Picture You Dead

10

Sunday, 22 September

Win some, lose some, Harry Kipling rued. It seemed that no matter how hard he busted his balls working, the company’s bottom line at the end of each year was always less than he’d hoped. His accountant would point out the need to increase his prices to keep up with his rising overheads and costs of materials, and yet Harry was always reluctant to act on her advice, fearing that would make him no longer competitive.

Between his and Freya’s earnings, they just about kept in the black, but there was never enough left over to pay off some of the mortgage, as they started out every year intending to do, and their dream of upgrading to the pretty Sussex village of Steyning, a few miles to the west of Brighton and Hove, remained just that, a dream. Something always seemed to happen to scupper his profits and it had just happened again this week. Ironically, it was an extension in Steyning.

Vine Cottage was a job he should never have taken on, he knew. He’d already been overstretched with work, and the profit margin was a lot smaller than usual, but it had seemed a straightforward and simple extension. He’d thought he could take on a couple of builders who worked for him occasionally, and who’d just had a job cancelled, and make a small but tidy profit on the job.

On Monday they’d cut very carefully through the bottom of a wattle-and-daub-rendered end wall, to make a doorway through to the proposed extension. But the wall had started to crumble; the ceiling above had immediately begun to sag, urgently needed to be shored up with steel beams. And now, because it was a listed building, they were going to have to reconstruct the wall exactly as it had been. The time involved was going to dent his profit margin and he had already drawn up a revised estimate.

He’d finally put the nightmare of this past week with Vine Cottage behind him, with a blinder of a round at the Dyke golf course this morning, beneath a glorious, cloudless sky. Overjoyed at having played well below his handicap of 15, scoring three birdies, the couple of pints with his mates at the bar afterwards had further helped his mood.

And another pint of Harvey’s now, as he sat in the conservatory of his home, with the patio doors wide open, the Sports section of The Sunday Times and a mail order catalogue on his lap, was helping his mood even further still. He’d sort out Vine Cottage, maybe the cost would be less than he feared – he’d figure something. He took another sip of beer and turned his attention away from the catalogue back to the television. South Africa were giving India a trouncing at cricket. That, combined with the smell of burning charcoal on the barbecue outside, and the sunlight streaking in, was improving his spirits even further.

He looked lovingly at their son, lounging at the other end of the sofa, orange headphones clamped over the fourteen-year-old’s ears as always, head tilted down towards his phone, Jinx, their rescue cat, snuggled on his lap. Tom was dressed in a Seagulls T-shirt, Nike skinny tracksuit bottoms and immaculate white Air Force 1 trainers, which he scrubbed clean obsessively, almost every day – pretty much the only thing he did ever clean. The glass of cider they now allowed him as a Sunday treat sat on the coffee table in front of him, dangerously close to being knocked over by his clumsy, gangly legs alongside it. With his eyes half closed it was hard to tell, as it usually was these days, whether Tom was looking at his phone or was in a trance. And ever since the big scare, just over two years ago, both Harry and Freya always kept a close watch on him.

On his twelfth birthday they’d arranged for Tom and a dozen school friends to have an afternoon at the go-kart track at Albourne, for racing followed by pizzas and cake. But the following morning when Harry was at work, Freya had been unable to rouse Tom to drive him to school. For some dreadful moments of panic, she actually thought he was dead. Then she’d calmed enough to remember her first aid training and checked his pulse. Just a faint pulse she thought – hoped – prayed – and dialled 999, barely able to speak when the call handler answered. Then a long, agonizing wait for an ambulance.

Later the A&E consultant had told them, gravely, that Tom had been diagnosed as Type-1 diabetic. He had gone into a coma and if he’d been left for just a few more hours, he would almost certainly have died.

From that moment, Freya had become obsessed with Tom’s sugar levels, to the point where Harry sometimes felt she was mollycoddling him. But he understood. Tom was their miracle baby, who had come along after over eleven years of their trying for one, including numerous very expensive and failed attempts at IVF. Finally, when they’d given up on all avenues and instead had decided to look at adopting, Freya fell pregnant.

The boy had always been particularly precious to both of them, as Harry guessed all kids were to their parents, but these past two years since his diagnosis, she worried constantly, especially as Tom resented that his diagnosis meant he wasn’t supposed to eat the kind of treats all his friends enjoyed. While he was good much of the time, he regularly had major lapses, bingeing on chips, chocolate and soft drinks, sending his sugar levels into orbit.

Harry and Freya had had long debates over which school he should attend. Freya had wanted Tom at her own school, where she could keep an eye on him, and Harry had resisted vigorously, feeling that being the son of the deputy head could have a stifling effect on him.

But now she had an even better way of keeping an eye on Tom, via an app on her phone. Tom wore a circular Libre patch on his arm which monitored his blood-sugar levels around the clock via a tiny needle permanently inserted in his skin beneath the patch, which was changed every two weeks. If the levels went too low or too high, an alarm pinged on both his phone and her own.

Freya was lying on the sofa opposite them, sipping a glass of rosé and reading through a thick pile of paperwork from her school. She wrinkled her nose a couple of times, sniffed, frowned, then focused on her reading again.

On the screen the Indian batsman blocked a fast ball and that was the end of the over. Harry jumped up, taking the opportunity to check on the barbecue. Hopefully the weather would stay fine, and they’d eat outside on the deck. The garden, with its hot tub, miniature plastic dinosaur, slide and swing – which Tom had long ago stopped using – immaculate lawn and lush flower beds and shrubs, was Freya’s pride and joy.

Nearly ready. A row of bowls he’d prepared earlier sat on the table beside the Weber. King prawns, salmon steaks, No Bull vegan burgers, corn on the cob, and skewers of courgettes, red peppers and paneer. Sweet potatoes were baking in the oven.

He returned to the sofa and quickly glanced at a few more pages of the catalogue. Harry loved household gadgets and was forever buying them from the inserts that regularly arrived with the papers, much to Freya’s amusement. His most recent purchase had been a tool to slice carrots into a floral spray, and it had done an effective job on his forefinger an hour ago, as the antiseptic cream and bandage she had patiently applied to his throbbing finger reminded him. Another gadget now caught his eye and he held it up to Freya.

‘What’s that? It looks like some medieval torture instrument,’ she said.

‘It’s really clever – long-reach toenail scissors!’

She was about to reply when she was interrupted by two sharp pings, almost instantaneous, one from Tom’s phone, the other from hers. She looked down immediately and saw a high glucose alert on her monitoring app. It was reading 28.

She jumped up and went over to Tom who, with his headphones on, had been oblivious to the sound. She prised one away from his ear and he looked up at her, irritated. ‘Mum!’

‘Your sugar’s high, darling,’ she said. ‘Have you been eating chocolate or ice cream or something?’

‘Just Haribos,’ he mumbled. ‘Oh, yeah, and a caramel Magnum.’

‘Just Haribos? You know how much sugar is in them?’ she said. ‘And the ice cream?’

He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ He looked back down at the game he was playing.

‘You need to give yourself a jab,’ she insisted.

‘OK, I will.’

‘Now!’

He glared at her, but then, trying not to disturb Jinx, reluctantly dug in his pocket for his insulin pen and clicked out a measure. She felt sorry for him. Tom was a kind person, and life had dealt him a crap hand by giving him this disease at such a young age. She used to binge on all the sweet treats he now craved and knew how she’d have felt if she’d been denied them.

As she settled back down on the sofa, she noticed again a smell that had bothered her earlier. She sniffed hard. ‘Harry, can you smell something burning?’

‘The barbecue, darling.’

She frowned. ‘It’s not a barbecue smell.’

Like a fish momentarily surfacing from the ocean depths, Tom raised his head and sniffed, then returned to the safety of the depths.

Without looking away from the television, as the Indian batsman hit a ball dangerously high in the air, Harry sniffed, too. The South African fielder dropped the easy catch, and the ball rolled towards the boundary. He sniffed again. Freya was right. There was a different, acrid smell, one he recognized instantly as the smell of burning paint.

He looked around, puzzled. Was it a light fitting or some other electrical problem? It was getting stronger. Coming from inside the conservatory.

Then, yelling, ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ he ran to the painting, the one he’d bought at the car boot sale and had left face out towards the glass side of the room. The south-west-facing side.

A thin, grey stream of smoke was curling up from that side.

He grabbed the frame, lifted it up, blowing frantically at the centre of the old crone’s face, where the smoke was rising from a bulging blister.

Freya, who had followed him, watched him in horror as he ran through into the kitchen with the painting and over to the sink where he grabbed the spray mixer tap off its cradle, squeezed the lever and directed the fierce jet at the woman’s face. After a few seconds the smoke subsided and stopped, as water ran down the picture.

Leaving it perched on the draining board, he went back into the hallway, momentarily baffled. After some moments Freya, looking at the window with the direct sunlight streaming in, and then at the shelf above the low sill where they lined up pots of cacti and a few other ornaments, realized what had happened.

She lifted up the offending article, a clear glass globe paperweight. ‘This is what caused it.’

‘Oh God, yes, it is!’ he said, smiling with relief. ‘Do any of your kids at school ever use a magnifying glass to refract the sun’s rays and burn holes in pieces of paper? We used to do that all the time at school, in summer.’

She shook her head. ‘No, we don’t, things have tightened up since we were at school, sadly!’

‘What, you don’t teach them basic physics?’

‘Yeah, but we leave out the bit about how to burn the school down.’

‘When I was in the boy scouts, we used to do that to light camp fires. And we did it to piss off teachers! Don’t you remember old Mr Leask?’

‘The geography teacher?’

‘Yep! No one liked him. We used to take magnifying glasses into his lessons and then, when he was sitting up at his desk, we’d try to set his things on fire by all focusing our magnifying glasses on his jacket!’

‘I didn’t realize I’d married a monster.’

He grinned. ‘It would really annoy him and make him yell at us!’

Harry had been expecting her to smile at this, but she didn’t. Instead, she was looking at him with a horrified expression. ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ she said. ‘You could have hurt him.’

Harry shrugged. ‘Yep, well, we were just stupid kids, we didn’t think about consequences.’

Freya nodded thoughtfully. ‘Actually, remember my old friend Rachel?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘She spent a couple of years in Israel, living with a family. She told me they used to draw the curtains in the daytime to prevent the bright sun rays from refracting through glass objects and causing a fire.’

‘That’s exactly what’s just happened.’

‘Jesus, Harry, this is scary. Can you imagine if we’d been out today? The house could have burned down.’

He put the paperweight down on the island unit, shrugged again and went back to the kitchen. He checked the picture wasn’t still burning before dabbing it dry with a tea towel. And stared at the blistered centre of the woman’s face. He poked the blackened bulge tentatively with his forefinger, checking it wasn’t still hot, and flakes of it fell away. He knocked away the rest of the fist-sized bulge, then stood still in amazement.

‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Look at this. Look, look! There’s something underneath. Another painting!’