The Man Who Built the World (20 page)

They had made a beautiful, healthy boy look dead to their eyes.
Ian had rushed from the room, unable to stand it, tears glistening in his eyes. Red, sobbing, had stroked the baby’s tiny face, his big hands the size of the child’s body. He had wept, looked across at Bethany’s sleeping form, and looked back at the baby. A dead baby. His stillborn son.

Liana knew they ha
d done more than steal his child. They had taken part of his soul away too.

That day she
had promised herself never to do something that cruel again, whether it might end up saving them all or not. Red and Ian had no idea just how important little baby Jack was. To them, to the sisters, to Gabrielle, and now to Bethany.

‘He won’t remember,’ Liana said.
‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Even his obscured memory might be enough, you stupid fool.
Who knows what he might cause if he starts shooting his mouth off? You’re an idiot!’

‘I’m sorry –’

‘Oh shut up! I’m sick of hearing it.’

Liana bit her
lower lip and continued to wash the dishes. She hated her sister sometimes, for her total lack of compassion, but knew she might as well hate herself. And she knew her sister was right, but even so, it just didn’t make believing her words any easier.

At least she would still get the baby.
Elaina would soon tire of him, leaving Liana to step back in and take over. Elaina could never hold any sort of compassion for long.

‘Matthew’s sick, you know,’ Liana said.

A moment passed, then Elaina’s voice floated back from the living room. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘He’s got too much of his mother in him, I think.
He hurts. The seeds planted the night he tried to kill his father have grown. Until recently they’ve been dormant, but in the last few weeks they’ve begun to bloom.’

Elaina shifted in her chair.
‘Speak English, for God’s sake. What on earth are you blabbing about?’

‘Violence and corruption.
It’s like a force he struggles to control. I could feel it inside him, emanating out. It was hot, it almost burnt me.’ She pulled the plug from the sink, watched the water and the bubbles drain away. ‘He drinks heavily as a means to escape it, to try and control it, but it just makes him worse.’

‘So what makes him any different
to the rest of the human race?’

Liana went through into the living room and sat down on the couch opposite her sister.
She swung her legs up under her and rubbed her hands. She hated the cold.

‘He doesn’t want to be the way he is, but he has so much anger inside him.
He blames his father for everything that happened.’

‘And why not
? It was because of Ian that all this started in the first place. He should have left Gabrielle alone. It
was
all his fault.’

‘You know as well as I do that Gabrielle found him.
It had nothing to do with Ian.’ Liana’s eyes drifted, and she smiled, a long, wistful smile. ‘If you had been Ian could you have left a beautiful woman alone in the forest? Could you? They found love, Elaina. Don’t you understand?’

‘Pah
! You and your love of romance. It’s all a waste of time if you ask me.’

‘Well, you would say that.’

‘And
you
would say
that
.’

They stared at each other for a while, having reached some sort of stalemate.
As always, Liana could never understand the heartlessness of her sister, any more than Elaina could understand the unbreakable compassion that Liana felt for everything. They could only understand that each, as opposites, felt compelled to feel those things, and that their painstakingly achieved agreements would eventually bring them to a definitive and usually correct answer.

‘Just go tell him to try some Feng Shui or something,’ Elaina said at last, with a bitter smirk.

‘Don’t you see? His anger might be part of it. It might have unsettled her.’

‘Well why don’t you go find him, give him a good seeing to, bring a smile back to his face and then it’ll all be okay again
? How’s that for an answer to all the riddles of the universe, eh?’

‘Oh . . .
you
!’ Liana scowled as much of a scowl as she could.

They were silent for a while.
Then suddenly Elaina stood up, held the baby out from her and muttered several expletives under her breath. She startled Liana, who had drifted off into a daydream.

‘Come and take your baby, if you want him so much,’ Elaina growled.
‘Let him do this to you.’ She indicated a damp patch on her skirt then rushed out of the room.

Liana smiled, hugging the baby tightly in her arms.
‘Don’t like her, do you, my sweet one,’ she cooed softly. ‘I don’t blame you, she’s a real misery guts. But you showed her, didn’t you?’

The baby, just a few weeks old, gave her a little smile, and Liana felt a tear well up in her eye.
She would absolutely die for a child of her own.

‘Well, while I’ve got you, I’m going to look after you,’ she said quietly, rubbing the child’s nose with her little finger.
‘But now I’d best get you changed.’

She stood up and carried the baby through into the kitchen.

8

Ian and Red faced each other across the table. Two mugs of coffee stood between them, wisps of steam drifting up into the air.

A couple of months ago, the precarious world they lived in had slipped out of control.
At the time neither had understood, both had been blinded to something that had turned both their lives upside down. Now they understood, could see the answers through the mist. Matt’s floundering, demented intervention had been the soft, revealing light through the fog.

They both knew what they had to do.
After they had finished their coffee they would get up and head out to Ian’s truck. They had a journey to make, a short one by distance, maybe, but in terms of the journey of their lives perhaps the longest one of all.

They were almost ready.
They knew the importance of time; both could sense that little remained before whatever needed to happen,
happened.
But they were weary, so, so weary. Their bones felt heavy, their skin felt dragged down by gravity, sucked into the soil of the earth, and they stood alone, just soul and flesh, burdened by the knowledge of their past and aware that a culmination of everything might be close at hand.

But they had time to rest briefly before they got up to go.
Enough time for a coffee, and a few minutes of quiet reflection.

For a few final minutes together
as friends.

Red smiled and shook his head.
‘It’s funny really, thinking about it. All these years, and I never told you.’

‘What’s that?’
Ian’s response was muted, his eyes had glazed. He was thinking about Gabrielle, Bethany and Matthew. All dead or out of reach, all lost.

Red didn’t look Ian in the eye.
‘I never told you about why I didn’t ever marry.’

Ian looked up, lifted one eyebrow.
‘I assumed you never found the right girl, Red. Huh.’ He grunted a short laugh, the deep-throated sound of a cornered dog, but one ready to submit rather than fight. ‘Not everyone gets married, Red. It’s a myth of childhood. Children see their parents and think that’s how it is. They don’t see the full picture until they’re adults themselves.’

‘I guess it was difficult for you, wasn’t it
? Me and Bethany together.’

Ian smiled, took a sip of coffee.
‘You’re right. I struggled with that for a long time.’

‘I could tell.’

Ian shrugged. ‘But I figured, after a time, what with her mother dead and her brother deserting her –
us
– and also her disability, she deserved to find some semblance of happiness. I thought, you, if anyone, would do good by her.’

‘I tried my best.’

‘I often wondered how you communicated, how you managed to speak with her when no others could.’

Red shrugged.
‘I guess we had our ways.’

‘Yeah, and you can hold that.
I don’t want to know about that.’

Red shook his head, gave a weary smile.
‘I don’t mean like
that
. I mean, I guess I could just tell what she was thinking. I
knew
what was going through her head when she looked at me. I guess you’d call it intuition.’

‘Well, whatever.’

‘I hoped the kid might bring her out of herself. I asked her so many times why she refused to speak, but nothing. Not a thing.’

‘It was to do with her mother,’ Ian said.
‘So much to do with her.’

‘Gabrielle,’ Red barely whispered the word, just rolled it over his tongue like he might a lit match; respectfully, careful not to press too hard lest the flames scold him.

Ian looked up, eyes narrowing. He stared hard at his friend. ‘Red? It was
her
, wasn’t it? That’s why you never married.’

Under the dim glow of a lamp at the far end of the table, it was impossi
ble for Ian to see if Red’s cheeks darkened with colour, but such a mixture of shame and regret poured from his eyes that had it been wine it might have filled a glass.

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

‘Forever I’ve known you, Ian. Forever we’ve been around each other, as far back as I can remember. As children playing together down in the woods, as young men in the fields, now old men sat at a table sifting through memories as though sifting sand for gold. In all that time I’ve loved you like a brother. I would have given you my entire world at any time, had you asked. Everything of mine could have been yours.’

He rubbed hi
s eyes with a thick, weather-beaten finger that resembled a gnarled piece of wood. ‘And I wanted nothing in return. Not drink from your table, a book off your shelves, nothing. Except that one thing you would never have given me.’

Ian nodded.
‘I get it now. Gabrielle.’

‘I was there the day you brought her back,’ Red continued.
‘Remember? The day you came out of the forest with her in your arms, wrapped in your coat to cover her nakedness. I’d been into Plymouth, bought a few things I’d brought round to show you. Some blues records, some new clothes . . .’ He paused, shook his head, expression thick with resignation. ‘And there you were, coming out of the forest with the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.’ Red drained the rest of his coffee then held up the mug. ‘Jesus, I could do with something stronger.’

‘It’ll get us nowhere, you know that.’

Red nodded. ‘Yeah I know. This is just so damn hard to talk about.’

‘Well I guess some things have come out over the last few hours none of us really wanted to be thinking about right now.’

‘Huh. Might as well keep going then.’

Their search for Matthew had tailed off.
The house was huge; he could be hiding in any one of a number of nooks and crannies and it might take hours to find him. They had climbed up as far as the attic, looked into a random selection of rooms, but could not even be sure he had come back here. Matt had been rambling when he had run off, still drunk, and shaken up by what he had seen. He might have gone home already, though Ian didn’t think so. He could sense his son’s presence, the same way he could sometimes sense his daughter’s, and even Gabrielle’s, even though they were both dead.

No, their main concern had been what Matthew had seen, but over the course of a few p
rayers said to Bethany’s memory and the walk back up to the house, the answers had come of their own accord. Vague, absurd answers, but answers all the same.

Or at least fewer questions than before.

‘Gabrielle,’ Red whispered. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter to tell you now. That woman bewitched me. If I hadn’t seen the way those golden eyes stared up into yours, telling me
so
much
, I would have killed you and taken her from you.’

Ian just watched his friend, saw the terrible agony in Red’s eyes, the sheer heartache the words caused.
He had never thought anyone could hurt as much as he had over Gabrielle’s memory, but perhaps – just perhaps – he was wrong.

‘I would have done anything to have been you that day . . .’
Red stared into his empty mug. ‘But I guess everything happens for a reason.’

‘Maybe it does, maybe not,’ Ian said.
He watched Red. There was more, he knew it.

‘And then Bethany, of course.
I watched her all those years, watched her growing up into the beauty she became . . .’

Ian felt a sudden unease grow inside him, a black, shivery feeling that accompanied his friend’s words like a shadow at the shoulder of a haunted man.