Hugh glared at her. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘There’s just no way I’m going to open that can of worms. No fucking way. I’ll tell Hope about it, and it’ll be her choice, but I’m sure she’ll agree.’
‘You think?’
‘Yes. I know my wife better than you do.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Geena. ‘But I’m betting otherwise.’
‘Like it’s any of your business.’
‘I just wanted to help,’ said Geena, sounding upset.
‘I know, I know. I appreciate that.’ Hugh frowned. ‘Why did you want to help us, anyway? Why take these risks? Is it because you’re a Christian, or what?’
Geena snorted a laugh. ‘I’m not a Christian! What makes you think that?’
Hugh pointed. ‘That cross around your neck.’
Geena looked away, then back. ‘It’s a cross I have to bear,’ she said.
‘Family pressures?’ Hugh guessed, with some sympathy.
‘Good God, no! My parents are as godless as I am. It’s a… cultural thing. I’m from a Catholic community – Goan, you know?’
Her voice had taken on a higher pitch: light, over-casual.
‘Oh, I get it,’ said Hugh. ‘Same reason as my colleague Ashid’ – he jerked a thumb over his shoulder – ‘wears the round cap, even though he isn’t a Muslim. Community identity, loyalty to—’
Ashid’s voice suddenly boomed from the hallway, through which, in one of those bloody-typical moments, he happened to be lugging a bucket of rubble.
‘You’re a bloody fool, Hugh!’
Hugh turned, embarrassed, into the full beam of Ashid’s grin. The plasterer’s gaze basked in Hugh’s discomfiture for a second or two, then switched to Geena. He patted the top of his head and tapped his chest.
‘You and me for the same reason, eh? To show the cops we’re not bloody Hindus! Every time they stop me they check me over and I tell them I’m a good Muslim and then they send me on my way with the same joke: they miss the jihadists, hah-hah! Like their fathers missed the IRA!’ Ashid mimicked a posh English accent, very badly, to add: ‘Sporting chaps the IRA were, at least they didn’t blow themselves up!’
Geena giggled. ‘Yes, that’s it!’
Ashid waved and went on. When Hugh turned back to Geena she was blinking rapidly and sniffing.
‘What’s the matter?’
Geena turned away and blew her nose, then turned back. ‘Sorry, nothing. It just upsets me sometimes. The stops. You’d think with all the information they have on us they’d not bother, but they do.’
‘You get hassled by cops?’
Geena gave him a what planet are you on? look. ‘Yes. And so does your friend, by the sound of it.’
‘He’s never mentioned it.’
‘People don’t,’ said Geena, in a bitter tone.
‘Ah, I’m sorry about that, I didn’t realise. Still,’ he went on, trying to lighten the mood, ‘I know what it’s like not mentioning things.’
Geena gave him a pitying look this time. ‘No, Mr Morrison. You don’t.’
After half a minute of silence, she spoke again: ‘I think we’re about finished here.’
‘Thanks for trying to help,’ Hugh said, ushering her to the door.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Geena.
That evening, after the ten o’clock news, Hugh waved a hand in front of Hope to ask her to disengage from her glasses, on which she was surfing. She took them off.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got a confession. Today a very pretty girl came to see me at work.’
‘How nice for you.’
Her tone was light but wary.
‘Ah, that’s not really the confession.’
‘I didn’t think it was, somehow.’
Hope put aside her glasses and leaned back. Hugh leaned forward and began talking.
When he finished, her eyes narrowed, as they had when he was going through the bit about the witchcraft accusations.
‘That’s all?’ she said. ‘That’s everything? You don’t have any more secrets you’d like to get off your chest?’
Hugh thought about it. ‘No.’
‘Good.’ She sounded miffed, as well she might.
However, to Hugh’s surprise, she took the rest of his account of the morning’s events in her stride. She insisted that the new information didn’t change anything. The gene was probably for nothing more than a susceptibility to hallucinations. She certainly didn’t want to make it the basis for any appeal.
‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘For Nick.’
‘The publicity?’ Hugh asked.
‘The being made to feel different.’
‘They make him feel different already,’ said Hugh, with some bitterness.
‘That’s just prejudice,’ said Hope. ‘I’d hate for it to be science.’
Something was bugging her about the science, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
14. Joining Dots
The following morning Hope finished the nursery walk and the breakfast dishes and the beds before 9.30, then sat down at the table and fired up her glasses, stared at the endless scroll of language-mangled queries and thought: fuck this.
Let Searle handle the questions for today. She couldn’t concentrate. She hadn’t slept well. Hugh’s late-evening belated confession had shaken her even more than the one last week, the one that had started with her confrontation with him over the gun. That Hugh, in their apparently open, weepy, letting-it-all-come-out-at-last conversation, hadn’t actually told her what was evidently one of his biggest bugbears about his hallucinations, and one of the main reasons why he’d kept it bottled up so long – that really, really pissed her off. Especially given that this aspect of his story was directly connected with the matter of social services and child protection, not to mention making Lewis seem an even less attractive place in which to get away from all this for a while.
She loved him, but, aagh.
Hope jumped up from the table and stalked over to the sink, where she’d earlier noticed that the regularly recurring pinkish algal slime on the dish drainer was back. She dried the almost-dry plates and mugs racked there and put them away, then pulled on an apron and rubber gloves and filled the sink with hot water and started scrubbing the empty drier. When that was clean, she noticed that the sides of the sink were grubby, and scrubbed them.
That bit of displacement activity out of the way, she ambled around the flat, tidying up. Nick put away his toys every evening, or at least stacked them against the living-room wall, but it was amazing how many he could scatter around in the hour between getting up and going to nursery. She dusted the bookshelves and took books down and opened them and turned over pages of heavy, glossy exhibition catalogues of artists, photographers and designers, and thin, dense-printed textbooks of economics and business administration and management studies, each little more than a taster for the DVD or CD in a plastic envelope attached to the inside back cover, and therefore almost completely useless. Somewhere in the flat there had to be a DVD player, but she couldn’t think where. As if searching for a scientific answer to that question, she moved on to Hugh’s battered old engineering manuals and science references, some of them handed down from his father like a family Bible and likewise unchanging and full of small type, with constants and formulae defined for all time in bold black font barbed with serifs, a King James Version of truth. Then her browse took her to cookery books – again, the most used handed down, this one from Hope’s grandmother – and as she flipped through recipes whose results were appetisingly and artfully photographed in an advertising style her arts-trained eye could recognise at a glance as early 1980s, she lit upon a faded glossy pic of a beef casserole. She could almost smell the steam, and a sudden craving told her exactly what they’d be having for dinner this evening.