Nineteen Seventy-Four (25 page)

He said, “I think you’re lying.”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t know, force of habit?”

I turned and looked out over the dead brown hedge at the dead brown field with its dead brown tree.

“What did she say about Clare Kemplay?” said Fraser quietly.

“Nothing much.”

“Like what?”

“You think there’s a link?”

“Obviously.”

“How?” I said, my dry mouth cracking, my wet heart thumping.

“Fuck, how do you think they’re linked? She was working the cases.”

“Noble and his lot are denying it.”

“So what? We all know she was.”

“And?”

“And then there’s always you.”

“Me? What about me?”

“The missing link.”

“And that makes it all somehow connected?”

“You tell me?”

I said, “You should’ve been a bloody journalist.”

“You too,” hissed Fraser.

“Fuck off,” I said, starting the car.

“Everything’s connected,” said Sergeant Fraser.

I checked the rearview mirror twice and pulled out.

At the junction of the B6134 and the A655, Fraser said, “Midnight?”

I nodded and pulled up alongside the Maxi on the forecourt of the empty garage.

“Make it Morley,” said Sergeant Fraser, picking up the carrier bag as he got out.

“Yeah. Why not?”

One card left to play, I checked the rearview mirror as I pulled away.

City Heights, Leeds.

I locked the car under white skies going grey with their threats of rain and never snow, thinking it must be all right round here in the summer.

Clean sixties high-rise: flaking yellow and sky-blue paint work, railings beginning to rust.

Climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, the slap of a ball against a wall, children’s shrieks upon the wind, I was thinking of The Beatles and their album covers, of cleanliness, of Godli ness, and children.

On the fourth floor, I walked along the open passageway, past steamed-up kitchen windows and muffled radios, until I came to the yellow door marked 405.

I knocked on the door of Flat 405, City Heights, Leeds, and waited.

After a moment, I pressed the doorbell too.

Nothing.

I bent down and lifted up the metal flap of the letterbox.

Warmth watered my eyes and I could hear the sounds of horse racing on a TV.

“Excuse me!” I yelled into the letterbox.

The racing died.

“Excuse me!”

Eyeball back to the letterbox; I spy a pair of white towelling socks, coming this way.

“I know you’re in there,” I said, standing up.

“What do you want?” said a man’s voice.

“I just want a word.”

“What about?”

Playing the last card in my last hand, I said to the door, “Your sister.”

A key turned and the yellow door opened.

“What about her?” said Johnny Kelly.

“Snap,” I said, holding up my bandaged right hand.

Johnny Kelly, blue jeans and sweater, a broken wrist and beaten Irish face, said again, “What about her?”

“You should get in touch with her. She’s worried about you.”

“And who the fuck are you?”

“Edward Dunford.”

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

“How’d you know I was here?”

I took the Christmas card from my pocket and handed it to him. “Merry Christmas.”

“Stupid bitch,” said Kelly, opening it and staring at the two plastic strips of Dymo tape.

“Can I come in?”

Johnny Kelly turned back into the flat and I followed him down a narrow hall, past a bathroom and a bedroom, and into the living room.

Kelly sat down in a vinyl armchair, clutching his wrist.

I sat on the matching settee facing a colour TV full of horses silently jumping fences, my back to another winter afternoon in Leeds.

Above the gas fire a Polynesian girl was smiling in various shades of orange and brown, a flower in her hair, and I was thinking of brown-haired gypsy girls and roses where roses were never meant to go.

The half-time scores were coming up under the horses: Leeds were losing at Newcastle.

“Paula all right is she?”

“What do you think?” I said, nodding at the open paper on the Formica coffee table.

Johnny Kelly leant forward, peering at the print. “You’re from the fucking papers, aren’t you?”

“I know your Paul.”

“It were you who fucking wrote that shit, weren’t it?” said Kelly, leaning back.

“I didn’t write that.”

“But you’re from the fucking
Post?
”

“Not now, no.”

“Fuck,” said Kelly, shaking his head.

“Listen, I’m not going to say anything.”

“Right,” smiled Kelly.

“Just tell us what happened and I promise I’ll say nothing.”

Johnny Kelly stood up. “You’re a fucking journalist.”

“Not any more.”

“I don’t fucking believe you,” said Kelly.

“All right, say I am. I could just write any old shit anyway.”

“Usually do.”

“Right, so just talk to me.”

Johnny Kelly was behind me, looking out of the huge cold window at the huge cold city.

“If you’re not a journalist any more, why you here?”

“I’m here to try and help Paula.”

Johnny Kelly sat back down in the vinyl armchair, rubbing his wrist, and smiled. “Not another.”

The room was darkening, the gas fire brightening.

I said, “How’d it happen?”

“Car accident.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Kelly.

“You were driving?”

“She was.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

“Mrs Patricia Foster?”

“Bingo.”

“What happened?”

“We’d been away and were on our way back…”

“When was this?”

“Last Friday night.”

“Go on,” I said, thinking of pens and paper, cassettes and tapes.

“We’d stopped off for a few coming back and so she said she’d better drive last bit because I’d had more than her like. Anyway, we were coming down the Dewsbury Road and, I don’t know, we were mucking around I suppose, and next news some bloke just steps out into the road and, bang, we hit him.”

“Where?”

“Legs, chest, I don’t know.”

“No, no. Where on Dewsbury Road?”

“As you come into Wakey, near Prison.”

“Near them new houses Foster’s building?”

“Yeah. Suppose so,” smiled Johnny Kelly.

Thinking everything’s connected, thinking there’s no such thing as chance, there is a plan, and so there is a god, I swal lowed and said, “You know they found Clare Kemplay near there?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Kelly was looking beyond me. “I didn’t know that.”

“What happened then?”

“I reckon we only glanced him like, but it was dead icy so the car started to spin and she lost control.”

I sat there in my polyester clothes, on the vinyl settee, staring at the Formica tabletop, in the concrete flat, thinking of the rubber and the metal, the leather and the glass.

The blood.

“We must have hit the curb and then a lamppost or something.”

“What about the man you hit?”

“I don’t know. As I say, I reckon we only clipped him like.”

“
Did
you look?” I asked, offering him a cigarette.

“Did we fuck,” said Kelly, taking a light.

“Then what?”

“I got her out, checked she was all right. Her neck was not too clever, but there was nothing broke. Just whiplash. We got back in and I drove her home.”

“The car was all right then?”

“No, but it went like.”

“What did Foster say?”

Kelly stubbed out his cigarette. “I didn’t bloody wait to find out.”

“And you came here?”

“I needed to get out of the road for a bit. Keep me head down.”

“He knows you’re here?”

“Course he bloody does,” said Kelly, touching his face. He picked up a white card from the Formica table and tossed it across to me. “Bastard even sent me an invite to his fucking Christmas party.”

“How did he find you?” I said, squinting at the card in the dark.

“It’s one of his places, isn’t it?”

“So why hang around?”

“Cause at the end of the fucking day, he can’t say so bloody much can he.”

I had the feeling that I’d just forgotten something very fucking bad. “I’m not with you?”

“Well he’s been shagging me fucking sister every Sunday since I was seventeen.”

Thinking, that wasn’t it.

“Not that I’m complaining.”

I looked up.

Johnny Kelly looked down.

I had remembered that very fucking bad thing.

The room was dark, the gas fire bright.

“Don’t look so fucking shocked pal. You’re not the first who’s tried to help her and you won’t be last.”

I stood up, the blood in my legs cold and wet.

“You off to the party, are you?” grinned Kelly, nodding at the invitation in my hands.

I turned and walked down the narrow hall, thinking fuck them all.

“Don’t forget to wish them a merry bloody Christmas from Johnny Kelly, will you?”

Thinking fuck her.

Hello love.

Cash and carrying it.

Ten seconds later, parked outside some Paki shop, the last of my cash in bottles and bags on the floor of the car, radio rocking to a Harrods bomb, a cigarette in the ashtray, another in my hand, pulling pills out of the glove compartment.

Drunk and driving.

Ninety miles an hour, necking Scotchmen, upping downers and downing uppers, scattering Southern girls and seaview flats, ploughing through the Kathryns and the Karens and all the ones that went before, chasing tail-lights and little girls, scrambling love under my wheels, turning it over in the tread of my tyres.

Fuhrer of a bunker of my own design, screaming, I’VE NEVER DONE BAD THINGS.

Motorway One, foot down and taking it bad, sucking the night and its bombs and their shells through the vents in my car and the teeth in my mouth, trying and crying and dying for one more kiss, for the way she talks and the way she walks, offering up prayers without deals, love without schemes, begging her to live again, live again, HERE FOR ME NOW.

Tears soft and cock hard, screaming across six lanes of shit, I’VE NEVER DONE ONE SINGLE FUCKING GOOD THING.

Radio 2 suddenly silent, white motorway lines turning gold, men dressed in rags, men dressed in crowns, some men with wings, others without, braking hard to swerve around a crib of wood and straw.

On the hard shoulder, hazard lights on.

Bye-bye love.

11 Brunt Street, all in black.

Brakes to wake the dead, out the green Viva and kicking the fuck out of the red door.

11 Brunt Street, the back way.

Round the houses, over the wall, a dustbin lid through the kitchen window, taking out shards of glass with my jacket as in I went.

Honey, I’m home.

11 Brunt Street, quiet as the grave.

Inside, thinking, when I get home to you, I’m going to show you what I can do, taking a knife from the kitchen drawer (where I knew it would be).

Is this what you wanted?

Up the steep, steep stairs, into Mummy and Daddy’s room, tearing up the eiderdown, ripping out the drawers, tipping shit this way and that, make-up and cheap knickers, tampons and fake pearls, seeing Geoff swallowing the shotgun, thinking NO FUCKING WONDER, your daughter dead, your wife a whore who fucks her brother’s boss and more, spinning a chair into the mirror, BECAUSE THERE COULD BE NO LUCK WORSE THAN THIS FUCKING LUCK.

Giving you all you ever wanted.

I walked across the landing and opened the door to Jeanette’s room.

So quiet and so cold, the room felt like a church. I sat down upon the little pink bedspread next to her congregation of teddys and dolls and, dropping my head into my hands, I let the knife fall to the floor, the blood on my hands and the tears on my face freezing before they could both join the knife.

For the first time, my prayers were not for me but for everyone else, that all of those things in all of my notebooks, on all of those tapes, in all of those envelopes and bags in my room, that none of them were true, that the dead were alive and the lost were found, and that all of those lives could be lived anew. And then I prayed for my mother and sister, for my uncles and aunts, for the friends I’d had, both good and bad, and last for my father wherever he was, Amen.

I sat for a while with my head down, clasping my hands together, listening to the sounds of the house and my heart, picking the one from the other.

After a time, I rose from Jeanette’s bed and, closing the door on the room, I went back into Mummy and Daddy’s room and the damage I’d done. I picked up the eiderdown and put back the drawers, gathering up her make-up and her underwear, her tampons and her jewellery, sweeping up the mirror’s shards with my shoe and righting the chair.

I went back down the stairs and into the kitchen, picking up the bin lid and closing all the cupboards and the doors, thanking Christ no-one had called the fucking cops. I put the kettle on, let it boil, and brewed a milky mug with five large sugars. I took the tea into the front room, stuck the telly on, and watched white ambulances tear across the black wet night, ferrying the bombed and blown this way and that as a bloody Santa and a senior policeman both wondered what kind of person could do such a thing and so near to Christmas.

I lit a cigarette, watching the football scores and cursing Leeds United, wondering which game would be on
Match of the Day
and who’d be the guests on
Parkinson
.

There was a tap on the front window, then a knock on the door, and I suddenly froze, remembering where I was and what I’d done.

“Who is it?” I said, stood up in the middle of the room.

“It’s Clare. Who’s that?”

“Clare?” I turned the latch and opened the door, my heart beating ninety miles an hour.

“Ah, it’s you Eddie.”

A heart dead in its tracks. “Yeah.”

Scotch Clare said, “Paula in, is she?”

“No.”

“Oh, right. Saw the light and I thought she must be back. Sorry,” smiled Scotch Clare, squinting into the light.

“No she’s not back yet, sorry.”