A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (36 page)

Manson said, ‘But you don’t think you are, do you?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Cassie jumped up. ‘Today of all days, do you have to
quarrel?
Of course he’s right, she’s his daughter. Whatever we did with Prue, if we loved her too much or gave her too much, whatever it was that made her the way she is …’ her eyes suddenly filled—’the way she was, we’ve no right to do it with Eve. We’re only guardians. And very temporary guardians.’

Manson said bitterly, amazed at her vehemence, ‘Suddenly he knows all about children, is that it?’

Cassie turned on him. ‘He’s her
father
, for God’s sake. You’ve
had
your chance. We both have.’ She started to cry in real earnest.

Gavin said, ‘Cassandra, I’m sorry. I had to say it but I didn’t mean to make trouble.’

Manson said slowly, not quite alerted but disquieted somewhat,
‘Cassandra?’

Gavin said, defensive and aggressive, ‘Should I call her
Mother?’

‘Mrs. Manson would do.’

‘When you’re hospital visiting for a fortnight you get beyond that. But
you
wouldn’t know.’

‘And who
put
her in hospital?’

Cassie screamed, ‘Christ.’ She put her hands over her ears. ‘Stop it. Both of you, stop it. I don’t want to
hear
. We’re all guilty, we’re all to blame, and she’s
dead
. Now shut up, can’t you? We all helped to kill her and you fight about
names’
She collapsed into sobs and they both stared at her horrified, relieved and helpless.

Presently Gavin said to Manson, as if they were friends, ‘That’s good. That’s better. She needs to cry.’

F
OR MANSON
, total unreality took over. He ate, he slept, he lived at the flat. He even went to the office, like a ghost, an office now run by Rupert, attired in theatrical black, who had touched his arm, saying, ‘You poor bastard. Our lovely Prue,’ and thereafter left him alone. He expected to be left alone, because he did not exist. Sometimes he wondered if his life had ended with Prue’s, so detached did he feel. He thought of Sarah occasionally as a distant image of beauty, but it was Prue’s face that haunted him in dreams. Sometimes he woke crying for her, for himself, and the pillow was wet and he was alone. He worked in a vacuum and went home alone, to dream. Sometimes, so lost was he in his mind that he nearly stepped out in the path of a wildly blaring taxi. He had forgotten how to cross the road. He felt victimised, as if by loving people too much you lost them, and that this was a rule of life which, unfairly, had not been explained to him. But he hoped, and he lived on dreams, undefined. London looked unreal to him, as if seen through mist or frosted glass, and the people he met spoke remotely, from a long way off, and the responses he made came from another agency. At times he almost enjoyed it, this total dissociation from life. It was Cambridge again, it was youth. He was detached from the real world, where people made demands and suffered. But still he missed it; it had been his home for so long.

Living like this, it was a shock to find a letter from Monica. She knew nothing, she was writing to ask him a favour. Did
he know of anyone needing a secretary? Her marriage was over and she urgently needed a job. Gould he help? She didn’t want to be a nuisance but she was desperate. Manson read the letter twice, all his earlier premonitions about the marriage haunting him as if he had made this happen, had willed it and brought it about for his own ends, to put back the unforgiving clock.

C
ASSIE HAD
forgotten what a small baby was like. She was nervous at first handling Eve: even Gavin seemed more confident, having no expertise to forget. They were together a lot, inevitably, with the baby, and glancing from father to child she saw Sven and the child they might have had till she felt dizzy with the fusion of past and present. It was all in her mind, she told herself, but that did mot make it less real. The resemblance was more in essence than in feature, the generation gap huge, and yet there it was, the danger, the threat, the culmination of her life in all its delicious terror. She did not know if she wanted to run towards it or away from it. Everything that was functional in her life, the contact with Gavin, the caring for Eve, seemed to force her automatically into Prue’s role. She felt sometimes that she was being transfigured by events, by a force beyond her control. And they were inexorably allied, she and Gavin, by their love and their guilt; whereas Peter had chosen to grieve all alone. When they talked on the phone he was so remote that she marvelled they had ever been married.

Gavin came down most evenings, straight from college, but always caught the last train back. This was something they did not discuss. He did not touch her. Not once since Prue’s death, not a kiss on the cheek, not a hand on her shoulder. Even passing the baby to each other they did not make contact. But they loved her together, unself-consciously. And they ate and talked and watched television; they even began
to make jokes again. She did not know whether to be ashamed or relieved at the resilience of human nature, or indeed how much of it was due to Eve. But they were endlessly compatible, and she was grateful and amazed.

One night in December it was foggy and she was worried about his train yet did not know how to ask him to stay or even if she should. They hovered at the gate, one on each side of it, saying goodbye but not going.

‘Don’t stay,’ he said, ‘you’ll get cold.’

‘I’m all right.’ She smiled at him to be reassuring. Their faces were dim, the mist damp on their hair, in their mouths.

‘You’re fantastic with Eve,’ he said.

‘I love her.’

‘Yeah, so do I.’

I’m forty-eight and he’s twenty-two, she told herself. Those are facts. And it’s facts that matter, not feelings. We’re related by marriage. I must be out of my mind.

‘You’ll miss your train,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I must go.’ And he did not move. Then suddenly he leaned across the gate and kissed her hard on the mouth. ‘Cassandra.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he going to come back?’

‘I don’t know.’ This was the truth.

‘Do you want him to?’

‘I don’t know.’ This was also true.

‘I’d so much rather he didn’t.’

T
HEY MET
in the park. She had refused lunch, feeling that food would choke her; it was so long since they had eaten together that it seemed an unnatural act. Besides, the social ambiance of a restaurant was alien to her now, so enmeshed was she in domestic life. She realised now that this was what she had missed all these years, since the boys went to school. She marvelled that she had ever let them go away, to board; marvelled too that she had ever played with the idea of work, a career, of using her qualifications. She was obviously not cut out for it. Her academic brain was a red-herring, completely irrelevant. Emotionally she wanted only the home and a child, the only true creation for her. She thought she had not been so happy since Prue was born. It had been a wrench just to come up to town for this meeting; Marjorie was baby-sitting, gladly, but she envied and resented every second.

Manson said, after the usual greetings, ‘I’d like to see the baby.’

‘Well. You can any time.’

‘I don’t know. It feels awkward, visiting you while we’re … like this. And
he’s
always there.’

She didn’t answer. Perversely she thought, Why should I make things easy for him? And she was tired of speeches emphasising Gavin’s parental rights.

‘Monica wants to come back,’ he said, breaking a long silence.

‘Oh? But I thought—’

‘Yes. But her marriage has folded up. She needs a job.’

‘Oh dear. Poor Monica.’ A nice girl. She dimly remembered her kind, plain face. ‘That’s rather convenient though, isn’t it, from your point of view.’

‘Yes it is. I hate it to happen this way but since it has, well, I couldn’t be more relieved to have Monica back.’

She saw at once how good it would be for him: a healing touch of the past. She said hopefully, ‘And have you heard from Sarah?’

‘No. But I didn’t expect to.’ No emotion.

She watched the ducks on the pond, and the people feeding them. How simple to be a duck. Quack, dive, little forays below the surface, bread on the water, all that. But perhaps they had their problems too. Duck problems, unknown to man. She felt herself smiling and wanted to tell Gavin the joke. The realisation pulled her up short.

He was saying, ‘Cass, what are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shied away from decision. Decision was final, was endstopped, when life should be open.

‘I thought … I’d feel better but … she’s with me always, I can’t relate to anyone else, not yet …’ His voice petered out.

‘There’s plenty of time.’ She still loved him, she realised, but it was no longer a choice. Gavin was right, or else she was mad. You
could
love all over the place: it was not a question of choice.

He tried again. ‘Perhaps, by Christmas. When the boys come home. If … I feel like a human being again by then, I don’t know … I do love you, believe me.’

‘I believe you.’ She wanted him to be happy. She would have done anything to spare him the wretched isolation he was inevitably imposing on himself. But in a sense it was irrelevant, whether he came back or not. She loved him, he was her husband, she wanted him to be happy. But there
would always be Gavin and Eve. Whatever he decided, and she would not influence him, that much was fixed. Her life, full of richness and complexity. She realised now that the whole must be accepted, no matter how messy, how unorthodox, how impossible. It had to be attempted. What she had always believed and then crushed had emerged like green shoots, forcing their way through the frost-iron earth. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘I’ll always be there.’

* * *

In the taxi, on the way to college (for there was just enough time to catch him after his last lecture), she thought of herself for the first time in years. Herself and Eve and the person who called her Cassandra. Then she focused her mind on Peter, on Sven’s distant shadow, on Prue in happier days. They were all part of her life; there was no division. Whatever so-called decisions were made, there was no choice. She was open to everything; she had accepted. Arriving at the college she paid off the taxi and walked through the gates; students were pouring out of the building. She screwed up her eyes to pick out the one; in a jumble of bodies she suddenly saw Gavin emerging at the top of the steps, smiling broadly, hair tousled, scarf flying in the wind, his arm round the girl looking up at him—the image was seized, extended, and fixed, as in a frozen frame.

Jonathan Trigell

‘Creepy and involving… From the beginning, Trigell weaves a sense of drama and a disturbing feeling of inevitability’
Independent

‘Trigell brilliantly depicts the pressures of living with a terrible secret… written with a naive clarity which evokes the unfamiliar wonders of the outside world’
Guardian

‘A fine and moving debut novel… Harrowing at times, this compulsively readable novel is more optimistic than it sounds… a rare treat’
Independent

‘Eerie parallels to the Bulger case abound in this modern day immorality tale about the attempted rehabilitation of a child implicated in murder… delivered with a horrific sense of foreboding’
Arena

‘A shocker of a first novel… told with extraordinary restraint’
New York Times

‘Grim reading to be sure, but you turn the final page with real sympathy for a child-killer - which is a frankly amazing achievement’
FHM

‘A challenging novel of atrocity and redemption… [A] fast-paced, thought-provoking read, perhaps all the more significant for the questions it can’t answer’
Big Issue

‘The book bristles with issues of personal responsibility, social justice and the reformative value of prison life. It would give reading groups much to ponder over’
New Books Mag

Boy A
is a 2007 film directed by John Crowley, with screenplay with Mark O’Rowe. Starring Andrew Garfield and Peter Mullan, it won 4 BAFTA awards, including best actor for Andrew Garfield and best director for John Crowley. Available on DVD from all good retailers & online.

David Peace

‘British crime fiction’s most exciting new voice in decades’
GQ

‘Quite simply, this is the future of British crime fiction’
Time Out

‘The pace is relentless, the style staccato-plus and the morality bleak and forlorn… Peace’s voice is powerful and unique’
Guardian

‘Breathless, extravagant, ultra-violent’
Independent on Sunday

Red Riding Trilogy
is a 2009 film directed by Anand Tuckett and Julian Jarrold, starring Rebecca Hall and Brendan McCoy. Available on DVD from all good retailers & online.

Elfriede Jelinek

‘In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore’
Guardian

‘A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold’ Walter Abish

‘A brilliant, deadly book’ Elizabeth Young

‘Some may find Ms Jelinek’s ruthlessly unsentimental approach - not to mention her image of Vienna as a bleak city of porno shops, poor immigrants and loveless copulations - too much to take. Her picture of a passive woman who can gain control over her life only by becoming a victim is truly frightening. Less squeamish readers will extract a feminist message: in a society such as this, how else can a woman like Erika behave?’
New York Times Book Review

‘With formidable power, intelligence and skill she draws on the full arsenal of derision. Her dense writing is obsessive almost to the point of being unbearable. It hits you in the guts, yet is clinically precise’
Le Monde