The first thing he thinks of when he wakes up is the burial chamber, and what happened. His body goes hot all over, remembering. He can still smell her, the sweet scent of her hair and the bitter smell of gin. He thinks about how soft she felt. How in some way she needed him.
It comes to him like a sudden revelation, how lonely she really is.
He hears a van draw up outside, and a voice. The post! He pulls on a pair of jeans and rushes down to get there before anyone else sees. The postman is getting a long box out of the van.
‘I’ll take it,’ Simon says.
Lucky or what! He lugs it back to his room. It’s heavy. But that’s not the reason his heart’s hammering in his chest like that. He pushes the box under his bed, even though he’d like to rip it open and have a good look straightaway. Better to wait till he knows where everyone is, when they’re all safely out of the way.
Ellie’s in the front room watching telly. Nina still seems to be in bed. Her door’s closed. It must be earlier than he thought. He showers, finds clean clothes, combs his wet hair, studies himself in the mirror. Not too bad. He runs his hands through his hair to mess it up again. Better.
By the time he gets downstairs Ellie and Nina are in the garden. Nina doesn’t say anything about how late he was last night. Nor does he. He makes toast and takes it out to the table under the tree.
‘We’re going to a new beach today,’ Ellie says. ‘And we’re having supper with Matt.’
Nina’s watching his response. Careful.
‘Do you want to come to the beach?’ Ellie asks. She snuggles up close to him on the bench and he lets her, for once.
‘Where?’ he asks.
Ellie doesn’t know.
‘Portheras Cove,’ Nina says. ‘It’s supposed to be beautiful. Want to come?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Simon says cautiously.
‘But you’ll come for supper?’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then. Yes, I guess.’
‘Good. Since he’s invited us all specially.’
‘What time?’
‘Seven thirty? We’ll make sure we’re back from the beach by six. What will you do? You seeing Leah?’
‘No,’ Simon says. Has she guessed? Did she see them coming back last night? What would she say if she knew what he’d done?
‘We’ll take a picnic, Ellie. Want to help?’
Simon watches them go into the kitchen together. He hears them chatting easily together as they make sandwiches. They seem a million miles away.
Two secrets now: the air rifle and Leah. It’s like he’s moved on to a completely different planet, and they’ve absolutely no idea.
When they’ve gone to the cove, he gets the box out and spreads the different pieces on the bed. There’s an instruction sheet about how to fix on the scope using special mounts, and how to line up the scope using the adjusters. The gun’s got a silencer. His heart beats fast all the time. He strokes the smooth wooden stock, practises holding it steady at his shoulder, flicks the safety catch. He reads everything it says about safety and dangers. How never to carry the gun loaded. Always keep the safety catch on. Carry it barrel down.
Nina would have a complete fit if she saw him now. He has never so openly defied her. There’s no going back now.
One tin of lead pellets was in the box with the air rifle. He pours some into his cupped hand and examines them closely. Each one is a tiny mushroom shape, with a curved top.
He examines the rifle slip for carrying the gun. It’s in good nick. You can’t tell any of it is second-hand.
He makes a set of cardboard targets. He can set them up in the garden, since no one will be back till six, and practise shooting.
It goes well. Over a couple of hours, he definitely gets better. It’s more difficult than he expected, though, to aim right. He gets used to the feel of the rifle jerking as it fires, the way your body absorbs the energy.
He gets it all tidied up and away by three, just in case they’re back early from the beach. He hides the air rifle in its slip in the box, wrapped round with an old sheet, pushed well under the bed. He’ll ask Leah sometime whether he can keep it at her house. If she’s still speaking to him.
He’s not seen her all day. There’s no sign of anyone being in. She’s sleeping, maybe. Sleeping off a hangover. Avoiding him? Or she could have gone out when he was shooting. He wouldn’t have heard anything, then. What will he say when he sees her? What if she doesn’t even remember what happened? He doesn’t even want to think about it right now. It’s been a relief, just focusing entirely on the air rifle.
The next hours drag. He turns the radio on while he makes a sandwich. It’s tuned in to Radio Four, and he catches the end of a documentary programme about scientific experiments on soldiers without them knowing. They mention the nerve gas, sarin. Old men talk about what happened to them. How they thought they were being injected with the common cold virus. Now they’re getting cancers and muscle-wasting diseases. Next there’s a news bulletin. Two more Americans shot in Iraq. A bomb on a bus in Israel. A seven-year-old boy recovering in hospital after being swept out to sea on holiday somewhere.
He wishes he’d gone to the beach now. It’s too hot.
At last he hears the car.
Ellie runs up. ‘We went in the sea and I swam without armbands! There was a real live starfish on the sand and we put it back in the water. And there was a dead jellyfish!’
Over her head, Simon sees Leah get out of the car and go into her house without waving or looking at him. His heart starts to thud.
‘Simon?’ Ellie tugs at him again. He wasn’t listening. What was Leah doing in the car?
Nina closes the car door and smiles at Simon. She dumps a pile of sandy towels on the path. ‘OK, Si? We had a lovely time. Almost too hot on the beach. But it’s perfect for swimming. You should’ve come.’
‘Did she go with you?’ He can’t say her name out loud.
‘Who? Leah?’ Nina glances over to the house. ‘No! We just gave her a lift back from the bus stop. She’s been at work, at Mart’s. Anyway, I’ll just rinse this stuff out and hang it out to dry and then we can start getting changed and ready to go out. I need a shower.’
Simon scowls. Changed into what? And why?
He goes up to his room and lies on his bed with his eyes shut. He thinks of his new gun hidden underneath.
He’s in a forest in Kamchatka, far east Russia. Forest makes up seventy per cent of Russian territory. It spans twelve time zones. The lungs of Europe. Night’s closing in. He hasn’t eaten for days. But he’s been following the tracks of a wild boar for hours and it’s just ahead of him, crashing through the undergrowth. Now’s his chance. He crouches, waits. His feet are numb with cold, but he hardly notices. His eyes strain through the dimming light. He flips the safety catch. Aims at the dense undergrowth. Waits, senses movement, fires. The animal squeals, runs, stumbles, falls, its huge weight crashing to the ground. Blood seeps on to the forest floor.
‘Bathroom’s free,’ Nina calls. ‘Have a shower and put on those new trousers and a clean T-shirt.’
He builds a fire, ready to spit-roast a leg of the wild boar. He’ll have to hang the rest in a tree, out of the way of other predators. The meat juices will run between his teeth. He’ll tear the flesh from the bones.
She hammers on the door. ‘Didn’t you hear? Hurry up.’
Simon yawns. Opens his eyes. Sun slants through the window on to the dusty floor of his room. He sighs.
Matt Davies serves up oven-roasted organic chicken and Mediterranean vegetables with lemon couscous. Nina’s highly impressed, Simon can see. Ellie’s taken in too. She’s allowed lemonade in an expensive wine glass, and doesn’t have to eat any of the courgettes.
‘They’re all home-grown, the vegetables,’ Matt says.
‘What, even the red peppers?’ Simon says, to catch him out.
‘Yep. And the aubergines. In the greenhouse. You can go and see, if you like, while I clear up here and sort the pudding.’
It’s a good enough excuse to leave the table. Ellie gets down with him and they go out into the garden.
The stone walls trap the heat from the day. Even the paving slabs feel warm. The greenhouse door is wide open. Tiny red and green tomatoes are growing on vines in earthenware pots along one side. On a shelf are pots of pepper plants with shiny dark leaves, an aubergine, cucumbers and a pumpkin plant. It smells amazing, a pungent, earthy smell. Ellie loses interest pretty quickly and wanders back outside to look for ladybirds. Simon stands in the green light of so many leaves, watching her. She’s content; doesn’t mind the way Matt soft-talks Nina, flatters her. He can hear their voices from the kitchen. He’s grilling the pudding he’s made, to caramelize the topping, and setting out coffee cups. Nina laughs at something he’s said. She laughs a lot more these days.
The door to the studio is open. Simon wanders inside, runs his hand along the wooden bench under the window, picks up different tools. He runs the edge of the chisel over the back of his hand to feel the rasp on his skin. A stack of paper is propped up on an easel. He knows he shouldn’t, but it’s like a compulsion he can’t resist, to lift the cover and start examining each drawing. Each one is more damning than the one before. To begin with, it’s his mother in varying degrees of undress, and that’s bad enough. He flicks the pages over more quickly. Mostly it’s her back view, her head and shoulders, the curve of her spine. But then there are new drawings, quick charcoal sketches, a few in oil pastels which have smudged where one page falls over another. It’s Leah. Leah leaning over the sink, with her hair falling in sunlight. Leah reaching up to put cups on the hooks on the dresser. Leah sweeping the kitchen floor, Leah at the doorway, a half-smile on her face. And the last one: Leah with her hair held up in one hand, showing her long neck, the curve of a bare shoulder, the line of her spine drawn so carefully you can see where each bone lies just under the skin.
He wants to throw up.
He lets the pages drop back under the cover. He’d like to kick the easel over, stamp the drawings into the dust. But Ellie is standing at the doorway, watching him.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks, so innocently that he can’t speak. Absurdly, tears spring into his eyes and he has to turn away to blink them back.
‘Mum says, are you coming for pudding and do you want coffee?’
He’s spinning, dizzy. The air in the studio is suffocating, full of stone dust. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now it seems to fill his lungs and his eyes and he can hardly breathe. He stumbles past Ellie into the garden. That’s when he sees the stone sculpture. It’s the one Matt Davies was working on before. Emerging from the block of stone are the head and torso of a woman, only she’s changing. Where her legs would have been before, he can now see the curve and slope of a fleshy fish tail, the stone surface scalloped into scales.
The head is wrapped in a soft cloth, so Simon can’t see the actual features. The hands, what he can see of them, are the small, fine hands of a young woman.
He might actually be sick. Any minute.
‘Si?’
He feels Ellie’s small hand touching his. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ he croaks. ‘It was too stuffy in there.’
She sits next to him on the low wall without speaking. Eventually he leans down and picks up a handful of small stones from the path. ‘Want to play? See if we can hit the flower pot next to the wall. The one with the red flowers in it.’
Ellie crouches down to gather her own pile of stones. She looks happy again. It doesn’t take much. He lets her stand closer to the pot, to make it more fair. She’s still hopeless; all her stones go wide.
He hits every time. Each throw’s a little harder. Eventually, he cracks the pot.
Ellie gasps and giggles. ‘You’ll be in trouble.’
‘Who cares?’
She giggles again, but nervously. ‘Shall we go and have pudding?’ she asks.
‘You can. I’m staying out here. Find out when we’re going home and come and tell me.’
There’s no way he’s going back in there. Or speaking to that man, ever. He’d like to smash that stupid statue thing into tiny pieces.
To think of Matt Davies, watching Leah like that, drooling over her as he draws and sculpts. And what about Nina? How’s she supposed to feel?
Simon can’t bear it, the muddle of it all. How it makes him feel. Sick and angry, and wretched. A horrible, messy, confusing feeling he can’t explain even to himself.
He imagines blasting the stupid thing with his air rifle. Splatting it with lead shot. It’s just fantasy to begin with and then it dawns on him: he could do actually do it, for real. No one would know it was him. No one even knows he’s got the gun.
Every time he thinks of Leah with Mr Davies, he gets this awful ache deep in his guts, so bad it’s like he’s going to throw up.
He hears footsteps behind him, but doesn’t turn round.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Nina hisses at him. ‘How rude can you be? Get back inside and make an effort. Now.’
‘No.’
She grabs his arm, but he shakes her off. He’s stronger than her now.
‘Simon, I’m warning you. Now. I mean it.’
‘Warning me of what?’
‘How dare you speak to me like that! All I’m asking for is a few decent manners. We haven’t even finished the meal. He’s gone to a lot of trouble, cooking special things. The least you can do is come and make some sort of conversation. We’re not going until you do.’
‘You can’t make me.’
She looks as if she’s about to explode, but Mart’s shadow appears, and Nina turns to face him instead.
Simon listens to the low voices.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’m sorry, Matt. He’s being — difficult. Pig-headed. I don’t know why.’
Matt laughs. ‘It doesn’t matter. Leave him there for a bit.’
‘It does matter. I hate it. It’s spoiled your lovely meal.’
‘No it hasn’t! And I understand. It’s bound to be hardest for him. That age. Don’t worry about it.’
‘I do worry. I hate him being so rude. Not speaking.’
‘That’s fourteen-year-old boys for you.’
‘Is it? Is it really? And why? They’re not all like that. He used to talk all the time when he was little. I just don’t understand.’
‘No. You wouldn’t. But I remember it only too vividly.’
‘What, you? You weren’t like that, I bet.’
‘I was fourteen, wasn’t I? You don’t ever forget how hard it is. Finding a way through. Survival, anyway you can.’
Simon puts his hands over his ears. It’s even worse, listening to him being understanding. Better to have him and Nina angry, and then he can just hate them.
They go back inside. He hears music coming through the open windows. It’s getting dark in the garden. Moths circle closer to the lit windows. Some insect with small quivery wings brushes against his arm. A fox barks.
Nina stands at the back door, Ellie in her arms. She calls to him.
‘Can you unlock the car? Ellie’s asleep. Time to go.’
He stands up awkwardly, stiff from sitting in one place for so long. He takes the key from her and goes ahead out of the gate. The grass is wet with dew. Matt does not come out to see them off. Nina drives home in silence. Neither of them speaks when they get back either, except for the strictest of functional purposes.
‘Key.’
‘Carry this.’
‘Lock the back door.’
Nina doesn’t even say goodnight.