A Line of Blood
A Line of Blood
Ben McPherson
UK (2015)
and the lies that destroy us.
your neighbour dead in his bath. Your son is with you. He sees
everything. You discover your wife has been in the man's house. It seems
she knew him. Now the police need to speak to you.
Mercer's life upside down. He loves his family and he wants to protect
them, but there is too much he doesn't know. He doesn't know how the
cracks in his and Millicent's marriage have affected their son, Max. Or
how Millicent's bracelet came to be under the neighbour's bed. He
doesn't know how to be a father to Max when his own world is shattering
into pieces.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollins
Publishers
2015
Copyright © Ben McPherson 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollins
Publishers
2015
Cover photograph © Henry Steadman
Ben McPherson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007569564
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007569588
Version: 2015-02-11
For Charlotte
Crappy
is the name given by North Londoners to the very worst parts of Finsbury Park. People start using the name ironically, but it very quickly sticks.
Contents
The precarious thinness of his white arms, all angles against the dark foliage.
‘Max.’
Nothing. No response. He was half-hidden, straddling the wall, his body turned away from me. Listening, I thought. Waiting, perhaps.
‘Max.’
He turned now to look at me, then at once looked away, back at the next-door neighbour’s house.
‘Foxxa,’ he said quietly.
‘Max-Man. Bed time. Down.’
‘But Dad, Foxxa …’
‘Bed.’
Max shook his head without turning around. I approached the wall, my hand at the level of his thigh, and reached out to touch his arm. ‘She’ll come home, Max-Man. She always comes home.’
Max looked down at me, caught my gaze, then looked back towards the house next door.
‘What, Max?’
No response.
‘Max?’
Max lifted his leg over the wall and disappeared. I stood for a moment, unnerved.
In the early days of our life in Crappy we had bought a garden bench. A love seat, Millicent had called it, with room only for two. But Finsbury Park wasn’t the area for love seats. We’d long since decided it was too small, that the stiff-backed intimacy it forced upon us was unwelcome and oppressive, something very unlike love.
The love seat stood now, partly concealed by an ugly bush, further along the wall. Standing on it, I could see most of the next-door neighbour’s garden. It was as pitifully small as ours, but immaculate in its straight lines, its clearly delineated zones. A Japanese path led from the pond by the end wall to a structure that I’d once heard Millicent refer to as a bower, shaped out of what I guessed were rose bushes.
Max was standing on the path. He saw me and turned away, walking very deliberately into the bower.
‘Max.’
Nothing.
I stood on the arm of the love seat, and put my hands on top of the wall, pushing down hard as I jumped upwards. My left knee struck the head of a nail, and the pain almost lost me my balance.
I panted hard, then swung my leg over the wall and sat there as Max had, looking towards the neighbour’s house. Seen side by side, they were identical in every detail, except that the neighbour had washed his windows and freshened the paint on his back door.
A Japanese willow obscured the rest of the neighbour’s ground floor. A tree, a pond, a bower.
Who builds a bower in Finsbury Park?
Max reappeared.
‘Dad, come and see.’
I looked about me. Was this trespass? I wasn’t sure.
Max disappeared again. No one in any of the other houses seemed to be looking. The only house that could see into the garden was ours. And I needed to retrieve my son.
I jumped down, landing badly and compounding the pain in my knee.
‘You aren’t supposed to say fuck, Dad.’
‘I didn’t say it.’
Did I?
‘You did.’
He had reappeared, and was looking down at me again, as I massaged the back of my knee, wondering if it would stiffen up.
‘And I’m allowed to say it. You are the one who isn’t.’
He smiled.
‘You’ve got a hole in your trousers.’
I nodded and stood up, ruffled his hair.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not much. A bit.’
He stared at me for a long moment.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘it hurts like fuck. Maybe I did say it.’
‘Thought so.’
‘Want to tell me what we’re doing here? Max-Man?’
He held out his hand. I took it, surprised, and he led me into the bower.
The neighbour had been busy here. Four metal trellises had been joined to make a loose arch, and up these trellises he had teased his climbing roses, if that’s what they were. Two people could have lain down in here, completely hidden from view. Perhaps they had. The grass was flattened, as if by cushions.
Now I noticed birdsong, distant-sounding, wrong, somehow.
Max crouched down, rubbed his right forefinger against his thumb.
From a place unseen, a small dark shadow, winding around his legs. Tortoiseshell, red and black. Max rubbed finger and thumb together again, and the cat greeted him, stood for a moment on two legs, teetering as she arched upwards towards his fingers, then fell forwards and on to her side, offering him her belly.
‘Foxxa.’
It was Max who had named the cat. He had spent hours with her, when she first arrived, whispering to her from across the room:
F, K, Ks, S, Sh
. He had watched how she responded to each sound, was certain he had found the perfect name.
‘Foxxa.’
The cat chirruped. Max held out his hand, and she rolled on to her back, cupped her paws over his knuckles, bumped her head gently into his hand.
‘Crazy little tortie,’ he whispered.
She tripped out of the bower. Crazy little tortie was right. We hadn’t seen her in days.
Max walked out of the bower and towards the patio. I followed him. The cat was not there.
From the patio, the pretentious absurdity of the bower was even more striking. The whole garden was no more than five metres long, four metres wide. The bower swallowed at least a third of the usable space, making the garden even more cramped than it must have been when the neighbour moved in.
The cat appeared from under a bush, darted across the patio. Too late I saw that the back door was ajar. She paused for a moment, looking back at us.
‘Foxxa, no!’ said Max.
Her tail curled around the edge of the door, then she had disappeared inside.
Max was staring at the back door. I wondered if the neighbour was there behind its wired glass panels, just out of view. Max approached the door, pushing it fully open.
‘Max!’
I lunged towards him, but he slipped into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the garden.
‘Hello?’ I shouted. I waited at the door but there was no reply.
‘Come
on
, Dad,’ said Max.
I found him in the middle of the kitchen, the cat at his feet.
‘Max, we can’t be in here. Pick her up. Let’s go.’
Max walked to the light switch and turned on the light. Thrill of the illicit. We shouldn’t be in here.
‘Max,’ I said, ‘out. Now.’
He turned, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and the cat jumped easily up on to the work surface, blinking back at us.
‘She likes it here.’
‘Max … Max, pick her up.’
Max showed no sign of having heard me. I could read nothing in his gestures but a certain stiff-limbed determination. He had never disobeyed me so openly before.
Light flooded the white worktops, the ash cupboard fronts, the terracotta floor tiles. It was all so clean, so bright, so without blemish. I thought of our kitchen, with its identical dimensions. How alike, yet how different. On the table was a pile of clean clothes, still in their wrappers. Two suits, a stack of shirts, all fresh from the cleaners. No two-day-old saucepans stood unwashed in the sink. No food rotted here, no cat litter cracked underfoot, no spider plants went short of water.
From the middle of the kitchen you could see the front door. The neighbour had moved a wall; or perhaps he hadn’t moved a wall; perhaps he had simply moved the door to the middle of his kitchen wall. Natural light from both sides. Clever.
Max left the room. I looked back to where the cat had been standing, but she was no longer there. I could hear him calling to her, a gentle clicking noise at the back of his throat.
I followed him into the living room. Max was already at the central light switch. Our neighbour had added a plaster ceiling rose, and an antique crystal chandelier, which hung too low, dominating the little room. The neighbour had used low-energy bulbs in the chandelier, and they flicked into life, sending ugly ovoids of light up the seamless walls. What was this? And where was the cat?