Chapter Thirty-Nine

Stella hurried on down the road to catch up with Frank, her feet sliding in the snow. She turned and waved one last time to Gareth as the Zodiac skidded then pulled away.

Stella and Frank walked into the village up the middle of the road, big piles of dirty, melting snow along either side, and only room for one vehicle.

‘Where’s the house, Frank?’

‘Along here on the right, I think,’ he said. ‘Your grandmother said it was one of the bungalows, pebbledash. Yes, 21, that’ll be it there, where the boat’s outside.’

‘She’s got a boat?’ said Stella.

‘It could be anyone’s. It’s just there because there’s room on the grass.’

‘Can’t imagine Hedy Keating sailing about in a boat, can you? Doesn’t fit the picture, somehow. I wonder if she’s still the same?’

Frank shrugs.

‘Who’s going to knock? Do we need to be worried about nets tweaking?’ Stella nods towards the houses opposite, where there is already movement in the curtains.

‘Probably best if we get a move on,’ says Frank, ‘just in case. But it’s the fireworks, that’ll be why people are looking out. There’s a load of people heading over there towards the beach.’

‘Bonfire night,’ says Stella, ‘I forgot. I lost track of time.’

‘Probably best if I knock,’ says Frank. ‘She could get one hell of a shock if she sees you. Though, whether she’ll remember me after this long...’

‘Of course she’ll remember you. What are you talking about?’

A small group of children, eight or nine years old, come round the corner jostling and giggling with excitement. Two are squeezed together, bumping shoulders, each holding onto one handle of a rusty old wheelbarrow with a wobbly wheel. Stella nudges Frank as they watch the little procession making its way up the street. A small horde of over-excited children is running to catch up with the barrow. ‘Penny for the Guy!’ the children shout, ‘Penny for the Guy!’

Hedy Keating’s door opens, and she comes out and chats to the children. She goes back in. The kids outside are hopping foot to foot till she comes back. This time she is carrying the Guy, dressed in old workmen’s dungarees with a load of knotted yellow wool for hair sticking out from underneath a flat cap. She hands the Guy over and helps the kids get him propped upright in the wheelbarrow. The kids giggle and jump about in the cold, their breath visible in the night air. Frank and Stella watch.

The kids make their way towards the bonfire, the barrow wobbling along. The Guy keeps tilting and the children giggle some more and do their best to hold him up straight. Stella drops some coins into the tin can one child has round his neck on a string. Other people are doing the same. ‘Penny for the Guy!’ the kids shout.

‘Yep. That’s Hedy Keating alright. See, I was right about the house,’ Frank says.

‘Don’t make it so obvious. She’s gone fat, though, hasn’t she?’

‘It’s her alright. I’d know her anywhere. Ten years, Stella – middle-age spread catches up with the best of us.’ Frank pats his own belly and laughs. ‘You’ll get your turn.’

‘Keep on walking,’ says Stella. ‘Don’t make it obvious, until we’ve decided what to say.’ Stella looks round as Hedy Keating goes back in and closes her front door. ‘Shit, we might have missed our chance,’ she says. ‘She’s gone back in. Go and knock now, Frank, strike while the iron’s hot.’

‘What’ll we say?’

But Stella’s already pushing Frank through the gate and following him down the path. Frank raps the knocker on the front door of Hedy Keating’s bungalow. Stella bites the tip of her tongue so hard it hurts. She watches without blinking for the door to open. Hedy is taking a long time. Stella buries her nose in her cuffs. In the air, the smell of hot dogs and onions frying, and the crackling noise of someone trying to tune the ghetto blaster, the excited shrieks of children, a dog yap, yap, yapping.

Still Hedy does not come to the door. Frank raps the knocker again, then taps his knuckles on the window. Over by the bonfire, not yet lit, children are jumping up and down and waving sparklers, making swirly patterns, some of them trying to write their names in the air. Stella smells the smoky sizzle of the barbeque and hears the low hum of conversation, the slow rhythmic crash of waves on the shore, the Bee Gees now, ‘Staying Alive’.

Then the door opens, and Hedy is standing there, a blank expression on her face. A group of teenagers go past, dragging a tarpaulin load of rubbish for the bonfire: chairs, a table, boxes, a sofa, a mattress, twigs and bushes. Hedy is still standing there looking at Frank and Stella as though she expected them, but now they are there, she can’t quite take it in.

‘You’d better come in,’ she says, standing back to let them in. ‘You’ve come at a good time,’ she says, almost smiling, ‘yes, a very good time.’

Half an hour later, they are back outside.

‘I had a suspicion,’ Frank says to Stella afterwards. They are walking down towards the bonfire. ‘Yes, old Ruby thought as much as well. And we were right. So it was Hedy after all who took the baby, all those years ago. Took him on the very day Muriel died.’

‘I feel bad she blames herself so much for Muriel’s death,’ Stella says. ‘She shouldn’t. That was down to me and nobody else.’

‘Hedy didn’t know any of the background, none of it. And neither did we,’ Frank says.

‘Family secrets, eh? But it’s sad, though, isn’t it? She had to dig up her own baby’s body so she could give him a proper burial.’

‘She never said how they did that,’ says Frank.

‘How could they give him a proper burial? When you come to think of it, they couldn’t have done. It doesn’t make sense. They would have needed a death certificate.’

‘She’s been terrified all this time that one of us would blurt out the truth…’

‘The irony, don’t you see, is nobody knows the truth. Nobody knows how or why the baby died. She thinks it was just one of those things. Could it just have been one of those things, Frank? Could it be that Muriel was innocent after all?’

‘What the final truth is, we will never know. Ruby blamed Muriel. Muriel blamed you, Hedy didn’t know what to think, and me neither. Once the whole thing started, and the story was told to the polis about the abduction and they started looking into that, we were all bound into that story, so to speak, and everyone was intent on covering up their own and everyone else’s tracks. The truth gets lost, Stella, when there’s too many people chasing it. It hides itself away.

Stella sighs. ‘I need a drink,’ she says. ‘It’s been a long few days.’

‘You and me both.’ Frank buys two bottles of Newcastle Brown at the stall by the barbeque. They have the caps taken off and they drink from the bottle.

‘Let’s go down to the bonfire,’ Stella says. ‘I’m so cold, Frank. And do you know what? We’re none the wiser. We still don’t know where the baby is, where Hedy buried him.’

‘She says we need have no worries on that score, Stella. Hedy swears she’s not going to talk. And in her position, you wouldn’t either.’

‘Well, no. So that’s that, then.’

Just then, a posse of excited children comes careering by, waving sparklers. A couple of dads are helping the kids hoist the Guy out of the wheelbarrow and heave him onto the top of the bonfire. He sits there all lopsided, cap askew, looking quite ridiculous, but only for a moment before the flames all around him catch and he topples forward. The bonfire blazes. A loud cheer as a bright plume of fire shoots into the air. The Guy is going up in flames.

Hedy Keating is standing by herself, hands in her coat pockets, staring into the bonfire. They hadn’t seen her coming over.

They walk round the outside of the crowd to where Hedy is standing. For a minute or two, Stella and Hedy stand together, looking into the fire. As the Guy finally keels over and disintegrates, Hedy turns to Stella and looks into her eyes and takes both of her hands in her own. Stella sees Hedy’s eyes are welling up, but perhaps it’s just the smoke from the bonfire.

‘Well, well, well, Stella Moon,’ Hedy says. ‘You’ll be glad that’s the last of it. That’s him away now. God rest his poor wee soul.’ Hedy crosses herself. She inclines her head towards the fire where the Guy is burning and crosses herself a second time.

Stella stares at her, trying to take it in. She looks at the blazing effigy, then back at Hedy. Hedy looks into the fire until the Guy is completely cremated, until there’s nothing left of him at all. Then she crosses herself a third time, turns, and walks away towards the bungalow.

‘I hope now you can do something with your life, Stella. And you too, Frank,’ she says as she leaves.

Stella watches Hedy walking across the grass, knowing how very hard it must have been for her finally to do what she did, knowing that she did it for Stella, for Ruby, for Muriel’s memory, and for Frank, as much as for herself.

Stella clicks open the little blue suitcase she’s still clutching. She pulls out the bag of vomit-covered clothes – Muriel’s silk dress, the sage green cardy, the gold lamé slippers – and tosses them onto the bonfire.

Time to move on.

‘Just a minute Stella, love, there’s one more thing,’ Frank starts to say, ‘before we go our separate ways…’

‘Leave it, Frank,’ Stella interrupts.

She knows what he’s going to say and she doesn’t want to hear it. If he’s about to say Sorry, then Sorry is not enough and it’s more than Stella can bear. Sorry would feel like yet another assault, yet another invasion, yet another onslaught. No more. Never again. Stella cannot forgive and she will not forgive and it is wrong of him even to think about asking: it’s all part of the same vile, abusive thing.

‘Leave it out, Frank,’ Stella says, more emphatically. ‘I mean it. I really don’t want to know.’