Kale staggered out. His T-shirt was stuck to him, dark and wet as if he’d been swimming in it. There were livid red marks around his wrists, legs and neck. One ran across his forehead like a bandana. His face was congested and shiny with sweat as he held on to the shed door and gulped air.
“Jesus Christ,” said Ben, awed.
His imagination balked at what he could have been doing to get into that state. The shed wasn’t that big. He focused quickly on the dark gap through the doorway. There was an impression of something vaguely mechanical inside, then Kale had closed the door. His limp was even more pronounced than usual when he went over to Jacob.
Still breathing heavily, though slightly less so now, Kale pointed to the car wing and bonnet that he’d brought into the garden earlier and said something to his son. When Jacob didn’t look up from his puzzle, Kale bent and took it from him. Ben’s finger pressed on the shutter release as he recorded Jacob’s angry protest. Kale said something else, but he was wasting his time. Ben knew from experience that Jacob was winding up to a tantrum. He could hear his frustrated cries drifting up the hillside as he tried to grab the puzzle back. Kale withheld it for a few seconds longer, then let go.
Jacob went into a protective huddle, clutching the puzzle to his chest. Kale looked down at him, but whatever he felt didn’t show on his face. He picked up the bonnet, seemed to consider for a moment, then laid it on the pile. He shifted it several times before he seemed satisfied, then did the same with the car wing.
He stood in the centre of the garden and regarded his handiwork. He didn’t move when the kitchen door opened and Sandra came out again. Her expression was pinched and mean as she stared at her husband’s back. Ben wondered if he knew what else went on behind it while he was at work. He didn’t think so. Kale was the possessive type. He’d kill her if he found out.
Sandra was speaking. The heat in her words was evident even though Ben couldn’t hear them. Kale didn’t answer.
His wife gesticulated angrily towards the kitchen, then said something else when Kale still didn’t respond.
Your tea’s on the table. No, Ben amended, seeing the forms her lips made. Your fucking tea’s on the table.
Without turning around, Kale abruptly snapped something at her. The effect was immediate.
She subsided, and in her face was something that could equally have been either hate or fear. It didn’t stop her from mouthing Fuck off at her husband’s back as she seized Jacob’s arm and pulled him into the house, but something made Ben think she hadn’t spoken the words out loud.
The light had almost gone. He straightened with a groan, kneading his back, and began to pack everything away. When he made his way through die darkening woods, Kale’s shadowy figure was still standing in the garden.
Chapter thirteen
Gradually, with each visit, he began to discern the patterns that the Kales lived by, the rhythm and routines which ruled them. He was literally seeing just one side, only what went on at the rear of the house, but from that he was able to draw conclusions about the rest. He picked it up piecemeal, making the hour-and-a-half journey to the woods whenever he could steal the time from work, until he was able to fit the pieces of their lives together like Jacob would a jigsaw puzzle. Slowly, a picture of the whole began to emerge from the separate parts.
On weekdays Kale and Jacob would have left before he arrived. He presumed that Jacob would be taken to school by the local authority’s minibus while his father went to work.
But that was part of the front life of the house, the part that Ben never saw. All he observed was their absence. And the time they spent in the garden.
As far as he could tell Kale hadn’t endangered Jacob again.
The lump of metal he’d hoisted over his son remained where it had landed that first time, and Ben was finding it harder to convince himself that it had been anything other than an isolated incident. Yet the rest of Kale’s activities there followed a strict order. While Jacob lost himself in one of his puzzles, he would exercise and busy himself with his scrap. He would switch pieces around, arranging them with such precision that Ben began to wonder if he was missing something obvious.
Perhaps it depended on the angle. Perhaps, if he could see through Kale’s eyes, he would be able to understand what the point of it all was. He even considered the possibility that the entire scrap pile was some sort of free-form sculpture, tried to imagine Kale as an aspiring artist. But no matter how he tried to rationalise it, he always came back to his earlier theory.
The man was a fucking nutter.
His exercise regime always ended with him going into the shed. Even on Sundays, when he would be at home all day, he didn’t go into it in the morning or afternoon. Only in the evening, at final light, and Ben would wonder what part of the picture that he was piecing together was concealed by the flimsy wooden walls. He toyed with the idea of slipping down to look inside when the Kales were at work, but the prospect of having to climb over the high fence in full view of the neighbours was too daunting.
Often when Kale came out, drenched in sweat and streaked with red weals as though he had been whipped, he would set a piece of scrap on the ground in front of Jacob like an offering. He would sit close to the boy and begin to talk to him, making Ben wish that he could hear as well as see them. Kale would eventually stop, looking expectantly at his son as if he were waiting for a response. When he didn’t get it he would calmly move away and contemplate the mountain of wreckage surrounding him, his own little kingdom of rust.
Ben would always be driven out of the woods by darkness before he tired of it.
That was the pattern that Kale and Jacob’s back-of-the house lives took. But, except for weekends, they weren’t played out until the evening.
During the day the house belonged to Sandra Kale.
No friends or neighbours called round, and if the man he’d seen sneaking out of the garden went to visit her again it was when Ben wasn’t there. She rarely did any housework except washing dishes and making the bed. Most of the time she stayed in the kitchen, drinking coffee (instant, with milk and sugar) or just sitting at the table, smoking and staring into space. The main event of her day came at about half past eleven, when she would leave for work.
Sometimes she dressed in the bedroom.
The first time it happened Ben had guessed she was going to get ready when she stubbed out her cigarette and left the kitchen. On the previous occasions he’d been there that had been the signal for the bathroom light to come on, and for her to reappear fully-clothed twenty minutes later, with wet hair that she would dry with a blower next to the sink. That morning, though, she had gone straight into the bedroom.
He waited for her to gather her clothes together and go out. Instead she unbelted the bathrobe she was wearing and tossed it on the bed.
The glare on the window restricted his view, but he could still see her clearly enough to tell that she was naked underneath.
She crossed to the dressing table and picked something up. Deodorant. Her breasts lifted as she rolled it under her arms, jiggling with the brisk motion. They were low, heavy but not sagging, with small, very dark nipples. Her stomach was flat and, he saw when she came nearer the window, had lines across it, as though the folds of her bathrobe had dug into her flesh.
Below them the trimmed black stripe of her crotch made a lie of her bleached yellow hair.
Ben had watched as she pulled on bra and pants, short skirt and blouse. She had gone out, and as he’d waited to see if she would return a bird clattered in the branches above him.