postscript

Keiko stood at the kitchen window, staring down into the yard. If she shut her eyes tight she could still just get the sequence to play: the grim-faced woman with her buckets, kicking the door shut behind her and plodding to the centre of the concrete to tip out the water into the drain. But the features were beginning to blur and no amount of effort could map them on to Grace’s face in her imagination, just as no amount of trellis and clematis could disguise the three hulking bins down there and make it look less like a yard and more like a garden, even with the extra space where the slaughterhouse used to be.

She would be sorry to leave. More than that if she were honest; she was scared to leave. The memories were ever a little paler, a little smaller, against the changed reality of the place where she had lived through them, but they might begin to grow again once their only home was in her mind.

The printer was still whirring on the big table in the living room, and she padded through to check on its progress. Seventy pages done and the same to go. It was going to cost her a fortune to post it to Dr. Bryant, but she knew if she took it to him by hand he would make a point of pretending it was nothing very special and, although she didn’t believe he could take away her swell of pride and relief, she wasn’t sure she could resist crumpling up the pages and hurling them at him one by one, or just whacking him in the kidneys with the ring-binder. She squared up the cover sheet on top of the first seventy. Forty-three Cooks and a Pot of Broth: decision-making by committee. The title had been Malcolm’s idea and she knew Dr. Bryant would veto it, but it had made the Traders laugh when she’d presented her final report at the last meeting, and any respect Dr. Bryant might have started out with had been killed off by her swerve into a completely different topic halfway through her first year, despite all the profiling work she’d done.

Keiko heard a car slowing down and glanced out of the window. Surely they weren’t here. If she was working when they arrived, the visit would be off to a very frosty beginning. The car carried on up the street and away.

Of course it was too soon for them to be here. There was a speed-bump at the top of the memorial gardens, where the petrol station used to stand. It marked the beginning of the twenty zone, and she still thought every car was stopping.

No one had minded giving up the roasting pit and picnic tables; everyone agreed three trees to honour the dead were much more fitting. A maple for Mr. Byers, a willow for Murray Poole and a magnolia that most thought a strange choice for Duncan Poole, but a few knew was perfect for Natasha Turnbull.

Forty pages still to go. Keiko took another bundle out of the printer tray and added them to the bottom of the pile. She knew her parents wouldn’t mind that she hadn’t gone to collect them at the airport. It was better for her to be here to welcome them into her home. If she had turned up in the terminal, swinging car keys, it would have shocked them. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, her mother would say. Much more fitting for Malcolm to greet them and bring them home and for her to be waiting. They liked Malcolm. They had cowered at first when she took him to Tokyo, despite her warnings that he was “large, mother, very large indeed,” and even Keiko—who was used to him—had been astonished at how enormous he seemed there, someone to break all the furniture and knock down buildings. But they liked him. They knew he lived here with her, because he answered the phone, but he would stay with Grace and Jimmy during the visit, and they would like that too.

“Don’t you mind?” she had asked him.

“We’ve got the rest of our lives, Keko-chan,” he said. “I don’t mind anything.”

Twenty pages left. She had plenty to do after this, after her visit to the post office to send it on its way. Eight people for dinner tonight, and she was cooking, thinking perhaps her parents would need a little time to recover from their flight before sitting down to one of Malcolm’s dinners. He liked her cooking almost as much as his own now and, although she knew Mrs. Watson was joking when she pretended to scold Keiko for letting him fade away, it was true that he no longer needed extra tape sewn to the strings of his work aprons.

Eight for dinner; she must be mad. She had invited Craig McKendrick as Jimmy’s nearest relation and good company in any gathering, and of course Fancy was going to be there. Keiko smiled to herself. Fancy had taken Mr. McKendrick up on his invitation to call him Uncle Jimmy, and it didn’t seem so odd after a while, when she was installed at his right hand in the long months of meetings and when she walked beside him with a hard-hat and clipboard just like his as the work on the memorial garden finally got underway. Craig McKendrick said nothing. He said nothing either when he saw Fancy and her first fireman out for a drink in the Covenanters’ Arms, and he only mentioned to Keiko in passing that Fancy seemed to have found a good supply when he saw her with her second fireman in the Bridge. Keiko told him gently that she was sure there was nothing serious going on, but Craig wouldn’t admit to the worry she was trying to soothe, and Fancy threatened to warm her arse for her if she scuppered Fancy’s chance to get her own back on bloody Craig McKendrick for all the fannying around she’d had from him. Keiko couldn’t argue.

However, the firemen were in the past now and Craig was home from his travels, and so something Keiko must remember to do in this busy day was write out place cards for the dinner party and make sure they were sitting together.

Fancy would be angry with her.

“He didn’t say a word to Tash,” she reminded Keiko last time the subject of Craig came up. “A foster kid, like me.”

“And like Craig,” Keiko said gently.

“Living with your uncle, who’s king of the hill, is nothing like getting farmed out to whoever’ll take you,” said Fancy.

“He didn’t harm Tash,” said Keiko.

“What? Not like me, you mean?”

“You didn’t harm her either. But you’ll never find peace in anger.”

“He’s not right for Vi and me,” Fancy said. “We don’t all get a fairy tale ending.”

Ten pages. Keiko hoped she’d have time to cross to the river and stand at the railings, look down into the water and clear her eyes. Perhaps she’d even have time to walk up the bark path through the woods to the little look-out platform above the waterfall. Maybe someone she knew would happen by, and she would tell them that she was finished and they would hold out a hand and say well done. Or more likely, she said to herself, they would say what a good thing to get it over and done with just in time.

The town was very excited about the wedding. The town. If she tried she could still just about think of it that way: the town that had been shocked numb and silent after the fire; the town that hated its notoriety and wouldn’t want to be famous for anything.

“I thought the committee would have my guts for garters,” said Mr. McKendrick. “Me changing my mind after all the work I’d done to persuade them about Food Town. Going on about a big splash in the national press, Painchton in the spotlight. But they didn’t mind. They seemed … relieved.”

“Really?” said Keiko. “I wonder why.”

But she didn’t wonder; she knew. Because she had asked them. Sandra and Iain with their affair. Kenny and his sock puppet reviews. Etta McLuskie and her backroom deals to start the Food Town bid early. All of them thinking their secrets were bound to come out, and a big splash would only make the stories worth more to whoever was selling.

She had asked Mrs. Watson too, one quiet evening, about the envelope for you. And Mrs. Watson had told her about those dreadful days—years ago—when the nasty things started up, one after the other and the last one asking for money.

“Of course, I knew it was just nonsense,” she said. “I’ve done nothing to make someone blackmail me. But when I saw you with one in your hand that day and thought it was starting again …”

“Why didn’t you tell the police, Mabel?” said Keiko.

“I didn’t know who it was who’d sent it, poor soul,” Mrs. Watson replied. “Some friend, some neighbour, not in her right self.”

“Her?”

Mrs. Watson flushed. “Grace was going through a right bad spell just then,” she said. “Very low. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d made it worse for her.” She sniffed. “And anyway, they stopped after the one that asked for money, didn’t they?”

They stopped for anyone who didn’t pay, Keiko thought. Anyone innocent. But there were plenty of others.

“Willie bloody Byers just picked a town and set up shop,” Fancy said.

“No trouble with planners and zoning in the blackmail business,” said Keiko.

“And paying him killed my father,” said Malcolm. “Even though Byers knew nothing.”

They all agreed that Grace should never hear the truth—that they’d paid for no good reason, after all. Grace was looking forward to the wedding. And Keiko had offered herself up to all the rituals she must follow, from the borrowed veil to the hen night to the first waltz, which Mr. McKendrick had taught them. But she would be glad when it was over.

There had been such a regular drumbeat of occasions, all different enough to other people, she assumed, but all so much the same to her, with their flowers and toasts, hats and handbags. The opening of the memorial gardens, James and Grace’s wedding, even Mrs. McMaster’s adoption of Fancy in the registrar’s office, where Viola pirouetted with excitement. All the gatherings took Keiko back to Murray’s funeral—the empty coffin lowered into the grave beside his father’s, and Mrs. Poole, after the guests had left, sliding down the wall to the floor, rucking her skirt up to her waist, spewing out the ugliest, most wretched noises Keiko had ever heard, draining the blood from Mr. McKendrick’s face and drying Malcolm’s tears.

The printer came to rest with its fan purring. She took out the last warm bundle and lifted the rest of the pages onto the top of it, making the finished pile as tidy as she could get it, knowing it would never be the same smooth sculpted block of cool blank paper as when she’d begun.