THE NEWS WAS not good. Paul asked how long, as if he were looking at lit X-rays in a consultant’s office. End of the week. The staff was skeletal. The operation was being moved to the East. Far or Near? Who knew? The guy even suggested that Paul would have been let go long before now, but for his circumstances.
‘My circumstances.’
‘You know.’
Paul shook his hand, left the building and ran to where his bike was locked, got honked at twice on the ring road, cutting across lanes, breaking lights. His daughter was standing out on the close’s dust track in her pyjamas. ‘I felt safer outside,’ she said.
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘She’s not in her room.’
Paul let his bike go, and heard it hit the ground behind him. Up the stairs: Martina’s humid room, his own, the girl’s. He was shocked to find nothing; more than anything he was shocked to realize, once again, how disappointed he was to find nothing. There was no answer from the caravan. He picked up his bike from where he had dropped it and coaxed his daughter back inside, insisting that Martina would be back.
‘Simple reason?’
‘There is,’ he said. ‘There has to be.’
He told her about the job. He said that he was delighted. To prove it, he burned his suit in one of the empty oil drums on the site. They sprawled out the back, splitting Martina’s last small bottle of rosé from the fridge, as ribbons of black smoke from Paul’s burning suit tangled upwards into the clear sky, and not once mentioning that there was still no sign of Martina. They slept in, were fairly silent over lunch and walked the mile and a bit that it took to reach the centre of the town from their close. It was mid-afternoon and they felt like aliens. It was, Paul said, like a coach tour of the Balkans, where you take a pit-stop in one of those dying hamlets that had been the centre of some medieval empire. A few upright chairs outside open terrace doors, bearing magazines so out of date they must be used as fans. A handful of lurchers sniffing around the base of a granite statue. A stack of bikes unlocked at the top of the street. The hum of a wireless through someone’s open window.
The shops were desolate. Even the minimart, usually stocked with tat for passing traffic, felt empty. Paul bought a net of satsumas and a Sharpie of royal washable blue for the girl, but there was nobody to pay. He tapped a coin’s rim against the checkout, called through the ‘Staff Only’ door and, when nobody answered or came through, poured a fistful of spare change onto the rubber belt without bothering to count it. There was footpath for half a mile of road from the edge of town, and none for the second half-mile after the supermarket. They stepped into long grass and briars whenever they heard a car coming. Twice they made way, and twice nothing came.
He waited until almost eleven, when it was starting to get properly dark and there was a light clearly glowing from the caravan.
‘I’m going up to ask Marcus.’
‘I’m coming.’
‘Stay where you are. Me and Marcus need to have a proper chat.’
He made that last bit sound like there would be raised voices, language. She was better off sitting tight. When there was still no answer from the caravan, he tried the locked handle. No Marcus. Not much of anything, except for some class of bed, visible through a gap in the curtains, where Marcus must have got his head down. With the light off his bike, he went into the townhouse nearest the caravan.
‘Marcus?’
His voice sounded thin, hollow, in the black cavities that were intended to be rooms. He thought he could hear footsteps. He started whistling. Had he ever whistled before? He couldn’t remember ever whistling. Yet there he was, trying to hold still a light that was dwindling fast, edging through the shell of a half-built apartment block, and whistling for all he was worth to keep himself company. All the floor’s crap had been swept into a single pile in one of the rooms: broken pallets, buckled screws, scraps of piping, foam pellets and dust. At the centre, what must have been the entrance hall, a wooden ladder leaned up into a fathomless rectangle.
‘Hello?’ Flood answered on the ninth ring, just as Paul was preparing to speak to the recorded message.
‘Flood?’
This was the following day. Paul had promised his daughter, when he came down from the site, that he would try Flood. She had written out what to say while Paul watched her. She was still in her pyjamas. Her hair was pure black, just like her mother’s. The hand holding her Sharpie had little patches of eczema around the knuckles. Though twelve and getting lanky, she had looked small and vulnerable with her clipped accent and her series of bullet-points. Paul hadn’t wanted to call Flood, in case Flood pressed about rent that was owing, but the girl insisted.
When he answered, Flood sounded as if he was waiting to hear from someone else.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Paul. From number seven?’
‘Yes?’
It wasn’t clear whether or not Flood had any idea who Paul was. It was weeks since he had called in. Apart from that first visit, he and Paul had hardly exchanged two words. Paul needed to speak quickly, before Flood hung up.
‘I need to speak with Marcus.’
‘Okay . . .’ The Flood of a few months before had been so sure of himself, with all the time in the world, shooting the breeze with the ladies, full of lame flirts and riddles. This Flood had a way of sounding cornered, one that seemed to dread what Paul might ask of him. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I just need to talk to Marcus.’ Paul didn’t want to say about Martina going missing, and he reckoned Flood knew nothing about her and his nephew. ‘Just some stuff on site.’
‘Okay. I’ll pass on the message.’
‘Can you not give me his number?’ It sounded as if the line had gone dead. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
‘Can you not give me Marcus’s number?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘No, as in you won’t give me Marcus’s mobile number?’
‘Can’t.’ The far end of the line rustled. ‘Can’t, won’t, same difference.’
‘I’ll go up myself and see him tonight so.’
It was then, only then, that Flood cleared his throat and spoke something resembling the truth. ‘He won’t be there tonight,’ Flood said. ‘He won’t be there tomorrow night either. He hasn’t been on site since the end of last month.’
‘Excuse me?’ Paul knew he shouldn’t have come across as stunned as he did, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘His light is on in the caravan every night. I’ve seen him around too.’
‘The light in the caravan’s been on a timer for the past three weeks. Maybe you saw his shadow, but it wasn’t Marcus. There wasn’t funds to keep Marcus on site. He was offered a start in Reading and he took it.’
‘So who’s been looking after the place?’
Instead of answering that, Flood rattled on awhile about times being bad and not getting better any time soon. All these weeks, had Martina been dolling herself up to visit an empty caravan? It was as if, Flood was wittering, they were back where they’d started and the whole shebang never happened: places closing all around you and no life anywhere.
‘Are we nearer completion your end?’
‘Completion?’ Paul had no idea what Flood was on about. ‘I wish.’
‘That family from the midlands might be moving in. Any day now.’
Flood had promised the same thing two months ago. There was no family from the midlands. The family from the midlands was a mirage, a dim collective ruse shimmering out there on the horizon.
‘Fantastic,’ Paul said finally. ‘Us and all the other neighbours will be sure to throw them a huge fucking beach party when they land.’
‘Then where did she go?’ The girl was sitting on one of the chairs at the picnic table. Paul didn’t tell her that Marcus wasn’t around, only that Flood knew nothing. Even as she asked that, her voice seemed to be breaking. ‘We saw her go up. Remember?’
The girl cried. She was probably crying for Martina and her mother all at once. Mostly, she had seemed a bit dazed for months. But the shock had been short-circuited for his daughter as well, Paul could see, by Martina’s being there, being so like Helen and so prepared to think the best. Now Martina was gone as well. Now the forty-eight hours which the officers had said see most similar cases resolved were almost up. Paul went around to his daughter’s side of the kitchen table and held her small face against his T-shirt’s logo.
‘It’s okay,’ he kept repeating. ‘It’s okay.’
‘So be it.’
They said nothing about this either, just as they had said nothing to one another about Helen. They said nothing about Martina’s absence, her possible whereabouts. Paul withheld the fact that Martina had been pretending to wander up the close to pay visits to someone who had weeks since left the country. Had she, after a fashion, followed Marcus to Reading? That didn’t sound like the kind of thing Martina would do, any more than Helen. And what if she had done? Good luck to her, Paul thought. His daughter said nothing to Paul about the words on the kitchen window that she and Martina had found, washed away, and couldn’t help chirping at every opportunity since. Paul said nothing to her, yet, about what he had seen up in the townhouses. Nor did he make any reference to the way in which his daughter had moved into her auntie’s room, was sleeping in her unlaundered bedclothes and had taken to wearing her ochre lip-gloss.
In fact, they said nothing about Martina to anybody. There was really nobody to say anything to. Martina and Helen had been one another’s only family. Paul didn’t report Martina’s absence to the authorities, nor did he decide not to. He just never got around to making a phone call. When his daughter asked him if he was going to, he said he was afraid of how it would make them look to the outside world. He said he was afraid she would be taken from him.
Slattery started putting in appearances. They knew it was him, even before they spoke to him. He had the very demeanour Flood had described – of one who forgot that he no longer owned that plot, making free with all the unoccupied houses and their flotsam. He came down the hill between the row opposite and the townhouses, across the green area that still had no grass seeded on it. One day he just seemed to fade into view out of scrub and bushes. After that, he came down so frequently that there were tracks from the tyres of his quad in the long grass on the hill up to his place.
He looked in his late fifties at least – a small man, though it was hard to tell since he never climbed down off the quad; as if coming in contact with this earth would wither him in an instant. He wore a tweed fedora and one of those quilted sleeveless horsey gilets in navy blue. The girl even referred to his quad as his horse. She spent her afternoons at the window of the master bedroom, surveying the close. She kept Martina’s penniless phone charged and with her, in case of any calls or texts.
‘Here he comes!’ she would shout down through the silent house. Or ‘Your friend is coming on his horse.’
Slattery had nothing in particular to do. He was just snooping. He appeared at the same hour most evenings, after the spite had gone out of the sun and before it had started its slow descent, cruising from shell to shell in low gear. Sometimes he would come to a standstill, raise himself slightly off his saddle and peer into each abyss. Sometimes you could see him shake his head before inching forward again. He came up their side of the close once.
‘He’s coming our way!’
Slattery paused right outside the front window of Sheila’s empty place. Paul had gone upstairs to watch as well. Slattery was having a proper gawk in through the bay window of number three. He shook his chubby head again, reversed back out into the dust and disappeared into the rear access between number three and number four. He was out of sight so long that they thought he must have gone home and they had somehow missed his going. Next thing, he was at the end of their drive. He was braking.
‘Can I help you?’
Paul had run downstairs and stepped nonchalantly out onto their doormat. In Marcus’s absence, Paul had appointed himself unofficial site watchman. Not that there was much to watch over. It was just something to do, a distraction from the aimlessness of their days.
‘I beg your pardon.’
Slattery was hamming up surprise when he said that. He was pretending he had no idea that anyone lived there. He pronounced ‘pardon’ as if he had a hard-boiled egg lodged on his tongue and the word rhymed with ‘Gordon’. Was Slattery’s first name Gordon? He certainly looked like a Gordon, to Paul standing there unshaven and thick with the tedium of another stifling evening.
‘I suppose,’ Slattery said, ‘this makes you and me neighbours.’ He pointed backwards up the hill, in the direction of the horse-chestnuts. He smiled a smile of benevolence. He was, after all, treating Paul as an equal of sorts. ‘Howdy, neighbour.’
Slattery was assuming that Paul knew all about him. Paul knew all about him, but really did not want to give Slattery the satisfaction. Paul sauntered down the drive, taking one hand from a pocket of his shorts.
‘I suppose it does,’ he said. Slattery’s hand, when they shook, was cold and damp. It was also strangely small. It wasn’t like the hand of a grown man. It was slender, weak and weightless. ‘Paul.’
‘That’s right,’ Slattery said. ‘Paul.’
‘I didn’t quite catch—’
‘No, no,’ Slattery said. ‘We know all about you, Paul.’ He removed the fedora. He had arrived with the air of one whose words came preformed, had been tested many times in their own echoes and proven to be sufficiently appropriate. ‘You have our sympathies, Paul.’
Two minutes before, Slattery had been doing his little shock routine. Now here he was, not only admitting that he’d known they were there, but admitting, too, that he had read all about them in the papers. Or, rather, some anonymous plural (in which Slattery included himself) had known and had read all about them.
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘Forgive me.’ Slattery replaced his fedora, back to business, a tad put out by Paul’s bluntness. ‘Myself and Hazel.’
Nobody was entirely sure where Slattery made his money. That was what Flood had told Helen. The one consensus seemed to be that nobody with a name like Slattery could be to the manor born. Dog food, some said. A handful of factories around the country. There was talk, too, that he had married into a dog-food fortune and had acquired the nobility of dog food overnight.
‘Haze is a big fan.’
‘Haze?’
‘The little lady.’ For a second there, Slattery looked unsure if Paul and he spoke the same language. ‘Hazel.’ He squinted. He seemed to reach the decision, right in front of Paul, to speak slowly to him. ‘I call her Haze. She’s a huge fan. Of yours.’
‘Of mine?’ Paul wondered if Slattery was making fun of him. ‘Aren’t they all?’
‘I beg your pardon.’ There it went again, the hard-boiled egg. ‘I phrased it tactlessly. Forgive me.’ It was becoming obvious that Slattery had an errand to run, that he was not trucking further distraction, that Paul was the errand. ‘My little lady has admired how you have disported yourself through this whole . . .’ he threw one hand away from himself, seeking the precise word ‘. . . trauma?’ Was ‘trauma’ the precise word? Had Helen been beaten to a pulp and found naked from the waist down in some shore-bound field up the coast, gnawed to the bone by crows and stoats? Was that the truth Paul had deleted from his hard drive? Slattery looked so positive that ‘trauma’ was the precise word. ‘Haze has all the cuttings and she talks about you all the time. She has asked me to tell you that if ever there is anything we can do for you, not to hesitate.’
Slattery did something with the right handle of his quad. It locked into reverse and twisted backwards, away from Paul.
‘Anything at all,’ Slattery was calling from the dust pluming around him. What did Slattery have in mind? Babysitting? A spot of landscaping? ‘Anything.’
‘What was all that about?’ the girl asked, when her father came back into the house. She had been watching from upstairs. The last thing she needed, Paul figured, was Slattery’s little lady’s obsession with their ‘trauma’.
‘Who knows?’ Paul said. ‘A prick.’
Slattery came back about an hour later. It was just starting to get dark. He didn’t knock or anything of the sort. He simply braked at the end of their drive once again and flashed the headlamps of his quad. Paul and the girl were sitting at the flicker of their flat screen. The room lit and blackened and lit again in a few short jabs, like sheet lightning minus thunder.
‘Come for supper.’ The voice still belonged to Slattery, but the person was scarcely visible behind the beam of the quad. Just the outline of the fedora. ‘Haze insists.’
‘You’re very good.’
Paul had come back to the front step. He had his top off, was in the shorts he wore cycling and in bed. He was shielding his eyes with his left hand. He was speaking down to the beam, through the engine’s grumble, to the disembodied voice behind it. Supper chez Slattery sounded like a night in hell. Slattery may well have been the prick everybody said he was, but he was still the only prick kind enough to invite them over.
‘Shall we say the Friday of next week? Sevenish?’
‘Perfect.’
‘Not this Friday. We have to go away. The following Friday, next week.’ He was determined to be understood, Slattery was, amid the noise and the glare. ‘Not this one coming. The next one.’
Paul’s eyes were aching. ‘You’re very good.’
Two men moved into Sheila’s empty house. They worked in construction, judging by the cut of them: jeans and boots spattered with chalk and paint. They looked, indeed, like brothers. They were gone all day every day, weekends included, in an old station-wagon with strange plates, which they parked at odd angles to Flood’s barrier, ferrying all manner of gear to and from the house. Their patio door was open every evening, through which wafted loud trashy rock and the smells of frying meats. Paul referred to them as ‘the Poles’, though they could have been from anywhere. They certainly didn’t appear to have a word of English, and they never waved or acknowledged the presence of their neighbours.
‘I’m Paul.’
Paul had rung their doorbell and the one who answered looked askance at him and then said, ‘No, thank you,’ like those words were his only learned phrase and served as an answer to everything. Maybe he thought Paul was selling chattels door-to-door.
‘No.’ Paul laughed. He waved up the close. ‘I live there. In number seven.’ Then he pointed at himself, deliberately. ‘Paul.’ He held out his hand to be shaken.
The Pole just looked at it, confused, and said again, ‘No, thank you,’ stiltedly, before closing the door. Paul stood there almost a minute, considering knocking again, laughing some more and shaking his head. All the curtains had been removed. Sheila’s furniture was stacked in the front room. Through the double doors to the kitchen there were units and a row of sleeping bags on the tiled floor.
The sun kept beating. The sun kept beating until the whole world, it felt, was dried to parchment. The back garden remained clumps of topsoil, with only scraps of limp weeds here and there. Martina’s creepers had not thrived. A slip came through the letterbox with a notice warning about the danger of fires started carelessly. It lay there for days among flyers for takeaways and bank letters with red print on them. What fires there were, they thought, were way off in the distance and seemed confined to gorse. Then Marcus’s caravan burned to the ground. It must have been in the small hours. It must have blazed hard, but they heard and saw nothing. One morning it was walls melted inwards, innards still smoking.
A different night, Paul was woken by the sound of water splashing downstairs. At first he assumed that it was some sort of wish-fulfilling dream and just lay where he was. When it kept running, he went down and found the cold tap in the kitchen sink on full blast. They must have left it on by accident. He sat up the next night, the cold tap on, and the same thing happened. Three to five o’clock. The flow got strong and the water properly cold. Paul figured that the mains back on at night was a secret few enough knew about. They set alarms, sleepwalked down to the sink and filled their bottles. Some nights they were more awake, and sat up tippling from Martina’s plastic picnic glasses as if tap water were Prosecco. They felt merry and full of hope, while yet another glaring dawn grew gradually across the back wall.
The girl found fortune cookies from the Chinese takeaway Martina had bought. They were in a drawer. Each was still in its cellophane, tasted of nothing but sugar and had a little rectangle of paper in its hollow centre.
‘Soon life will become more interesting,’ the girl read.
‘Don’t look down upon yourself,’ Paul read.
‘In the end all things will be known.’
‘You are a person of another time.’
The Poles seemed to multiply and disappear at will. You never saw the same head twice. Neither of the original brothers, as Paul called them, was anywhere in sight. There were times he thought there was nobody in number three, nor ever had been. Other evenings there would be three jalopies lined up outside, or you would glimpse half a dozen of them, all men, walking in a pack on the hard shoulder of the ring road with bottles of water bought in the same discount supermarket where Martina had got the sun-loungers.
Then it was August. The mains had dried up altogether. Like the Poles, Paul and the girl were surviving on bought bottles. They would walk to the discount supermarket and wheel a trolley full of translucent litres packed in cubes back along the road and just leave each trolley to die a slow death up on the site. They drank from bottles, made tea with it, rationed what they drank. The attic tank was dry. Its pipes, without any current flowing through them, made occasional whale music. They filled a basin in the bathroom every morning, and took turns to wash in that. The girl went first, since washing in his daughter’s water didn’t bother Paul. Last thing every night, they used the day’s basin to flush the toilet, which was filled with scraps of roll.
There was comfort in the noise the Poles made. They could be heard most nights in the garden of number three, talking loudly, laughing. It always sounded like they were drinking, but jolly with it. The racket made Paul feel safer and the slight murk of the evenings more approachable. For a while, he and his daughter even started sitting out the back again, watching the sun set somewhere over the wall and the hedgerows beyond.
‘What’s the chances of them feeding us dog food?’
‘Stop,’ Paul said.
They were at Slattery’s door when she said that about the dog food. They had taken the shortcut up through the slope of high grass. They considered going the long way round, turning right out the road, trekking the hundred yards or so, then turning right again when they came to the entrance to Slattery’s avenue. But it was far too hot for such formalities. They had cut through the undergrowth, skirted the mountain of rocks and muck, and walked in the tracks Slattery had flattened with his quad. She had walked up one track, Paul the other. After two-thirds of the distance, the long grass became lawn, staked saplings and gravel. The tracks Slattery’s quad had ground went around to the rear to what looked like stables. A sign said, ‘Goose eggs for sale’. Peonies spilled out of decommissioned cannon shells.
‘Guys!’
They had heard hounds yelping and Slattery whistling. When Slattery dragged the door towards himself, half a dozen things chimed and rattled. He hadn’t struck Paul as a ‘guys’ kind of guy, but you never can tell. Slattery looked them up and down. He had made it sound informal when they’d spoken. So informal that Paul and the girl hadn’t even bothered to change before leaving.
‘Just the pair of you,’ he said. ‘We were expecting herself as well.’ When Slattery had referenced their trauma so delicately, Paul assumed that he knew all about Helen’s disappearance. Slattery pointed at the stubble Paul had let grow into a proper beard. ‘Love the whiskers.’
The front door must have been seldom used. They had to wade through walking sticks, shotguns and golf umbrellas. Slattery parked them in a room with a white carpet and the smell of something rotting.
‘Darling!’ Slattery was yodelling into his hallway’s vaulted silence. ‘Haze?’
When Hazel neither appeared nor answered, he said, retreating from the room, ‘She’s very excited about your coming, perhaps even a little nervous.’
Paul made a face at his daughter in the three-seater that backed onto the centre of the room. Behind the sofa there was a table with an antique rotary-dial phone that looked carved from ivory. They weren’t as flush as Slattery would have you think. The upholstery was threadbare at the edges and had wisps of horsehair hanging out of it. The carpet was stained and worn thin. The girl whispered that the sofa felt damp. She moved onto a leather ottoman that had several substantial gashes in it. The coffee-table was a battered trunk covered with glossy dog magazines that had mug rings on them. Paul held up one of the magazines and mouthed, ‘Dogs!’
The air felt damp, which probably accounted for the fire being lit with slabs of rough turf. When Slattery returned alone, bearing a silver salver of drinks already poured, Paul was standing inspecting the over-mantel.
‘Gilt,’ Slattery said.
‘What?’
‘The frame. It’s gilt.’ They both grinned at the misunderstanding, Slattery more so than Paul. ‘Gilt without the U in it. The best sort.’
‘Very good.’
With every chuckle, Slattery shook. Paul watched him shaking, the velvet of his jacket, the ripples of burgundy corduroy and the quivers of flesh visible beneath. His skin looked fresher, more youthful, than Paul had remembered. Brow all perspiration beads, Slattery handed drinks around.
‘Please.’
Tonic mostly, two lemon wedges and dry gin measured out by the thimbleful. The girl as well. It seemed to be the only option. Slattery flopped into the long sofa and Paul tried to ignore his host’s feet not quite reaching the white carpet.
‘Sad news.’ Slattery nodded backwards through the long windows down the hill. He didn’t look all that sad. ‘About our friend Flood.’
‘I haven’t actually heard.’
‘How have you not?’ Slattery looked delighted to be the bearer of the news. ‘Front-page stuff. On the run. Creditors galore, all wondering where on earth Signor Flood has scarpered off to.’
Paul felt stung on Flood’s behalf. He wanted to say that Flood’s disgrace explained Slattery’s recent presence on the manor, but there were hours yet to grin through and Flood hardly deserved Paul’s loyalty. Instead, he stirred his drink with his little finger.
‘Forgive me! Were you pals?’ Slattery slid to the edge of the sofa until his feet were just about grazing the carpet.
‘Me and Flood?’ Paul’s daughter was staring at him. She looked unsure of what her father would say. ‘Eh, no . . .’
‘Portgal.’ Slattery missed the middle vowel both times he said that. ‘Apparently our friend has been sighted in Portgal.’
‘Which has no U in it either,’ Paul said. ‘Apparently.’
‘Pardon me?’
Hazel was unexpected. She came out of nowhere, with so little ceremony that she was in the middle of the room before anyone noticed her entrance.
‘Ah, Haze,’ Slattery shouted. Was she deaf? ‘Good girl. Now’s the chance to meet your hero.’
Paul had pictured some fusty dame in twin-set and gardening gloves. The real Hazel was half Slattery’s age. That, or Slattery wasn’t as old as he initially seemed. What was the phrase he had used? ‘The little lady’ . . . She was poured into a class of flamenco combination: black ribbed dress and thick heels. She had a white perm gelled back at the temples, heavy black mascara and, odder still, satin elbow gloves that were snipped coarsely at the fingers to reveal nails polished black as well. She said nothing. Even when Paul said, ‘Thank you for having us,’ Hazel said nothing.
‘How are we looking?’ Hazel did something Slattery took as assent. ‘Good girl. Smells delicious.’
She led them through to an open-plan modern kitchen littered with dog bowls. Was she mute as well as deaf? They could have been forgiven for thinking their hostess was mute. She had uttered zilch so far. She had barely acknowledged them. Not until she turned from the oven towards them, with a flat casserole dish cupped in silicon pads, did she finally move her lips. ‘Paul.’ Her voice had a tremble in it. So did her hand.
Slattery stood, wielding a serving spoon, and ladled onto their plates hefty portions of meat and dumpling and pearl onion all bound in thick brown gloop. ‘Can’t go wrong with goulash,’ he said. ‘Please tell me there are no veggies among us.’
‘No.’
The look on the girl’s face said what had occurred to Paul too late, namely that one or both of them could have excused themselves from the main course on ideological grounds.
‘No,’ Paul said. ‘Both carnivores.’
‘Paul.’
Twice Hazel had spoken now, and each time she had mumbled the same name. Paul glanced first at Slattery, then at the girl, searching for some clue of what was expected of him.
‘Forgive me,’ Slattery said. ‘Drinks.’
Slattery placed a pitcher of iced water at the centre of the dining-table and disappeared into a different room on the other side of the kitchen. They could hear bottles chink, their host chuntering to himself. The ice was melting quickly in the pitcher, almost visibly, at the surface of the water. When it was first put down, Paul could see his daughter through it, distorted by the pitcher’s curves. Then condensation was forming on the outside of its glass, making it opaque and his daughter less visible. It was thickening. It was gathering into drips that streamed down and made a wet ring on the tablecloth. For months the inside of Paul’s mouth, its roof, tongue and throat, had scraped like sandpaper. Without thinking, Paul reached forward and caught a falling drip with the end of one finger before the drip hit the bottom, and he sucked it. It was so beautifully cold.
‘Do help yourself.’ Slattery had a bottle of red in one paw, a corkscrew in the other. His face was pure puzzlement. ‘By all means.’
‘Paul.’
Was Hazel’s speech confined to one syllable? Slattery poured wine into goblets that had stems stained blue, insisting that their guests tuck in while the food was still hot.
Talk was of Flood. The cowboy Flood was. ‘Cowboy’ was the word Slattery kept using. Paul caught his daughter’s eye. The girl had yet to touch her food. She hadn’t even handled her cutlery. She was staring at her plate. Paul took a lump of bread from the middle of the table and swabbed it with sauce. It tasted of nothing except salt and grease.
‘Are we all grand?’
It was Hazel who said that. Seated now, she had spoken once again. She scarcely moved her lips when she spoke. Her voice was feathery, begging extra attention.
‘Grand,’ Paul said. ‘Just waiting for it to cool.’
Flood was one of a thousand similar cowboys, all coming over the hill on their horses. While Slattery spoke, Hazel concentrated on eating as delicately as she could. Her nerves, of which Slattery had warned them, seemed real. Apart from Slattery’s bark, the loudest thing in the room was Hazel’s knife and fork trying not to clink on the china of her plate. There was something touching about her. Notwithstanding Slattery’s bluster, having Paul and his daughter to dinner did appear to be a big deal. She had gone to far too much trouble, with her appearance and with the place-settings: napkins folded into swans. There was something vacant about her as well, Paul thought. Was she all there?
Alas, Slattery was saying, the cowboys had taken over, the cowboys had carte blanche.
‘The cowboys?’
‘Flood and his ilk.’
‘Of course.’ Paul had a piece of gristle in his cheek. He was waiting for a distraction to spit it into his napkin, trying not to gag. ‘It’s really delicious.’
‘Shall I tell them what I call the development, honey?’
‘Paul.’
‘I call it Flanders . . . You know. All the muck and shrapnel. All the poppies, one for every dismembered body lying decomposed underneath. One for every skeleton.’
‘Paul.’
‘Very good.’
‘I call it Flanders Fields. I wander down at sunset some evenings, as you know, and I always holler the same thing leaving, don’t I, honey? I’m off to Flanders Fields, I always holler.’
‘Yeah.’ Paul was getting freaked by Hazel’s repeated chirping of his name. He was put out, as well, by his host’s description of what was still their home. ‘Very witty.’
War was Slattery’s thing. He had dozens of glossy coffee-table tomes on it. He had compiled an inventory of names from the surrounding parishes of young chaps – the sons of good families and farm labourers alike – who had all signed up together in the local post office and had perished together within weeks.
‘Paul.’
‘All right, Haze, all right.’
Slattery stood again, though mostly it was hard to tell, and poured more wine for everyone, except the girl, who had scarcely touched hers. She was too busy sliding lumps around her plate and occasionally lifting a fork with a morsel on it to her lips. After draining the bottle, Slattery left the room.
Paul pleaded with his daughter to eat properly. He didn’t really give a damn. He was just trying to fill the air deadened by Slattery’s absence.
‘Please,’ Paul said to her, ‘don’t let me down.’
‘Eat what you like, sweetie.’ The more puce with wine the inside of Hazel’s mouth got, the more her tongue loosened. ‘Ignore your daddy.’
In spite of the amnesty, or maybe because of it, the girl shovelled several large forkfuls into her mouth and followed them each with a hefty slug of wine. They sat watching her until Slattery returned with a couple of pieces of memorabilia that he had bought at auction: a pair of scissors prised from dead enemy hands; a gas mask the colour of copper. He gave the scissors to the girl: crooked, rusting at the handle, bearing a Gothic inscription on the inside of one of its blades that the girl read aloud, her mouth half full.
‘Kettenhunde.’
‘Very impressive,’ Slattery said. ‘And its meaning?’
‘Chained dogs,’ the girl said.
Slattery was adamant that Paul should try on the gas mask. He stood behind Paul and forced the straps at the back. The inside smelt of old rubber and of sick. Paul raised his glass of wine and, for a joke, tried to take a drink. While the others laughed, Paul swallowed the piece of gristle he had been holding in his cheek all that time and felt his throat coated in its grease. He could hear, but he could hardly see a thing and he couldn’t push off the gas mask. Slattery was jabbering on, explaining to ‘the ladies’ that he had spent a weekend with it on once, that wearing it gave you a bird’s-eye view of what it was like to be actually in a war and facing the enemy. Who was the enemy?
Paul tried to remove the gas mask, but the thing felt suctioned to his head. He tried to say, ‘Please help me get it off,’ but he could hear how muffled his voice was by all the tubing, and the others only laughed again.
‘If you say so,’ Slattery said.
‘Paul.’
The mask’s goggles got fogged with his breathing. The straps at the back of his head had no give in them. The other three were receding into mist: Slattery prattling on about craftsmanship, only the girl’s expression and Hazel’s voice displaying any awareness of what was happening.
‘Paul.’
Paul stood, tugging at the straps and growling, ‘Please get the fucking thing off me.’ Slattery came behind him and said to take slow, even breaths. When they finally yanked off the mask, Paul’s beard was dripping sweat, his hair everywhere, and they were staring at him as they might a scuba diver dragged up after a sudden loss of pressure.
‘Cheese and coffee?’
Hazel fetched a hand towel for Paul to rub his head down. It smelt of petrol, the towel did. She said, ‘I wish Martina could have made it.’
‘Martina?’ Paul didn’t dare look at his daughter. Slattery must have meant Martina when he said that, out on the doorstep, about a third person. ‘Made what?’
‘Here. Tonight,’ Hazel said. ‘I wish Martina could have made it here tonight.’
‘I said that, honey.’ Slattery was balancing cheeses on a marble block. ‘When they arrived, I said we had been expecting all three of them.’
‘Isn’t Martina your wife’s sister?’
‘I warned you she was a huge fan.’ Slattery was blushing. Or was that just the wine and the heat of the kitchen and the summer that was in it? ‘Fetch your scrapbook, Haze.’
The scrapbook was wrapped in floral-embossed wallpaper, and in it was glued every cutting they knew about from all the newspapers. Hazel had even taken a poster from one of the filling stations out the road and folded it in two. She held the scrapbook longest at the article that featured a photo of them all: Paul, his daughter, Martina, seated on the sill of the bay window. The reflection of the flash in the double-glazing had made a blind spot of Martina’s head. Hazel was rubbing her thumb around and around the bright sun where Martina’s face should have been.
‘Has she gone out?’
‘Martina?’
‘Has she a hot date?’ Hazel asked.
‘Kind of thing.’
‘You know I met them?’ Slattery said.
‘Really?’ Paul wasn’t sure how much he could trust Slattery’s word. ‘Both of them?’
‘Your wife mainly. I saw them together in Rainey’s around the end of May.’
‘In?’
‘Rainey’s?’ Slattery sounded suspicious of Paul’s ignorance. ‘The supermarket and lounge just down the road. It belongs to the Rainey family.’
‘News to me.’
‘I bumped into them there at the end of May and bought them drinks. I spoke to your wife only, to be honest, not to her sister.’
Helen and Martina did go to the pictures together, once, and did stop for one at the lounge belonging to the supermarket.
‘She mentioned something all right.’
‘Perhaps they had no idea who I was.’ When Paul didn’t protest, Slattery gave a petty shrug. ‘I told your wife I had known their folks.’
‘Did you?’
‘Oh, yes. Not well, obviously, but I had met both of them at different times.’
That wasn’t what Paul meant. He wasn’t asking Slattery if he had really known their parents. He was asking if Slattery had said that to Helen. Paul had never known anyone raise their parents with Helen or Martina.
This was why they had been invited. It had to be. Slattery had a smile that said, ‘In your own time . . .’ All those years of skirting around Helen’s past, of accepting Martina’s presence and her protectiveness of her sister, of keeping the girl in the dark. Nobody had ever asked Paul anything. Even Helen had scarcely spoken of it. Oddly, this moment, at the table of a stranger whose wealth was rumoured to come from food manufactured for consumption by dogs, was the closest Paul had ever got to its core. It is conceivable that he wanted to say something, to spill whatever was left to him, but there was still his daughter to think of. His shoulders ached: he was only propping the floodgates shut a while longer.
How much did Slattery know? More than him? There were times Paul wondered if parts of the truth, and therefore its entirety, had been withheld from him. Slattery wanted juice. You could all but hear the saliva accumulating in his jowls. He could swing for it, Slattery could. Slattery could swing for whatever dirt he was chasing. They all could. Refusing to meet their fat faces gazing at him, Paul pushed his plate towards the centre of the table and coughed.
Slattery finally said, ‘Unimaginable, really.’
The girl vomited onto her plate. Just like that. She had eaten every scrap, had sat in pale speechlessness, and now was heaving loudly all over her place-setting shreds of animal flesh swimming in acrid human stomach acid.
‘Something didn’t agree with you,’ Slattery said.
Paul hauled her to the sink. With the second substantial heave came stuff other than food or bile. There was dust in there, sawdust. There were also tiny shards of wood, masonry and steel. Paul tried to run the taps to wash it away before anyone else saw, but nothing came out.
‘We should leave.’
‘A quick coffee?’
‘She’s covered in sick.’ Was Slattery, Paul’s tone meant to ask, even thicker than he appeared? ‘I should really get her home.’
At the door, Slattery said something about going to ‘Portgal’ until the end of the summer, about hooking up when they got back. The door dragged shut behind them, the crunch of gravel underfoot ceased and the long grass was silver in the light of a torch borrowed from their hosts.
‘It looks strange from up here,’ the girl said.
They could see the outline of the close, their house alarm’s blue strobe, and the town’s and ring road’s smattering of lights in the distance.
‘Freaks!’ Paul screamed into the darkness. The air was too dry for echoes.
The girl laughed and screamed too. ‘Bloody freaks!’
The Poles were at it full throttle. A bigger than usual gang, a ghetto-blaster cranked up, some drunken singing, raised voices and possibly even a scuffle. By two a.m., Paul had had enough. He pulled on his tracksuit bottoms and thumped on their bell. Nothing. The rear gate was locked. He climbed onto one of their bins and, when there was no evidence of a party, jumped into their garden. Though the patio light was still on, the kitchen was unlit and empty. He could see yellow coming down the stairs, and there seemed to be movement up there. He shielded his eyes and, pressing against the back door, glimpsed only himself in what must have been a long mirror against the nearest wall. His two images, on the glass and on the mirror behind it, were like concentric reflections. They receded when he stepped backwards. When he moved closer again, they loomed into one another, frame into frame, gaze into gaze, mouth into hollow mouth.
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘What happened?’
There was no hiding it, not now or any more, to his bleary-eyed daughter standing in slippers in their hall, deadlock bolted behind him.
‘There was nobody there for anything to happen,’ he said. ‘Nobody except some nutter staring straight back out at me.’
After the water, the money ran out. The phone line went dead, and with it the modem. Even the electricity stopped pumping into their walls. A couple of times a week they walked to the library, where she charged her laptop for free at a power point beneath the back shelves and he riffled the local papers trying to find some mention of Flood’s fall from grace. Nobody said anything to them. Otherwise, they made do with Helen’s scented candles scattered from the bathroom throughout the house, and with Slattery’s torch, used sparingly to save on batteries. The banging on their door resumed, sometimes in the small hours, sometimes during the day. The envelopes piled inside the letterbox. One day a page with red writing was glued to the door.
‘What does it say?’
‘Something about repossession,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with us.’
They started sleeping in the attic, to get as far away from the banging as they could. Paul laid a few unscrewed wardrobe doors as flooring and squeezed two mattresses up through the trap into the attic. It was sweltering up there, with no window and all that hot air under the roof and the smell of melting wax. Mostly he read paperbacks that had been stacked on Martina’s bedside stool, while his daughter kept trying to video-call old schoolfriends via a weak unencrypted signal she occasionally picked up. Paul had saved the last satsuma from the bag he had bought in the supermarket. He held it over a flame and gazed at it, marvelling at its glow. He gazed at it so long that its zest began singeing. The girl’s calls kept dropping or, worse, being scrambled by a high-pitched whistle or a monotonous backbeat. One by one, the disembodied voices receded. It was too much, lying there, eyes shut, hearing your daughter asking, ‘Kannst du mich hören?’ or ‘Hallo, ist da jemand?’ of a mute screen.
‘They can’t hear you,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody there, pet.’
Once, no sleep to be had up in that furnace, he asked from one side of the darkness to the other, ‘Why did she keep saying my name?’
‘Who?’
‘Haze. Frau Slattery.’ He could hear his daughter sniggering gently. ‘All she kept saying was my name, over and over and over.’
‘I thought she was talking to him,’ the girl said. ‘I thought his name was Paul too.’
‘Ah . . .’
‘What did you see in the townhouse? I want to know.’
‘I saw Martina’s sombrero, hanging on a nail. That’s it, and some graffiti next to it.’
‘So be it?’
After a long pause, Paul said, ‘How did you guess?’
‘Do you believe in demons?’
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘Just what I said.’ Her voice was still very young. ‘Do you believe in demons?’
‘Do you?’
‘I asked first.’
‘I believe,’ Paul said, ‘that if we don’t believe in demons, they won’t believe in us. Do the demons believe in us? That’s the question. The day the demons believe in us, we’re in real trouble.’
Martina’s phone rang and cut off before either of them could find it. The number read ‘withheld’. Late one weekend afternoon, the house lights came up all at once, the fridge shivered, a country ballad on the radio kicked in during its chorus. Paul whooped, ‘Yee-haw!’ and took the hammer to the shopping trolleys still lying around the site from the water runs and retrieved their coins. They ran to the supermarket and bought oats, nuts and syrup to bake flapjacks. The girl and her mother had always baked flapjacks, and Paul figured making flapjacks might liven up the place.
‘How are you since?’
The old biddy in the supermarket was handing back their change in coppers when she asked that. Since what? Like they were compadres, Paul spat on the hard shoulder home, like they had ever even conversed about fucking anything.
Paul sat at the table watching his daughter, saying how like her mother she was getting. He told her how gorgeous she was, a young woman almost, how tall she was becoming. He thought he could smell burning. There was, as well, in the core of his skull, like a wasps’ nest ablaze, this sizzle that he could scarcely hear his own voice above.
‘You’re not going to just disappear on me too,’ he said, almost shouting. ‘Are you?’
‘No chance.’
‘What?’
‘I said no chance!’ The girl was shouting too. ‘I’m not going to just disappear!’
All the while, she was setting the timer on Martina’s phone and wiping the mixing bowl, the spoons, tying her curls into a crushed-velvet scrunchie and watching through the oven’s glass door. Once, she turned and smiled, the way her mother used. All the rooms were pure gold, with the bulbs still on and sun out the back. She was wearing only Martina’s silk scarf as a bikini top and sweatpants that were far too loose on her. Her abdomen was exposed, the white crease marks that the elastic of her knickers cut in her skin, the twin pelvic bones like a pair of dainty fists covered with a cotton handkerchief. Just when they looked golden, perfect, the power died. The long-range weather forecast cut off in medias res, the fridge released a death rattle and all the rooms returned to the old gold of natural light. She said, ‘I’m pretty sure they’re done anyway.’
She divided the tray into twenty careful rectangles, three cuts lengthways and four widthways, the tip of her tongue on the chapped point of her upper lip, and rested each separately with the butter knife on a rack to cool.
‘About ten minutes,’ she said.
She said it again, walking into the front room. She said it from the bottom of the stairs.
‘They’re done,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes to cool.’
She stopped around the middle step. Everybody turn, the kitchen started bleating, Everybody turn . . .
‘Papa? Please.’
She put her head around each bedroom door, saying his name as she did. She stood at the foot of the ladder and spoke into the attic’s black square.
‘Please, Papa, please.’
Both front and back doors were still locked from the inside. It was then, she said, that she started screaming, ‘Papa, please! Papa, please!’ It was then that she couldn’t find the keys, that she heard them rattling in the pocket of her father’s jacket and unlocked the front door’s bolt from within and sprinted without breathing or stopping until she reached a door, which she hammered on and which I, finally, held open.