Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) (6 page)

Abby stumbled on her two-inch heels and then righted herself. “It’s just along here,” she said, slurring only a little. The buttons on her jacket had come undone and it flapped open, displaying the small humps of her breasts beneath the blouse and the excess material at her flat stomach. The top two buttons of the blouse were also undone. Her sternum was prominent, with only a scant covering of pale flesh.

She’s so thin
, he thought.
Almost emaciated
...

Again, he was confused by the strength and source of his own desire.

Curtains and blinds were shut at the windows of most of the houses they passed, but pale light bled around the edges and through the gaps. Marc caught sight of the occasional red eye of a lit cigarette as someone smoked on their doorstep. There was a feeling of mute desolation, a sense that behind this façade there was nothing but a deep, black emptiness. He had no idea what time it was, but it felt late. Too late to turn back, anyway.

When they reached the house, she stopped underneath a streetlight. The sickly light made her look ill. Marc waited to see what she would do, and when she reached for him he twitched in shock. Then, as she leaned in close and opened her mouth, he let himself go with the moment, enjoying the seedy glamour of her overly made-up face closing in on his.

When she kissed him, she did it with such force and urgency that he feared she might leave bruises. It felt as if she were trying to eat his face without breaking the skin. Her thin lips were hard; her large mouth was soft and wet and tasted of wine and soda. When she forced her tongue into his mouth it felt like an invasion, the prelude to a rape. He almost gagged but then he got the reaction under control, stopping it before it went too far. His stomach flipped. The muscles in his thighs tightened.

Abby’s long, firm tongue explored the inside of his mouth and he brought his teeth together softly, nibbling gently.

They came apart slowly. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. His crotch was aching. She reached down and brazenly cupped his balls, and then rubbed her hand across the front of his trousers, pressing her palm so hard against his erection so that it began to throb. “Let’s go inside,” she whispered.

He followed her through the gate and along a narrow concrete path. The lawn on each side of the path was overgrown and filled with weeds. The curtains were open at the large front window. There was a standing lamp switched on inside the lounge, shedding weak light across the carpet. The TV was on and showing scenes from a 1970s action movie: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke; cops and criminals in grey suits with flared trousers running through the grimy streets of downtown San Francisco.

She opened the door and stepped inside, kept going along the hallway. She’d left the door open, so Marc assumed that he was meant to follow her inside. He shut the door behind him and continued towards another door at the end and on the right: the living room. When he went inside, Abby was closing the curtains. She’d taken off her jacket; the thin material of the blouse clung like crepe paper to her slight form. Her arms were painfully thin.

She turned around and smiled. She seemed more relaxed on her own turf, as if she’d also taken off a layer of the armour that had been so apparent in the Unicorn.

“Drink?” She moved gracefully across the room, running a hand across his chest as she passed him on her way to the door. “Or should I try to find a pizza menu, or something?”

“To be honest, I’m not really that hungry anymore.” He took off his coat and threw it onto the sofa.

She smiled. “Beer okay?” She walked out of the room before he had a chance to answer.

Marc sat down on the sofa and watched the muted television. The film had come to a break. Adverts for banks and supermarkets played out before his eyes, not even touching him.

“Here,” she said, opening a can of bitter and sitting down beside him. “It’s cold but I don’t know what it tastes like – I never drink bitter.”

He barely paused to wonder why she had cans of the stuff in her fridge.

He sipped the bitter and felt her place a hand on his thigh. When he looked over at her she was sitting staring at him, a strange, unreadable expression on her face. She seemed to be looking inward, staring at something that lived inside her. That was the only way he could think of to describe how she looked.

He put down the can on the floor and leaned in towards her, knowing that it was what was expected of him. He kissed the side of her neck and she moaned softly. He pulled away, feeling as if he was doing something wrong. Nothing felt right. He was simply going through the motions and feeling nothing of any substance.

He looked around at the living room. There were a couple of cheap prints on the wall, framed landscapes of places he didn’t recognise. On the mantelpiece above the electric fire was a small plastic model of the Angel of the North. Shoes were scattered on the floor in one corner. On a small occasional table to one side of the television there were photographs of a little girl. These were all held inside pretty little silver frames. One of the photographs was of the girl in school uniform. Another showed her smiling on a desolate beach. There were at least seven or eight of these images: it was like a small shrine.

“My daughter,” she said, noticing his interest. “That’s our Tessa.”

“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said.

“She was. She was very beautiful... my little Princess.”

Marc knew what was coming. He should have known that the woman’s damage must have come from something like this, but he’d been too drunk and aroused to stop and think about what he was doing, who he was really with.

“She went missing five years ago. She was only ten years old.”

He looked again at the photos. Placed among them were other items: a few crude, childish examples of arts and crafts. Perhaps they’d been created by the girl when she was at school or attending a day nursery. There was a fired clay saucer, a primitive pottery figure, and two small macramé animals. This was the art of loss, bespeaking all manner of private grief.

“Should I go?”

She shook her head but remained silent. The television flickered like a faulty god from across the tawdry room.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. Her eyelids fluttered in the gloom. She slid across the sofa so that their thighs were touching. This time the contact was electric; he imagined sparks flaring between them, forming an arc of white light. She leaned in close. He felt the soft warmth of her breath against his cheek. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and this time when she kissed him it was less hungry, more relaxed and intimate. This time it felt like she knew exactly who she was kissing.

He embraced her, running his hands across her back, feeling her bra strap through the thin blouse. She was breathing heavily. He felt constrained, wanted to get out of his clothes and feel her naked skin against him. He moved his right hand, bringing it around to the front and slipping it between them. He cupped her left breast. She took a sharp breath and smiled into his kiss.

They were upstairs before he’d even registered that they’d moved off the sofa. They picked at each other’s clothing, pulling away garments like hunters skinning an animal. That’s how it felt: primal, necessary. An act born out of need rather than want.

Her body was so thin that she was made up of angles. Her elbow bones were sharp points in the dark and her kneecaps stood out from the skin. Her breasts were small, with large nipples and dark areolae. He bent forward and kissed them, one at a time, teasing the nipples erect. She tugged his trousers down to his knees and he backed away from her to take them off and throw them across the room. She slipped off her knickers and displayed the darkness between her thighs. He knelt like a supplicant, moved his head forward, and began to lap at her crotch, feeling her open up for him. She reached down and pushed the back of his head. He tensed his tongue, jabbed the tip into her clitoris.

She moaned something under her breath but he couldn’t make out the words.

The sex was both hard and soft, it was desperate and yet it was also strangely rhythmic. They felt their way towards separate climaxes, and then, after a short and silent period of rest, they made love again. This time it was slower, more relaxed, and although lacking the same urgency it was no less intense.

Afterwards, Abby fell asleep in his arms, her head resting against his chest. It was uncomfortable but he didn’t want to move in case he woke her. After several minutes she shifted, turned her back to him, and curled up with her spine bent, the bones prodding her skin. He reached down and touched her flesh. She was hot to the touch.

He was sober now, and unable to sleep. The sex had invigorated him, washing the tiredness from his system. He stared at the ceiling, and then at the walls. In this room, too, there were several photographs of Tessa. She was a pretty girl with a wide smile. She looked a lot like her mother, with a similar long face and thin lips. She had the same ice-blue eyes.

The walls were covered with a type of wallpaper that had been in fashion half a decade ago. The ceiling was plastered with ridged white swirls of Artex. The furniture in the room – the double bed, a built-in wardrobe, a dressing table and chair – looked inexpensive, mass-produced.

Gently, he slid out of bed and went to look for his trousers. He found them near the door and put them on. He didn’t bother looking for his shirt. The heating must be on; it was warm inside the house.

He glanced back at the bed but Abby hadn’t moved. The skin of her back was white in the darkness, like dead flesh. He could make out the individual bones of her vertebral column through the papery flesh. Her shoulders were so narrow that she could have been a child lying there on the mattress, sleeping uneasily in her parents’ bed.

He opened the door and left the room, closing it gently behind him. He padded across the landing and paused at the top of the stairs. There were two other rooms up here – one must be the bathroom. He moved further along the landing and tried the first door. It opened onto the second bedroom. This must have been where Tessa had slept. There were posters of ponies and fairy tale characters on the walls. The bed was covered in a pink duvet. There was a small TV, a stereo, an Xbox, and all the books on the shelf above the headboard were storybooks about princes and princesses and faraway lands.

Abby must have kept the room exactly how it had been when her daughter went missing. He was again reminded of the small table-top shrine in the living room. At the centre of the bedroom there was a large, roughly triangular pile of what at first he took as random objects. Then, when he moved further into the room to take a closer look, he realised what the objects were. Broken toys, the pages from what might have been her favourite books, stuffed animals that were missing an arm or a leg, and in one case even a head. There were doll parts, oversized jigsaw pieces, fractured board games, foreign dolls in national dress, and the remnants of a destructed playroom: all the sad parts from the broken toys that nobody ever got around to fixing.

The pile of discarded playthings formed a small pyramid, the apex of which was level with Marc’s mid-thigh. He stood before it and wondered how long it had taken to build. Had Abby created it all in one go, or had she added to the mound gradually, forming a kind of homemade monument to her memory over the past five years since her daughter had disappeared?

He put out his hand and let it hover above the totem. That was how he’d begun to think of the weird construction: with each layer of toys representing a period in the girl’s life. The older toys were nearer the bottom – baby things, the mobile from above her crib, perhaps even her first stuffed toy – and the newer stuff was at the top.

As he stepped around the mound, he noticed a photograph attached to the top of the pyramid. A small monochrome portrait of the girl, possibly taken not long before she’d gone away: her last school photograph, or maybe one taken by Abby on their final family holiday? The background was a greyish blur, so he couldn’t make out where the picture had been taken. It wasn’t even clear if the girl had been indoors or outside in the open air.

When he looked closer he realised that her eyes were shut. What he’d at first assumed were the girl’s eyes were in fact drawn on; somebody had sketched false eyes onto her eyelids. He bent down to inspect the photograph closer, to try and understand what it was he was looking at.

Was it an image of a dead girl, like Victorian post-mortem photography? Or was she simply asleep, and whoever had drawn the eyes had been playing a joke? There wasn’t enough detail to be sure, but the image disturbed him. Perhaps if the photograph had been in colour, he might have been able to discern more detail. As it was, this was just a girl with eyes drawn onto her closed lids.

He backed out of the room slowly, trying not to make a sound. He could not turn away from the grim totem, and now that he’d seen the photograph he was unable to think of anything else. Even when he closed his eyes, he saw that face: the drawn-on eyes stared at him from the red-tinted darkness.

He shut the door on the dreadful image and went to the next door along the landing. It was the bathroom. He locked the door and sat down on the toilet, trying to clear his mind. But all he could think of – and all he could see, like a flash against his retina – was the girl’s small, white face and those crudely drawn eyes.

He stood and lifted the toilet lid, took a piss and stared at the clean white tiles above the cistern. As he washed his hands, he tried not to meet his own eyes in the mirror above the sink. He knew that they would look haunted, just as this house was haunted by something that was not immediately apparent – a quiet spectre, a ghost of sadness and decay. He wasn’t afraid, he was mournful. The death of this child – if she even was dead, and not simply being held somewhere by another haunted and tormented soul – permeated the bricks and the mortar, the very fabric of the building in which he stood. Her absence was like a physical thing, taking up space that it did not own.