Hide and Seek (13 page)

Shut up, brain.

“Are you going to say some words, Will, or would you like me to?”

He smiles. “I’ve plenty of words,” he says. “But we need to get the coffin ready to lower first.”

Yep, right, the coffin. Excellent. Sorry Leo, I mouth internally, about your mad father. Seems like the undertaker coffin incident wasn’t a dream. Goodness knows what the man had thought, or if he’d wondered if we were harbouring a dead body. Maybe Will had explained what would be inside it. Not that I know what will be inside it. That is still to come.

I turn to see Will approach. As I’m turning, I think he must be dragging it over the grass; it must be heavy, a full-grown coffin. Goodness knows how he thinks it will fit it into the leaf incinerator. But then, when I turn round fully, I see he is not dragging it. Then I see why. And I almost scream.

It is a child’s coffin. Smaller, even, than that. It must be designed for a baby. I inhale and rub a soothing hand on Leo’s stomach home. It’s all right. Daddy is just being practical. No point paying for a large coffin when there’s no body, and you can’t burn it on a DIY pyre. But, seriously, how can Will bear to think of dead children, when I’m carrying one inside me? Oh God – no, not a dead child. I hope. A live one. Or one that will still be live. The coffin looks like a terrible jinx, a suggestion of an event that should never be discussed.

“I thought this size would be appropriate,” says Will. “We’re not just burying my father, you see. We’re burying the little me, too. The other me, that might have lived, with him.”

I nod mutely. Thankfully, my words don’t seem to be needed. The beat of the music prevents an awkward silence.

Will puts the coffin down on the ground near to the fire. He lifts off the lid. I almost can’t bear to look inside, unsure what Will can have put in there. But I know it’s expected. Must show an interest in the little boy’s games. So I force my head to tilt down and look.

I exhale. Maybe too loudly, but Will lets it go. Inside it is only a picture. Max Reigate, printed from Wikipedia, in black and white. But no, hold on, there is something else. I start to kneel down. Will sees my interest, and brings the coffin up to me. There is another picture in there. It is a red crayon picture of a man and a boy. The crude lines and colours have the appearance of a child’s drawing. Underneath is the scrawl ‘Daddy’. I think I’ve seen this before. I look up at Will.

“It was in the keepsake box,” he says. I didn’t know he’d even been looking through the box. Usually that’s something we’d do together. Reminisce, about happy (happier?) times gone by.

“When I drew it, when I was six or whatever, it was meant to be John, of course,” he explains, looking at me. “It was such a jolly little picture, I asked John to let me keep it, when I came across it years ago. Reminded me of all those after-school trips to Sainsbury’s with him. But it would have been Max, if he’d still been there. That picture would be us on our way to a concert hall. I’ve got to bury both of those lives.”

I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. What do you say on such an occasion?

“What?” asks Will. “Too much, you think?”

“You don’t have to close off your whole heritage, you know,” I opt for. “That doesn’t have to be lost to the flames too.” How would he feel if little Leo rose up and burned him in years to come? Obliterated his daddy and all the love he’s felt?

There is a silence.

“But that’s what I’m mourning, Ellie. The idea of my father. It turns out I’ve never really known John. And I didn’t know Max. Or at least, I must have done. But I don’t remember him. I don’t have those little snippets of memory. I don’t know why. So I’m not mourning him. I’m mourning what we might have had. That’s the idea I have to grieve.”

“The memories will come back,” I tell him, “now you know who Max is. Don’t bury that idea, let it come out. Let it live.”

Will does a movement with his head that must be a nod, because he takes the drawing out of the coffin. He folds it up without looking at it and puts it in the breast pocket of his pyjamas.

“Fine,” he says. “Let’s just bury him.”

Here’s hoping that’s the right call. It is Will’s grief, he knows what he has lost. I could tell him to throw in the picture too, consign it to the flames, repress all thoughts of being fathered by Max Reigate. But you’ve got to exercise authority, with these little boys, haven’t you? And there’s nothing that undermines authority like changing your mind. Besides, he’s already lining up nails in the lid of the coffin. And there he is, picking up the hammer meant for Leo’s crib. Before Will got a new crib from his dear departed father.

Will hits the first nail. Bang! The sound ricochets off the fence posts. Will moves on to the next nail. As he raises the hammer, I see his hand is shaking. Bang! It goes again. He drops the hammer.

“Will, are you all right?” I ask.

He nods, and picks the hammer up again. He delivers a third blow, and this time when the blow is struck he not only drops the hammer but leaps back from it, and falls down flat on the grass.

I rush to him, and put an arm round him. What’s going on? “Will, what’s wrong?”

He looks up at me. He is white and shaking. It’s his eyes that are the worst, though. For in his eyes, there is fear.

“I don’t know, I just can’t,” he says. His voice is wavering. Tears don’t sound far away. “It’s really weird, it’s like…” But he shakes his head and doesn’t continue. “Could you finish…?”

So, these are my duties now: hammering nails into the baby coffin of a dead pianist in the garden before dawn, while my mad husband lies on the lawn. And they say motherhood throws challenges at you – be a wife, anyone?

“Of course.”

I pick up the hammer and make to bring it down on one of the remaining nails.

As I’m bringing it down, I hear Will shout.

“No! No!” He has his hands up to his temples, clawing at them. In his eyes there is an expression of terror. Then he rushes at me. “No, no, you mustn’t!” He grabs the hammer from my hand. “Stop!”

I let the hammer drop. Will stares at it, breathing heavily, then stares at me. It is a look of pure hatred. I step backwards. My heel comes into contact with the side of the CD player and oh, my footing, it’s gone, I’m going to trip. Not a fall. Please, not a fall, on my stomach!

But Will seizes my arm, rights me. The fall doesn’t happen. I am safe. I think. I look up at Will. He is white and shaking again. I don’t know if his tremors are about the hammer or about my almost fall.

What is going on? Was I wrong about the funeral? Has it pushed Will over some kind of edge that neither of us knew was there?

“Let me get you a chair,” he says. He rushes off down the garden, and brings back one of our wrought-iron chairs. We were proud of them when we bought them, complete with pretty daisy-print seat covers. They’ve become a bit less pretty, with time. Never mind that now. I sink into the chair.

“That could have been…” I start to say. Horrible, tragic, awful, are the words in my mind.

“A memory, I know,” says Will.

So. The shakes were about the hammer.

“Yes, quite a memory,” I say, bitterly. “Of the fall. If we’d lost the baby. Will – what are you playing at? A memory of what?”

Will bends to kiss me. I feel his tongue in my mouth, like an invader. It is a deep kiss, a passionate one. “The baby is safe,” he says, as he pulls away. “Our future is safe.”

OK. Maybe he’s right. I nod. It was a scare, nothing more. Everything is fine. The sky starts to lighten and I see the first hints of the sun come over the horizon.

“Will, what memory?” I think back to what he was saying the other night, before I cracked open the valium. About blood clots, talk and die, blunt instruments. But it was all just burbling. It meant nothing.

“Don’t worry,” he says. He seems excited. The fear-shakiness has gone. It’s been replaced by some kind of adrenaline rush, it seems. He’s too alert, too keen to please. “I’ll finish this quickly now,” says Will. “Never mind the hammer, I’ll just lower the coffin into the fire, say a few words. Then we’ll have some breakfast, OK?”

I nod. “OK.” Maybe Will was just having some kind of grief-fit, a low blood sugar moment. Bloody weird. Frightening. But maybe now he’s through it, he’ll move on from whatever dark place took him there. Maybe he’ll need a little less looking after. Be all set for fatherhood. The funeral idea is proving a success. How clever of me, intuiting what he needed. I wish we’d stuck to the dawn timing; it feels much less noir now the sun is breaking through.

Will begins lowering the coffin into the flames. Then he’s doing his speaking thing, his funeral address.

“We do this in memory of Max Reigate, a gifted and talented pianist, who I’m sure, had he lived, would have been a gifted and talented father, to me, his son. There were four years; I am sure they were happy. Somewhere within me, I will treasure them. Perhaps they will re-emerge. But I will take them with me to a place of contentment, in the future.”

The flames rise up and seize the coffin. The lid slides open and Max’s face is revealed. Will stares into the fire as the black and white face slowly curls, and then disappears into the heat of the flames.

When he speaks again, there is more emotion in his voice.

“Max Reigate, a father much missed.”

“And a husband,” I contribute. “He was a husband, too, don’t forget. Your mother – your real mother, Sophie – will have missed him too.”

Will looks up. The sun, not quite fully risen, is covered by a cloud. I shiver slightly.

“A husband he may have been,” says Will. “But we don’t know if he was missed.”

Chapter Seven

-Will-

Because I have a new theory, you see.

I’m not telling Ellie, because she’ll just try to shush me. Or give me valium again. And she’s all pro-mothers (real mothers) at the moment, obviously. My theory is anti-mothers. A particular mother. A particular mother who, if she can abandon her four-year-old child, was capable of much more harm.

And besides, we don’t need to tell each other everything now, do we? That’s what Ellie decided. When she changed the rules.

But now that Ellie’s given me her permission to go back to work, now that I’ve apparently been cleansed – her words – by the ‘funeral’, I can think about my theory properly. Not that I’m going straight to work. It’s back to the old regime – swimming at the Rotunda first, on my way to the station. Get some serotonin going, get rid of the daddy fat that will otherwise build up. But most of all, just to think.

I dive in. Miscalculate slightly – my nose almost touches the black and white tiles at the bottom of the pool and I have to pull up quickly to avoid impact. I surface, gasping, then make my way to the edge of the pool to start my routine. Take some air, push the water behind you, then head down again. Count: 1 – 2 – 3. Think: was it her? See the black and white tiles through goggles at the bottom of the pool. Head up, snatch a breath, push behind, behind, behind, with the arms. Look only forward. See the end of the pool, the black and white checks, the goal. Head down again. Count: 1– 2 – 3. Black and white. Up again. Think: hit my father? Black and white. Close your eyes. Still black and white. Think: before the recording? Head down again. Black and white. Count: 1 – 2 – 3. Up again. Think: blood on brain? Black and white and the water. Breathe. Down. Think: talk and die? My eyes are open. Through the goggles, black and white, black and white, black and white and the water.

Agh! There’s a sudden smack against my head and I open my eyes. Black and white. The end of the pool. I missed my usual two-hand touch at the end of the length. I stand up and tear off my goggles. I pull my hands across my face. A female gym attendant stands at the end of the pool, looming down at me.

“Are you OK?” she asks.

I nod and wade through the water away from her. I climb out of the pool, my toes on the black and white tiles. In the changing-room shower area, I slosh through water, looking at my feet against the tiles. Suddenly my feet seem much smaller, the size they were in that dream, and the tiles much bigger. I shake my head. An optical illusion. I step into a shower cubicle. The tap won’t turn so I bang it three times – clang, clang, clang. I look up at the showerhead standing over me and before my eyes it becomes a woman. A woman holding a hammer. I duck out of the shower cubicle, leaving the water running. Breathing heavily, I stand on the concourse between all the other showers. Water, black and white, a woman with a hammer. A man gives me a dirty look and wraps his towel more closely round himself. Thinks I’m staring, some kind of pervert. But I’m not. I’ve hit a memory artery. It’s all flowing out like blood. I turn and head to the locker area. Water, black and white, a woman with a hammer. I dry myself roughly, then pull on a sock, but my foot isn’t dry, so it sticks awkwardly. It doesn’t matter. Water, black and white, a woman with a hammer. I insert myself haphazardly into the rest of my clothes. By the time I am doing up my shirt buttons, I know. The black and white, it’s the piano. The hammer, it’s the hammer held by a woman. The woman is my mother. My real mother. Sophie Reigate née Travers. She is the one who murdered my father. The water is my tears.

And I have them again, now. Streaming, my eyes are, as I walk to the station and board the train. But these are angry tears. I have done mourning, thanks to Ellie. Now there is just the rage, rage that this woman could have taken a hammer to my father, then negligently, callously, have let him go off to record his concerto. Because that’s what happened: that’s what the dreams are telling me. The woman with the hammer, chasing me down the keys. All her! The classic domestic, like so many other talk and die hammer cases I’ve read about. Maybe at the time, she tried to chase me too, tried to kill me. That would explain why she is chasing me, in the dreams. And why I’m so scared of women standing over me – Ellie, that lifeguard. I’d repressed it, kept it back, the trauma – or maybe she’d repressed it out of me. And she fled justice, ran from the son who might betray her.

Well guess what, Sophie Travers. You can’t escape. Because I know now. The dreams, the memories, awakened by Max’s music, by the hammer, have told me. Sure, I need some proof that other people can see. But I’ll find that. And then I’ll find you.