The Day She Died

Fifteen

Which shows what a Sherlock I am. I’d got just about everything wrong that I could have so far. But I was right about one thing: Kazek was scared shitless, and scared people aren’t scary.

“Jaroslawa?” he said, like a cracked record. “Dead, jess. You try make happy not cry. Good woman.”

And just like that, it made sense. He hadn’t meant to say, Hey, my girlfriend’s gone, but you could take over, sweet cheeks. He meant, It was kind of you to say she wasn’t dead and stop me grieving. Thank you.

“It’s too complicated,” I told him. “I thought you meant Becky. She’s dead. I never meant that Ros was. I’m sorry.” But, of course, he didn’t understand me. Anyway, he had moved on.

“You?” he said and pointed to the bucket and the Hoover, both lying on their sides on the grass, I could smell the stink of the pine cleaner; the lid must have been loose and now it was seeping away. “Key?” he asked, miming, pointing at the door.

I opened it. If he needed to see for himself, that was all right by me. But he didn’t go round calling her name and searching for her. He went straight to the kitchen, dragging a chair, climbed up and felt along the top of the cabinet, down behind the cornicing and pulled out a packet wrapped in a Morrison’s bag with the bunny-ear handles tied together to keep it secure. He kissed this too, like the Bible, and held it against his chest for a minute; then he climbed down and put the chair away.

“Oh, right!” I said. This wasn’t Ros’s place after all! I opened the bin bag and fished about until I found the toothbrush.

“Thank you,” said Kazek and put out his hand.

“No!” I pulled it back and dropped it in the bag again. “God, that’s vile.”

“Jednorazowka?” he said, scraping a finger down his face, through the beard.

“Yeah, but it’s filthy,” I told him. “You’d get germs.”

He was still staring at the bag, like he really wanted that manky old toothbrush and Bic back.

“Where’s the rest of your stuff?” I said. I pointed to his coat and trousers, mimed folding clothes. He shrugged and held out the legs of his jeans showing them to me. “That’s it?” I said.

He held out his arm to me, slapping the thick fabric of his jacket sleeve. It was sturdy, right enough, solid in fact, but it had shrunk and buckled, and it was too tight across his back to button closed. Not really that warm then. And not waterproof either: the fake leather bit across the shoulders was cracked and flaking, as if it had been…

“Oh Jesus!” I said. “You borrowed that tumble drier in the carport down there?”

“Jess,” he said. “Tumble dry!” He swept an imaginary cloak-

tarpaulin, in fact-around himself with a crackling noise. Then he shrugged and smiled at me. “Nie chce znowu zmoknac?” he said, and even though he didn’t mime I knew what he was asking from the look on his face, sheepish and hopeful. He wanted to stay in the caravan, like Ros used to let him do. But Ros did the books and she knew when the vans were free. For all I knew, Moormist would be full of kids in wetsuits by tomorrow.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But here.” I took out my wallet and gave him a twenty.

“Thank you, jess,” he said.

“Jessie,” I said, pointing at my chest.

He laughed again. “Jessie-Pleasie!” Then he took a last look round the van and headed towards the black square where the door stood open onto the night.

“Hang on,” I told him. I was 85 percent sure this was okay. “You can come back to the house.” It took a bit of miming, but he got it eventually. Started shaking his head as soon as he understood what I was trying to say.

“No way,” he said. “No tell Gus King. No way, José.”

“Why not?” I said.

And he treated me to another long splurge of slow, loud Polish that might as well have been whale song. But I had another plan anyway.

“Wait here then. Ten minutes.” I held up both my hands. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Any problems?” said Gizzy. She was at her desk in the office, and it might have been my imagination, but it looked like her desk lamp was turned so the light hit the water metre square on. She’d have seen that I hadn’t been tempted then.

“No, fine,” I replied. “Do I chuck these cloths now or wash them?” One look at her face told me all. “I’ll just rinse them then.” I planned what to say while I stood at the sink, wiping the bucket, squeezing the cloths. “It’s lovely here,” I said when I returned. “I suppose you’re full up for half-term next week, though?”

“All but one,” she said. “How?”

“My friend from work was talking about getting away with her grandkids. Not far, just a break. A view of the sea, she said.”

Gizzy was clicking through screens on her laptop. She spoke absentmindedly. “Sea views are the first to go,” she said. “The one that’s left’s a woodland setting.” There were a few trees up the back near Moormist right enough, but a woodland setting was stretching it.

“Is it you who thinks up the names?” I said. “That’s lovely: woodland setting.”

She looked over the tops of her specs. “That’s not the name of the van. The van’s called Foxleap. You should have been checking the list by name. Oh my God, I might have known it was too good to be true, you waltzing in just when I… ”

“Aye, aye,” I said. “Sundown, Cliffview, Moormist, I know. So I’ll see you tomorrow, eh? I’ll just head off home then.” I scuttled away before she could tell me to leave the master key.

He was right where I’d left him, waiting huddled in his shrunk jacket, still holding his Bible and rosary. He followed me as I crept about with my torch, peering at the van signs, trying to stay on the quiet velvety grass and keep off the gravel where our footsteps crunched loud enough to drown out the sound of the sea. Foxleap, when we finally found it, was nicely tucked away-I suppose that’s why it was empty-and I was pretty sure no one heard me turn the key and ease the door open. Inside, it was the usual monument to beige, but Kazek looked around it like he’d just checked into the Ritz. Then he turned to me and spoke really slow and quite loud, as if maybe I’d understand Polish if I just would give it a go. He raised the Bible and waved it in my face, holding it so tight that it bent into a curve, trying so hard to tell me something he wanted so much for me to know.

“Wasting your time with me, pal,” I said. “I’ve had it shoved so far down my throat I could shit it. Didn’t work then, won’t work now.”

“English,” he said. “I try. Jaroslawa no leave me. Never. No way. Wojtek no leave me. Never no way.”

“Who?” I said.

Kazek opened the Bible at the front cover and showed me the two words printed there. Wozciech Zajac.

“Gone,” he said. “Bad man. Frighten.”

I looked at the words and back at his face.

“Let me get this right,” I said. I pointed to the Bible and then to Kazek, raising my eyebrows. He shook his head, pulling faces. Then he did a mime that that would have made my mother drop dead if she’d seen him. He put his hands out to the sides and let his head loll, pretty good crucifixion pose, then he rolled his eyes and blew a raspberry. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He jabbed his finger at the two words and then held his hands together in prayer.

“Right,” I said. “This is somebody else’s? That’s his name written there? Wozzy… ”

“Wojtek.”

“Got it. Where is he?”

“Gone,” said Kazek. “Bad man.” Then he gave up and broke into Polish again.

“But you kissed it,” I said. “I’m confused.”

“Confused,” said Kazek. “No shit, Jessie-Pleasie.” I laughed again. He was weird, filthy, stank like a dead dog, had scared me badly twice, and was probably going to lose me my job in the next day or so-but I liked him. Even when nothing made any sense at all, I felt like I knew where I was with him.

“So, Ros?” I said. “Jaroslawa? And you?” I made a kissy noise and fluttered my eyes.

“No!” said Kazek. “No way. Friend, jess? Friends.”

“So tell me this then.” I took the photo of Ros and Becky back out of the Bible. “Ros and Becky?” More kissy noises.

He raised his eyebrows, thinking about it, then shrugged. “Nie wiem,” he said. “Maybe. She is dead? Dead, Becky, jess?”

“She is,” I said. “She killed herself. Ros went away and Becky killed herself. And now you need to move on, right? Find a new place. You can have a couple of nights here, but then you have to go.”

He shook his head. “No way Jaroslawa leave me. Friend, Jessie-Pleasie. No way.”

“Why are you talking like Tarzan and Jane?” said Gus. It was gone nine by the time I got home. Home! Back to the cottage, finding him in the kitchen, polishing shoes, newspaper spread all over the table. Paolo Nutini on the Fisher Price tape deck. I’d said: “Hiya. Missed you. Tea? Hungry?” Now I laughed.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said to him. “I will speak in whole sentences from now on, like I’m sitting an oral English exam.”

“Aye, whole sentences of total mince,” he said. “How’d it go?”

Obviously the thing to mention was finding the Bible and meeting the crazy guy, sneaking him into an empty van, and lying to my boss. That was the headline news of my first day. But I couldn’t forget the definite sound in Kazek’s voice. No tell Gus King. No way. And I couldn’t imagine how Gus would take it, anyway. Would it be like the bathroom bin? Like the baby monitor? One more way to piss him off and have him tell me I hadn’t and change the subject and play the Becky card until I couldn’t tell up from down? I shook myself. Where the hell had all that come from? What I meant was I was probably going to piss him off anyway when I started in on Ros and Becky, so why piss him off for no reason too.

Instead, I told him about Gizzy and the water-free cleaning, about the woodland setting and the warm hospitality and he listened and smiled, still working away at Dillon’s shoes with a toothbrush, cleaning right into the stitching.

“Sorry,” I said, in the end. “You must have heard this before. From Ros, I mean. Or passed on from Becky.”

He kept on scrubbing, but his smile fell away. “Ros didn’t hang out with me,” he said. “And Becky didn’t tell me anything. I was a spare leg with that pair, Jess.”

Which was a brilliant opener to what I wanted to say. The kettle was nearly boiling, and I took the chance to steel myself, have a quiet pep talk, plan how to deal with him going bananas if it turned that way.

“This is just a thought,” I said. “It wasn’t even mine. It was Steve at work.” He looked up. “Is there any chance that Becky and Ros were more than just friends?” The red started under his sweatshirt collar and climbed his neck in splotches. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from it. “Cos,” I went on, “I know things weren’t great between you and that might explain why Ros would take off-a breakup, you now-and that might explain why Becky could get so bothered about her leaving too. And maybe the reason she… ran around-sorry; that’s not a very nice thing to say-was because she didn’t want to think she was what she was, and maybe the reason she didn’t take the pill or whatever was like some kind of denial too? And Steve even said that she might have had trouble with the idea of babies and it might explain the depression.”

There was a long silence. The toothbrush moved slower and slower until it stopped. He put Dillon’s shoe down beside the other one and lined them up like for inspection in the army.

“Who’s Steve?” he said, at last.

“Oh God, nobody really,” I said. “Done tons of Open University and thinks he’s Einstein.”

“I’ll try again,” said Gus and his voice was very steady, like he was talking someone down from a high ledge. “Who the fuck is Steve? And why the fuck were you talking to him about Becky?”

I blinked a couple of times. Well, at least there was no denying I’d pissed him off this time.

“Steve,” I said, “is my pal from work and of course he knows about Becky, because for one it was on the news, and for two I had to explain why I was driving in from out of town in a strange car and where I went on Wednesday. Which was, in case you’ve forgotten, to pick up your daughter at school and bring her home, even after I had said she wouldn’t be able to cope, which she couldn’t. And after I’d said I couldn’t do it because I’m no good with kids and I shouldn’t be left with them. So shove that up your arse, Gus King.”

There was an even longer silence after that. Hardly surprising. But when he spoke again he was a different person. Well, in a different mood, anyway.

“It’s just… what you said.” His voice was quiet and kind of wondering, like he was trying to wrap his head round it. “It’s quite a lot to take in. All at once.”

“Well, while you’re taking it in then,” I said, “I think I’ll get the torch and go and get the pee-stick out the bin like I should have done last night. I’m sorry I went off at you.”

He had picked up Dillon’s shoe again and was staring down at it, turning it over and over in his hands, and he only nodded sort of half-listening and half off in his own wee world kind of way. No chance of him apologising too, it didn’t look like.

Outside, with the torch balanced on the kitchen windowsill, I lowered the wheeliebin onto its back and shook it until all the nappy bags and banana skins and other crap were up near the top, then I got down on my hands and knees and peered inside. The stuff from the bathroom was a long way down; I could see two bog roll middles and a plaster. I was looking about for a long stick when I heard the back door.

“Don’t do that,” said Gus. He held me by the waist and dragged me backwards. My knees scraped on the hard ground through my jeans leg.

“Hey!” I said, wriggling out of his reach. “I can’t keep up. Do it. Do it now. Do it tomorrow. Don’t do it at all.”

“Don’t do it at all,” Gus said. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m sorry, Jessie.”

“Yeah, what the hell was that in there?” I said.

“I was jealous,” he said. “And I was just saying what was in my head, cos with you, I can.”

So I put my hands in his and let him pull me to my feet.

“I get it,” I said. “Flexing your muscles, kind of thing? Well, newsflash, Gus: you overshot.”

“Yeah, I know,” but he was still smiling. “But it’s not brought the sky down, has it? I pissed you off and you straightened me out, and it’s over. It’s brilliant.” He kissed me, and it seemed kind of rotten to carp.

So I changed the subject. Or changed it back again anyway. “Why doesn’t it matter now?”

He put his arm around me, tucking me in against him, and led me around the house to stand in the garden and look out at the black sea.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It just seems like that baby isn’t really real anymore. I only heard about it on Tuesday and by the end of Tuesday, it was all over. Seems daft now. Keeping something to remember it by.” We stood side by side listening to the rush and sweep of the tide, smelling the chimney smoke, snatched by the wind and sent gusting past us. I shivered.

“Come on,” said Gus, rubbing my back hard, trying to warm me. “Let’s crack open a bottle of wine and sit in front of the telly like a pair of old farts, eh?”

“What’s on?” I said, turning and following him back inside.

“Oh, bugger all,” he said. “I’ll let you loose on the video collection and you can choose.”

But the first three films I spotted were Forrest Gump, The Witches of Eastwick, and Dances with Wolves and my heart fell into my guts and died there.

“We could just listen to music,” I said.

“What’s up?” He ran his hand along the shelf of boxes. Chicago, Chicken Run, St. Trinian’s. “Jessie, what’s wrong?”

I went to one of the armchairs and sat down, hugging myself, feeling colder now than when I was standing in the dark of the garden.

“I know they’re all pretty ancient,” he said. He pulled a box out of the row. “Have you seen Crouching Tiger?” I shook my head. “Give it a go?” I shook my head again. There had been too much stress already, no room for more. If I couldn’t get myself together, I would just sit through whatever he chose and hope he didn’t see my eyes screwed shut.

“Jessie?” he came and crouched in front of me, cupping my face in his hands. “Tell me.”

So I did.

“Forrest sits on a bench and a-shit!-a feather floats down and it keeps coming back all the way through. The Witches of Eastwick has a storm of feathers all over the road and they get stuck to him. The Indians in Dances with Wolves wear headdresses. So do the dancers in Chicago. Chicken Run-clue in the name. And St. Trinian’s has a pillow fight. Probably. I’ve never plucked up the courage to watch it.”

“There’s absolutely no feathers in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” he said.

“Yeah, except there probably is,” I said, and I knew I hadn’t managed to keep even a drop of the misery out of my voice.

“There really isn’t,” he said.

“Okay,” I nodded. “What about Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves? Any feathers in that?”

He sat back and thought hard for a minute. “Not a single one,” he said.

“Except for a hundred and fifty million arrows,” I said. “So who the hell knows about Crouching Tiger either, eh?” I was angry. So hurt and sick of it and so disappointed that I’d spoiled everything again. I wished he would just get on with it, laugh or shout or sneer or do whatever he was going to do, but do it soon and get it over.

“You poor sweetheart,” he said. “You poor wee darling. You know what you need?” I looked at him, half laughing, pretty sure he’d suggest the last thing I could even think of doing right then. “You need to sit on my knee and let me tell you a story,” he said. “Like Ruby when she’s sodded something up and wants to punch somebody.”

I laughed then. “Exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

“You’re just like her,” he said squeezing in beside me and lifting me into his lap. “In a few years people are going to be saying. ‘Oh, Ruby’s just Jessie over the back.’ You wait and see.”

I curled my feet up and stuck them down the side of the chair between the arm and the cushion, then I tucked my head under his chin.

“Your hair smells nice,” he said. “Covers the smell of whatever that smell is in here.”

“It’s milk,” I said. “I spilled some on Tuesday night. I’ll have another go at it in the morning.”

“So what’s your favourite story from when you were wee?” he asked, beginning to rock me.

I laughed so loud and sharp that he jerked his head away, saving his eardrums.

“You’re kidding, right? My mum used to pray for me when I made a ‘nuisance of myself with my nonsense’. Do you want to hear the prayer?”

“Something tells me I’m not going to like it,” he said.

“He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe in his feathers.”

“What a prize bitch,” said Gus.

“A few years ago, I’d have thought you meant I was one for telling tales on her,” I said. “But I’m getting better.”

“And you’ll get even more better now I’m helping,” said Gus. “So here’s where we’ll start. Tell me what happened.”

I was wedged in tight to the chair and his arms were wrapped right round me, but I stiffened and tried to wriggle away. He held me tighter.

“You’re as safe as a baby in your mother’s bell-Bad example. You’re as safe as a bunny in a burrow. Tell me and I’ll make it better. I’ll take care of you.”

“You’re not angry with me for saying that about Becky and Ros?”

I thought I felt him flinch and I turned to see his face, but he was smiling by the time I could see him.

“I’m angry about whatever happened to you to make you think I could be angry,” he said. I was too tired to follow. Too tired to do anything except give in, really.

“My granny had a quilt,” I said. “I’ve never told anyone this before. Except therapists and them. I tried to tell Dot just the other day, but I crapped out in the end. Okay, so my granny had a quilt. It was plain mustard-coloured silky stuff on one side and green and pink patterned on the other side. Flowers and kind of bandstand things. She’d had it since she got married.

“And it fitted perfectly onto the three-quarters bed in her spare room. My bed when I stayed there. With a bolster pillow and a pillowcase that had lace at the end like the pantaloon legs of the girls in my book of nursery rhymes.

“But it was jaggy. It wasn’t so bad on the inside where there was a sheet and a blanket under it, but if you put your arms outside the covers, it jagged you to bits.”

Looking back with my adult brain I can see that it was wearing out, washed too many times, getting threadbare, and the feathers were poking through. Back then, five years old, all I knew was that one night I found if I pulled the jags they came out, and it was soft and comfy. So I did. I pulled and pulled, my little hands roving all over the patterned top, finding the spikes and pulling them out. Every time I thought I had finished I found another one. Then I started on the inside, through the mustard backing. And there were just as many there.

“So I pulled the feathers out,” I went on. “I’ve never bitten my nails so I could get a hold of every last one. I must have been awake for hours doing it. And then in the morning I woke up again, dead early too. Something had made me sneeze.”

No prizes for guessing what, although it had been years later with a therapist called Moira that I had worked it out: in the night, more feather ends had worked their way to the surface and there were more jaggy spikes for me to pick at.

“So by the time granny came to wake me, the bloody thing was practically empty. Well, not really, but there was feathers absolutely effing everywhere. She opened the door and they all blew up in a big storm like a snow globe and I could hardly see her through them. It was quite a small room.”

“And was she angry?” said Gus.

Granny had stood at the door with her mouth wide open as the feathers settled. She had blown one off her lip and then she had started-

“She was furious,” I said. “I got the worst row I’d ever had in my life.”

– she had started laughing. She kicked the feathers up like she was walking through autumn leaves in the park and she said-

“She said I was an evil wicked child and I’d spoiled something precious that couldn’t be replaced.”

– she said, Eh, dear, Jessie my darling. I didn’t know how thin that old thing had got. I think it’s time it went in the bin now, eh?

“I don’t believe you,” said Gus. “What’s that got to do with looking after kids?”

“Eh?”

“Why would that make you say you’re not good with kids?”

“Because if a bad thing happens I won’t be able to cope. They won’t be safe with me.”

“There must be more to it than that.”

“I’ve told you everything,” I said. “Swear to God.” That same therapist, Moira, had taught me how to put things in a box and put the box in a room and lock the door. So there was nothing more to say.

“What’s wrong with your face?” he said.

I put my hand down in my lap like he’d caught me picking my nose. I hadn’t even realised I’d been touching it. That little puncture mark in my cheekbone, so faded now you couldn’t see it unless I had a suntan. So small that only I knew it was there. I didn’t even know if I could really feel it anymore or if I just touched the place I knew it had been.

“Nothing,” I told him. “My face is fine. And that’s the whole story of my pteronophobia. You think it’s going to be something that makes sense and it doesn’t. I can’t watch a film I’ve never seen before because my granny gave me a row for wrecking her quilt. I’m an idiot.”

He just looked at me. “You’ll trust me enough one of these days to tell me it all,” he said.

And a flash of anger blazed through me. He didn’t believe me? Look at what I’d swallowed from him in the last three days, and he had the nerve not to believe a perfectly sensible story from me? Maybe not true, but sensible for sure.

Except under the anger was something else, I knew. Down the stairs into the garden, over the lawn, and into the lift-the therapists never tell you what a lift’s doing in a garden, by the way-down and down and down, past the panic and the memories and past the room with the box (locked tight) right down to the basement. And then out again at the beach. This is some lift, from a beach to a garden-and the beach is the safe place. Annabel-another one-told me that nearly half of the folk she spoke to chose that same lame beach. Or they chose their own bed or their armchair. And some chose a mountain. And one she told me about chose Harvey Nick’s food hall, but I reckon that was for show and probably in her head she had a wee beach there, one floor down in a lift maybe.

But the thing is this: in all my imagining of that safe place, I never expected someone to meet me when the lift opened its doors. Now it seemed like if I went down, past the anger and panic and memories, Gus would be there. And the beach had a name: Sandsea Bay.

“Now what kind of story d’you want me to tell you?” he said.

“Tell me about something you’ve made,” I answered. I knew how big a thing I was asking. “Like the pram. Or something you want to make. A plan.”

He knew how big it was too.

“Okay,” he said, at last. “You might think this is daft. It’s a shed. It was a shed. A garden shed. And I dismantled it and used the planks to turn it into a boat. Or like a raft. And I floated it down the river-that was the only way I could think of to move it-right down the Dee, and when I got it to the workshop, I rebuilt it.”

I waited for a while and then I asked him: “What’s it called?”

“Shed Boat Shed,” he said.

“So… ”

“And,” he said. “I put a video camera in the middle of the floor while I was taking it down, revolving. So it was making a film of the all the planks coming off and you could see the allotments outside and the sky and everything, and I filmed the journey on the raft, and then I put the camera back in the middle of the floor and filmed it going back up. So when the last plank goes on the roof, it’s completely dark again and that’s the end.”

“Wow,” I said. “Can I see it?”

He shook his head. “It’s sold.”

“Hey!”

“Yeah. You can’t see it but until Tuesday, you could have driven around in it. I sold it and bought Becky a car.”

“Did she like it?”

“She thought it was an okay shed. She didn’t think much of the raft, and she thought it took up a lot space in the workshop when it was a shed again. She’d have a fit if she saw what’s in there now.”

“Jesus,” I said. I had felt sorry for Becky, angry at her, jealous of her, puzzled by her. But that was the first moment I just felt nothing for her. If she didn’t get Shed Boat Shed, she wasn’t worth the bother.

“I bet the kids loved it,” I said.

“Dillon was too wee to know, but Ruby thought it was brilliant,” he said.

“Have you got a copy of the film?” I asked. It took him a long time to answer.

“The film’s part of the piece,” he said. “It’s sold too.”

I felt like I’d asked if I could get a painting in cream to match my couch. Felt like I’d had no business looking down my nose at Becky. Poor, miserable Becky.

“Bed?” said Gus.

And he carried me all the way.