The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER FIVE





LANA SAT IN the chair by the window and watched the fire in the sky. She wasn’t sure what was happening out there, or where exactly the source of the reflected flames was located, but at least it wasn’t right outside her door. That, at least, was a comfort.

These days she took her comforts where she could, and they were always small. So small, in fact, that she was often unable to pinpoint them amid the general chaos of her existence.

The flames burned on, beautiful and pitiless, as if a great furnace door had been opened.

Only last week Lana had been sitting in the same position, sipping a similar glass of Chardonnay to the one she now held, when some kids had let off a firework in the street outside. The rocket had arced up into the sky and then turned slowly towards her window, striking the glass. The crack was still there: it was paper thin, barely even noticeable, but she saw it every time she looked through the window. She’d called the council, trying to get a workman to come out and replace the pane, but her request had been met with a wall of apathy.

“Little bastards,” she said, gripping her wineglass, not knowing if she meant the culprits or the council workers. The fire in the sky shimmered, as if in response, and then it dimmed before giving off another surge of brightness.

Kids, it was always kids. Places like these, council estates inhabited by the people society had shoved to the bottom of the pile, were full of ill-mannered kids out to cause trouble. Some of the parents didn’t care, many of the ones who did simply lacked the skills to manage, and the schools were unable to cope. The rest got lost in the shuffle.

It was just the way of things; there was nothing anyone could do about it. The situation had gone too far, the rot was set too deep, and the country had long ago accepted this kind of anti-social behaviour as the norm at a certain level of society. The level she and Hailey now occupied.

It seemed like there was a constant stream of bad behaviour on the estate: lighting fires, vandalising private and public property, killing house pets, bullying the incapacitated. It never stopped. There was no end in sight.

It all amounted to just another night in the Concrete Grove.

Hailey was in bed, dreaming of whatever she craved for these days – no doubt pining in her sleep for everything they had lost. Her bedroom door was closed, perhaps even locked. She had never locked her room at the old house in South Gosforth. Back then, there had been few secrets between mother and daughter. But now, in this new life, it sometimes seemed like secrets were all they had, the only things that kept them close. They shared nothing but the fact that they hid things from each other. The glue that bonded them was impure, toxic.

The details of what had happened to Timothy constituted one of those secrets. At first Lana had even tried to keep it from Hailey altogether, but once the newspapers and the local TV news started reporting the story, that soon became impossible. So she was forced to tell the child at least part of the truth – the fact that her father had been broken by life and chose a dark way out. The effort to keep the secret from everyone else – to remain tight-lipped around the estate in which they now lived – had finally brought them together again. The bond they shared was not the same as the one they’d had before, but it was all they could hope for under the circumstances. Quite frankly, Lana suspected that it was now the closest thing to love they would ever know.

She sipped her wine and wondered whether she could possibly summon any more tears, or if her well had finally run dry. Then, disgusted with herself, with her stupid self-pity, she emptied the glass and refilled it. She was getting drunk. Her eyes were heavy and her mind was blurred, as if layered in cotton wool. She could no longer trust her emotions, or her instincts.

But that was good: she liked being drunk. It made the lies seem more like truths.

That man. The one from earlier this evening. What was his name? Tom? He was nice. She smiled at the memory of his nervous grin, his loose limbs, dumb T-shirt and silly running shorts. Why was she thinking of him now, at her lowest ebb? Was it because, for some reason, when she had spoken to him she had felt less alone?

“F*ck,” she said, enjoying the way the word tasted of wine and stolen kisses. “Get a grip, woman.”

Now that she had time to think about him, Tom seemed even more attractive than he had when he’d brought Hailey home. After Hailey had gone to bed, Lana finally had the time to consider what she had felt as he stood there, bare-legged and shaking in her doorway. Clearly he found her attractive too – Lana was experienced enough to recognise the signs. But it was more than that, deeper. There was a connection between them, a quiet spark that had simultaneously slowed down and speeded up the short time they’d spent together. He was older than her, but that might even be part of the appeal: a figure of authority to cling to in the night, when her demons came loping towards her out of the dark.

Lana struggled to understand the thoughts in her head. The wine, the night, the worry over Hailey and those weird fainting spells, it was all setting her off balance, confusing her to the point where she no longer felt that she could trust herself to do the right thing.

But what was the right thing? And how would she recognise it? There were no rules here, no written bylaws she could follow. Everything was fluid: even emotions were up for barter.

She took another mouthful of wine, held it, and then swallowed. The taste was good: bone-dry and woody, just how she liked it.

When the telephone rang she took a few seconds to register its quiet buzzing. Frowning, she glanced over at the handset where it rested on the windowsill. She stood and walked to the window, once again looking at the fiery darkness hanging above the distant silhouette of Far Grove.

Sirens drew close as she reached out to pick up the phone, as if the sound had been triggered by her motion.

“Hello.” Her voice was bounced back at her through the earpiece – a fluke of acoustics, or a fault on the line. “Hello,” she said again, and this time she was answered by a thick, heavy silence.

Feeling her heart swell in her chest, Lana waited. She knew who it was. There could be only one man who would call her so late, and project such a sense of menace down the line.

The line hummed. It sounded like distant wings, hundreds of them, beating so fast that it filled her ears with a single note.

“Do you have it?” His voice was like rocks splitting, concrete breaking under immense pressure.

There was no point in pretending, in playing dumb. “No. Not yet.” She closed her eyes. “But I will.”

She pretended that she could hear the sound of her own heart beating, and if she waited long enough it would rise in volume and drown out his words, silencing his threats.

“I want it tomorrow.” Again, that gritty voice: pure verbal hatred. “I’ll send a couple of the chaps round.”

Lana still could not open her eyes. If she did, she thought she might see him standing there, grinning, his hair slick with gel and his eyes blazing. “It’s too soon. I don’t have it. Please… just give me a few more days. A week.” She loathed the pleading tone in her voice, the fact that she was reduced to begging from scum like this, whining like a dog for scraps from the table.

“Tomorrow.” That humming. The sound was audible behind his voice. “The chaps’ll call on you. Be there or it’ll only be worse for you.” Then he hung up.

Lana stood there, bathed in distant firelight, her forehead sweating and her hand gripping the telephone receiver. She was unable to put the phone down. Her fingers refused to budge, to open and relax their grip.

“No,” she said, and the word was like an exhaled breath. It made as little impact on the world as a sigh. “I don’t have it.”

Finally, after what seemed like a long time, she was able to relinquish her grip on the handset. She put it back on the windowsill, carefully, delicately. She still had her eyes closed. Her lips were trembling. Darkness danced behind her eyelids. The world was unstable, as if someone had untied her from her moorings and she was beginning to drift, to move away from everything that had ever seemed safe. The darkness behind her eyes beckoned.

“Mum?” Hailey’s voice, behind her and filled with concern.

Lana opened her eyes and the fiery darkness flooded in… then, gradually, it receded, letting in the light. The sirens were louder.

“Mum? Are you okay?”

She turned round and faced her daughter. Hailey was standing in the doorway, the light from her bedroom forming a bright pool at her feet. She was wearing an oversized nightgown and clutching the ear of a ragged teddy bear – the one her father had given her, and which they had both, for some reason, christened Well-do. It was a private joke, one of the few things father and daughter had ever really shared.

“Hi, honey. Can’t you sleep?”

Hailey shook her head. She was fourteen years old, yet she often seemed a lot younger. Right now, standing there with her weight on one hip and Well-do in her hand, she looked about ten, maybe even younger than that.

“What’s wrong, Hay? Bad dreams?” Lana started to move across the room, towards her daughter, but Hailey flinched long before she even made it to her side. “What is it, honey? Tell me about it.”

Then, at last, she saw it: the dark stain at the crotch of Hailey’s nightdress, the way she was standing turned fractionally to one side to hide the damp patch. “Oh, Hailey. Oh, baby, come here…” She went down onto her knees and hugged her daughter close, ignoring the smell of urine and the way that Hailey shuddered at her touch. “It’s okay. Just an accident, that’s all.” She felt her eyes begin to prickle and blinked away the threat of tears. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

So for the second time that night Lana comforted her daughter, treating her as if she were an infant. She ran a hot bath and watched in silence as Hailey undressed, trying to hide her thin body in the steamy bathroom. Lana stared at her slight arms and legs, at her small mound of a tummy. She was aware of a strange sensation in her chest, like the slicing motion made by a thin blade, and she looked away, unsure of what it was she was feeling.

There was a soft splashing noise as Hailey climbed into the bath; a louder one as she sat down in the water and moved her hands through the bubbles.

“Everything’s going to be fine.” Lana heard herself say the words, but she couldn’t believe them. The lie came easily, like a gift, and she accepted it with good grace. Sometimes it was easier to let people hear what they wanted, and this was certainly one of those times. “We’re going to be fine.” But they weren’t; of course they weren’t. They were in a lot of trouble and nothing she could do or say could alter the facts: she owed money to the biggest bastard in town, and he wanted it back, one pointless payment at a time.

Lana ran the sponge across her daughter’s narrow shoulders, letting the hot water spill across her pale skin, turning it pink. Hailey said nothing. She just sat there in the bath, letting the water soak her, staring at the same spot on the tiles. She didn’t even blink.

What is it? Lana squeezed the sponge, stared at the soapy water on soft flesh. What’s come between us?

A lot more than the murders and Timothy’s suicide had created a vast gap between them, pushing them and keeping them apart. There was something else – an unknown quantity – and Lana did not know what she was meant to do to fix the problem. She was not armed with all the facts; whatever Hailey was going through, she was keeping it to herself. For some reason, perhaps even fear, the girl would not come to her mother for help.

“Speak to me, honey.” Lana whispered through tight lips, her jaw aching from the tension. “Tell me what it is.”

But Hailey kept staring at the wall, at the stained white tiles, her eyes unfocused yet seeing something beyond the room, the flat, the entire estate. Whatever it was she was looking at, Lana felt that it was changing her daughter, transforming her into a stranger. Making her different. Turning her inside out.

The room was filled with steam, obscuring her vision, and Lana felt that she should open the window but she didn’t want to leave Hailey’s side. Something kept her there, near the body that had begun life curled up within her, the construct of skin and hair and bone she had built for nine months inside her womb.

Lana was afraid for her daughter, but she didn’t know why.

Hailey had not wet the bed since she was two years old, and even then it had been an accident. Even her father’s death had not caused this kind of physical reaction, just the expected crying and outbursts of rage.

So what, Lana thought, was so terrifying that Hailey was suddenly fainting in the street and pissing herself in her sleep? What the hell was scaring her this much?

The steam moved sinuously, as if it were hiding shapes within its cloudy mass. At last Lana was able to move away, and she walked to the window and opened it, letting in the cool night air. The steam shifted, breaking apart like a hacked sheet. There was nothing behind it, no monster hid within the folds of dissipating steam. Nobody was in the bathroom apart from the two women, mother and daughter, and the unmistakable presence of their shared fear.

“Please,” said Lana, once again hating the fact that she was forced to plead.

Hailey said nothing. She twitched her head to the side, one corner of her mouth turning up in an expression that was not quite a smile but something else, something unreadable. “It’s nothing,” she said, and her voice was like that of a small child, not much more than a baby. “I promise, Mum. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”

Lana stood by the window, the cold air kissing her neck, the sirens wailing in the night. In that moment, with the song of the estate ringing in her ears, she knew that Hailey was lying.