Rory groaned. ‘No, Mum,’ he said, ‘I need it now. I need to get my application off, like, yesterday. We’ve booked our flights. We’re going in two months.’
‘Going?’ she said absent-mindedly.
‘Spain. I told you. Me and Kayleigh. Going to Spain, for a month.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’ She tutted loudly.
‘Why are you tutting?’
‘Oh –’ she wrapped her hand around the back of her neck – ‘I just don’t get it. I don’t understand what the attraction is.
Going away
.’ She tutted again and laughed under her breath, as if
going away
was some kind of oddball pastime.
‘Everyone does it, you know? It’s perfectly normal.’
‘Oh, I
know
that, silly. Of course it’s normal. It’s just, when you’ve got this –’ she gestured around her – ‘and that –’ she gestured at the window – ‘and all the people you love, why would you want to go anywhere else? All that faffing, and packing and unpacking and sleeping in a strange bed and not seeing the people you know when you go to the shops …’ She shuddered delicately. Then she looked
around the room again and said, ‘Well, darling, you’re welcome to see what you can unearth in here, but frankly, I’d rather wait for Daddy. He’s much more organised than me. And you know, it might not even be in here. It could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. And I really need to get back to the little ones now. We’re making pasta necklaces.’
Her body language was all directed away from Rory and away from this hellhole of a room. He was about to move out of the way to let her past when he felt something rise up through him, a question he’d never realised he wanted to ask before, but one that suddenly felt like the most important question in the world.
‘Why do you never want to talk about the past?’
‘What?’
‘You. You never talk about the past. Or the future.’
‘I live in the moment, darling, didn’t you know that? It’s the secret of true happiness.’
‘Yes, but …’ He paused. ‘But you’re not happy.’
‘Not happy?’ She blinked at him with her big owlish eyes.
‘No. Not happy.’
‘What on earth are you talking about, darling? I’m deliriously happy.’
‘How can you be?’ he asked, a hint of anger in his voice. ‘How can you be happy?’
‘Because of everything I have. All my blessings.’
‘But …
Rhys
.’
Her smile froze.
‘He was your baby. Your special one. You didn’t cry at his funeral. You don’t visit his grave. You don’t even have
any photos of him on display. It’s like … it’s like he never existed.’
She narrowed her eyes at him and growled. ‘This is
her
, isn’t it? This is that girl.’
‘Kayleigh?’
‘Yes, her. She’s changed you.’
‘Yes, she has. For the better.’
‘No, I mean, she’s made you hard, like her.’
‘She’s not hard.’
‘Oh, darling, sweetie-boy, of course she is.’
‘What, because of the way she looks, you mean?’
‘Well, partly, yes, but it’s her aura, too. She has no soft edges. None at all. Vicky noticed that, too …’
‘Urgh,’ said Rory. ‘Vicky, Vicky, bloody fucking
Vicky
.’
‘Darling, horrible language. I thought we were having a civilised chat. Don’t be base. I assume that’s more of
her
influence.’
‘No. I’ve always used bad language. Just not in front of you. Because I had too much respect for you.’
‘And now?’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t respect someone who doesn’t respect the memory of her dead child.’
She looked at him then, a terrible haunted look, a look that Rory would never forget as long as he lived and said, ‘Don’t you
ever
talk to me like that again.’
For a moment he thought she was going to slap him. But she didn’t. Instead she shoved him roughly out of her way and left the room.
Rory’s dad found the birth certificate two days later. It was in a carrier bag full of disposable bendy straws in fluorescent colours that Lorelei had bought in bulk from Poundstretcher. The receipt in the bag was from 1989. ‘Oh!’ she’d exclaimed with pleasure, taking the straws from her husband. ‘I was wondering what had happened to those. The little ones will
love
them.’
All four birth certificates were together, in a pale-blue folder marked ‘Kiddies’. There were other things in the folder: medical papers about the first few days of Rhys’s life, GP certificates, notes on vaccinations and four little plastic wrist bracelets with the words ‘Baby Bird’ on them, which struck Rory as rather charming.
His father suggested they meet in the pub. Said he could do with a change of scenery. Rory had never been to a pub with his dad before. He’d never even considered the possibility.
‘Well,’ said Colin, handing him the certificate, ‘I’m really, really happy you’re doing this. It’s been a long time coming. I feel like we’ve all been set in aspic these past years, pickling ourselves in grief. And Mum would never let us go away when you were all young, so, good on you.’
‘Remember Greece?’ said Rory, picking up his pint.
His dad laughed drily and rolled his eyes. ‘How could I forget? It took me years to get up the nerve to suggest it in the first place. Then those bloody burglars …’
‘Mum hates her,’ he replied.
‘Who? Kayleigh?’
Rory nodded.
‘Oh, I doubt it,’ Colin said dismissively. ‘I doubt it very
much. She just resents you spreading your wings, finding charms outside her tightly controlled little world. And she finds it easier to blame that on an outsider.’
Rory nodded again. He was probably right. ‘Do
you
like her?’ he said.
‘I barely know her.’
‘No. I know. But from what you’ve seen?’
His father narrowed his eyes at him, and took off his glasses. ‘I think,’ he began, rubbing the lenses of his glasses against the hem of his shirt, ‘that she is just what you need. Right now. But …’
‘What?’
‘But maybe not what you need for the rest of your life?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s a drama queen. And drama queens are difficult to live with. They don’t want a quiet life. You’ll be left gasping in her wake …’
Rory absorbed this pronouncement. There was something thrilling about the concept of gasping in someone’s wake – it sounded better than being ‘set in aspic’ or ‘pickled in grief’ at least.
‘What was Mum like, when you met her?’
Colin replaced his glasses, picked up his glass of wine and smiled. ‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘Joyful. Glamorous. She looked like a model, hair down to her waist. Always smiling. Hundreds of friends. Always dancing, turning somersaults, doing cartwheels, hair everywhere, laughing, vibrant. It was like going out with … with
summer
.’
Rory had stopped breathing. His father’s face was
candescent. He’d never seen him look like that before.
‘And then,’ Colin continued, ‘well, you know, babies, more babies – it takes the edge off a bit.’
‘She thinks she’s still happy, you know?’
‘I know.’
‘Even though Rhys is dead.’
His father sighed. ‘I know.’
‘What are we going to do about it?’
Colin looked at him curiously. ‘I have no idea. How the hell do you help someone who insists on believing that she’s happy?’ He blew out his cheeks and sighed again. ‘To be honest, to be totally and
entirely
honest –’ he paused, then looked Rory directly in the eye – ‘I’ve kind of given up.’
He glanced away then, quickly, but not too fast for Rory to see the look of guilt and regret that passed across his face.
Colin drove them both to the airport two months later. Lorelei had said she was far too busy to come. Rory hadn’t even wanted to know why. She’d hugged him hard the last time he’d seen her and told him to have an incredible time, that she loved him, that she’d miss him, that she couldn’t wait to hear all about his adventures. It had been a perfectly reasonable enactment of a mother-and-son farewell scenario. Any casual onlooker would have sighed and found it charming. But Rory had felt the distance in her body language, the need to be getting on with something else, to be elsewhere, otherwise occupied.
Hurry up
, said her body language,
hurry up and go
.
Kayleigh and Colin were sitting in the front of the car chatting about Andalusia, Kayleigh flicking through her
Rough Guide
, pointing things out to him. Her hair was short now, and white-blonde. She looked like a beautiful little boy. From behind, it occurred to him in an uncomfortable wave of realisation, she looked like Rhys.
He turned his gaze to the window and watched the countryside pass him by. It was high summer. The world was vivid green, with wide stripes of yellow where the rape fields grew. Everything was so familiar to him: the soft butterscotch of the Gloucestershire bricks, the evocative names of the villages, the peaty smell of the air, the solid feel of British tarmac beneath the tyres of his father’s car. It was all he’d ever known.
‘Oh, by the way –’ his father turned to address him – ‘don’t forget to call on your mother’s birthday, will you? And Beth’s, too, if you can remember.’
‘Oh, God, yeah, when is that?’
‘July the nineteenth. She’ll be twenty-three.’
‘Poor Beth,’ Rory sighed, under his breath.
‘What’s that?’ said Kayleigh, picking up on the tiny, rising bubble of family discord.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. ‘Just feel sorry for her. Stuck at home on her own for her birthday. Seems a bit of a pitiful way to turn twenty-three, that’s all.’
‘I’m going to be twenty-three next year,’ said Kayleigh, ‘and I’ve been living away from home since I was sixteen. She needs to cut the apron strings. You know what I mean?’
‘And remember to give us a phone number. So we can let you know when Meg’s baby comes.’
‘I’m pretty sure there won’t be a phone there,’ said
Kayleigh. ‘I kind of think that’s supposed to be the idea. You know, a retreat.’
They were going to stay with a guy called Ken to whom Kayleigh had lost her virginity when she was seventeen and he was forty-nine. She’d met him at a festival in Limerick and stayed in touch with him. She referred to him, rather charmingly, as her ‘pen pal’. He now lived in a kind of informal commune in Andalusia with three girlfriends, some goats, some donkeys and half a dozen children. He sounded both hideous and mesmerising in equal measure. But he was giving them free board and lodgings in return for some light farming, building, decorating and childcare, and given that Rory had exactly £200 to last him the month, it was an offer he couldn’t reasonably refuse.
‘
Are you still in love with him?
’ he’d asked.
Kayleigh had thrown him a withering look and said, ‘
Are you mad, Rory Bird? You think I would take you across the world with me to stay with a man I’m in love with? What kind of a person do you think I am? I may be a lot of things, but a polygamist is not one of them
.’ Which was kind of reassuring to hear.
‘Well, then,’ said Colin, ‘be sure to get to a phone if you can around about the due date. Meg will be livid if you don’t get in touch somehow.’
‘Leave it with me, Colin,’ said Kayleigh, gently touching his arm. ‘I’ll make sure your son does all the right things. I promise you that.’
Colin turned and smiled at her and said, ‘Good girl.’
Rory still saw ghostly little Rhyses everywhere. He could barely remember Rhys as a teenager, but he vividly
remembered him at nine, freewheeling down this hill on his BMX. He remembered Rhys at six trying to keep up with him as they chased through those woods together looking for the wild pigs that someone at school had said they’d seen there. He saw Rhys sitting on the steps with him outside the chemist on the High Street with his chin on his hands, waiting for Mum and the girls to come out with bags of things that were of no interest to either of them. And he remembered Rhys sitting there, in the boot of the hatchback where he always wanted to sit, facing backwards, his legs stretched out and the dog in his lap.
And now Rory was going somewhere that Rhys had never been. He wondered if the ghosts would follow him there. And if they didn’t, he wondered if he would miss them.
Rhys’s room was just as it always had been.
The sheer volume of empty space before her almost took Meg’s breath away.
‘My God,’ she muttered, ‘she kept it. She kept it as it was.’
‘That’s freaky,’ said Molly. ‘Totally.’
‘It really is. I mean, how could she have controlled her impulses? It’s like, I don’t know, if she could stop herself hoarding in this room, why couldn’t she stop herself doing it in the others? If she could control part of herself, then why not the rest?’
The ancient floorboards creaked and complained beneath their feet. Rhys’s bed sat stripped bare in the far corner, his wardrobe was empty, his desk piled with just a few objects: an encyclopaedia, a pot of pens, some folders, deodorant in a rusting nineties-designed aerosol can. There was his stereo, a huge thing, designed for CDs and records, that had never heard of MP3s or iTunes. And posters on the walls. Dozens of
them. Pearl Jam. Nirvana. NWA. Alice in Chains. Courtney Love.
‘It’s, like, a museum of the nineties,’ said Molly.
Meg nodded and smiled. It was. Untouched, just clothes and bedding taken out. Everything else as it had been that day, when she’d put down that tray of food and kicked down the door. She ran her hand around the inside of the door and felt it there, the lock still hanging off the door by uprooted nails.
‘And is that where he, you know, did it?’ Molly nodded towards the buttress beams in the high ceiling.
‘Yeah,’ said Meg.
‘With rope?’
‘Yes. A very long piece of rope.’
‘Where’d he get it?’
‘What?’
‘The rope. Where did he get a very long piece of rope?’
‘Christ. I don’t know.’
‘What, like, the village rope shop or something?’
Meg threw her daughter a look of only half-formed outrage.
‘And how did he get it up there?’ She nodded again at the beams.
‘It was there,’ said Meg, the image coming to her, clear as the present moment. She pointed to a lower section of the beam. ‘He stood on a chair. That chair.’