Turquoiselle Page 5

  Andy knew his mother, whose name was Sara, was not much interested in him. She had lost interest when she and he got away from her boyfriend, his father, and the bullying and physical violence ended. Not having to protect Andy anymore, however ineffectually, seemed to turn off all maternal connection for Sara. But he had never been close to her, or so it seemed to him, or would have done had he properly considered it. He had never been close to anyone, except in the physical proximity way – hugged and smothered, or thumped about, or – now – thumping in turn, as Andy had been doing not long before, with Iain Cox. Cox was one of the school bullies. One or two years older than Andy, thickset and thin-eyed, he liked to take the piss, and/or take away your possessions. So Andy had used a couple of techniques he had learned from watching his father with one of his own weaker male cronies. Grabbing and twisting Cox’s balls, Andy had brought him down, then knelt on his curled-over body, pummelling his thick-thin face until Cox was whimpering. Andy, by now, did not often attend school. Cox had been unlucky, and definitely wrong in his choice of victim.

  Andy turned up the long house–lined road that led away from the shops, and towards the station. You could get to London in just over half an hour from there. Andy had done it. But he would not be doing it today. He wanted to go home and watch the TV horror film he had got from Video Rodeo at the weekend. He might also play with the golden action figure. He was not sure he was not already too old for such a toy. At just on eleven it was difficult to judge sometimes. Not that Andy would have put it in that way.

  Starting up the station road, Andy realised, belatedly, somebody was on his tail.

  Cox? It seemed very unlikely. Without needing hospitalisation, Cox had still been in a mess.

  Andy set his mind, his ears, his other senses, to suss out who it was that was moving along, about two garden-wall lengths behind him.

  Not the Law, he was pretty certain of that. The Law would anyway have got hold of him before this. “Thieving, eh? Think you made it? You didn’t. Right, we need to have a word.”

  Andy shoved the improvised dialogue out of his brain. He had no real idea what a cop would say, because Andy had never been apprehended by one, let alone a store guard, or any of the shop cameras. His improv came from some old film he had seen, probably, a feature long out of modern date. No, this follower was of another sort– Abruptly the latening sun cast down a shadow on the nearest stretch of wall. It looked most like a huge humanesque toad. That was simple then. It was Heavy.

  Heavy, about Andy’s own age, had arrived at the school when Andy was already often going missing, and Andy had not seen much of him. But he knew the gist of Heavy, including why he had been allotted the name. Heavy was ungainly and fat. But some current policy had, it seemed, said no one must be called fat now. They were heavy. So, the fat kid of about eleven years of age got that nickname. Which he seemed not to mind, barely to notice as mockery and insult. Whatever his given name was, which Andy did not know, perhaps Heavy preferred Heavy to it.

  Andy turned suddenly. He planted himself and glared straight into Heavy’s bulbous eyes.

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, just,” said Heavy, and smiled. He was like the specialised Idiot you sometimes saw in old films too, Charlie Laughton swinging on a bell, or someone.

  “Fuck off,” said Andy.

  Heavy did not grimace or grin. Did not cringe or brace himself. Did nothing let alone go.

  “You are a fucking cretin,” said Andy.

  At that moment a big ginger cat leapt up on the wall, and Heavy immediately transferred all his attention to it.

  Andy should have taken the opportunity to move on, but something odd arrested him. It was Heavy’s look, his way of reaching out and touching the cat – abruptly and weirdly graceful, lavish, full of – of intelligent concentration and a type of – what? What was it? Kindness..?

  Andy stared, knowing he should go at once.

  But when Heavy moved back round again, smiling and still half watching the cat, as if it were the most fascinating sight for miles, Andy did not go. And when the cat began to wash itself, Andy remarked, “See, even the cat can’t fucking stick you. It wants to wash you off it.”

  “Oh, no,” said Heavy’s soft turgid somehow browsing voice, “no, they do that when they do like you. To get your scent in their mouvfs and over them, and taste you and be remembering.”

  “You’ve got shit for brains,” said Andy. “Who told that shit?”

  “My moth–er.” He mispronounced some things, Heavy, curious ways. And he said ‘mother’ as if she were a flying insect: moth-ah.

  “Your mother’s a cunt.”

  Heavy looked back at him. He was still quietly smiling, unphased, happy. “She isn’t a cund. But she’s got a cund. All women do. Like we have pricks.”

  “Go to hell,” said Andy, lamely, he thought. And took off up the road at a rate of knots, leaving Heavy far behind – if he had even reckoned to follow – just as if Heavy were the bully and Andy the weak misfitted coward.

  But he had the stuff from Woolworths. And he had the X–film. And Cox had perhaps lost a tooth. Not too bad for an hour’s work.

  As a rule a film could not be on the cards. But his mother would be out late tonight. She was cleaning the big Kirkpatrick house, six in the evening until about 11 p.m., while the happy owners were off getting rat-arsed. So he could easily watch the film before she returned. He had taken it the usual way. He had a modus operandi, (he knew the term for it), for each and all his thefts. All were slightly, or very, different. His technique here too had never let him down. Part of the secret was, he had found, in casualness. He could act casualness, as he could act quite a few states of mind and body, had learned this, perhaps, as he had how to fight dirtily and to effect, watching others.

  When he reached home, a small flat which had been provided for Sara and himself over an electrical shop, once they had got away, he climbed up the iron staircase and let himself in. There was a front room and kitchenette facing the street, a kitchenette-sized bathroom and two rabbit-hutch bedrooms that looked out the other way across garages to some strips of rear garden, and the rear-ends of houses, and a church sometimes known locally as St Crudes. Andy opened the bedside cabinet in his bedroom. It was his private storage area, and as such Sara respected it. She believed everyone needed secret places, apart from those locked up in their brains.

  A deep shadow by now was filling the tiny back rooms, which faced north. Inside the cupboard was darkness, but to Andy a vague glow seemed to open there, the longer he gazed in. The upper shelf and the lower, boxlike area, seemed to shine with the heaps of booty he had accumulated. Some liquid soap from a cafe toilet, two library books he had taken unseen and not returned, a glass from some other café, and a general litter that included a knife and fork from a school dinner, a watch-strap, safety pins in a container... and so on. Andy slotted today’s trophies with some care in among these already established items, then sat back on his heels to review the assembly, the still–life he had created, was creating, would always, presumably create. One day he would run out of room, of course. But not yet. He piled the bigger and the littler things together with such cleverness.

  Andy stayed there on the floor, his head slightly to one side, then grew aware of this mannerism and corrected it. (Mannerisms were not helpful, he had found; at best they were silly, at worst they could be giveaways.)

  The glow bloomed and floated on the things in the cabinet. They seemed to grow even paler, and lose individuality, as he stared at them, unblinking. Like a soft amalgam of some dim darkish snow.

  When he had had enough he shut the door.

  He had left the lipstick and the toffees out, on his bed, (which Sara had made), for the present-giving. It would not matter too much if Sara saw them beforehand. They had a purpose and so were not secret.

  Stealing, to Andy, had no purpose that interested him or that he grasped. It was what he did, and was good at. Nor had he any interest in, o
r want of, what he stole for brief use – an action figure, a film – such things he would return. The value was never in the stolen article he retained, but in the act. Its skill – and the afterimage. (His skill in taking what he might like, momentarily, to have was simply incidental.) A private affair indeed.

  There was a dead sparrowhawk on the patio paving when Carver looked out the next morning. He unlocked the kitchen door went to see.

  A beautiful form, even dead.

  The curved wings, already ossifying, held his eyes some while. Like fanned and folded greyish palm fronds. And the cruel perfect head. What had brought it down? A consummate predator, it would grip another bird on the wing, everything seen to in an instant. But the hunting was done for this one.

  Perhaps someone had poisoned it, some Keeper guarding pheasants for humans alone to kill.

  Presently, raising the hawk on a shovel, he carried it down the garden and cast it over the outside wall by the shed. If it was wholesome a fox would take it, not if it was venomous; they seemed to know.

  As he was turning to go back to the house, he saw old Robby Johnston ambling crookedly up the lane through the morning trees towards him.

  “Hi, Car. How’re things?”

  “OK, thanks. You?”

  “Oh, not much changes for me.” Johnston stepped off the lane and crookedly ambled up to the wall. Though partly disabled now, by some never-detailed leg injury, which had got worse, it looked, in recent days, he had been and still was a tall, lean man. The ground sloped up just at this point. Standing on the rise between the tree roots and the scuffle of silver-russet leaves, Johnston raised his face to the sunshine. “Wind’s fucked off any way,” he remarked, cordially. He had a handsome face, if creased and lined as if pleated and pressed, and had kept a strong longish mop of steely hair. Late sixties, Carver surmised. He had never bothered to check up on Robby J. No doubt the office had. Maybe now Carver ought to as well.

  “Yes. The wind’s dropped,” Carver agreed. He leaned the spade by a shed door, one of the ones that did not open.

  Johnston glanced at him. “Your lady all right? Haven’t seen her for a bit.”

  “Donna? Sure. She’s at her mother’s.”

  “Oh, they still like going to mummy’s, don’t they. Funny that. Even sometimes when they don’t really like mummy that much.” (“I hate her, I always have,” said Dusa the dead hawk, in Carver’s head, “from seven years of age.”) “In fact, Car, I’ve been meaning to have a word with you.”

  “Sure.”

  Johnston watched light ruffs of cloud blot over the pale, lowish sun. He said, still sky–watching, “I’ve been seeing someone about, the past couple of nights.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mmn. Oh, I know some of them go up and down via the woods, and there’s the odd nocturnal courtship. Not to mention animal wildlife. But this was a man on his ownsome. I couldn’t see much of him. No moon round the first time. It was about 2 a.m. I usually have to get up for the old feller about then, he wants the lav. And I took a look out of the window, as you do, and there’s this tallish bloke, all in black, out in the woods, between here and the cottage. Thing was, he wasn’t courting, or pissing, or walking through. He was standing there. Just standing. I went back to bed in a bit, didn’t stay to watch long. Too old for that malarkey. Wondered if I’d dreamed it, the next day. But last night he was back again. About the same time, and the same thing, just there, just stood there. I couldn’t see which way he was facing, towards your place or mine. I had the impression his face was covered up as well. A black mask or a black balaclava. Should have told you, perhaps, the first time. But now it’s happened twice. What do you think?”

  Five

  He heard the car draw up about four in the afternoon. The sound was different, and he recognised it: a 2000 Chevrolet Monté Carlo SS. Bought about three years ago, second-hand admittedly, as a present from a then-admirer, it was a rich oiled red and gleamed, as it always did in sunshine. Maggie’s car. Looking out from the upstairs window in his ‘playroom’, Carver made sure only Maggie got out of it, and only Maggie had been in it.

  He locked the ‘playroom’s’ door before going down.

  “What lovely tea, Car. I can do with this. The traffic, honestly. It’s absurd at this time of day.”

  “Yes, it can be.” He waited, gauging her as he tried his own glass of soda water.

  “This is quite difficult,” said Maggie.

  He waited on.

  “It’s Donna,” she said, and her well-organised prettiness flushed with a sudden, perhaps hormonal agitation.

  “What’s the matter with Donna?”

  “You don’t sound very concerned,” said Maggie sharply. “I mean, I say ‘it’s Donna’ and you sound – almost bored.”

  “No, I’m not bored. I’m just listening.”

  “And now you sound very patient.”

  He waited.

  Maggie drank her tea. At last she put down the mug and said, “I love my daughter, Car. Of course I love her. But I know sometimes, particularly recently, she can... exaggerate things. To others, to herself. Do you see? That’s my difficulty.”

  “Is she ill?” Carver asked quietly. It was a much safer response than the one she might expect: What has Donna exaggerated?

  “Oh – no. No, I think she’s fine–”

  Fine but not pregnant? He wondered, pondered, kept silent, kept waiting.

  “No, she just – I don’t know how to broach this, Car. I simply don’t. It would be a different matter if I didn’t know you – I mean, we know each other, don’t we? We have done for a few years. And I’m not such a bad judge of men. Even quiet men, like you. Even men your young age, Car. And so – oh shit. Well, here goes. She says,” Maggie put back her artistically styled and blonded head and looked him fiercely in the eye, “you’ve abused her. You’ve been physically violent.”

  He allowed the surprise to show on his face. (He had been anticipating something else, some floundering guess Donna had belatedly made, concerning the work he did. Some notion his ‘office in London’ was not exactly that at all. That his job involved somewhat more than the ordinary, soulless, time-eating yet well-recompensed slog he had always implied it was and did. She had never taken excessive interest in it, and this he encouraged. The long and erratic hours always irritated, and more recently apparently maddened her, but did not make her believe, he had supposed, that it was more than corporate overkill and overtime.)

  “Why,” he said slowly, “does she say that?”

  “Well, fairly obviously, Car,” said fierce-eyed Maggie, angrily, “because she thinks you did.”

  He wished to say, Has she shown you any bruises? He did not say this. He said, “Why should she think that?”

  And Maggie got up. She shouted at him, the way Donna had if not quite so loudly or savagely. “Maybe because you have?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, No. Well. You would say that, wouldn‘t you.”

  “Not necessarily. If I were that way inclined I might agree, and make some excuse.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “No, Maggie. Because I didn’t abuse Donna.”

  “She says you did.”

  Now it was appropriate to say it. “What did I do? What’s the evidence?”

  Maggie flung her arms quite elegantly upward. Her nails were long and faultlessly painted a soft coppery shade. Then she sat down again. She said, in the hushed tone of someone speaking of something unspeakable, “She wouldn’t say and she wouldn’t show me. She said – the marks had faded. And she was – ashamed.”

  “Why ashamed?”

  “She wished she’d hit you back.”

  “I hit her then, she said?”

  “She – implied you hit her.”

  Carver looked out of one of the front windows. The Chevrolet sat smartly, glittering, on the space outside the garage. Across the lane the woods were also at last beginning to burn up red.

  “What do
you want to do, Maggie?”

  “I told her I had to go into Maidstone, and I didn’t say I was coming here. I don’t know what to do. Donna has been – odd.”

  “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  Maggie’s nicely lipsticked mouth dropped open and she stared at him. “What? Pregnant – No. Is she?”

  “I’ve no idea. She told me she thought she might be. She was going to see the doctor, she said. But I don’t think she has. At least, not yet.”

  “But didn’t you try to make her go?”

  “No, Maggie. I didn’t try to make her do anything. Just as I didn’t hit or otherwise abuse her.”

  “You sound so – cool, Car. Is that how you feel?”

  “I’m startled, Maggie. Like you, more than you. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “This is insane.”

  “Yes.”

  “What shall I do?” Maggie asked, but not of him. Or he did not think so. “Honestly, Car, I just don’t know. Look,” she said, seeming to straighten inside her fashionable jeans, her sleek white jumper, her cared-for skin, “she wants to stay on with me for a while. That’s all right. We can do things. Maybe be childish, go to the seaside... Something. I’ll try to get to the bottom of this pregnancy business. You know, Car, I don’t think she is. There’s just – something missing from that, somehow. She isn’t... like a pregnant woman. But could she be? Had you been trying?”

  “I didn’t know we were, but maybe she was. If you mean have we been having sex, then yes. We do have sex. She never expressed the need for a child.”

  “But you wouldn’t – mind? I mean, you’d like it if she had a baby?”

  Carver said, “I didn’t suggest it, but yes. It might be good.” Just the proper amount of cautious interest and agreeability in his voice. A lie. Less than liking the concept, he was utterly indifferent, and had been when, and since, Donna told him.

  “Well. We’ll see how it goes. Better keep it at that. For now.”