Paradise City (28 page)

The posters, the shelves, the carpet – none of it seems to fit with the carefully cultivated elegance in the rest of the house. There is no surface gloss, no pretence, no show. It is, Esme thinks, the most authentic part of the entire building.

‘In here,’ Theresa says, motioning for Esme to follow her into the private cinema. The room is dark at first but when Theresa rotates the dimmer switch four rows of plush red-leather seats become visible. There are two oversized vases of dried flowers on either side of the screen, the plasticky petals dulled by dust. The windows, high up on one wall, are blacked out.

‘Sit,’ Theresa says.

Esme takes a seat in the second row, lowering herself into the deep upholstery and allowing herself to relax. For a moment, she forgets where she is and surrenders herself to the pleasurable sensation of being about to watch a film and her taste buds start to crave a bucket of sweet popcorn and a tepid Diet Coke. It is only as the screen flickers into life that she remembers what she is doing here.

And then, all at once, she is there: the lost girl, Ada Pink, projected to several times her normal size, her face filling most of the screen. She is smiling, the crinkle of it reaching up to her eyes. Her front tooth is chipped. There is a crookedness to her face that serves only to heighten her extraordinary beauty. Esme had never thought of Ada as beautiful. The newspaper images of the missing girl had always made her appear depressed, shrunken, soulless. On screen, she is vital, pinkness of flesh made real, a shine to her hair, her eyes, the ridge of her cheekbones. And then she speaks.

‘So, I wanted to make this little film for my dad to wish him a very happy birthday,’ Ada is staring at the camera with those dark, serious eyes. ‘You might drive me mad sometimes, but I love you to bits.’

It is a teenage voice with a North London accent and everything she says sounds light and full: a clear glass of water about to spill over.

She takes her seat at a white piano on the left-hand side of the screen. The film judders and a rash of black spots appear on the celluloid, then vanish. Ada is sitting upright on the piano stool, her posture so correct that it is obvious she cares, perhaps too much, about getting this right. Her fingers rest on the keys, palms of the hands hollowed out, knuckles lifted upwards. Her birch-branch arms are slender and pale, cross-hatched at the wrist with faded pink indentations. Looking at those thin, marked lines, Esme imagines the cut and slash of a razor blade – the pain and then the release. She has known enough teenage girls to recognise the scars.

Ada starts to play, stumbles on a chord, shakes out her long brown hair, and continues, closing her eyes, tilting her head to the light and then she sings.

‘“It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside . . .”’

Her voice cracks and wobbles on the higher notes, but this only serves to underline the perfection of it, the poignancy, the heart-stopping loveliness of a fifteen-year-old girl singing a song to her father thinking she is unobserved, believing that no one apart from him will ever see this tape and certainly not a journalist she had never met, who knows of Ada Pink only as a tragic newspaper story, a story left unfinished, a question still hanging even now, so many years later, even now that she would no longer be this girl, with her brown hair and her grey trainers and her white piano and her chewed nails and her pink, blood-bloomed skin.

Esme presses the tips of her fingers to her face. This is not your story, she reminds herself firmly. Maintain objectivity. Be professional. This is not your sadness.

But somehow it was. Somehow, within her, Esme has begun to associate Ada Pink’s disappearance and the acuteness of Howard’s loss with the death of her own father, the truth of her own grief. And sitting here, in a millionaire’s private cinema, watching his daughter sing him a song, Esme knows she has never allowed herself to feel too deeply or to acknowledge how much she loved her dad or how much she continues to love her mother. Because to do so would be to make herself vulnerable. It would mean she had to face up to certain things – things that had to do with the terrifying unpredictability of life, the fragility of each intake of breath. What guarantee was there – for any of it? She wishes she could cut the love out of her, like a cyst.

So she refuses to cry, even as Ada comes to the end of her song, stands up from the piano, takes a bow into the vastness of the world and then switches off the camera, pitching the room into shadow.

Esme sits for a minute and then walks out into the odd little corridor. Ignoring the shakiness in her legs, she finds her way up the stairs, placing the flat of one hand along the wall to steady herself. She lets herself back into the sitting room, where the fire is still laid, waiting to be lit, and the potpourri is still scenting the air and Sir Howard is sitting on the sofa exactly where she left him. He turns to look at her but doesn’t get up. Their eyes meet.

‘Helpful?’

Esme nods.

‘It’s not easy to watch,’ Howard says.

‘No,’ Esme replies and her voice croaks. ‘But I really appreciate you showing it to me. It’s important – seeing Ada as she was, remembering . . .’

‘That she’s a real person?’ Howard completes the thought. ‘Yes. People forget.’ He closes his eyes. ‘I let her down,’ he says, so softly it is nearly inaudible. And Esme is about to respond with some meaningless platitude but she stops herself because she is not sure she can form the words without everything becoming undone.

Ever since he walked through the door, she has been trying to work out what it was about Howard Pink that felt so familiar. There was an elusive quality about him that she half recognised in herself and yet she couldn’t quite pin it down. It was a gap she knew the shape of, but not what it contained. But now, looking at him looking at her, it comes to her in a rush of completeness. She knows what it is they recognise in each other. It is shame.

Carol

She doesn’t scream. the sound never makes it out of her. The oddness of this hits her at almost exactly the same time as she experiences the not screaming, so that she is curiously untethered from the situation, as though examining herself through the wrong end of Archie’s binoculars. She is looking at the dead person’s hand in her neighbour’s flower bed and all she is thinking is: Well, this is strange. Why aren’t I screaming? Why aren’t I shocked? I seem to be taking this very calmly, don’t I?

She forgets, for a moment, the presence of Archie. She feels wholly unruffled, completely in charge of every filament of her emotion. There is also a lack of surprise, an unacknowledged suspicion. She has been carrying this nebulous anxiety with her ever since that day Alan came round for tea, consciously leaving it unformed and unspoken in case it scared her, in case she had to do something about it. And now, here it was: confirmation.

Something is tugging at her sleeve. She wonders what it might be and then she looks down and sees Archie trying to get her attention.

‘Grandma, what is it? What is it?’ His words fall over themselves and she knows that he can sense there is something wrong. There is a density to the air, an encroaching thickness. She seems to be looking at everything through a pane of glass – a microscope slide smudged with fingerprints.

Archie’s voice pierces the confusion of her thoughts. The microscope slide slips and cracks. All at once, everything snaps into focus.

‘Nothing to worry about, Archie love,’ Carol says automatically. ‘What I need you to do is to go back to your mother and tell her I’ll be over in a minute. I’ve just got to finish up here.’

‘But—’

‘No questions, Archie. I’ll explain everything in a bit. Now run along and get yourself a nice hot Ribena.’

He looks up at her, his face questioning. Then he nods, just the once, and scampers back up the garden into the kitchen. She knew the hot Ribena would do the trick. She listens for the sound of the front door slamming. When she hears the clunk of it swinging shut, Carol exhales. She hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath.

She doesn’t want to look at the hand again but she forces herself to bend over, bringing her face closer to the damp, springy soil. She squints through her spectacles. It would be embarrassing to call the police when it was just a pile of old twigs, she thinks. Best be on the safe side. She regulates her breathing – in and out to the count of five – and feels the crack and twinge of her joints as she stoops.

She shudders when she examines it. Although Carol has never seen a decomposed human hand before, she has no doubt that this is what she is staring at. Slender pipe-cleaner fingers, blackened with a yellowy tinge. The bones are stripped of flesh and pointing skywards. She is reminded of lamb chops served with frilled white paper in fancy restaurants.

Thumb. Finger. Knuckle. She can see, for the first time, what clever things knuckles are, so neatly designed: the peaked cap of the socket, the perfectly shaped joint, the smoothness of the bend and flex. She wonders briefly whether the hand belongs to a man or a woman. Something tells her it is female.

Nausea rises. A dizziness comes over her, threatening to send the lawn into a whirling vortex like the fast cycle on her washing machine. She breathes in and out. Reminds herself that she needs to be calm. Imagines Derek’s voice: ‘Pull yourself together, love. No use crying over spilt milk.’

She has never been good in a crisis. Derek had always been the steadying hand, the person who knew exactly what to do when their car broke down on a roadside or when a pipe burst or the central heating went on the blink again. He had this male sixth sense that meant he always knew what tool to ferret out from the cupboard underneath the stairs or what telephone number to call, even when they were abroad.

‘No good wishing he was here,’ Carol says out loud. ‘Get on with it.’

The sound of her own voice makes her feel better. Steady now, she cautions herself. Steady.

She turns away from the flower bed and, with an enormous effort of will, forces herself to walk back to the kitchen door. Her feet are heavy and unbalanced and she limps the last few steps. She feels very old. Shock, she thinks. It must be the shock. And then: What I wouldn’t give for a sugary cup of tea.

Carol continues down the hallway, placing her hand flat against the wall to keep herself upright. She remembers seeing a phone by the front door and makes her way to it. It is an old-fashioned thing, moss-green in colour with a rotary dial. Before she picks up the receiver, she has a flash of fear that Alan will come back unannounced. Carol puts the safety chain on the door, just in case. Then, for only the second time in her life, she dials 999.

She is asked for her name, address and telephone number by a polite young woman on the other end of the line. When Carol tells her what she has discovered nestling in her neighbour’s flower bed, the woman is perfectly relaxed, as though Carol has just been reciting the details of her weekly shopping list.

‘Have you touched the hand, Mrs Hetherington?’ the woman asks. Faint accent, Carol thinks. Northern.

‘No, no. It’s still there.’

‘Who else is there?’

‘No one. I mean, my grandson was here but I sent him back home. It’s just me.’

‘OK, that’s good, Mrs Hetherington, thank you. Have you told anyone else about what you’ve seen?’

‘Hmm? Oh, oh no. Archie – that’s my grandson – he saw it too but we didn’t talk about it.’

‘How old is Archie?’

‘Twelve last August.’

‘OK, what I want you to do, Mrs Hetherington, is wait where you are. Don’t touch anything. We’ll send an officer out to you straight away. Just sit tight.’

‘All right,’ Carol says, swallowing hard. ‘How long will that be?’

‘Not too long at all, Mrs Hetherington. They’ll be there shortly.’

Carol places the receiver back on the phone with a click. She feels sick at the thought of staying here a moment longer but she has never been good at standing up for herself. If someone has told her to stay, then that’s exactly what she’ll do, even if it takes several hours.

There is a pad of paper next to the telephone and a painted bowl filled with random knick-knacks: elastic bands, drawing pins, blobs of Blu-tack and a radiator key. But something at the bottom catches Carol’s eyes, glinting in the fading light. She pokes a finger in the bowl, clearing aside the rubbish to get a clearer view. It is a small gold ring bearing a crest on a flat oval. She picks it up, holds it close to her face. The crest is engraved with a large bird, like a stork, and three triangular peaks. The circumference of the ring is too small to fit a man’s finger. She thinks of the hand. Then of the ring. At the exact point that she makes the connection, she notices her teeth are chattering.

There is a knock on the door. Carol jumps. It is gloomy in the corridor. The sun has set and she has not yet turned on the light. She hesitates. The doorbell rings. Another knock. She presses her eye to the spyhole and sees a blurred vision of her daughter.

‘Mum, it’s me,’ Vanessa is saying. Carol undoes the safety catch and opens the door, feeling a great wave of reassurance as Vanessa marches into the hallway, hands on her hips, and asks her mother what on earth’s going on. Carol tries to explain but for some reason the words come out in a bit of a jumble and her lips feel cold and clumsy so that she has trouble forming the syllables.

Vanessa seems to pick up on this and, without any more being said, folds her mother into a tight, expansive hug. Carol feels the back of her head being stroked and patted like a child and Vanessa is saying something in her ear, soothing, and Carol thinks how nice this is, to surrender control, to be looked after. She has never seen this side to Vanessa before.