Why Don’t You Come for Me (26 page)

‘She’s only twelve,’ said Sean dismissively. ‘Charlie might want to hang around with her.’

Sean had known her age all along. For the first time it occurred to Jo that Sean might be a valuable source of information. ‘Did you meet her when she was home last holidays?’

‘Yeah, a couple of times.’

‘How about her mother? She’s a bit weird-looking, isn’t she?’

‘Who – the woman you thought was following us that day?’

Jo flushed. Sometimes she forgot that Sean was neither blind nor deaf. ‘I’m sure she wasn’t really following us. But she does look a bit odd, don’t you think?’

‘Don’t know. She looks a bit old to have a daughter.’

‘That’s only because she doesn’t do anything with her hair, and the way she dresses. She’s actually the same age as me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Oh – it came up.’

He left the table soon afterwards. She had been so enthused by this burst of communication that she wanted to prolong it, to say, ‘Don’t go upstairs – let’s watch a DVD together or something. You can choose,’ but she knew her offer would be rejected. It was only a partial thaw, not the coming of spring.

She was clearing the table when the phone rang again. She raced to pick it up, but it was a recorded message, offering her no-win, no-fee representation in the event that she had had an accident. As she was replacing the receiver it occurred to her that she could ring the hospital. That would show she cared. She had to go into the office to root out the ward number. She tried the back of the telephone book, where they usually kept numbers acquired on loose bits of paper, but then she saw that both the ward and telephone number had been pinned to the cork notice board next to the big wall chart which showed with coloured stickers who was out on tour at any given time. Her eye fell on the chart, where her little yellow stars had all been annotated with the initials of whichever guide had been deputed to pick up her tours while she was ‘taking a break’. Marcus’s green dots and Melissa’s red triangles sat smug and unsullied while the defaced stars mocked her. A red triangle and a green dot were snuggled up next to one another in the box marked with today’s date, but there were no symbols at all in tomorrow’s square. Marcus’s and Melissa’s tours had both finished that morning. She flopped into the leather office chair and continued to stare at the two little symbols. They had been stuck on at the beginning of the year – she could not even remember who had done the chart this year – but instead of keeping a decent distance, the green dot and the red triangle were almost touching: you couldn’t have got the edge of a ten-pence piece between them.

She reached for the telephone and keyed in the direct line for the ward. It rang for quite a long time before being answered by a young female voice.

‘I’m ringing about Mrs Handley,’ Jo said. ‘I’m her daughter-in-law. I was wondering how she is.’

‘She’s comfortable.’

‘Well, yes … but has she got any worse?’

‘She’s about the same. I’m sorry, who did you say you were again?’

‘I’m Mrs Handley, too. I’m her daughter-in-law. My husband is there now. Could you let him know that I rang, please?’

‘I will if I see him.’

‘He’s there now,’ Jo said, a touch crossly. ‘He’s sitting by the bed.’

‘There’s no one by the bed at the moment. I can see it from here.’

‘Oh … thank you.’ Jo put the phone down. It had become quite dark in the office. No one looking at the rain-streaked windows would have guessed that it was July. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn back to the wall chart. It was too dark now to make out the initials etched on to each of her yellow stars; the symbols representing Marcus and Melissa were turning an identical shade of muddy brown in the dusk, becoming no more than a series of dark blots against the shiny white background. His mobile was switched off, and he was not at the hospital. She picked up the phone again and pressed the speed-dial code for Melissa’s home number. The phone rang out half a dozen times, before Melissa’s ‘Hello?’ sounded at the other end of the line. Jo instantly cut the call off.

A minute went by and then the phone began to ring. The caller display lit up with Melissa’s name. Jo let the machine take it. ‘Hello – I think you just called me. Is everything OK, Jo? Call me if you need anything, otherwise I’ll just assume you hit my number by mistake. Byeee.’ The line went dead.

Jo stepped into the hall and replayed the message, turning up the volume in a vain attempt to detect any sounds in the background. Then she rewound the tape and listened twice more.
Jo
. How had Melissa known that it must be herself and not Marcus on the end of the phone? She grabbed her fleece from the peg in the hall and yelled up the stairs as she pushed her arms into the sleeves, ‘Sean – I’m going out.’ She picked up her bag and ran to the door without bothering to wait for his reply. By way of an afterthought, she turned back to the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife out of the block.

As she gunned the engine into life her fury increased. How many times had they contrived to be away together this year already? Joint tours and nights off which coincided … She worked through the coming confrontation in her mind; what she would say to them, what they might say to her and what she would do. She had to force herself to focus on the road. The rain was driving down in straight lines, a million tiny silver javelins in the headlights. It was not yet nine o’clock, but already dark as an autumn night.

She had not gone very far before she saw the loom of an undulating blue light above the walls and hedges. She quickly realized that it was static – a police car or an ambulance, pulled up some little way ahead. Then she rounded a bend in the lane and was waved to a halt by a policeman in a dayglo yellow waterproof coat. As he approached the car, she experienced a momentary wave of panic. Did he know what she was thinking, and why she was heading for Melissa’s house? Without taking her eyes off the approaching officer, she tried to see whether the knife was visible in the passenger foot well. She lowered the window as he reached the car, noticing the way water cascaded from the peak of his cap as he bent down to talk to her, holding her breath – but he had merely come to tell her that the road ahead was closed due to an accident.

‘But I have to get through.’

‘Sorry love, but the road’s completely blocked. Are you local? Yes? Well if you take the Oak Bank turn, then do a right at Coxley Beck Farm; that’ll bring you down to the main road. Best thing is to reverse a couple of yards and turn round in that gateway. Plenty of room back there, and it’s solid concrete in front of the gate.’

From within her bag, her mobile trilled.

‘Shouldn’t have that switched on when you’re driving,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know it was switched on. I wouldn’t have answered it.’

‘Better pull in on that side if you’re going to see who it is – and mind you turn your engine off first.’

‘Right – yes – thank you.’

She turned the car on to the wrong side of the lane as the policeman had indicated, so that she wouldn’t be blocking any other vehicles which happened to come along and needed to turn round. The phone had stopped ringing by the time she silenced the engine, but she saw that the missed call was Marcus’s mobile. With trembling fingers she returned the call.

He answered right away. ‘Jo, is everything all right? They gave me the message when I got back to the ward, but when I called home I got the answering machine again. Where are you?’

‘I’m out in the car.’ She felt so sick that she could hardly speak. She thought of arriving on Melissa’s doorstep, demanding to be let in, insisting that Marcus was inside … when all the time he had been at the hospital in Manchester.

‘Why are you out? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing’s happened. I rang to see how your mum is. I thought you’d be with her, but they said you weren’t there.’

‘Sandra and I slipped out for a bite to eat. But why aren’t you at home?’

‘We’d run out … of something. I was going to Booths, but there’s a road block. There’s been an accident, so I’m going back home.’

‘Are you sure you’re OK? You sound very shaken. You weren’t involved, were you?’

‘No. I don’t even know what’s happened. A policeman was standing in the road, making people turn back.’

‘Booths won’t be open, will they? Don’t they close at eight on a Saturday?’

‘I’d forgotten,’ she said. ‘Is your mum much worse?’

‘It’s difficult to say. Sandra seemed to think this might be it, but you know the hospital won’t ever commit themselves. I’m staying to please Sandra, really. I don’t believe Mum knows whether we’re here or not.’

As they talked she felt colder and colder. It was as if the car had turned into a deep freeze, and the blood in her veins was slowing, turning to ice. The flickering lights of the police car made everything seem unreal: they might not have belonged to a police car at all, because her own car could have been anywhere, the windows obscured by streams of rain and every other external sound eliminated by pellets of water crashing into the metal a thousand times a minute. The policeman must still be out there keeping a lonely vigil against oncoming motorists, but she could not see him. The thought that there was someone standing unseen in the darkness, someone who could be right up beside the car for all she knew – even if he was a policeman – gave her a shivery feeling. Even the interior of the car had become a place of uncertainty in the undulating blue light, which illuminated now the dashboard, now a section of her thighs, now a pale hand, resting against the sill of the window. It might almost have been someone else’s hand because in the transient fragmentary light she could not see where and how it joined up with the rest of her. To prove whose hand it was, she made the fingers move, but they seemed to mock her, each of them tapping in turn, forwards and backwards like someone playing a scale on an invisible piano

When she made the fingers stop, she fancied that they carried on wriggling a while longer, just to let her know that she was not entirely in control. It was the same hand which had drawn the pictures of Melissa in her sketch book.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Marcus’s mother did not die on Saturday night, contriving to expire instead at a moment on Sunday afternoon when neither Marcus nor his sister were at her bedside. Sandra wanted to arrange the funeral for a week on Monday, but Marcus persuaded her to put it back two days so that it would fit better with his work schedule. It seemed to Jo that every detail of the arrangements became the subject of a spat between brother and sister, with Sandra insisting that the service include ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’, while Marcus protested that his mother had never really liked it and complaining that Sandra had vetoed his idea of including a Rossetti poem among the readings.

Jo tried to be supportive, but found it difficult to relate to any of their disagreements. Her own mother’s funeral had been arranged by the authorities. There were people in ‘secure facilities’ whose job it was to register deaths and make the appropriate arrangements. They had contacted her and asked if she wanted to attend, but she had replied that there was no point. Her mother had not wanted to see her in life, so it was hardly likely that she would have wanted her around at the funeral. The details of her father’s funeral had become obscured among those tangled memories of his death: a blur of uncomfortable silences and shuffling feet, people in dark clothes; herself in the front pew flanked by Aunty Joan and Grandma Molesly, with her father’s family keeping separate from her mother’s. Two families previously bound together by a marriage, now abruptly disunited because one of their number had destroyed another, a chasm opening up between the two sides and herself being swallowed by it.

Marcus insisted on driving them down for the funeral himself. It was a predominantly silent journey, with Sean in the back seat, wearing his school trousers, white school shirt and a black tie specially purchased for the occasion. Jo half wondered whether Sean’s mother would put in an appearance, but she did not come. Sandra wept openly during the service, but Marcus looked straight ahead. Jo squeezed his elbow when the coffin slid away, but he gave no sign that he was aware of her.
That’s the trouble,
she thought.
I can never be there for him, because he’s self-contained and doesn’t actually need me.

She offered to drive back, but Marcus preferred to take the wheel himself. As they approached the motorway, Marcus began to outline the relationships of the various mourners to Sean, who listened politely while his father explained that the old lady wearing the hat with black net across the top was Aunty Kate, who had been married to Uncle Tom, who was wounded at Monte Cassino, while Uncle Derek was the son of Tom’s long-deceased brother Kenneth …

Jo let it roll over her. She reflected that this was the second funeral she had attended in a matter of weeks. Grandma Molesly always said deaths came in threes. In the old days, when families were much larger and people didn’t live so long, that prophecy had probably been more easily fulfilled, but now that Marcus’s mother was gone, she could not think of anyone she knew of who was particularly old or ailing.

At least Marcus would not have to be forever paying duty visits to Manchester any more – or staying overnight there. She shuddered at the recollection of how close she had come to doing something very foolish. If only she and Marcus were not apart so often. That was the root of the problem – a lack of quality time together – although when they were together these days, she could rarely think of much to say to him, while his own attempts at communication seemed forced or superficial and their sex life was non-existent. There had been a period in their relationship when sex had been joyful and abandoned. Not at the beginning, when Marcus had assiduously avoided putting any pressure on her, preferring to become first a friend and confidant, wooing her gently with romantic gestures, so that sex, when it happened, was a wonderful confirmation of what they already knew. Marcus had put so much effort into making her happy. Her happiness and well-being had been the most important thing in his life – he had actually said that to her once. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps she had been his project of the moment. Marcus had put his heart and soul into turning her life around, but once he believed that he had made her happy, his main focus had transferred elsewhere. Maybe he had intended for Sean to become a project too, but the trouble was, Marcus could only devote himself to one big thing at a time: he might want to be the good son, the good father, the good husband, but his number-one priority now was the business.