The viewing at number two Marine Drive had finished and Greg was just leaving when Laura pulled up on the drive. The strain of the day was taking its toll, and she felt as if she’d been wearing herself for too long. For the first time since reporting Bryan missing on Easter Saturday she wanted the one thing that up until then she’d been most afraid of: to be alone.
She turned off the engine and stared at the dashboard of the Lexus she’d insisted on, aware of a sudden, overwhelming sadness. She felt sadder than she’d ever felt in her life before and with the sadness came a sense of lifelessness.
There was a knocking sound on the car window and, looking round, she found Bryan’s former colleague, Greg, smiling in at her.
Reluctantly she wound down the window. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘There was a viewing,’ he said, uncertain. ‘I spoke to the receptionist at the salon – told her to tell you.’
Laura continued to stare at him without speaking.
Then without warning, she hooked her hands under the bottom of the steering wheel and, shoulders shaking, started to cry.
Greg stood looking awkwardly around him. He couldn’t just leave her like this, alone in the car, crying. Her hair was hanging forward, concealing her face, and the ends of it were trembling. Her knees were pressed together and the fabric of her trousers had gone dark in the places where tears had fallen.
‘Come on,’ he said, made suddenly decisive by a pity he felt in his lower abdomen. ‘Let’s get you indoors.’
Numb, she let him pull her gently out of the car.
‘My handbag –’
‘I’ve got your handbag,’ he said, steering her towards the front porch. He put the keys he’d used for the viewing into the lock and opened the door.
Without another word, she walked down the hallway and disappeared into the lounge.
After a moment’s hesitation, he shut the front door behind him and followed her.
She was lying in the corner of one of the sofas, her head flung back, staring at the pelmets that framed the heavy curtains.
At a loss, but unable to leave, he hung in the centre of the room he’d stood in barely fifteen minutes ago pointing out the solid oak floor and fireplace to a Mr and Mrs Reddington.
‘I went to the mortuary this morning – a body was washed up in Cullercoats Bay and the police wanted me to identify it.’
‘Shit, Laura – I had no idea,’ Greg mumbled – running a hand through his hair – helpless. He didn’t have the words or emotional palette to deal with this, but Laura’s collarbone along with most of the skin around it – revealed to him because of the way her shirt had fallen open at the neck – had gone red after the outburst of tears in the car, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
‘I’m so tired,’ she said, more to herself than Greg, shutting her eyes and letting her head fall even further back, her throat long.
For some reason, as soon as her eyes shut, Greg felt a sense of entitlement he’d never felt before. It was as if eight years of longing combined with eight years of dissatisfaction with his own lot in life came suddenly to a head in a moment of stillness that contained all possibilities.
Why not?
Laura remained motionless on the sofa with her eyes shut, and he continued to watch her – intently now.
Neither of them made a sound.
Did she know he was watching her?
There was something abysmal about all of this that didn’t suit Greg – or the neutral tones of the décor for that matter – but it was too late now.
Laura had become so still that he wondered if she’d actually fallen asleep, and felt a brief sense of relief that vanished immediately as she arched her neck even further back before dropping her head to one side and opening her eyes to observe him.
Without thinking, he crossed the room, knocking his left knee on the corner of the coffee table as, crouching he pulled her roughly off the sofa and onto the floor. When she didn’t resist or even react, he felt a brief anger – absurdly – towards his wife, Patsy, as if she had failed to protect him from this.
Then grunting and later whining, he laid bare the bones of an ultimately banal fantasy he’d nurtured for eight years – while still wearing his suit. He didn’t even take his shoes off. It took three meaningless minutes and yet its horrible intimacy would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Their failure to exchange a single word or look afterwards.
The sight of Laura laid out on the lounge carpet.
His clumsy attempt to wash himself at the sink in the downstairs bathroom.
The rush to leave.
The vague sense of having committed a crime, but against whom, he couldn’t have said.
Hearing crying from the other end of the hallway and knowing he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Knocking over the vase of dried flowers by the front door then the front door opening without him having to touch it.
Thinking he was about to see Bryan walk through the front door only to be confronted by someone who looked remarkably like him, but whose neck was covered in a web of tattoos . . .
Greg ran.
He got into his car, locked the doors then started the engine, his hands shaking as he drove out of Marine Drive.
Ever since that first time, there had been a complicit understanding between them that Jamie would pick Martha up from school. The arrangement gave his days a shape he hadn’t been able to give them himself after twenty years inside.
When he first started work, he took whatever shifts they gave him, but after meeting Martha he always requested the six to two so that he could pick her up from school. His request for specific shifts was something Janet, the counsellor, was told about, and when she brought it up in one of their meetings and he said that an old friend of his needed someone to pick her kid up from school, Janet looked pleased. When she asked how old the child was and Jamie said fifteen, she didn’t look so pleased. He tried to think of something to say that would make her look pleased again, but became so agitated, he knew the only favour he could do himself was to remain silent.
Since Martha, he woke up in the morning without the paranoid feeling of invisibility.
He was real.
He was alive.
He knew the names of all her teachers, and who took her for which subjects; the teachers she liked, and those she hated.
He knew her timetable – and that on Tuesdays when he picked her up, her hair would be wet because Tuesday afternoons she had swimming squad.
Laura had no idea any of this was happening.
He’d never once anticipated Martha when he was inside, and now he couldn’t imagine having any sort of life without her.
She was waiting for him in the usual place – on the low wall circling the chestnut tree where she was convinced she’d seen Bryan that time.
She smiled when she saw him – she always smiled – and did her funny running shuffle towards the van, pulling her various bags after her.
‘What are these?’ she said as she got in, picking up the brochures on her seat.
He flashed her a smile as she pulled her hair back over her shoulders and started to flick through them.
‘You said you wanted to go to Norway.’
‘When?’ she demanded, excited.
‘I don’t know yet. I need to see about money and . . . stuff.’ They drove slowly towards Seaton Sluice, Martha commenting on the brochures, reading bits out loud. Then she asked him about his day, and John – who he worked with. He’d once told her that John had an artificial limb, and after that she always wanted to know about John. Sometimes he told her about things that had really happened; sometimes he just made stuff up. It didn’t really matter as long as he made her laugh – he loved making her laugh.
Then there were the dark days when he lost sight of himself; the days he couldn’t face that he spent in his room sitting on the floor with the curtains drawn. On those days he had to set the alarm to remind himself to pick her up from school. He’d be silent and unable to talk and she’d know not to try to speak to him.
Tonight as they turned into Marine Drive – he always drove her to the front door and waited until she was inside – she slipped the brochures into the pocket in the door and was about to say something when she noticed Laura’s car parked on the drive alongside another unfamiliar one.
‘Mum’s home,’ she said flatly, her eyes skirting over the Lexus. The presence of the Lexus was strange in itself – Laura was never home at this time.
Martha looked at him, scared. ‘Are you coming in?’
Jamie nodded as she picked up her bags, opened the van door and slid uncertainly to the pavement.
What happened next, happened fast, and even though everything around her looked the same as it always did, nothing felt right. She put her keys in the lock, but it was already being pulled open from the inside and there was a man standing in front of her she recognised, and the man was looking at her but not really seeing her. Then Jamie pushed past her and the man just ran out of the house like he was running away from something.
Without moving from the spot, she turned and watched him bundle himself into his car while trying to remember his name. Greg – the name came to her as his car reversed off the drive.
Indoors there were muffled, indistinct sounds coming from the other end of the hallway, which suddenly seemed much further away. She called out, ‘Jamie!’, and he appeared a few seconds later, framed in the lounge doorway.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, and even though his face didn’t look as if it was okay, she let herself be pushed up the stairs by him and into her room because instinct told her she didn’t want to see what he’d seen.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing’s happened – just stay there.’
She nodded and sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, holding her school bags still as images of Norwegian fjords from the brochures she’d been reading in the van on the way home slipped through her mind.
Jamie stood staring down at Laura, who was lying on her side with her trousers round her ankles, her arms and legs useless looking, her head turned to one side. For a moment he felt nothing then with a rush that was almost audible, everything caught up with him and he let go suddenly of something he’d been holding onto for twenty years. In that instant he felt such an overwhelming mixture of fury and pity towards the woman lying at his feet, who had once been Laura Hamilton, that he could have killed her.
Checking the hallway behind him to make sure Martha wasn’t there – it was Martha now, he realised, that he needed to protect at all costs – he knelt down awkwardly beside her as she rolled onto her back and stared up at him, her face older, swollen and unreadable.
She wasn’t shocked at finding him kneeling beside her, and made no attempt to help as he pulled up her pants and trousers.
‘You’re her mother,’ he hissed angrily.
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
‘Martha. Martha can’t see you like this.’
‘Martha?’ Laura started to raise herself on her elbows, her head swaying, but Jamie picked her up suddenly, balancing her momentarily on one knee before standing up, the muscles in his neck thick with the effort.
She hung onto him because there was nobody else to hang onto.
‘I feel sick.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘I’m always drunk.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Greg. He’s called Greg.’
‘Who’s Greg?’
She shook her head, clinging onto him as he carried her upstairs. ‘It was horrible –’
He carried her into the en-suite and told her to get undressed.
She stumbled obediently out of her clothes and let herself be pushed into the shower.
Jamie sat on the edge of the bath as steam started to fill the bathroom and Laura disappeared into it.
Pulling a large white towel off the rail, he stood up and opened the shower cubicle doors.
She was propped in the corner, her head against the tiles and her eyes shut, water from the shower streaming over the left hand side of her body. He didn’t know if she was crying or sleeping. She was beautiful, but the woman’s body didn’t make him feel powerless in the way the girl’s had – not because the skin was different or the shape was different but because the innocence which had been her glory had forsaken her.
She came to, sliding her head round on the tiles and peering at him through the jets of water with panda eyes where her eye make-up had run. Leaving the shower running, she stepped out into the towel, let herself be wrapped up in it then led into the bedroom where she stood shivering as he pulled down the blind.
Laura continued to stand there as he rubbed her body and hair roughly with the towel then, holding up the duvet, motioned for her to get in. She lay in bed staring at the radio clock whose red digits told her it was 17:57, but this didn’t really signify much apart from marking the twenty minutes that had passed since Jamie picked her up from the lounge carpet.
They looked at each other carefully then looked away.
‘You should sleep,’ he mumbled.
She turned onto her back for a moment before sitting up and pulling the duvet around her, her hair sticking to her shoulders in thick, wet strands.
He cast his eyes quickly round the room, looking for something he might recognise – other than his brother’s wife – but there was nothing.
His eyes came to rest heavily on her again.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ she asked in a small, flat voice. Jamie laughed. ‘If I was going to kill you I’d of done it by now. No,’ he said, slowly shaking his head as if it was too much of a burden for his body to carry. ‘Twenty years, Laura,’ he exploded suddenly, the veins on his neck standing up as if those twenty years had come rushing in to choke him. ‘And you forgot all about me.’
‘I didn’t forget – I put you out of my mind. When you’re thirteen, twenty years is forever and thirty-three is never meant to happen.’
‘But it does happen, and here we are.’
Laura sat rigid not daring to move. ‘I was thirteen, Jamie,’ she whispered.
‘And because you never came to visit me – because I never laid eyes on you once in those twenty years, you never grew up. You stayed thirteen, and you stayed with me. You’ve been wearing that pair of red shorts and that yellow blouse you wore that afternoon for twenty years. I’ve been in that afternoon for twenty years because you never came to see me . . . you never came to tell me that you’d grown up.
‘No matter where they put me, it was always the same – as soon as it was lights out, I could hear Iron Maiden playing, and the crackle of the posters on the wall because of the breeze coming in through the window catching at them. I spent every night beneath the Paddington Bear duvet cover my mum never got round to replacing, and that none of us thought to after she died.’ He stared at her as he walked slowly across the room and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I’ve been smelling you on me for twenty years.’
‘I was frightened. I was so frightened of you.’
‘I’d never of hurt you, Laura. I never hurt you, did I? Did I?’ he insisted.
‘I don’t know any more,’ she said tearful and confused, ‘I was just so frightened. All the sex stuff . . . I didn’t want anybody knowing about that. I was terrified of mum and dad finding out and when the police interviewed me they told me what you’d said about us – what we were doing that afternoon. They said I’d have to stand up in front of all those people and tell them what we were doing, and I couldn’t do that Jamie. I couldn’t do it. I was a child.’
Jamie sat rubbing at the duvet cover, trying to understand the implications of this. ‘We were both children.’
‘I didn’t know what was going on; I didn’t know what I was saying.’
‘But you said enough –’ He sat up and stared straight at her.
‘I just wanted the police gone. I wanted you gone – the whole afternoon gone,’ she whispered.
‘But you kept coming round to the house that summer.’
‘Bryan,’ she said helplessly, lifting the right hand up in the air then letting it fall back to the duvet again. ‘I was forever hoping to see Bryan, but he was never there. It was hopeless.’
He looked at her, amazed. ‘So Bryan was there – even then?’
She nodded slowly at him, her eyes expecting him to understand.
‘I thought he came after, but he was there before me? So we never had that afternoon? We never even had that?’
‘It was easier to pretend it never happened.’
‘I used to hold onto the memory of you so tightly I thought you must be getting short of breath out here. Twenty years,’ he added in disbelief. ‘Twenty years of pretending you weren’t in my bedroom with me that afternoon? Twenty years of pretending I never took those red shorts and yellow blouse off you? You lied to yourself.’
Watching him, Laura felt a horrible sort of wonder take hold of her as she finally realised. ‘You were in love with me that much?’
‘And you lied to the police,’ Jamie carried on, ignoring her now.
An impatience she couldn’t risk flickered across her eyes. ‘Stop it. Stop saying that,’ she demanded, quietly.
‘They knew you were lying. You knew you were lying. Who was it? You know, don’t you?’
Neither of them had seen Martha, standing in the bedroom doorway.
‘Stop it!’ Laura shouted, putting her hands out and holding onto his arms, knowing the gesture wouldn’t stop him.
Jamie stared at her. ‘You know who it was, don’t you?’
Then he realised that he knew as well – that he’d known all along.
Laura saw him realise. ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she shouted, scared. ‘They found Bryan.’
‘Who found him?’
‘He drowned – I identified him this morning.’
‘She’s lying,’ Martha said in a clear voice from the doorway as Jamie, who hadn’t realised she was in the room until then, saw the reflection of her in the doorway.
‘She’s lying,’ Martha said again.
She’d changed out of her school uniform into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and her hair was loose round her shoulders.
He looked from the woman in the bed to the girl in the doorway – then himself, in the mirror.
For a moment the woman and girl became one and the same person before separating again, and he made his choice. He never wanted to do anything that would compromise the trust of the girl standing in the doorway whose reflection he couldn’t take his eyes off because her trust in him was his glory.
‘I saw him,’ Laura was saying loudly. ‘It was him.’
But Jamie wasn’t listening as he stood up to take hold of Martha, who was running across the room towards him. He saw himself, in the mirror, with his arms wrapped round her, buried under the hair that had filled his dreams for twenty years. Only Martha was real. He was holding onto somebody who was real.
Jamie had gone. It was 3:00 a.m. and Laura was dreaming. She was in the small, tiled airless room she’d been in that morning, and the drowned body was on the table in front of her. She was just about to speak to someone who was in the room – someone she couldn’t see, but who she knew was standing just behind her; whose presence she felt – when a shiver passed through the bloated, discoloured remains in front of her. She didn’t see the body shiver, she felt it – in the same way she felt the presence of the person standing behind her, but just as she was about to turn to them and ask if they’d felt it too, she became aware that the other person had gone. She was alone in the room with the body and the body was slipping sideways off the table it had been lying on and attempting to half slither, half crawl across the tiled floor towards her – something amphibian that should never have been brought up out of the water, and that was now attempting to get back, taking her with it. She could hear it slapping against the tiles then the next minute it went dark and the creature disappeared – there was only the sound of it. Then the sound stopped and the lights came back on. She kept checking her feet and legs half expecting to see the creature grasping wetly at her, but there was nothing on the floor. Instead, she felt the presence of the other person behind her again – the same presence she’d felt before.
It was 3:00 a.m., and it was all still here Bryan thought, using keys he hadn’t used in months to let himself into his home. He walked into the kitchen and peered through the patio doors at the garden. It had been here all along.
Up until that morning – when Laura told him about the body she’d identified – returning to life as Bryan Deane remained a possibility. If Bryan Deane was officially dead, that was no longer an option. He’d had the idea, this afternoon, of walking into the nearest police station and announcing that he believed himself to be a missing person. It was the third time he’d almost turned himself in – the first time was only weeks after his disappearance when he was living rough up near Rothbury, and the second time was after seeing Martha outside school, which had broken his heart.
He’d gone to Martha’s room first and, resting his head against the doorframe, contemplated his daughter while trying to overcome an urge to wake her so that he could feel her eyes on him and watch her face when she saw him. He remembered her sleepwalking as a child between the ages of nine and twelve – something they’d never found an explanation for – and how he’d followed her eerily slow moving, unconscious figure through the early morning hours half expecting her to lead him straight out of this world.
Then he saw the photograph propped against the window – the one she’d taken of him in Cephalonia – and the candle burning beside it, and for the first time began to have some real sense of the magnitude of what it was they’d done.
He’d come to warn them – wake them.
If he woke them now, they could all leave together, and yet here he was creeping about the house, terrified of doing precisely what it was he’d come to do.
Here he was standing over his wife, in their bedroom, watching as she turned her head on her pillow. She was dreaming; had always been a heavy dreamer – he’d forgotten that and, standing motionless beside the bed he used to sleep in, in the bedroom he used to fall asleep in every night and wake up in every morning, he felt a prick of tenderness towards her he hadn’t felt for years. Crouching down until his face was on a level with her, he traced over the lines and shades of her unconscious face, which had a softness to it he never saw when she was awake.
A softness that enabled him to glimpse the girl he’d turned to when there was no-one else left to turn to – the girl he’d abandoned himself to before marriage – before the rest of their lives. Things went wrong after that – things they never thought about let alone spoke about because there was never time, and over time it became easier to just carry on. So that’s what they did because that’s what people do . . . they carry on and on and on.
There were moments over the years whose insignificance had an eerie vastness to them, when – standing in a supermarket queue or drying his hands in some public toilet somewhere or filling the car at a petrol station while watching the digits on the screen flicker and lose meaning – he recognised what was going on. He had two lives inside him – the one he was living and the one he could have lived, but wasn’t that the same for everyone? How did that help and what on earth was he meant to do about it?
Then there were the debts, which had worked like a corrosive on the building that was their marriage – a building which had somehow managed to stay up despite the absence of any blueprint; a building which, throughout the years, Laura had been constantly adding rooms to in order to ensure that he never found his way out.
A better man could have loved her for that alone.
He stood up, pausing as his knees cracked loudly and looking around him at the outlines of familiar furniture in the light coming under the bedroom door from the hallway. Everything was the same as it had always been – the only thing that had changed was that he was missing from it.
He caught sight of himself then in the mirrors on the wardrobe doors and wondered who that man was standing in his bedroom – the blond hair shining strangely in the light from the hallway.
He remained in the doorway a minute more before turning away and walking back downstairs.
He left number two Marine Drive, and the Duneside development, crossing the road and walking past the play park and into the dunes, lying on his stomach in the damp sand and grass. He could just make out the candle burning in Martha’s bedroom window, and a few seconds later the candle reached the end of its burning time and flickered out. He rolled over onto his back, staring up at the threads of cloud moving fast across the night sky – and the stars, which Martha once told him had already died by the time they came to lay eyes on them.
He’d made up his mind.