Cross Country Murder Song (8 page)
Read Cross Country Murder Song Online
Authors: Philip Wilding
One afternoon he found his father standing silently in the kitchen. It was a Sunday and it was early for him to be back at home.
Want to go for a drive, kid? he asked, staring out at the garden. His mother wasn't home. He had no idea where she might be. Soon they were among the fields, his father gunning the engine as they passed a low red barn with acres of moving green beyond dotted with horses. He could see a boy standing among them, his hand reaching out to the tallest of the horses, his gesture making the animal wary, causing its head to pull back in quick jolts, its curious, beautiful eye regarding the approaching hand with caution. The horse took off with a snap of its mane, its tail suddenly whipping the air. The boy jumped back and the horse came at the fence at a gallop, the three-bar fence acting as a rickety sentry between the road and the farmland beyond. The horse ran its length, keeping pace with their car. His father grinned happily and opened up the engine and the horse harried itself on only feet away and they travelled momentarily neck and neck as if both were reaching to break an imaginary wire. The field divided at its corner and the horse spotted it before they did and threw himself back into the heart of the field, bucking and roiling, his head lolling happily, legs kicking hard as he ran out of sight.
His father hit the driving wheel with his open hand. Hey, he exclaimed, hey!
He grabbed his son's shoulder. Did you see that? he asked, Damn, what a beautiful fucking thing. He looked at him. You don't have to tell your mother I just said that, okay, he said.
You see that horse? his father asked. He nodded. They'd both been made dizzy by the sparks of energy it had given off.
Horses and dogs, I mean the domestic kind, pets, you know, not pack dogs, the wild kind, his father said. He nodded. He did know.
Animals, like that, they just run for fun, his father said. When we run, we're running after something or we're running from it. His father's voice had changed as if he was shifting down a gear like he did when their car approached a bend in the road. His father became quiet. He found a farm driveway he could back up into, turned around and headed back home. He walked up the steps into the house with his arm on the boy's shoulder and then walked into his study and closed the door.
The squirrel was sitting on top of the post, silver grey and alert. It was twitching with life, fidgeting endlessly, shifting its weight around. The family dog, Pascoe, a black Labrador, sat at the bottom of the post patting the earth down with his paws and making a strange low whine that turned into excited yapping. The squirrel clung onto the post and pointed itself at the earth, driving the dog into a frenzy; then it took off with a suicidal-looking leap and darted past the dog and into the thicket of trees that stood at the back of the house.
Shit, he said and raced after the dog as it lurched off in pursuit. Three loping figures in profile frozen for a moment before the squirrel exploded with a burst of speed and hit a tree, running and skipping up its thick trunk and into the higher branches out of sight. Pascoe fared less well and went through a mesh of bracken and bushes, drool gathering at his panting jaws. He chased in after him, calling his name.
Pascoe, suddenly mute, was sniffing around the edges of a dilapidated beehive, a small wooden cube with a sloping roof now discoloured with age. He lifted a leg lazily and added to its patchwork of stains. He pushed the dog back and circled the hive slowly, as if the air might suddenly fill with bees. He touched the panelling on its side and gave himself a start as a piece of wood came loose and hit the floor. Pascoe ran forward barking, his tail making a fan in the air. He shushed the dog and was leaning forward to examine the piece of wood when he saw the tight bundle of oily rags pushed underneath the hive. He pulled it free and was surprised at its weight; he untied it and gasped when he saw the revolver sitting there in his hand. He picked the gun up gingerly and then held it out before him and looked along its barrel. Pascoe whined and backed up behind him. He moved the gun around, aiming the sight at the high branches above him, and then he pulled the trigger. The safety held the trigger in place and without thinking he found the metal nub above the handle and flicked it forward. He pointed the gun at the tiny blossoms of light breaking through the foliage above him and fired. Pascoe ran back towards the safety of the house and he heard the scuttling above him as the higher branches emptied of startled squirrels and birds. Then the housekeeper was racing through the trees followed by his father who he heard before he saw him, his repeated, breathless, Jesus! sounded like a mantra as he came racing across the garden. The housekeeper wrestled the gun from his hand and threw him so violently to one side that he fell. His father came rushing through the brush and clipped the beehive as he did so. His stream of expletives was louder than the gunshot, his face was red and astonished. He dragged him inside the house and beat him around the face and shoulders until he was doubled up with exhaustion and then he locked him in the basement with a hand towel filled with ice cubes to stem the flow of blood and to help reduce his swollen cheek.
He'd wanted to kill his father after that, but he knew he was too scared of him. He could only imagine failing, stalling in his actions as he stood over his father's sleeping form and his father coming awake to pull the knife away from him and exact some terrible revenge, his mother's screams in the half-light. He missed his father regardless, he missed him even when he was around, he'd hear him walking about in the rooms above his and his mother was always out of sight, still and watchful in the shadows somewhere. He drifted from room to room in their cavernous house, a figure pinned as a silhouette in the tall windows looking out over the gardens. The kitchen was always full of voices, his father's friends' laughter louder and more prolonged as they stretched into the night.
He slept fitfully in his motel room that night as his father walked his dreams as he once had the upper storeys of his house, silently pacing through room after room but never meeting his son's eye. He was getting ice from the end of the corridor early the next afternoon when he saw the man exiting the room opposite his. As the door opened a woman smiled coyly and placed her hand on the man's forearm and drew him briefly back in, they both laughed and then she let him go and even before she'd fully closed the door he saw the man's face, now turned towards him, change from glassy happiness to gloomy indifference. His look of resignation was almost profound.
The driver waited by his door, listening to the toing and froing outside, the cleaner's cart and the dislocated voices and steps retreating down the hall, and when he heard the woman leave the room opposite his he quickly let himself out and caught up with her at the elevator. He studied her on their descent and then matched her hurried stride across the reception, just beating her to the door that he held open with a flourish. Once they were outside, he asked her about her affair, but he was gentle about it. Her lover's stony face had rattled him and he felt the shadow of his mother's sadness pass over him. She bristled though, no matter his tone, she couldn't understand that he was trying to reach out and help her. He tried to tell her about his father's affairs, about his mother's drinking and how eventually when his mother died how his father had taken to drinking with the same bleak enthusiasm.
Ironic, he said. She was mute though, untrusting. He could see that she wanted to be left alone to unscramble the guilt and lust strangling her thinking. He left her standing in the car park and sat in his car and watched her drive slowly past and away. Her face was rigid with thought and he watched her until she disappeared into the traffic that was pulling onto the highway. He sat for ten minutes while the tears gathered in dark blue blotches on his jeans like ink soaking into blotting paper and then he drove sharply off, cutting across a car that was trying to pull in to the motel. The sound of screeching tyres and someone shouting was all he heard as he pulled away and a headache built behind his eyes.
Song 4: Plastic
The day he came to tell her he couldn't continue the affair, builders were drilling and hammering at the building opposite and she couldn't catch his words. He was gesticulating at her, mouthing his goodbyes, when she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the cool light and quiet of the kitchen where he broke her heart. Even though he was standing very close, she was trying not to listen so that the words would deflect from her and wouldn't count, that they wouldn't have enough weight to drag their relationship down. She stared hard at the pots and pans hanging in an uneven line and tried to address the inverted, ballooning scenario developing in the gleaming reflection of the biggest pot closest to her. She couldn't hear him, but she could see that he was pointing at her and then she realised that he was gone from the pot, from the kitchen and from her.
Her name was Nancy. He was called Kory and he was married to her sister and had been for three years. She hadn't been his first affair, he'd admitted that to her the second time they'd slept together, as she was running a finger through the sweat gathering in the small of his back. She looked across at him and knew it was his way of warning her off, letting her know that this was something that would not last, that he would go back to her sister, just not then (though he was gone within the hour and always would be), but inevitably, ultimately. That's where his life was. He said that so much that it became like a mantra to both of them as if once he left home and came to her that it was in some kind of hinterland, that their actions weren't concrete in this world, that their fucking was without consequence. That there need not be an outcome to this, it was set in time, like a bug caught in amber.
She thought about this as she looked at her bandaged hand. Her thumbs were uneven â or had been â with a bulb of flesh making an imperfect line on her left hand. She'd all but forgotten about it until Kory touched her for the first time (discreetly and at a safe distance from the house) and she'd felt him flinch when his hand had bumped against it. He'd disguised his reaction quickly and smiled as he kept looking from the house to her and told her how he felt about her, how he'd always felt. She wasn't stupid enough to believe him, but she wanted to believe something. Her sister came out of the house and he placed his hand back in his lap and smiled at her again and then he stood up to embrace his approaching wife.
Their affair started soon afterwards. Christmas had passed, but winter still lingered long into the New Year. The snow was still on the ground when she first made love to him; she did wonder later whether it was making love for him too or just fucking. Even later still she'd feel silly and girlish for even allowing herself to ever think that; he was fucking her against the wall of a generic motel room in a building that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and landed near the highway, and in his memory he always would be.
Cosy, she thought to herself as she tried not to think about the orange bedspread or the lifeless-looking carpets as she first entered the room. Dull light played through the window as he produced a bottle of whisky from his bag and went down the corridor to find some ice. She'd enjoyed it and him, though, despite herself. The sex was good and playful, sometimes rough. She found herself smiling as she sat across him and was happy to feel his weight pushing against her as he covered her body with his. She'd had a mole removed from near her mouth next. It was strange to look at herself in the mirror and not see her hand move to it any more, to caress it lightly and wonder what she would look like without it. Now she knew; there was less of her, there was nothing to see, no punctuation to her face any more, she thought, and then wondered what had made her think that.
You look different, her sister said to her, and for a moment she panicked and thought that guilt and satisfaction really could be seen set across someone's face. Your mole, her sister said, and she looked at her again more directly as if trying to balance the two halves of her face: before and after. I liked your mole, her sister said again. Why did you get rid of it? She didn't know, she said, then she said, a mole can indicate cancer, you know. Her sister, a hint of hysteria creeping into her voice leant forward and said in a stage whisper, Your doctor thought you had cancer? She shook her head. No, she said, the doctor never thought that.
They were sitting on high stools at a corner of a bar that neither of them had been to before. There was a silence between them; her sister waved her glass at the barman, ordering another round.
Better to be safe than sorry, right? she said, but her sister just stared at her, at the tiny mark, at the thin line where her mole used to be.
He was pushing his thumb gently into her mouth when he noticed that the mole had disappeared. He traced a finger against the minute scar and held it there a second. The skin was lighter, slightly off. He was still inside her when he asked where it had gone. She told him the lie about the cancer and the doctor's warning, but he seemed impervious to her reasoning. He was staring and seemed not to be listening at all.
I like it, he said, and stroked her face again, pushing himself deeper into her until she gasped happily.
Next she had her lips pumped with collagen. They looked like two tiny pillows. She felt comical and absurd and couldn't wait for them to deflate. Technically, she told herself, this wasn't an operation; this truly was cosmetic, nothing had been taken from her, nothing had been removed. At first she found them freakish and obscenely large, but he had liked them. He couldn't resist nipping gently at them with his teeth, running his lips against hers. She'd stop and regard herself, usually after she'd taken a shower and he had gone, her hair wrapped up in a towel set high on her head. The weight of it toppled slowly backwards, pulling the skin on her face tight. She admired the set of her jaw, the clean line where it met her neck. She pulled down the towel she had draped around her and rearranged her cleavage so her breasts were pushed together, jutting forward, making them both high and round. She pouted at herself and then smiled as the condensation clouded her reflection in the mirror.
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