Hidden Cottage (46 page)
‘I’ll tell them everything. How you hit Mum and me. I’ll tell them about the bruises and how Mum cries.’
‘It’s called discipline, Owen. It’s what a father has to do. Especially with boys who lie. And you’re a liar, which means I have to beat it out of you.’ He went back to pushing lumps of coal into place on the fire with the poker. ‘It’s for your own good. You’ll thank me one day.’
‘What about Mum?’ Owen forced himself to ask. ‘Why do you hit her?’
‘For the same reason. She lies to me. You both lie to me. You’re as bad as each other.’
‘We’re not bad,’ Owen said defiantly. ‘It’s you who’s bad.’
Suddenly his father lurched to his feet, grabbed hold of him and pushed him to the floor, grinding his face into the hearthrug. It was when Owen smelt burning that the pain started and he began to scream and scream, kicking his legs, doing everything he could to get away. But his father was too strong for him and pinned him down until he was finished.
‘Tell anyone and this is what I’ll do to your mother,’ his father hissed in his ear when the worst of the pain began to subside and he’d stopped screaming.
A week later Gretchen and Lillian helped Owen and his mother to escape. They gave them money and arranged for a taxi to take them to the station. From there they went to London before they finally ended up in Basildon. It had always been a great sadness to Owen that he and his mother lost contact with the two women who had done so much for them. Initially they did stay in touch by letter, but because they moved so regularly, Gretchen and Lillian’s letters often didn’t reach them. Many years later, when Owen passed his Grade Eight piano exam, he decided to write and thank them for the encouragement they had given him when he’d been a boy. All he could remember of their address was: The Hidden Cottage, Little Pelham, Northamptonshire. He never heard back from them and was left to conclude that they had either moved, or died.
As a child Owen had never questioned why his mother didn’t just leave her husband, because as a child those questions don’t really enter your head. But as an adult, he had asked himself the question and knew that there wasn’t a simple answer. But mostly it was fear that made a person stay with a violent and abusive partner and Owen’s mother had been terrified of her husband, not just for what he might do to her, but what he might do to Owen. By staying with her husband she had thought she was protecting her son, but when Ron Fletcher had taken that poker from the fire and pressed it against Owen’s shoulder and scarred him for life, she had known he was capable of anything and they had to get away.
Ron Fletcher had come looking for them on several occasions. One time he almost caught up with them, but thank God they had always managed to stay one step ahead. When he died they were finally able to breathe a long sigh of relief.
A lifetime on, Owen could still feel the searing pain and smell the awful stench of burning flesh. Another legacy from those days was that he detested violence of any sort; he couldn’t watch a boxing match or a fight scene in a film without feeling sick in the pit of his stomach.
A breeze blew in at the window, bringing with it the sound of a blackbird chirruping shrilly down in the garden. Dragging himself back from the past, Owen turned away from the window and repositioned the stepladder by the chimney breast so he could get to work with the scraper on an area of wallpaper that had so far resisted removal.
As he climbed the steps, he wondered as he had before about the way Jeff had spoken to him last Saturday. He hadn’t seen that level of pent-up anger in another man since his father. He would never go so far as to describe Jeff as a vicious bully like Ron Fletcher, and certainly Mia had never once hinted that he’d ever ruled the roost with his fists, but bullies had many disguises and often just needed the right tipping point to reveal their true colours.
And that was what worried Owen as he remembered the frozen look of guilt on Mia’s face when she realized they had been spotted by Wendy. ‘We’re doing nothing wrong, Mia,’ he’d said. ‘Act normally and smile at the woman.’ Which was exactly what he did. To do anything else would have made them look guiltier still. Wendy had smiled back at him through the glass. He’d been damned sure the cheery smile on her face had been as false as his. Owen had expected Mia to be angry with him for putting her in the position he had, but she had said nothing, had looked sadly at him and said she ought to go now.
Jabbing too hard with the scraper, a powdery chunk of plaster came away from the wall and fell to the floor. It coincided with an almighty crash, followed by a volley of banging that made Owen start and drop the scraper. Steadying himself on the stepladder, he worked out that the deafening racket was coming from the front door. Just as his startling powers of intuition brought him to this conclusion, the banging stopped. He climbed down the ladder and in the silence that followed, he found himself irrationally rooted to the spot.
He was about to do the sensible thing – go and see who it was trying to batter his door down – when the noise started up again, this time at the back of the house, just as loudly, just as violently. He went over to the open window, and leant out. But he couldn’t see who it was because the door was hidden beneath the sloping roof of the veranda.
When he heard his name being called, he knew exactly who it was. It was as if his thoughts only minutes ago had been a presentiment of what was about to happen. With real dread in his step, he went downstairs.
There was no one on the veranda when he opened the door. But when he took a wary step forward, Jeff appeared from the side of the house, where the log store was. In his hand, he had the axe that Owen had left there earlier that morning after chopping logs. His first reaction was to laugh at the absurdity of what he was seeing, but there was nothing remotely funny about the expression on Jeff’s face.
‘You bastard!’ Jeff yelled, his face red, his eyes wild. He was seriously pumped up. ‘You lying, cheating, bastard!’
‘Jeff, put the axe down, OK?’
‘Don’t you take that patronizing tone of voice with me. I knew you were too good to be true. All that nicey-nicey stuff you’ve fooled everyone else with – I wasn’t taken in for a minute. The second I set eyes on you, I knew you were trouble.’
‘Look, whatever it is you want to discuss with me, let’s do it calmly and reasonably.’ Owen moved slowly across the veranda and stood at the top of the steps that led down to the garden.
‘You think I can be calm when I know you’ve been screwing my wife behind my back? Not a chance!’
Owen took a step down from the veranda. Then another. He was playing for time. Trying to figure out the best way to handle this. Denial seemed the most sensible option – it was probably what Mia would want him to do, and besides, just what could Wendy have said, other than supposition based on very little when you got down to it? But what if Mia had already confessed to what they’d done? If that was the case, a denial from him would be futile and enrage Jeff yet more. And he looked plenty agitated as it was. Still playing for time, he said, ‘If you don’t like me, Jeff, that’s fair enough, but I have no intention of patronizing you. Now how about you—’
‘Shut up! Just shut the hell up, will you? Do you think I’ve come here to chat man to man and then leave, saying, “That’s all right, old sport, I quite understand you couldn’t keep your hands off my wife”? Is that what you expect?’
With a shiver of genuine fear, Owen honestly didn’t know what to expect.
Expect the unexpected
, echoed inside his head. ‘Jeff,’ he said, deciding to be straight with him, ‘tell me what you know.’
Something flashed in Jeff’s eyes. ‘I told you, I
know
about you and my wife. And you’re going to pay for trying to break up our marriage! Let’s see how you feel at losing something you value.’ He spat the words out and suddenly turning his back on Owen, he marched away.
What now?
Following after him, Owen then realized what Jeff had in mind to do.
The first swing of the axe smashed the headlight on the driver’s side of the E-Type, the second took out the headlight on the passenger’s side. Next Jeff went for the bonnet, crashing the axe down with a crunch.
Owen yelled at him to stop. Then: ‘Stop, or I’ll call the police!’
At that Jeff let out a cry of frustration – the blade of the axe was firmly embedded in the metal of the wrecked bonnet and he couldn’t budge it. Owen quickly made his move. It was time to stop the madness. Up close he could see a sheen of sweat on Jeff’s face; he could also smell the disgustingly sour aroma of vomit.
‘I bloody well hope you feel better for doing that,’ he said. It was a cheap taunt and one he regretted in a second.
Having assumed Jeff’s anger was spent, he wasn’t prepared for the fist that caught him on the side of the head. Stars sparked behind his eyes and he rocked on his feet, then with a guttural roar Jeff came at him again, grabbed him and slammed a fist into his jaw. Owen reeled backwards, lost his balance and fell to the ground with a thud. But still Jeff wasn’t finished and once more he came at Owen, this time with his foot, kicking him in the ribs. Instinctively Owen brought his knees up to his chest to protect himself as yet another kick landed – this time it was his head, and pain exploded like a firework inside his skull.
‘I’m going to break every bone in your body,’ Jeff yelled at him as he unleashed yet another ferocious kick followed by another and another.
For a terrifying moment, as he tried to clear his vision that was spangled with stars, Owen thought that nothing would stop Jeff, that caught up in this frenzy of violence he was no longer in control of himself and would go on kicking until he was exhausted.
Knowing he had to defend himself, that he had to fight the paralysis that had gripped him, Owen tried to get to his feet, but as he reached out to push himself up, Jeff grunted and raised his foot and brought it down hard on his hand. Owen let out a cry of pain and tried again to get to his feet, but another kick to the side of his head felled him and Jeff let rip with a blood-curdling cry. The sound filled Owen with real terror and he knew that Jeff really had lost it. Nothing would stop him now.
But suddenly the kicking did stop. The awful blood-curdling noise continued though, and when Owen dared to look at Jeff, what he saw had him convinced he was hallucinating, for he was staring at something straight out of Hitchcock’s film,
The Birds
.
He wasn’t hallucinating; Putin really was attacking Jeff!
The noise was terrible. Screeching and squawking, the bird was going crazy, flapping its wings, throwing itself at Jeff and pecking viciously at whatever bit of him he could get at. His arms flailing, Jeff was yelling and thrashing around in a blind panic, trying to get away from the bird. But keeping up the onslaught, Putin was forcing Jeff across the lawn and towards the lake; it was as if the bird was planning to push him in.
Dizzy and wincing with pain, Owen got to his feet. He should intervene. He staggered across the lawn and added his voice to the melee, shouting at the bird to stop. With his back to Owen, the bird didn’t react. Why would it? It wasn’t as if the bird could speak or understand English!
‘Stand still, Jeff!’ he then tried. ‘Don’t move!’
But Jeff wasn’t hearing him.
Circling round, Owen placed himself so that he was directly in Putin’s line of vision. At once, miraculously, the bird fell silent and stopped what it was doing. It stared at Owen, lowered its wings, tilted its head and seemingly let out a breath, its feathers rising and then settling. Throwing a sideways glance at Jeff, the bird shook itself and sauntered off.
In the deathly hush, Owen looked at Jeff. The man’s face was white and he was visibly trembling. Jeff opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. He began to shake harder, then very slowly his body crumpled and his legs gave way and he dropped to the ground.
At first Owen didn’t grasp what Jeff was doing, but then he realized that he was crying. It started quietly, a sort of stifled moan, and then gathered force until it was a full-blown howl coming deep from his guts and he was calling out Daisy’s name over and over, begging her to forgive him as he lay prostrate on the grass. But then like a man possessed, he began to babble incomprehensibly.
Owen looked on. He didn’t know what else to do. Then gradually, some of what Jeff was saying started to make sense. Sense of a kind. And with shock Owen realized that Jeff wasn’t asking for forgiveness for the row he’d had with his daughter which Mia had told him about, but for something he had done the night of Daisy’s death. It was something Owen was certain Mia knew nothing about.
Despite the immense pain he was in, Owen half carried, half dragged Jeff up to the house.
He took him inside, sat him at the kitchen table and using the hand that Jeff hadn’t stamped on, he shakily poured two glasses of brandy. He passed one of the glasses across the table.
‘Drink it,’ he said. He raised his own to his mouth and knocked it back in one go, the liquid burning his throat. How much would he have to drink to block out the pain? he thought.
He put his empty glass down on the draining board and looked at his left hand. Already it was bruised and hideously swollen and he could barely move his throbbing fingers. He noticed then that the face of his watch was cracked and for a split second he felt more annoyed about that than any broken bones he might have.
He took the watch off, laid it next to his empty glass and then gingerly with his right hand touched the side of his head that hurt the most. He felt wetness and when he looked at his fingertips, he saw they were red. An old and familiar feeling of shame consumed him as he thought of himself on the receiving end of Jeff’s fury, when he had literally frozen, haunted by the memories of witnessing his father’s anger and terrifying loss of control.
As an adult he had firmly believed that his aversion to anything of a violent nature didn’t make him less of a man, and he wanted to believe that now. But he couldn’t deny that a part of him unequivocally wished he hadn’t been paralysed by fear, that he had beaten Jeff to a pulp. He knew, though, that had he done it, he would never have been able to live with himself, not when it would have meant that he had become no better than his father.
