs of the houses in Summerskill Road. He counted the houses from the end and in the eighth house, Carol's house, he saw the lights were on. She was home. He began to hurry.

The bikes revved up behind him and then, one by one, they coasted slowly past him, six of them, heavy powerful
bikes, all gliding with deliberate slowness past him along the path.

There were a lot of mirrors in the house. Carol was standing in front of the one in the hail doing something to her hair with what Barry thought of as a ‘kind of hairdresser's thing' she had plugged into the point above the skirting board.

‘What's that?' said Barry, standing behind her with his hands on her waist.

‘A hot brush. It's for styling hair. I nicked it from one of those rip-off places up Brent Cross.'

She smiled at him in the mirror. She was back to normal, she was as she used to be. From the feel of her, a softness yet somehow also a return to electric springiness, he knew they would make love that night, perhaps before tonight. Curling her hair, smiling, she let her body rest in his hands.

‘I got a chicken,' he said. ‘I got a couple of bottles of wine. You didn't want to go out, did you?'

She spoke dreamily, ‘Whatever you say, lover.'

He took his bag of groceries into the kitchen. It made him smile to see how she hadn't been able to wait to try out her new gadget, all the more precious because she hadn't paid for it. That was typical of Carol, the old Carol, to rush in and drop her coat on the floor because she couldn't wait. He picked up the coat and her handbag and her gloves and a carrier the hot brush had been in and took them upstairs. Out of the bundle of Carol's things, whether from coat pocket or half-open bag or carrier he didn't know, had fallen a slip of paper. It was a receipt for purchases from Boots and on the back of it was written: Terry, 5 Spring Close, Hampstead. The writing wasn't Carol's, it was a man's. While she was out, she had met a man she used to know and he had changed his address since last they saw one another. It was all quite clear to Barry. He knew now why she seemed excited and loving and the way she used to be.

This man wouldn't have written down his address and Carol wouldn't have accepted it if she didn't intend to see
him again. Barry made up his mind to ask her about it, just as he would ask her who Jason's father was. An idea that was very unpleasant came to him – that they might be the same person.

He would ask her all this later, after they had made love. He put the slip of paper into her bag and closed the clasp.

UP UNTIL THE
last moment he hadn't believed Freda would go without him. All the odds and his own experience were against it. A woman of fifty-four lucky enough to get hold of a man of thirty-two doesn't go off on her own for an indefinite time to the Caribbean when she could easily afford to take him with her. She wasn't even a well-preserved fifty-four and she could never have been much to look at. It was humiliating to remember it now, but that last day, the day before she went, he had been waiting for her to surprise him with an air ticket.