Girl A Read online

  ‘It’s only temporary,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

  When he first met Mother, Father had described himself as a businessman, which wasn’t so far from the truth. In the evenings and at weekends, he still occupied an office space in town, with dirty white blinds and a sign which he had ordered from a printer: CG Consultants: Ideas with a spark. He dispensed advice on purchasing computers, fixed Walkmans, and hosted unpopular programming classes on Saturday afternoons. Children of all ages were welcome; on the better days, two or three glum boys would file into the room, accompanied by their mothers, who liked to tap on the keyboards and talk to Father. Father wanted to talk about computers; the mothers wanted Father to talk about himself.

  Father spoke only when he was quite sure that his audience was listening to him, and so each phrase was weighed, prepared, and carefully proclaimed. The mothers at coding class leaned eagerly into the silences between his words: they liked his quiet temperament and his beard and his black hair, and the heavy hands which skimmed across the computer keyboard, and which were easy to imagine on your skin.

  ‘Back to the breach,’ Father said, and stood from the table. One of the coding club mothers had made an appointment to discuss whether she should purchase a Macintosh or an IBM. A busy evening at CG Consultants. Ethan waited for the front door to close; as soon as it had, he darted past me and Mother, and upstairs. He, too, went to work.

  Sunday dinner: the fortnightly endurance of steak and kidney pudding. The burst of each slither of organ made me want to vomit.

  Ethan had visited the town library on Saturday morning, and smuggled home a rucksack of books which he refused to share; he upended the swag onto his bed and bundled me out of the room. Now we awaited him at the kitchen table. Delilah was anxious, contorting in Mother’s arms. Mother flopped a breast from her maternity dress and offered it to the child.

  ‘That’s it,’ Father said, and stood up. ‘I’ll go and get him.’

  There was no need. We heard the light footsteps on the stairs, and Ethan appeared at the kitchen door.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  He was quiet through the steak and kidney pudding, and quiet as we took the plates to the sink. He was quiet when Father asked him for liquor, which he took carefully from the Forbidden Cupboard and poured into Father’s wedding glass, as he had been taught.

  He, like Father, understood the importance of just when to speak.

  When we were back at the table, and watching Father drink, Ethan cleared his throat. He was too nervous for introductions, and he came right to it.

  ‘There is such a place,’ Ethan said, ‘as the Wild West.’

  I looked up from the table. Father’s lips were wet, and he licked them. He rolled the bottom of the glass around the table, and watched the amber surface shifting under the kitchen lights.

  ‘What’s this?’ Mother asked.

  ‘Where Mr Greggs went,’ Ethan said. ‘I’ve read about it. It’s just a way of talking about the American Frontier, when people first got to that part of the country. There weren’t any laws, just cowboys and pioneers, and saloon towns. It’s different today, but you can still go. You can go to Texas or to Arizona or to Nevada, or to New Mexico, which is where Mr Greggs went.’

  Father set down the glass and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘So,’ Father said. ‘What you’re saying is that you and Mr Greggs are much cleverer than me. Is that it?’

  I swallowed, hard; I thought that a bite of the kidneys might have lodged between my throat and my stomach.

  ‘No,’ Ethan said. ‘What I’m saying is that you were wrong about the Wild West. It is a real place, and Mr Greggs wasn’t making a fool out of me.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Ethan?’ Mother said.

  ‘Aren’t you listening?’ Father said. ‘He’s talking about how much better he is than the rest of us.’ To Ethan: ‘And what else would you like to teach the family? Please – do tell us more.’

  ‘I can tell you about the cowboys,’ Ethan said. ‘And one thing I read was about life as a pioneer. They received these letters, from other people on the frontier – from friends and family – telling them to go west—’

  Father was laughing.

  ‘Do you know the problem with thinking that you’re so clever?’ Father said. ‘You become very boring, Ethan.’

  Tears shook in Ethan’s eyes.

  ‘You just don’t like it,’ he said, ‘because I was right, and you were wrong.’

  The way that Father moved reminded me of crocodiles in the nature documentaries that I liked at the time, their bodies placid until prey touched the water. Father stood up, lunged across the table, and slapped Ethan with the back of his hand, hard enough to knock him from the chair and send a dash of blood across the table. Delilah, woken by the clatter, started to cry. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ I whispered to Mother, and made it only a few steps from my chair. Father stepped past me – crouched on the carpet, and faced, yet again, with the kidney pudding – and opened the front door. He didn’t close it behind him, and the damp night air stole into the house and settled there.

  Mother cleaned Ethan’s face, and my vomit, and Delilah. Already, little disappointments had tugged at her jawline and her breasts. She was becoming sullen; the sharp eyes of her childhood photographs were hard and resigned. She finished the leftover liquor in Father’s glass, then waited for him to return. She felt the tapping of the fresh child in her womb. The Parade marched on.

  Some time deep in the night, Ethan returned. I could hear him downstairs, talking to Horace, and I fell asleep. When I woke up next, he was at the threshold, the hallway light behind him. I remembered another doorway, at Moor Woods Road; how he had filled that, too. In silhouette, he hadn’t changed.

  ‘Can we talk?’ he said.

  The exposure of somebody awake while you’re sleeping. I wore thin, cheap pyjamas, purchased at the station. They had bunched at the stomach and between my legs. I wrapped the sheets up to my neck, and squinted into the light. ‘Now?’ I said.

  ‘You’re my guest. Aren’t you supposed to entertain me?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I think it’s the other way around.’

  He closed the door behind him. Into the room came the smell of tired wine. For a moment, before he found the light switch, we were in the dark together.

  ‘How did it go?’ I said.

  He was leaning against the wall, smiling like he knew something I didn’t.

  ‘The best part of it,’ he said, ‘is watching them trying to decide if they want me to succeed or to fail.’

  He paused, back in the hotel bar. I could see from his face that he was pleased. Had known exactly what to say. He had lobbed his slights, and they hadn’t yet landed; they would hit the governors in bed, midway through the night.

  ‘Anyway. How was your evening? You and Ana.’

  ‘It was nice.’

  ‘Nice. Nice how?’

  ‘What do you want, Ethan?’

  ‘I’d like to know what you talked about,’ he said. ‘For starters.’

  ‘Nothing. The wedding. Her dress. The island. Nothing very exciting.’

  ‘Moor Woods Road?’

  ‘It’s not really Saturday-night conversation. Is it?’

  ‘I’d like you to know,’ he said, ‘that things are good for me, now. But I can’t deal with interference, Lex. I can’t deal with your stories, at a time like this.’

  ‘My stories?’ I said. I was starting to laugh.

  ‘I’ve had to be selective,’ he said, ‘with what I’ve said to Ana. You understand that. I don’t want to upset her. There are things – certain things – that she doesn’t need to know.’

  ‘Are there?’ I said. Laughing harder, now. ‘Certain things?’

  ‘Stop laughing, Lex,’ he said. ‘Lex—’

  He crossed the room and took me by the throat. Palm crushed against the cram of tubes and bone. Just for a second; just long enough to show me that he could. As soon
as he let go, I clambered from the bed, coughing with the shock of it.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Lex. Lex, please.’

  He held his arms up to me, his whole body in appeasement. As usual, the sentiment didn’t reach his face. I leaned against the wall, as far away from him as I could get. Sweat shifted in my hair, down my back. The insect legs of it.

  ‘Don’t wake Ana,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Certain things …’ I said. I was waiting for my body to stop convulsing long enough to make the point. ‘Like what? Like how you were next in line to the throne? Truly – Father’s son?’

  ‘That’s unfair.’

  ‘You know, I always used to think that it would be you who would save us,’ I said. ‘I waited. I would think – he isn’t even restrained. Any day now. When he’s eighteen. When he can leave of his own accord.’

  ‘I tried, Lex. When we were little. Do you remember? When I still could. But by then – I was out of courage.’

  We surveyed one another across the bed. He was smaller now. Ethan, with his deficit of courage, and a good face for sympathy.

  ‘That isn’t how I remember it,’ I said. ‘That isn’t how I remember it at all.’

  He sat down on the bed and brushed the creases from the sheet. We listened for noise from Ana, but there were only the quiet floors of the house: the rugs and the bookshelves and the bay windows, undisturbed.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ I said, ‘tonight – we talked about other things.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Go to bed, Ethan.’

  ‘What I said before,’ he said, ‘about the governors—’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I won’t fail,’ he said. ‘Will I?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Drunk, he smiled at me. Smiled all the way to the eyes. It was as if he was already forgetting.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He clambered to his feet and crossed from the bed to the doorway. I heard him retreating along the hallway to his bedroom, stumbling into a canvas halfway there, then the whispers of a mattress, of him and Ana. I sat with my back against the wall and my legs stuck out ahead of me, holding my throat where he had held it, tight then loose, confident in the control of my own fingers, the muscles obeying the motor cortex. I waited a while, until I started to enjoy it, and went back to bed.

  When we were tired of the hospital room, Dr K helped me into a wheelchair, and we wound down the corridors. I liked the hospital courtyard, which was really just a balding garden between wards, populated by smokers and people making serious phone calls. The doctors demanded that I wear sunglasses whenever I went outside, but Dr K had recoiled at the frames provided by the hospital and promised to fetch me a pair of her own. I rolled out wearing pyjamas, blankets, Wayfarers.

  This day, the detectives weren’t with us. ‘They’ve asked me to make a particular enquiry,’ Dr K said. ‘It’s a sensitive matter, I think.’

  We sat side by side, her on a bench and me in the chair. It could be easier to talk about the difficult things, she said, when you didn’t have to look at one another.

  ‘It concerns your brother,’ she said. ‘Ethan.’

  I had suspected that this was coming. In the detectives’ questions, Ethan was implicated by omission. It had been more than a month, I thought, since I had heard his name.

  ‘You see,’ Dr K said, ‘he wasn’t in the same condition as the rest of you. He was stronger. Nothing broken. He wasn’t even in chains.’

  Beneath the blankets, I wrapped my fingers around one another, and checked the surface. Making sure that she couldn’t see them.

  ‘There were sightings – reports – suggesting that he had been allowed outside the house.’

  I saw the detectives hunched around a television, watching a year pass on the same dull street. Scanning for Ethan’s gait.

  ‘The police are questioning,’ she said, ‘whether he suffered at all. Or whether his role was altogether different.’

  A month of detective work, for this moment. They would be waiting for Dr K to call, after our meeting, with tight jaws and the necessary documentation.

  ‘Did he ever hurt you?’ she asked.

  I tried to make my face like hers: like a house from the outside.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have to tell you,’ she said, ‘that the time for protecting people has passed.’

  ‘There was nothing he could have done,’ I said. ‘Just like the rest of us.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ she said. I allowed myself to look at her, then, over the top of my glasses, so that she could see that I meant it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The house in Oxford was beautiful in the morning. A long rectangle of sunlight cut into my bedroom and rested on the duvet. The Islip canvas in the guestroom was a river in motion, and Ana had placed it behind the bed, facing the window, so that it was hard to tell what was the effect of the paint and what was the real light in the room. I kicked off the cover and stretched into the warm day. For a moment I imagined that the house was mine, and empty. I would take a book from the study and spend the morning in the garden. There would be no need to talk to anybody all day.

  Downstairs, Ethan and Ana were in the kitchen, standing close together at the counter, their bodies touching. Reconciliation.

  ‘How was the meeting?’ I asked. Ethan turned to me, unperturbed.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. He was wearing a polo shirt, and his hair was damp. ‘They were after a general update, before the results days. It’s impossible to predict, of course. But I’m positive.’

  He served me a coffee. The whites of his eyes were sallow and cut with little red wires.

  ‘You must have been back late,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Oh, not too late. There’s sport at the school today, so I have to be on decent form. Ana and I are heading up. You’re very welcome to join us.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to take the train back to London. I need to think about speaking to the others, like you said.’

  ‘Well, we’re making eggs. Stay for that, at least.’

  We ate in quiet, looking out onto the garden. When Ethan had finished, he pushed his plate away and took Ana’s hand. ‘Before I forget,’ he said, though there could have been no chance of him forgetting, ‘Ana and I discussed your proposal. About how to handle the house.’

  My mouth was full. I nodded.

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ he said. ‘A community centre, in a town like that. No associations with us. It sounds good, Lex. Let me know what to sign.’

  ‘I’m sure we can donate some supplies,’ Ana said. ‘Paints, paper. Anonymously, of course.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘OK.’ I thought for a moment of Devlin in a negotiation, and how she might display a studied softness when her adversary least expected it; it was as if she had trusted you with her most precious secret, and you couldn’t help but like her for it. ‘We could talk about some limited publicity,’ I said, ‘if you think that it might attract more funding.’

  ‘It’s all very exciting,’ Ana said. She clapped, stood from the table, and kissed Ethan on the head. ‘Is it summer dresses?’ she asked. ‘Or more casual?’

  ‘Wear a dress,’ he said, and she nodded, and ran upstairs.

  I turned to Ethan.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘I thought about it some more. I don’t need it. Not really. Do what makes you happy. Besides, Ana loved the idea.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Almost. There’s a condition.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking, Ethan.’

  ‘I’ll sign off on all of this. But if we’re doing it your way, you deal with it. Demolition, funding, whatever. I don’t want to hear anything about it. I mean – look around. This is where I live now.’

  I looked at the drowsy bees on the grass, and the eggy, hand-painted plates, and Horace dozing beneath the sunflowers which Ana had planted at the end of the garden. (‘There’s a loc
al competition,’ she had explained, seriously, ‘between the old women of Summertown. But this year, I’m going to win it.’)

  ‘Even seeing you,’ Ethan said. ‘Sometimes it’s too much.’

  There were many responses to that, but each would lose me the deal. I nodded. ‘OK,’ I said. We shook hands, as if we were children placing a sombre bet on the capital of Tanzania. The memory made me smile, and the capital wouldn’t come to me, so I asked Ethan. This, more than anything, was an offering of peace.

  ‘It isn’t Dar es Salaam,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Dodoma,’ he said. He looked at me, triumphant and then wistful. ‘Mr Greggs and his capitals.’

  ‘I remember them.’

  ‘Not Dodoma, though.’

  ‘No. Not Dodoma.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Ethan said, ‘I was giving a presentation last year, at a conference for headteachers. It’s a big event. Headteachers from around the world. And at the end of my speech, when the applause started and I could actually relax, I looked up, and I was sure that I saw him in the crowd – Mr Greggs. He was near the back, but he was clapping, and I thought that I caught his eye. I tried to find him afterwards, at the drinks reception, but it was busy, and it was the last night of the thing, and I never did.

  ‘Anyway. I decided that I would look him up. I requested the list of attendees from the conference, and he wasn’t on that. I searched for headmasters across the country, thinking that the list might have missed him off, somehow. He didn’t come up there, either. So then I search more widely. And it transpires that he couldn’t have been at the conference, because he died. Five years earlier. He was still a teacher then, in some comprehensive in Manchester – dead in service.’

  I thought of Ethan leaving for school on the days of his presentations, brimming with knowledge. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what is it to me? But he was a good teacher.’