Playing for the Ashes (80 page)

Mr. Friskin responded with only a grim “We’re playing police games at the moment. It’s par for the course.”

“What games?” she’d asked. “What’s happened? What d’you mean?”

He said, “They’ll be trying to grind us down. And we’ll be trying to maintain our position.”

That’s all he would say because the herd of journalists came thundering down on them. He muttered, “They’ll be after Jim again. No, not the media—” this as her attention
fle
w to the approaching newspeople. “They’ll be after him as well, but I meant the police.”

“What’d he say?” she demanded, feeling sweat break out in a band along the back of her neck. “What’d he
tell
them?”

“Not now.” Mr. Friskin had hopped into the car and started it with a roar. He spun away and left her to elbow through the throng to the Cavalier. She’d opened the door and locked herself inside. The cameras recorded her every move, but the pictures would show no word or glance of acknowledgement to the questions, and no reaction on the face to the media frenzy over a son being questioned about the murder of his father.

And still she was no closer to learning what he had told the police than she had been after their conversation in the kitchen on the previous night.

You wanted him dead more ’n anything, Mum? We both know that, don’t we
?

Long after he had left her sitting across from his bowl of soup, observing the skin form on the top of it, forcing herself to wonder how it was that tomato soup formed a skin when it cooled while other soups didn’t, Jimmy’s two questions bounced in her head like rubber echoes. She did what she could to drive the questions away, but nothing—no prayer, no evocation of the sight of her husband, the faces of her children, the memory of their once-whole family sitting down to have a Sunday joint of beef—could keep her from hearing Jimmy’s questions, the conspiratorial, sly tone in which he asked them, or the answers that came to her, as immediate as they were completely contradictory.

No. I didn’t want him dead, Jimmy. I wanted him with me for the rest of my life. I wanted his laughter, his breath on my shoulder when he slept, his hand on my thigh at night when we talked about the day, the sight of him snapping a newspaper open and falling into a story the way a sky diver falls out of a plane. I wanted the smell of his skin, the sound of him shouting, “Move that ball, Jimmy! Come on, think like a bowler, son,” the touch of him squeezing the back of my neck like he did every night when he got home from the print-works, the vision of him at the sea with Stan on his shoulders and Shar at his side and the binoculars passed among them in a search for birds, and the taste of him that was purely him. I wanted him, Jimmy. And to want him like that and to have him like that was to want him and have him alive, not dead.

But she was there, wasn’t she? Seeing what I saw. Lolling like a cat with cream in what was mine. She stood between us and what was meant to be—Kenny coming home, Kenny singing like a hyena every morning in the bath, Kenny leaving his trousers in a heap at night and his shoes and socks at the bottom of the stairs, Kenny climbing into bed and turning me to him and pressing our legs and our stomachs together. So long as she stood between me and Kenny, between Kenny and his family, between Kenny and what was meant to be, there was no hope, Jim. And so long as she stood there, I wanted him dead. Because if he was dead—truly dead—I wouldn’t ever have to think of Kenny and her.

How could she tell him this, Jeannie wondered. Her son wanted
yes
’s and
no
’s. They made sense out of life. They were the great untanglers. To lay all this before him would be to ask him to make a leap into adulthood that he couldn’t yet make. Far easier just to say, No, no, I never wanted that, Jim. Far easier to make fast and loose with the facts. But as she followed the Rover along the Thames and tried vainly to read what was happening between the solicitor and her son in the other car as they made their way home, Jeannie knew she would not lie to Jimmy, any more than she could tell him the truth.

In Cardale Street, the journalists were
fin
ally gone and it seemed, at least for the moment, that none of them had decided to make the long trek back to the Isle of Dogs. Obviously, there was more scope for stories in hanging about Scotland Yard right now. Still, Jeannie had little doubt that they would be back with their notebooks and their cameras the very instant the journey seemed profitable. The trick was going to be to make it unprofitable. The only way to achieve this seemed to be to stay in the house and keep away from the windows.

Mr. Friskin followed Jeannie inside. Jimmy pushed past them and headed for the stairs. When Jeannie called his name he didn’t stop, and the solicitor said kindly, “Best to let him go, Ms. Cooper.”

She felt desperately tired, useless as a dried-out sponge, and completely alone. She’d sent Stan and Shar off to school this morning, but now she wished she hadn’t done. With them in the house, there’d at least be someone’s lunch to fix. She knew without completely understanding why or how she knew that if she fixed lunch for Jimmy, he wasn’t going to eat it. For some reason, this realisation
fil
led her with new despair. She could offer her son nothing of what he either needed or wanted. No food to strengthen him, no family to support him, no father to guide him.

She knew she should have done things differently. But as she watched Jimmy’s trainers disappear up the stairs, she couldn’t have said what things or how.

“He wouldn’t say last night,” she said to Mr. Friskin. “What’s he told them?”

Mr. Friskin related it all to her, what she already knew and had tried to deny since the moment the two police officers had walked into Crissys on Friday afternoon and identified themselves as having come from Kent. Each fact felt like a death blow to her, despite Mr. Friskin’s efforts to relate them kindly. “So he’s confirmed a number of their suspicions,” the solicitor concluded.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“That they’re going to press forward to see what else they can get from him. He isn’t telling them everything they want to know. That much is obvious.”

“What d’they want to know?”

He spread out his hands and showed them as empty. “For them to tell me what they’re looking for would be for them to place me on their side, and I’m not on their side. I’m on yours. And Jim’s. It’s not over yet, although I expect they may wait twenty-four hours or longer to let the boy worry about what’s going to happen next.”

“Is it going to get worse, then?”

“They like to push, Ms. Cooper. They’re going to push. It’s part of their job.”

“So what d’we do?”

“We do our jobs as well as they do theirs. We play the game.”

“But he’s told them more than he told them when they were here, at the house,” Jeannie said. “Can’t you stop him?” She could hear the desperation in her voice and she tried to control it, not so much out of pride at this point but mostly out of fear of what desperation might indicate to the solicitor about the truth. “Because if he keeps telling them…If

you let him just talk…Can’t you make him hush?”

“It isn’t like that. I’ve advised him and I’ll continue to advise him, but there’s a point at which the rest is up to Jim. I can’t gag him if he wants to talk. And…” Here Mr. Friskin hesitated. He looked like he was sorting through his words carefully, which wasn’t the kind of behaviour Jeannie expected a solicitor to have to engage in. Words came out of them slippery and easy, like eels out of traps, didn’t they? “He does appear to
want
to talk to them, Ms. Cooper,” Mr. Friskin said. “Can you think why?”

He wants to talk to them, wants to talk to them, wants to talk. She could hear nothing else. Dazed by the revelation, she felt her way to the telly where her cigarettes lay. She dug one out and a flame shot up in front of her face like a rocket launched from Mr. Friskin’s lighter.

“Can you?” he asked. “Can you think why he wants to talk to them?”

She shook her head, using the cigarette, the inhaling, the very activity of smoking, as a reason not to speak. Mr. Friskin regarded her evenly. She waited for him to ask another question or to offer an expert opinion of his own to explain Jimmy’s unaccountable behaviour. He did neither. He merely held her in an eye lock that had the effect of saying, Can you can you can you, Ms. Cooper, as good as if he was saying it himself. Still, she remained mute.

“The next move is up to them,” he said finally. “When it happens, I’ll be there. Until then…” He removed his car keys from the pocket of his trousers and went to the door. “Phone me if you think there’s anything we need to discuss.”

She nodded. He was gone.

She stayed by the telly like an automaton. She thought of Jimmy in the interview room. She thought of Jimmy wanting to talk.

“Kids are all a bit odd,” Kenny had said to her one afternoon in the bedroom, sprawled out on the bed with his right leg cocked like it was forming the number four with his left. The curtains were drawn against the midday sun which still filtered through them, altering the colour of their bodies. Kenny’s was tawny, corded with muscles that sculpted his skin, and he lay against the pillows with one arm crooked behind his head, looking like he meant to stay forever. Which he did not. Which she knew he did not. He ran his hand up her spine and circled his fingers in gentle massage at the base of her neck. “Don’t you remember what we were like at that age?”

“You talked to me then,” she replied. “He won’t.”

“That’s ’cause you’re his mum. Lads don’t talk to their mums.”

“Who d’they talk to, then?”

“Their birds,” and he leaned forward to kiss her shoulder. He murmured against it as his mouth marked a path from her shoulder to her neck, “Their mates as well.”

“Yeah? And their dads?”

His mouth stopped moving. It didn’t speak and it didn’t kiss. She put her hand on his calf, rubbing her thumb along the muscle that arced from beneath his knee.

“He needs his dad, Kenny.”

She could feel him leaving her, like his spirit was fading even while his body was still as water at the bottom of a well. He was close enough to her that his breath was a ghost kiss against her skin, but the Kenny of him was an ebbing tide.

“He has his dad.”

She said, “You know what I mean. Here. At home.”

He sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He reached for his pants and his trousers and began to dress. She listened to the clothes sliding over his skin, thinking how each piece served to armour him from her better than mail. The act of his dressing and the when of his doing it comprised his answer to her unspoken request. She couldn’t bear the hurt of it.

She said, “I love you. My heart feels so full when you’re here.” She felt the bed give a heave as he lifted himself from it. “We need you, Kenny. And it’s not just me I’m thinking of. It’s them.”

“Jean,” he said. “It’s hard enough for me to—”

“And you want me to make it easy for you, right?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s not as simple as packing my bags and moving home.”

“It could be that simple if you wanted it to be.”

“For you. Not for me.”

She took a breath that caught.

He said, “Don’t cry, girl. Come on. Jean.”

She ducked her head, and she hiccupped to keep the sob from breaking. She said, “Why d’you come round here, Kenny? Why d’you keep coming round? Why’n’t you just let
go
?”

He came to stand before her. His
fin
gers lifted and released fine strands of her hair. He didn’t answer the question. She didn’t require an answer. What he needed was here, within these walls. But what he wanted was elsewhere and he hadn’t found it.

Jeannie ground her cigarette into the shell ashtray and dumped the ashes and stubs into the kitchen rubbish. She removed her Crissys cap and apron, placing the former on the table between the panther pepper pot and the palm-leaf holder for paper napkins, hanging the latter over one of the chairs where she smoothed it carefully into pleats like she was planning to wear it tomorrow.

A collection of
should have’s
took up residence in her mind, each one of them declaring how changed their circumstances might have been at the moment had she only had the foresight to act differently. The largest and the loudest of the
should have’s
was the one that badgered her about Kenny. It was simple enough. She’d been listening to it every day and every night for the last four years. She should have known what to do to hang on to her husband.

The root of every trouble they’d experienced was with Kenny’s departure from Car-dale Street. Trouble had started small, with the death of Jim’s multicoloured mongrel,
fli
pflopped and crushed beneath the wheels of a lorry on Manchester Road not a week after Kenny had packed his bags. But it had grown like a cancer. And when she thought about those troubles now—from the death of Bouncer, to the fire Jimmy had set at his school, to Stan’s bed wetting and nightly masturbation, to Shar’s blind devotion to her birds, to all the ways her children had been shouting out for her notice and failing to get it and giving up about wanting it or needing it in the first place—she wanted to lay the blame at Kenny’s door. Because he was their father. He had responsibilities here. He’d been a willing partner in creating three lives, and he had no right to walk out on those lives or on his duty to safeguard them. But even as she wanted to lay blame on her husband, the primary
should have
returned once again to remind Jeannie where the strongest measure of guilt and accountability truly belonged. She should have known what to do to hang on to her husband. Because if she had done, all the troubles of the last four years would never have descended upon her family in the
fir
st place.

She finally felt ready to climb the stairs. Jimmy’s door was closed and she opened it without knocking. Jimmy was lying on his bed, face down into the pillow like he was trying to smother himself. One of his hands scrabbled at the counterpane while the other curved round the stubby bed-post. His arm was jerking like it wanted to pull him to the headboard and crush his skull, and the toes of his trainers dug into the bed, first one then the other, in a mimicry of running.