Half Broken Things (35 page)

Mother herself had always had a shrewd idea that it was worth something, though Father would never spell out to her how much. That was why she had checked up and, of course, why she was furious that the clock was mentioned specifically in Father's will as going to me. But why didn't you
tell
me, I asked her, why? Of course I knew the answer: if I wanted to flounce off on my high horse and sell it to some two-bit shop, that was my own lookout. She loved it, telling me all this.

It explained Mr Hapgood's three bedroom house in Rectory Fields. I think I'd realised something of the sort.

Anyway, since I've told this much, I might as well tell it all.

It wasn't even Mother's bombshell over the clock that day that did it, in the end, nor the way she kept quiet so that the money for university never came my way. No, it was what she went on to tell me about my real mother that really did it.

You see, I hadn't quite realised until that day that I had been living all those years, all of my life to date, not
with
the hope that I would find her, but living
on
that hope. It had been feeding me. And with what Mother told me, the hope died. That day, I saw that I would never know how it felt to come first with somebody. I had been holding on to the chance that I might still come first with my real mother, once I found her. But what Mother told me, the information she tossed at me as if it didn't matter, was that although my mother had not died when I was five, she had died since. She
had
been alive, all those years ago, when Mother first told me I was a prostitute's bastard. But now she was dead.

It will keep for later, what happened next. It still makes me cry to think about it and really I think I've said enough on that subject for now. I have searched my conscience and concluded that what I did was not my fault.

So let me get back to that night after Michael came home. I did sleep a little, burdened still with something that, on balance, was not a feeling of guilt. This may surprise you if you are the sort of person who puts people like Michael, Steph and me in a different category from other people. But for some reason I find myself incapable of believing that I am significantly worse than everyone else.

———

Michael slept dreamlessly and woke early. But Steph was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, and he could tell that she had been like that for hours. Even in the half-light, he thought her features had sharpened overnight; around her mouth it seemed that an old tightness had returned. Turning on his side, he reached out and, starting at her hairline, with one finger traced the line of her profile. When he touched her forehead she did not move, but when he reached the soft little lift of flesh between the base of her nose and her upper lip she tipped back her head and caught his finger in her mouth. They had done this before so many times that it was by now their customary foreplay. But Steph did not this time keep hold of his finger, running her teeth gently along its length. She did not then turn to him without letting go for a moment, and take her mouth to his, and only then gently remove his hand and place it between her legs. Instead she took his finger from her mouth and pressed hard, dry kisses all over his hand, pulled the fingers open and smoothed his palm over her face. Her cheeks were wet. Michael drew her close and they held each other tight in the silence of the room. Outside, the first creamy light of the day was melting to yellow sunshine. They heard Jean get up and go downstairs. Then they lay listening to the yammering of the birds as light tried to burn through the curtains, until Steph's body relaxed against his and slowly she drew him into her. They did not hurry; all too soon this sweet time would be over, anyway.

By six o'clock the next morning we were all downstairs. I had made a pot of tea and got out all the maps I could find, for I had already begun to grapple with the practicalities and had an inkling of how we would have to proceed. We had been set upon a path that we simply had to follow to the end. We had no choice. We hated the necessity for it, and wished desperately that we could undo the events of the day before. I could tell by their faces when they joined me at the table that Michael and Steph felt this, too.

There was so much more to do, and in some ways it would be even worse than what had been done yesterday. And there was the extra worry of not knowing how much time we had. So if I say that we became brutally practical, don't misunderstand. I mean it only in the sense that one might say it of people attending to the consequences of accident or misfortune: firemen or paramedics or surgeons. (That was, in fact, exactly what we were doing.) There is a need to get the job done, and what it looks like, or feels like, to attend to it must not be allowed to interfere with physical skill, courage or resolve to see it through. What good ever comes of people ceasing to think clearly? So we became brutally practical, but we never acted with brutality. We merely mustered the strength, for one another's sakes, to do what we had to. In fact I would go as far as to say that in our case, the killing of that man was attended by nothing but regret. Even what we did next was carried out only because we had to, and it was done with respect, even with something like tenderness.

He couldn't stay here, at Walden. That was certain. Not just for the obvious reason that he might be found but because he would somehow dirty our surroundings. We were already thinking of the poor soul as a kind of pollutant. Wherever we might have put him, and there were dozens of places where he could have been buried, we just could not bear to keep him anywhere on the premises. The earth here was Miranda's, and her presence sanctified it. I imagined myself lying in bed in a week's time at four in the morning, knowing that he was lying not far off, and I knew that unless he was got rid of I should never feel that this place was ours or was quite clean, ever again. We had to get him away. We had to put far from us the ugly, terrible thing that Michael had been forced to do, we had to take ourselves beyond the whole episode. If we could, we would rid ourselves even of the memory of what had happened. We had to be allowed to go on as before and that would not be possible if he were anywhere close by. Besides, what if the police came digging?

No, he would have to go, and this brought a number of considerations. For one thing, I could not leave the house. Quite apart from my own inclinations (I had not felt like leaving the house since my day in Bath) I was the house sitter and what if Shelley telephoned about anything? Steph also would have to carry on as before, appearing each day at Sally's and looking after Charlie. So it would be up to Michael alone. He would have to do it by himself, and here came the first of several quite appalling practical difficulties. Michael could barely lift him. In one piece, I mean.

———

Jean seemed to know that the police would not do anything about the disappearance of an adult until at least forty-eight hours had elapsed. Even then they would point out that people have a perfect right to absent themselves without being considered as having gone missing. But eventually the police would have to take it seriously, and when they did, she told them, they would be sure to come asking questions. Neither Michael nor what remained of Gordon Brookes must be anywhere near Walden when that happened. Michael's presence was in itself a problem, because trivial though it now seemed, the matter of his unpaid fines meant that he could not risk giving the police either his real name or a false one. By this time tomorrow Michael would have to be well clear, and the business of disposing of Gordon Brookes under way. Jean waved an arm over the maps that covered the table.

‘I'm trying to work out where you could go. But it's hard to tell,' she said, apologetically. ‘A map only tells you so much.'

‘As long as it's quiet places,' Michael said. ‘And a long way from here. Just write me down a route and I'll improvise.'

Steph squinted at the maps, then at Michael. ‘It's hard on your own,' she said, suddenly eager, ‘trying to read a map and drive. You need somebody with you. Jean, he needs somebody with him, doesn't he? Jean, suppose I go as well?'

But of course she knew even as she asked that it was out of the question. Steph and Jean must stay, and carry on precisely as they would if Gordon Brookes had actually visited and left, as Steph had already told Sally he had. Nothing must change on the surface; life must go on in its usual way. Meanwhile in their heads, they must create a yesterday in which everything had happened as it should have done, and as they would claim it had. They must construct a yesterday like a film that would play over and over in the imagination, with conversations and events whose details they must rehearse until they were as real as memories. This must be the yesterday they would reel back to and remember and talk of, when they were asked about it.

‘Steph, of course you can't go with him.'

Michael said, ‘You've got things to do here. You have to stay here and wait. If they come, you've got to be here to tell them. You tell them Mr Brookes stayed all morning but he left before lunch. He spent the morning with Charlie, right?'

Steph stared at them both for a few moments. Then she said, ‘With Charlie
and
me. He wasn't used to babies. He just watched. We were outside on the playmat; me and Charlie played with his cars and the blue rabbit.'

‘Mainly he watched. But he did put on the Cookie Monster glove puppet and did some funny voices for him,' Jean suggested.

‘Charlie
hates
that puppet,' Steph said. ‘Mr Brookes just watched. He didn't seem very happy.'

‘Yes! You're right, he did seem withdrawn. Perhaps he was depressed, but we hadn't met him before so we thought it was just shyness,' Jean said. ‘He said very little. He didn't say anything about his holiday. But he read to Charlie out of one of his books.'

‘Yes, he read him
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. Then he carried Charlie round the garden and showed him the flowers. Oh, yes, and he gave him his bottle,' Steph said, with finality. ‘Don't you remember?'

‘Now you've mentioned it,' Jean said, ‘yes, I think I do.'

‘We said to ourselves when he'd gone, what a nice man.'

‘Very serious, and quiet, but nice. And we noticed how he said goodbye to Charlie, didn't we?'

‘Yes, oh yes. We noticed—
what
?'

‘How he whispered in his ear and held him tight, and for such a long time. How his eyes were watering when he handed him back, as if he were leaving for the other side of the world! After he'd gone, we said, well, he clearly adores that grandson of his.'

‘We said, lucky little Charlie.'

‘So we did.'

‘And we thought no more about it.'

 

Michael put on gumboots, found goggles, heavy gardening gloves, a long gardening apron. Jean found two rolls of plastic bin liners and a bag of carefully folded supermarket carrier bags that she had saved from Michael's shopping trips. He fetched the chain saw and took it, with bin liners and bags, to the pool pavilion. Carefully he closed the French windows behind him, entered the bathroom and closed that door too. A little later, when Steph and Jean heard, faintly, the cough of the motor, they did not remark upon it to each other. They were busy. There were the clothes from yesterday to burn, including shoes and a panama hat. There were the clothes Gordon Brookes had packed for his holiday, the backpack itself, his walking boots and anorak, too. Together they carried armloads down between the vegetable rows to the patch of ground behind the walled garden. Michael had forbidden them to use petrol, so Jean scattered a whole box of firelighters under a heap of kindling, sloshed a bottle of methylated spirit over it and flung in a match. She and Steph stood back and watched as flames whirled upwards, sucking breath out of the air that began to tremble against the sky. It was still early, but presently it would be time to fetch Charlie. Steadily they began to feed the fire. It would smoulder for at least a day and a night, giving off the choking smells of charring and melting cotton, canvas and plastic, but without discussing it, Jean and Steph both knew that they wanted the first and fiercest blazing of Gordon Brookes's belongings to be over before Charlie came. They wanted to give him a nice, ordinary day. They all needed it, and they would try to make it so, despite the edgy smell of burning that would hang in the air, and the constant background noise of raw grating, as a chainsaw blade some distance away met and sliced into something solid, yet wet-sounding.

The surface of the day passed. In the house the hours and minutes presented themselves and were filled conventionally. Outside it clouded over and rained for a short time, reducing the fire to sullen smoking and keeping them indoors. Charlie was now eating variously coloured forms of creamy slop that Steph prepared for him, and he slept off his lunch of mashed banana and avocado while she began on a drawing of a jar of honeysuckle that she had picked and placed on the kitchen table. But even after the rain the day remained close and muggy. Steph's head began to ache and she fell asleep.