Natural History (21 page)

Nately consulted his watch. It was still 1 April.

‘Of course.'

There was a noise on the line, and for a moment Nately wondered if Patrick was weeping. He thrilled with terror. And on its heels, there was a kind of relief.

‘She can stay as long as she likes. She's welcome.'

‘Great,' said Patrick. ‘See you in the morning.'

After Patrick had vomited, then wept, then threatened to kill his own child, then wept again, he got himself together.

He opened a bottle of whisky. Then he sliced a lemon in half, tilted his head back and squeezed the juice of each half down his nostrils.

He snorted, choked, coughed, cried out.

Then he drank off a quarter pint of whisky, wiping at tears with his forearm. When that was done, there was a moment of violent disorientation. But then his head cleared.

He looked at his child. Hating him.

Then he went outside and looked at Chris McNeil's car. He had the bottle of whisky in his fist.

Charlie followed him.

‘Have you touched this car?'

‘No.'

It looked very solid in the moonlight, like an ingot.

Patrick turned and stalked inside.

In the kitchen, he stared at the corpse and began to cry again. ‘Who is she?'

He'd already asked it a hundred times, and had not once waited for an answer.

He wiped his snotty nose on the back of his hand and then took a swig of whisky. Then he knelt and opened the bottom drawer. It was the carrier-bag drawer. He took out a carrier bag. Tesco.

Charlie hung over him. Patrick looked up and snarled. For a moment, crouched there, he resembled a wolf.

‘What did you touch?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Her handbag? What?'

‘Nothing.'

Patrick swallowed a mouthful of sour whisky vomit. He looked briefly at the floor.

‘Go and get some gloves. And some boots. And a coat.'

Charlie went upstairs to get his boots and his parka. He put them on. He found his gloves. He put them on, too. Then he went downstairs.

In the kitchen, Patrick had worried and strained at the hammer until he was able to remove it from Chris McNeil's head. Then he set it to one side, on a carrier bag. He was kneeling. He had lifted Chris McNeil's head into his lap and slipped a carrier bag over it. Now he was Sellotaping the carrier bag; wrapping the tape round and round the dead woman's throat.

He was muttering under his breath. Charlie tilted his head; a question.

‘It's for the blood,' said Patrick. ‘You little prick. It's for the blood.'

Chris McNeil was heavy. It was like carrying a sofa, or a mattress, and it took them a long time just to get her to the stile, and a great deal of heaving to get her over it. By then, it had gone midnight: it was 2 April.

They lugged her through the oak forest, and onto the clifftop; the place where, in the summer, Patrick sometimes liked to come and read a book. Here, they laid her down.

Their backs and arms and legs hurt. It was hard to breathe. They were muddy and scratched.

The night sky was still very clear. Patrick could feel the comet, although he did not look at it. He knelt and removed the carrier bag from Chris McNeil's head. He had been careful, so that none of the tape's adhesive had stuck to her throat. He scrunched up the bag and put it in his pocket.

There was a hole in her skull; the shape of a hammer-claw. The shape went into her brain; the police might take a cast from it. So, on his knees, Patrick felt around for a rock, something that would fit the palm of his hand.

In the darkness, on his knees, it took a while. When he had the rock, he knelt beside Chris McNeil.

He said, ‘Oh God,' and brought down the rock on Chris McNeil's head. He felt it break, like an egg. But not enough. So he did it again, and again, until he was sure.

When he was finished, he turned his face away and stood. Stooped. Grabbed her wrists. They were slender.

Charlie grabbed her ankles.

Patrick counted quietly to three. Then, keeping their backs straight, they hoisted her. And then they swung her—one, two, three!—like a hammock, and tossed her over the edge of the cliff.

Chris McNeil was broken up by the rocks below. And soon the tide would send out fingers to dislodge her from the rocks, take her with it, wherever it was going.

They heard nothing. Just the sound of their own breathing.

Charlie sat and hugged his knees.

Patrick stooped to pick up the rock. It was speckled with wet matter. He was glad he was drunk.

He reached back his arm, as far as it would go, and he launched the rock into the sea.

They walked back. The night spoke softly.

Outside the house, Patrick ordered Charlie to strip naked. When Charlie protested, Patrick struck him, open-handed across the face. Charlie fell to his knees.

Patrick wanted to hit him again; but if he started, he wouldn't stop. He waited with fists clenched at his sides, until Charlie stood like a stamen in a bloom of a muddy clothing. He was naked in the moonlight, hairless and tuber-pale, this murderer, and Patrick turned the hose on him.

Charlie screamed, because the water was shockingly cold. Patrick grabbed his neck and forced him to his knees and passed the cold surge of water through his hair.

Then Patrick stripped and turned the hose on himself.

And dripping, he went into the house and got two bin bags and took them outside, and into the bags he stuffed their muddy clothes.

Patrick stood, naked, shivering, in the kitchen. He dripped on the flagstone floor, big fat splats. Wet footprints. His hair curled, wet, at his nape.

He picked up the whisky and drank the rest of it. He waited until the fire passed through him.

He put the bloody hammer into the sink. He ran the tap, so the hammer was covered with half an inch of water. Into the water, he emptied half a container of Drano—it was in a cupboard under the sink, among a jumble of other unused cleaning products. The water began to foam and boil. It would destroy the blood and dissolve the hair.

He went upstairs, to get dressed. He passed Charlie's door. Charlie was sitting on the edge of his bed.

Patrick stood in the doorway.

Charlie didn't move. Patrick expected his eyes to glow yellow in the lamplight. But instead, they had the pleading mildness of a kitsch Christ, rendered in Catholic tat.

Before sunrise, Patrick set out in the Golf. He ordered Charlie to follow fifteen minutes behind him, in the VW.

He drove all the way to Bristol; to a council estate called Knowle West. He remembered it from his time on the
Evening Post.
It was notorious. He left the Golf parked by the kerb.

He headed down the street, aware of the pit bulls and German shepherds growling behind flimsy gates. He reached the main road and waited outside a corner shop until a bus came to take him into town.

He met Charlie outside a Mall called the Galleries. Charlie had dumped the binliners in the wheelie-bins behind a McDonald's—and in another bin were Chris McNeil's handbag and credit cards, carefully shredded.

Patrick let Charlie take the wheel on the way back to Devon. It wasn't a long trip, fifty or sixty miles south-west, but Patrick soon lost his sense of position.

He unwound the window and smelled the sea. It did not make him happy. That man was gone.

That man had been a sidekick. This man was an accomplice.

They parked in the sunlight outside their house. They got out of the car. They stared at the house. It had not changed.

Patrick said, ‘You killed Rue.'

Charlie swivelled his head. And at last, Patrick saw the creature that lived behind Charlie's eyes: the hyena.

‘And the letters. Those terrible letters to your mum. The photographs. That was you, too?'

Charlie stared at the house.

‘Why?'

‘I wanted to stop her.'

‘Stop her
what?
'

‘Sleeping with Richard.'

Patrick roared and raised his fist. He grabbed his son by his tender throat and squeezed. He backed his son into the door and roared into his face. Charlie cringed and trembled.

And when the roar didn't empty Patrick, he let the boy go and watched him sink to his knees. Then he punched the door, and punched it again, and punched it again until the panel splintered and the skin of his knuckles ripped and the bones bruised inside him and the urge to kill had gone.

Patrick sucked at his bleeding fist while Charlie knelt in the shadow of the house, coughing green bile upon the stone threshold.

We were adapted to live in the shadow of predators. It was fear of the beast that made us human. Beasts were simply the product of forest and grasslands—the urge to kill, to live, to create life. Beasts were part of natural history.

So were monsters.

Patrick bound his swollen fist in an athletic bandage and they drove to Minehead and had their heads shaved; Patrick was concerned that brain matter and blood had dried in there. He sat in a nylon cape and watched curls drop into his lap; he looked at an unfamiliar face: haggard, older than he expected, with raw, red ears.

Charlie's hair was like suede; his skull was a fine shape. His eyes were big and harmless. He looked like a wigless prince.

Shaved, Patrick wandered the infinite double loop of Monkeyland. His ears and his scalp were chilled by the wind. He stood and watched the capuchins.

They stopped capering. For an extended moment, they raised up on their hind legs and stared at him. He dropped his eyes in shame; moved on.

Patrick drove to Nately's house, still drunk, with Jo's things in bags and boxes: her books, her clothes, her posters, her only CD,
Nevermind.

He wanted her never again to set foot in the house Charlie had contaminated. It was filled with black radiation. It would ruin her. It would blacken her teeth and poison her hair; it would riddle her with tumours.

Nately's garden was just entering into bud, and Nately and Jo stood together in the doorway. They saw Patrick—thinner, shaved, deep vertical scores in his cheeks, holding a box of Jo's stuff in his arms.

Nately took the box from Patrick, took it and stepped inside. He said nothing.

He left Jo on the doorstep.

‘Dad?'

And their last moment was gone; it had been a long time ago. He thought of their morning runs; of her determined slog, her comically flailing limbs. And he loved her, terribly and acutely, as something lost to him.

He kissed her forehead. He ran his hands though her dry tangled hair, as he once had, when she was a toddler and he was soothing her tears.

‘I love you, baby girl.'

‘Me, too. And it's not for ever, is it? It's not like it's going to be for ever.'

He crushed her to him. She was so fragile; her long thin bones.

‘Nothing is. Nothing's for ever.'

But he was lying, and in the terrible nights that followed—alone with Charlie, full of whisky and hatred and ghosts—Patrick thought often of the night of the perihelion, in Nately's garden: how Nately had asked him not to go. And how he'd tapped his watch and said no.

And he hated Nately, for if there had been no comet, the woman might still be alive. And when he remembered his daughter, safe and uncorrupted in the haven of Nately's cottage, and Nately's goodness, he clenched his helpless fists and ground his helpless teeth for the creature he'd become.

When the morning came for Charlie to leave, Patrick grabbed his son's shirt in his fist—so violently that Charlie nearly lost his footing—and stuffed into his pocket a wad of cash. Charlie didn't need the money; he'd saved so much, pulling all those double shifts at the Anchorage Hotel.

Patrick growled, ‘Go to Greece, France. Whatever. Go where kids go. Get a job. Stay away.'

Charlie touched the wad of folded, dirty cash. ‘When can I come home?'

Patrick barked, and flecks of his spittle wet his son's face, his eyelashes.

‘If I ever see your face again, I'll smash it with a fucking rock.'

Charlie burned with resentment and self-pity. He hoisted his rucksack.

Patrick said, ‘I
made
you.'

But Charlie didn't understand. With watering eyes, he dumped his rucksack on the back seat of the orange Volkswagen estate, with its Greenpeace and WWF decals, and drove away. He left the car at Heathrow airport.

Now it was two weeks later. Jo was still at Mr Nately's. Patrick was at his desk, putting his paperwork together. He was preparing to sell Monkeyland, and with it the house. It would bankrupt them.

Mrs de Frietas put through a call. It was Don Caraway. The line was bad: thin, with loud bursts of white noise.

Caraway said, ‘Patrick?'

Patrick was distracted; he was shuffling papers, leaving them in a neat pile for Mrs de Frietas to file.

‘Yup?'

‘You'll never guess where I'm calling from.'

‘No.'

‘Minehead.'

‘That's lovely for you, Don.'

Patrick's flatness dimmed Caraway's excitement for a moment; then it flared again.

‘Aren't you going to ask what I'm doing here?'

‘What are you doing there?'

‘Attending an autopsy.'

Patrick stood up. There was no paperwork to knock from the desk. He looked at the clean corner where it should be.

‘What autopsy?'

‘A body.'

‘Whose body?'

‘Some suicide.'

‘Man? Woman?'

‘Woman. Can I get to the point?'

‘Sorry.'

‘She's not a drowner, apparently. She's all smashed up. A jumper.'

‘Definitely suicide?'

‘Looks like. Can I actually finish?'

‘Sorry.'

‘Well. Guess where they found her?'

‘Where did they find her?'

‘In the
woods—
back of your house.'

Patrick dropped the phone. It lay, meaningless, on the floor, buzzing like an insect.