Split Second (10 page)

‘They didn’t tell you?’ Andrew said.

‘No.’ Why not? She was angry that no one had seen fit to keep her informed.

‘They didn’t give us many details, but they were bothering Luke first, then they all got off, Jason as well.’ He hunched his shoulders over, looked down at his hands. ‘I was in the house,’ he said. ‘By the time I got outside . . .’ He shook his head. ‘My wife Val, she saw some of it, she called the police. The three of them were . . .’ He hesitated, swallowed. ‘They were kicking Luke. Jason went for one of them, he managed to pull him off, then as I came out he was pushing the smaller of the boys away. Then they all ran off. We don’t know who used the knife.’

She sat for a moment trying to picture it, constructing it from what he had told her but at the same time not wanting to. ‘Just instinct, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You see a fight, you want to stop it, especially if it’s three on one. Natural reaction.’

‘Is it?’ He looked peculiar. She couldn’t tell whether it was anger or some other emotion; fear maybe. But there was a tremor in his eye, a gleam of something sharp.

She thought of instances: kids brawling outside school, a scrap at a wedding, the pockets of violence on the demos her grandad had taken her on, a set-to once in the off-licence. Always that churning inside and the urge to separate the warring factions, calm them, admonish them. Stop them. ‘Yeah, it is. People do it all the time.’

He looked stricken. His son had died doing it. She felt a rush of sympathy, then the grip of guilt. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘You must wish he hadn’t.’

‘My wife thinks he was very brave.’ There was a tension to him that made the hairs on Louise’s arms stand up.

‘And you?’

He frowned hard, the furrows deep on his forehead, the skin along the edges of them bleaching.

If it had been reversed, Louise wondered, if Luke were dead, murdered because he’d intervened for this man’s son – what would she feel? Torn open, harrowed beyond sound judgement.

After a moment he took a breath. ‘But the stories you hear, people standing back, turning a blind eye, letting it happen . . .’

She remembered fragments of stories: a girl raped on a train, a homeless man set alight. She chose her words carefully, the atmosphere dense between them, his need magnetic. ‘Maybe you only hear about them because they’re so unusual, out of the ordinary. Or when something goes terribly wrong, like this. All the other times, when someone knocks it on the head and it’s over, that’s not newsworthy, is it? “Man breaks up fight, trouble nipped in bud, brawl averted.”’

There was the faintest hint of a smile on his face.

‘The papers were there when we got back on Monday, soon as they’d released his name,’ she said. ‘All these vans and cars, people with microphones, the phone ringing off the hook. It was like being under siege.’ She recalled the sensation of being harried, trapped. They wanted her to come out and speak to them; they wanted to pick apart her feelings for the nation to see. She and Ruby had had to sneak out the back and ring a cab from Angie’s to take them to the hospital the next day. ‘Have you had them?’

He shook his head. ‘We’ve been staying away; we’ve only just gone home.’

Of course, she could have kicked herself. ‘Home’ was where it had happened; how could they have remained there in the aftermath? There was a silence. She looked at Luke. After a while, she spoke again. ‘It’s not knowing I find hardest,’ she said. ‘Who they are, why they picked on Luke.’

‘Jason walked into the house,’ he said. ‘He . . .’ His voice shook, his grief bloomed between his words and Louise felt her back stiffen. ‘He didn’t know he’d been stabbed. We didn’t know until it was too late.’ He paused. ‘I keep seeing him.’ He stole a glance at her.

Louise didn’t speak.

‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said.

‘No,’ she agreed. She wondered whether he’d told his wife. If she saw Jason too.

He gave a heavy sigh and sat back in the chair, rubbed at his throat. ‘Is there anything else they can do?’ His eyes, pained, moved to Luke.

‘No,’ Louise said. ‘It’s just a waiting game now.’

‘Jason was in here – well, next door, St Mary’s – when he was born. Premature. He was having fits. For a while it looked like he wouldn’t—’ He broke off.

Louise tried to think of something to say, keen to divert Andrew from his suffering. ‘Luke wanted to go in the army,’ she said. ‘I made him wait. Didn’t want him in danger. You never know, do you?’ If she’d said yes, would he have been safer?

‘Mum?’ Ruby was back from the café. Louise was relieved to see her. Andrew stood up.

‘Ruby, this is Andrew, Jason Barnes’ dad.’

Ruby swallowed, nodded.

‘I’ll be on my way,’ Andrew said.

‘Perhaps we could swap numbers?’ Louise said. ‘Then if you hear anything else . . .’

‘Of course.’

‘What did he want?’ Ruby asked when he’d left.

I’m not sure, Louise thought. ‘To see how Luke was.’

Ruby sat down. ‘There’s carol singers downstairs collecting for the WRVS. What’s that stand for?’

As Louise told her, she thought more about Andrew Barnes, wished there was something she could do to ease his pain, and knew there would never be any way to make amends for the terrible sacrifice Jason had made. The sacrifice that had saved Luke’s life.

I
t was almost dark when he left the hospital. He felt drained, hollow. He kept stumbling. The gusts of wind were spinning litter about, sending carrier bags jinking down the streets. Drifts of food cartons and drinks cans rattled in corners. Squalls of rain spat at him. He was indifferent to the groups of partygoers with their tinsel and antlers, the shoppers laden with bags, the beggar sprawled on the pavement, the pools of water underfoot and the drunk roaring red-faced at the traffic.

Jason went past on his bike. He hadn’t any lights on. Andrew went to call out, to warn him, then the chill came over him. He increased his pace, trying to warm up. He couldn’t feel his toes. Could do with a drink. There was a pub on the corner, snowflakes sprayed on the windows, coloured lanterns strung round the building. He imagined the scene inside, the yeasty smell of beer, the golden glow in the mirrors at the bar, the giddy bonhomie. Walked past and on until he found a newsagent’s and grocer’s, grilles over the glass and a notice: ONLY 2 SCHOOLCHILDREN IN SHOP AT ANY TIME. Above that, over the door, the ‘Licensed to sell’ plate.

He bought a half-bottle of brandy, the brand unfamiliar. The first swig hurt his gullet going down, but soon the numb sensation spread, making his mouth cottony, softening his spine, releasing the rigidity in his shoulders, befuddling his brain. He took another draught of liquor, belched and carried on home.

There were fresh candles outside the house, next to the fence, but the wind had blown the flames out. He wondered who had brought them, who had taken time from their Christmas preparations to remember Jason.

Three faces turned to greet him, conversation suspended. Val and her close friends Sheena and Sue. He felt like an interloper. He’d expected her to still be where he’d left her, curled up in Jason’s duvet.

‘Oh, Andrew.’ Sheena, always more demonstrative than he cared for, came to hug him. There was no way he could avoid reciprocating. He wondered if she could feel the brandy bottle in his pocket, smell his breath. He felt unsteady on his feet, feared he might topple over, pin her beneath him in some ghastly faux-pas.

Sue followed. ‘So sorry,’ she said. He knew they had been over to see Val while they were at his parents’, but this was the first time they’d encountered him since it happened.

‘Get a glass,’ Val suggested, but he caught the lack of conviction and knew it would be better all round to leave them to it. Good for Val too; she confided in these friends unreservedly. Their friendships went back years, and although at times they all met up as couples at social events, the men, their other halves, never made independent arrangements. He realized there was no one he saw of his own accord any more. He’d be hard pressed to know who to invite out for a pint and a session putting the world to rights if the fancy took him. Everyone had disappeared into marriage and children and he assumed that they, like him, relied for intimacy on their families.

‘I won’t, thanks.’ He was aware of the slur in his words, his tongue clumsy. ‘I’ll, er . . .’ He was going to say get a shower, but suddenly that sounded callous. He waved one hand upstairs.

He was cold to the core. He hadn’t had a bath in years, but now he ran one, deep and hot. His skin prickled as he stepped in, goose bumps breaking out on his arms and legs. He took a drink from the brandy and set it on the side. He sank back, gasping at the heat, until only his face and knees protruded.

Jason aged five, in the bath, screaming in terror as a large moth batted about inside the lampshade. ‘It’s only a moth,’ Andrew kept saying, ‘it can’t hurt you,’ as he rigged up the stepladder.

‘I hate moths,’ Jason had sobbed. ‘Take it away, Daddy.’ Hysterical with panic, then screaming, and Val getting him out of the bath into a towel, an edge to her voice. ‘That’s enough, Jason, stop it now.’ Disliking his display of fear. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she’d said.

‘He can’t help it,’ Andrew had protested. The furry moth still smacking into the shade, little puffs of powder exploding as it collided with the glass.

Val glared at him. The wrong response. She believed they must be consistent with Jason, and to be fair, they did see eye to eye on most aspects of parenting, but Andrew recognized in her an impatience, a hardness even, that he didn’t share. She talked of toughening Jason up, and resilience and independence, and Andrew would look at the small boy and wonder why love and protection weren’t enough for now. The child’s neediness, his dependency, seemed to rankle with Val, a burr under her skin. She was a practical, dispassionate nurse whenever anyone was ill; caring for her baby with chickenpox in the same manner as she’d looked after her parents when they each became infirm: her mother with dementia and her father with a series of strokes.

Her whole family had been like that really: practical, unsentimental, sharing a belief in hard work, common decency, moderation and frugality. Val’s father had taken over the family ironmonger’s in the late fifties and expanded into general hardware. They’d all worked in the shop, Val after school and on Saturdays until she escaped to university. Once their parents were gone, dying within a year of each other when Jason was seven, her brother got out too. Single and in his thirties, he decided to travel. To everyone’s astonishment, he had entered a monastery in Thailand. He informed Val by postcard. She never heard from him again. They didn’t even know if he was still alive.

They had no way to tell him about Jason.

Andrew had found Val a little intimidating on first acquaintance. Beautiful, with that fine blonde hair and her cool cover-girl looks, but overpowering. It was a union meeting, local authority branch in the upstairs room of a pub. The first he’d attended. He’d have died of boredom but for the antics of this young woman, who repeatedly challenged standing orders and queried points of procedure. He didn’t follow all the ins and outs but could see that some sort of power struggle was under way. Val was a shop steward in environmental health. The meeting ended, they adjourned to the bar downstairs and Andrew ended up sitting opposite her. She interrogated him about the proposed cuts in the planning department and invited him to a fund-raising benefit for anti-apartheid.

He thought she was just drumming up business, but she gave him her undivided attention at the event. He offered to walk her home, and she laughed and said she was hoping for more than a walk. She took him back to the room she had in a shared house and they slept together.

The bathwater was cooling. Andrew drained the last of the brandy and got out. As he lay in bed, he could hear the cadence of conversation downstairs. He woke just after three and his head was throbbing, his stomach cramped. He made it to the bathroom just in time, puking over and over again until he was spent and the waves of nausea receded.

He fed the stove, took some ibuprofen and lay down on the sofa. Waiting for morning to come, for the day to pass, for another night to descend.

More snow had fallen, smothering everything thick and white. Clouds hung feathery in the sky, their edges an oyster sheen. Louise threw scraps out for the birds and watched them come: the robin and the sparrows. A white Christmas. It was cold, too; she could feel the bite of frost in the air, the snap of it as she breathed in.

Much of the country had ground to a halt, airports closed, cars abandoned, trains marooned. It seemed fitting somehow: the muffled unreality of the weather, the suspension of normal life, the eerie hush, the extreme cold and glittering white world an apt backdrop to Luke in his frozen state, in his white sheets in his quiet white room.

Carl had gone home for Christmas. He had offered to stay, said to Louise that he didn’t like to leave her when she was in the middle of a crisis.

‘You’re fine,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll spend most of the time at the hospital anyway. Besides, your mother’d kill me.’

He’d grinned. Carl had told her all about his mother, an old-school matriarch who would clout her kids for the slightest indiscretion and was fierce as a tiger in their defence. Carl was the baby. He tried to get back once a year, at Christmas time. He’d spend almost three days travelling there on coaches and trains.

‘We’ll take our presents in to Luke,’ Louise told Ruby on Christmas Eve. ‘Open them there.’

‘I thought we weren’t doing anything.’ Ruby was practising her dance routine; none of their rooms were really big enough, but it was too muddy for her to do it outside. After the holiday she’d be able to use the school dance studio during lunch break.

‘Well I’ve got you both a little thing,’ Louise said. ‘I’m not taking it back. And you’d better have got me something.’ Knowing full well that Ruby had done her Christmas shopping and had made a point of asking Louise on three separate occasions what her favourite colour was.