The Sick Rose (5 page)

He looked around and found himself in Toytown. The houses were old but immaculate, the gardens plastically perfect; the few cars not parked in driveways were showroom-shiny and perfectly parallel to the kerb. The Kelstice Arms, an old-fashioned pub with ivory-coloured walls, stood on a little hillock in the middle of the village. It, too, had windows that you couldn’t see into but there was something welcoming about the tiny diamond panes of glass, each one reflecting sunlight at a different angle. Apart from that, there was nothing. Not a church, not a shop, nothing. There was certainly nobody of whom he could ask directions to the castle. He scrambled up to the top of the hillock looking for a clue, but the gentle rise and fall of the Warwickshire countryside meant that, while it was possible to see fields and treetops waving their way into the distance, it was difficult to gauge more immediate surroundings.

Eventually he found it, up a single-track road. At the end of the road was a sign on a stick, rather like an estate agent’s hoarding, announcing that a mysterious body called Veriditas was responsible for the restoration of the Kelstice Lodge Gardens. A further sign announced that the project was due for completion in spring 2012. The signs almost obscured a tiny house, the same pink stone as the rest of the landscape, whose collapsing walls gave Paul the impression of a kicked sandcastle. At its tallest point the bricks reached his elbow. A snarl of plants peered over the top. A Coke can, aged to a pale pink, lay on the floor next to a crushed beer can as shiny as a Christmas bauble and cigarette packets rotted to pulp. Clearly it had once been a gatehouse; perhaps that was why it was so small: a man could not lie down in it and fall asleep on the job.

The road petered into a dirt track, at the end of which were several cabins the size and shape of shipping crates. Cables linked them but no lights shone from within and every door was shut. Through a gap between two cabins, as though through ramparts, he glimpsed the house for the first time.

Kelstice Lodge sat on a small, steep hill. Like its baby, it was a ruin, a wreck. There was no roof and only two surviving windows, their fragile stone frames hanging from disintegrating walls like ragged lace. Three chimneys remained. What structural superiority did they possess that they had weathered the storms or attacks or years that had felled the rest? The bottom of the building was stained dark with damp or moss, so that it appeared to be sucking up water from the ground like something alive.

Paul took the slope at a run to scale it. Once inside the ruin, he craned his neck to look up. Halfway up the remaining walls was a line of thicker stone where he supposed a floor had once been, and an arch of brickwork described the remnants of a huge hearth. A vestige of a spiral staircase came to an abrupt end in mid-air. Whiskery vegetation grew in the cracks between the steps. He walked the ruin’s perimeter, surveying the estate below. It was impossible to tell where the Kelstice Lodge land stopped and the surrounding farmland began. Here and there were the beginnings of order; rectangular spaces had been cleared and pathways had been marked, but most of the land he could see consisted of shedding trees and impenetrable thickets. The sky rolled lavender and anthracite above him, big clouds that threatened something more dramatic than rain: he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see a cloud split in two to reveal a giant, glowering eye. Something in Kelstice Lodge awoke long-buried memories of childhood games, make-believe sessions of warriors and kings. Paul clasped his hands together, put his foot on a jutting stone and pretended to pull a sword from deep in the rock. He wielded his weapon, turned to point its tip at an imaginary foe and fancied he could hear the whistle of its blade as it cut through the air. For a minute or two he was lost in foolish fantasy, his imagination free to roam as it had when he was a little boy. He felt like he used to before he met Daniel. When his father was alive.

Chapter 4

June 2002

On the morning of his death, Liam Seaforth had sexual intercourse with his wife. Sexual intercourse was the technical term for shagging; Paul’s class had done it in a special science lesson only the week before. He had struggled to marry the dry biological descriptions from his textbook with the pictures he’d seen on Jake’s dad’s laptop, let alone with the giggling and squawking coming from his parents’ bedroom. Dad had brushed his teeth beforehand. Afterwards, he sang ‘their’ song in the shower, the one about doing something to me and hanging on a wire. Mum stayed on her own in the bedroom for ages with the door closed.

Paul had been watching television and chain-eating cereal since half past eight. His heart leapt when he heard his father come down the stairs and then sank again as he saw that Dad was wearing his blue all-in-one. The overalls meant that he was going to be working in his shed.

‘Morning, Pablo!’ said Dad. He kissed the top of Paul’s head and stuck the kettle under the tap. Pablo was Spanish for Paul. Mum always said that the reason they had called him Paul was specifically because you couldn’t shorten it, and here was Dad making a mockery of the whole thing by adding an extra syllable. Dad said that he was
really
named after Paul Weller, but that this was their secret.

‘Are you working on the shelving project?’ asked Paul. Liam, who read nothing for pleasure apart from record sleeve notes, had long struggled to understand his son’s appetite for books (‘He must get it from you,’ he told Natalie, as though it were a heritable disease). Everyone agreed that the current library system, books lining the floor of Paul’s bedroom like the aftermath of a domino-toppling experiment, wasn’t working. Liam was designing and building a shelving system that would fit into the alcove in Paul’s room.

‘Sure am, Pablo,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve done all the prep. What’s the magic formula?’

‘Measure twice, cut once,’ said Paul. ‘Can I help out?’

He was expecting Dad to say, ‘Health and Safety wouldn’t allow it,’ which was his usual response to this request. It was unfair and patronising: last time he’d looked, all Dad’s tools had been in holders on the wall in rows so neat and tidy that it looked like a hardware store. Admittedly there were all the power tools, but Paul wasn’t asking to be allowed to wield the chainsaw. He just wanted to be in there, maybe hold something down and turn the handle on the vice. Sometimes, thought Paul, his dad acted like he didn’t
want
any company in the shed.

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Liam this time. ‘You are nearly eleven, after all.’

‘
Seriously
?’ Paul couldn’t believe his luck.

‘Hands off to start with, mind you. I’ve got to take you through the theory before you begin the practical.’

They took their cups of tea outside. Above their heads, two aeroplanes had crossed paths and scored an X in the cloudless blue sky. Paul bristled with anticipation. Until now, the closest he’d got to helping out was turning on the yellow hose which wriggled like a snake when water ran through it.

Dad unlocked the shed. ‘I must get rid of those,’ he said, toeing the jagged panes of glass that were all that remained of their old greenhouse. They leaned against the shed wall in a stack so thick they looked green. He showed Paul how to unravel the extension lead and thread it through the kitchen window so that they could power their tools from the house. (‘Whatever you do, don’t unplug the microwave, she’ll go nuts.’) Dad showed him the red light that meant the supply would automatically cut off in the event of a power surge. (‘If that goes out, you tell me right away.’) Paul wasn’t sure what a power surge was but he liked the idea of it. It made him think of flexing his muscles and lifting weights. He unravelled the skein of orange wire and trailed it across the garden. There was some loose cable where he’d overestimated the distance between the house and shed, so he wound it back into its casing and placed it at the shed door, hardly daring to blink in case the red light went out for a second and he missed it.

‘What’s the golden rule?’ said Dad, before he started.

‘Look, but don’t touch,’ said Paul. He sat cross-legged on the patio table, a platform which was the perfect height for viewing. Dad had a stiff steel tape measure that flew back into its casing if you didn’t lock it the second you had the right measurement; he worked it like an expert. When the electric saw was turned on, you couldn’t hear yourself think and a sandstorm of dust flew up around Dad, eventually settling to reveal him in the same pose, bent over the workbench, bottom teeth chewing on his top lip. He looked up, winked, mimed a clumsy falling over that made Paul giggle. Then he lost his footing for real.

In the seconds that followed, all senses but sight temporarily abandoned Paul. It was as though someone had turned the volume down on the world. Dad tipped forward, dropping the saw, arms flailing madly for something to hang on to. He missed the workbench but the movement dislodged the topmost pane of glass, which fell slowly away from the wall just as he plunged downwards. The jagged shard met his neck. Blood poured through the cut slowly and easily at first, like an egg sliding out of its cracked shell, then flowing faster and stronger until it was squirting from his neck at one-second intervals. It was as though the blood didn’t want to stay in, as though it had been going round and round in Dad’s body for years, trapped in his veins, and now it had got its chance it was making a glorious bid for freedom. Paul felt marooned on his table, as if it was an island and the grass was a shark-infested sea; he watched in paralysed horror as Liam’s wild swooping movements were replaced by a series of twitches. The neatly coiled flexes at the shed door began to look like spaghetti in tomato sauce. Only when the red river began to flow his way did Paul spring from his cross-legged position, jump down from the table and run back to the house. He saw his reflection in the sliding doors as he crossed the garden: jeans, T-shirt, face. His lips were forming the word ‘Mum’ but no sound came out. It was as though he was the one who had had his throat cut.

Liam was coffined in his favourite Ben Sherman suit, the one he’d got married in. A Mod flag was draped across the casket. That fucking Paul Weller song was played as the curtains swallowed the casket, and his ashes were scattered in the Thames estuary, in the shadow of the suspension bridge he had helped to build. Paul found his voice again two weeks after the funeral. He was still off school but since both his grandmothers had left he was desperate to go back, just to get away from his mother. She hadn’t turned the television off for days – at night, she slept on the sofa in front of it – she couldn’t bear the silence, she said, she didn’t have to think when the telly was on. It was too hot to touch but Paul kept fingering its scorching surface, terrified that it would explode. His dad would never have let things get like this. He used to turn the telly off at the plug every night.

She was in the bathroom, during the ad break between
GMTV
and
This Morning
, when he heard the scream. It was a high-pitched cry of shock and horror, completely different to the constant quiet crying she’d been doing since the accident. His hamstrings propelled him up the stairs two at a time and he threw open the door without knocking. Mum was sitting on the toilet. In her hands was a ruffle of toilet paper that was bright with blood. Paul began to scream too, in a voice louder and higher than hers, begging his mother not to die. She fumbled with her jeans and the paper and shouted at him to get out, but he couldn’t let go of her leg. It ended in a slap, after which he ran into his room. He could not close his eyes tightly enough to squeeze out the colour red.

After a while, she came and sat on the end of his bed. She was wearing different clothes. ‘I’m sorry, honey. I shouldn’t have cried like that, it’s not fair on you. I thought I might be pregnant. But if I was, I’m not now. You do know about these things, don’t you?’ He did know: he should have known, they’d had to learn about periods and all that before they got to the sex lessons. But the sight of the blood, that shocking scarlet, had erased everything else from his mind apart from the memory of his dad. ‘It’s just . . . if there had been a baby . . . we both wanted it so much, and it would have been something to remember him by . . .’

Paul envied this neverborn brother or sister. It would never have known Dad, which would be preferable to the pain of remembering and missing him. She pulled him onto her lap; he resisted at first, then climbed on. He was still small and light but placed his tiptoes on the floor to bear his weight nonetheless. He wished he could turn himself into a baby again. ‘You’ve still got me,’ he said, and wondered what he would ever be able to do to make that enough.

Chapter 5

September 2009

‘Now, Paul, this isn’t an interview,’ said Demetra. They were in the cabin that served as a canteen. These huts might look like shipping crates from the outside but their interiors were well appointed, better than some of the industrial buildings Paul had illicitly shone his torch around. There was an office, a couple of store rooms, this canteen, a cabin with flushing toilets and even a room with lockers, sinks and a shower. He slurped a cup of tea made with water that didn’t come from a kettle but from a huge silver container that she called an urn. She was drinking camomile. Paul hated herbal tea. It reminded him of when his mother had gone through a phase of thinking that infusions from the Chinese herbalist were the answer, and the house had stunk of muddy, bitter roots and leaves for weeks.

‘It’s just a chat for us to get to know each other. I’m not interested in this!’ She brandished a sheaf of documents which Paul guessed must be his case notes. With concentration he deciphered the inverted letters and numbers of the top sheet. His mother’s name leapt out at him immediately after his own, the letters of it familiar and instantly legible despite being upside down and at an awkward angle; next to it, he made out the phrase ‘Emergency contact’. The page listed all the people connected to the case, the police officers and his solicitor flanked by small-print contact details and Daniel included under the word ‘Defendant’; there was no number next to Daniel’s name but Carl’s name and address followed immediately afterwards. This document linked him to all the people he was trying to escape, like a thin, tensile steel thread that could tug him back to Essex at a moment’s notice – or lead them to him. Demetra saw him looking and closed it on her lap.