What You Left Behind (9 page)

It was dirty but she put it on anyway.

“Who stayed last night?” she asked tentatively, grabbing a potato.

“The usual crowd. One or two haven’t gone out since this morning. They’re ill, so they say.”

Frank grabbed hold of a large piece of red meat with a bone poking out of one end and thumped it down on a wooden block. He then took an old cleaver and brought it down hard, cracking the bone in two. He did this over and over until it was hacked into stew-sized pieces.

Lana swallowed and looked away.

“Did Lenny come in?” she asked after a short while, taking another potato. She knew her mum had been concerned about him recently, had been worried about his cough. She’d wanted to keep him in, but New Hope had a policy of turning out its guests by nine a.m. sharp so the volunteers could clean up as well as giving everyone a fair chance of getting a bed later. The queue began to form about three in the afternoon, earlier on winter nights.

“No sign of him,” Frank replied. “Oddly,” he added slowly.

He threw the meat into a huge pot and wiped his hands across his face. He looked as if he’d been in a fight, had a nosebleed.

Lana instantly heard her mother’s voice:
Consider deficiencies, trauma, blood-thinning medications … Check blood pressure, platelet count, vitamin K …

Frank took the meat scraps out to the trash cans and Lana sighed, getting on with the peeling. But a moment later she heard sobbing coming from the main hall. She went to investigate and, on one of
the nearer bunks, she found someone cocooned and writhing in a sleeping bag. Whoever was in there was caught in a jet of sunlight streaming in through the tall arched window opposite.

“Are you OK?” she asked, tentatively touching their shoulder and catching a whiff of sickness and despair.

Always get involved with the guests
, her mother had told her.
Find out their stories, see what makes them tick. It’s good for your CV. You’ll get interviewed about your work experience!
Actually, she’d been wrong. Her CV, honed to perfection by her mother—eighteen years broken down into eleven straight A stars at GCSE, the same superlatives predicted four times over at A level, Grade 8 piano with distinction, Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award, and enough work experience for Lana to qualify as a doctor without even going to medical school—hadn’t prompted any of the four university interview panels to ask one single question about her work at New Hope.

Lana tried again. “Are you OK? Do you need help?”

The thing was, even though the interviews were over, even though she’d got an offer to study medicine at Imperial College London if she got the A grades in her exams, Lana still kept coming back to New Hope. Sometimes she wondered whether she was trying to assuage some of the guilt she still felt over Simon’s death. She wondered if her mother felt this way too.

She patted the shoulder of the pupa-like wrapping. A mass of sweaty hair emerged.

“No.”

Lana recognized her voice. “Cup of tea?”

More wriggling, and then a hand came out of the sleeping bag, followed by a face.

“Abby, you don’t look well. Do you want some water?”

Another shake. In fact, all of her was shaking.

“I’ll get you some.”

When Lana returned from the kitchen, Abby was sitting up in
bed scanning the jobs section of the local paper. She took the drink and shoved something into her mouth from the palm of her hand. It got washed down.

“Are you staying for lunch?” Lana thought she could do with a good meal.

“Dean would have loved that job,” she said instead of replying.

Lana could hear Frank in the kitchen, grumbling that he’d been left alone to prepare the meal.

“What job?”

“Vet’s assistant. He liked animals.”

Lana turned her head sideways and read the job description. She fought the curl of pain in her stomach. “It’s the kind of job that vet sci students might apply for in the holidays.” For a second, she heard her mother’s once-keen voice sounding within her own.

“What’s vet sci?” Abby said, turning her dark eyes on Lana. Her voice was thin and bitter, like the rest of her. Apart from her expanded pupils, she was barely there.

“It’s short for veterinary science,” Lana said. She didn’t want to say that Dean would have had no chance of securing a job like that, that you needed qualifications, ambition. “Simon was going to be a vet.”

She froze for a second as she realized what she’d just said, then turned and rushed back into the kitchen.

“Who’s Simon?” Abby’s thin voice somehow filled the entire hall.

But Lana was peeling potatoes again, fighting back the tears, incapable of an answer.

G
IL APPEARED AT
the window, making her jump as she washed her hands at the sink. One side of the kitchen window still had chipboard nailed to it, waiting for the glazier to fix it; Gil was peering in through the unbroken side, his face looming like a large moon.

Lana put her hand on her heart. “Jesus, you scared me. Where’s Dad? Did he bring you?”

Gil held up two black plastic bags stuffed full of clothes. “He’s waiting in the car and he said I have to bring these to you.”

Lana snapped off the rubber gloves and opened the back door.

“Has Mum been having a sort-out?” she asked, but Gil was already shaking his head.

“Mum’s nowhere to be found,” he said.

Lana smiled, guessing she was tending to the horses. Gil often got muddled, sometimes even forgetting that he was her uncle or that Tony was his elder brother.

He handed the bags to Lana just as one split open. An assortment of male clothing puddled at her feet, as if their wearer had magically disappeared from inside them. And when Lana saw the rugby shirt with the stitched-on name label at the breast, she realized that was kind of true.

“Bye then,” said Gil, and headed for the door.

“Wait.” Lana bent down to retrieve the rugby shirt and ran her finger over the embroidered name.
Simon Hawkeswell
. It was the second time in five minutes that she’d been faced with her dead brother. “Whose idea was it to get rid of this stuff?”

“Tony said to bring them, he said they were in the way. I tripped over.” Gil rolled up the leg of his long shorts to expose his kneecap. It had the red crown of a fresh bruise.

Think patella
, her mother said in her head.
Consider X-rays. Cartilage. Hairline fractures. Reduce the swelling. Immobilize and ice …

“Ouchy,” Lana commented.

She knew the tack room had been used for all sorts of dumping over the years, not least for Gil. He’d been moved out there not long after Simon died, when his artwork took over the house. Her dad had got fed up with all his mess and converted the little outbuilding into a place for his brother to enjoy some independence. Lana had felt bad for him at first, as if he were an unwanted possession, like
Simon’s things—stuff that no one had the heart to get rid of completely but didn’t want in the house.

“He likes it out there,” her father had said.

“He’s perfectly happy,” her mum had agreed.

And Gil did seem content living in the tack room. It had a wood-burner, a kitchenette with a couple of cupboards from Ikea, an old sofa, and an ancient boxy television rigged up to receive all the channels. There was no bathroom so Gil used the gardener’s toilet and washed standing up by the kitchen sink. Lana always knew when he’d sneaked into the house for a bath because of the earthy scent he left behind.

“Thanks for bringing the stuff, Gil.” She tried to sound grateful. She’d had no idea Simon’s things had been bagged up to be given away. She’d not been in his bedroom since it happened.

“Dad said you have to give them to the homeless people,” Gil said.

Lana felt a pang of sadness. She smiled and nodded, placing the bags on the table. When she looked round, Gil had gone.

S
IMON HAD BEEN
big and healthy, sprouting out of himself for as long as Lana could remember. Abby was twig-like and drugged, her head poking out of the wide neck hole like a dried-up autumn berry. Simon’s shirt was massive on her.

“How do I look?”

She was lying on her bunk, smoothing the bloated curve of her belly, the only large thing about her. Lana thought she looked like a famine victim.

Think mineral and protein deficiencies
, her mother shrieked in her head.
Electrolyte imbalances, dehydration, and muscle atrophy
.

Her stomach clenched at the thought of the exam results. She remembered her papers being collected up and whisked off to an
unknown marker who would decide the rest of her life with a few quick flicks of a pen. She felt sick. The pressure was on, now that Simon was gone.

“You look great,” she said quietly.

Sometimes she hated Simon for what he’d done to them all. He’d played in the first fifteen. He was fit. He was the best-looking lad in his school
—the jock
, Dad used to tease proudly. He’d gained a scholarship to university for that autumn, won essay-writing competitions. Got straight As and played the violin. Everyone was his friend. The girls adored him. He was going to be a vet. Then he hanged himself.

“What else you got in the bags?” Abby had finally got up off her bunk after the effort of digesting a sparrow’s portion of lunch had worn her out.

Think enzymes, peristalsis, Crohn’s disease, or celiac sprue
, her mother’s voice suggested.

“There are a couple of T-shirts. They might be good as nightshirts.” Lana pulled out some more clothes, trying to stay dry-eyed and pragmatic about her brother’s possessions. “What about this one? The color will suit you.”

“Really?” Abby queried, as if she’d never had a gift in her life.

“Really,” Lana said, pressing it into her hands, noticing the skull ring hanging on a chain around Abby’s neck, the one that Dean had always worn.

There was a sudden bang as Frank came into the hall, his heavy boots echoing on the floor.

“I need a word,” he boomed, his voice causing Abby to shrink back onto her bed.

Lana swallowed. “Yes, of course,” she called back, wondering if she’d not peeled enough potatoes.

She walked quickly to the kitchen and Frank closed the door, shutting them in together.

“It’s about the burglary,” he said in a much quieter voice. He came up close to Lana and she reckoned she could smell something sweet and boozy on his breath. “The police were in touch.”

“Do they know who took the computer?” She couldn’t help the quiver in her voice.

“Indeed they do,” he replied, his voice now barely there, ghosting out from between his rotten teeth. Frank’s hands reached out to her shoulders, his fingers sinking into her skin. “Indeed they do.”

8

Lorraine wanted nothing more than to give her nephew a big hug. He looked surrounded, defeated, and utterly miserable.

“So not even the beer-battered fish and chips would tempt you?”

Lorraine’s hands twitched, wanting to take hold of him, show him that however much he was hurting she would try to help.