Driftnet (10 page)

Now her
attention was directed towards his father who had on his special
‘attractive woman’ face. Jonathan took a slug of the vodka
relishing the blast as it slid down. Then he put down the glass and
unzipped his jeans and took out his thing. It lay there flopped to
one side, pale and blue veined against the denim. He reached down
and touched it with the cold glass and it jumped away from him in
annoyance. Outside the girl was standing up now, her face turned
towards the house, the light green gauze material of her dress
folding about her breasts. He stared at her, imagining what her
tits would look like under that dress, while he rubbed the cold
glass up and down his prick.

It was always
better to wait until his parents were asleep, before he logged on.
Usually he had to put up with Morag coming home and telling him
things she had or hadn’t done that night, but she was in already.
She’d come home about midnight and gone straight to her room, so he
didn’t have to suffer a blow by blow account of her night’s
exploits. After that he usually had to sit through all the snorting
and panting from his parents’ room. Ever since his father had been
offered the candidacy he’d been poking away merrily. Jonathan
wondered how his mother put up with the smarmy bastard. At least he
wouldn’t have to sit through that noise tonight. His parents had
been at it earlier. He’d heard them when he came up to his
room.

Now the house
was asleep, the only hum of life coming from the pale blue computer
screen in the corner.

Jonathan’s
first thought was to send Mark an email. Something that would make
him laugh, something about his parents having it off before the
dinner party. Mark usually checked his emails when he came in,
however late it was.

Jonathan
clicked on the mail icon and waited.

There was
always an iffy moment when the buzz and whine of the modem
connecting shattered the quiet and Jonathan would hold his breath,
waiting for the sound of his father’s step on the landing. But
tonight he was well out of it. Jonathan waited till the whine
finished, then clicked on the in-basket.

There were two
emails waiting for him.

When Jonathan
first realised that his father was a wanker it had come as a shock.
When he was small Edward hadn’t been around much. His mother always
said he was working. And when he did come home, he was tired. So
Morag and he went to their mother for what they needed, or more
often to Amy, who had worked in the house for as long as Jonathan
could remember. Amy was a pal but she had strict ideas of right and
wrong. Drinking and smoking and sex ‘at his age’ were wrong, and
Jonathan had never built up enough courage to ask her when they
became right. When he was small, he stayed with Amy while his
mother was ‘out’. Where ‘out’ was, Jonathan never knew, but his
mother always smelled nice when she went there. It wasn’t work, he
knew that, but when she came home she was ‘exhausted’ and would
collapse on the sofa and ask him to bring her the drink she’d
taught him to make. One thing he did know was that his family was
respectable, well off, and Tory. They didn’t like blacks, browns
(except tans gained on foreign holidays), yellows or lefties. They
thought you should stand on your own two feet (even if you only had
one), and that a move to London was going up in the world.

When Jonathan
was about ten he’d been brought home by a friend’s mother earlier
than expected. The car dropped him at the big gate and when he saw
his father’s car sitting outside the house, he suddenly didn’t want
to go in and be questioned (they called it having a conversation),
so he’d decided to go and check out his SSTD (special secret tree
den) before he went in the kitchen to look for Amy. He’d slipped
across the front lawn and round the side of the house into the
orchard, then ran through the thickness of apple blossom, darting
this way and that as if he was being followed and slid through the
door in the garden wall, with one last glance to convince himself
that the enemy hadn’t seen his escape. Already he could hear the
sound of the river and the trees were crowding in on him with
rustling voices. Jonathan loved the wood. It wasn’t like the front
of the house, with its flowering rhododendrons dotting the anorexic
lawn. Here things grew just the way they wanted. Big and bold,
heavy and sweet. Jonathan could smell them growing, especially when
he lay down in his den, his face close to the earth.

He had walked
quickly, anxious to get to his den. The ancient pine tree that
marked its location was twisted with years, its trunk split in two,
to form younger branches. On three sides of it huddled gorse and
juniper and patches of thorny brambles. On the fourth side, the
path opened up into a patch of grass and sunlight. Jonathan circled
the tree until he was out of sight of the path, then threw himself
on the ground and slid along on his belly, avoiding the sharp
thorns of the brambles. The ground began to dip below him and he
rolled down into his den with a grunt of delight.

He was lying
there looking up at the thick canopy of foliage that was his roof,
when he heard voices. He sat up a little, enough to peer out
through his special peephole at the couple who walked towards him
along the path. The woman was young and pretty. She wore a bright
blue dress lit up by the sunlight that dropped down through the
rustling leaves. She laughed, a tinkling sound that made the hairs
on the back of Jonathan’s neck stand up.

Then he heard
the man’s voice. It was his father.

Jonathan
pressed himself to the ground, his heart thumping so hard that he
knew they must hear it. But they had no ears or eyes for anything
but themselves. When the talking and laughing stopped, there was
something in the sudden silence that made Jonathan squirm against
the earth floor, twisting round to get a better view. The woman was
backed against the tree so that he could only see a line of leg on
either side. There was a frantic scrabbling sound and then one of
her legs was up and round his father and the other was in mid air,
swaying wildly with each pumping motion. Now all he could hear was
the squeak and moan of her voice.

Pump pump pump
pump and then her shoe began to loosen, swinging on her toes for a
moment before it dropped onto the grass.

When Jonathan
got back to the house, after waiting a full half hour by the watch
his father had given him for Christmas, Edward was at the front
door, busy telling Fiona that he had arrived home minutes before
her.

From then on
Jonathan knew everything his father said was a lie.

The first email
was from Mark. He must have sent it before he went out because it
said, Yo! I’ve just put on the pulling juice and I’m off. Think of
Shona Seaton’s tits and you’ll know where I am.

Jonathan tried
to think a reply that would make Mark laugh. But anything he said
would be made up, and talking about your parents having sex rather
than you having sex was sad. He wondered why Mark bothered emailing
him. At school Mark was usually too busy being cool to be seen with
Jonathan.

Jonathan went
for the vodka and this time drank it straight from the bottle. It
was having the desired effect. He supposed he could tell Mark about
the cold glass wank and the tits in the conservatory. It would be
better than nothing. But he didn’t click on reply, instead he had
another drink, knowing he was putting off the moment when he would
open the second email.

It had been
going on for three months now. The first message had come
apparently by accident. Jonathan had spent a week setting up his
own homepage, putting in some of his likes and dislikes. It had
been meant for a competition in a PC magazine but after he designed
it he suddenly didn’t want to enter it after all. After it was
uploaded, his homepage had brought half a dozen replies. Four liked
the same football team as Jonathan and two told him to fuck off and
get a life by supporting another one. Then things went quiet until
the first message from Simon.

Jonathan had
spent a lot of time talking to Simon after that first message. It
had been exam time and his father had been moaning on about Law
again and what grades he’d have to get if he was going to do Law at
Edinburgh or fucking Cambridge. Who wanted to go to fucking
Cambridge? Who wanted to do fucking Law anyway, Jonathan said and
Simon had agreed. You should study what you really like, Simon
said, and if that was Art then that was what you should do. Simon
even sent him information on various Art colleges and web page
addresses where he could find out more.

Jonathan never
really thought about Simon’s age. Electronically, age didn’t
matter. It was obvious they thought alike. One night he’d moaned on
about girls. He’d been pissed off because Catriona Cummings had
told him to fuck off, after he’d peed himself for a week worrying
about asking her out. Simon had talked to him for a long time after
that and a lot of what he said about girls was true.

Jonathan laid
down the bottle and tried to open the drawer of his desk. The
handle was a little hazy and kept moving when he reached for it but
eventually he caught it and pulled it open. He had put the first
pictures he’d printed out in there under his school books. They
were inside an old Algebra jotter. His mother would never look in
that.

The ink
cartridge on the printer had been running out and the printouts
were faded in parts but you could still see what they were doing in
them. Jonathan riffled through until he found his favourite.

He scrabbled
about with his zipper but either the drink, the bad orange or the
earlier pull had rendered his thing unconscious so he had another
drink instead.

When the second
lot of printouts arrived he’d looked at them, then torn them up.
The third set he’d looked at for a lot longer, then taken them and
hidden them at the SSTD. He hadn’t been down there for over a week
now and he had pretty much made up his mind to burn them.

Jonathan
stuffed the pictures in the drawer and looked at the screen. The
unread email was big which probably meant it contained
graphics.

Jonathan
finished the vodka, clicked on the screen and opened it.

Chapter
12

The envelope
arrived by the first post.

Rhona was
already awake. The rattle of the letter box made her heart jump
into her throat. She got up and hurried through to the hall. A
large brown envelope lay on the carpet. She picked it up, carried
it through to the kitchen and laid it on the table. Then she put
the kettle on. She had waited seventeen years, she could wait a few
minutes more.

Her parents had
never known about their grandson. Right to the end Rhona kept it
from them. After her dad retired they had moved out of the city,
back to the west coast where he was born. Rhona had spent her
childhood holidays there, running along the shore, climbing the
rocks he told her were the oldest in the world. As a student, Rhona
had visited often, stealing long weekends from her studies, or a
week in the summer. She loved the house with its white face staring
out to sea. Being there was like being a child again, going
fishing, walking the shoreline. She had taken Edward with her once.
He had sat in the kitchen nursing a dram, talking to her parents.
She had loved him then. But when they left, chugging along the road
in their rebuilt MG, he had told her how he didn’t like the wilds,
that he was a city boy. She never took him back. When she found out
she was pregnant and they decided to have the baby adopted, she
couldn’t face her parents and she made excuses when her mother
phoned; pressure of work, she would see them in the summer when it
was all over.

The baby would
have been five when her mother died. Rhona started going home at
weekends to see her father and each time she returned there was
less of him. Once or twice he came to Glasgow to stay with her and
they went back to the Gallery, but now the bottom level was all he
could manage. As they retraced their familiar routes, she watched
his face light up and she knew she had cheated him of something
very precious.

Edward and she
lasted six months after the adoption. That was all they could stand
of one another. Love and hate. Hate and love. She hated him for
persuading her (did he?), and hated herself even more for being
persuaded. And Edward? He just hated the messiness of it all.

The address on
the envelope was in Edward’s handwriting. This was one job he
hadn’t got his secretary to do. Rhona stared at it for a long time,
then carefully slit it open, her mouth dry.

She pulled out
two sheets of paper. The top one was a copy of a birth certificate.
Her hands shook as she read the words. Liam James MacLeod, born
2.35am Monday 2nd January, 1985. She had never seen the birth
certificate before. Edward had registered the birth. No use
brooding, he’d said, it’ll be easier if I do it and then you can
put it all out of your mind. We have to get on with our lives.
Rhona touched the writing. In the mother’s box was her own name,
Rhona Elizabeth MacLeod. The father’s box was empty. Edward had
said it was better that way.

‘Then I can’t
come back when he’s a millionaire and ask him for money,’ he’d said
with a laugh.

The second
sheet was a short sharp note.

‘I enclose a
copy of the birth certificate. As you know, a birth parent has no
statutory rights to trace events or gain access to Court papers.
However I have found out that the adoption was processed a month
after the birth. Contact was then made with the registrars and an
adoptive certificate was issued in the name of Hope. A friend of
mine in the police force tells me that the dead rent boy has been
identified as a James Fenton from Manchester.’

Of course there
was no connection between the two boys. Edward was right. She had
been imagining things. Liam was out there, alive and happy. Edward
had sorted everything out. Tidied up her life for her. Again.