39

Eileen enjoyed her evening, driving her husband’s car. She was a hesitant driver, prone to hogging the outside lanes at far too moderate a speed, but had needed the car for her various errands that night. Jim, she knew, would relish his time alone at his carpentry table and maybe even, wonder of wonders, Andy might join him for a few hours of much-needed ‘quality time’. And besides, the drugs Dr Grenell had prescribed had the strange side-effect of giving her an odd sense of nausea in his presence. She had put this down to acid reflux, a common enough occurrence in mothers of her age, and a by-product of all sorts of pharmaceutical treatments, if the sites she consulted on the internet were to be believed. So if truth were to be told, she enjoyed her time alone. She had attended a PTA meeting at Andy’s school and discussed the possible hurdles of the coming year. She hardly raised her voice, but was grateful to hear the other parents voicing concerns similar to her own, if not quite so extreme. Familiar words like ‘puberty’ and ‘testosterone’ were mentioned, together with unfamiliar ones, like ‘hypothalamus’, ‘gonadotropin’ and ‘pituitary’. She wished she could take these issues with a pinch of salt, the way some of the other mothers seemed to, until it occurred to her that maybe they themselves were on medication, similar, if not better, to her own. But her gratification came with a significant residue of guilt. Why should she feel relief, even pleasure, at the very real troubles of others? So after the PTA meeting she had driven across the familiar bridge that she had walked over so many times, always in daylight. She swung left, past the cement bathing shelters, and parked in the hardened sand amongst the darkened dunes. She saw the movement of shadows among the distant humps of sand grass, and remembered the reputation of these dunes, as a lovers’ hideout. And she wondered once more what could have occurred between Carmen and Andy on that afternoon of the flying ants. Something that could not be named. Whatever it was it belonged to the shadows, a shadow somehow deeper than all of the shadows about her. She turned her attention to the sea then, to calm her teeming brain. a crescent moon sat in an expanding halo of clouds and was reflected in the quiet September waters. Was it September already? she wondered, and she realised her thoughts were rambling again, turning and turning in some echo chamber of the mind, when she heard the rap of knuckles against the passenger window. There was a man there, in a leather jacket, and he was fumbling with the buttons of his trousers. Eileen reached for the keys, pushed the car into gear, too quickly, far too quickly, she realised, since the car began to buck and shudder like a horse suddenly confined to a box. She found first gear then and the car roared towards the shoreline, leaving her unknown Casanova in a veritable cloud of risen sand. She heard a howl as she drove, and could see through the rear-view mirror him hopping on one foot, and she had to allow herself a smile at the thought that she had somehow driven over the other. Serves him right, the weirdo, she thought. She turned right then, when the indented sand nearest the shoreline began to rattle the car once more, and headed back for the wooden bridge, and home.

Her sense of guilt returned, though, when the empty bus stop came into view. Had she broken his foot? she wondered. Pervert or not, he hardly deserved that. And was guilt to become her constant companion now, guilt at her relief that the sons of others were faring no better than her own, guilt at the loss of the son she had been so close to, guilt at all of the secrets she had kept from her dear husband, and she was turning through the cement pillars into her driveway, when she saw them both, Jim for some reason with a shovel in his hands and Andy, stamping a rough circle of exposed earth around the cherry tree.

Jim began to walk, in an odd series of uncoordinated movements, across the lawn, to the hard cement of the driveway itself. She heard the loud scrape of the shovel, as it moved from the surface of the lawn to the surface of the drive. Andy did what he had been always doing lately, just stood by the cherry tree and stared. Her eyes flashed from her son to her husband, whose face flared like a ghoul in the headlights, and another came behind him, from the small half-gate by the garage that led to the back garden. Something about the sloped shoulders, the down-angled head, brought a memory flooding back. A cardboard case, out of which came a ball of silvered glass. As the one that was her husband staggered towards her, she knew nothing would ever be the same again. She knew, in fact, as she pushed the gear handle down, that things had not been the same for quite some time now. He took one ghoulish step more and she drove the car forwards, caught him somewhere between the knees and midriff, and sent him spinning back towards the garage doors. She put the car into reverse then, and saw Andy, blocking her exit. She spun the wheel, and felt the sickening crunch as the back bumper hit the cherry tree. She saw Andy stretch his arms out towards his father, who, although it seemed not possible, was rising again, and she carved up half-circles of tyre-marks in the lawn, heading once more towards her son, the only obstacle between her and the street beyond. He jumped away as she drove forwards, gripped her wing-mirror with his hand, but she continued onwards and screeched the car to her left when she reached the street. She glanced in her rear-view mirror to see the place she was leaving and saw a severed bleeding thumb, caught in the knuckle of her wing-mirror. And when she reached the sea road, she finally understood something. She had heard no howl of anguish, or pain.