‘Hey, hey, it’s over now,’ he said, noticing that his friend smelled strongly of body odour.
‘They took my blood, for Christ’s sake.’ Adam’s voice was hoarse, as if he had been shouting. ‘They said I was him. Where was I this night and that night and the other? How the bloody hell am I supposed to know where I was six months ago? Not like I keep a diary, is it? They threw me in a cell. I couldn’t call anyone – it was fucking terrible. I thought we were innocent until proven guilty in this country.’
‘They came here.’
‘I know. The barmaid backed you up apparently. Thank God we’re regulars, eh?’ He scratched at his scalp, violently. ‘Oh God, Chris, man, it was terrible, the way they look at you, the way they talk to you, trying to tie you up in knots. She’s dead, Christopher. Even when I thought it, I didn’t really think it, do you know what I mean? But there’s no denying it now. She’s dead. I can’t help thinking if I hadn’t got there late… but I didn’t think she’d walk off, if that’s even what she did.’
‘She might not have turned up at all,’ Christopher said. ‘She may have run into someone she knew. You can’t torture yourself. All you did was arrive a little late – that’s hardly a hanging offence.’
Again Adam pushed his face into his hands. ‘The way the policewoman looked at me. Like I was him. Like I was some sick bastard who could do something like that. Poor Sophie. Poor, poor Sophie. I can’t believe it. I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Christopher. Never.’
Chapter Eighteen
Dear Christopher,
Your dad has had an accident at work. Nothing serious, he has broken his left wrist after a sink fell on him…
As Christopher pushed on the gate, his parents’ front door opened and his mother appeared. He called a hello as he walked up the path and stepped inside. It was cold in the hallway. The smell of braised meat drifted out from the kitchen.
‘I saw you out of the window,’ Margaret said as he stepped inside. She did not kiss him or hold out her arms but stood back, rubbing her hands, in her face a worn sadness that made him too feel sad. ‘Your father’s upstairs.’
‘How is he?’
She frowned. ‘It’s been a terrible business.’
Christopher took off his coat and put it on the hook. He followed his mother into the kitchen. Her back curved more than he remembered it doing, as if she were cowering. She looked smaller.
‘You got here anyway,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ He sat at the kitchen table and chafed his hands together to warm them.
His mother turned to the sink and ran the tap.
‘Why don’t you pop up and see your dad?’ she said. ‘I’ll bring tea up.’ She did not turn around.
The stairs creaked underfoot. As he neared the top, Christopher found himself slowing down. At the door to his parents’ room, he stopped, his hand on the door handle.
‘Dad?’
‘In here.’
Christopher eased open the door. It brushed on the carpet, the sound like someone breathing on glass. His father was sitting in bed, fully clothed and with a white plaster cast on his left forearm. His legs were under the covers and his head was propped up by two pillows. If the hallway had been cold, the bedroom was like a tomb. His father was wearing a woollen hat, which was not pulled down and which made a strange bulbous shape of his head. He looked, Christopher thought, miserable and quite, quite mad.
‘You made it back then,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Christopher made to sit on the bed but, seeing the outline of his father’s thin legs, thought better of it and instead sat on the chair by the window.
‘Your mother was disappointed you didn’t come home for Easter.’
‘I’m home now.’
To think, he had missed a Friday with Phyllis for this. On the bedroom floor was The Sun newspaper. His father must have followed Christopher’s gaze because he said, ‘Your mother reads me the paper.’ He held up his plaster cast, as if to explain. How a broken arm affected one’s eyesight, Christopher could not figure.
‘How is the arm?’
‘Hopeless. I’ll lose weeks. You know I’d had to take on a lad.’
Christopher nodded. A reference to his own desertion. ‘Yes, Mum said in her letter.’
‘The idiot let go of the sink while I was on all fours welding a joint – and bang! Lucky I wasn’t concussed. Lucky I wasn’t killed, to be honest. Bloody idiot.’
How being killed was any kind of tragedy for someone who took so little joy in life, Christopher struggled to see. ‘How come you’re in bed?’ he asked. ‘It’s just your arm, isn’t it?’
‘Agh.’ With his good arm, his father swiped at the air, as if to swat a fly. ‘Can’t see any point getting up. Not like I can do much, is it?’
‘You could watch television?’
‘Television’s rubbish. Absolute rubbish. If it’s not a bunch of idiots talking about things best left private, it’s some American detective twaddle.’
His mother appeared at the door with two mugs in her hands.
‘Tea,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’ Christopher stood and reached to take both mugs but his mother gave him only one. The other she took around the bed and delivered wordlessly to her husband’s bedside table before creeping out of the room in silence, like a maid. Not that his father looked in any way grand. If anything, he too looked smaller, there in the double bed, wrapped in blankets, silly hat on. They had diminished, the pair of them. They were shadows even of the shadows they had been. Christopher wondered how Jack Junior and Louise found it here in the ticking silence, wondered if they longed to get out as he had done. Once university had finished, he knew he would never live here again. Twenty minutes in the place and already a heaviness had overtaken his limbs. He wanted to shout, to run down the stairs, put on a record – loud – and pogo around the living room.
For lunch, his mother made him egg mayonnaise sandwiches. He took them on a tray with a glass of milk up to his loft room, where, in the afternoon, he studied. Later, his father conceded to dinner downstairs. Jack and Louise had by then come home from their respective friends’ houses and so there were five of them around the table once again. Jack Junior and Louise had changed too, even since Christmas; they were older, louder, bigger. They told him their news with an enthusiasm he had not experienced from them before, and he wondered if this was because he had not come back in so long. With distance, he had become a guest, a stranger before whom they put on a kind of performance of themselves. It wasn’t unpleasant – better, in fact, than indifference.
He left the next morning, Saturday, refused his mother’s offer of a lift to the coach station but accepted a carrier bag of food.
‘Thanks, that’s very kind of you.’