Faith (51 page)

Barney’s death the year before had almost destroyed Laura. After the first couple of months of shock, self-blame and terrible grief, she wilted into a sort of zombie-like state where she didn’t eat, sleep or communicate with anyone. On several occasions she was picked up by the police wandering the streets of Edinburgh in the middle of the night. She was even taken into a psychiatric ward twice because it was feared she was suicidal.

During the autumn of that year Lena and Frank drove up to Scotland to see their daughters, and prompted by Jackie they visited Laura. Lena was to say much later that she was horrified by Laura’s appearance: her weight had dropped to six stone, her hair was falling out and she had several untreated boils on her neck. But she found it even more alarming that Laura was incessantly cleaning her flat, scrubbing and polishing so much that her hands were raw. Lena felt that unless she intervened, Laura would end up being sectioned.

She and Frank decided to take her back with them to London, and they contacted her landlord and told him she was vacating the flat. It was left to Charles and Belle to pack up what belongings they thought she might want in the future, and take them to their house to store for her.

Laura could remember very little of that period. She did recollect sometimes feeling mystified about how she ended up in Duke’s Avenue, in Jackie’s old bedroom, but it was only much later, when the medication she was given by Lena’s doctor began to work, that she understood how deranged she had become.

By the following January, seven months after Barney’s death, thanks to Lena’s care, her health had improved, and she felt she must get a job.

There was no question of her returning to promotional or even shop work, for she couldn’t have coped with talking to people, so she got an office-cleaning job. It suited her very well, for she worked alone in the early hours of the morning, and again in the evenings, and spent the rest of the day reading and sleeping. She felt a sort of strange irony that she was doing what her mother had once done, yet she didn’t feel it was demeaning in any way, in fact she was glad to be doing it, for it made her feel less of a parasite.

It was in May that Lena suggested she went to work in Italy. Laura didn’t want to go anywhere, but agreed because she knew Lena meant well by arranging it and she also felt that she was in danger of outstaying her welcome with her. She was terrified on the flight to Naples because she was afraid she might crack up without Lena close by to support her.

Janet met her at the airport. She was a dumpy, middle-aged woman with a sweet face and greying hair, and she had a similar down-to-earth manner to Lena. As they drove round the Bay of Naples to Sorrento, she explained that the job was simple enough, cleaning rooms, changing beds and helping Carlo in the kitchen when needed.

Vincenzo’s in the Via Santo Paolo was a very old building dating back to the sixteenth century. It was a small, comfortable hotel with only twelve bedrooms, and the guests ate their breakfast down in the restaurant on the ground floor. Laura had a tiny, simply furnished room on the third floor and from the window she could just glimpse the sea over rooftops. Janet told her to go off and explore after she’d unpacked her suitcase.

Laura felt she had to go out, but she didn’t want to. It was very hot and the tall old buildings either side of the narrow cobbled streets around the hotel seemed almost to press in on her. She didn’t like the foreign kind of smells wafting around, or that she couldn’t understand what people were saying, and the hordes of tourists, who all seemed to be going the opposite way to her, kept pushing and elbowing her.

But she forced herself to keep going, keeping her head down and not meeting anyone’s eye. Then suddenly she stepped out of the shadow of the buildings to find herself at the top of a very steep lane, and unexpectedly, there below her was the sea and a pretty little harbour. She smiled involuntarily, and the cloud of greyness which had enveloped her for so long seemed to lift a little.

The work at the hotel was quite arduous. She was up serving breakfast at seven, and then cleaned the guests’ bedrooms and the bathrooms. They were messy, untidy people who left their clothes on the floor, covered every surface with toiletries and dumped wet towels on their beds. But she found satisfaction in making the rooms look nice again, and she could tell that Janet was impressed by her work. She had the whole afternoon off until six, and she spent that exploring, each day walking a different way until the pretty little town became as familiar as Edinburgh.

Her favourite place was the harbour. The beach to the right of it wasn’t very special, just a manmade one beneath the rocky cliffs, always crammed with sunbathers and noisy children, and she avoided that for fear of seeing boys who would remind her of Barney. But she could sit on a bench in the sunshine, well away from the beach, and watch the boats bobbing in the water, or the ferry coming back from the Isle of Capri.

But by the second or third week she found herself wanting to get away from people and craving silence. She found that just a couple of hours of complete peace in the afternoon seemed to make her calmer. One of her favourite walks was right along the Via Califano, a road going out of the town along the clifftop where there were no shops, only the odd hotel and a few sleepy little bars with terraces overlooking the sea where she could linger over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and enjoy the view.

It was in one of those places that she came to grips with what she was doing the day Barney died.

For a whole year she had never allowed herself to think about that. Barney came into her mind all the time in vivid flashes. It was as though she had a slide show in her head, but the pictures were not in chronological order. A glimpse of him in his first school uniform would be followed by one of him sitting in his high chair, or waving his arms and legs as she changed his nappy. Then suddenly she’d see him as he was just before he was snatched from her, a tall, gangly eleven-year-old, kicking a ball around the park. His trousers were always sliding down his slim hips, his shoelaces invariably untied, and when he smiled his nose wrinkled up and his front teeth were slightly crooked, something she’d intended to get put right.

Sometimes she cursed these pictures for bringing on a fresh wave of grief; sometimes they comforted her. But she blocked out the memory of what she was doing when she heard about his death, for she was afraid that facing up to that would destroy her.

The little terrace bar was just like ones she’d so often seen in holiday brochures since then. The bar itself had green and white awning above the door, there was a shocking pink bougainvillea cascading over a whitewashed wall, and the tablecloths on the small round tables were lemon yellow. Even the black iron railings that prevented anyone falling headlong down the cliff into the sea below were festooned with scarlet hibiscus.

It was a scene so different to the greyness of Edinburgh that she had imagined it would be impossible for her mind to jump back to the city. But suddenly she found herself back there mentally, and she could not prevent herself from reliving that Saturday afternoon a year earlier.

She had met Howie, a tall, blond, muscular Australian, several times before that day, but she had put him down as an arrogant twerp who thought he was God’s gift to women because he was handsome and bronzed. He had no real conversation, or even a sense of humour. Laura had once said to another woman that she thought the best use for him would be to stick him in a shop window modelling swimming trunks.

But that weekend she was on top of the world. The day before she’d paid £900 into her bank account, she had another film ready for distribution, and Barney had gone off to Jackie’s until Sunday. When she woke on Saturday morning she decided she was going to have some fun.

Her hairdresser was her first port of call. He dyed her hair black and curled it into loose ringlets and it looked sensational. She had her first drink of the day while changing into skin-tight white jeans and a skimpy red and white halter top, which showed her cleavage, then made for a pub in Rose Street in the New Town.

After a couple more drinks and a line of coke in the toilets, she was ready for anything. Then she saw Howie.

As always, he had the sleeves of his pale blue denim shirt rolled up to show off his tanned muscular arms, and he was posing at the bar with one hand curled round a pint of beer, the other in his jeans pocket. It was a look-at-me pose, I’m a real hunk, eat your hearts out, you scrawny, pale-faced Scotsmen.

The pub was crowded, mainly with men, either waiting for their women to finish shopping, or the usual losers who spent the whole of the weekend propping up a bar. Laura walked right up to Howie and grinned seductively. ‘If you play your cards right you can have me tonight,’ she said.

As she was wearing heels, she was almost as tall as him, and he arrogantly looked her up and down.

‘Maybe I don’t want you,’ he said.

‘Oh, I know you do,’ she said, giving him a smouldering look. ‘But I haven’t got the patience to stand around waiting for you to make the first move.’

As several other men had overheard this exchange, and it was clear by their dropped jaws that they thought any man had to be mad, or gay, to refuse her, Howie bought her a drink.

She didn’t care that his conversation was so limited. The pub was noisy anyway, the jukebox was playing ‘You Drive Me Crazy’ by Shakin’ Stevens, and she was buzzing from the coke. He bought her a second drink, and he seemed amused and stimulated by her direct manner, but his arrogance still showed through. She had the idea she would take him home, give him the time of his life, then deflate him completely by telling him to piss off when she’d finished with him.

A couple of other Australians he knew came in, and they made it quite plain they fancied her, which made Howie move closer to her. One of the Australians put ‘Jealous Guy’ by Roxy Music on the jukebox and they teased Howie saying it was for him, which made her feel all-powerful.

It must have been half-three in the afternoon when they left the pub and by then Laura had had five or six drinks. They bought a bottle of wine to take back to her flat, and almost the second they were through the door Howie leapt on her, pulling off her clothes and shedding his.

It was probably the hottest, most erotic sex she’d ever had, and the fact that she hardly knew him, and didn’t like him much as a person either, seemed to make it all the more exciting. He also had amazing staying power; he had her in every different position she knew, and a couple she didn’t – on the floor, against a wall and on the bed. He treated her like a slut, and kept saying the crudest things, but she was so stoned she felt she was the star of a blue movie and loved it.

He had come twice, and so had she, and she was kneeling in front of him giving him a blow job when the phone rang. She let it ring, but Howie barked at her to answer it because it was putting him off.

It was Belle and she was crying. ‘You’ve got to come over here at once,’ she sobbed. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

Laura’s stomach lurched. Belle had only moved up to Scotland a couple of months earlier, and she’d seemed to have become aloof and cold in the couple of years since they last met. She had never phoned Laura before, and for her to do so now it had to be a real emergency. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

She could hear a male voice in the background, and it sounded as if he was almost wrestling with Belle to stop her saying anything more, but the only words she heard clearly were ‘not over the telephone’, then the phone suddenly went dead.

Stoned as Laura was, a sixth sense told her that it was something to do with Barney.

‘What is it?’ Howie asked, for she’d sunk down on to the floor by the phone.

‘I think something has happened to Barney,’ she gasped.

‘Who the fuck is Barney?’ Howie asked. His aggressive tone and the way he was standing above her, stark naked, suddenly made her aware of the sordid nature of the scene.

‘My son,’ she snapped. ‘And cover yourself up.’

She rushed to find the phone book then and with trembling fingers rang Kirkmay House. The phone rang and rang, and as she waited for it to be answered, her heart was racing dangerously. She was just snatching up the bedspread to cover herself, when a man finally answered.

‘Belle phoned a few minutes ago. Please tell me what’s happened. It’s Laura Brannigan, was it about my son?’

There was a second or two’s silence as if he was considering what he should tell her. Then, ‘There’s been a car accident. The police called to tell Belle that her sister has been taken to hospital in Kirkcaldy,’ the man said.

‘But what about Barney?’ she asked frantically. ‘Was he with her?’

His hesitation was enough.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she cried out. The room was spinning round her and she was clinging to the telephone receiver as if that would stop it. ‘Just tell me! I don’t know who you are, but for God’s sake tell me the truth.’

‘I’m John and I’m just staying here,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t receive terrible news like this on the phone, from a stranger, but I’ll have to tell you now. Yes, he’s dead, Laura, and I’m so very sorry.’

She put the phone down and clutching the bedspread round her tighter sank down on to the floor. ‘He’s dead, Howie,’ she gasped. ‘My little boy is dead.’

‘Strewth!’ he exclaimed, and when she looked up he was buttoning his shirt, not even looking at her.

‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked.

She could smell a rank odour of sex and sweat, and it was coming from both of them. They had spent all afternoon doing the most intimate things to each other, yet he didn’t even move to hold and comfort her.

‘You bastard!’ she exclaimed.

‘What?’ he said, and it was at that moment she noticed his eyes were as cold and blank as a dead fish’s. ‘Hell, I didn’t want anything heavy. It was just a bit of fun.’

‘Get out of here,’ she yelled at him, and seeing one of his shoes close to her she threw it at him. ‘I just hope one day you get a phone call like that and find out what it feels like.’