AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season (27 page)

Thomas stayed in the freezer room for a while, thinking about the phone call from Father Sholtham. He couldn’t say how long, but it felt like a long time.

Squeak was an altar boy but he wasn’t religious, he said he did it for the trips. He was devout like Lars was. For Lars religion was like a membership of an afterlife country club: he despised people who weren’t Catholic, and really believed they were going to hell and good riddance to them. Thomas struggled against the reflex to prayer, especially now, when everything was so mixed up. Maybe Squeak was going through that too. Maybe he genuinely confessed to a drunken priest the morning after. It was just possible that Squeak had found his faith again in a moment of despair. Thomas shook his head. Squeak was scheming. He was scheming even before they met on the beach. Squeak didn’t want to get caught. He was so far ahead of him, Thomas was defeated before the fight began.

He stood up and walked heavily up to the bright kitchen.

Theresa still hadn’t phoned. Thomas glanced at the wall clock. Ten past seven. She might call yet, but she wasn’t in a hurry. He’d have called her hours ago, if it was up to him. The lightness of the morning in town left him, making everything seem bleaker.

He poured himself a Coke from the bottle in the fridge, drank it down and went back upstairs, gathering himself on the traipse up the staircase, getting his story right for Moira. He’d say the phone call was the girlfriend in town’s father. He wanted to ask Thomas about him meeting her because she’d been late back to school lessons and the father’d had to write her a letter explaining her absence from PE. Thomas supposed that’s what happened at day school. You had to write to them about everything. The PE detail made the lie more believable, he thought, and it had to be good because Moira was so used to being lied to.

He walked back into the bedroom and knew immediately that he’d walked into the middle of a catastrophe. They looked so utterly detached from each other they might have been in different rooms.

Moira was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away from Ella, pale and scared, as if something horrible and sexual had happened. He thought of the depressed girl from Kiev in the miserable room in Amsterdam.

Ella was over by the window, behind the bed, looking out over the lawn.

Moira looked up at Thomas, ashen, and said why didn’t he take Ella downstairs to the family room and maybe they could watch a movie together? Confused, Thomas sat down next to her, put his hand on her back, tried to read beyond the horror. “Mum?”

Moira attempted a smile. “Ella’s…” but she didn’t know what Ella was.

Thomas stood up and looked at his sister’s reflection in the window, just beginning to form as the sun set. She was crying, her mouth open, turned down like a mask from a Greek drama.

She began to flap her right hand, small shakes, like she’d eaten something hot, and then the shakes got bigger and she started hitting the glass on the window, louder and louder with the back of her hand. It was time for this nonsense to stop.

“Ella?”

She didn’t listen. She started to say something but he couldn’t make it out over the noise of her hitting the glass.

Thomas went to her, yanked her shoulder, turning her around to face him and shouting “Stop it!” but she didn’t. She carried on crying and shaking her hand and upsetting everyone. So Thomas shouted again, even louder, “Ella! Fucking stop it! We’re all sad, for Christ’s sake. You can’t make it all about you!”

He was feeling pleased because that was exactly the problem, he’d articulated it perfectly. But she was shaking, her whole body trembling now, as if she was getting into it. Thomas raised his hand and slapped her hard across the face.

Ella stopped shaking.

Thomas glanced up and saw himself in the side window. He was tall and broad-chested, the sinews on his arms tight, looming over the small girl. His face was twisted with annoyance. He looked like Lars.

Ella dissolved to the floor, arms in front of her. He looked down. Her wrists were scarred, badly scarred with long scratches up and down them.

He tried to pick her up. She flopped onto the floor again and curled around his ankle, sobbing, tears rolling into her yellow hair at the temple, her cheek maddened by the slap.

Thomas bent down, crouching right down on his haunches and waited until Ella got tired and stopped writhing, until she was staring at his ankle, seeing nothing. He knew that this was the real Ella.

Suddenly, he understood the worried calls from the school over the year. This was why Lars and Moira went to visit her so much more than they went to see him. This was why they dropped their voices when they spoke about her. This was why they kept them apart. She had been ill for a long, long time. She was mad and baffling and scary. He looked at Moira and he understood why she made certain that he was the first one home.

They should have told him. He didn’t know, he thought she was snooty and spoiled but he didn’t know that she was nuts. They should have told him.

He touched Ella’s shoulder, the way Doyle had tried to touch him, and he said to her, “I’m sorry, Ella, I thought you were faking.” And then he didn’t say anything after that.

Ella waited until Moira went to the bathroom and shut the door. Then she slowly got up and stood slack, occasional tears dripping from her nose onto the floor, leaving deep dents in the thick carpet.

“Come on,” he said, and took her hand and led her out of the bedroom. She saw her own door, her bedroom door, and stopped, bringing a toe towards it, pointing at the bottom of the door frame and Thomas said, “Do you want to go in there?”

But she didn’t answer and he was afraid to leave her alone so he took her downstairs, helping her on the steps, walking in front of her, holding both her hands as if she was a very old lady. He saw the ridges on her wrists then, and saw that some were very old and healed white and some were so new they were still sealed with crusty scabs.

They were at the bottom of the stairs when Moira called down to them that she was tired and going to bed and they’d sort this out tomorrow. All right? Thomas? Darling?

“OK, Mum.” He heard her shut her door tight and imagined her locking it, though he didn’t actually know whether there was a lock on that door.

In the family room they sat next to each other, squashed up shoulder to shoulder on the frosty white sofa, watching
Mission Impossible II
. Ella sat with her hands palm up, showing her scars, and Thomas felt like tutting because it was so dramatic but he looked at her face and saw that she just didn’t give a shit if he saw them or not. She didn’t speak but she nodded to herself at the movie when the characters peeled their faces off.

“You’re not well,” said Thomas as the credits rolled.

Ella dropped her head to her chest as though she was very tired. Thomas didn’t think he had ever seen anyone as sad as her.

“Ella?”

She didn’t look at him.

“It’s all going to be all right. I’m going to look after you now.”

She didn’t answer but he could see that she had heard and understood and that it mattered to her that he had said that. He could do that for her. He could be Theresa for her, a proper parent, someone who was there all the time and made sure she didn’t do anything to hurt herself.

He walked her upstairs, to her rooms, his arm through her arm, guiding with his elbow. They walked through the pink sitting room and through to the bed. She sat down on the edge and he lifted her little feet and made her lie down. He sat in the other room and left the door open, watching her chest rise and fall until she fell asleep.

Thomas put the lights off in there but kept the side light on in the sitting room and left the door ajar. He stopped outside for a moment. Through the master bedroom door Moira’s television laughed loudly. He knocked but she didn’t answer.

And Theresa still hadn’t phoned.

Morrow pulled her car into the steep driveway and crunched on the handbrake, leaving the Honda in first gear. She didn’t trust it on the gradient.

The living room curtains were drawn. Orange light bleeding around the edges, shining bright and warm into the night. The light was on in the hall as well. This was her second favorite moment in the day, drawing up to the house, knowing Brian was in there. Her first favorite moment was climbing into bed. Rock and roll.

She opened the door and stepped out, locked the car and looked around the quiet neighborhood. A nice area for a family to grow up in. She smiled to herself and walked up to the door, fitted her key and opened it, calling, “Hiya,” as she put her door keys back in her pocket and hung her coat up in the cupboard.

“Hiya.” Brian came out to meet her. “How was London?”

“It was grim. Bannerman wouldn’t let me take Harris because he’s seeing revolutions everywhere…”

“What was the bar like?”

“Good-looking women, ugly men. Saw Kay again though, and her boys.”

“Go OK?”

“Yeah, they did really well.”

He was standing half in the hall, half in the kitchen, holding on to the door frame. It was an odd posture for him. He looked secretive, coy, as if he was blocking her way, as if the kitchen was full and he was about to spring a surprise party on her.

She nodded at him. “What?”

Brian balked at conflict. Morrow quite liked a fight but not in the house. Brian didn’t like any kind of antagonism. He took a deep breath. “Come in here.”

She followed him into the kitchen, expecting a surprise as soon as she walked in. The kitchen looked the same, same table, same bland fitted units the old couple had left, usual kitchen cloth draped over the tap to dry, usual bowl of dinner waiting for her in the microwave.

She smiled. “What’s going on?”

Brian looked worried. “I want you to sit down.”

She took a chair. He sat next to her and chewed his bottom lip. “Danny came here today.”

She looked around suddenly as if he might still be in here, and when she spoke she found she was whispering. “Here?”

“Yeah.”

“You met him?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Teatime, about five, five thirty or something.”

“Why didn’t you phone me?”

“Didn’t want to bother you.”

Brian wasn’t injured. He didn’t even look scared or bothered. She touched his cheek and he smiled at her, seeing how protective she was of him. They sat close, huddled, suspicious.

“I don’t like him coming here.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want him knowing you.”

He took her hand. “I’m all right.”

She squeezed his fingers. “I’m sorry.”

He squeezed hers. “No need.”

“Was it about JJ?”

“Yeah, and Kay Murray.”

“Kay Murray?”

“Someone came to see him, told him to pass on a warning to you: you’ve to lay off the Murray boys.”

“He’s warning me off?”

“No, he’s telling you
someone else
wants you warned off.”

She snorted. “He can’t come here and tell me what to do.”

“Is that what he was doing?”

Morrow shrugged. He’d never done anything like this before. She sat back and thought her way through the possibilities. Danny could be telling the truth, but that would be out of character. If he was lying she had to wonder why he would tell that lie. He wanted her to lay off the Murray boys but wouldn’t say it directly. Then it hit her: Joe was sixteen. Alex had lost touch with both of them but Danny and Kay probably still knew each other back then. She considered for a moment the possibility that Danny was Joe’s dad. But Joe didn’t look much like Danny. He didn’t act at all like Danny. And then she remembered the flat, how little Kay had, buying four lots of shoes at Costco, all the same, because they were waterproof and would last a winter. She was working as a cleaner and a carer and clearly supporting herself and her kids. She wasn’t taking anything from Danny. But Kay was proud. She wouldn’t have taken anything from Danny.

It could have been true, Danny could be warning her that someone else, not him, knew they were related and wanted her to lay off the Murrays. It could have been Kay herself.

“She doesn’t trust us,” she said.

“Who doesn’t trust us?”

“Kay Murray. She doesn’t trust the police.” Alex shook her head at the table. “Could Danny be his dad? Joe’s lovely.”

“Is he?”

“Does he know Joe?”

“He didn’t sound as if he did.”

“Why, what did he say?”

Brian shrugged. “The Murray boys, he kept calling them the Murray boys. Someone wants you to lay off them.”

She was lost in her thoughts for a moment until Brian said, “I made a nice lamb stew. Will I heat it up?”

“Please.”

Brian stood up, shut the microwave door and put it on for three minutes, watching, waiting with a spoon. Morrow saw herself and Kay in the avenue that first time they met and how pleased Kay was that she was a police officer and how she might have gone home, or sat on the train and thought about her, being an officer, and how that was an alternative life for her son.

Joe might be her nephew. She laughed to herself. If she was related to Kay in a distant sort of way she wished she’d known. She’d have loved an excuse to stay in touch.

The microwave pinged, Brian opened it and stirred and then shut it and put it on again. When he sat down he was smiling. “He looks like you.”

“Think?”

“Yeah,” he touched her lips, “same chin.”

“He can’t warn me off anything—”

“Alex.” Brian leaned forward, put his hand flat on her stomach. “He isn’t warning you off anything. He’s calling a truce.”

“You don’t know him—”

“No, I don’t but I can see that he’s asking you for help and you’re saying no.”

Thomas sat down in the family room, holding the phone receiver and told himself that, for fuck’s sake, a hundred years ago people emigrated at his age. They lied about their date of birth and joined up and fought in the First World War at his age. It wasn’t that big a fucking deal. At school they were always talking about resilience, developing resilience, Duke of Edinburgh and all that crap. This was a Duke of Edinburgh. He should get a Duke of Edinburgh for this.

Making plans, he decided to ring a doctor in the morning about Ella. And at least now he knew that on or off the medication, Moira was a feckless prick. He was holding the phone receiver so that he could get to it before Moira. He’d been holding it for so long that the cold metal handset was body temperature now.

Theresa wasn’t bothered about talking to him. She’d have called by now if she was. He still really wanted her to phone and speak to Moira though, wanted her to break the news to Moira that she wasn’t that fucking special. She wasn’t so fucking chosen that she could ignore a twelve-year-old having a breakdown and pack her off to school or to watch a movie.

He stood up, went into the hall, and found the jacket he’d worn this morning. In the inside pocket, folded in two, was the stiff embossed memo from Lars’s desk and it had Theresa’s address and number on it. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, listening. No noise from Ella’s room. Moira’s television was still on, still loud.

Tiptoeing for no reason, he snuck down to the freezer room, put the light on and sat in whirring warm as he dialed the number.

He listened as it rang out, his heart beating loudly in his throat. It was answered by a boy. “Yeah?”

Thomas opened his mouth but the words took a moment to form. “Is this Phils?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Thomas Anderson.”

They listened to each other breathing for a while, half brothers, each waiting for the other to say something. Phils pulled the phone from his mouth and said in a drawly posh-twit voice, “Mummy, it’s that boy—the
son
.”

Theresa took the phone. Her voice was clipped. “How did you get this number?”

He looked at the card. “I 1471’d it last night.”

“To what end?”

He didn’t know what she meant. She was like a different person. He’d meant to make conversation, ask how her day had gone, work up to politely wondering aloud why she hadn’t phoned Moira. He’d meant to give her an excuse, maybe she was feeling too tired to phone? Not to worry, she could call tomorrow.

“
To what end,
Thomas? What are you up to?”

“Nothing really, you said you’d call my mum…”

“
Her?
Why would I call
her?
”

“Well, I don’t know, you said you’d call—”

“A woman,” she sounded furious, “so wrapped up in herself that she was complicit in the sexual abuse of a child?”

For a moment Thomas thought Phils had been abused, by Lars, but it made no sense. “What are—”

“Did you or did you not fuck your nanny?”

It sounded as if she was talking to someone else, as if she was someone else. But she was waiting for an answer.

“Theresa?”

“Do you or do you not know Mary Morrison?”

“Nanny Mary?”

“And she fucked you, didn’t she? She says Lars ordered her to. That he threatened her if she didn’t. What kind of people are you? Don’t ever call here again.” She hung up.

Thomas stared at the floor, the phone still on his ear, listening to the burr of the dialing tone. What the hell had happened?

He ran through their parting—had he done something to offend her? Had he said something about himself, something about Lars that was shocking? She’d said Lars was a bit of a prick and he just agreed. Well, actually he didn’t agree but he didn’t stand up for him either. Maybe that was it. Maybe she expected him to disagree. Maybe she was disappointed about that. He thought of her lovely messy hall and her nice round tits and was sorry for whatever it was he had done.

She quoted Nanny Mary. Nanny Mary must have gone to her house and told her that stuff, chasing a payment, but it was utter bullshit. Lars might have paid her to fuck him but he wouldn’t threaten her. And he was fifteen years old, he wasn’t a child.

He got up and turned the light off. As he climbed up into the kitchen the phone rang again.

“Hello?”

Theresa, still crisp and unfriendly. “Look,” she said, “I’ve been having a think. We’ve got to get this sorted out.”

“No one threatened Mary.”

“You’re a child, Thomas.”

“I’m fifteen years old.”

“You’re still just a child.”

“Yeah.” He thought of her today, putting the baseball bat down, linking arms and brushing her nipples across him as they walked along the road. “Didn’t stop you shaking your tits at me this morning, did it?”

She paused at that, kind of acknowledged it, and spoke confidentially. “It makes your mother sound very bad indeed, all that Mary stuff. So far she’s come off as the victim, but if people
knew
…”

“And, plus, you were going to hit me with a baseball bat before you realized you knew me, how does that fit with me being a poor little kid?”

She heard the steel in his voice and shouted, “Phils and Betsy are
not
going to be pulled out of their schools, you can bet on
that
.”

“I never said they should—”

“And I want a share of the proceeds of the house.”

“Which house?”

“The one you’re standing in.”

Thomas had told her they were going to sell. He saw suddenly that she’d been pumping him for information all morning. She’d been saying how funny it was that everything had changed, where would they holiday now? Where were the children going to school now? Would he study abroad, when he went to uni? She’d even sympathized when he said they only had the Piper left. She probably knew Nanny Mary before, knew all that stuff, was working him from the beginning.

“Tell your mother that she’ll be hearing from my solicitor in due course.”

“Tell her your fucking self, Ther
ee
sa,” he said, and hung up.

He dropped the receiver on the worktop and stepped away, staring at it. Bitch. A fucking bitch. Sarah Erroll had died in her place and it was her fucking fault, all of it.

What else had he told her? He didn’t know what he was doing, he couldn’t look after Ella or worry about Squeak, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Looking up at the high ceiling he felt defeat creeping through him like a chill. He was just a kid. He didn’t know what he was doing. His loss was private now but soon, when she went to a lawyer and the papers heard, it would all be made public. Stander.

Panicked, he went upstairs to his mother. Her television was still on but he tiptoed past Ella’s door and knocked gently. Abruptly, the television fell silent and the light snapped off under the door.

Thomas tried the handle and found it open. He didn’t look in, afraid she might be naked or something.

“Moira?” he whispered.

After a long while she answered, faking a sleeping voice, “Hmm?”

“Ella’s…asleep now.”

Moira was determined to see the pretend-sleep through. “Wha…? What are you saying, darling?”

Theresa had spent the morning smiling and sharking around him for information. He honestly believed she liked him. Moira couldn’t even tell a convincing lie about being asleep.

Angry, he reached in and turned on the light.

Moira was fully clothed, sitting on top of the bed with an ashtray on her lap and a curl of smoke snaking out of it. He was surprised. He didn’t know she smoked. He forgot what he meant to say for a moment.

She smiled weakly. “I must have nodded off…”

“Ella’s asleep.”

She tried to smile but it looked really bitter. “As should you be.” She said it like a mother in a story book.

“What’s Ella got?”

She seemed surprised, as if she hadn’t noticed really.

“She’s nuts,” he said carefully. “What is it she’s got?”

“Ella’s…nervous.”

“She’s really not well.”

Moira grinned, her eyes slipped his and then came back, her smile sadder than before. She was trying hard. He could see that she was trying and she’d been on a high dose for a long time.

Thomas wanted to tell her everything. A woman died in Scotland. Ella is floridly nuts. Theresa is Dad’s other wife. She is a shark. She is not stupid. She has round tits and handsome children. She will eat you alive while we watch and I cannot save you because I am a child.

But he didn’t say those things. Instead he said what Moira wanted and needed to hear: “Good night, Mum.”

A warm grateful smile broke over her face and she slid down a little in the bed. “Good night, darling.”

Carefully, Thomas shut the door and stood alone in the dark hall.