‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The pages in the envelope were never wet.’
‘Huh,’ said Millicent. ‘Weird.’
She sat there at the table, radiating brittle intensity, eyes darting, while she uselessly reshuffled the five small pieces of paper from the envelope, as if seeking some alternative reading. How small she looked, I thought, how very small and lost.
I apologised to Arla when she came back with Max, and asked her to go out for the rest of the day. She asked me what the hell was going on; then she asked Millicent what the hell was going on. When neither of us said anything she asked Max if he was OK.
‘I’m fine, thank you, Aunt Arla,’ he said.
‘Well, if every
thing
’s peachy and every
body
’s peachy then that’s just peachy,’ said Arla. She smiled her Pacific-Ocean smile, but I could read the anger in her eyes.
‘You guys should ring me when you’re on top of your
stuff
. Tomorrow I go home. I sort of kind of thought maybe we could go get some Chinese food later?’
‘Mum knows Dad did you,’ said Max. ‘Would it be OK to have pizza instead?’
‘What?’ said Arla. She looked at me. I nodded.
She knows.
‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘I mean, really, Alex? Really? What is it with you and your need for revenge? It’s sophomoric, you know that?’
Millicent stood up. ‘It wasn’t Alex who told me.’
Arla looked from me, to Millicent, to Max. Max looked suddenly uncomfortable, as if caught stealing sweets. ‘Oh,’ said Arla. ‘OK.’ She swallowed, rocked on her heels; then she drew breath, raised her chin and met Millicent’s gaze. I looked at Millicent’s right hand, clenching and unclenching, her eyes locked on Arla’s.
The back door was still open, but I could no longer hear the starlings harrying the crow.
Arla was the first to drop her gaze. ‘OK. Millicent … I guess the truth is that it was what it looks like, and that I can’t explain why it happened. I don’t know where to begin. I did a really terrible thing.’
‘You were always such a follow-the-script second child, Arla.’ Still Millicent hadn’t dropped her gaze.
‘And I guess I deserve that right now. Millicent, if there was some way …’
‘… that you could unmake this?’ said Millicent. Arla gave a sad little nod. Millicent exhaled sharply, rubbed her hands across her forehead and down her cheeks to her chin, held her lips between her clenched forefingers.
‘Aunt Arla,’ said Max. ‘Aunt Arla, do you think maybe Dad did you because the neighbour did Mum?’ There was no malice in the question. It sounded as if Max genuinely wanted to know what she thought. But I couldn’t help myself.
‘Shut up, you manipulative little shit.’ I was on my feet, my face very close to his. Max crumpled and took a half-step backwards.
Arla and Millicent stared at me. I could hear no traffic noise, but somewhere in the street a fightdog gave voice. Millicent put a warning hand on my arm, reached her other hand out to Max.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Max. And I’m sorry, Arla. Max should never have spoken to you like that. You’re sorry, aren’t you, Max?’ Max nodded, the picture of small-child contrition. I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘He’s been under a lot of stress. More than any boy should have to cope with. We’ll see you later.’
Arla backed slowly out of the kitchen. I heard her footfalls on the living-room floor. She opened the front door and slid it quietly shut behind her.
‘Sit down, Max,’ Millicent said gently. ‘We need to talk to you.’
‘OK,’ said Max. ‘I want Ribena.’
‘All right,’ said Millicent. ‘You can fix yourself some Ribena.’
‘Can’t you make the Ribena for me?’ said Max.
‘I think you can do it yourself,’ I said.
Max sighed a theatrical sigh, and got up. He turned on the tap and left it running while he fetched a glass from the cupboard, located the Ribena bottle on the kitchen work surface. God, the thinness of his shoulders; the fragile angularity of him. Was he really capable of murder?
Max poured a large measure of Ribena into the bottom of the glass, then looked enquiringly first at me, then at Millicent. ‘Is that too much?’
Neither of us responded. Max emptied the Ribena bottle into his glass. He topped up the glass with water and sat down, left the tap running.
I turned off the tap and sat down at the end of the table.
‘So,’ said Millicent.
‘So-o-oo,’ said Max, a valley-girl parody of her accent. Millicent rubbed a hand across her eyes.
‘Did you do it, Max?’ I said.
‘Did
you
do it?’ He was looking me straight in the eye. Was he challenging me?
‘I expect you to answer my question, Max.’
‘Alex, wait,’ said Millicent. ‘I would like that you not make this a confrontation, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘All right. But Max, I do need you to answer my question. We need to know what happened.’
‘I
don’t
need you to answer my question, Dad, because I know the answer already. You didn’t kill the neighbour, even though he was doing Mum, and you never would have killed him, either, even though he was a fuckingbastardingcunt, because you’re much too scared and you’re much too nice.’
He sniffed hard. His breathing was laboured. He was close to tears. I could see that now, could see in him Millicent’s defiant fragility.
‘Max,’ said Millicent softly, ‘honey, slow down a minute. Just stop for a moment. Take time to breathe.’
Max shrugged. ‘OK.’ He gulped at the air, inhaled and exhaled, three times. Then he drank down half of his Ribena, put the glass carefully back on the table in front of him.
‘OK, honey,’ said Millicent, ‘so why don’t you start by telling us, how did your book get wet?’
‘The neighbour dropped it in the bath.’
‘What was Bryce doing with your book, Max?’
‘He was in the bath. I gave him the book, and he dropped it in. I had to dry it really carefully and write over it in pen again. It took a really long time.’
‘Max, my beautiful child,’ said Millicent with a tenderness that surprised me, ‘you are going to have to explain to us what happened. In small steps. From the start.’
‘When I made the book? Or when the neighbour dropped it in the bath?’
‘When he dropped it in the bath.’
‘I knew you meant that.’ Max sipped his Ribena, looked at his mother, then back at me. He’s pausing for dramatic effect, I thought.
A sharp look from Millicent –
do not rise to this
.
She was right. The defiance was a front. Perhaps he needed it to be able to say what he had to say.
‘Anyway,’ said Max, ‘I knew that the neighbour was going to have a bath, because I could hear the water running in the pipes.
‘And so I got some tape, and I waited until I could hear the neighbour getting into the bath, and then I went downstairs and Dad was working and you weren’t here, and I went out into the garden and climbed over the wall.
‘And then I opened the neighbour’s back door with my key and went in and then I went into the sitting room and opened his fuse cupboard and I taped over the breaker switch.
‘Also, I already knew it was the right breaker switch because one day when the neighbour wasn’t at home I plugged in a light on the landing and the breaker turned it off. Like, I know about electricity and stuff.’
‘Max,’ I said, ‘did you plan this?’
Max nodded. Of course he had planned it.
‘Anyway,’ said Max, ‘I had to walk really carefully and it took me quite a long time to go up the stairs so the neighbour wouldn’t hear me. And the bathroom door was open and you could see the neighbour in the bath, but he wasn’t looking at me because he was reading his book, so I went really quietly past the door, and I went to the cupboard in the landing and I got out the iron. And even though it made a little bit of noise I don’t think he heard anything.’
You’re eleven
, I thought.
How is any of this even possible?
‘I had to do the plug before, when the neighbour wasn’t at home, so I came home early one day from school because I told Mr Sharpe I wasn’t feeling well, and he believed me because normally I don’t tell lies. Really I don’t.’
That conviction: the child who knows right from wrong; the irony of it.
I wanted to put my arms around him, draw him back to a time before all of this. I wanted Max to be ten once more; I wanted Millicent to be undefiled by the neighbour. A year, that’s all it would take; give us a year and a little insight and we could side-step this.
A month even. A month back, the neighbour would still have seduced Millicent, but he wouldn’t be dead. There must be other possible outcomes. There must be something I could have done to head this off.
‘I wore gloves, though,’ said Max, ‘because I know about fingerprints.’
‘You took your mum’s gloves?’
‘She never wore them anyway.’
I looked at my son. A little boy, asking for his father’s approval, wanting me to know he’d thought of everything.
Why can’t you be ten again, Max?
Max drank down the rest of the Ribena, held the glass a few centimetres above the surface of the table, and dropped it on to its end.
‘I think Arla’s been drinking the Ribena.’
‘So, fix yourself something else, honey,’ said Millicent.
‘Please may I have Ribena?’
Millicent looked meaningfully at me. ‘What?’ I said. Her eyes flicked towards the door. ‘Are you seriously suggesting I go to the shop?’ I said. ‘Now?’ Millicent nodded.
‘Crisps too,’ said Max. ‘Please, Dad.’
I remember nothing about walking down the street, I remember nothing about entering the shop, and I remember nothing about the walk home. But I remember my thoughts, in precise and frightening detail.
I wondered how Max would get on as a ward of the British state, skirting the walls of some secure institution, trading phone cards with other terrified souls, trying to stay a step ahead of the big kids with their shanks and their shivs.
How would my sensitive little son measure up? Not well, I thought, not well at all.
The evidence must be destroyed.
Truth be damned.
What kind of man would willingly see his eleven-year-old son face justice?
Another visit to the neighbour’s house, a little white spirit on a cloth, and a wipe of the breaker switch while the agent’s back was turned. That would do it. Anything else, any other prints to emerge unexpectedly, could be explained by the fact that it was Max and I who found the body. You know small boys, don’t you, June? They touch everything.
I was calmer when I walked back into the house.
Millicent and Max were sitting together at the kitchen table. Max looked like an eleven-year-old boy with cuts on his knees. Millicent looked like a concerned mother.
I put the bottle of Ribena on the countertop and dropped a large packet of Monster Munch on to the table in front of Max.
Millicent got up. She broke the seal on the bottle, poured a generous serving of Ribena, topped it up with water from the tap.
‘Have we got any ice?’ said Max.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, putting the glass down in front of him. ‘Go check for yourself, honey.’
‘No, it’s OK.’
My son, and my wife. It all looked so normal, so very North London. I sat down at the table. Millicent sat down. Father, mother and child at our little table in our little kitchen in our little overpriced house.
‘It’s OK, Dad,’ said Max. ‘I didn’t tell her anything while you were out.’ I said nothing in reply. Max opened the Monster Munch and placed a stack on the table in front of himself. Then he poked his pinkie through the maw of an extruded potato monster and raised it meditatively to his lips. He can’t read us, I thought. It’s almost as if he expects us to reward him. He still thinks he did the right thing.
‘Dad,’ said Max.
‘Sorry, Max. Go on.’
‘So, anyway, the neighbour was in the bath and I think he heard me plugging in the iron, because he shouted, “Who’s there?” and I shouted, “Max”, and then I went into the bathroom, but I left the iron outside so he wouldn’t see it. I think he was quite surprised to see me, and maybe a bit cross, but I don’t think he was frightened. And he asked me what I was doing and how I got in but I didn’t answer that, but I took out my notebook and opened it at the first of the drawings with all the ropes and he started to read it.’
I could think of nothing to say, so I took a handful of Monster Munch and made a small pile of them in front of me. I put one in my mouth. Horrible – both cloyingly sweet and saltily moreish, like a dilute memory of bad drugs.
‘Don’t take them if you don’t like them, Dad.’ Max eyed me diffidently. He threw a Monster Munch into the air, made a show of catching it in his mouth.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I think maybe the neighbour was embarrassed or something, because he covered up his
penis
with one hand, except he couldn’t really, because he was reading the book and he kept having to turn the page. And he was getting water on my drawings because his hand was wet, but I didn’t say anything. And I took Mum’s gloves out of my pocket and put them on, but I went out of the bathroom to do it, and then I went and got the iron and put it on the floor in the bathroom but he didn’t see because he was looking at the pictures.’
‘Max,’ I said, ‘where did you get the iron?’
Max looked confused. ‘It was his iron. The neighbour’s.’
‘He didn’t own an iron.’
‘He did.’
‘Max, don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m not. I’m not a liar.’
A man of expensive tastes.
‘He had his clothes dry-cleaned, Max.’
Millicent’s hand was on my arm. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘he owned an iron.’
‘The police told me …’
Millicent’s gaze did not waver.
‘Oh.’
If indeed you owned an iron …
June had not lied to me either. She had simply suggested a possibility. I was a dolt.
‘I’m sorry, Max.’
‘It’s OK. Anyway, he asked me how I knew what his bathroom looked like and I told him I had Mum’s key and I had been in his house before. And he looked quite angry, like he wanted to get out of the bath, but I wasn’t sure if that was because of the drawings or just because I was in his house.