The Kindness (2 page)

‘Let me go.’ She tried to stop her voice shaking. ‘Please let me go. Let me go, let me go.’

‘Promise not to leave me and I will,’ he said, as though this was just play-fighting and it was simply a matter of getting her to say ‘Submit’.

‘Let me go!’

He was attempting to kiss her.

‘Leave me alone.’

She was exhausted and lay impassive, though her heart was still knocking. She could feel his slobber and tears on the back of her neck.

‘Take down your jeans.’ Her favourite red shirt was now ripped in several places.

‘Don’t be stupid, Chris.’

‘For old times’ sake before you go.’

Julia knew she’d wear the shame for ever, but she was suddenly just tired.

He pulled her jeans to her knees as soon as she stopped resisting and spat into his hand.

The loose frame of the back door rattled; the wind was building up again outside. Her stomach churned as she thought of another night, windy like this one, the same part of the Downs where she’d flown Lucifer earlier.

They’d been ‘lamping’ with a powerful light fixed to a truck and a helpless rabbit in the beam. Chris’s hawk swooping low into the ring of light, like a skater in an elaborate cape and hooking its talons into the rabbit’s spine, shielding it with its mantle as it screamed. Chris on his haunches stretching the rabbit’s neck: ‘It’s kinder this way.’ She didn’t hear a crack and it continued jerking its hindlegs, running nowhere. ‘Just nerves,’ he said, presenting it like a sacrifice, and the bird ripped strings of meat from its throat while its legs kept pumping.

He took his time. She begged him not to come inside her. But he did.

At last he relinquished his grip and rolled away into his sea of dirty laundry. She stood shaking and pulling up her jeans, and flew at the door and over the steps with no one to run to but Julian.

FIRDAWS

August 1997

One

There are no photographs of Mira now. A drugged sleep, a ringing phone, a room full of daylight that has been cleansed of her existence. Julian surfaces, arms flailing, and wakes to a morning with no reason for waking. There is no sticky bottle of Calpol by Julia’s side of the bed, no chewed copy of
Goodnight Moon
by his. The doll baby has disappeared along with her cardboard-box cot from the corner where Mira played. Even the extra little pillow they had kept between their own in tacit approval of the nights she crawled in between them has been tactfully removed. Julian ignores the phone and buries himself deep beneath the sheets, sinking back into a fug that smells only of himself so that he has to curl into a ball to bear it.

Another August day dawns blasphemously close to midday with his arms and hands so groggy it is an effort to silence the phone when it starts up again. It’s stuffy. He has to keep the windows shut against the creeping night-scented jasmine because it’s been giving him a headache of late. Birds squabble among its vines, something scritches at the glass, a distant cow bellows. A flare of light cuts through a gap in the curtains, dust motes swirl and though the picture is missing from his bedside table, Mira’s face is the first thing that swims into focus: Mira, with a crown of daisies and sunshine in her hair.

He’s clumsy on the stairs, grabs the handrail to stop himself falling. He’s an old man of twenty-nine before the double hit of nicotine and coffee. Crocked up and scratching beneath yesterday’s T-shirt and boxers, automatically stooping his head beneath the beam at the turn and again at the door to the kitchen. The dog dances around him, out of kilter with his mood, tail whacking the back of his legs, oblivious to anything but the emergency of its bladder and bursts like a cork through the door, runs sniffing among the fruit trees. Before setting the kettle to boil, Julian scrapes meat into the dog bowl and lands the fork with a clatter into the sink.

Outside there’s the slam of a car door, the indignant cough of an ignition. He heaps coffee into a pot. The drawn curtains at the front (which, of course, Julia had wanted to change) are gauzy with sunlight. He keeps them closed so the people who come knocking might believe him not in. At last the car drives away.

There remain Sellotape traces on the fridge door. They show up more on bright days like this, tiny ziggurats at the corners of spaces where once had been a cut-out zebra daubed black and white; a face painted on a paper plate; an abstract in pasta shapes; a nursery timetable; a strip of photos from a booth, Mira’s eyes surprised by the flash and big as flying saucers; a red and yellow painted butterfly; the merry wave of her handprint.

Inside the fridge there’s nothing much to want apart from the milk for his coffee. Half-wrapped butter sits stippled with crumbs. There are meals that his mother has prepared, not knowing what else to do, their contents marked on cardboard lids. Lemon chicken, lasagne – things he especially liked as a boy – banoffee pie and Persian stews with nuts and oranges, barberry, almond and lamb. She’s added extra labels:
You must eat
and
Made with love
. It’s a wonder there isn’t one declaring:
You will get over this
. There is a tray of eggs that Katie Webster’s mother left at the front door, speckled browns from her Marans. He thinks briefly of boiling a couple but his stomach tightens, leaving little space for anything other than salty grief.

He wanders, slurping coffee, to his study. The dog trots in from the garden, finds him sitting there with his chin in his hands and slumps at his feet with a deflated sigh. Julian’s desk is about as welcoming as a pool of stagnant water, its surface littered with Post-its. His computer is poised for action; a bunch of pens offer their services from a green glazed jar. Again there’s a space to which his eye always wanders, where once had been a photograph in an ebony frame. The picture has been taken away along with everything else. There will be no asking for it back.

The jar for his pens was made by his mother, the glaze partially oxidised in sawdust so it is almost metallic where darker rivers run through it. He has everything he needs: Pentel V5s in black, blue and red, new foolscap, ink and toner for the printer, packets of gum, tobacco, Rizlas and all the time in the world.

He reaches a hand to the bottom drawer of his desk. Resists. Daily he must stem the urge to check it’s still there. One scuffed shoe: the left. Soft leather. Mira’s with a T-bar and a silver buckle that she’d almost learned to do by herself.

The dog stretches, shoulders twitching, throwing his master baleful looks. Julian’s mother will ring, she won’t mention Julia, she won’t talk about Mira: everyone agrees it’s for the best. She’ll ask if he’s eaten, if he’s managed to take Zephon for a walk. ‘It would do you good, walking always does,’ she’ll say and the forced brightness of her tone will bring an extra bleakness to his day.

He slides open the drawer.
You will get over this
. The shoe is the only thing there. Cut-out diamonds in the leather and a whitish crêpe sole. Her heel has left a grubby print where it says
Start-rite
inside. She was a good little walker right from the start: he remembers the tug of her hand, the determined hoppity-skip of her steps. Her shoe is a little rough across the toes, worn down on the outer edge of the heel. She’d walked too soon – at eleven months and thirteen days. He remembers the feeling of slight loss that quite shamed him as she made it triumphantly across the room. Mira, the jutting of that determined chin announcing that she wouldn’t stay a baby for long. Always keen to be somewhere else. Her ever-pointing finger: ‘There, over there . . .’

He closes the drawer, tries to make himself focus on work.

Above his desk is a window, jasmine wreathes across leaded glass, vines reaching and twisting in double helixes. The sun throws patterns across the flotsam of yellow Post-its. Their corners curl, his scribbled words have faded and some are circled by coffee from his mugs. Sometimes he reads what’s written – a short description of something, a phrase, the odd metaphor – and tries to make sense of it.

‘And so it came, this dark messenger, flapping towards him like an omen,’ says one in ancient biro. What omen? But it is his writing.

‘Gather a cloud around us to secretly make love (Homer?),’ scrawled across another like ancient code. Time passes.

In the kitchen he shovels down something slippery from a tub. As for walking, the poor dog lives in a state of dashed optimism, darting to the door each time Julian stands from his chair to ease his back or pace, scooting back and forth like a cheerleader, prodding him with his nose.

‘OK, OK, let’s go out,’ he says, opening the door. They get as far as the outbuildings, the dog twirling around his legs, before Julian is defeated by voices along the lane.

He returns to his desk, wakes his computer, makes himself check his inbox but fails to answer a single email. It doesn’t help that the pills are making him muzzy. The dog stays outside, barking at swallows to annoy him. He stares at his mystifying notes, though they might as well be written on papyrus: ‘They disappeared into the mist, arm in arm, like lovers walking into the pages of a book.’

He wonders what it all means but for now can do nothing much but rest his head in his arms and think about Mira.

Missing pictures haunt the spaces they once inhabited. Indelible, though gone from her ebony frame, Mira is a sunny baby in Julia’s arms. The front door to their flat in Cromwell Gardens is ajar, a mild April morning with the dust just starting from the plane trees and Julia concerned that the baby’s eyes might get irritated. Mira has the gummy smile of a pixie, on her head a flecked red wool hat with a green stem at its centre, like a strawberry. She’s in a white billowy dress for her party, across which Julia has managed to get her name appliquéd in red felt.

Mira Eliana. Mira
for the miracle and wonder of her birth (from the Latin
mirus
‘surprise’). The second name sprung on him by Julia on the day they registered her at Hornsey Town Hall. Eliana. According to the book of names it had Hebrew roots meaning God-given, or Greek ones relating to the sun.

It had a good ring. Mira Eliana. And it made sense, for he had been present for the miracle: the midnight sunshine of her birth.

Julia had made him promise to stay away from what the midwife called ‘the business end’. But the South African doctor was calling: ‘She’s crowning!’ And Julia’s face was turned away. ‘Quick!’

A membranous dark dome was forcing its way through the lividly splayed folds of Julia. Her thighs were bloody and the head was emerging, pushing and stretching her into a purple scream. She was propped on her elbows panting, hair clinging to her forehead (tentacles it was his job to hold back), as the crown pressed towards him like a giant eye from its socket and was born in a splatter of blood.

‘Oh God, Julia,’ he cried three times, overcome by a sudden flood of remorse.

‘My baby, is my baby all right?’ her only concern.

Julian can see it all: the birth room that had seemed so without charm when they arrived, the stern bed and banks of monitors, the optimistic primrose-yellow walls, squishy bean bags piled in a corner. As she’s placed in his arms, Mira’s quavery wails shoot to his heart and a golden light – impossible because it is the middle of the night – starts spreading throughout the room.

He sits beside the bed and someone tucks a white waffle blanket around the baby and slips a tiny cotton cap over her head. He cradles her in the trembling hollow between the crook of his elbow and his chest and she stops wailing with a quiver of her lower lip. A look of deep concentration takes over, her fingers play an invisible harp. They are opening and closing around the astonishing lightness of air and her forehead furrows into a deep V beneath her new cap while she considers this strange phenomenon. He lifts her closer to his face to reassure her, pressing his lips to the softness of her skin, breathing her new smell of warm bread and hot blood.

The South African doctor, who seemed a little grizzled only hours before, takes on the sun-kissed sheen of a movie star, his coat and teeth pearlescent. ‘She’s a beauty,’ he says. Mira is moving her mouth, trying out shapes and pursing her lips, her cheeks surprisingly rounded and as soft as new mushrooms. Julia wears the pale face and pellucid eyes of a saint, turning her head on her pillows, cooing to the baby girl in his arms while the doctor finishes stitching. The anaesthetist, who Julian had only partially registered previously (when the gauge of the needle she’d pushed into Julia’s spine had made him go genuinely weak at the knees), has a pretty Irish voice and a halo of red curls. She clucks over the baby. Mira yawns and locks on to his gaze, her eyes so steady he feels she is reading his mind.

‘There, you can give the baby to Mum now.’ The doctor snapped off his gloves. ‘You’ve done very well,’ he said, patting Julia’s thigh as though she was a favourite filly. Even that failed to rile him as Mira continued staring into his eyes.

Almost reluctantly he broke the contact to place her into Julia’s waiting arms and sat beside the bed quietly in awe of the pair of them. Watching them falling in love. Murmuring. Crying. Julia unbuttoning her nightdress.

A tractor has started up nearby, its droning amplified and falling as it drags the baler back and forth along Horseman’s Field. A distant shout brings him back to his desk. His emails remain stubbornly unanswered. Michael is cautiously broaching one or two outstanding questions: the design for a slipcase of his entire
Historical Dogs
series awaits his approval; his film agent wants him to sign up to write
Fletch le Bone III
.