Lazybones (30 page)

Holland made it to Romford in a notch under forty minutes, and stepped out of the car to find Irene Noble waiting on her doorstep. She marched down the path toward him. “You did that pretty quickly. It usually comes down to the traffic in the Blackwall Tunnel. This is probably the best time, actually…”

She was wearing a cream trouser suit and full makeup. Holland saw her glance toward the houses on either side. He guessed that she was hoping to see the twitch of a net curtain, a sign that one of the neighbors might be watching the young man walking toward her door.

“It was fairly easy,” Holland said. “There wasn't much traffic at all…”

He followed her inside, where he was enthusiastically greeted by a small off-white dog. Its fur was matted and smelly, but Holland tried his best to make a fuss of it as it yapped and licked and scrabbled at his shins.

Mrs. Noble shooed the dog into the kitchen. “Candy's getting old now,” she said. “Actually, she was Roger's dog, once upon a time. She was still only a puppy when he passed away.”

Holland smiled sympathetically as they stepped through into the living room. A blue three-piece suite sat on a carpet of pink and purple swirls, and a glass-topped coffee table stood square on to the fireplace. A squashed
corduroy cushion, covered in tufts of white dog hair, was the only thing in the room that didn't look spotless.

Holland took a step toward a beechwood cabinet that ran along the back wall. Its doors were mirrored, and its top covered in framed photographs of children.

Mrs. Noble walked across and picked up a picture. “Mark and Sarah aren't here,” she said. “I couldn't bear looking at them and not knowing. I put them away once I felt sure they weren't coming back. Put them away and bloody well forgot where.” She must have seen concern pass across Holland's face and reached out a hand to touch his arm. “Don't worry, you haven't had a wasted journey. I finally found pictures of them tucked away inside our old wedding album…”

Holland nodded his understanding. She turned the photo she was holding so that he could see the picture. “David's a stockbroker, doing really well.” She put the frame back and began pointing to others. “Susan's a nurse up at the Royal Free, Gary went into the army and now he's training to become a printer, Claire's about to have her third baby…”

“There's a lot of them,” Holland said.

“We fostered long-term mostly, which was the way I wanted it. I couldn't stand to see them go, you know, just when they were starting to belong. Still, we had more than twenty kids, before and after Mark and Sarah. I know what
most
of them are doing…”

She smiled sadly, not needing to say any more. Holland smiled back, thinking of those twenty other kids, and the man who was once their foster father, and wondering…

“I didn't know whether you'd have eaten,” she said. “So after you phoned I took a lasagne out of the freezer. It won't be five minutes…”

“Oh, right…”

“I presume you can have a drink?”

In spite of what he'd previously thought of her, Holland was suddenly filled with something like affection for this woman. He thought about all the children she'd lost in one way or another, and her simple belief in a man whose heart was too full of darkness to go on beating any longer. He felt comfortable…

“Let's both have a drink,” he said. “I've got a nice bottle of wine in the car.”

 

“You have to let me pay you for the mattress,” Thorne said.

“It's fine, really. You can get dinner…”

“How much was it?”

“It's a late birthday present,” Eve said. “To replace the first one.” She smiled. “I don't remember seeing the plant anywhere at the flat, so I presume you've managed to kill it.”

“Oh, right. I was going to tell you about that,” Thorne said.

A waiter brought over their wine, and at the same time the manager came across to the table and laid down a platter of poppadoms. “On the house,” he said. He put a hand on Thorne's shoulder and winked at Eve. “One of my very best customers,” he said. “But tonight is the first time he has been here with a young lady…”

When the manager had moved away, Eve poured herself and Thorne a large glass of wine each. “I'm not sure how to take that,” she said. “Does he mean that you normally come here with young
men
?”

Thorne nodded, guiltily. “That was another thing I was going to tell you…”

She laughed. “So you come in here on your own a lot, then?”

“Not a
lot.
” He nodded toward the manager. “He's talking about the number of takeaways…”

“I've got this image of you now, sitting in here on your own like Billy No-Mates, eating chicken tikka massala…”

“Hang on.” Thorne tried to look hurt. “I do have one or two friends.”

Eve chopped the pile of poppadoms into pieces. She picked up a big bit, ladled onions and chutney onto it. “Tell me about them. What do they do?”

Thorne shrugged. “They're all connected to work in one way or another, I suppose.” He reached for a piece of poppadom, took a bite. “Phil's a pathologist…”

She nodded, like it meant something.

“What?” Thorne said.

“You never really switch off, do you?”

“Actually, me and Phil talk about football most of the time…”

“Seriously.”

Thorne took a gulp of wine, feeling it swill the bits from the surface of his teeth, thinking about what Eve was saying. “I don't believe that anybody ever leaves what they do behind completely,” he said. “We all talk shop, don't we? Everyone gets…reminded of things.” She stared back at him, rubbing the rim of her wineglass across her chin. “Come on, if you're out somewhere and you see some amazing display of flowers…”

“Flowers aren't bodies, are they?”

Thorne was disturbed to feel himself growing slightly irritated. He fought to keep it out of his voice as he picked up the bottle and topped up both their glasses. “Well, some people might say that they're dying from the moment they're picked.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Everything's dying,” she said. “What's the bloody point of anything at all? We may as well just ask the waiter to put ground glass in the biryani.”

Thorne looked at her, saw her eyes widen and the cor
ners of her mouth begin to twitch. They began to laugh at almost the same moment.

“I never know when you're winding me up,” he said.

She slid her hand across the table, took hold of his. “Can you leave it behind just for a while, Tom?” she said. “Tonight I want you to switch off…”

 

“Kids are a bloody handful,” Irene Noble said. “They change things beyond all recognition.” She stared across at Holland. “But you'll still be glad you did it…”

Holland had supposed that if they talked at all, they might well talk about kids. He never imagined that they might end up talking about
his.

“I just feel so guilty,” he said. “For resenting what might happen to me. For even
thinking
about walking away from it.”

“You'll feel stuff that's a whole lot stranger and more painful than that. You'll feel like you would die for them and the next minute you'd happily murder them. You'll worry about where they are and then you'll wish you could have a second to yourself. Every emotion is unconditional…”

“You're talking about afterward, when the baby's there. What about feeling like this
now
?”

“It's normal. It's not just the woman's emotions that get messed around with. Mind you,
you
can't use hormones as an excuse…”

Holland laughed, the two glasses of wine he'd put away helping him to feel relaxed. An hour or so earlier, he'd felt far less sure of himself. He'd thought, when they'd started to eat and he'd suddenly begun pouring it all out, that there might be more waterworks on the way, but Irene had helped him stay calm, convinced him that everything would work out for the best…

“I'll take these out.” She stood up, lifting the tray from the empty seat on the sofa next to her.

Holland passed over his empty plate. “Thanks, that was great.” He was talking about more than just a lasagne that had been cold in the middle.

He sat back down and listened as she pottered around in the kitchen. He could hear her talking softly to the dog, loading the dishes into the dishwasher.

It had been a conversation that Holland would never have had with his mother. Irene Noble, give or take a year or two, was the same age as his mother—a woman who'd been buying baby clothes for the last six months. A woman who refused to admit that anything could go wrong
ever,
and remained blissfully unaware that things were less than hunky-dory between her eldest son and his pregnant girlfriend.

Irene came back in brandishing choc-ices. “I always keep a stock of these in the freezer. Bloody marvelous in this weather…”

For a minute they said nothing. They sat and ate their ice creams, and listened to the noise of the dog's claws skittering across the linoleum as she scrabbled about in the kitchen.

As Irene Noble started to speak, pulling her feet up onto the sofa like a teenager, Holland watched her face shift and settle until every one of her years was clearly visible on it.

“Whatever problems you have, I hope you work them out together, all three of you. But they won't be in the same league as some of the things that kids have brought with them through my front door. You pass them on, you know. Hand them down, like baldness or diabetes or the color of your eyes…”

“You're talking about Mark and Sarah…”

“The other day I was very harsh about the two sets of carers who had the children before we did. About their inability to cope. The truth is that we weren't really coping any better than they had.”

“You adopted them.”

“I think it was our last effort at making them feel part of something bigger. Two parents and two children. We wanted them to come out of themselves, to engage with the rest of the world a bit more.”

“It's understandable, though,” Holland said. “That they'd be tight-knit. That the two of them would be very close, after what happened.” He looked away from her, down to the floor, thinking,
And what was still happening
…

“They were
too
close,” she said. “That was the problem. When they disappeared, Sarah was pregnant, and the baby she was carrying was Mark's.”

They walked slowly back down Kentish Town Road toward Thorne's flat. At not much after nine o'clock, it was just starting to darken but was still warm enough to walk without a jacket. The road was as busy and noisy as ever. Cars moved past them constantly; those that could had their tops down; most had sidelights on.

Despite what Eve had said earlier, they had both tucked a fair amount of food away, though Thorne put the feeling in his stomach down to something else entirely. Before they'd left the flat, Eve had helped him make the bed, laying a clean white sheet across the new mattress she'd brought with her. Thorne knew very well that when they got back there, she was going to help him unmake it again.

There were some things in his life that he counted as certainties: there was always another body somewhere; you could never get rid of blood completely; people who killed without motive tended to do it again. But
this
was the sort of promise that Thorne hadn't been on for a very long time…

Eve grabbed his hand suddenly and raised it up, bringing their bare forearms together. “You'd look a lot better with a decent tan,” she said.

“Is that an invitation?”

“When was the last time you had a proper holiday?”

Even after thinking about it for a minute, Thorne
couldn't provide anything as specific as a year. Lack of time was not so much the problem as lack of inclination and anybody to go away with. “It's been a while,” he said.

“Are you a lying-on-the-beach kind of guy, or do you prefer to do stuff?”

“Both, really. Or neither. I think lying on the beach gets a bit boring, but probably not
quite
as boring as walking round a museum…”

“Not easily pleased, are you?”

“Sorry…”

“All right, where would you like to go, if you could go anywhere?”

“I've always fancied Nashville.”

She nodded. “Right. The country-and-western thing…”

“Another one of my dark secrets…”

“I quite liked it.”

“Really?”

“You're not going to get kinky later on, though, are you? Dress up in leather chaps? Bring out the bullwhip and spurs…?”

They turned right onto Prince of Wales Road, the sound of live jazz coming from the Pizza Express on the corner. Thorne wondered if a pizza might not have been a better idea. The combination of curry and humidity meant that beads of perspiration were popping all over him.

They were still hand in hand and Thorne could feel the moisture between their palms. He wasn't sure whether it was her sweat or his own.

 

The bike weaved effortlessly through the traffic. Occasionally, where it got really heavy, or the road narrowed, he would have to sit and wait. Idling in line among the bike messengers and trainee cabbies on mopeds. Soon
enough, there would be a gap and he would be away, the backpack bouncing against his back as he drove across sleeping policemen and holes in the road…

He pulled up at traffic lights and checked his watch. He was probably going to get there a bit early, but it wouldn't matter. He would park up, stroll off somewhere, and wait. Keeping out of sight, until it was time.

Next to him, a big Kawasaki revved up, ready for the green light. A girl in cutoff jeans rode on the back, squeezing her boyfriend tighter with each growl he twisted from the engine. On amber, the Jap bike was gone, and he watched it go, easing his own machine slowly away from the lights.

Picking up no more speed than was necessary…

He had plenty of time, and the last thing he wanted was to be pulled over.

It wasn't so much a question of the ticket or the points on his license. He was so excited, so full of what he was about to do, that were some copper to pull him over and ask where he was going, he might just have to tell him.

 

Holland looked at his watch and was shocked to see that he'd been there for an hour and a half.

“I need to be getting back,” he said. “Could I have those photographs?”

Irene Noble climbed a little wearily from the sofa, slipped her shoes back on. “I'll go and fetch them…”

While he was waiting, Holland sat, going over their conversation and marveling at the capacity people had for self-deception. Irene Noble was far from being a stupid woman. He found it hard to understand why, even though she claimed that they, and previous carers, had caught the children in bed together, she had so readily presumed that Sarah Foley had been made pregnant by her brother. Had no other explanation occurred to her?

He heard her coming down the stairs, shouting to him.
“It doesn't seem five minutes since these were taken.”

Probably no other explanation she could live with…

She walked into the room holding out a small bundle of photos, half a dozen Polaroids and a couple of slightly bigger standard prints. Holland took them from her. She stepped back and perched on the arm of the sofa, pointing to the pictures as he began to look through them.

“Those are the two I had in frames on the sideboard. They're the ones that were taken at school the year before they disappeared. The others are from a birthday party we had for Sarah. Her eleventh, it would have been. Roger had just bought this instant camera…”

From the moment he'd looked down at the first photograph, Holland had stopped hearing anything but the sound of his own breathing. A girl in a blue-patterned dress, her hair tied back, smiling as though at something only she found funny. Holland lifted the picture of Sarah up, revealing its companion, the portrait of her brother.

“Jesus,” he said.

Irene stood up. “What's the matter?”

Holland flicked through the other photos to make sure, stopping at one in particular and staring at it, elated and terrified. He couldn't hear as Irene Noble continued to ask him what was wrong, didn't see her moving across the room toward him.

Sarah Foley sat at the table, the knife in her hand poised above a cake, the girls either side of her looking far more excited than she did. Just visible in the top right of the picture, Mark stood in the corner of the room. His fingers were curled around the edge of the door, as if he were preparing to throw it open and run through it, or else push away from it, launching himself toward the camera and whoever lay beyond it.

Her face was thinner then, and his perhaps a little
fuller. The eyes were wider and the skin smoother, but that was understandable. These were the faces of children, which had yet to weather, but Holland was familiar with their expressions.

He was looking at pictures of people he recognized.