The Concrete Grove (6 page)

Oh, they still shared something like love, but it wasn’t the same kind they’d known before. The feelings had changed, mutated, as they were battered and torn in the accident, and then they had re-emerged as a form of duty.

Tom watched her eat, trying to take pleasure from the fact that she was still alive. At least she still lived. But he knew in his heart that living was something she no longer really did: all she was capable of was existence.

When she was done he took the tray and left her bedside. He turned back at the door, looking at her, but she was concentrating on her book. It was a paperback mystery, the kind she couldn’t get enough of these days. It puzzled him that although she was terrified of everything outside the front door, she enjoyed reading about murder and mayhem. Perhaps the fictional horror helped keep her real-life fears at bay.

“I’m going to work for a while. Shout for me if you need anything else.”

She did not look up from her book. “Thanks, I will.” Her eyes blinked behind her small reading glasses and she licked her colourless lips. She had not even noticed the soup stains on her nightdress. She was so utterly unconcerned with how she looked these days that it had passed her by.

She used to be beautiful
, he thought.
So very beautiful
.
Like Lana Fraser.

He left the room and closed the door, leaning back against the thin wooden panels and feeling moisture gather in his eyes. He looked at the tray, at the dirty, red-smeared bowl and the crumbs on the plate, and he realised that he’d always fucking hated tomato soup.

The memory of what he had seen on his way home – the dog with a boy’s face – came back to him. If he was seeing things, imagining monsters, nobody could blame him. His life was a slow implosion of duty and regret. Tom knew that he was going under, that things were getting to him in a way they never had before, and perhaps his strange vision was a result of his conflicted emotions.

Wouldn’t any man who was forced to wipe his wife’s arse after she took a shit in a plastic bowl, and then struggle with her spongy, shapeless form to pull up her pants experience some form of breakdown? Not to mention the fact that once she had deteriorated enough to have the bag and tubes fitted, it was up to him to keep them washed and sterilised. Didn’t that justify some kind of emotional upheaval?

Now that he was home, and away from that grotty estate, he could rationalise what had happened. The thing he thought he had seen out there in the darkness could not possibly exist. His mind had conjured a demon to represent his inner turmoil – that’s what the psychology books and websites he occasionally read would say, anyway, and he was inclined to agree with them.

But still he could not shake the fear he had felt when he thought that he was being stalked – or, to be more precise, when he felt hunted. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was real, and the terror had been so strong, so overpowering, that it had felt like a twisted kind of happiness.

Jesus, was he so messed up that he now equated fear with a feel-good factor? He laughed softly, but even to his own ears it sounded forced, as if he were trying to convince an unseen listener that he was taking none of this seriously.

The truth was, of course, that he was unable to do anything else.

He went back through to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher, wiping down the work surfaces before slipping the washing tablet into its slot and pressing the buttons to set the machine away. The dishwasher thrummed softly, a soft voice singing in a foreign language. He closed his eyes. The sound was almost soothing.

Closing the door on his way out of the kitchen, Tom made his way upstairs to what he still occasionally liked to call his study, a room that had once been the guest room, where their friends had stayed after entertaining dinner parties and drunken conversations. The room had served as his office for ten years now, since Helen had come out of hospital to be cared for at home.

Ten years. It felt to him like a lifetime, a span of time that he could barely make sense of. How had it become so long so very quickly?

He booted up his computer and waited for the programs to load. He knew that he should start work immediately, but felt restless. There was no way he could settle down this evening, not without something to calm him. Internet porn? Meeting Lana had certainly stirred his libido. But no, it didn’t feel right. Maybe he’d hit one of the regular forums and chat for a while with his faceless friends – other lonely carers reaching out across cyberspace to try and make their own lives seem less empty.

The computer screen flared into life.

Tom ran his fingers over the mouse, trying to make sense of his need.

Lana. Lana Fraser.

What’s your story, Lana Fraser?

Tom opened the browser and without thinking about what he was doing he typed her name into the search engine. The name was not uncommon. The search summoned a lot of unrelated hits, but halfway down the first page he saw the one he wanted. His eyes were drawn right to it, as if he were meant to see the details.

It was a link to an article in a local newspaper, dated eighteen months ago:

… Mrs. Fraser has lost her home… murderer… wife and daughter… prominent businessman killed himself…

Tom clicked his cursor on the link and was taken to the relevant page. He read the article, feeling sad and horny and shameful. There was a photograph of a much younger version of Lana, black and white, clearly taken some time ago. She was wearing a dark suit. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She looked glamorous and sharp as a blade.

He had no recollection of the story, but must have read about it at the time. Her husband had murdered three people – shady businessmen with organised crime connections – and tried to make the killings look like gangland assassinations. They were revenge killings, brought about because of an investment that had gone sour. When his crime was uncovered, and he became aware that the police had marked him as their top suspect, Timothy Fraser, aged thirty-eight, had taken a small-calibre handgun and shot himself in the face. He lived on in hospital for a week, in a coma and under police guard, and then he died.

Lana had lost everything: her home, her money, her lifestyle. It had all been taken by administrators to cover the cost of the bankruptcy and pay back her dead husband’s debtors.

Tom needed a drink. He pulled open the top drawer of his desk and took out the whisky bottle and tumbler he kept there. He poured a large measure, knocked it back in one. Then he poured another, smaller amount into the glass and returned the bottle to the drawer.

“Lana Fraser,” he said, his lips burning slightly. “I think we might both be in need of a friend.” He took a sip and closed his eyes, then threw back his head to enjoy the swallowing motion as the harsh liquid flowed down his throat to light up his insides like a flame.

CHAPTER FIVE

L
ANA SAT IN
the chair by the window and watched the fire in the sky. She wasn’t sure what was happening out there, or where exactly the source of the reflected flames was located, but at least it wasn’t right outside her door. That, at least, was a comfort.

These days she took her comforts where she could, and they were always small. So small, in fact, that she was often unable to pinpoint them amid the general chaos of her existence.

The flames burned on, beautiful and pitiless, as if a great furnace door had been opened.

Only last week Lana had been sitting in the same position, sipping a similar glass of Chardonnay to the one she now held, when some kids had let off a firework in the street outside. The rocket had arced up into the sky and then turned slowly towards her window, striking the glass. The crack was still there: it was paper thin, barely even noticeable, but she saw it every time she looked through the window. She’d called the council, trying to get a workman to come out and replace the pane, but her request had been met with a wall of apathy.

“Little bastards,” she said, gripping her wineglass, not knowing if she meant the culprits or the council workers. The fire in the sky shimmered, as if in response, and then it dimmed before giving off another surge of brightness.

Kids, it was always kids. Places like these, council estates inhabited by the people society had shoved to the bottom of the pile, were full of ill-mannered kids out to cause trouble. Some of the parents didn’t care, many of the ones who did simply lacked the skills to manage, and the schools were unable to cope. The rest got lost in the shuffle.

It was just the way of things; there was nothing anyone could do about it. The situation had gone too far, the rot was set too deep, and the country had long ago accepted this kind of anti-social behaviour as the norm at a certain level of society. The level she and Hailey now occupied.

It seemed like there was a constant stream of bad behaviour on the estate: lighting fires, vandalising private and public property, killing house pets, bullying the incapacitated. It never stopped. There was no end in sight.

It all amounted to just another night in the Concrete Grove.

Hailey was in bed, dreaming of whatever she craved for these days – no doubt pining in her sleep for everything they had lost. Her bedroom door was closed, perhaps even locked. She had never locked her room at the old house in South Gosforth. Back then, there had been few secrets between mother and daughter. But now, in this new life, it sometimes seemed like secrets were all they had, the only things that kept them close. They shared nothing but the fact that they hid things from each other. The glue that bonded them was impure, toxic.

The details of what had happened to Timothy constituted one of those secrets. At first Lana had even tried to keep it from Hailey altogether, but once the newspapers and the local TV news started reporting the story, that soon became impossible. So she was forced to tell the child at least part of the truth – the fact that her father had been broken by life and chose a dark way out. The effort to keep the secret from everyone else – to remain tight-lipped around the estate in which they now lived – had finally brought them together again. The bond they shared was not the same as the one they’d had before, but it was all they could hope for under the circumstances. Quite frankly, Lana suspected that it was now the closest thing to love they would ever know.

She sipped her wine and wondered whether she could possibly summon any more tears, or if her well had finally run dry. Then, disgusted with herself, with her stupid self-pity, she emptied the glass and refilled it. She was getting drunk. Her eyes were heavy and her mind was blurred, as if layered in cotton wool. She could no longer trust her emotions, or her instincts.

But that was good: she liked being drunk. It made the lies seem more like truths.

That man. The one from earlier this evening. What was his name? Tom? He was nice. She smiled at the memory of his nervous grin, his loose limbs, dumb T-shirt and silly running shorts. Why was she thinking of him now, at her lowest ebb? Was it because, for some reason, when she had spoken to him she had felt less alone?

“Fuck,” she said, enjoying the way the word tasted of wine and stolen kisses. “Get a grip, woman.”

Now that she had time to think about him, Tom seemed even more attractive than he had when he’d brought Hailey home. After Hailey had gone to bed, Lana finally had the time to consider what she had felt as he stood there, bare-legged and shaking in her doorway. Clearly he found her attractive too – Lana was experienced enough to recognise the signs. But it was more than that, deeper. There was a connection between them, a quiet spark that had simultaneously slowed down and speeded up the short time they’d spent together. He was older than her, but that might even be part of the appeal: a figure of authority to cling to in the night, when her demons came loping towards her out of the dark.

Lana struggled to understand the thoughts in her head. The wine, the night, the worry over Hailey and those weird fainting spells, it was all setting her off balance, confusing her to the point where she no longer felt that she could trust herself to do the right thing.

But what was the right thing? And how would she recognise it? There were no rules here, no written bylaws she could follow. Everything was fluid: even emotions were up for barter.

She took another mouthful of wine, held it, and then swallowed. The taste was good: bone-dry and woody, just how she liked it.

When the telephone rang she took a few seconds to register its quiet buzzing. Frowning, she glanced over at the handset where it rested on the windowsill. She stood and walked to the window, once again looking at the fiery darkness hanging above the distant silhouette of Far Grove.

Sirens drew close as she reached out to pick up the phone, as if the sound had been triggered by her motion.

“Hello.” Her voice was bounced back at her through the earpiece – a fluke of acoustics, or a fault on the line. “Hello,” she said again, and this time she was answered by a thick, heavy silence.

Feeling her heart swell in her chest, Lana waited. She knew who it was. There could be only one man who would call her so late, and project such a sense of menace down the line.

The line hummed. It sounded like distant wings, hundreds of them, beating so fast that it filled her ears with a single note.