The Pure in Heart (5 page)

‘How the hell am I going to manage?’

The woman with the child had a baby in a pushchair and two cases. An emergency platform alteration meant that she had to cross the iron bridge. She was in
tears, the children exhausted, the rain still lashing down.

‘Come on, my love,’ Andy heard himself say. He took the cases and after carrying them over the bridge, came back for the pushchair. The far platform was dangerously crowded. Rain was coursing along the gutterings and down in a stream.

‘You hold on to your little girl, I’ll get the door open and bag your seat, don’t fret.’

‘What’d I
have done?’ the woman kept saying to him. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done.’

‘Someone else would have looked after you.’

‘You can’t trust everybody, though, people are funny. I can trust you.’

Andy looked at her. She meant it. Later, he thought, he would see the humour of it.

‘Where are you going yourself?’

‘Lafferton. Near Bevham?’

‘That’s the other side of the bloody country.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You going home?’

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

‘What do you do?’

He opened his mouth. Rain was trickling down his neck inside his shirt. ‘Market gardening.’ But the train was drawing in. She was fretting over her children and hadn’t heard him.

Andy threw himself at a door as it slid by him and as the handle locks were released he was inside the train, pushing past to a seat, throwing the
woman’s case across it before going back to lift the children.

‘You’re a saint, you know that, how’d I have managed? I’d never have done this, you deserve a bloody medal.’

It was another hour before he got on a train himself. By then, the lights were back on and the wind had quietened though the rain was still sluicing down.

There was no seat and no buffet car. He sat on his bag in the gangway,
crushed next to a boy with a stereo making tinny noises.

There was no way he could let Michelle know when he might be arriving, and by now it scarcely mattered. The train stopped every now and then, for a few minutes, or half an hour. After a while, he slept sitting upright. When he woke, it was dark outside.

He wondered where the woman with the children was.

The boy nudged his elbow and passed
across a can of lager.

‘Cheers. Where’d this come from?’

‘Had a couple or three in me bag.’

Andy took a long swig of the lukewarm gassy beer.

Four hours later, he walked up the concrete path of his sister’s house. It was still raining. From one end of the street to the other there was noise, television noise, music noise, kids screaming and adults shouting noise. The orange street light shone
on a plastic tractor at his feet.

‘Bloody hell, you took your time.’ His sister Michelle looked nearer to forty than thirty and the hallway behind her smelled of frying food. She had visited him twice in prison, right at the beginning, before she married Pete Tait after divorcing the first no-hoper and started on another lot of kids.

‘What you been doing?’

Andy followed her through the house
into the back kitchen where the smell of frying was strongest. Fat was spitting up from a pan of chips on to the tile-effect wallpaper. He dropped his bag.

‘There was this storm. Gales and flooding, or maybe you didn’t look out the window.’

‘Oh ha ha, I had to bloody wade through it to get them to bloody school, didn’t I? Did it stop the trains then?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You had your tea?’

‘No.’

His sister sighed and stuck the kettle spout under the tap. From the next room the television screamed with skidding car wheels.

Andy sat down at the table. His head ached, he was hungry and thirsty, he was shattered. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be at home. Where was home? There was no home. Michelle’s was as near as it got.

‘You’ll have to sleep on the couch or up with Matt in his
room.’

‘I’m not bothered. Couch then.’

‘Well, Pete’ll want to watch the telly till all hours, we got Sky, he watches sport.’

‘OK, Matt’s room. I said I’m not bothered.’

He looked up. His sister was staring at him as she lit a cigarette. She didn’t offer him one.

‘You’ll know me again.’

‘You don’t look any different,’ she said in the end, through a face full of smoke. ‘Older maybe.’

‘I
am
older. I was nineteen. I’m nearly twenty-five.’

‘Jeez.’

She put a mug of tea in front of him. ‘Pete says you can stop just till you find something. Will they fix you up at the probation?’

‘Look, if you want me to drink up and go, just say, Michelle.’

‘Makes no difference to me. What you going to do all day?’

‘Work.’

‘You ent never worked.’

‘I’ll work.’

‘What at? What can you do?’

‘I’ve
been training.’

The chip fat spurted viciously. She dragged it off the gas.

‘What, sewing mailbags?’

‘You don’t know anything. You didn’t bother to come and find out.’

‘I wrote you, didn’t I, I sent you stuff, I sent you pictures of the kids. It was half across the bloody country and Pete wasn’t keen.’

Pete Tait. A squaddie when Michelle had married him but he’d got out when he fell off a
wall on an assault course and slammed his back. Now he sat in a cubbyhole watching a shopping mall CCTV screen from two in the afternoon till midnight. Andy knew that much from the single-page notes Michelle had scrawled to him half a dozen times a year.

‘They’ll sort me out a place. Flat or something.’

‘You want beans or tomatoes?’ Michelle was opening a packet of corned beef.

‘Whatever.’

Baked beans. Corned beef. Chips. Tomatoes. Prison food. He got up and poured himself another mug of tea. The woman with the luggage and the children came to his mind. Funny. You saw people. Talked to them. They went. You never saw them again. All the men in all the prisons. Never saw them again.

‘The kids watching television?’

‘They’re in bloody bed. It’s half past nine. I’m not one of those
lets them stay up all hours.’

She set the plate of food in front of him.

So the television was having a car chase all to itself.

‘I haven’t eaten since half seven.’

‘You want bread and butter as well then?’

Andy nodded through a mouthful of beans and chips.

Michelle sat opposite him.

‘I don’t want my kids turning out like the rest round here and I don’t want them hearing stuff from you
either.’

Stuff. The stuff was years ago, in another life. He hardly thought about it. He hadn’t been that nineteen-year-old for nearly six years in any sense at all.

‘They won’t.’

‘There’s always jobs going on security. Pete could’ve put in a word, only I don’t know what they’d ask.’

‘They’d ask.’

‘You got to do something.’

‘I told you.’

‘What then? You still ent said.’

The television
was wailing with police sirens. ‘Don’t you ever turn that off?’

‘What?’

‘You don’t even know it’s on, do you?’

‘I’ve only just bloody sat down, I’ve been on my feet all day. Anyway, Pete’ll want it on when he gets in.’

‘That’s three hours.’

‘Shut up, will you, who the hell do you think you are, telling me how to run my house, live my life, you’ve just bloody walked in after being in stir
for five years, you’re bloody lucky Pete didn’t say no, sorry, no chance, he’s not bloody coming here, but he didn’t. He said you could come.’

‘Very nice of him.’

‘Look …’

‘Market gardening.’

‘You what?’

‘I’ve trained. They have a big market garden, we supplied veg all round, shops, hotels, schools. Big enterprise.’

‘What, digging and that, potato lifting? Sounds like hard work. You never
had no practice at that.’

‘Well, I have now.’

‘They get you a job digging then?’

‘There’s a lot more to it than digging.’

‘Can you cut hedges? There’s one in front wants cutting and if you fancy digging up the concrete from the back I could have some flowers.’

‘I don’t.’

‘They give you money when you came out?’

‘I earned money. They keep it for you.’

‘Only if you’re going to eat like that
…’

Andy reached round the back of his chair for his jacket. He took out the plastic wallet they’d given him with the money that was due to him that morning and threw it across the table.

‘Take what you want,’ he said, looking at
Michelle, ‘I wouldn’t expect my sister to give me owt for nowt.’

Above the television voices of two men arguing violently, a child began to shout in the room overhead.
Andy tried to remember its name or even if it was his nephew or his niece but couldn’t.

Simon was halfway down the steep track into the ravine when the sky, which had been gathering over his head, seemed to have been slashed open, releasing a deluge of rain. He cursed himself for having decided to continue in spite of the darkening weather rather than head back to the car and now he held on to the scrubby bushes at the side of the path as the water rushed down around him, taking
small stones and debris hurtling with it to the ravine below. He was already saturated and his boots were full of water. The air steamed and the wind whipped up a mini tornado overhead. It would pass quickly but in the meantime he knew it was dangerous to carry on down into the ravine and almost impossible to struggle back up to the moor above him.

In the end, he crouched, holding on to the roots
of the tough little bushes, and waited as the world broke around him.

Once, a couple of years before, he and two colleagues had pursued a man out here not in rain but in a snowstorm. Simon still remembered the
fear he had felt as the criminal had pitched himself over the edge and begun to slither down the steep side of the ravine. He had been high on crack cocaine and armed with a butcher’s knife
and the car he had stolen lay upside down and on fire. Simon had been heading the pursuit; the call as to whether they went down into the ravine after the man had been his.

He shuddered, remembering. Yet police work still excited him; he still loved the chase better than anything and his only regret about his promotion to DCI had been that he would be out there in the thick of it all less than
before.

He had been right. He now spent more time than he enjoyed behind a desk. But the solution wasn’t easy to see. Ought he to have shunned promotion? What kind of career would he have had then, chugging along as a DC until retirement, his lack of ambition noted and derided?

The rain had soaked his canvas bag. He shifted his weight and almost lost his balance and slipped. Up had got to be
better than down.

He had gone fifty yards or so, head bent against the driving rain, across the open moor, when a motorbike skidded up beside him out of the storm.

Simon could not hear what the rider was shouting to him out of his helmet visor but he understood the man’s gestures and climbed up behind him, drawing up his legs against the flying swirl of mud around them.

Ten minutes later they
were back in the comparative shelter of the car park. The motorcyclist lifted his visor again and shouted above the roar of the bike’s engine in reply to Simon’s thanks. ‘You’re all right.’

He had turned in a spatter of mud and stones and spun off down the track. Simon followed, driving off through the storm to the Deerbon farmhouse at Misthorpe. On very rare occasions he shied away from the
silence and empty spaces of his own home.

Halfway to Cat’s his mobile beeped a text message.

Ma here. Wants talk re Martha. Come 2 supper?

Simon pulled into the side of the road.

‘It’s me. I’m at Hassle. I was on my way over anyway.’

‘You haven’t been on the moor in this?’

‘I have and I’m drenched. I’ll need to borrow some clothes from Chris. I nearly fell down the ravine.’

‘Simon, are
you trying to send me into labour?’

‘Sorry, sorry … listen, can you talk? What’s this about Mother?’

‘Yes, she’s upstairs reading to Hannah. She came on here from the hospital. She wants to talk to us all … well, Chris and me, and she asked if I could raise you.’

‘Dad?’

‘Not sure.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. I think that’s the problem.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘Who, Ma? Bit tight-lipped.’

‘OK
… anything else I should know?’

‘It’s roast chicken.’

‘On my way.’

He loved the farmhouse. He loved everything about it, outside and in, loved the way it sat, long and low and grey-stoned in its fold of paddocks, loved the two fat ponies leaning over the hedge as he went by, loved the chicken run and the garden which was never immaculate or well weeded but always more welcoming than his mother’s
prize-winning designer half-acre, loved the hugger-mugger of a porch, full of wellington boots and milk bottles, loved the warmth and the tumble of his nephew and niece and the cat on the old sofa beside the Aga, loved the cheerfulness and urgent medical conversations between his sister and brother-in-law. Loved the happiness the place gave off, the smell and noise and love of family life.

He
pulled in beside his mother’s car. The rain had lessened. Simon stood for a moment looking at the lights of the farmhouse streaming out. From somewhere inside he heard the children shout with laughter.

Is this what’s wrong? The question came back to him for the thousandth time since the death of Freya. She might have been inside a house like this one waiting for him, there might have been his
children …

A twist of pain. Yet he could not always remember what she had looked like. They had had dinner together. She had had a drink in his flat. There had been …

What, precisely? Precisely nothing.

Easy to regret nothing.

He walked across the gravel and opened the porch door. The smell of roasting chicken wafted out.

‘Hi.’

His sister Cat, moon-faced in pregnancy, huge-bellied, came
out of the kitchen to meet him. Simon thought suddenly, this is why there was nothing. Freya was not Cat. Nobody is Cat. Nobody else can ever be Cat.