Thin Air (16 page)

‘There are in-between places,
you see.’

‘In between?’

Julie nodded. ‘Yes. Cracks, I
call ‘em.’

‘And is Dex in one?’

‘Yes,’ said Julie. ‘He is.’

Jay and Julie
spent the rest of the afternoon driving around the town. After
they’d visited The Ship so that Jay could settle her bill and
collect her belongings, Julie directed her to Dex’s old school,
then to where his first gig had taken place, and after that a tour
of where his friends had lived. Jay could not discern a sense of
Dex in these places. The boy that existed within the pages of
Julie’s photo albums seemed unreal. Jay couldn’t fix him into this
world. It seemed strange. Finally, they crawled slowly past the
drab house where Little Peter had lived. There were no pale faces
between the curtains in the upstairs window.

Once the take-away Chinese meal
had been consumed and the children put to bed, Jay opened the first
bottle of wine. Julie thought it was too dry and, to sweeten its
taste, added a generous measure of lemonade to her glass.

‘I’m not a big drinker,’ Julie
said, adding meaningfully, ‘not like you.’

Jay smiled. ‘Oh, come on, you
know all journalists are drinkers. It’s part of the job.’

Julie shook her head. ‘The ones
that drink probably say that.’

Jay sat on the floor, feeling
jumpy. She’d finished her first glass of wine before Julie had even
got half-way through her diluted drink. Maybe she should cut back
on her alcohol intake. But what the hell for?
I should have gone
home
, she thought, and on impulse pulled her phone from her
bag. As she suspected, there were plenty of messages from Gus, and
a couple from Gina. She must have been mad to speak to Gus like
that this morning. She’d pay; he’d make her pay. Perhaps she should
phone him now, try to make amends. She could lie, say Julie had
contacted her, and that was why she was here. Perhaps she should
open the gin instead. ‘Oh God!’ said Jay, resting the back of her
head on the sofa.

The two women sat in silence,
with only the gas fire lisping between them. Julie drained her
glass and sighed. ‘Oh well, I might as well come clean.’

Jay raised her head, reached for
the wine bottle. Cold liquid splashed over her hands.

‘Chris came to see me three days
before he disappeared,’ Julie said.

Jay took a drink, could say
nothing.

‘He told me not to tell anyone,
ever, and I haven’t, but now, well, I s’pose you should know.’

‘What did he say?’

Julie laughed. ‘He was in a bad
mood, all right. Hated the world and everything in it. I knew he
was looking for a way out again. I recognised the signs. It was no
surprise to me when he disappeared.’

‘You know, don’t you,’ Jay said
quietly. ‘You know where he is.’

‘No,’ Julie answered. ‘Only that
it’s no place you could get to. He never mentioned you, though I
saw all the pictures in the papers afterwards. I just thought “poor
cow”. Didn’t recognise you when you turned up here.’

Jay imagined Dex arriving at
Julie’s house; the car at the kerb, like hers was now. She saw him
pacing round the kitchen, full of frenetic energy, unable to sit
down. Julie would be at the table, making tea, Kylie at the table
drawing. How old would the kid have been? There would have been no
Melanie then. What had been going through Dex’s mind? Would he have
told Julie the truth? Jay could not help but feel wounded that he’d
made no mention of her. Perhaps, by then, she had already stopped
existing for him, as he’d made the decision to leave her and his
life behind. But what had he said?

Julie offered fragments, like
scratched and defaced paintings from the wall of an ancient tomb.
Many stories might fit the marks: Dex was ill and unstable and had
run away; he’d been afraid of something, or sick of something, or
maybe just tired of the life he had made. Maybe it had been
something to do with the past, some uncleansed, emotional wound
festering away beneath the gloss of fame and wealth. Perhaps he’d
had something to run
to
, rather than away from: a person, or
a place, or a dream. Julie’s memory was imperfect, perhaps because
at the time she hadn’t imagined she’d never see her brother again.
A hope might have fountained within her: Dex had cast off his life
in order to spend more time with his family. Had he intimated
this?

Julie became agitated by Jay’s
constant questioning. ‘He was unhappy, bothered,’ she said, ‘that’s
all. Something wasn’t going right for him. I thought maybe he’d had
enough of all the stupid people he must have to deal with.’

‘Is that me you’re talking
about?’ Jay asked. She had finished one bottle of wine herself.

‘He walked out on you,’ Julie
said acidly. ‘Maybe you were part of it. You never reached
him.’

‘Who did?’ Jay argued. ‘I did
everything I could. I treated him like a real person.’

Jay didn’t know why she was
arguing. Julie was right; most of the people both she and Dex had
had to deal with were stupid, or shallow, or selfish and greedy.
The industry attracted types like that. None of it was real. Hadn’t
she said that herself to Jez only a short time ago? She put her
fingers against her temples. ‘I thought we had a good life, Julie.
It was such a shock to me. I’m not like the others. I’m not.’ Drink
talking. She should stop. But it seemed that only a small, sober
part of herself was aware of that. A greater, emotional part spoke
with the voice of the wine. There were tears on her face now,
broken sentences spilling from her mouth. It had come back; all of
it. The pain, the bewilderment, the senseless questions, the frail
blue flame of hope deep within.

Julie got down on the carpet and
wrapped her arms round Jay’s shoulders. She smelled of wine and
tobacco. ‘I’m sorry, love. Here, come on, don’t get upset.’ Jay,
swimming in maudlin gloom, leaned against her, sobbing. Then
Julie’s body stiffened against her.

Jay instinctively pulled away.
‘What is it?’

There was silence, but for the
purr of the gas jets. Was Dex there? Julie was staring at the
closed door.

‘What?’ Jay asked again in a
low, desperate voice.

Julie turned back. ‘You’ll know
one day,’ she said.

‘Know what?’

‘He’ll let you know what
happened.’

‘How will he do that?’

Julie screwed up her face, shook
her head. ‘You’ll just know, that’s all.’

‘How? Julie, please. Tell me.
Please’

Their voices seemed to have
broken the atmosphere. The room was breathing again.

‘Chris just told me,’ Julie
said.

The next day was sunny, but the
air seemed hard in the brightness. After dropping Kylie off at
school, the two women drove north out of the town, Julie with her
baby on her knee - she could not ask Marie a baby-sitting favour
twice in one week. The noises emitted by Melanie made Jay grit her
teeth, but she hoped that this time, Julie would not be opaque,
that she’d really reveal something tangible about Dex.

While Julie chaperoned Kylie to
the school gate, Jay sat waiting in her car. She phoned Gus. And
lied. Even lies weren’t enough. She was tired of his whining,
carping tone after only a minute. Why should she put up with this?
Why not simply break the connection, but she listened, making
sounds of denial and placation. She let him rant, then said, ‘I’ll
be back later. Don’t be angry, Gus. I had to do this.’

Julie had got back into the car
at the tail-end of the conversation. Jay threw the phone into the
back of the car. ‘God, why do we put up with it?’ She banged her
hands against the steering wheel.

‘Boyfriend being off again?’

Jay made a low, growling noise.
‘It’s that bloody attitude I can’t stand. Snotty. Condescending.
That’s what it is. Like he’s so fucking faultless!’

‘There’s not a man on this earth
doesn’t act like that,’ Julie said. ‘Sod ‘im.’

Jay nodded and started the car.
‘Yeah.’ She managed a smile. ‘Today, he doesn’t exist.’

She wished she could mean
that.

As they drove off, Jay felt
anxious. Gus was angry. He was so angry he said to her he might not
be there when she got home. She knew this was unlikely. In a way,
she’d have preferred his absence. What she dreaded were the sulks
and interrogations on her return.

The north road skirted the edge
of the heath. Further away from the houses, the landscape seemed
more natural. Jay sensed it would not be so littered with the
careless detritus of humanity; cans and bottles and discarded
wrappers. They pulled onto a narrow, twisting track between high
hedges, which expelled them into a flat area strewn with gravel,
where people could park their cars. Hills rose softly all around,
their contours mellowed by age. The parking area was surrounded by
oaks, beech and ash, with paths going off in all directions, their
entrances blocked by wooden beams on posts to prevent anyone
driving up them. In among the older deciduous trees, pine trees
seethed up the hillsides.

Julie indicated where Jay should
park the car, at the edge of the trees. Only one other car was
there; a woman was unloading a brace of tawny Labradors from the
hatch-back. Once Jay was free of the heated interior of the
vehicle, the air was crisp and biting. It was scented by pine oil
and loam; it seemed alive. Jay’s jacket would not keep her warm
here. They unloaded the push-chair from the boot and secured
Melanie into it. The woman with the dogs had already disappeared up
the flank of one of the hills; Jay could hear her high, fluting
voice calling to her pets. Julie led the way down one of the paths,
pushing Melanie ahead of her. A network of narrow streams plaited
through the undergrowth to either side, almost concealed by tangled
naked blackberry briar. Their path was straight, it did not rise to
one of the hills. Jay followed, wondering what mystical experience
Julie had in mind for her today.

They walked down the path for a
hundred yards or so, then came upon the wide pool of a natural
spring, cradled in a grove of oaks that was surrounded by the dour
spears of sentinel pines. The spring had been concreted around the
edge, but Julie said that at one time there had just been mud and
grass and water; torrential in the spring, fading away to a memory
of a stream by mid-summer, but back again in winter. The branches
of the oaks enclosed the area, protecting it. It was not
oppressive, but somehow soothing. Jay was surprised by the clarity
of the water in the pool. Julie said it was drinkable, but Jay
shrank from trying it. In such a place, knights would have been
offered enchanted swords by mysterious pale arms that sliced
without a ripple through the surface of the pool.

The women fought their way
through a tangle of sodden dead bracken amid the fir trees. By this
time, Julie had hoisted Melanie onto her hip, and Jay carried the
folded push-chair. After ten minutes of so, they came upon another
oak grove, where the trees shouldered together closely. These trees
were squatter than the noble forest lords around the pool. They
were like dwarves, their roots rippling over the soil in knotted
cables. The grove was situated in a hollow that Julie explained was
dusty in summer and a quagmire in wetter seasons. This was Dex’s
place, his secret den. He hadn’t even taken Little Peter there.
Only Julie knew about it. It had been his hiding place, and she’d
always been able to find him there when he’d gone missing after
trouble at home. The trees were bare now, their ancient barks
ragged. Some had had their insides gouged out by age and parasites.
The spreading roots humped like giant arthritic toes from the damp
earth, as if intent on tripping and obstructing invading humans.
Here, the air smelled riper, more loamy.

Jay hugged herself as she looked
around. Julie stood with firmly planted legs, the baby drooling at
her hip, clearly allowing Jay to get a feel of the place, perhaps
hoping some deep-seated intuition would be aroused. Could there be
a sense of Dex here? Jay was almost afraid to imagine it.

‘Did he come here, Julie, last
time he visited you?’

Julie shrugged. ‘All I know is
that there’s something here for you,’ she said.

Jay went up to one of the trees
and touched its heavily furrowed bark. She realised she felt
slightly light-headed again, as she had at the beech grove Julie
had taken her to the day before. ‘What’s here for me? A message, a
feeling, or a thing?’

Julie pulled a face. ‘No idea.
Just something. We’ll have to look.’

Jay kicked at the brown rotting
leaves beneath her feet. ‘Where to start?’

Julie had unfolded Melanie’s
chair once more and now strapped the baby into it. ‘Looks like you
already have,’ she said.

Together, the women turned over
the mulchy carpet of leaves with their toes, then their hands. They
felt among the geriatric roots, put their fingers into damp, fungal
crevices in the tree trunks. Nothing. The trees bowed to the earth.
They were easy to climb, with wide laps where the branches splayed.
Jay clambered upwards, swinging from tree to tree above the ground.
Melanie reached towards her with starfish hands, uttering animal
cries.

Julie’s face was pale and
expressionless below. ‘Go on, girl, go on.’

Jay’s arms ached, her legs were
trembling. She climbed up to a place where a flaking limb bulged in
an unnatural way. She reached for it, hauling herself higher and
found there a metal box, wedged into an old swollen wound in the
bark. Once her hands fell upon it, she felt dizzy. How had she
climbed this far? How would she get back down? ‘There’s a box
here!’ she called to Julie.

‘Get it!’

‘I can’t. It’s stuck.’ She
didn’t want to exert too much force for fear of overbalancing. The
ground looked very far away, but probably wasn’t. If she fell the
mulch would cushion her, maybe. Jay tugged at the rusting artefact.
Could Dex have put it here? It seemed to have become part of the
tree, to have been lodged there for longer than three years.
Clawing at the bark, she tried to pull the ancient fibre away.
Fragments fell down. Julie dodged away from them, laughing.
Eventually, a huge corky mass broke off in Jay’s fingers and the
box plummeted down to the floor of the grove. Julie just looked at
it.