The Unblemished, page 14
What, yours or mine? she suddenly felt like asking. She didn’t like the man’s skin. It was too pink, and bumpy, like an orange. He had a bad scar on his jawline, livid and white, perhaps a shaving accident. She guessed with skin so uneven he sustained a lot of nicks and slashes. She also didn’t like the set square parting in his hair, which was too ginger to be described as red, or strawberry blond, which was, she ventured, how he liked to see it. His eyes were too small and close-set. His teeth were uneven. His shirt had not been ironed, or ironed too well …
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I spend far too much time staring at old curiosities.’ She wanted to laugh again. The urge was in her like that of wanting to pee.
He seemed discomfited by her apparent slur, but was either too polite or too stupid to challenge her on it. He put down the magazine he had been reading, and Sarah noticed with a pang of regret that he had been studying one of the stapled supplements, a map or graph of some kind, and that it had been inserted the wrong way up.
‘What do you do for a living?’ she asked, then chided herself for being so upfront. What was he going to say: My name’s DCI Doe. Would you come with me to the station, please, madam?
He seemed mildly astonished by the question. ‘I’m an insurance salesman.’
Oh yeah, sure you are.
‘Is there anything I can help you with?’
‘Possibly, Miss –’
But she wasn’t falling for that. She simply arched her eyebrows.
‘I’m interested in old watches. I collect them. Do you have –’
‘We’ve not got any watches at the moment. You could try the antique shop, just up the lane.’
‘How about clocks?’
‘Not really. The stuff we stock is a little further down the antique food chain.’
‘If I could leave you my card … you could contact me if something horological came in.’
Horological. Very good. Boning up on his subject back at the station before he came over …
She took the proffered white rectangle and gave it a quick glance: Mick Goodhart, Salesman.
‘Could I have your name? Just as a point of contact?’
Point of contact … police if ever she heard it.
‘Ray Carver owns the shop. You’d be best speaking to him.’
‘And you are?’ He wouldn’t give up. He was staring at her, unblinking. To evade him again was to incriminate herself.
‘Martha Peake,’ she said, removing the Patrick McGrath novel of the same name from the desktop. She gave him a piece of paper with the junk-shop name badly photocopied across the top and its contact details.
He made a play of inspecting an opened tin filled with brooches, but she could tell he wasn’t really looking at them, and then he quietly turned away and walked out of the shop. She followed him to the door, fully expecting to see him climb into an unmarked squad car and radio in to HQ, but he was standing by the window of the furniture shop, staring at a dining table. She watched him pull a hand from his pocket and assess his loose change, then he crossed the main road and entered the fish and chip restaurant.
She wiped her hands against her blouse, as if ridding herself of his oleaginous residue; she could still smell him, a mix of stale tobacco and coffee, and something else, something acrid: shoe polish, maybe. Brasso. Wrinkling her nose, she went back to the counter.
Claire was no longer reading. She was asleep, her face laced with weak, wintry sunlight. Something chased her in her dreams; she was restive, agonised. She was mouthing words that Sarah had to stoop to get any hope of understanding. Millimetres from her daughter’s face, she thought they might have been Come to me.
A yellow comma of slime was curled across her top lip. Sarah dabbed it away with her finger, wondering if Claire might have sneezed in her sleep. When she saw the broken spider in her left hand, moist, too moist to be alive, missing five of its legs and most of its abdomen, she recoiled.
It’s okay, she thought, it’s okay to eat insects in your sleep … most of us do it without knowing.
The way she was holding it, though, like some little fondant fancy. Like some … some fucking praline.
‘Claire? Claire, darling?’
She stirred a little, enough to lift her hand with the remainder of her snack and try to push it between her teeth. Sarah gave a strangled sob and slapped the spider from her fingers. Her daughter came up out of sleep fast, her eyes bloodshot, a snarl wadded in a throat that sounded too wet, too animal. Her teeth were shocking. White. Deep. Like a shark’s. Sarah clattered backwards, knocking over a chair and skinning her back on the hinged edge of the counter.
Claire’s aggression faded as quickly as it had risen; she slumped again, sucking her fingertips, making babyish lalling noises. A few moments more and it was as if Sarah were seeing her asleep for the first time. She seemed peaceful, content. Sarah shakily got to her feet and drew the blinds. The sudden darkness made her feel giddy, spangled with fear. She retreated into the cold space of the junk shop and busied herself with tidying the magazines the so-called Mick Goodhart had disturbed. She did not go back to check on her daughter. She waited for her to wake naturally. When she heard her stirring, a little less than half an hour later, it was all she could do to stop herself from running out of the junk shop and away down the high street.
My baby. My baby. Where are you? Where did you go?
Later. Had she slept? She must have done; the darkness was somehow less dense, less invasive. Nevertheless, she did not feel refreshed. Claire’s hand was no longer within her own. She reached out but the duvet had been thrown off. The dimpled area where Claire had been was now cold.
Sarah switched on the bedside light and sat up, blinking, a fist tightening inside her chest. Sometimes Claire preferred to spend the night by the window, staring out at the dark. Frequently she did this while nude, no matter how cold, her skin rising off her in a pimpled mass. But she was not sitting by the window now. The door was ajar. It was just shy of 5 a.m. At least, Sarah saw as she hurried to get dressed, her daughter had taken her clothes with her.
She closed the door behind her and put her hands to her face. Stupid. Stupid bitch. Who was that aimed at? Her. Her daughter. Both. It didn’t matter. Just get on and find her.
The door across from hers opened. It was Nick, the barman. He was in a pair of shorts. Soft, trancey music followed him out on to the landing.
‘You doing a runner without paying?’ he asked.
‘It’s my daughter. She’s gone.’
He held up one finger, his face suddenly serious. He ducked back into his room and she was suddenly convinced he would return with Claire, freshly deflowered as some kind of rebuke for Sarah’s lack of interest in him.
He returned in seconds, wearing boots, jeans and a hooded top. He handed her a sweater. ‘It’s cold outside,’ he said. He carried a heavy black torch with a long handle. Sarah hadn’t considered that her daughter might have gone out. She thought she would be in the lounge, or sitting at the bar, but a cursory check suggested Nick was right. The wind bit her as they stepped into the street. A brindle cat moved rapidly along the row of shops opposite, belly low to the ground. There was nothing else.
The sky was tinged with green where dawn touched it but it was still too dark to see properly, especially away from the streetlamps.
‘Are there any cliffs?’ she asked in a small voice, seeing the worst, as she could never help but do.
‘Not near here,’ he said. ‘Further, much further up the coast. Don’t worry.’
It seemed too quiet to start calling Claire’s name, but she chastised herself for being so stupid. She cried out for her as loudly as she could and was bolstered by Nick echoing her call.
She didn’t know where to start. She looked to Nick for leadership and he was moving off to the left, in the direction of the sea. She followed, guessing it was the best place to begin. If she had been a wounded teenager, she’d prefer the mystery and sympathy of all that black water, although she felt bad about reducing Claire’s problems to some hormonal sulk. The street forked, becoming narrower. A bookshop, a tweedy clothes shop, a fishmonger’s, a charity shop, all reflected her image as they moved towards the beach. She hated the reluctant stoop of her shoulders, as if already weighed down with the awful truth of her daughter’s death. Or even worse, the unforgivable wish that she was gone, because life would be so much easier.
A pub on the left, the Lord Nelson, was the last building before the world dropped away to nothing. Although she couldn’t see the sea, she knew it was there; it sucked what light there was out of the sky, creating a dark band, like a huge no entry sign. She called for Claire again and Nick reached out, held her arm.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘I mean, stupid question, I know, but … do you want to wait here?’
‘No,’ she said, and shrugged herself free, pushing past him, down the steps to the shingle.
‘Claire!’ The wind made a mouse of her voice. Minute, pale tiles of light showed her where the rebuilt pier reached away from the land. Behind her, strange smudges of orange hopscotched away, as far as she could see. She turned to Nick, his torch beam picking holes in the darkness.
‘Night-fishing,’ he said, when she asked him what it was. ‘We can talk to them if you like.’
Her exhaustion and fear tossed up awful images, her brain would not stop with its terrible games. She saw herself pulling back the flaps of one of the fishermen’s tents to find someone baiting a hook with slivers from her daughter’s face. Downwind from Nick she called for Claire again and let the name turn into a howl of pain. She screamed it all out until she felt dizzy, sick, better. She was turning to follow Nick back towards the tents when she saw a flicker of white.
At first she thought it was litter, a page from a newspaper or a white carrier bag caught in the stones. But its movement was too controlled, she believed. She approached cautiously.
‘Claire?’ she called, but again the wind nipped in and shredded her voice. She turned away from the force of it and her hair bracketed her face; sensation came back to her skin. She waved to Nick, shouted his name, and the beam of his torch swung her way, picking a route through the shingle towards her. She turned again into the teeth of the weather and stopped walking. She desperately wanted to establish whether the restless shape was her daughter but the persistent play of shadows bothered her. It was like looking at an omen, of something due. Sarah didn’t want to be confronted with something she didn’t understand. She was worried that what was up ahead might be nothing more than the denigration of her own mind. Nick could confirm or deny that for her. Unless he too was an invention. She felt like laughing. At any moment, all of this – the beach, the sea, the village – would unravel, revealing her to be sitting in a chair wearing restraints, grinning through a haze of tranquillisers.
Nick arrived by her side, his breath steaming out of him. He smelled good, of clean sweat and too much wine. She liked the gently hollowed area beneath his cheekbones, the soft, boyish sweep of his jawbone, the cheerful curve of his chin. Bed hair that no amount of brushing could tame. She felt suddenly attracted to him, and simultaneously appalled that she should allow her carnality any headway when her daughter might be in jeopardy.
Nick was staring into the same anarchic spot on the beach as she, which was, in one way, a good sign, but only served to heighten her anxiety about Claire. She felt herself moving forward, impelled by a decision she had apparently come to in some ancient part of her that didn’t listen to reason or sense or in fact anything inspired by the brain at all. This was a chapter in her life that needed animal responses. All that mattered was protecting her baby, whom she still loved to the point of distraction. It didn’t matter that she liked to eat spiders. It was a trifling matter. Hadn’t she herself had a habit of eating worms and soil as a child? Claire could be a mass murderer of disabled children for all Sarah cared; her love transcended anything.
Nick was saying something to her now, but all she could hear was the slow beat of the tide against the stones. The arc of the beam from the lighthouse became something too intense to look at; it slowed, as if affected by the treacly rhythms of the ultra-black ribbons winding themselves around that penetratingly still white heart. Every pulse of acid-white light illuminated the lovely ruin before her as it collapsed and reassembled itself, like wounded tissue knitting itself well again at supernatural speed.
Claire’s face swam out of it, upturned, gilded, rapturous. She was rising and falling, like breath made solid. She was moving as though beneath the thrusting body of a lover.
Sarah cried out and sensations swarmed back into her. She ran to her daughter as Claire, startled from her reverie, fell back against the shingle with a sickening crunch. She was still smiling when Sarah reached her, Nick’s torchlight flashing crazily across the stones, and her daughter, as he rushed to keep up.
Her lips were black, the teeth behind them stained too, as if she had been eating licorice. Sarah scooped her up in her arms, immediately aghast by the weightlessness of her, and picked her way unsteadily back to the road at the top of the beach. The noises Nick was making coalesced into sense again now that she had Claire safely back in her arms.
‘We should call an ambulance, don’t you think? She’s in her pyjamas. She could be suffering from hypothermia.’
‘No. She’s fine.’
‘She is not fine. She could be in shock. Shock is a killer.’
Sarah made his voice go away, simply turned down the volume and allowed her own thoughts to provide an obscuring clamour. Once she had reached the road, she sat Claire down on a bench outside the Nelson. The silence here, guarded by sleeping buildings from the asthmatic sea, was shallow and wrong. She felt threatened, as if whatever had detached itself from Claire were still in close proximity, perhaps watching them, looking for an opportunity to steal in again and whisk her away.
Claire could not sit up unsupported; she lolled her head against her breastbone and smiled drunkenly. She turned sportive eyes upon her mother, but the pupils were dilated, beyond the capability of focus. Sarah shrugged off the sweater Nick had given her and wrapped it around Claire.
‘We have to get her back to the room,’ she said. She hooked her arms under Claire’s armpits and waited for Nick to grab her feet. He had stopped trying to argue with her.
She felt a swelling beneath her fingers; Claire hissed and writhed when she palpated it. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, but her daughter wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer. Sarah brushed away Claire’s flapping hands and tugged back her nightshirt. The flesh was blue-grey under the streetlamps. The lump was a tight, neat ball of shadow rising out of her skin. It was hot to the touch. ‘Claire,’ Sarah said. Her voice contained no weight. ‘Baby, what is the matter with you?’
They puffed and cursed as they carried the girl back to the hotel, despite her lack of weight. It was as if, in swearing, in pretending Claire was an awkward piece of furniture being shifted from one place to another, they could manage the insanity of the evening more adroitly. But the charade was forgotten when they moved into the light of the hotel lobby and colours – specifically the red smeared over Claire’s mouth – came back to their world.
14. PACK MENTALITY
A DREAM. THE strangest dream. Instead of being asleep and seeing everything as though still awake, this was the other way around. Surely it was. Bo was awake, and seeing everything from within dreamland. He had better be. Oh Christ, he had better be.
A flat tyre on the Ninja. A determination not to let the enclosed spaces, his new fear of people (what was that called, in the great dictionary of phobias?) cow him. Push your chest out. Flex some muscle. You are as good as, if not better than, any of these fuckers. Stalking hard these cold London streets he thought he knew so well, and yet all of the shadows and shapes seem so alien to him now. The cold is like something he could peel off the air; layers of it fasten to him, slowing him down, turning him sluggish.
At Russell Square tube station he sinks gratefully into the heat of engines, diesel and crude body warmth. The slam and clatter of ticket barriers, sliding doors; the blur of legs, the expressionless choirs of monotony. The sway of carriages as the tunnels sheathe the train. People who don’t know each other, don’t want to know each other, moving in concert, a sexless fuck rhythm. A coming to and sliding away from.
Where are you going? He doesn’t know. He bought a ticket, he boarded a train. North or south. It doesn’t matter. This is a dream. The dream will sort itself out.
Only somewhere between stations, a foot lands against his and the pain rockets him out of that cosy, seductive illusion. This is real. The people around him are real. He looks at them: the seven in his half of the carriage, sitting primly on the vomit-patterned upholstery.
Directly opposite, the man with the grey hair and the grey trimmed beard. The tanned skin. A copy of the Financial Times and a worn leather briefcase. Blue suit. Red tie. Speed-reading.
Next to him, the slacker chick, mid-teens, an expression of boredom or disdain never far from her features. Wide green eyes, a little nub of a nose, lips plastered with gloss. Smack of gum. Eyes fastened on the tube’s route above your head. Converse sneakers. Jeans way too long for her legs, hems rotten and ragged from dragging in the dirt. The gleam of a stone in her navel. Pale-blue Babydoll T-shirt and a black woollen cardigan, sleeves stretched, clenched into her palm by ragged nails dotted with chipped black polish.
Next to her, a forty-something Chinese woman in a smart green trouser suit. A clutch bag held neatly between the fingers of both hands. White earphones. Eyes closed. Listening to what? Classical music? A Podcast? Minutes from some medical symposium? A laminated badge hanging on a chain around her neck. Her face on it, smiling. Her name, Linda Ho.
Next to her, a skinny black man in a plain white T-shirt, sifting through a handful of photographs. Big, bright smiles now and then. Clean-shaven. Blue jeans with creases ironed into them – oh dear. Black, no-name trainers.
