Getting Home (16 page)

‘Yes,' the caller affirmed, sucking in an accusatory breath.

‘Has he been charged?'

‘Not this time.'

‘I'm most grateful.'

‘Yes.'

‘Is there damage?'

‘Damage? Damage, John?' the caller demanded of someone across the room. The answer was drowned. In the background his son was bellowing like a distressed bullock.

‘Some damage, yeah. A vehicle involved.'

‘He stole a car?'

‘Nah – vehicle was one of ours,' the caller confirmed. Then, without being asked, added, ‘We'll bring him over. Ten minutes.'

Ted and Allie slept in a super-king-size bed whose lavish latitude, covered in riotous rose chintz of an authentic nineteenth-century design, looked magnificent in photographs and suggested marital bliss of a high order. In reality it enabled the couple to sleep together with no fear of physical contact. Ted trekked around the bed to wake his wife. Gently, he put his hand on her shoulder. Violently, she reared up from her pillows and hit him.

‘Your fucking son,' she yelled, sitting up and grabbing the quilt around her. ‘That piece of shit. Why doesn't he just run under a truck?'

‘I didn't know you were awake,' he apologised, tasting blood from the inside of his lower lip.

‘Get out of here. Get out on the street. Stop them waking the fucking neighbourhood.'

He took cash from the safe in the dressing room and filled his wallet. A few minutes later he was fully dressed, and waiting at the roadside ready to begin damage limitation when the squad car appeared. Whispering, which induced the police officers to lower their voices in imitation, Ted got the party into the house. The neighbourhood, he calculated, was less likely to wake than Cherish and Chalice. Poor sleep patterns seemed to have been passed on in his genes.

Damon, now unconscious and heavy as a horse, was manhandled to the sofa in the family-size eat-in kitchen, and the officers assembled around the oak farmhouse table to begin the paperwork.

The charges were to be assault with a weapon, criminal damage, resisting arrest, using insulting language, possession of marijuana and damaging a police vehicle. ‘He followed a woman out of Filthy McNasty's bar in Helford.' The senior officer related the events with fatherly regret. ‘Asked her to come home with him and pulled a knife. Four guys from the bar saw it and piled in. Bar windows are out, he threw a table. Glass injuries, broken bones. They got the paramedics out, he attacked them. Terrible language. Tore the buttons off one of my officer's uniforms with his teeth. Parked his lunch in our car, just to finish things off nicely.'

‘I'm so sorry.' Ted wanted to crawl under the table and scream.

‘So're we. Can't take it off the road tonight, we're a car short already.'

No, he wanted to be a long way away, say up on Strankley Ridge with the rabbits and no representative of any other mammalian species, especially not
Homo supposedly-sapiens.

Among his minor weaknesses, Ted counted a tendency towards honesty. Devious went against the grain with him, but he would do what had to be done. He rubbed his eyes and nerved himself. The first time Damon had come home in a squad car, the arresting officers had patiently talked him through the routine. Now he was getting suave with it. ‘What can I do?' was the opening move. ‘Let me get an idea of the level of damage we're talking about here.'

He had the charges down to drunk and disorderly plus plain assault, and was about to explore the possibility that the bar owner would prefer restitution of a direct and personal nature to waiting on the deliberation of the Criminal Compensation Board when Allie appeared in the doorway. She was fully made up and wearing a pink silk kimono which ended above her knees. The famous lock of silky blonde hair fell over eyes now blue with innocence.

‘Oh dear. I am
so
, so sorry.' She perched on the sofa's edge to smooth her poor boy's troubled brow. ‘He's just under so much stress with his exams, you know. There's so much pressure on children these days, it's just too much for them, don't you think?' She crossed the kitchen and got some glasses from a cupboard. The three officers were mesmerised by the flicker of sinews in her calves. ‘Have we offered you something? Or are you still on duty?'

It was established that the senior officers were about to go off duty, while the youngest was driving. Ted invited them to sample a bottle of fifteen-year-old Island malt which an associate had given him that very day. It transpired that the senior officer's ancestors were from Skye. His wife enjoyed
Family First
very much and looked forward to baking the Cake of the Week. The Lemon-and-Lime Mousse Gateau had not risen as it should, although it had tasted superb all the same.

‘We're doing Chocolate Pecan Brownies this week.' She invested the promise with as much glamour as if they were planning to confide the secret formula of Coca-Cola. ‘It's such a great recipe – I'm sure they'll be just perfect. Of course, we have a professional caterer test all our recipes, but we had to change the firm we used a while ago because we were getting complaints. You must let me send you some tickets for the show – it's so good when we get a really smart audience in, the whole thing just gets wild.'

The senior officer was gratified to have his opinion validated.

‘And this poor girl.' Allie pouted in sisterly compassion for her son's victim. ‘How is she? She must have been petrified. He's a big boy now.'

‘She was pretty mad,' the junior cop contributed. ‘She was saying all kinds of things.'

‘Mad?' Allie's eyes widened with hope. ‘You mean – she's not quite right?'

‘She's right enough if you ask me,' answered senior officer, draining his tumbler which Ted solemnly refilled at once. ‘Works in some law firm. Hot stuff. Spouting this act and that case.'

‘Oh – not a secretary, then?'

‘Trainee, she said. Mind you, these women tell one story to us and when you get to court it's another thing.'

‘Terrible shock for a young woman. I'm sure she was nice looking.'

‘Depends what your taste is,' the driver replied, watching with a sour face as his superiors lowered the level of the precious malt at an astonishing rate. ‘Didn't reckon much to her myself.'

‘A woman can always make the best of herself,' Allie observed brightly.

‘She'd done that. She was having a night out, no question.'

‘The
poor
girl,' Allie sighed, and the drinkers drank, ingesting also the impression that daylight would reveal Damon Parsons' potential victim as a stupid, unstable young slapper unlikely to cross-examine well.

At 5 am, after an egg-and-sausage breakfast enthusiastically cooked by Ted, the officers left, leaving both whisky bottle and Ted's wallet empty. In exchange, the senior officer handed over Damon's weapon, a rusted Swiss Army penknife chosen for the implement for getting stones out of horse's hooves.

‘Get him off there,' Allie commanded Ted when he returned to the kitchen. She was walking up and down the room, jittery with anger. ‘That sofa'll be ruined if he pisses himself.' And because her husband did not react immediately she picked up an empty glass and threw it at him. It hit a worktop, fell to the Provençale tiled floor and shattered.

‘I can't carry him,' he told her, aware of his cut lip now smarting from the whisky.

‘I didn't ask you to carry him. Let him lie on the floor, for God's sake. Disgusting thing. Disgusting. Look at his shirt, for God's sake, look at it. I'll kill you if you get that on the covers. He's an animal, he should lie on the floor.'

Fearing the rising hysteria in her voice, Ted slowly rolled his son on his side and eased his bulk, legs first, down on the tiles. ‘Lucky he stayed in the area this time. At least the cops know us.'

‘If they hadn't banned him at the Wilde At Heart he'd never have got into this state.'

Wearily, Ted stopped himself contradicting her. Damon had been able to get into this state wherever in the world he was since the age of ten.

‘He'll have to go back to that re-hab place.' She was approaching the knife, which lay on the table with the blade open.

‘He won't stay. He checked himself out after a day and a half, remember?' From the corner of his eye he saw that Cherish, in her Forever Friends pyjamas, had appeared silently in the doorway.

‘Must you be so negative? If that place isn't secure, I'll find a place that is. Find somewhere that locks'em up. God knows where you think I'm going to get the time to run around the country looking for a place, but I'll do it if you won't. He‘s not bitching up my life as well as his own. I'll have him locked up – why not? He's a fruitcake. A secure mental hospital. What they call it? Sectioned? It'll be for his own safety, he'll kill himself at this rate anyway.'

‘He's not mad,' Ted protested, keeping his distance and trying not to look at the knife in case she followed his glance. ‘He's just dumb.'

‘You'd know, would you?' she demanded, getting into a well-worn groove. ‘Where were you when he was screaming his guts out round the clock from the day he was born? Out to meetings, out to lunch, out to dinner – that's where you were. Your usual table, sir. May I recommend the fucking Krug, sir? And I was locked up with him in this fucking house. Don't tell me he's normal.'

He breathed easier as she walked past the knife. Too soon. She heard him. Quick as a lizard she whirled around, seized it and ran at him.

Cherish let out a screech of utter fear. Ted dodged the blade and grabbed for the arm which held it but the whisky had made him clumsy and she was too quick for him. ‘Get out of here,' she screamed at the child, waving the knife furiously at father and daughter in turn. ‘You fucking little bitch, you had to get up, didn't you?' Cherish let out scream after scream. Blonde like her sister, she was undersized for eight and pitifully thin. The exertion brought no colour at all to her little grey face.

On the staircase behind her, Ted saw Chalice appear, trailing a quilt. Another scene.

‘Alex,' he said, hoping her real name would connect her with reality if only for an instant, ‘the girls are upset. Let them see you put the knife down so they'll know everything's OK.'

‘Everything is not OK,' she protested with bitter sarcasm. ‘Their brother is dead drunk, their father is dead beat and their mother will be on camera after two hours fucking sleep.'

He tried to hold her gaze but her eyes were flickering around the room, looking for further cause for anger. They found nothing. ‘Huh.' She exhaled viciously. ‘Hah.' In another few seconds, quite playfully, she tossed the knife into the sink. ‘Go on,' she told them, roaming the floor once more. ‘Go on. Go away now. All of you. Just – leave me alone.'

‘I'm going to take the girls upstairs.' When it came to moving, he did not have the nerve to turn his back on her but retreated step by step towards the door. He gathered Chalice in his arms, hustled across the hall to get Cherish by the hand and made himself climb the stairs to their bedroom at a normal speed.

Chalice was trembling and teary. Cherish was stiff with fright, her white limbs were actually rigid as she lay in her bed. Neither of them could speak. There was a story book, a present from his mother, and he read from it with all the animation he could summon, but his daughters lay in their beds and stared at the ceiling. Outside, he knew, the sun was over the horizon and the day was already light. No one was going to sleep.

‘Nessun dorma
,' he sang softly,
‘che
—'

‘That's the football song,' Chalice said, rolling her shadowy eyes around to watch him.

‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘Do you like it?'

‘Singing is for dick-heads,' she replied, in perfect resonance with her mother.

He fell silent and closed his eyes, thinking of Damon, grunting in beery oblivion on the cold kitchen floor. Certainly, it was true that the boy had changed their lives. Allie had conceived him as soon as she had landed her first screen job and, in the drama of that career breakthrough, failed to notice the signs until she was so far advanced that the pregnancy could not be terminated, for all she insisted and demanded and ran from one clinic to another with her gold Amex card.

It was then that she first entered the state of cold rage which was now normal, from which she never emerged. And it had been he, Ted, God help him, who had tried to soothe her fury by calculating that the programme's Christmas break fell exactly a month before the baby's due date. ‘You could only be off screen for a few weeks,' he had pleaded. ‘I could drop the baby on the studio floor and carry on working,' she retorted. ‘I suppose that's what you want?'

Damon had been born by Caesarean on December 23, much more premature than expected, destined to spend the first month of his life in hospital until his lungs were fully mature, a sad creature with loose, mottled red skin over his tiny bones. Allie, in contrast, made an excellent recovery, to no worldly purpose as her show was axed before her stitches healed.

For ten months she had no job. Her mood descended to a burning apathy, while the baby screamed to the limit of his growing strength. Night or day, he seldom slept for more than ten minutes at a stretch. ‘He's a high-energy kid,' Allie announced, ‘like me. He can't switch off.' She went to a spa for a month. The nurse who moved in to care for Damon suggested that the boy be assessed for evidence of brain damage. Nothing conclusive was ever established.

Allie got another job, and another, and came home later than her husband, and continued to act as if her child did not exist. Each year Damon grew bigger, noisier, more aggressive. At five, a paediatrician asked to see Ted alone, and suggested mother and child might be emotionally mismatched. ‘How can we be mismatched?' she demanded. ‘I'm his mother.'