The Influence (10 page)

Vicky’s glare dimmed slowly, and Rowan heard the whisper of sand through the sparse grass. “I told you so, didn’t l?” Vicky said. “I don’t tell lies. Go up and see what you can see.”

As Rowan reached the crest of the dune she saw Patty on the steps, trailing after Paul and Mary, who were running to their buckets. For a moment she seemed to look at Rowan, but the sun must be in her eyes. Her angry head bobbed down step by step, and then there was only Vicky, her dress white against the sunlit dune, watching Rowan palely as she raised the binoculars to her eyes.

She liked old things, but these might be too old. All she could see was a blur beyond a supine 8 of darkness. The oppressiveness made her head swim. She groped for a focusing screw, but there wasn’t one. “Just let them work,” Vicky said.

Suddenly they did. The view sprang at Rowan, so fast and so clear that she gasped. She was looking at the water in the middle of the bay, and not only the sight but the sound of the waves seemed closer. As she gazed at the slow wide unfurling, the water darkening and then growing more transparent like a promise that she would see into the depths, the dark tunnel that enclosed her vision seemed to vanish. “The more you use them the stronger they’ll get,” Vicky murmured. “Have a look where we were.”

Rowan lifted the binoculars toward Wales. The movement felt like flying over the sea; it took her breath away. The beach at Talacre sprang out of the waves, and she was dumbfounded by how much she could see: dogs chasing each other in a spray of sand, three sunbathers lined up on three towels like the stripes of a flag, children digging holes in the sand. The shouts of children she could hear must be on the Waterloo beach. “You’d see more from the top of your house,” Vicky said.

Rowan skimmed the coast road from Talacre to the Greenfield Valley. Reservoirs glinted among the ruined factories as she rose between the slopes to Holywell. Layers of cut-out cottages gave way to the bunched shopping streets, and then she was outside her aunt’s cottage.

Hermione was in the garden, stooping to the flower-bed. Rowan watched spellbound as her aunt tugged at a weed. She could see her aunt’s hand pressed to the small of her back, could see the old glove on the hand; she could almost hear Hermione’s grunt of triumph as the roots came loose, scattering earth. Her aunt straightened up and was gazing directly at her.

Rowan almost ducked behind the dune, Hermione seemed so close. She felt excited and a little guilty, and was no longer aware of holding the binoculars. She was awed by her ability to see so far. She watched Hermione moving her pail of uprooted weeds along the flower bed—she couldn’t stop watching. She didn’t know how long she had been watching when she realised that someone was calling her name.

The voice seemed so distant that at first she didn’t recognise it. Then the sound of her mother’s anxiety plucked at her, and she tried to find the beach. She had to close her eyes as her vision swooped back over the bay. She opened them and steadied the binoculars, and was looking at her mother’s worried face. The binoculars mustn’t work so well at this distance; her mother seemed farther away than Hermione had, far away down a long black tunnel. She tried to lower the binoculars, but her hands felt far away too. She couldn’t move while she was holding the binoculars; she would fall. Then her mother looked straight at her without seeing her and hurried away along the beach.

“Mummy,” Rowan cried, and wrenched the binoculars away from her eyes. The sky tilted, the dune heaved up beneath her. Her cry couldn’t have been as loud as she had thought, for her mother hadn’t turned. Rowan stumbled down the sandy slope, the binoculars dragging her faster, and clambered towards the promenade, the upward slope crumbling beneath her heels and gritting beneath her fingernails. Vicky was at the top, waiting.

Though her head blotted out the sun, her face was shining. It was expressionless but for the light in her eyes. When Rowan had almost struggled to the top, Vicky moved into her path and stretched out her hands. Did she want the binoculars? Rowan made to lift the strap from around her neck, but Vicky said “They’re yours now.”

Rowan wasn’t sure that she wanted them—and then, remembering how far she’d seen, she did. “May I keep them for always?”

“For as long as you’re in that house. If you stay there always you’ll be able to keep them always, won’t you? Perhaps you can.”

She made it sound as if she was about to tell Rowan how. Rowan would have lingered, but she could hear her mother calling. “I’ve got to go.”

Vicky stared at her. More than one slow wave swelled and withdrew on the beach before she moved aside. “I’ll come and find you again soon,” she said.

Rowan ran across the promenade and down the gritty steps. Her mother was hurrying back from the marina, her face pinched with anxiety. “Mummy, here I am,” Rowan cried. “I was only on the dunes. Patty wouldn’t come with me. I’m sorry.”

Her mother’s face changed from worried to angry, and then she was simply relieved. “Didn’t you hear me calling you? Don’t ever do that again, Rowan. I thought I could trust you not to go wandering off by yourself.”

“I was with Vicky,” Rowan protested. “I met her when I was at Hermione’s. We didn’t go far.”

“Well, I hope she’s more use than Patty. She couldn’t be much less.” Rowan’s mother was gazing doubtfully at the binoculars. “Did she lend you those?”

“She said I could keep them. They’re old. I’m sure they’re really hers.”

“All right, lovey, nobody’s accusing her of anything.” Rowan’s mother hugged her with a fierceness that made Rowan realise fully how anxious she had been. “Come on, we’d better get to Jo’s before Patty has her calling the police. You introduce me to your friend on the way.”

But when they climbed the steps and ran hand in hand to the houses, there was nothing to be seen on the dunes but roaming sand and tufts of grass. “Bring her home another time. It was kind of her to give you those. You’ll have to give her something in return,” Rowan’s mother said, and for a moment, as the sand dragged at her feet, Rowan wondered what Vicky might want from her, hoped that she wouldn’t ask for too much.

Chapter Eleven

On Saturday there were two letters on the doormat. One was from Rowan, the kind she often wrote.

Dear mummy and daddy, I don’t mind where I live so long as Im with you, I want to live with you for ever because I love you most in the wurld and Im glad you let me keep the
bincl
binnocli
binocculers, I hope you meet my new freind soon…

They gave her a kiss each and sent her to play in her jungle of a back garden while they stared at the other envelope. It was from the bank.

“You open it,” Derek said. “Maybe you’ll bring us luck.” He watched while Alison turned over the envelope and lifted the corner of the flap with a fingernail, slipped one slim finger under the flap and peeled it back, drew out the single sheet of headed notepaper and unfolded it, turned it the right way up. Maybe the manager had written to let them know their account was in the black at last, Derek tried to think, until Alison’s face went slack and she passed the letter to him. The cheque from the contractor had bounced.

It felt as if he’d snatched the three thousand pounds out of their hands. Derek saw their plans fade one by one like failing lights: redecorating the house to make it easier to sell, the holiday they might have had at Rowan’s half-term, a car for Alison, whose old car wasn’t worth repairing… The house seemed to bear down on him, a dead weight they would never be rid of, shabby and ugly and unwelcoming. As he tramped along the hall to the phone, creaks and echoes paced him. “Try not to lose your temper,” Alison said.

Children were fighting, a woman was screaming at them above the babble of a disc jockey loud as a public address. “Yeh,” a voice said.

“You don’t waste words, eh,” Derek said.

“Wha?”

“Is Ken there?”

“Who wants him?”

“He’ll know.”

Whichever of Ken’s sons it was went away and mumbled, then came back. “He isn’t here. Says leave a message.”

Derek could hear Ken whistling Beatles melodies amid the uproar. “I won’t bother,” he said, and leaned on the phone as he called to Alison. “I’m going over to see him.”

She came downstairs quickly, folded sheets piled on her arms. “Wouldn’t it be safer to have the lawyer write to him?”

“Safer and longer, with bugger all at the end of it, probably. Look, I only want to try and make him understand the fix we’re in,” he said, and put his hand over her lips. He could still feel her moist breath on his palm as he hurried out to the car.

He drove through Everton, streets of faded shops and cinemas gone bingo, and up the rubbly hill planted with tower blocks. Beyond Everton was Toxteth, black youths with ghetto blasters strutting through the Victorian streets, white youths in cars cruising for women. The window of the Faradays’ old flat was smashed and patched with cardboard. Ken lived on the far side of Toxteth, in Aigburth, at the end of a street above the Festival Gardens. Down among the gardens of all nations on the Mersey bank, the Festival Hall gleamed dully, a half-buried zeppelin. A wagon wheel leaned beside the glass porch of Ken’s broad pebble-dashed house. Derek rang the bell beneath a carriage lamp and heard voices screaming at the children to shut up.

Purple velvet curtains stirred at the front window, and then the front door was opened by Ken in an oriental dressing-gown. His round face was trying to look blank. “Hello, Derek. Visiting old haunts? We’re in a bit of a mess in here just now.”

“I can stand it. You don’t want me having to shout at you through the glass.”

Ken opened the porch door and came out, smoothing his uncombed hair. “I haven’t forgotten I said we’d do up your house, if that’s what’s up.”

“Your cheque is, mate.”

“You haven’t tried to pay it in, have you? Wasn’t it dated the end of next week? My mistake. So much on my mind, you know how it is. Hang on here and I’ll write you another.”

“We can’t afford to wait, Ken. We need the cash now.”

“You don’t think I’d be fool enough to keep that much in the house with so many thieves about, do you? Just tell your bank it’s on its way if they get stroppy. What’ll they do, kidnap your kiddie if you don’t cough up?”

“Your bank’s open on Saturdays. You could get me the cash when you’re dressed.”

“Can’t do it, pal. Cash flow problems and some of the prats I have to work with, you know how it is. Don’t make a scene, all right? We’re nice people round here, we don’t have rows in the street. Are you going to let me give you a cheque? Then you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got hungry rabbits.”

He strode round the side of the house, tying his dressing-gown tighter. Derek caught up with him as he emerged from the kitchen with a drooping lettuce. “I’m not leaving until you pay me the three thousand you owe me,” Derek said, loud enough to make the rabbits flinch in the hutch at the end of the garden.

“Still after the green stuff? Chew on this if you’re that desperate.” He shoved the lettuce at Derek, who grabbed it instinctively as Ken unbolted the alley door beside the hutch. “Now then, are you going to be reasonable? My boys will do your house next week if you don’t mind them working nights, won’t you, boys?”

Derek swung round. Ken’s two large sons were behind him. “Yeh,” one said, and the less talkative one nodded. “They’d be out of your way before midnight,” Ken said.

How could Derek consider letting them into the house when he could see they were ready to menace him? “I want my money,” he said.

Ken took the lettuce from him and opened the alley door, shaking his head sadly. “Give him what he’s asking for.”

Derek backed into the alley and knocked over a dustbin. He almost sprawled on his back. The youths snorted at that, but they weren’t smiling as they followed him. As he hauled himself to his feet, his fingers found the neck of a bottle that had rolled out of the dustbin. He smashed the bottle against the alley wall so savagely that Ken’s sons retreated a step. He felt a splinter of glass lodge in the side of his hand like a hint of how fighting them would feel, and it excited him, made him determined to hurt them worse. Then he thought of Rowan, imagined her seeing the state he might be in. He flung the bottle away and turned his back on the youths. They jeered at him and flung rubbish after him as he made himself walk slowly to the car.

He’d kept his self-respect, but at what cost? He’d have to use a lawyer now and pay more for the work on the house. He drove back to Waterloo, growing unhappier with himself and the news he had for Alison. But when he found her, sorting through old photographs in a room on the middle floor, she looked so taken aback that he was afraid to ask what had happened. “Lance killed himself,” she said.

“Never. When?”

“Days ago, but Richard only just called my parents. Hermione can tell us more about it when she gets here. You don’t mind her staying overnight, do you? She sounded pretty shaken.”

“Whatever you think, Ali. No joy at Ken’s, by the way. I could hardly get near him for his family.”

“We’ll survive until things improve.” She hugged him but only made him feel awkward, as if she were letting him know she realised he hadn’t told the whole truth. He was glad when the phone rang. “It’s a domestic job in Bootle,” he called up to her. “I’ll take Rowan along.”