Significance (47 page)

He turned his chair around again and cast his eyes over the pictures. The photos showed a young woman lying near some waste ground. She seemed to be somehow suspended over a drainage ditch. She wore a white dress and her legs were slim and tanned. Her hair fell down concealing her face. The picture didn't look real – the girl was too graceful, too clean. A policewoman in a wig had posed for these. All part of set up to trick him. But why?

He closed his eyes. Covered his eyes with his hand. Suzette. That was why. She'd been a
flic's
whore. His property. Marked as surely as if her face had been scored with a knife, her perfection overwritten with a jagged scar.

He opened his eyes and this time his gaze lit upon a different sort of picture. This showed a white cardigan that had been arranged on a sheet of creased brown paper as if it were a present that had just been unwrapped. He picked up the glossy print and stared at it. There was something familiar about the cardigan, yet he couldn't quite figure out what.

Then he remembered. It was the cardigan he and Suzette had found the other night, the one they had replaced after they had a change of heart about keeping it.

He remembered finding it discarded on the shrubs outside a café. Pictured himself kissing Suzette. He'd had a few drinks so much of what he remembered either had a dreamy, slow
-
motion quality or it existed only as a series of single images or memories of sensations or tastes. The events of the morning after had more clarity. They'd made love again, eaten and had coffee, then on leaving Suzette's flat together they'd put the cardigan back where they'd found it. His memories were bathed in glory. Him and Suzette. Suzette and him, staring at one another. The gaze that passed between them steady and unblinking. Since that night he'd had that uncontainable, irrepressible feeling of boundless good fortune and luck.

Florian did not remember anything illegal he had done. He had not for example left Suzette's in the early hours as he might have done a few years ago to snoop around the rest of the building in search of something to steal. He'd had no drugs on him. There was nothing during that night and the morning that followed that was anything other than honest and legal, nothing which burdened him in the cold light of day with shame. Indeed the business of returning the lost garment had felt like a turning point, an act of shared goodness, a celebration of him and Suzette getting together.

There was no one
-
way mirror in the interview room they'd put him in. He looked up to the corners of the ceiling where he was sure he'd find a security camera looking down on him. There it was in the right hand corner, the little wall mounted device, a boxy silver rectangle with a single black eye. He turned the photo of the cardigan around to show it to the camera and nodded his head slowly. The lens made a faint quick whirring sound as the focus was changed by an unseen operator.

He gathered all the ugly pictures on the table into a single stack with the image of the cardigan on the top, then leaned back in his chair, folded his arms and waited for them to return.

The Huntress

Marilyn had prepared the food in a frenzy of displaced energy. She knew that this was what she was doing even as she fussed with the food and all the alien cooking utensils in this French kitchen.

Aaron appeared without warning in the doorway. His face had the creased look of someone who has woken in the middle of the night and after a visit to the john will trudge back to bed, easily resuming sleep and perhaps even picking up the trail of interrupted dreams to continue on with the unravelling of their baffling mysteries.

Did Aaron dream? And if he did, what did he dream about?

Marilyn had covered the kitchen table with the food, bowls of salad covered with plastic wrap, the just
-
baked onion tart and a quiche with cheese and tomato and slivers of ham, an aubergine dip, basil and tomato salad, new potatoes that had been boiled with chopped mint leaves.

Aaron saw the food and went automatically towards it as though hypnotised. He pulled out a chair, sat down and lifted up his fork.

No words were said.

Marilyn sliced a portion of the onion tart and put it on his plate; he broke off a piece with his fork and ate with the sort of bug
-
eyed chomping wordlessness of children at a birthday party. He did not fuss as he normally would, shaking his head, pushing the plate away or clamping his mouth tight.

Marilyn continued to spoon more food on to his plate. She had a sense that he was not even aware of her, that for him the food was mysteriously delivered by unseen servants – as had been the case with Psyche when she dwelt in Cupid's golden palace.

He ate at a decelerating pace, until at last he put down his fork wearily and reached for the empty glass which she had set beside his plate.

He would want chocolate milk and luckily there was still half a carton of it left. Marilyn took his empty glass and set it on the counter to fill it, then before giving it to Aaron she shook two sleeping pills on to her palm.

He took the pills, throwing them expertly to the back of his throat, before taking the glass of milk from her. He drank noisily until it was all gone. He still had that slightly sleepy
-
eyed look about him as he pushed back his chair and began to trudge once more in the direction of the stairs.

She followed him up and at the top said, ‘Go pee
-
pee now Aaron,' even though he was already turning in the direction of the bathroom. He left the door open and did not lift the seat, but otherwise Marilyn was grateful that he was being calm and acquiescent.

It was dark by the time Marilyn came downstairs again. She again lifted the phone to check it was working. She did not switch on the table lamp, but with the curtains open, there was enough light from the street for her to manoeuvre her way around the grey humped shapes of the furniture and over to the window.

She gazed up the road in the direction of the town centre and willed the familiar form of Scott to materialise in the distance. He had a distinctive walk, Marilyn thought, he kept his shoulders squared and level, his back straight. His long legs moved in regular strides as his feet rolled easily over whatever surface was underfoot. He possessed a grace that defied his height. Other tall men she knew seemed to stoop or slouch or swagger. It was as if their centres of gravity eluded them; their limbs were as alien to them as they had been at sixteen or seventeen when they suddenly accelerated upwards with awkward, gangly legs and long puppy feet and wrists which shot out of their shirt cuffs, knobbly and naked.

Even as the stocky little policeman had led him to his car, Scott moved with grace, and betrayed little sign of anger or apprehension. He walked tall.

It was all a terrible mistake.

She told herself that over and over.

Some day they would laugh about it.

Then, whenever the subject of France came up while they were in company, she and Scott would quickly find one another's eyes, and say with exaggerated warning, ‘Don't talk to us about France!' before launching into their long and deliberately comical tale of this current nightmare.

All of that lay in the future. It was just up the road and would begin as soon as she saw his blond head and broad shoulders in the distance moving inexorably towards her.

But he did not appear.

She must have spent an hour going between the window, the hallway and the kitchen, not quite pacing, not quite like a person with an obsessive compulsive disorder, though she got a glimpse into the restless, anxious compulsiveness of the disorder's relentless uneasy thrall.

The phone began to ring at one point. Two quick rings, then silence. Marilyn had only got halfway across the kitchen before the phone stopped again, but despite this she continued towards it. She stared at it, willing it to ring again, then picked it up and said, ‘Hello?' Even as she said the word she knew it was hopeless, the connection was lost and her word encountered no answering human presence, only a machine. Yet still she repeated the word. Once, twice, three times. And listened, all her senses attuned to something, anything.

She replaced the receiver and stood for a time gazing at the telephone. The only source of illumination came from the kitchen with its functional but harsh fluorescent strip lighting. Upstairs she was aware (as she and Scott were always, always aware) of Aaron's sleeping presence.

It must be this way with a child too, she thought, even after you have laid the sleeping baby in its crib, your mind cradles the image of it as you move about the house. And there was so much that could befall a baby after it was born; for instance, a cot death – that sudden inexplicable exit from life. Or the infant could be stolen, bundled off by strangers in the rare second when your back was turned, and then forever after you would pray that whoever did it were only childless people driven by desperation – people who took your child in order to love him or her.

What was it then, the crux of this desire to parent, given its attendant fears? It was certainly about love; the wish to take the empty space between a man and woman and make a third new being who was the sum of their parts. Or not the sum, but a selective borrowing from each; Scott's blondness warmed by her own red hair to make a coppery yellow, her blue eyes and his brown making a hybrid green.

Inevitably Marilyn's mind returned to the poem she had struggled with so long. It was no longer merely an unsatisfactory fragment of verse but the key to understanding something about, not only herself, but her mother and also parents in general.

All children, as they grow, discover that their parents have feet of clay; they coltishly shrug off the concerns and rules and controls and silly worries, unwittingly torturing them with their young recklessness. Understanding only comes when they in their turn become parents.

Just as now she was worried sick about Scott and invented a hundred terrible explanations for his long absence, so a parent extemporises on the thousand ways they might lose their child. And her mother had seen one of these unfolding before her eyes when her beloved only daughter went pitching forward into the green algae
-
rich soup of the pond.

It should have proved to her mother that bad luck and danger could be overcome, but instead it confirmed the constant threat.

She automatically reached for the receiver again, but then as if catching herself; she merely laid her hand upon it. She had been about to ring her mother. Her mother whom she'd quarrelled with at about the same time she'd begun seeing Scott. It was years since they'd spoken to one another. Too long.

Both of them waiting stubbornly for the right apology phrased in the right blame
-
taking way, at the right time. Which, were Marilyn able to pick up the phone and dial the number, she would still be unable to produce. Instead she would sob and say, ‘Mom, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do, help me, Mom…'

And her mother might just hang up. Or even if she listened to Marilyn's garbled tale, she could not really help as she was the most impractical of women, incapable of even changing a light bulb, terrified of computers, rendered into a state of childlike awe and obedience by anyone in a position of power over her – doctors, nurses, politicians, policemen, bank managers, insurance salesmen, teachers, the clergy, tax inspectors. She was, Marilyn knew, a silly woman, the typical product of her generation.

Marilyn had fought to rid herself of these same traits, to be her own woman, relishing a vision of herself armed with an electric drill, a domestic paintbrush, a plumber's kit, dependent on no one but herself. It was this thought that now galvanised Marilyn into action.

Aaron was asleep and with the help of the pills she had given him, he would sleep for the rest of the night. She tried Scott's cell phone again, but when it went straight to message, she guessed that it was dead. He'd had it plugged into the car charger as they were setting off that morning, but they had gone nowhere. And he'd been waving it around at the guy in the other car. Then he'd used it to ring the police.

She had no choice it seemed, but to go out to find him. She went through to the kitchen, put on her jacket, picked up her bag, then she tore a blank page from her notebook and scribbled a note for Scott.

‘Time now nine
-
thirty. Aaron fine. Gone to look for you. Wait here. Marilyn. X.'

She propped the paper against the kettle, then turned to look at her notebook again. She opened it to the poem about her mother. She still had the pen in her hand and suddenly in a swift flurry of inspiration she wrote four new lines, which seemed for the moment at least, to sum up and allow an escape from the troublesome poem.

She would cross them out again tomorrow, of that she had no doubt, but at that moment it had been important to write them down, to say in words that she recognised the source of her mother's exaggeration, even while she chided her for it. Chided herself too, for buying into it.

She recapped the pen and put it, as was her habit, diagonally across the open page.

In the hallway she retrieved the house key from its hiding place and before unlocking the door she stood at the bottom of the stairs straining to hear any sound from upstairs that might suggest that Aaron was not asleep.