Case Histories - Страница 44

When he got home Jackson heated up something tasteless in the microwave. It was only nine o'clock but he was dog tired. There was only one message on his answering machine; it was from Binky. He'd meant to swing by her house to check on her, but now he didn't think he had the energy. He played the message. "Mr. Brodie, Mr. Brodie, I really need to see you. It's urgent," and then nothing, not even good-bye. He phoned her back but there was no answer. The second he replaced the receiver the phone rang and he snatched it up.

It was Amelia. A hysterical Amelia. Again.

"Who's dead now, Amelia?" he asked when she paused for breath. "Because if it's anything smaller than a large horse I'd appreciate it if you took care of it yourself." Unfortunately, this response had the effect of making her twice as hysterical. Jackson cut her off, counted to ten, and then hit the "caller redial" button and watched as Binky Rain's number came up. He had a bad feeling. (Did he ever have good ones?) "What is it?" he said when Amelia

answered, and she managed to calm herself long enough to say, "She's dead. The old witch is dead."

It was one in the morning when Jackson got home. He felt like he'd gone beyond sleep into some other place, a gray, foggy place where all his energy was being used to keep his automatic nervous system ricking over and the rest of his brain and body had shut down long ago. He actually went up the stairs on his hands and knees. His bed hadn't been made since the night he'd spent with Shirley Morrison. He wasn't sure whether he'd actually slept since that night. She'd been wearing that Celtic ring on her wedding finger. It was his own fault for not asking. "Are you married?" – it would have been a straightforward enough question. Would she have lied? Probably. The woman who loved babies who couldn't have any of her own, is that why she'd slept with him, to get pregnant? God forbid. Did her husband know? The woman who loved babies who'd lost touch with the one baby above all others that she was supposed to look after. Tanya. Something scratched at the edge of his memory, but he was so tired he could hardly remember his own name.

He opened a window. There was no air in the bedroom. Heavy weather. If a thunderstorm didn't break the heat soon, people would start to go mad. The weather had broken after Olivia disappeared. Amelia reported that Sylvia had said it was "God crying for his little lost lamb." Amelia had been behaving even more oddly than usual, blethering about Olivia even though it was Binky's body she had found. Blethering. That was one of his father's words. It was nearly a year now since the old man had died. Lonely and alone in his hospital bed. He was seventy-five and had everything possible, silicosis, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver. Jackson didn't want to become the man his father had been.

What had Binky wanted to tell him? He was never going to find out now, was he? He thought of Binky's small featherweight body lying in the remains of her orchard, the long grass damp with dew, although not the grass beneath her body, which had remained as dry as her old bones. "She's been lying here for hours," the pathologist said, and Jackson felt his heart lurch. He had driven by her house. Maybe he could have helped her. He should have broken in, he should have climbed the wall. He should have helped her.

He was about to close the curtains when something caught his eye. Walking along the wall on the other side of the lane, weaving its way in and out of the hollyhocks that grew like weeds. A black cat. If Binky Rain were reincarnated, would she come back as a cat? A black one? How many black cats were there in Cambridge? Hundreds. Jackson opened the window wider and leaned out and – and truly he couldn't believe he was doing this – softly shouted, "Nigger?" into the warm night air.

The cat stopped in its tracks and looked around. Jackson ran down the stairs and out of the house and then slowed himself down to a cartoon kind of tiptoe so that he wouldn't frighten the animal. "Nigger?" he whispered again, and the cat meowed and jumped off the wall. Jackson picked it up and felt its skinny weight in his arms. He experienced an odd sense of comradeship with the bedraggled animal and said, "It's okay, old boy, do you want to come in my house?" He didn't have any cat food in the house – he didn't have any food in the house – but he had some milk. He was surprised by an unexpected surge of affection for the cat. Of course, it probably wasn't Nigger (and, dear God, that name would have to be changed by whoever took this cat on). The cat would probably have responded to anything, but the coincidence seemed too much for Jackson in his exhausted state. He turned to go back into the house. And the house exploded. Just like that.

What was it Hank Williams had sung? Something about never getting out of this world alive?

Chapter 18. Amelia

Amelia was the only one who had seen that there were more of them. Julia was too busy flirting – Mr. Brodie this, Mr. Brodie that, and Jackson was too busy looking at Julia's breasts. Of course, it was difficult for a man not to look at Julia's breasts when they were on display like that. She had actually licked her lips when she'd suggested swimming naked to him! They had swum in the river when theywere children, even though Rosemary always told them not to. Julia was the best swimmer out of the three of them. The four of them. Could Olivia swim? Amelia thought she could see Olivia's little frog body, in a blue shirred swimming costume, moving through the water, but she didn't know whether it was a real mem-ory or not. Sometimes Amelia felt as if she had spent her whole life waiting for Olivia to come back, while Sylvia was talking to God andJulia was fucking. And she felt so unbearably sad when she thought of all the things Olivia had never done, never ridden a bike or climbed a tree or read a book on her own, she'd never been to school, or a theater or a concert. Never listened to Mozart or fallen in love. She had never even written her own name. Olivia would have lived her life; Amelia had merely endured hers. You're looking at my tits, Mr. Brodie. Julia was such a tart sometimes. Amelia could remember Victor once, hauling a teenage Julia back into the house when she was trying to sneak out to see some boy and yelling at her that she looked like "a common tart." (How many men had Julia slept with? Too many to keep count of undoubtedly.) Victor made her scrub her makeup off with a nailbrush. Sometimes he ignored them for days, only coming out of his study for meals. Other times he was on their case continually like some kind of religious patriarch.

After Rosemary died Victor employed a woman to cook and clean every day. She was called Mrs. Gordon and no one ever knew her first name. It was typical of Victor to employ someone who didn't like children and was a terrible cook. Sometimes Mrs. Gordon would make them the same tea every day for days on end – burned sausages, baked beans, and watery boiled potatoes were a particular favorite with her. Victor never seemed to notice. "Food is just fuel," he used to say. "It doesn't matter what it is." What an appalling childhood they'd had.

And really Jackson had been the last person she had wanted to see. Why was he sitting on the riverbank? Why him of all people? It wasn't fair. (Nothing was fair.) The gods were taunting her with him. She hadn't wanted to go to Grantchester, not at all, it was Julia who had persuaded her to go punting on the river, coaxing her as if she were a frail invalid or an agoraphobic. "Come on, Milly, you can't sit moping in front of the television all day." She wasn't moping. She was depressed, for God's sake. And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch Dogs with Jobs on the National Geographic Channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt like it because nobody cared about her. In fact, she could sit there all day, from Barney and Friends to Porn Babes Laid Bare, with hours of the Landscape Channel in between, and eat the contents of an entire biscuit factory until she was an obese, earthbound balloon whose dead and bloated body would have to be hydraulically lifted from the house by a fire crew because nobody cared. "I care, Milly." Yeah, right, as the slaters would say.

If Julia cared so much she wouldn't flirt with Jackson in front of her. She imagined them in the water together, Julia swimming like an otter around Jackson 's naked body, her red lips closing around his – no! Don't think that, don't think that, don't think that.

One evening Amelia found the God Channel between Discov-eryHealth and the Fashion Channel and discovered that there was a program called A Word from God that went on at midnight and she had actually watched it! To see if God had anything to say to her. But he didn't. Obviously.

Milly, do you want honey on your scones? And now she was talking about Rupert Brooke being naked. Couldn't she just shut up about naked people? Because actually it was quite nice being here, sitting in a deck chair in the orchard, soaking in the warmth of summer – why couldn't she be here on her own with Jackson, without Julia, why couldn't he be pouring her tea and buttering her scones, why did Julia have to be here with her breasts almost popping out of her bra when she leaned over him, drooling honey onto his scones.

And it was such a pretty bra, all white and lacy. Why had Amelia never had underwear like that? It wasn't fair.

She had made an utter fool of herself the other night ("Are you married, Mr. Brodie?"), like some ruined girl in a sentimental Victorian novel. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he thought she was delusional. (Was she?) She was so embarrassed that she couldn't look at him. Thank goodness she was wearing sun-glasses and a hat. (Did they make her look even the slightest bit mysterious and enigmatic?) And his lovely face was all beaten up (because, of course, she had looked at him), and she would have liked to comfort him, to take his face and hold it between her own breasts (which were just as big as Julia's, even if they didn't occupy the same horizontal plane). But that was never going to happen, was it?