He hummed more insistently as Jacquie struggled off her lounger, causing her left breast to fall out of her sundress. Instinctively, she looked up at the Zeller's house next door. She just knew old Gunther was lurking behind the spare bedroom’s net curtains.
Dave stopped humming.
"Where are you going?" His eyebrows raised in her direction.
"Doing what any worried mother should.”
"More to the point, you need to get our
soirée
invitations out for Saturday."
Jacquie didn't listen. It was 6.45 p.m. as she went through the side gate which was topped by a strip of carpet-gripper, feeling the heat from the house bricks reach her very core. Then through the open-plan front garden where Irma Zeller was weeding a flowerbed. Not that there was anything remotely weedy in the Germans’ plot, and illicit sprinklers switched on at night, kept their grass indecently green.
"You've not seen Louis by any chance?" Jacquie ventured. "He should be home from orchestra practice by now…"
The woman straightened. Fixed her with sharp, blue eyes.
"Thirteen is a bad age to be, Mrs Perelman."
Jacquie's heart took a dive.
"Why?" As a troupe of magpies waddled across the lawn. With a mighty handclap Frau Zeller sent them flapping to the roof where they proceeded to shit all over the decorative ridge tiles.
"When the fur grows, then innocence goes," she said, clapping again, to no avail.
Those unsettling words lingered as Jacquie strode out between the development's imposing entrance pillars, normally topped by a concrete ball apiece. However, they were again both missing. Despite a hidden CCTV camera, not a month had gone by without some Scrub End Estate yob displacing either one or both. This losing battle was costing residents £500 a go. They, like Dave argued that if the UK’s pond life had their benefits slashed even more, the deficit, inherited by the new Coalition government, would be halved. “Cut to the bone,” he’d opined. “That’s what’s needed.”
Jacquie stood under the array of signs that the Neighbourhood Watch Committee had erected once the first four plots had been occupied. PRIVATE PROPERTY - KEEP OUT; BEWARE OF DOGS; NO HAWKERS OR CIRCULARS; NO BALL GAMES OR BONFIRES. All besmirched by bursts of spray paint. Through the black trees opposite, she could see Sodom and Gomorrah's bleak hovels. A place you didn’t dare go.
However, she felt impelled to cross the road towards it, and stood poised to take her chance when suddenly from nowhere, a North Barton bus appeared. Instead of slowing down for Louis' stop, it swept by.
There was no point in phoning him. He wasn’t allowed a mobile until his next birthday.
*
Seven o'clock, and still no boy. There was nothing for it but to walk further down to the roundabout; a death-trap island in sea of Big Mac cartons, oil gunge and what looked suspiciously like a dried human turd.
Then something caught Jacquie’s eye. A black shape draped over the road sign. Definitely clothing. She was close enough to touch it and see its badge. North Barton Boys' School.
No…
The garment felt warm from the sun. Her hand dropped into a side pocket and found a small marble. A
Chewit
wrapper. Then the other pocket hiding a folded piece of lined paper torn from a pad. She recognised the writing. The loopy uprights, the tiny vowels.
Je m'appelle Louis Claus Perelman et je joue au violon.
"Briar Bank Police Station?” She began her call. “I want to report..." But here she faltered. Her BlackBerry too slippery in her hand. Through the kitchen window she saw Dave still in his deckchair, still studying his score. Lips moving on the notes.
"Report what, Madam?" A Constable Jarvis barked.
"A missing boy. My, I mean our son. Louis Perelman..." That surname was always a problem, especially on a poor line.
"Pearlman?"
"No. Per.. el.. man."
“Got it. Let's have a description..."
She'd forgotten the boy's height, for he grew every week. Forgotten most things, as if he'd been gone for years, except how she'd cut his hair and he'd hated it.
A dying wasp slid off one of the Venetian blind’s slats and spun in slow motion on the sill. Suddenly, she was distracted. Not by Frau Zeller fiddling around her plot, nor little Claire Smith wobbling around on her new bike. No. This was a tallish lad, his green shirt bagging out over his trousers as he toiled up the slope towards the house.
"Louis!" Jacquie set down her phone, then ran to meet him, clutching his blazer. But he turned his face towards number 9, where the widow Susan Linklater had emerged with a watering can. "What was this doing down the road?" She waved his blazer at him when all she wanted was to give a hug of relief. "Sixty pounds' worth of hard-earned money."
That wasn't the issue, however she knew he wouldn’t make things easy. Their pale child, uncannily similar to his real father at that age. “The least you can say is sorry." Her voice raised a notch as she followed him up the path and into the house, aware of Mrs Linklater's continued interest. She was also aware of a strange smell coming from his clothes. "I had to phone the police, you know."
“What?” He spun round and snatched the blazer from her. A glint of steel in those normally calm, brown eyes. "You mad, fucking cow. Thanks a bunch."
He dug in the pockets. "Where's the key?"
"What key?"
"My key."
"I don't know what you mean..."
"Fuck you."
With that he threw his things to the floor, took the stairs three at a time and crashed his bedroom door shut.
She stared up through the banisters, her heart bumping beneath her dress. She saw the LOUIS’ ROOM plaque which she'd made for him on an O.U. Early Learning course. Their stranger, but changed by whom? By what?
Outside, Dave stirred himself. He'd been right, of course. The boy had come back. A fresh wave of resentment hit her as the he gathered up his things and collapsed just the one sun lounger leaving her to do hers, plus the meal, plus anything else that wasn't connected to his career at the Mount Vernon Institute of Higher Education.
Meanwhile, anger continued from above. The boy was hunting for his missing key. Each sound like some encroaching earthquake, reaching the very foundations of their luxury home. Shaking the already flimsy faux cherry wood banisters, widening the settlement cracks, snaking into every room corner and around every window. Forcing open the thin skin of their lives in Meadow Hill, until the chasm below faced her like the pit of Tartarus.
9
"Talk to him, can't you?" Jacquie stood by Dave's shoulder as he played through that same Finzi piece on the electric Yamaha he'd bought with a recent tax rebate. She noticed dandruff; how the back of his neck needed a shave. The way his long, white fingers raked over the keyboard.
"You’ve a short memory." He stopped to pencil a few marks on the grass-stained score.
"That was six years ago. My God, you don't let anything go, do you?"
"Six or sixty. I don't care. He's your son, remember?"
"That's unfair."
But Dave turned the page and continued playing. His mouth a grim line as if reliving Louis' seventh birthday treat when the three of them had rounded off the afternoon with a visit to Burger King in Swindon. She'd been a Health Centre Practice Manager there, and he'd just been promoted to Director of Music at Chertstone F. E. College near Coventry.
Instead of eating his beef burger in the normal way, Louis had separated the meaty disc from its sesame bun and pulled it apart. He’d then transferred the more bloody morsels from the middle to Dave's plate.
"That’s what Prickly looked like,” he’d said. “So watch out..."
"Prickly? Watch out? Excuse me, son. Would you like to explain?"
"I'm not your son, and anyhow that hedgehog's dead. I did it."
Jacquie had shivered.
"You did what?"
"Stupid thing kept staring at me with its weird eyes. Look." He’d then dug in his pocket and produced a ball of kitchen paper. "Cute, isn't it?" As his chubby fingers had unravelled layer after layer until a tiny, shrivelled relic fell onto the table.
"What's that then?" Jacquie said, still cold.
"Its nose. And I'll do the same to you two if you don't leave me alone..."
*
So they did. Dave especially, and their lives resumed its ordered routine. However, more tense, gloomy like the penumbra just before the end of a tunnel. Except that sometimes Jacquie could foresee no light at all. Oh yes, they'd both walked on eggshells, buying Louis the best of what their combined incomes could afford. The Prep school, a new violin (instead of a perpetually borrowed one,) which was the one thing that brought a smile on his face and tranquillity to those eyes whose sudden hardening caused seismic rumblings to her heart followed by yet another Milky Bar for his pocket. A new dictionary and the latest Action Man by the time he was eight. All solitary occupations.
School friends didn't materialise. There was neither a boys' tea to rush home for, no cinema trip to organise. It was as if he floated on a plane above the world, not needing anyone's interest. Let alone anyone's love.
*
The ochre lawn reared up beyond the French windows as if one day it might gather its strength and fold right over like a huge, solid tsunami engulfing the whole house. Over the frill of fence and the tip of the Zeller's roof, Jacquie saw a vapour trail bisecting the sky then disintegrate. Just like her, she thought, aware of the brooding silence upstairs.
Then, with a bang, Dave secured the Yamaha's lid, and walked out.
10
Two o'clock, Sunday 4th July, and the kind of cloudless day which made Rita think of Walton-on-Sea all over again, like a kind of torture - now you see it, now you don't. Yet, faced with the minute-by-minute existence in Wort Passage, this rose-coloured recollection kept her sane. As did the Single Mums' Club which convened every Sunday afternoon in the church hall for tea and friendly discussions. She'd also put her name down for a computer class starting at the Comprehensive in September, and booked Freddie into the Scrub Lane Nursery
All part of her job-hunting plan.
But it was Jez who was keeping her awake at night, not the Ishmael's constant walkabouts and toilet chain-pulling. His attitude to everything had changed for the worst, and although his latest school report showed good grades in art and geography, it was home which painted a truer picture.
He’d not once used his little knives Frank had bought him on holiday to make more carvings, nor helped with chores like he used to. Instead, he'd shaved the sides of his head again, even closer to his skull, leaving a spine of spiky, red hair, and while she cleared the table after dinner, it was his trainers he was lacing up when she'd already buffed up his black shoes for Sunday School.
"You can't wear those," she clipped the back of his head as she passed, and he fixed her with such an ugly look that she nearly dropped the plates on the floor.
"An' you just let one out, ye dirty cow."
Rita had learnt not to rise to the bait - it only led to tears - usually hers, in private afterwards. Rather she focused on how long this lacing-up was actually taking. All fingers and thumbs as if he was a toddler all over again, and when Jip came over and got too close, Jez shoved him away.
"Pester 'er instead."
The dog cowered under the kitchen table and only began to wag his tail when Kayleigh came in with her doll's pram.
"What ye starin' at, dumbo?" he snapped.
She then imitated him, whereupon Jez gathered up saliva in his cheeks then spat at her before Rita could intervene.
"Right, my son. That's enough!"
She grabbed him by the shoulders but he pummelled away at her breasts, forcing her to let go. But not before she'd noticed his eyes. Their usual blue was eclipsed by black, and glared at her, full of hatred. She also saw how he shook from top to toe.
"What the hell are you getting into round here?" Rita demanded, keeping Kayleigh at a safe distance. "You're secretive, rude, and sometimes I wonder if you've been in school at all by the state of your clothes when you come home. When you come home, that is." She added, helping her daughter buckle her sandals.
"None o' yer fuckin' business." That glare still in place. Fists ready for a fight. "An' I do go to fuckin' school, OK? Ask old Jerry. 'Ell tell ye."
"Your headmaster's name is Mr Jerome Morris, so show some respect to him, even if you can't show it to me. Now," she held the door open, "You've five minutes to get to Sunday School, and you'd better make out to Mr Molloy that your proper shoes are being repaired. And you're to be back here by four."
Jez stalled, his neck suddenly flushing above his shirt collar.
"I'm bird watchin' after. OK?"
Kayleigh tittered but Rita looked puzzled.
"Bird watching? You've never been interested in that. And on your own?"
"Nope. Wiv Pete Brown. An' next week, we're goin' swimmin'."