The Hunger Trace (14 page)

‘Her name is Carol-Ann. Erm, erm, erm. It was just love at first. Erm. We send each other in the region of ninety texts a day.’

‘Jesus wept. Was that her who texted just now?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Do you mind if I check my emails?’

‘Sure. What did she say?’ Louisa asked.

‘Erm. Classified.’

‘Course. None of my business.’ But Louisa could not help it. ‘She go to your college?’

‘Nope.’

‘Where’d you meet her?’

‘Erm. Cyberspace.’

‘Oh.’

‘The problem is, she makes ten K a year. How am I supposed to compete with that?’ He walked over to the computer.

‘I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a competition,’ Louisa said.

‘I believe a man should look after his woman,’ said Christopher. ‘Family values.’

Louisa did not reply.

‘I’ve told her she means the world to me. I feel like I have a purpose, at last. Erm. I’m going to be the breadwinner and look after Carol-Ann and her child.’

‘Whoa. Hold on there,’ Louisa said.

‘What?’

‘This girl has a child?’ Louisa said.

‘A baby, yes. Simon, it’s called.’

‘It? I mean, you have to be careful here. You haven’t even met this woman. You don’t really know her.’

Christopher waved his mobile phone. ‘Erm, erm. Hello? In the region of ninety texts per day.’

‘Yes, but you can’t make promises like that without
really
knowing a person. You’re a young man. She could be trapping you into something you’re not equipped to deal with.’

Christopher stood up. ‘You’re just like
her
,’ he said, pointing his finger in the direction of the big house. He walked towards the door.

‘Chris,’ she said, following him.

‘It’s
Christopher
,’ he bellowed. Then, in a quieter voice, he said, ‘If you’re writing it down, and you’re in a hurry, I’ll accept Xtopher.’

‘Looking after a child is a big thing.’

‘How would you know? Whose side are you on?’

‘I’m not on anybody’s side,’ Louisa hissed. ‘Sit down, now.’ She pointed at the sofa. Christopher flinched, and the force seemed to drain from him. He sat down.

‘I’m not on anybody’s side. But
she
is,’ Louisa said, nodding towards the park. ‘She’s on yours.’

‘Maggie Green is in it for the money,’ Christopher said.

‘Nonsense.’

‘She’s probably going to sell the park.’

‘She’d make a loss if she did, you fool,’ Louisa said. Christopher looked up, surprised.

‘She doesn’t care about Dad.’

‘At the moment, all she talks about is you.’

‘About how she’s going to, erm, conspire against me.’

‘No!’ Louisa shouted. ‘About how she wants to help you. She wants you to have friends, a girlfriend. To be happy. She, on the other hand, is up there, completely alone. And what are you doing to help? Whose side are
you
on, apart from your own?’

Christopher punched his thigh, and stared hard at the ground. He had lost a contact lens; Louisa could see that one of his eyes was bright blue, while the other remained grey. He got down on the floor to search, and eventually Louisa bent down to help him. It was under the sofa, furred with dust. It appeared that he hadn’t noticed the shotgun.

‘You know what we should do?’ Louisa said.

‘Erm. What?’

‘We should go down to the White Hart, and get . . . shit-faced. What do you think?’

‘Erm. I think there’s no need for that language, but I suppose we could go to the pub. Although at college they say I’m not comfortable working in group situations,’ he said.

‘But which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ said Louisa. Christopher smiled.

They descended the hill together, and although Christopher stomped off into the dark to begin with, he soon slowed down and walked behind Louisa, occasionally placing his hand on her back as he resisted the slope.

The best part of the evening was seeing the collective discomfort of the regulars when they entered. Bill Wicks looked jaundiced in the light reflected from the optics. Christopher slouched on the bar. ‘This must be the quietest pub in Christendom,’ he said. He put Dr Hook on the jukebox to liven things up.

They drank heavily, offering flaming sambucas to the regulars, although Richie Foxton was the only man game enough to drink one, blowing first on the blue flame as though it were a birthday candle. Louisa and Christopher laughed when he asked if Maggie would be coming down. The other patrons shook their heads, and whispered amongst themselves. Christopher proposed a toast. ‘To the two biggest loons this side of the Pecos!’

Louisa half-raised her glass and smirked.

The night wore on, and Christopher spoke of Robin Hood. ‘People have this idea of him as a, erm, jolly character, but he mutilated Guy of Gisbourne’s face with an Irish knife.’

‘Does that make you like him more, or less?’

‘Erm. Times were hard and men were men. Sometimes you have to get nasty. Dad used to say it’s every man for himself. Sometimes you have to rock someone back to their ancestors, that’s what Dad used to say.’ Christopher tried to suppress a belch. He was wildly unsuccessful.

‘Doesn’t sound like David,’ Louisa said. ‘Never saw much violence out of him . . . and I don’t see how your violent Robin Hood is compatible with your family values.’ The word ‘compatible’ was something of a struggle.

‘Well, it’s like me and Carol-Ann. Marian knew who the breadwinner was.’

‘Not to mention the fact that, likely as not, he would have stunk to high heaven,’ Louisa said.

Christopher considered this. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He was a stalker. Like you. I think he would have been unusually clean.’

Back at Drum Hill, Christopher took the side entrance, to escape a rain shower. Louisa heard him begin to climb the stairs and then come back down to vomit on the doorstep. There was a note of tired acceptance in his retching.

Louisa was drunk and relapsing. She would later tell herself that it was the unusual light from the house which drew her into the front garden, but on some level she admitted the futility of the excuse. It was true, however, that she had never seen a light in the third ground-floor window before. She had never seen David in there, and had always assumed it to be some kind of storage room. Now she saw that, although small, the room contained a large armchair, and a disused fireplace in which stood a portable heater and a desk lamp trained on the ceiling, so that shadows extended from the bodies within.

Louisa had never seen the man before. His nakedness was made more shocking by Maggie’s state of dress. She wore a tight black shirt and boots; her jeans were crumpled around her knees. The man knelt before her as she sat in the armchair, her long legs over his shoulders. She put a hand through her hair as he lowered his head between her legs. It did not take long, Louisa noticed, before Maggie slid down in the chair. She reached out for the back of his head, and hesitated, perhaps fearing the intimacy of the gesture. But then she took hold of him anyway, and pressed him to her. His erection grew taut, and soon he pulled off her jeans and boots. Maggie left the chair and straddled him where he knelt on the floor, her legs behind his back and her head turned away from the window. In the dim light Louisa could barely discern the man’s features. He had rocky outsized shoulders and buzz-cut hair.

Standing there in the darkness, Louisa began to feel cold. Tears came to her eyes. This was nothing new. She thought of herself in her school uniform, in the coroner’s court all those years ago.

Maggie held on to his arms and arched her back. In the garden, the soundlessness was the strangest thing – or rather the discordance of the outside sounds: the sporadic wet hiss of distant cars, the leaves shaking themselves of water, the hum of some giant generator coming from God knows where, the animals, all accompanying this apparently silent act.

The morning after seeing Maggie with the man, Louisa woke early but stayed in bed. She watched the light glide across the carpet and illuminate the doorway. The jamb had splintered from her repeatedly slamming the door the previous night. Ugly channels of light wood showed where the white paint had come off, and debris covered the floor. The hinges had been damaged, too, and the door hung at a slight angle. She could not explain it, but she would not have to because nobody would know.

She was due to meet Maggie at the big house at 7.30 a.m. She lay in bed and waited for that time to pass. Shortly afterwards, her mobile phone rang. She threw it across the room. When it rang again, she rose to retrieve it and removed the battery. From her window she could see the tiny figure of Maggie in the distance, peering over at the cottage.

Fragments of their past conversations came back to Louisa throughout the morning.
‘You’re the only person I can talk to,’
Maggie had said.
‘I feel like I can tell you anything.’
They had talked about men. She remembered Maggie saying that she was too busy for a relationship. Too busy with Christopher.
‘He’s the man in my life at the moment.’

Louisa tried to focus on that remark, that lie. She tried to feel angry on Christopher’s behalf, but she knew that the hurt she felt was for herself. It wasn’t just the plans they had made, to work together on the park. There was something else, something deeper.

The next day, she could see Maggie across the fields, planning out the boundaries for the new, more spacious lynx enclosure they had talked about. Louisa felt a twinge of sadness, a momentary wish to be out there with Maggie, but she dismissed it sharply.

She had spent so much of her life avoiding people; it was really not so difficult. She slipped out of the back door of her cottage, put Diamond in the van and drove away, gunning the engine and heading for the reservoir.

Even out in the field, the images came to her frequently. Watching the clouds for Diamond, Louisa suddenly recalled the light fanning from the upturned lamp, the shadows around the big armchair, Maggie’s hand on the man’s neck, the slow control of his movements. She felt the blood begin to move in her body, felt her pulse quicken and her temperature rise. She had to call Diamond to the fist and sit in her van to calm down.

Travelling home she thought of David, and all the women he had brought to the house. After his first marriage failed, there were several, all of them practically the same: divorcees with a passion for cocktails and double-barrelling their surnames. Louisa had watched them all drive away, but she could not help but feel that she had spent her life being
replaced
.

Maggie visited in the afternoon. Louisa was in the living room listening to the bating of her hawks; the short bursts of frantic wingbeats were like someone trying to start a car. The light was already changing, the contours of her furniture dissolving before her eyes. Preliminary sketches of the dual-skylight breeding chamber lay on the table before her, fading into dark.

She could hear Maggie outside, talking to Iroquois. She could hear boots on the path as Maggie walked to the door. Louisa did not rise when Maggie knocked, and she had bolted the door this time.

‘Lou? You in?’

A few moments later Maggie was at the window, hand to her brow, squinting into the living room. Louisa knew that Maggie would not be able to see her, because of the dusky light outside and the darkness within the house. She sat there in the shadows with immunity, her pupils blacking out the colour, until Maggie took two steps back, and then turned away.

She saw the man arrive at the big house again, shortly after Christopher had left for his Sunday afternoon session in the Hart. The last hope that she had witnessed a strange one-night stand was gone. He parked his red Volkswagen Golf at the back of the house. It was almost dark, and impossible to discern his features from that distance anyway, as he walked through the beam of the outside light. He moved with the stoop of a tall man, and had a youthful bounce in his step. He gave a tap on the side door, which presumably led to the seedy little room. The door soon opened.

Louisa turned away from the window. Women like Maggie, they could marry, bury their husband, and find another man within – what? – two years. All that talk of grief: what did it mean?

She paced around her living room for half an hour, tempted to walk across the fields and face Maggie with her accusations. But she admitted to herself that those accusations – when put into words – amounted to little of rational substance. She could not, however, stay in the house, and so she got in her van, rolled it down the hill, and parked across the road. She waited.

In the van she picked over the last few months, trying to think of signals she had missed. She could recall nothing. All of this had clearly been happening on her doorstep and, despite the watchful eye she kept on the house, she had missed it. I confided in that woman, she told herself, and she took me for a fool. She wondered about the nature of the relationship between Maggie and the man. She wondered if she had the power to destroy it.