The Child Who (22 page)

‘Leo. Please. You’re scaring me.’

A Range Rover drew alongside and Leo twitched the steering wheel as though to veer into it. The 4x4 fell back. Leo swerved into the gap and accelerated towards the roundabout.

‘Where are we meeting her?’

‘What? Leo!’ Megan clutched at her seat.

‘Ellie! Where are we meeting her!’

‘At the gates! Just . . . The usual place.’

Leo slowed, slightly, yet took the roundabout in third. There were speed bumps blistering the side street and Leo surged over them, scraping the Passat along the tarmac on each downward lunge. The sound was like the world tearing and Megan, each time, gave another yell. She pressed one palm to the ceiling and clung with the other to the handle on the door. She was crying, Leo realised.

There were cars corked up ahead and children breaking from the school gates. Leo wrenched the handbrake. He opened the door and lunged with a foot but his seat belt was attached and it hauled him back. He fumbled, found the catch, and lurched once more into the street.

‘Ellie!’

Leo heard his name in the wake of his daughter’s, his wife’s voice echoing his. Whatever she said afterwards, though, was muffled by the shrillness of the schoolyard.

‘Ellie!’ he called again.

There was a hatchback moving off the way Leo had arrived and he caught its bonnet with his open hands just as it slammed to a stop. Someone shouted, swore, but Leo spun away and on, through the gaps between the double-parked cars. He collided with a coat, rebounded into an open door, and somehow found himself on the pavement.

‘Ellie!’ He paused, raised himself on tiptoes. People were stopping now, turning to look, but when they angled their bodies towards him they only made it harder for him to see. He shoved his way through a chorus of protests and emerged into a vacuum beside the gates.

‘Where is she?’ He whirled, spotted Megan approaching, but not close enough yet to answer his question. He grabbed the shoulder of someone passing. ‘Have you seen Ellie? Ellie Curtice?’ The boy made a face and shrugged Leo off.

‘Excuse me. Hey.’ Leo seized someone else, a girl this time, Ellie’s age, but the girl seemed unable, in her fright, to respond at all.

‘Leo! What are you doing!’

‘Meg. Where is she? You said here, didn’t you? You said to meet here?’

‘Yes but . . .’ Megan checked her watch. She frowned, as though it was later than she had realised. ‘Maybe she . . .’ She cast about, letting the sentence dwindle. ‘Ellie?’ she said. ‘Ellie!’

The crowd around them was drifting to a halt. It was thinning anyway beneath the reddening sky but the pupils and parents who were yet to leave had ceased chattering and were turning to stare. Leo spotted a teacher inside the gates, watching Leo with a look of alarm. He saw her collar a pupil, then propel the girl towards the main building. Leo searched the faces searching his. He yelled his daughter’s name.

‘Mr Curtice?’

A girl’s voice; one Leo recognised. He checked about him for its source. ‘Sophie!’ Leo stooped and clasped his daughter’s friend by the shoulders. ‘Have you seen Ellie? She should be here. Have you seen her?’

Sophie was already shaking her head. ‘No, she—’

‘Sophie!’ Megan, crouching beside him. ‘Have you seen Ellie?’

‘No. I was just saying. I saw her in lessons this morning but after lunch she was gone.’

No. Please God no.

‘Gone?’ Megan said. ‘Gone where?’

‘I dunno. She—’ Sophie grimaced. ‘Ow. Mr Curtice, you’re hurting me.’

‘Let go of her, Leo, for pity’s sake!’ Megan tugged Leo’s arm and shoved at his shoulder. He released his hold at the same time and stumbled backwards, colliding with the gate behind him. He slid until he found himself sitting.

‘Gone where, Sophie? Where did Ellie go?’ Megan was gripping the girl’s shoulders herself now, locking Sophie’s eyes with her own.

‘I dunno. She wasn’t at the shop at lunchtime so I figured she’d gone to the park. I mean, just lately we . . . we haven’t been . . .’ The girl looked towards the ground. ‘When I didn’t see her this afternoon, I just assumed she must’ve gone home. That maybe someone had said something or something. To upset her, I mean.’

Leo could only watch. He could only listen. He wanted to lift a hand from the floor but sensed, if he let go, that he would not be able to stop himself falling.

Megan, in front of him, was standing, scanning the street. Coatless, she shivered, but made no move to wrap herself in her arms. She started to speak, to nod, and Leo was aware, vaguely, of a voice drawing closer from across the playground. Ms Bridgwater. The head teacher. Stamping her authority on a situation that was already beyond her control. And Megan again, raising her voice now, hurling gestures towards the school, along the street, back to the school and then —

And then she stopped. She fell silent. She looked at Leo and angled her head. She said something, a question, and Leo looked up at his wife but could not answer. Because he was right. Now that he had let go it seemed like he was tumbling, like the world all of a sudden had given way. In its place there was just a void, an encroaching blackness, and the words on the page he had drawn from his pocket and was somehow holding out towards his wife –

– scrawled in blood and underlined with Ellie’s hair.

She is early herself
but he is already seated. It is not like him, she thinks. But then who is she, these days, to be able to judge?

She slides from her coat but no one offers to take it from her. When no one comes to direct her to the table either, she drapes the coat over her arm and makes her own way across the restaurant floor. It is busy for brunch-time and she has to weave and hoist her coat and apologise, more than once, for knocking other patrons’ chairs. Feeling hot, and damp from the rain, and conscious that her hair, probably, is a frizzy mess, she arrives. Leo stands to greet her.

This, ridiculously, given what she has come here to say, is the moment she has been dreading. Not the act of coming face to face after such a long time but the decision, once they are within range, about how she should greet her husband. A kiss, she thought, on the cheek but Leo is caught between the table and the leather bench and Megan, to reach him, would have to lunge. An embrace – a hand on the shoulder, a brief coming together – is her backup but this, in the circumstances, would prove awkward too. A handshake is out of the question so in the end Megan flounders. She says hi, then hi again, then smiles, sort of, and just sits.

He is staring. Megan does her best, with a surreptitious palm, to smooth her hair.

But, ‘You look well,’ Leo says. ‘You really do.’

In spite of her relief, she could take offence – what did he expect? – but his manner is earnest and his expression uncertain and she thinks that today she should endeavour to be kind. Compliments, she knows, are not her husband’s vernacular. He utters them, when he utters them, with the same failed fluidity that defines his French.

‘You look well yourself,’ she says. And this is indeed being kind because Leo looks anything but. He has shaved and is neatly turned out – a shirt collar beneath a V-neck jumper and the colours even vaguely coincide – but there is no dressing up a dishevelment that runs deeper. His skin is wan, sunless. He has lost weight. He had some to spare but it has slipped most noticeably from his cheeks. As for his hair: when she last saw him it was already deserting him and he has pre-empted the sedition of the rest by clipping it tight. The result, a stranger might say, was making the best of a bad lot – better than a combover, certainly. But it is not Leo.

She decides. If she was not sure before, she is sure now.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Leo already has a coffee but is directing a finger at a passing waiter. The waiter – a boy, practically, and east European, Megan predicts – has stopped mid stride. He does not have long, the bustle and his bearing convey. Quickly now, please: what will it be?

‘A cappuccino?’ says Leo. ‘Right?’

The waiter nods and is about to dart on but Megan reaches. ‘A Bloody Mary,’ she says. ‘Lots of spice.’ Again the waiter nods. Megan fails to look at Leo as she turns. She needs the drink. She is under no obligation to explain why. And now, she realises, she might un-decide. Such is her see-saw antagonism, her decision might tip on the weight of what Leo says next.

‘So,’ Leo says.

Megan lifts her head. Her husband is staring at his coffee.

‘So.’

‘You heard, then. The news.’

‘I did.’ She has an urge to reach across. ‘Leo, I’m . . .’ Don’t say it. You’re not, so don’t say it. ‘What happened? Do you know?’

Her husband has a gesture. It is not for strangers because it would be construed as rude. But for friends, family, Leo has a gesture – a flick of a finger, a turn of the head, a tightening across the lips – that says, I don’t want to talk about it. He will, Megan is convinced, use it now.

Instead he sighs. He picks up his teaspoon. He does not seem to know what to do with it so he puts it down again. ‘The short version?’ he says. ‘Or the long?’

Megan’s Bloody Mary arrives. It is a bouquet of celery in a blood-red vase. She would laugh, ordinarily. ‘I don’t have anywhere I need to be,’ she says instead. It is not true but she says it anyway.

Leo regards her, as though uncertain whether she means what she says. But he seems, in the end, to be convinced. He sighs again.

He is grieving, Megan realises. After all these years and after everything that has happened, he is suffering. For this child, this boy – this man, in the end: Leo is aching from the loss.

Megan shivers. She cannot help it and she cannot hide it. Her husband, though, does not notice. He is searching for his voice in his coffee cup.

‘It was the guards,’ he says. ‘Two of them. Allegedly, of course. They haven’t admitted anything and from what I hear each one’s covering for the other, blaming some mysterious inmate. But the guards. Can you believe it?’ Leo smiles and shakes his head.

Megan looks at her hands.

‘He was up for parole,’ Leo said. ‘Or he would have been. Maybe that was why. Huh. I didn’t think of that. Maybe just the thought of them letting him out . . .’ Leo shakes his head again. ‘Such rage,’ he says, as much to himself. ‘So much rage.’

‘Don’t tell me you can’t understand it, Leo. Not now. Not after everything that . . . that we . . .’ Megan’s anger, from nowhere, overwhelms itself.

‘What? No. Meg, please. I didn’t mean . . .’

She turns her cheek. She presses her lips. Leo, she can tell, is searching for the words that might appease her but she could save him the effort because there are none, not in that moment. Her husband, however, seems to have reached the same conclusion because the silence stretches.

When Megan turns back he avoids her eye.

‘It was the guards,’ Megan says. Her voice is taut but composed. ‘You were saying: it was the prison guards.’

Now Leo looks: a child peeking from beneath the covers. He nods, tentatively. ‘That’s right.’ He clears his throat. ‘That’s what people seem to think.’ He sits straight.

‘What did they . . .’ Megan, too, adjusts herself in her seat. ‘The guards. How did they . . .’

Leo does not answer right away. He is staring again. He wants to ask, she can tell: do you really want to know? Probably she does not but she can hardly confess to that now.

‘They stabbed him,’ Leo says and that, Megan thinks, is that – at least now they can move on. Leo, though, is not finished. ‘They stabbed him,’ he says again, ‘and punctured his lung. They locked him in the shower block and they watched through the glass as he drowned in his own blood. Allegedly,’ Leo adds. His smile, on anyone else, would seem dangerous.

Megan shuts her eyes. She makes a motion with her hand, as though Leo had not already stopped talking.

When she recovers herself, he is watching her. There is something in his look that was not there before.

‘He’s dead, Megan. Daniel Blake. He’s dead.’

She shakes her head. What is that supposed to—

‘That’s why you’re here. Right? That’s why you wanted to see me. He’s dead, I promise you. They’ve had their blood.’

And so, his expression seems to say, has she.

‘Leo. Really. Is that what you . . . Surely you can’t think that I . . .’

He waits.

‘. . . that I wanted – ’ she lowers her voice ‘ –
this
.’ She is shaking her head and Leo seems suddenly uncertain.

Until: ‘The divorce,’ he says and his shoulders wilt. ‘Right? Closure, finally. That’s what this is about?’

Still Megan shakes her head. ‘No. Leo, no.’ She almost laughs. How has she behaved? How has she treated him that he holds her intentions in such base regard?

Leo is searching the tablecloth for direction. He looks at Megan and his eyes draw narrow. Well? he does not say. What, then?

‘The house.’

Coward.

‘The house? What about the house?’