A Private Haunting (14 page)

Jonas left the search and hurried back through the trees, twitching at shadows and sudden birds. He didn't see the balaclava men again. Most of the village was still searching the woods so few people saw his muddy hobble back to End Point. It was something, he supposed, some might call it luck although others would just scream
fuck
, as Jonas did at one point.

He showered. Lay on his bed with the window open. A soft fussing rain, now and then the quick rush of a passing car. He heard a blackbird too, which made him think of The Beatles.

Eva.

She loved The Beatles.

Jonas cried, although he didn't want to. That Lutheran imprint from the old country. Never moan, just
endure
, a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and all the other crap. Well, fuck that. Fuck stoicism. Tonight he'd peer in the mirror at his bruised face and feed his sadness, look again for forgiveness from Eva for what had happened, the story he had to tell once more.

 

Downstairs, he found Fletcher in the kitchen. In trousers, amazingly, but still bare-chested. He was devouring a bowl of pasta, dribbles of tomato sauce on the table. He said nothing but followed every move Jonas made. When Jonas spun round to tell him to piss off, the table was empty. He went into the sun room and saw Fletcher lying starfish-splayed outside on the wet grass.

‘You should try it.'

‘Where were you this afternoon?'

‘The search.'

‘Didn't see you.'

Fletcher sat up and turned round. Grinning. ‘Have I done something wrong?'

‘Forget it.'

‘Suit yourself,' he said and lay back on the grass. ‘What happened to your face? Looks
nasty
.'

Jonas closed his eyes. Let it go. Be like Li Po. Keep quietly sweeping the steps of the temple.

‘It's cold.' Fletcher was waving his arms back and forth on the grass, like a child making a snow angel.

‘You'll
catch
a cold.'

Fletcher stopped moving and turned round. He looked as if he was about to laugh, then frowned.

Jonas looked away. This unbidden concern, he wanted to take it back. But it was said, was it not, by
gurus and wise men
, that compassion should be maintained regardless of circumstance. And if compassion could be sustained in all this weirdness then imagine a month, six months, a year from now; J-Man and the Bearded Ninja, a couple of likely lads, whistling a merry tune, a friendly salute as they pass each other on their way to and from the morning bathroom. The strangeness of today is the normality of tomorrow, Confucius said that.

He looked at Fletcher, who'd gone back to his rainy angel flailings. He was sure Fletcher hadn't been one of the balaclava ghost men. One of them was too squat, the other too tall.

It had to be Psycho Dave.

Or Buzz Cut.

Anger hit him. Not frustrated anger that Jonas remembered from teaching, some little bastard giving him cheek and that sudden urge to slap him. This was different, the kind that spooked you for a long time, uncontrolled, pre-socialised anger like back in primary when he got in a fight with Peter Møller and couldn't stop, whacking Peter's head off the playground concrete until a teacher dragged him away. He would have killed him, he was sure of it.

In a short moment he was in the street, running. Buzz Cut's local,
The Black Lion
, was closer than
The Hand and Shears
, where Psycho Dave worked, so Buzz Cut it would be. Jonas was going to glass him. With his own pint glass. Walk right up, wait for the smirk then
glass him.

Inevitably, Buzz Cut wasn't there. Jonas stood in the doorway for a few moments, chest heaving. Clara and Old Sam were talking at the end of the bar and turned round to stare.

‘Jonas. You ok?'

‘Looks like he's run a marathon,' said Clara.

‘Get this Norwegian a drink. Jonas, come and join me. I was thinking about Bergen this morning.'

Jonas's shoulders sagged. The anger suddenly drained, a tremble in his hands now, a weakness.

‘I tell you again. I have no idea why you're here. Why did you ever leave that fine city?'

Old Sam's eyes were bright. Jonas gave the cue, automatic. ‘I ask myself the same thing.'

‘The women, eh?'

‘Bergen women are the best, Sam. You know they are.'

‘I most surely do.'

Old Sam launched again into his story about the barmaid at
Logen's
whose name he could never remember no matter how he tried and I've even looked at books, Jonas, can you believe it, lists of Norwegian and Scandinavian names but none of them were hers but surely one of them must be and how could I forget her, blonde hair to her waist and not a day goes by without me thinking about her and maybe she thinks about me, Jonas, do you think she does?

‘I don't care, Sam.'

The old man turned. The light in his eyes seemed to waver. ‘Well... She really was beautiful.'

‘I don't care, Sam. Every time I come in here you tell me the same story and I just don't care.'

‘There's no need to – '

‘Shut up, Sam. Shut up!' And Clara was suddenly there, telling him to calm down, calm
down
.

Old Sam was silent. Clara stood at a wary distance. Jonas gulped down his pint but couldn't get rid of the lump in is throat. He looked up at the gantry mirror and in the reflection of the window saw birds in the sky, little birds as carefree as the children whose affection was forbidden. When he got up to leave Sam placed a hand on his arm. A hard squeeze.

‘Be careful, son…'

Jonas looked at him but the old man was staring straight ahead.

‘… with the friends you have.'

 

Jonas went home. Sat around. Played Can records.
Vitamin C
over and over until the world shifted so off-kilter that anything would make sense. Fletcher appeared once or twice. Standing in the doorway. A grin like irony defined. The ninja with one motive,
getting him out
, a Zen presence that could wait forever until the
koan
detonated.
Ah, I
get it, you want me to leave!

Mary appeared at 10 pm. A soft but persistent rapping at the front door. When he opened it she pushed past him quickly, a glance backwards but the street was deserted. Her smile was brief. He thought of old Sam, how friendship was so fragile. One, two blinks and it's gone.

‘I was worried. I didn't see you at the rendezvous in the woods and I didn't see you back in the square.'

He pointed at his nose.

‘What happened?'

‘I walked into a tree. Didn't want to sit there bleeding with everyone watching.'

‘You walked into a tree?'

‘Big beech.'

‘Looks like a bitch.'

‘What?'

‘It looks sore.' She moved her chair round to his side of the table and gently touched her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. ‘A bit swollen. You should go to the doctor.'

‘It's fine. Don't fuss.'

‘I'm not fussing.'

‘It's
fine
.'

‘Just let me
look
!'

‘
Ok
.'

She touched his nose again. Let her hand brush his cheek as she sat down in the chair.

‘I've been thinking about you,' he said.

She blushed.

‘I don't know what's happening here and God knows I've never been good at this.'

‘Jonas, don't – '

‘Sorry. Forget about it.'

‘You said you had something to tell me. On the bridge.'

He was silent for a moment. ‘What did he say?'

‘Adam?'

‘Did he say I had something to do with Lacey?'

‘Maybe.'

Jonas shook his head and walked out into the garden. The security lamp clicked on and illuminated Fletcher's towel, a dark rectangle on the wet grass. Like the opening to a chasm.

‘I get it,' he said. ‘You see an older man with a young girl. He's affectionate with her. And the stories you read. Bloody hell, they're enough to strike you blind. What do we really know about people, eh? How fragile is our trust that we can imagine that scenario,
believe
it?'

‘Look Jonas, I'm – '

‘You're here for my confession, is that it?'

‘What do you expect? I ask about Lacey and you're all peculiar and say you've got something to tell me. What am I supposed to think?'

‘Oh I don't know. That it might be something else. That your suspicion might just be wrong. That maybe because we seem to like each other I might have something to share with you.'

‘Well, share it then.'

He stared at her. She'd stood up, little fists bunched at her sides. She looked ready to burst out crying.

‘I came to Britain when my wife and daughter died, Eva and Anya. 22nd September 2005. A drunk driver outside Bergen. My daughter would be the same age as Lacey, fourteen.'

Mary blinked.

Her lips parted slightly and she seemed to empty of air. She sat down heavily on the sun room step. Jonas flung Fletcher's towel aside and sat down on the grass with his knees to his chest.

‘Lacey reminds me – '

‘
Don
't
, Jonas.'

A hand touched his shoulder. He didn't turn until it gently shook him. Mary's hair, outlined in silver by the kitchen light. Her face in shadow but Jonas still able to see the concerned frown, the darker space of a mouth saying such gentle words of apology and sympathy.

Eva.

It could be her. Taking him by the hand and leading him back across the garden and into the dark house, up the stairs to his bedroom where she slowly undressed him, gently pushed him back on the bed and straddled him, night becoming breath in silence until all was white light, a voice he couldn't quite make out and again that self-pity he didn't want to think about.

 

He pretended to be asleep as Mary quietly dressed. He let her slip out without the goodbye that would have been simple but unbelievably complicated. He heard Fletcher leaving or maybe coming back and didn't care. Tonight he wouldn't barricade himself in. Nothing could reach him but remorse.

Fletcher left End Point sometime after one, not wanting to hear any more of Jonas and Mary's strangulated fucking. He lay in The Skull unable to sleep, annoyed with himself for thinking about them. He kept seeing Mary, head moving against the pillow as Jonas pushed into her.

He hadn't gone out with Mary for long. Two weeks, Fletcher reckoned, hardly any time, even when you're sixteen. There was no logical reason for this jealous niggle, his reaction to the memory disproportionate, as usual, to what he actually remembered, which was little. For much the same reason, it was hard to decide if Mary's tired vulnerability was the effect of the teenage girl she'd been and not let go, or the middle-aged woman she'd become and didn't accept. He'd be sure to ask her when she'd figured out that dreams were the midwife of disappointment and growing up was about losing the ability to delude ourselves. Mary lived in disappointment. He'd seen her in her midnight kitchen, the radio softly on, staring out the window. Teenage Mary would surely be horrified by this clichéd affair with a man who was the
simple inversion of her husband
, as the counsellor might have described it.

Everyone liked absolutes. Fletcher found it reassuring when the counsellor called him
an introverted feeler
. But there was complacency in labels, the black and white got dull without some colour. So he cranked up the traumatised veteran role, rolled out lines like
I have seen such horror
, the gratuitous detail unsettling the counsellor but then, more slowly, himself. Because the horror was actually impossible to overplay, like Lieutenant Robinson, who stepped on an IED and it
was
as if a grey-red cloud had stained Fletcher's vision ever since, a burned-on after-image and an ever present echo of the explosion on the edge of his hearing. He wondered about Mortensen. A classic extrovert and connection seeker, he would have played straight with the counsellor. Yet each would have reached the same place, in the end.

The Norwegian must be wondering why he hadn't gone to the police. His contempt may be growing by the day. But Fletcher could handle that. He knew patience, cold winter doorways, hand out with the Styrofoam cup and diesel in his nostrils, waiting for the coins and watching the suspicious eyes, pity like a gemstone among all the indifference. In his mind, Mortensen was already gone, fading like the summer, a barely acknowledged presence and not even an irritation. One morning he'd realise he hadn't seen the Norwegian for days.

As the girl's disappearance would also fade.
The Race for Lacey... The Long, Hot Search for
Lacey.
The headlines would move on to other lurid fascinations. Trauma passes, in time, leaving behind the guilt of chance remembrance, driving past Lacey's old house and why do you think of her now when you make this journey so often? Perhaps we remember as one person and forget as another, whoever we might have been at any given time in all the pouring years.

He glimpsed her then, his little sister, beyond The Skull in the shadowed distance by the fairy castle of hole seven, as she was before they made him leave here, before they made him kill. Or perhaps it was the girl in Sangin, it was so difficult to be sure these days. Fletcher had to get closer. He scrambled down out of The Skull and ran across the golf course.

As usual, she never let him get close. When he reached the crumbling plaster towers of the fairy castle she was back over by The Skull, which glowed in the light of a quarter moon as if daubed with luminescent paint. His sister was sniggering at him, sniggering as he stared at her.

 

You ask again. How much do I remember? But you
know I remember it all, how you stood that morning
on the sunlit path in your blue jacket and red
and white polka dot dress as the sun beat down.
Such a hot summer, as hot as this year's.
I see your hand shade your eyes as you shout
back
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you
because we have fallen out. Or rather it is me
who has fallen out with you, once again. What do
you expect, you are my little sister, you want me
to notice you, always to notice you. If I did
not then I do now, I see you everywhere, as
there, lying in the Sangin bazaar in that pool of
swelling red as every sound retreated, as if I had
been plunged under ice water, and in truth I have
never surfaced, never felt Molloy's hand on my shoulder,
saying something I can't understand as I dip my
finger in the sticky puddle the girl has left behind.
So red. Red under blue, red as the polka dots
on another dress in another place, so far away it
is sepia-tinged and yet so immediate. How can I
separate you, you two who are one? How can I
possibly choose how to remember when you ambush me like
this? Two against one, like bullies, like Private Davidson at
boot camp before I broke his jaw. Your endless questions,
each said with that little smile. Even God could not
answer them, he who must let us all down in
order that faith can be tested. Be glad you will
never know the feeling of waking one morning with the
absolute certainty that life has played a terrible trick and
you will never figure out the scam. Be glad you
will never feel the slow curdling of the spirit and
optimism of the little girl who sang as she skipped
along the English hedgerows and drew smiles with a kite
on the Afghan blue. Be glad of that and leave
me alone.