The Hunger Trace (27 page)

‘My van is up the road,’ Louisa said.

‘I can drive. There’s nothing wrong with the car,’ she said.

‘I know there’s nothing wrong with the car. Get in the van.’

Cynthia followed without much protest, in one of her increasingly frequent numb states. She got into the van and sniffed the air.

‘Yeah, well,’ Louisa said, nodding to two peregrines in the back. ‘They probably don’t think much of your stink right now, either,’ Louisa said. Cynthia smelled of turps, milk formula, Malibu, saliva, Nelly’s Asda own-brand aftershave, tobacco, semen, and Chanel.

‘Don’t tell David,’ Cynthia said flatly.

‘It’s not the first time, is it?’ Louisa said.

‘First time with
that
prick.’

‘Steady on. He’s a friend.’

Cynthia spoke quietly, and without conviction. ‘Of course. You introduced us. All the more reason not to tell David.’

‘Don’t threaten me,’ Louisa said. Before, Cynthia would have screamed at a line like that. She would have actually cried. Now she just looked at her feet.

‘I did introduce you,’ Louisa said. ‘So it
does
put me in something of a bind. I don’t appreciate that.’

‘We’ll probably divorce anyway, but I can’t afford to walk away with nothing. Tell me what I need to do to keep it quiet,’ Cynthia said.

Louisa saw herself as if from the outside. She felt, as she often did, disconnected from reality and consequence. What did it matter what she said?

‘I think you need to get away from all this,’ Louisa said. ‘I think that’s what you need to do.’

Cynthia was gone by Christmas. In public they cited ‘mutual distance’, a strange phrase. Most people suspected that she could not handle life at the park. The divorce was amicable because David bowed easily to her demands, gave her everything she wanted and took everything she didn’t. Despite their low opinion of her maternal attributes, the villagers were stunned that Christopher remained on the hill. Such a thing was unheard of. Even Louisa thought that Cynthia would take the boy.

News came back, many years later, that Cynthia had done well on her second chance. She had kicked the drink. According to Bill Wicks she had even ‘got herself therapised’ and was an all-round calmer woman. David raised his glass to the news, said he didn’t even mind paying for such a philanthropic act. ‘Think of all the bartenders, waiters, shop assistants and service staff I’ve saved from her wrath,’ he said.

Nothing to do with me, Louisa thought, happy to have another little secret.

When Cynthia left, Louisa felt the sort of manic joy sometimes associated with grief. Since living on Drum Hill, she had had several half-hearted affairs, mainly in an attempt to make David jealous. Now, she finally saw an opening.

On New Year’s Eve, she was done up to dine at the country club. She knew David would be there. She wore a two-tone blue dress, darker and more sophisticated than the one she had worn to the Pony Club Ball all those years before.

Despite the schedule she had been devising for weeks, Louisa froze in the afternoon and ended up rushing her preparations. At the last moment, she remembered that she had not yet fed her young steppe eagle, Iroquois. She struggled outside on heels, and cast Iroquois into the wind. Iroquois did not come down on the meat she held, but on the exposed flesh of Louisa’s forearm. She locked her claws into the soft underside, and hung upside down before flying over the house.

Louisa was bemused. Such attacks were rare, and it was rarer still that a talon broke the skin. Perhaps the shimmer of her bracelet had momentarily aroused the memory of light in a vermin eye. ‘Surely I don’t look that bad in a dress,’ she said, when Iroquois eventually came to the fist. ‘You’re probably right,’ she said, applying pressure to the puncture marks, and walking back to the weighing room. ‘Mutton.’

She may have been in shock. The moonless evening did not help matters. She dressed her wounds absent-mindedly and drove to the country club through the dark lanes.

As soon as she stepped into the reception area, she knew the night was over. The concierge stooped as if to catch a dropping glass, and the other guests turned. In the poor light of the weighing room she had mistaken the blood, which had sprayed quite liberally from the original penetrations, for the darker shades of her two-tone dress. Now, standing beneath the bright lanterns of the club, it was quite clear that Iroquois had hit a vein. Blood speckled her cleavage. It had leaked through the bandage and dripped onto her lap while she was driving.

The guests were called to the tables. David, thankfully, had already taken his seat, out of sight. Louisa stood in the lobby for a moment, alone but for the receptionist, who busied herself with papers. ‘That’ll teach me to dress up,’ Louisa said, spinning on her short heel.

*    *    *

A few months later, Louisa’s father called. ‘I’ve just spoken to David Bryant,’ he said, uttering the words with a certain ceremony. She closed her eyes, and sat down. After all these years.

‘What did he say?’ she asked, looking at her glove splayed on the kitchen table. She imagined the words, not for the first time: y
our hand. He wants your hand.

‘He said he shot that boy,’ her father said. ‘Not you.’

Louisa waited for the plates of her mind to shift. When she failed to respond, her father continued. ‘He said he was never brave enough to confess. That you made a
massive sacrifice
. Now that your life is ruined, of course, he’s come forward, which is big of him. He’s told Lawrence, too. Nice little boost for a widower on his deathbed. Hello?’

Louisa cleared her throat, to indicate her continued presence.

‘When he said it, I thought,
yes, I know
. Typical me, you’re probably thinking. Typical know-it-all Daddy. But there you have it. If you took the blame to spite me, it worked, I suppose. And if you did it to test me, I failed. Either way it’s been a bloody waste, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Louisa, to her father’s surprise.

She went straight to David, confronted him in his office. ‘You’ve made a liar of me,’ she told him.

He sucked in his lips, as if he knew this was coming. ‘I told them what you did for me,’ he said. ‘How amazing you were. I couldn’t get straight with myself, Louisa. I couldn’t have gone on with it any longer.’

‘I could,’ she said.

He opened his mouth to speak, but they heard Christopher running through the hallway towards them. Louisa saw David smile, saw the new freedom in him, as he turned to welcome the boy.

It was as though they had one vial of strength between them, and they could not share it equally. It was the boy who completed David’s recovery. Philip Cassidy stepped up his hours on the park, David committed himself to looking after Christopher, and they managed. He took single-parenthood on with humour and imagination. Louisa retreated, feeling the sharp stab of her redundancy.

Two weeks after she had called Adam, Maggie was driving towards Detton when she spotted Louisa’s van in the car park of the Strutt Arms. The kidney colour was difficult to miss. Maggie pulled in beside it. She could hear the weir crashing below, and see the spume rolling in the late afternoon darkness.

The Strutt was a chain pub, and a good deal brighter than the White Hart. Through the big glass windows Maggie could see young families eating at the tables, and a group of boys gathered at the fruit machine. There were
people
, everywhere, in configurations she recognised from another life. And yet she was only four miles from the lonely house on the hill. She got out of the Land Rover and crossed the car park.

As she passed the Transit, Maggie saw Louisa leaning against the door. Louisa was smiling ruefully, her arms folded. When she saw Maggie approaching, Louisa’s expression changed considerably. She became rigid, and her face began to flush.

‘Hey!’ Maggie said. ‘I saw the van, so I pulled in.’ She turned to Louisa’s companion – she hadn’t registered him at first, nor how strange it was for Louisa to have company. ‘Oh, God,’ Maggie said, and gave a startled laugh. ‘Hi. Hello.’

‘Alright,’ said Adam.

Maggie turned to Louisa and tried to act naturally. ‘So, how’s things?’

‘Fine,’ Louisa said.

There was a silence.

‘I’ve got to be off,’ Adam said. He leaned towards Louisa and then stopped, put a hand on her arm.

‘See you,’ Maggie said.

He nodded and strode off to his car. Maggie waited until he had driven past, and then turned back to Louisa with a wide-eyed smile. She noticed that Louisa was wearing mascara.

‘How’s Diamond?’ Maggie said.

‘He’s fine.’

‘Hey listen, I hope I wasn’t intruding on you and . . .’

Louisa let the silence continue for a moment. ‘You know who he is,’ Louisa said eventually, with some irritation.

‘What, he told you we . . . ? I didn’t think he was supposed to talk about other . . .’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Well. It was a while ago, really,’ Maggie said, choosing not to count the more recent brief visit. She smiled mischievously, but when she saw Louisa’s reaction – a few stern deep breaths – she reined in the conspiratorial good cheer. ‘Lou, I hope you don’t feel weird about it. I certainly don’t. These kind of services—’

‘Do we
have
to talk about this?’ Louisa said. ‘I mean, are you finished with this
bloody
talk? I know exactly what you’re thinking because everything’s about sex for you, isn’t it?’

‘I wish,’ said Maggie. ‘Look, Louisa, it’s okay. It’s nothing to be . . . you’re a woman, you’ve got needs.’

‘No I haven’t,’ Louisa said. ‘It’s not like that. You don’t know anything about me and him. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I wish you’d mind your own bloody business.’

Louisa got into her van, and slammed the door. Maggie stepped back and waited. Louisa reversed and then drove away, leaving Maggie alone with the sibilance of the weir.

After a moment, Maggie went back to the Land Rover. Climbing in, she remembered Adam’s face when he had come to the house last week. He had looked disapproving, almost repulsed. Maggie had been drunk but surely such a situation was nothing new to a man like him. So the question loomed: why was he unable to sleep with Maggie, when he was clearly capable of keeping his appointment with Louisa? Maggie studied her own face in the rear-view mirror. She had not been sleeping, and tender patches of dark skin swelled beneath each eye. The radio told of flash floods in the North-East; a man last seen alive trying to cross a submerged car park had washed up a day later by the cathedral five miles away. The weather was heading south.

She turned off towards Drum Hill, thinking of Louisa’s smirk and slouch by the van. In the moment before she had seen Maggie, she had looked so at ease. It had taken a long time for Louisa to relax into such a posture, and Maggie knew she could take some of the credit. She tried to feel good about that.

*    *    *

That night, Louisa tried her best to pick a fight with Adam. They dined in a huge, virtually empty curry house on a back road out of town. The heavy pink curtains remained open, leaving the vast night sky visible.

‘I’m sick of hiding out in holes like this,’ she said, looking at the ceiling. ‘We’re like lepers.’

‘You suggested the place. God knows I’ve got nothing left to hide. Why don’t we go on back to Detton? Eh? The White Hart,’ said Adam, leaning back in his chair.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

‘I’m serious,’ Adam said, smiling. ‘I mean, you’re not ashamed of me, are you?’

‘You know that’s got nothing to do with it,’ Louisa said.

‘Besides. There’s no
point
sneaking around, now.’

Louisa looked up from her food. ‘Now
what
? What’s changed?’

‘Well. Your neighbour knows.’

‘You think
she
was the only person I was keeping it from?’ Louisa said.

‘Yes,’ Adam said.

‘How dare you?’ Louisa said, but she lacked conviction. She thought of Maggie’s look of bewilderment outside the Strutt.

‘She was always going to find out eventually, wasn’t she?’ Adam said.

‘Only because she’s always prying,’ Louisa said.

Adam laughed. ‘She pulled in to the pub because she saw your van, and she wanted to see you. It’s probably because she
likes
you or something.’

‘Why are you sticking up for her?’

‘I’m not. There’s no need to. She hasn’t done anything wrong. What’s she done wrong?’

‘All these questions she asks,’ Louisa said, trying to stoke the memories of earlier in the day. ‘She doesn’t know what’s going on between you and me. She thinks she does but she doesn’t.’

‘And why doesn’t she?’

‘Oh, it’s my fault is it?’ Louisa drained her lager and threw down her pink napkin.

‘Why does it have to be someone’s fault?’ Adam said. ‘Why is it all about vendettas for you? It’s not the mafia. You both live up there on that hill and it seems a bloody shame to do so alone. For both of you. Don’t you want to be happy?’