He was led to a seat at the kitchen table, where the wound was tended with biting antiseptic. The blood was slow to cease and Sarah replaced the first bandage almost immediately, the used dressing sporting a dark red smear at its centre.
Patrick tried to keep his voice temperate. ‘I slipped on the way out the school gate.’ He knew he wasn’t pulling off a capable performance and to avert discovery of his trembling hands he palmed them together and thrust them between his thighs. ‘A patch of ice,’ he added.
‘And there wasn’t anyone at the school who could have helped?’
‘The school nurse leaves at four. As I say, I was in the area.’
She wasn’t convinced, pushed a mug containing a bobbing teabag towards him. He reached for it with tremulous, dirty hands, his fingernails containing half-moons of Art teacher grime. Sarah’s hands closed around his.
‘What’s the matter?’
He stilled himself with short, shallow breaths. His back was a mess of knots and pain tore up his spine. This superlative stress and exhaustion, last experienced in the nuclear fallout of his marriage, had returned for another bout. He’d never been threatened with a knife before. The look in Denis’ eyes had been supernatural, psychopathic.
Jenna swanned past the kitchen wearing more make-up than Ronald McDonald.
‘Hold on, young lady,’ Sarah shouted, but her daughter’s feet were already a drum roll on the steps outside. Sarah flung an apology Patrick’s way then hurried out after Jenna.
Realising his opportunity, Patrick darted to Jenna’s bedroom.
It was messy, cold and smelt of cheap perfume. The mirror on her dresser featured blu-tacked photos of familiar classmates: Marie Rallings from 11B; Rochelle McNamara from 11F. The room contained a TV and DVD player, some maths books and – in a touching display of childhood fighting valiantly against adolescence – a small collection of teddies. An unknown rapper was crucified to her wall, topless and bejewelled with thick, gold chains and sovereign-encrusted digits.
He lifted the mattress to find a plethora of magazines and clothes in bin liners. The smell was musky, damp.
Upon spotting the shoebox, he slid the bedframe from the wall and, flipping the lid, found nothing but papers and notebooks, a black, spiral bound diary.
He flicked through it, disappointed that was all she’d been hiding. The majority of it was unreadable, like her sketchbook annotations over the last eighteen months. Patrick wondered if there was much about him in the journal, the way he’d muscled in on her mother and moved from her classroom to her home in no time at all.
The papers the diary had been sitting on weren’t lying completely true and Patrick lifted them as the sound of feet echoed from the steps outside.
The moment he saw what lurked underneath he dropped the bed and slammed it back against the wall. On his flight from the room he noticed the window was open about two centimetres, an unaccountably risky lapse considering what he’d just seen beneath her bed. He was back in the kitchen just as Sarah and Jenna emerged from outside.
‘Did you forget our curfew, young lady?’ he heard Sarah yell. ‘And where did you think you were off to dressed like that? Haven’t you got homework to do?’
‘Yeah. Your boyfriend’s.’ The teenager crashed herself into the house. Anger, like ambition, was a quick-fire, youthful emotion, Patrick reflected. Injustice required longer and longer run ups as he zeroed in on middle age. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slammed a door.
‘I told you. Nothing’s going on.’
‘Oh, right. So you just fucked him. That’s disgusting.’
‘Actually we haven’t even…’
‘Why not? He got a small dick or something?’
‘You do know I’m standing here, right?’ Patrick interjected.
There was a moment’s silence, then mother and daughter went out into the living room and whispered in urgent, angry voices. He finished his tea as Sarah re-entered.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked.
‘It’s a bit delicate. I’m very attracted to you, Patrick, but my daughter comes first. It’s an important year and I don’t want her distracted.’ It was a rebuttal that informed Patrick she still protected Jenna, that he was, naturally, in second place.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I like you…’
‘But?’
‘…I just think we need to tone things down a bit.’
‘Tone things down?’
The hands snaked back. ‘Look… I do like you. It feels right. It’s just that I don’t know that Jenna seeing us together is such a good idea. I told her…’ She tailed off.
‘That there was nothing going on? That you dumped me? That I was a mistake? What?’
‘More or less all the above.’ Her index finger hooked his left thumb. ‘The bottom line is: if – if – we decide we do want to see each other again, and she finds out about us, it’s over.’
‘And do you want to see me again?’
She waited until he was looking at her. ‘Yes. Do you?’
‘Yes.’ The word surprised him. But he’d meant it.
‘In which case, you should go.’
Patrick walked silently to the front door as appalling music blasted from Jenna’s bedroom. On the welcome mat, he turned.
‘You remember that business with Jenna and Denis,’ he mumbled. ‘Has she mentioned it since?’
‘No. Why?’
Patrick and Sarah had never mentioned ‘that business’ either. She clearly assumed the matter was over with, that he’d dealt with it through the proper channels. ‘It’s just that… I’ve seen them hanging around a bit.’ Sarah’s mouth fell open. ‘I mean, it might not be anything to get worried about. It may just be something that blows over…’
‘I… I can’t believe she’s hanging out with someone like… like him. After he…’ She collected herself. ‘I’ll have a word with the little madam right away.’
‘Please don’t. Not yet,’ he whispered. ‘It must be weird enough that a teacher’s in her home. I don’t want her thinking I’m sticking my beak in any further than I should be. I’m just letting you know. I really wouldn’t mention it. Please.’
She wasn’t happy, but had to concede his point was valid. He shouldn’t be abusing his position.
‘She’s all I have left,’ she said, defeat in her throat. ‘Keep an eye on her for me, Patrick.’
He already had been. But how could he tell Sarah about the goods under Jenna’s bed without admitting he’d been rummaging?
‘Sarah. I don’t know how to say this…’
He watched her brace herself. The hardening of the nostrils, the sudden deadness behind the eyes, publicised her expectation of another betrayal.
‘…I have reason to believe Jenna’s hiding cannabis in her room.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘How do you…?’
‘I can smell it. When she opens the door.’
Sarah bounded to her daughter’s room, rapped upon the wood and sniffed the air. Without waiting for a reply she pushed her way in, then yelled out Patrick’s name.
He raced to join her and found her desperately rifling through her daughter’s dirty laundry. He turned off Jenna’s CD player.
‘Where’s she gone?’ Sarah asked.
The window was closed now, but unlocked.
He watched as Sarah pulled out the contents of a chest of drawers, deposited it in a heap on the carpet.
‘Perhaps under the bed?’ Patrick suggested.
Sarah sunk to her knees and began extracting random folders and boxes. Patrick was bracing himself for the finding as she screamed.
She’d unearthed not the shoebox full of papers, diary and grass, but something far more odious and adult.
Patrick didn’t know the first thing about makes of guns. It was a dirty-grey colour, with an odd metal loop at the rear and a snub-nosed end giving it a squat, unbalanced appearance. The trigger was large compared to the hexagonal barrel, and the handle was chunky with gangland runes scratched on one side. Something tugged at Patrick’s memory; it was unmistakably the pistol from the video he’d watched with Christophe.
Sarah cast the gun to the carpet as though it burned her fingers.
Slowly, Patrick lifted the bed and pulled out the two bags of grass, dumped them down beside the weapon. Sarah wept.
‘I’m calling the police,’ she said, before jabbing the phone back and slumping on the armchair beside it. ‘I don’t know what to do… Will there be repercussions if she loses someone’s stash? Will she be accused of… snitching?’
‘I think snaking is the term nowadays.’
Patrick sunk into the sofa and willed the clock to move at a normal speed. In the company of Sarah’s hysteria the present was everlasting, a Dali-like stretching of the clockface. Patrick had been as good as dismissed from the home already but didn’t feel he could leave while she paced, kicked furniture, stared with rabid eyes at Millie’s photograph on the mantel.
Sometime later, there came the sound of breaking glass and shouting. Being nothing unusual, Sarah ignored it, but curiosity led Patrick to draw back a curtain. Across the road, a second-floor flat rippled ablaze.
‘Sarah… Look at this.’
She came to join him, angry flames reflected across her face. ‘Do you think there’s anyone in there?’ she gasped.
By way of reply, the burning flat’s front door exploded in a burst of copper sparks. Two figures flew from the flat and hit the balcony walkway coughing. No locals ran to drag them free, which Patrick thought bizarre. Instead, many seemed to shrink from the spectacle. The pair, a half-naked man of large build and a slightly older woman of mixed race, spluttered their lungs of noxious fumes.
The man, now raging at the fire which cast long, inconstant shadows across the quadrangle, looked familiar. In fact, he looked a lot like an older version of Matthew. Was it Sean Keane’s apartment in flames?
Music started again. Sarah ran to Jenna’s bedroom and smashed her way in.
‘What are you doing?’ her daughter shouted. ‘Have you gone completely mad? Look at the state of my room!’
Patrick followed to find the drugs and gun gone, and Sarah on her knees sweeping her arm under the bed. The window was open and cold air set the curtain in a sail. Patrick strode over, looked down. Using an overflow pipe, three window ledges and rudimentary mountaineering skills, the route up from the alley could be traversed. The blue lights of a fire engine sprayed the brickwork, its accompanying siren yowl dying as the unseen vehicle handbraked to a halt. What truly frightened Patrick was the knowledge that those sirens, those livid flames, were neither the culmination of a series of events nor the start of something bigger. It was life. It was ‘just how it is round here’.
‘Where are they?’ Sarah demanded from her daughter.
‘Where are what?’
Sarah turned. ‘What do I do, Patrick?’
He looked blankly at the space the illegalities used to occupy on the floor.
‘We should tell the police.’ The determination in Sarah’s voice was probably intended to scare Jenna, rather than allude to her own resolve.
‘Are you crazy?’ Jenna exploded, indignation creasing her face. ‘There’s nothing here.’
‘Jenna, we both saw it.’ Patrick hated himself for wading in.
‘We’re having all the locks and windows changed. As of tomorrow,’ Sarah said. ‘This ends. That… stuff never comes back, okay? Ever.’
Jenna persisted in her defence. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You could go to prison for this, Jenna. Oh God. Do I report my own daughter? What do I do, Patrick?’ She continued to use ‘I’ and not ‘we’. His involvement was officially acknowledged as that of a bystander. ‘Whose was it, Jenna?’ she pleaded, shaking her daughter. ‘Whose was it?’ She slapped a stinger across Jenna’s cheek.
Jenna held her mother’s gaze with defiance, condescension. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
With so much anger and disappointment in the home, a stoic daughter remaining tight-lipped in the face of a mother’s rage, it would have been impossible for him to stay. When the debris settled, questions answered or not, Sarah might well have wanted a man about the place, for support, for protection, but they’d coped for a long time without him.
He took a few paces backwards as they quarrelled, then turned and left.
Outside, the fire-fighters had managed to douse the flames and most onlookers had returned to their homes. There was little now to see; only faint curlicues of smoke dimpling the night on their way to obscure the stars.
When Sarah’s landline number flashed on his phone at two in the morning he pounced, but the voice on the other end was unfamiliar and otherworldly. ‘Please come over,’ it begged, in-between gulping silences, the catarrhy lacunae of distress. ‘It’s an emergency.’
‘Jenna? What’s happened?’
‘Please. Straight away.’ She hung up.
Panicked, he tore that day’s clothes back over his body. His mind was blank as he hurried to the main road in search of a taxi. Convinced something terrible had happened to Sarah, fear and adrenaline synthesised into primal shutdown, an urge merely to arrive at the side of his summoner in as little time as possible.
It didn’t take him long to locate a taxi, the twenty-four-hour ubiquity of minicabs being one of London’s only certainties, and persuade the driver to slalom his way to Union City. He was dropped off a couple of blocks short of Bateman, for reasons now clear to Patrick, and once the money had changed hands the cab skidded off without pause.
Lightning in the distance, sweeping closer. And ‘Danny’s Tune’ repeating, repeating. A majestic melody from G to A, from A to D, from D to…
It was so familiar to him now, this tune. He’d been gestating it for what seemed his entire life. The most transcendent melodies always seemed as though they’d always been ‘out there’, demanding plagiarism royalties on behalf of the universe.
…E minor, from E minor to G, from G to A, from…
‘Bollocks.’
It came to him, finally. ‘Danny’s Tune’ wasn’t his. It was Adam’s ‘Find the Ocean’, ‘the worst kind of mainstream, sub-Beatles singalong crap’ Patrick had allegedly ever heard in his life, the song they’d famously argued about in the dying days of their tense studio time together. He’d never uttered the quote attributed to him on their Wikipedia page but, still, of all the tunes on Earth, how had that one managed to invade him so commandingly?
Patrick hurried past a weaving circus of 50CC bikes, child riders yelling at each other with broken voices. The smell of burning fuel, caustic and metallic, like spent matches. A car alarm squealing. An estate map being pissed against.
Bateman block, by contrast, was silent. As was the block opposite. Hours earlier, the fire had set ablaze the community, but not one fire-fighter now remained and the building across from Sarah’s had been reduced to little more than a blackened husk, a charred, glassless stacking of bricks and beams.
A black shape was sitting on the west staircase, three steps shy of the third floor. Jenna had her arms curled protectively around her knees and looked up, dog-eyed, as he approached.
‘What’s…?’
He was immediately shushed. ‘Follow me,’ she said, her words brittle.
Jenna had never been like the other kids, had always seemed to carry baggage, and even in Year Eight had possessed nothing like the nonchalance of other twelve-year-olds. But this was different. Something was very wrong. The girl was as beset and brow-beaten as any adult could ever be.
She led him into the flat. ‘Keep quiet. Mum’s asleep.’
Patrick was taken aback. ‘Asleep?’
Even before the door closed, she collapsed into shivers. ‘I didn’t know who else to call… I found your number on Mum’s phone.’ A long line of grey mascara had etched itself from her left eye to midway down her cheek and at its tip hung a tiny tear. He watched it roll, picking up speed on its way to the chin. The soft pink buds of her lips drew back, revealing a gnawing of white teeth. The light bulb bathed her in ugliness.
Patrick, in dread anticipation, felt water pooling on his breastbone. No teacher training had prepared him for this.
Surrealism poured from Jenna’s mouth. ‘…He was here… They’ll know it… oh God oh God oh God…’
Uselessly, he tried to comfort her with an aged and inappropriate arm on the shoulder. She walked to her bedroom, indicating he ought to follow, and then pushed the door almost closed behind them.
The hairs on Patrick’s neck stalked. Standing with Jenna in her bedroom, as her mother slept through the wall, felt nothing short of treacherous. He wondered whether Sarah had taken one of her sleeping pills, if she’d be passed out for hours.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I…’ She steadied herself against the end of her bed, all traces of youth pulled from her face.
‘Tell me.’
‘He was at my window. He kept knocking. I was worried Mum might hear, so I opened up…’
‘Who? Who was at your window?’
‘…Denis.’ She could barely say the name.
‘Was it his gun you were keeping?’
She looked at him askance. ‘What do you think, Patrick?’
Her use of ‘Patrick’ startled him. In that moment, there was something like understanding between them. He wasn’t the teacher and she had stopped being the pupil. And then she collapsed in tears on the bed and the understanding dissipated. But it had been enough. Enough time for her to suspect Patrick knew more than he was letting on. Enough time for him to realise he didn’t know the half of it.
Why had she contacted him? Why not a friend? Why not her father?
‘He was…’ she sobbed into the pillow, drawing the duvet around her.
In an attempt to coax the story from her, he crouched by the bed, offered a tissue. ‘Why did you call me? What is it you think your mother can’t help you with?’
For a long while they remained in their places. A gentle rain auditioned at the window.
‘I killed Denis,’ she said.