Crying Out Loud (21 page)

‘Cool.'

It wasn't a completely altruistic move; I didn't want to be fighting Leanne over which programme to watch. I imagined our tastes would differ somewhat. And having a lodger seemed to work best when we had a degree of autonomy.

‘Won't be anything fancy, mind. No plasma or 3D.'

‘I made a list,' she said, ‘stuff for the flat. Some of it they might give me a grant for.' She handed me the piece of paper. In the same neat capitals that had been on the note she'd printed out: CURTAINS, CHANGING MAT, COT, LAMP.

‘What colour curtains?' I said.

‘Something shiny would look good against that colour blue. Maybe a gold, or dark blue with some sparkle in it.'

‘Ever made any?' I asked her.

‘You having us on?' Her eyes sparkled with merriment.

‘I've a sewing machine – you can get fabric at the market, or there's a good place in town I know. It's not hard. I'll show you.'

‘OK. Give us summat to do while we're waiting for the telly,' she grumbled.

I smiled.

I'd gone into my usual practical mode after Dryden's attack: sleeves up, head down, all systems functioning. Keep calm and carry on. Driven, I'd managed to get the car repaired, do my chores and continue investigating for Libby Hill. On top of all that I'd handled Leanne's Lazarus act and found myself in a stand-off with Ray.

But just as the bruises all over my body were coming into full bloom, the colour of butter yellow, mottled with blue, reminding me of pansies, so the emotional and psychological impact of the assault was bubbling to the surface. And as soon as I stopped racing about, filling my time keeping busy busy busy, I could feel my composure splitting and fraying, tearing apart.

The nervy unease in my stomach as I showered and got ready for bed was the start of it. And a cup of warm milk and honey did nothing to lay it to rest.

Now Leanne was here and Lola would be sleeping – or not – upstairs in the flat with her, I should have been able to immerse myself in a deep and healing sleep. I started out OK. My eyes grainy and tired, the bed blissfully comfy once I'd found a way to lie without putting pressure on my sore bits. No need to listen for the sound of a baby breathing or panic if it was too quiet.

I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind: banishing Charlie Carter and Damien Beswick, Ray and Laura and their baby Oscar. I struggled to fill the space with fantasies. Holiday dreams, perhaps. When that failed and scenarios started playing out where Ray and Tom and Digger moved away, leaving Maddie and I weeping on the threshold, I resorted to doing multiplication: working out how much rent to charge Leanne and what that would be per month, per year. The dullness of that succeeded, enabling me to sleep but then the dream came.

I was in the garden, by the pond. It was summer, high summer and uncommonly warm. I was on the sun lounger and Lola was in my lap. She was happy, gurgling. A shadow fell across us. I looked up, dazzled by the sun and saw the silhouette of a man. Dread shot through me. Nick Dryden was there. He was shouting and as he did he tore at his shirt, pulling it apart. The scar on his stomach, ridged and ropey, began to open, peeling apart like a zip, and blood poured out. Dark red and sticky, glistening in the sun. I was screaming, trying to get up from the lounger but my legs had no power in them: my bones had turned to water.

Then I was standing in the house and he was breaking all the windows, the sheets of glass crazing then collapsing like a crash of ice cubes. Over and over. Leanne came in through one of the broken windows; she had a gun in her hand.

‘Get out!' I screamed to her, ‘He's here.'

She didn't move. She was staring at me, her face urgent, deadly serious. She just said, ‘Where's the baby?'

I had lost the baby. I couldn't find the baby. I started hunting under the cushions, behind the settee. The television was on the floor. There was blood on the carpet. There was something under the television. I saw a small hand, tiny fingernails, like translucent shells. I began to cry. I had killed the baby.

‘I'm sorry.' I turned, gulping. Leanne had gone. But Valerie Mayhew was there, with her straight, silvery hair, bright eyes, her smartly tailored suit.

She held the gun now. ‘That's your baby,' she said. ‘You have to go to the police.' She was shaking her head, severely disappointed in me.

It was Maddie. I'd killed Maddie. My eyes filled with tears as the enormity of what I'd done, that dreadful, dreadful mistake tumbled through me. I'd destroyed everything: my lovely precious girl dead, Ray gone and Tom, too. Maddie was dead.

I reared awake, slick with sweat, my heart aching, bile in my throat. It took me a few moments to really believe that it had only been a dream. I felt so sullied by it, so tainted, that I needed proof, to reorientate myself in the here and now. To banish the monsters.

The children were there: safe, asleep. The night light glowing, the toys and posters and bedding familiar. I watched them for a while. If I could have wept, it might have helped; I craved release but I couldn't let go. The fear and the tension clotted in my chest, gripping my throat. As if I had swallowed a rock.

Downstairs I found the arnica that we give the kids for upsets and minor injuries. Something I should have taken straight after I'd been hurt. I swallowed a pill. Digger, sleeping under the kitchen table, opened one eye, then decided it wasn't worth his while to do more than that and closed it again. His tail twitched. Dreaming already. Swap you, I thought. Rabbits and tree trunks for dead babies and guns.

I'm not completely lacking in self-awareness, just a bit slow getting there at times. A few bouts of counselling in the wake of other traumas meant I recognized what my body or my psyche was telling me to do: to slow down, to care for myself and take some space to recuperate. But what about work, was my knee-jerk reaction. It'll keep, I reminded myself. Take a day, one day. Nothing is going to change significantly in twenty four hours. Then reassess. See if you are ready to go back. The case won't disappear, no one is expecting to see you tomorrow and you'll be better able to work if you're not spending half your energy pretending to be fine instead of licking your wounds and going easy on yourself.

Ray was taking the kids to school. I hugged Maddie before they left. ‘We've missed some bedtime reading recently, haven't we? I'll do double tonight.'

‘Triple,' she said.

‘Deal. You were snoring, you know,' I teased her.

‘Was I?' Her eyes beamed.

‘Like this.' I made outrageous snoring sounds.

‘I was not,' she yelled, laughing.

‘No, OK, you're right,' I said, ‘that was Tom.'

‘Huh! No way!' Tom objected.

‘Does Ray snore?' Maddie said to me. Pointedly. The kids now knew we sometimes shared a bed. They must have absorbed the chilling of relations. The lack of affectionate gestures or kind words, the absence of a little light flirting or gentle sparring between us. They are like little Geiger counters, really.

‘Snores like a pig,' I told her.

He didn't even grace me with a look.

‘We could go shopping,' I suggested to Leanne. ‘Get a couple of the things for your room.'

‘It's really definite, then?' she asked. ‘Have you talked to him?'

‘It's definite,' I said, choosing not to answer the second question.

‘Cool. I haven't got any money, though. I'll have to go to Jobcentre Plus, register here, then get on to the housing benefit.'

‘Tomorrow. Let's do the fun stuff first,' I said. ‘We can get a TV, too.'

‘Maddie said they couldn't have a telly because they had broken it.' Leanne studied me.

‘Yeah, well.' My agreement with Ray went straight out of the window. I seemed to be making a habit of disregarding his views: moving Leanne in, reinstating the TV. But it didn't seem unfair to me, not in the scale of things, not half so bad as his refusal to include me in his personal life. I wanted us to be sitting up till the early hours, chewing it all over. I wanted to be supporting him, listening as he worked through his confusion. Not cut off like someone who didn't matter, who didn't have a special, intimate place in his life.

We measured the windows in the flat and I explained to Leanne that we'd need different amounts of fabric depending on whether she wanted to pleated curtains on a rail like the existing ones or ones with a pole and rings across the top.

‘I like these,' she said, and then looked troubled. ‘Will that be more money?'

‘Yes, but it won't break the bank.' Though the new telly might, I thought to myself.

Her reaction to Abakhan's material shop, a treasure trove of fabric piled in great bins and stacked in piles, much of it for sale by the pound weight, was all I had hoped for. I'd no idea if Leanne had any capacity for sewing, it didn't matter, really, but she loved rummaging around and kept getting distracted.

‘I can make Lola a tiger outfit,' she hooted, holding up some stripy fun fur.

She had even more fun looking upstairs at all the trimmings, ‘Check the feather boa! Maybe you need one of those for the old man.'

‘He's not my old man,' I said. It just didn't sound right; like we were some old married couple.

‘The old man,' she said, stressing the ‘
the
'. ‘He's old, and he is a man, or am I missing something?' She cocked her head on one side, scrutinized me. ‘So what's the story?'

I hesitated. ‘It's complicated.'

‘You saying I'm thick?' she challenged me. Oh, boy! The touchiness of teenagers.

‘No,' I blew out, constructed an opening. ‘His ex, Laura  . . .'

‘He was married?' she said.

‘Girlfriend. She's had a baby. He's only just found out. It's thrown him.'

‘So he's got a downer on you?'

‘No,' I said.

She curled her lip. ‘That's what it looks like from where I'm standing. He's nicer to the dog.'

I sighed. ‘I want him to let me help, to talk about it. He's not very good at that. In fact, he's totally rubbish.' I moved aside to let someone past us. ‘We thought Lola was Laura's baby at one point, that she had dumped her on us for Ray to look after.'

‘I didn't dump her!' Leanne was all offence.

‘Left her, then,' I said steadily.

She grimaced. ‘You thought he might be the dad? Ewww! That is totally gross!'

‘He can't be as bad as her real dad given everything you've told us.'

‘You're right there,' she conceded easily enough. Her eyes roamed over the rolls of cloth and she twirled a strand of hair around her fingers. ‘There,' she nodded, ‘I like that gold one there.'

Material measured and bagged, I drove us to Ikea.

‘Not been here,' she said, bending to get Lola out.

‘Really?' I said. ‘Once in a lifetime opportunity – never again. Least I bet that's what you say when we come out the other end.'

I was wrong. She loved it, and relished the slow parade through the furnished rooms upstairs which always drives me nuts. She wasn't gushing: she knew what she liked and what she didn't. ‘That is mingin',' she said of one bedroom layout, ‘give you a migraine, them colours.' But she loved the whole playing house, interior design thing. Of course she would. The local authority care homes Leanne had grown up in had been toxic places, brothels in effect, where she was at the mercy of staff who had managed to infiltrate the system for their own ends and maintained a regime of violence and abuse. No amount of toning colour schemes or cheery duvet covers would have mitigated the effects of that. Home had not been a refuge or a place of safety. The opposite.

I wondered if she had had a place of her own in the years since we last met. How long she remained homeless and on the run before she had found help with the project she mentioned in Leeds. I didn't ask. It was something I hoped she'd share in the fullness of time.

She chose a bedside lamp and a cot that would later adapt into a child's bed. I felt a little tingle of anticipation at the thought of the future rolling out before us, Lola growing up alongside Maddie, and hopefully Tom. A more dubious thought followed: was I replacing Ray and Tom with Leanne and Lola? Was that my real motive for offering them a home? An insurance policy for myself. Was it actually a selfish move – was I just using them? No, I told myself. OK there was an element of selfishness in there – I liked the idea of new people in the house, these new people, and the notion that the baby would be staying – but it didn't go anywhere near making up for the loss of Ray and Tom if it came to that.

‘Meatballs,' I offered Leanne, feeling weary now we had emerged at the other end of the shopping experience and got through the tills.

She looked puzzled. I nodded to the restaurant. Her expression altered: a grin.

Leanne fed and changed Lola and we ate our meatballs – well she did; I had the herring. In the car park, after we had loaded the car, Leanne smoked a fag while I sang Lola to sleep.

I had managed to forget about work for several hours, then, as we were heading to our last port of call – Curry's, Leanne said, ‘So who did beat you up, if it wasn't him?'

I must have flinched because she said, ‘Was it him?' There was uncertainty and concern in her voice.

‘No!' I insisted.

‘Right,' she said disparagingly, as though she didn't believe me. She wasn't gonna leave it without an explanation.

‘It's to do with work. Confidential, really,' I said. Hoping she would get the hint.

‘Fine,' she grumbled, indicating my reticence was anything but. She sighed noisily and twiddled with her hair again. Her impatience was tangible. ‘I'm not a kid,' she said after a couple of minutes.

‘A conman,' I said, watching the traffic as we approached the big roundabout that I hated navigating. ‘The sort of bloke who rips people off for a living. Really nasty piece of work.'