Wake Wood (5 page)

Tommy nodded sagely. ‘You found a good one there, Arthur, no mistake. He knows how to doctor beasts.’

Patrick glanced from Ben to Tommy. They were so alike, not just in looks and clothes but also voices – they could have been twins. ‘Want to keep your hand in, boss?’ he asked Arthur.

Arthur shook his head and smiled. ‘Ah! If only I could.’

A phone rang. Arthur reached instinctively into his pocket but it was Patrick’s mobile that was ringing. It was a critical moment in the operation. Still caught in the amniotic sac, the calf was visible through the gash in the mother’s side. Ben came forward to give Patrick a hand.

‘Steady there.’ Patrick supported the sac. His phone stopped ringing. He didn’t have to check the caller ID. He would phone Louise after he’d stitched up the cow, when the calf was on its feet and he’d made sure that the mother had taken to her offspring.

‘You don’t miss the blood and muck of the farmyard
then
, Arthur?’ Tommy grabbed the hip flask Arthur was handing him, unscrewed the top and took a deep pull of brandy.

Arthur shook his head and offered Tommy an open pack of cigarettes.

Patrick stopped Ben from reaching for the calf. ‘Not yet, Ben,’ he warned. ‘Slow and careful does it.’ Patrick inserted the scalpel into the gash he’d made in the animal’s side and made an incision in the amniotic sac, slicing it through. Blood and fluid spurted out, adding to the film that coated his overalls, the wall behind him and the floor of the pen.

Ben winced and turned his head aside.

‘Everything all right there, Patrick?’ Tommy called out anxiously.

Patrick didn’t answer. Frowning in concentration, he reached inside the incision he’d made in the cow’s side. A squelching filled the air as he fought to get a grip on the calf. ‘Here we go.’ He pulled out the forelegs of the young animal. Slowly at first, then in a gush, the body emerged, squirming and wriggling in a stew of blood, amniotic fluid and afterbirth.

‘There,’ Arthur said proudly, as if he were the one who’d completed the operation. ‘A new life and no harm done to mother or young one. It looks a fine calf too. Well done, Patrick.’

‘Yes, well done,’ Ben and Tommy echoed.

Patrick set the calf on the floor of the pen and pushed it towards its mother. The cow bent down and licked her offspring. It was a sight that Patrick had seen often but it never failed to thrill him, although he was too
preoccupied
by thoughts of Louise’s telephone call to enjoy it.

He knew that if he’d answered her call there would have been more silence than conversation. Nine months into their new life in Wake Wood and still he was waiting for his wife to start living again. Would she ever? Could she without Alice?

Louise allowed Patrick’s phone to ring four times before ending the call. She leaned against a wall and looked up and down the street before remembering she’d left the pharmacy unlocked and with a customer inside.

Retracing her steps, she hurried back. The pharmacy was empty. After a quick check that everything, especially the drugs cabinet and till, hadn’t been touched, she closed the shop for the day. She emptied the till and placed the takings and float in her handbag. She went outside, shut the door and took her keys from her pocket.

What did it matter if she closed early? It wasn’t as though the pharmacy was ever that busy, even after the doctor’s surgery. If anyone wanted something desperately they’d return in the morning.

She inserted her key in the lock but started when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned her head to see Mary Brogan standing behind her.

Mary had been one of the first people to introduce herself when Louise and Patrick had moved into Wake Wood. Louise had estimated her neighbour’s age as late thirties or early forties, but there was an air of girlish naivety and unworldliness about her. Mary dressed like
a
latter-day hippy in long flowing skirts, beads and scarves, and today was no exception.

Her waist-length hair was tied back from her face with a broad rust-coloured scarf that matched her dress and home-made tote bag. Her long green home-knitted cardigan was knee-length and far too large for her slim body. Her face was pale and drawn.

‘Are you closing?’ Mary stated the obvious.

‘I was. Did you want something?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, but I was hoping to get something for a headache.’

Louise hesitated, fighting the impulse to walk away and say, ‘I’m sorry but I’ve already locked the till.’ But something in Mary’s manner made her withdraw the key.

‘Come in.’ Louise opened the door and they entered the pharmacy together. ‘A headache, you say, Miss Brogan. What kind? Stabbing, dull ache …’ She looked along the shelf of painkillers that could be bought without a prescription.

‘Please call me Mary. Don’t mind me asking, Mrs Daley, but you’re very pale,’ Mary observed. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Louise hadn’t meant to snap. She took a box down from the shelf and gave it to Mary. ‘These are mild but they work for most people.’ She stiffened when she saw someone moving behind one of the cosmetic displays. Someone she was sure hadn’t been there when she’d closed up minutes before.

A painfully thin, willowy adolescent girl, with long dark hair and a stone-coloured coat worn over a striped
sweater
and slacks, came into view. She glanced slyly at Louise from beneath her eyelids and murmured, ‘Hello.’

‘I didn’t see anyone else come in.’ Louise shivered as the temperature dropped suddenly and dramatically. It was as though someone had opened the door to a freezer and left it open. She looked to Mary in confusion. ‘Are you together?’

‘This is my niece, Deirdre. Come for a short visit to Wake Wood,’ Mary explained.

‘Hi there, Deirdre.’ Louise forced a smile. She watched Deirdre take an asthma inhaler from her pocket. The girl tried to use it, but it clicked, unmistakeably empty. That didn’t deter the girl. She continued to click it again … and again … and again.

Clearly uncomfortable with her niece’s odd behaviour, Mary intervened. ‘It looks like you need a refill, Deirdre.’

‘May I?’ Louise held out her hand to take the inhaler. Deirdre handed it to her with an awkward smile.

‘Thank you.’ Louise checked it.

Deirdre turned back to the shop and looked around at the walls and shelves crammed with health and beauty products. ‘When did you do this place up? It’s totally different to what it was. Much nicer and brighter. And so many more things to buy. Nice things, hair grips and cosmetics and scent.’

Louise struggled to keep her equanimity. ‘It was finished just recently.’

‘Not that recently,’ Mary Brogan elaborated. ‘It must be nine months or more by now.’

‘Something like that.’ Louise tried and failed to sound casual. So many months without Alice. So many.

‘And in that time, you’ve worked wonders. Hasn’t she, Deirdre?’ Mary looked at her niece.

Louise held up Deirdre’s inhaler. ‘Ventolin, one hundred micrograms. Can I see your prescription, please?’

Mary glanced at Deirdre. Louise wondered if she’d actually seen or imagined guilty looks being exchanged.

Embarrassed, Mary began to rummage in her bag. ‘I might have it in here. I always hang on to everything. It needs a good sort-out.’ She lifted out a hairbrush, a purse and a pair of gloves.

Louise continued to watch Deirdre, then, realising she was staring, made an effort to be pleasant. ‘So … how long are you visiting your aunt here in Wake Wood, Deirdre?’

Deirdre didn’t answer, just continued to look around the shop. The young girl seemed odd, dislocated from her surroundings in some way, and Louise wondered if she had a problem communicating with people.

Mary finally extracted a prescription from her handbag. ‘What a relief,’ she said loudly. ‘Here it is.’

Louise took the crumpled slip of paper from Mary. ‘There’s a Wake Wood address on this.’

‘Mine,’ Mary explained. ‘The doctor wrote it out the last time Deirdre stayed with me.’

Louise read it and handed it back. ‘It expired last year. Have you another?’

Mary looked at Deirdre and shook her head. ‘No. But she needs the inhaler.’

‘I can phone the doctor—’

‘No,’ Mary interrupted swiftly. ‘No. Don’t do that. There’s no need to bother him. We’ll manage somehow. Deirdre, time to go.’

The young girl went to the door. Headache forgotten, Mary dropped the packet of pills Louise had given her back on to the counter. They left the shop and walked quickly down the road, Mary’s long skirt billowing in the breeze behind her. Two slender figures from another era.

Louise slipped her hand inside the collar of her polo-necked sweater. The shop suddenly seemed uncomfortably warm and stuffy.

PATRICK HAD SCHEDULED
the cow’s Caesarean for what he’d hoped would be the end of his working day, but he’d reckoned without a cat that had had its ear torn in a fight with a fox, and a horse with colic. He didn’t finish until night had fallen, dark, misty and waterlogged. The windscreen wipers on his estate could barely cope with the downpour and he found himself peering through a dense grey fog that obscured the trees as he headed up the lane that led to the cottage.

His blood ran cold when he saw the house in darkness apart from a single light that burned low in the master bedroom. He hadn’t returned Louise’s call. He could have if he’d wanted to. It would have been a simple matter to make time between doctoring the cat and the horse. But he just hadn’t wanted to engage in another telephone call with his wife littered with strained silences.

He parked the car, lifted his instrument case from the passenger seat, turned up his collar and ran to the front door. Unlocking it, he dropped his case, switched on the landing light and climbed the stairs. The door to the spare room was ajar.

He stepped inside but didn’t turn on the lamp. The
landing
light illuminated all he wanted to see. They’d left the room bare when they’d moved in. Bare, that is, apart from the black sacks and red bag Louise had placed behind the door. Neither she nor he had ever mentioned them. Patrick wasn’t even sure she was aware that he knew of their existence. The only emotion the bags had engendered in him until now was relief that Louise hadn’t unpacked them.

But both the sacks and the bag had gone, and recently. The area where they’d been stacked the last time he’d looked was the only part of the floor free from dust balls.

He closed the door, crossed the landing and walked into the bedroom they shared. Louise had emptied the sacks and bag on the carpet beside their bed. She lay in a muddle of Alice’s belongings, clutching Alice’s towelling bathrobe to her chest, surrounded by their daughter’s clothes and toys. The clothes even smelled of Alice. A mixture of lightly perfumed floral soap and talcum powder, a scent he associated with youth and innocence.

Louise’s eyes were wide open, focused on the photograph of their daughter she kept on her dressing table.

‘Hey.’ He stooped down beside her and gently touched her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’

She shrank away from him, moving back against the wall. Still clutching the bathrobe, she continued to look at the photograph.

Patrick rose and hesitated, but only for a moment. Squaring his shoulders, he turned his back to her and
began
to gather up Alice’s things. One by one he dropped them into the red bag, and when that was full he dumped it outside their bedroom door. He returned and continued to collect Alice’s belongings, tossing them indiscriminately into one of the black sacks.

Louise stiffened. ‘What are you doing?’

There was so much anguish in her cry that he found it difficult to ignore her but he carried on gathering and bagging Alice’s possessions. ‘I know what I’m doing and so do you,’ he answered harshly. ‘It’s like a black hole in here. We have to let in some light.’

Her voice rose precariously. ‘We can’t just take Alice’s stuff and throw it away.’

‘No?’ he challenged. He stopped gathering Alice’s things and looked down at Louise. ‘What I do know is that we can’t keep them,’ he said determinedly.

‘Why can’t you understand that I still love her, Patrick?’ she pleaded.

‘You think I don’t?’ he cried out angrily.

‘You’d forget her if you could,’ Louise retorted savagely, deliberately and knowingly hurting him.

Silence reigned in the room, thick, blinding and suffocating, while he reeled from the pain she’d inflicted.

Wishing she could take back her words, knowing she’d never be able to, Louise tried to soften her attack by pleading for understanding. ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. I’m not ready …’ Her voice trailed off and she choked on her tears.

He dropped the soft toy he’d been holding into the bag at his feet.

‘You really do want to forget her,’ she whispered so low he couldn’t be sure she’d actually repeated the barbed words.

‘You know I can’t. And I don’t want to. Alice, you … were –
are
– everything to me. Louise, please,’ he appealed to her. ‘What can I do?’

Exhausted, she slumped against the wall. ‘Let me go.’

He shook his head, refusing to accept that their marriage was over. ‘No. You can have anything you want, Louise, but not that.’

‘It’s not you, Patrick,’ she said wearily. ‘And it’s not even because of you. I left you when she died. That’s what happened. I’m simply not here for you. Not really.’

‘We still have one another,’ he insisted.

‘No, we don’t,’ she contradicted. ‘Without Alice I’ve got nothing.’

He knelt beside her, wrapped her in his arms and held her close. ‘All I want is for you to be OK.’

‘Please.’ She pushed her hands against his chest, forcing him away from her. ‘Drive me to the station. Now, Patrick. Right now.’

He went downstairs, sat at the table and sank his head into his hands. He couldn’t bear the thought of Louise leaving, but he didn’t know how to stop her. A few minutes later she joined him, coat on, bag packed, handbag slung over her shoulder.

Patrick wondered if she’d made the decision to leave before he’d even reached home. He left the chair and reached into his pocket for his car keys. She followed
him
to the door and he held out his hand. She gave him her bag.