If This Is Home Page 14

  The Carpenter’s was the first pub Bethany and I went for a drink alone. I ordered a Jack Daniel’s and Coke and stood to the side of the bar, Bethany laughing. You don’t change, do you? she said. Everything changes but you.

  In fact little had changed in the Carpenter’s, though the music was less abrasive and there were fewer leather jackets. We had agreed to meet there as it was neutral territory: no one from either of our schools would know us. So we drank and smoked, talked about our absent mothers, but quickly, and moved on. When we kissed, drunkenly, I felt like the world had started anew. It was one of those kisses. I was young, full of hormones and full of everything else, but the power of that moment—

  Had I lived, would you feel the same way? Bethany said. Poor boy, you’ll never know, will you?

  Bethany sat on the stool next to me, smoking a cigarette, drinking gin and tonic. She watched me with amusement. You never cease to amaze me, Mark. Your capacity for delusion. She finished her drink and walked out onto the High Street; I followed as she walked over to the Queen’s, the record shop opposite now a mobile-phone store. They shut down the Melody Maker too, she said. It was only a matter of time.

  The Queen’s was stinking full, hard to negotiate and packed with people who had a glimmer of girls and boys I had once known about them. They did not look my way. The bar was three deep as it always had been, the same beers on, the same look of veiled dislike on the bar staff’s faces. I ordered a pint of Pedigree and it foamed on the bar towel, thick and faintly smelling of sulphur. The barman took my money and I turned away, bumping into a belly. I looked up at the man it belonged to.

  ‘Matthew,’ I said. ‘Matthew Cunningham?’

  He looked down on me, his height cramped under the low roof.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘We went to school together. Kelmscott.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. Yes, I remember. You well?’

  ‘Good, yes.’

  ‘Funny accent you got there. Sound like a Septic.’

  ‘I moved there years back,’ I said. ‘Must have picked it up.’

  He nodded. He had no idea who I was. He liked hip hop and had an attractive elder sister; he liked to draw and was funny without being a clown. He was always trying to make money, always had a scheme on the go. Now he looked, dressed as he was in smart jeans and a Ralph Lauren shirt, like he had made his money, was living as best he could. He got the barman’s attention and ordered a round of drinks.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ he said. ‘See you around.’

  Bethany laughed. You think they remember you? What an ego you have!

  I stood in the room where the pool table used to be. I placed my pint pot on the mantelpiece of an unlit fire and watched Bethany drink a pint of Guinness. She kept a cigarette lit at all times. You think this is bad, she said, you’ve got your father to see yet. Mine too. Imagine how that’s going to play out! You just dropping by like this with no word for what, how long? And then you’re back. What are you going to ask them? What are you going to say? Sorry? That isn’t going to cut it, not by a long way. Sorry, Dad, I walked out on you. Sorry, Mike, that I never contacted you? You have no clue what you’re doing, no idea of the wounds you’re going to open up with your salty fingers. But so long as you’re okay. So long as you feel like you’re doing the right thing. Fuck everyone else, right? What exactly is it you want here? If you’ve come looking for answers you’re a decade and a bit too late. Anyway, you’re Josef now, right? You’re a whole other person. Go back to New York. Go back to America. Just fuck off now, okay? Home is where real life happens, where we can’t just hide behind stupid names and bought identities. There isn’t anything for you here, Mark.

  I wept then, softly, unable to stop Bethany’s questions, stop her smiling mouth from scything through me. I drank my pint quickly and headed through the bodies to the door. Bethany followed, a jacket covering her Cramps T-shirt. You don’t get away that easily, you fucking coward, she said. There’s more to see. Much more to see than this!

  *

  The war memorial had fresh flowers by it, soldiers fallen in Afghanistan. I sat on the bench and smoked a cigarette, Bethany, still holding her pint of Guinness, was standing in front of me. You think I matter? All those people who die, they don’t matter, so why should I? What makes me so fucking special? I was raped and murdered. Happens all over the world. Every single minute of every single day. But you had to take it personally.

  ‘I loved you. I still love you,’ I said.

  You love yourself.

  Bethany drank the last of her Guinness and sat down next to me on the bench. We need to keep moving, she said.

  *

  Hannah’s house was a long walk away. Her estate was typical of those that had sprung up in the seventies. Cars guarded garage doors like sentries. Bethany walked in silence until we arrived at her red front door, the crazy-paved driveway. There were lights on inside, the flicker of a television projecting onto drawn curtains. It was where the three of us used to meet before going out.

  They probably fucked in there, Bethany said with a snort. Bethany marched off and I hurried in her wake. Imagine it, the two of them!

  We came out at the east corner of the estate and met the Crewe Road. Now this you’re going to love, she said. My school, the reason we had met in the first place, should have been up on the right, but as I approached, the road looked too wide and open. Cranes and diggers were chained together behind big wooden boards, the gaps in between showing the deep excavation of the ground. Where the science block had stood there was rubble, where the playing fields had been there were the first imaginings of a housing estate: scaffolding, breezeblocks and partly constructed roofs. Bethany stood with her hands on her hips. I told you, she said.

  The Carpenter’s meeting had been arranged in the school, a note given to me by Hannah. It was not long, written in Bethany’s scratchy, elegant handwriting. I remember that note, long and stupid it was. I think I quoted from some band you said you liked. I asked you if you’d meet me sometime, said that I’d had such a good time with you in the restaurant and that I owed you a drink for being so nice to me, taking me in out of the rain. The letter I got back was a disappointment, to be honest. Just half a side ripped from an A4 binder. Your handwriting was poor and it was hard to make out what you’d written. But it quickened my heart anyway.

  I put my hand to the boards and looked again over the building site. She sparked up another cigarette and laughed. The thing is, if you go looking to destroy yourself, someone else will always do it better.

  Saturday, 7th July 1990, 2.33 pm

  Lunch is held in a marquee, roped off from the general carnival crowd. The mayor is wearing his heavy gold chain, which bumps his perfectly round, pregnant-looking belly every time he moves. There is wine and tea and beer from a local brewery pumped from casks. A string quartet plays in the background and sandwiches and pastries are arranged on silver salvers. Since they arrived to a round of applause, Waller has not left her side, introducing her and himself to each group or couple they meet. They are the local businessmen and Rotarians, local councillors and their wives. They all dress in the same style: Gabicci shirts, Farah slacks, double-breasted suits with too wide lapels, everything bought from Waverley’s in the town. They tell her how beautiful she looks, what a great job she’s done. She smiles and shakes their hands, thanks them for their kind words. She no longer recognizes herself.

  Her father is there, standing alone by the buffet, and she waits patiently to be with him. She can see him watch her as she is passed from one group to the next and she sees his pride again and reminds herself that this is for him. Only for him.

  After her mother died, Bethany looked after her father. There was no one else to do it. The factory was left in the capable hands of his deputy and Mike made it in only when he felt well enough, which was not often. He didn’t do much. He didn’t cry, watch home videos, obsess over old photo albums; he just sat in his armchair, stari
ng at the wall or the window. Bethany didn’t interfere, but she coerced him into at least a semblance of a routine. She made him eat at the right times, shower and shave, change out of his dressing gown. Her grief she carried to her bedroom, her anger to school, her sadness to whenever she was alone. It took her father over a year to begin to function again; the slight hoods over his eyes now the only suggestion of his loss.

  Bethany and Mark talked about those months often; the months of waiting on a heartbroken parent. Mark’s father was angry and drunk and scared to leave the house; became paranoid that everyone was talking about him, about how he’d let his wife run off with another man. He went to work as usual, came home and, despite his apparent rage, sat watching television and drinking beer. He’s pretty much the same these days.

  Mark wouldn’t talk about his mother much; something that Beth found difficult to understand. She’d asked him whether he missed her at all. He shook his head.

  ‘My mother was … I should say is …’ he said, never finishing the sentence.

  Bethany is shaking another hand and accepting a kiss from the man’s wife. She nods as Bob and Rita say how beautiful she looks, what a great job she has done. The marquee is stuffy and Hannah is nowhere to be seen. For that at least she is grateful.

  ‘I was the carnival queen once,’ Rita says. ‘Nineteen fifty-five. It was the happiest day of my life. I can remember it like it was yesterday. You don’t forget things like that I can tell you. I’ve still got the photographs somewhere.’

  ‘She was a right stunner in them days,’ Bob says. ‘I don’t know what she ever saw in me.’

  ‘He had a motorcycle,’ she says with a laugh. ‘And he looked good in leathers.’

  The image of the two of them, young and in love, riding a motorcycle out of town and over the hills towards Macclesfield and Leek, stays with Bethany as Waller steers her towards the next group of couples. They tell her how beautiful she looks and what a good job she has done.

  ‘Last year, we called her the carnival scream,’ one of the women says and they all laugh.

  Could they be like that, Mark and Bethany: later, older, still in love, still clinging to memories of excitement? It seems so improbable, to get to that age, to see the years slip by. She never wants to be like Rita, thinking back to when she was her happiest.

  Eventually she reaches her father. He has heaped a plate with sandwiches, crisps and a couple of vol-au-vents; he has also poured her a glass of white wine. He hands the drink to her and she resists the temptation to drain it quickly.

  ‘You know,’ he says, ‘it’s times like this I miss your mum the most. What would she think of all this?’ He sweeps his arm around the room. ‘I mean, look at these people. Can you imagine her spending more than a minute with any of them?’

  ‘She would have loved it, Dad,’ she says. ‘Imagine all these Tories to bait, the whole lot of them in one place. No escape!’

  ‘And with Thatcher gone too,’ he says. ‘Imagine that!’

  ‘She’d have been in her element.’

  ‘And she’d have given me hell when I got home.’

  ‘Both of us.’

  Bethany finishes the tuna sandwich and the last of her wine. The string quartet pauses and there is a small flourish of applause. Her father goes to the bar and returns with wine for them both. He smiles but it’s more for his benefit than hers.

  ‘I think I’m going to head back,’ he says. ‘Have a bit of a snooze before this evening.’

  ‘I’ll see you at the restaurant for seven,’ she says. ‘Assuming I haven’t killed Waller by then.’

  ‘See you there, love,’ he says.

  *

  She is guest of honour at the motorcycle stunt display and is seated on a raised plinth with half a dozen other dignitaries. The crowds are scrunched around the barricades and sawdust has been scattered in the arena: there are various obstacles lined up: ramps and jumps and hoops and pipes. She is under the full beam of the sun and can feel it tightening her skin. The woman to her right has a battery-powered fan that buzzes like a swarm.

  Waller looks at his clipboard and checks his watch. On cue the motorcyclists pull out from their trailer. One is dressed all in red, one in white and one in blue. They pause, rev their engines and wave at the crowd, then they roar away, towards the three ramps, hit the planks together and take to the air, turning their front wheels in Bethany’s direction. They lift their hands from their grips and join gloves, then break. They hit the ground just in control and the crowd goes wild. It is all lost on Bethany Wilder.

  She spots Daniel. He is drinking from a can of lager and talking to some men, none of whom are looking at the motorbikes. She imagines that they are talking about her, that he is describing what he will do to her later. They could be telling him that they’ll come and watch, all of them hiding in the woods, their trousers round their ankles. Part of her is not as disgusted as she wants to be.

  She watches Daniel drink, his mate draped over his shoulders, the men laughing together. She watches as they light cigarettes, as one pulls more beer from a rucksack. None of this is real, she reminds herself, none of it. She is rebalancing the past; there is nothing more to it than that.

  Two men run into the display area and move three rings into its centre. They set them alight and there is a long oooh from the crowd. The riders rev their engines and the smoke billows. Bethany can smell diesel and something else, like the garage at Mark’s house. She looks at Daniel and then at the riders. The crowd seem to want them to fail, even though they know they won’t. The PA plays ‘Ring of Fire’ by Johnny Cash. Bam-badam-badam-bah-da-um; bam-badam-badam-bah-da-um. The riders take their jump, make it through, put their hands in the air, take off their helmets. They are all women and the crowd applauds.

  ‘You didn’t see that coming, did you?’ Waller says.

  ‘No,’ Bethany says. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  FIFTEEN

  There were people in the hotel bar, a couple of men drinking brandy and smoking small cigars. I was damp from the rain. Bethany had stopped talking to me, disappearing as we made our way through the downpour back into town. I ordered a whisky and carried it to my room, turned on the television and smoked cigarettes one after another. I watched a rolling news channel, stories tumbling out, presented in strobing graphics and discussed by experts and the professionally concerned. I wondered if Bethany’s death would have made it on to the news now, and knew that it would. A pretty white woman; a carnival queen, how could it not?

  The next morning I found a pizza box and an empty bottle of wine outside Ferne’s room. The maid was cleaning inside, piles of clothes on the floor and a mess of cosmetics on the dressing table. There was also a stack of cheap thrillers. She caught me looking, but was too wrapped up in her phone call.

  ‘Can’t you just for once sort this out yourself?’ the maid shouted into the mouthpiece. ‘I’m supposed to be working here, aren’t I?’

  Outside it was bright again, the roads sludgy with traffic and the High Street surprisingly busy. I found the police station next to the library that Dad and I used to visit every Saturday when I was young. He liked to read military history, mostly about the air force, and he would deposit me in the children’s section while he browsed the shelves. He liked the silence, I always thought, and there was precious little at home in those days. The building was looking seamy, like it had been left to fester, though there was a windowed atrium tacked on where people were using computers and drinking coffee. Bethany and I used to walk past on the way home some nights and see the books that people had posted through the letter box. There used to be a sign telling lenders not to. There was no sign there now.

  After my interview with the detective and the WPC, there had been no follow-up. I was never required to attend the station and so now couldn’t tell whether it had changed much. The desk sergeant was talking on the phone and taking notes. A woman waited on one of the brown sofas, her handbag close to her chest. In front of her was a pla
stic cup of coffee, steaming and ignored. A policeman punched the digits on the combination lock and she looked up.

  ‘How much longer?’ she said. ‘I’ve got to be at work for twelve.’

  ‘They’re just processing him, Mrs Reynolds. Shouldn’t be too long now.’

  ‘He’ll never learn, that boy. Maybe this time someone’ll press charges. Might do him some good.’

  The policeman smiled and disappeared into the back of the station. The desk sergeant put down the phone and looked up at me.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I hope so. I was wondering whether it might be possible to speak to DI Simon Parks.’

  The man chewed his pencil and screwed up his eyes.

  ‘And what is this concerning?’

  ‘Well, I’d prefer not to say. It’s just important I speak with him.’

  ‘Really?’ the sergeant said. He had deep-ringed eyes, a smirk to his face and hair protruding from his shirt collar and his jumper’s rolled-up cuffs. ‘I dare say it is important, but DI Parks retired about five year ago. So whatever it is, you’ll be needing to speak to one of the other DIs. And I’ll need to know what the “important” thing is before I can refer you.’

  ‘It’s sort of a personal matter. I really need to speak to DI Parks.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help you there, sir. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you know where I might find him?’ I asked. The desk sergeant shook his head and the heavy door opened. A youth came out accompanied by an officer; there was blood on his T-shirt and his jeans were ripped.

  ‘Here you are, Mrs Reynolds. Be seeing you soon.’ The officer turned to the lad. ‘Lucky day again, Scotty. Let’s hope they don’t ever run out, yeah?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ the officer said.