Lockdown

Chapter Seven

MacNeil stood in his son’s bedroom, looking from the window into the back garden at the swing he had assembled from a kit and concreted into the grass. He could still hear Sean shrieking in delight as MacNeil pushed him higher and higher, terrified and exhilarated at the same time. Don’t stop, Daddy, don’t stop!

A train rumbled past the foot of the garden, beyond the high wooden fence, and the vibration of it shook the house. It was something they had stopped even noticing.

MacNeil let the net curtain drop and turned back into the room. Posters of Arsenal players adorned the walls, a red and white scarf draped over the bedside chair, pennants hanging from a wire strung across the ceiling. In the next room, he could hear Martha sobbing, and he kicked Sean’s football at the far wall in a sudden explosion of frustration. The ball rebounded into the chest of drawers, knocking over a framed family photograph. The glass shattered. MacNeil stooped to pick it up, and shook the photo free of its broken frame. They’d had it enlarged from a snap taken on a family holiday on the Costa Brava. The three of them crouching together in the sand, a crowded beach behind them, sunlight coruscating across an impossibly blue sea. They’d asked some young woman to take it with their camera, and it had turned out to be the best picture of them they’d ever had. A moment of happiness caught forever. And lost now for eternity.

He sat on the edge of Sean’s bed, holding the photograph in his hand, and thought of his own parents for the first time in a very long time. Somehow the loss of his child made his feud with his parents seem futile and foolish. We all had only one life, and it was too short to waste on something as destructive as anger.

He had told himself time and again that it was not his fault, but he knew he had done nothing to bring about a rapprochement. He had never been close to his parents, and called them only occasionally from London. And when he had, there had always been a tone. Veiled barbs. How nice it was to hear from him — when what they meant was why hadn’t he called before? His mother was the master of the acid reproach delivered with a silvered smile.

When Martha had told him she was pregnant he had delayed in telling them. He knew they would not approve. They didn’t even know that he was living with someone. Sex before marriage, in their world, was a sin. And the longer he put it off, the harder it became. Until the point where he decided not to tell them until after the wedding. He and Martha had married in a London registry office with a couple of friends as witnesses.

And when he finally told them, his parents had been mortally offended. Not just because his vows had not been taken before God, but because they had not been invited. To their own son’s wedding. And when they learned about the coming baby, and put two and two together, that had been the last straw.

He had taken Martha and the baby north only once. A trip he had dreaded, and not without cause. The atmosphere had been awful. While his parents had fussed and fawned over their grandson, they had been cool with him, and just short of rude to Martha. The day before they left, MacNeil had had it out with them, while Martha was walking the baby in the pram. A dour, painful, prickly confrontation in which the things left unsaid had almost been worse than those spoken. He had not been back since.

Now, as he sat on the bed his son would never sleep in again, he thought of them for the first time without anger. Remembered things he had forgotten. Things from his childhood. Laughter, kindness, safety. He had always felt safe with them, secure in a love that was real, if severe and perhaps lacking in warmth. It was very Scottish, very Presbyterian. You could feel affection, but you mustn’t show it.

He took his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and turned it back on. It beeped and told him he had several messages. He didn’t feel inclined to hear them. Instead, he scrolled through the numbers in its memory until he found his parents’ telephone number. He should have known it, but he didn’t. It was another element in their estrangement — they had moved house after he left, and it had never felt like home to him. The house where he had grown up was home, and he harboured just the smallest resentment at their selling of it.

He listened numbly while the phone rang in a house nearly six hundred miles away. In another time, another world. He wasn’t sure quite why he felt the need to call them, but he did. Perhaps he simply wanted to curl up into childhood again, insulated from reality, free from responsibility. His father answered the phone. Very correct, very precise, rhyming off the number in full.

‘Dad, it’s Jack.’

There was a long silence at the other end. ‘Hello, Jack. To what do we owe the honour?’

‘Sean’s dead, Dad.’

This time the silence was interminable. Then eventually he heard his father draw a long, slow breath. ‘I’ll get your mother,’ he said, in a very small voice.

It was more than a minute before his mother came to the phone, and he heard the tremor in her voice as she spoke. ‘Aw, son...’ she said, and the tears rolled down MacNeil’s face.

Martha was in the hall when he came out of the bedroom. He knew from the way she looked at him she could tell he’d been crying.

‘Who were you talking to?’

‘Mum and Dad.’

He saw her tense. ‘And what did they have to say?’

‘Not much.’

‘They didn’t suggest it was God’s way of punishing us, then?’

He looked away. ‘No.’ They stood for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, ‘I have to go.’

‘Work, I suppose.’ There was more than a hint of accusation in her tone.

‘A little girl was murdered.’

‘Your son’s dead, Jack.’

‘I can’t change that. I can’t even find someone to blame for it.’

She stood with her arms folded across her chest, barely in control. And then tears filled eyes already red from spilling them. ‘Stay,’ she said.

‘I can’t.’

‘Won’t.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Martha. I’m not sure there’d be any point.’ He brushed past her towards the front door. Then he stopped and turned. ‘Would there?’

All the tension seeped out of her and she went quite limp. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Take the FluKill,’ he said. ‘I’ll only have to give them back tomorrow.’

She took the bottle from her pocket and looked at it for a moment. And then she turned and strode to the bathroom at the end of the hall. She flung the door open and unscrewed the lid of the bottle, emptying its contents down the toilet. She looked back at MacNeil defiantly. ‘To hell with the fucking FluKill,’ she said. ‘I hope I catch it. I hope I die.’ And she pulled the handle, flushing away any hope of salvation.