The rain had cleared just after nine and left a clear sky that, further inland, would have presaged frost. Now, closing in on midnight and beneath a coal-black night, bright with frozen stars, Mac stood on the narrow strip of beach and thought about the boy he had left that afternoon. He had taken George up to Hill House just before teatime. Rain beat down so hard against the windscreen he almost missed the turn into the narrow, winding drive. They had joked about the name, ‘Hill House’. The way it sounded like something out of a bad horror film, but Mac knew that for George this wasn’t really such a good joke.
‘I felt like I was abandoning him,’ he said. ‘I wanted to turn the car around and bring him back here.’
‘You did what you had to do.’ The elderly woman standing beside him shifted her sensibly shod feet against the shingle. ‘George knows he has to have a proper place to live, for now at least.’ She jabbed hard against the shingle with a walking stick Mac knew she didn’t really need and, one-handed, turned up the collar on her old waxed coat.
She’s as upset as I am, Mac thought. They had both become very fond of George and both felt responsible for him, Rina because she had been there when Edward Parker, George’s violent father, had fallen from the cliff at Marlborough Head. Mac’s feeling of inadequacy was a little more difficult to define. George’s mother had killed herself, in Mac’s flat, in a place where she was supposed to have been safe. And Mac had not anticipated this; not seen how desperate and lost the woman was. He found it hard to forgive himself.
Mac thrust cold hands deeper into his pockets and stared harder at the ink-black ocean that dragged at the shingle just a few yards away.
‘They were all so damnably cheerful,’ he complained. ‘The carers or whatever you call them. All so “come along in, George, you’ll be fine. Just have some cake”.’ He laughed awkwardly, aware suddenly of how petulant he sounded. ‘I think Paul’s parents would have kept George if they could but they have to jump through the usual hoops first. Seems like a stupid waste of time to me.’
‘I suppose social services have to do things according to their own, mysterious plans,’ Rina said calmly. ‘They can hardly hand a child over to just anyone and to them Paul’s family are just that. An unknown quantity. And he could hardly have moved in with you, now, could he?’ She patted Mac’s arm, her bright-red woollen gloves greyed out against the bleak, stark, black of the night sky.
‘He’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘The boy has survived much worse things than over-cheerfulness and the offer of cake.’
Mac knew he was meant to laugh but somehow it wouldn’t come.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘he has friends who will look out for him. I’d even go as far as to call us family, of sorts.’
Mac nodded, knowing she was right; hoping it would be enough.
‘We should go in,’ Rina said. ‘You’re frozen through.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘Oh, I’m rarely cold, you know that.’
He glanced sideways, taking in the solid figure in the old waxed coat, twin scarves and straight tweed skirt. Topped and tailed by those ugly crêpe-soled boots and that unsquashable, shapeless, red velvet hat. ‘Dressed like that, I’m not surprised. You know,’ he continued as they turned to go, ‘there was a time when I couldn’t even bear to look at the ocean. Couldn’t stand the sound of it.’
‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said and nodded emphatically. ‘Do you still dream about her?’
Mac did not immediately respond. Rina was always direct but this subject – the little girl that Mac had been unable to save – was one that even her straight-to-the-point approach usually diverted around. Mac had confronted her abductor on a beach very like this one. Had seen the child die; forced to watch and been unable to do a damn thing about it. He hadn’t even realized Rina knew until the story had made it into the local papers after someone had taken the trouble to dig into Mac’s past.
Not that they’d had to dig very hard.
A quick web search and Mac would be there, staring out of the page, his picture side by side with …
‘I don’t need to dream to see her. She’s there, every time I blink, every time I see a little girl in the street, every time …’
‘And nothing new on her killer,’ Rina finished for him. She slipped her arm through his. ‘Do you want to stay with us tonight?’
He thought about the flat above the shops on the promenade. Cheerless and, though his stay in Frantham was still only six weeks old, already full of bad memories. He compared this to Rina’s warm, chaotic household where she looked after a house full of lodgers, all retired theatrical folk. Good food, bizarre but friendly company, no ghosts sitting on the sofa. And he was tempted. Sorely tempted. Mac sighed. ‘I’d best not,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to make an early start and besides, I’ve spent more nights at your house than at mine lately. You’ll be charging me rent soon.’
‘Still nothing permanent on the horizon?’
‘A couple more places to see.’ He released Rina’s arm so that she could climb the steps on to the promenade. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said. Then go back to the flat and his other, newer ghost. He didn’t want to tell Rina that he saw them all now. It sounded weak and stupid and melo-dramatic to say that they all lay in wait for him these days. The frail old lady and the sad, blonde woman now joined the little girl he had watched die on that other beach in that other time. He glimpsed them out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of them, like a snapshot printed on the inside lids of his closed eyes. Heard their voices in the conversations of those walking along the promenade, and he did not want to admit, either, just how close he had come lately to being tempted back into the bottle. The urge to crawl inside and not come out again until their faces and their voices and the scent of the woman’s perfume and the stink of the old lady’s house had been drowned in alcoholic oblivion.
But he would not go back there; not give in to those urges. Mac was determined of that. This time he had to face the pain and, he figured, Rina probably did know all about that anyway, without him needing to spell it out. After all, Rina knew everything, didn’t she?
They paused outside her door. ‘Sure you won’t …?’
He shook his head. ‘See you tomorrow, probably. Give my best to everyone.’
She nodded. Stood just inside as she watched him walk away half expecting him to turn around and come back. Then, when he did not, she closed the heavy door to Peverill Lodge and, relishing the warmth and light of the tiled hall, she unwound her scarves and removed her outdoor clothes.
‘Everything all right?’ Tim, the youngest of Rina’s assorted residents, appeared in the kitchen doorway, a mug of tea in hand. ‘He’s not come back with you?’
‘Oh, he walked me home. Wouldn’t stay. I think he’s afraid that if he spends too many more nights here he’ll never leave.’
‘Would that be a bad thing?’
‘For us, no. For Mac, yes I think it might. It would be too easy. We’d just become a new crutch for him. Better for him than the alcohol, perhaps, but just as addictive and dependence breeding. No, for his own sake we’ve got to keep a little distance. Everyone else in bed?’
Tim nodded. ‘There’s tea in the pot. Did he say how George had settled in?’
‘Not much. I don’t think he stayed for long. He said everyone seemed nice, but of course he’s feeling bad about abandoning the boy. Not that he is, of course.’
Tim poured her tea and she flopped down heavily into the Windsor chair set at the head of the table.
‘We all feel that way,’ Tim observed. ‘But I don’t see what else we can do.’
‘Nothing,’ Rina agreed, ‘except make sure the boy doesn’t feel any more forsaken than is absolutely inevitable.’
At that moment George was feeling very much forsaken. He knew there was nothing anyone could do about it and the rational bit of his brain told him that everyone had been going out of their way to be nice to him, but that really didn’t help.
He perched on the windowsill of the room that had been designated his and he remembered another room; that one with a high window that he’d had to climb on the bedhead to reach, but which had a view of the sea very much like this one had. Black sky merged with darkened water and the only way he could define the horizon was to notice where there were no stars. He was relieved that Mac had managed to delay his coming here until the Sunday – actually, everyone had conspired to delay his arrival for as long as they could and he’d managed to spend almost a week longer with Paul’s family than the woman from social services had wanted. To have arrived at the start of the weekend, and have to mix with all of these new people for a whole two days, would have been unbearable. This way, at least, he’d just had to get through tea and a bit of evening telly before being able to escape to his room. Tomorrow he’d be back at school and, though the thought filled him with dread, at least he’d see Paul and at least it would be familiar ground. He never thought he’d welcome the monotony of double maths on a Monday morning, but right at that moment, it sounded almost blissful.
From his post by the window George surveyed his tiny room. Single bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe crammed into the corner and a desk ‘for doing your homework on’ as Cheryl, his ‘key worker’ had informed him. That left, he reckoned, about enough space to turn around in. No cat-swinging in here.
To be fair, he’d slept in far worse places, but he missed his own room with his own things and though Mac had promised to make sure the rest of his belongings were brought up to him in the coming week, George despaired of being able to fit them in. He’d never figured that he owned much, but what he did would be hard to cram into this little space.
Or was he just feeling so down on everything that he was determined it was all going to be bad no matter what?
George sighed. He supposed he ought to get ready for bed, but despite knowing that he was tired out, he’d never felt less like sleep.
The worst bit was the whispered conversation he had heard between Cheryl and some other woman. He thought she might be called Christine. This woman must have been away for a couple of weeks or so because when she came on duty Cheryl had taken her aside and told her about George.
‘The new boy’s arrived, need an eye keeping on him. Poor kid’s been through it.’
‘Oh, the mother … suicide, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah. And there’s a history of violence with the father. Apparently he’s recently deceased too.’
She had spotted George then, standing in the doorway. He hadn’t meant to hear, he’d just been trying to find her to ask if it was OK if he went to his room.
Cheryl had been all smiles. ‘Course it is. This is home now.’
No, George thought, this could never in a million years be home. He thought of his mother. Wondered how long it would be before he stopped being mad at her for leaving him. Thought about his dad; no loss there, but George could probably have done without seeing him die. And finally, thought about the one person Cheryl hadn’t mentioned. Karen. At just nineteen she was five and a bit years older than George. His greatest ally through all the years of abuse and the mastermind behind their eventual escape. He missed her most of all and knew that the chances of his seeing her again were less than remote.
You forgot about a sister that’s wanted for murder, he thought, though Cheryl probably didn’t know about that. So far as George could tell, only Mac and his bosses and Rina knew. Karen had not been publicly named as a suspect for Mark Dowling’s murder and, though a lot of people had wondered why she’d gone away when George most needed her, most had been polite enough to accept his story that she’d been offered a good job and that she needed to take a break from being ‘Chief Responsible Person’ for a while.
A light tap on the door made him jump. Probably Cheryl, he thought. Come to check up on him. Wearily, he climbed down from the window and opened the door. Not Cheryl but a girl he’d been introduced to at teatime. He tried to remember her name. Failed. She looked just a bit younger than him, but it was hard to tell. Blonde and skinny and small with a pinched little face and almost too large blue eyes.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be feeling … you know. Look, I thought you might want to borrow this.’ She held out her hand and proffered what George recognized as an MP3 player and a tangle of headphone wires. It was a cheap, generic thing and bright, virulent green. ‘It’s my spare,’ she said. ‘My aunt sent it to me, that’s why it’s such a vile colour. She thought it was “funky”.’
George could hear the inverted commas. He summoned a half-hearted smile.
When he didn’t move, she reached around the door and set it down on the desk. George noted her familiarity with the layout of the room and wondered if it meant that all of them were the same.
‘It’s got a radio on it if you don’t like any of the tracks,’ she added. Then, as she turned to go: ‘I’m Ursula, by the way. I’ve been here for six weeks and five days.’
‘How many hours?’ George didn’t know what made him ask; just knew that she’d be counting.
She grinned, a slightly lopsided effort, as though she’d lost the habit. ‘Seven hours and …’ She paused to look at her watch. ‘Thirty-nine minutes. My watch doesn’t have a second hand.’
‘Thanks,’ George finally managed as she walked away.
The next house along the cliff top had a single light still burning in an upstairs window. The curtains were still open; the window faced the ocean and could not be overlooked so Simeon rarely bothered to close them. He knew, vaguely, that it was important that he didn’t get undressed where other people could watch and that was why his brother had given him this room. In here, no one could see anyway, so it didn’t matter that Simeon left the curtains undrawn. His brother knew that Simeon hated to cover the windows, he loathed not being able to see outside. Andrew, on the other hand, liked to shut out the dark and sit close to the fire. He said it felt cosy. They had reached a compromise. Simeon knew that Andrew liked compromise. Andrew’s rooms were on the other side of the house. A bedroom upstairs and a sitting room and study down. Andrew did as he pleased in his own space and Simeon didn’t go in there; the curtains might be closed and that might lead to the cold, heart-stopping sense of panic that Simeon hated so much. Besides, those were Andrew’s rooms and Andrew liked his own space. Simeon liked his own space too and Andrew never intruded there.
Simeon’s rooms and the rooms the brothers shared never had their curtains drawn.
Compromise. Andrew said that was what made the world work.
Simeon was still sorting through the newspaper clippings his brother had brought home, collected over the week and presented to Simeon at Sunday teatime. A weekly ritual.
Andrew might tell him that it was compromise that was the most important thing but Simeon knew better. It was order. Routine. Placement. At least in Simeon’s world. He knew that other people didn’t think like that; that very few could understand him the way his brother did. Some part of Simeon’s complex self-appraisal informed him that most people would in fact view him as frightening or at best just downright weird, but he knew, Andrew having told him and empirical evidence having reinforced that information, that he could do nothing to help that. There was the outside world and there was Simeon’s world, and he was on the whole happier when the two did not have to collide.
He spread the clippings on the bed, still thinking about the order and placement of them. It was important to work this out before pasting them into their final positions. Once fixed, they were there forever; visibly there until covered, at which time they changed form. Fossilized, stratified but, like a fossil in a matrix of rock, still present.
His brother was sleeping. He had heard him moving about until an hour ago, then the sounds, dim but audible, of him getting into bed. It was part of their compromise that Simeon would have to wait until morning and after Andrew had left for work before he put these clippings in place. Andrew needed to get some sleep. Andrew said that he thought Simeon was semi-nocturnal. He rarely went to bed before three or four o’clock in the morning and then slept for most of the day before lunch. Simeon didn’t really like mornings.
He studied the clippings again and rearranged them, his fingers tracing the headlines and caressing the photographs. Andrew always tried to get pieces with photographs.
All these people who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Simeon thought. All these fragile lives. The woman hit by a bus; the young couple and their baby killed when their car skidded off a frozen road; the old woman who had disturbed a burglar; the man stabbed outside of a nightclub. He studied their faces, looking for a connection he was sure would be there if only he could see it. Andrew had argued once that Simeon could not really attribute the lives lost to wrong temporal placement. That saying someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time implied that there was a right place and a right time for them to occupy.
Simeon remembered the argument, and he nodded slowly. Of course that was what it implied. ‘If they hadn’t been there, hadn’t been then, they wouldn’t have died.’ Obvious.
And tomorrow, this new handful of disasters would join the others pasted to the walls. The dead, the wounded, the murdered and the suicidal alongside the accidents and the misadventures all logged and catalogued according to Simeon’s complex definition of wrong place; wrong time.