The kitchen seemed at once familiar and strange, like somewhere visited in a dream. He was used to seeing it from the outside, framed first by the window, then the viewfinder, as two-dimensional as an image on a TV screen.
The reality was both more vivid and yet somehow less real. He couldn’t quite believe he was there. I’m inside the looking glass.
He glanced through the window, but the hillside was obscured by the rain and mist, reduced to a vague shape. In the foreground, the mound of wreckage formed a darker one below it.
Sandra finished plugging in a convection heater that stood against one wall and turned to face him. She leaned back against a work surface with her fists on her hips.
“Well?”
Now he was here Ben didn’t know how to start. He put his bag on the floor.
“I want Jacob back.”
Sandra stared at him, then put her head back and gave a laugh. “Oh, is that all?”
Her expression became heavy with disdain, but there might have been an element of relief there, too. “If that’s all you wanted to say you might as well fuck off back to London. Thanks for the lift.”
The hot air from the heater hadn’t yet warmed the room, but he was already feeling stifled in his bulky coat.
“What are you frightened of?”
“I’m not frightened of anything. I just wish you’d piss off and leave us alone.”
“Leave you alone?” he said, incredulous. “All this started because you wouldn’t let me see Jacob.”
“If you’re so bothered about the little bastard you shouldn’t have given him away.”
“I didn’t know what Kale was like then.”
She dropped her arms, stepped towards him. “He’s not a fucking dog! He’s got a first name!”
Ben refused to back down. “You know what he’s doing isn’t right.”
“Do I?”
“I think so. And you don’t want Jacob here any more than I do.”
“What makes you such an expert on what I want?”
I’ve watched you.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
She looked away. “It doesn’t make any difference anyway. What I want doesn’t matter,” she said, and the bitterness was so close to the surface he could have touched it. Abruptly, she turned back to him. “You think it’s going to do any good, coming here? You think I’d really help you? Even if I fucking could?”
“I hoped you might.”
“Well, you hoped wrong! Sorry to disappoint you.” She went to her handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes.
“Even if I can’t get Jacob back I want to make sure he’s properly looked after,” Ben said. “He needs special schooling, he needs to mix with other kids. He’s not getting any of that.”
Sandra had a cigarette clamped tightly in her mouth. She struck a match and held it to the tip. “Life’s hard, isn’t it?”
“What about all that macho shit with the weight, lifting it over Jacob’s head in the garden? What happens if he drops it?”
She looked at him sharply, but didn’t ask how he knew. The fear he’d thought he’d detected earlier flared in her eyes again for a moment. She blew smoke towards the ceiling. “John won’t drop it.”
“That’s it, is it? One slip and Jacob’s dead, but you just pretend it can’t happen?”
She shrugged.
“Wasn’t it enough letting your own daughter be killed without letting it happen again?”
Her face went white. The bruise on her cheek was like a strawberry birthmark against it. “Who told you that?”
Ben hadn’t wanted to bring it up quite so brutally, but now he had there was nothing to do but carry on. “I know you’ve been married before. And about your criminal record.” He tried to convince himself he’d nothing to feel bad about.
Sandra swayed slightly, as if she were about to faint. She closed her eyes. “This is that fucking detective, isn’t it? I wish John had killed him.”
He nearly did, Ben thought.
“Did he ask for money?”
Her face was drawn as she nodded. “He told John he’d tell the social services if he didn’t pay him. Stupid bastard.”
“So Kale beat him up.”
He thought she would shout at him again for using Kale’s surname, but she didn’t. They’d already gone beyond that. She just looked at him, as if the question didn’t deserve an answer.
He felt himself reddening. “Didn’t he know about your past until Quilley told him?”
“He knew. It didn’t matter to him, though. It never seemed to occur to him that anything could stop him getting Jacob back. He was his son, and that was it.”
“Didn’t it occur to you?”
“Of course it fucking occurred to me! But what do you think I was going to do? Tell him? I’d have been out on my ear if he’d thought I might stop him getting his precious little son back. I didn’t have one night’s sleep for months, worrying about them finding out.” The colour had come back to her cheeks, but she still looked tired. “When they didn’t I was so fucking relieved.”
“Weren’t you worried someone might recognise you on TV?”
“You think I still look anything like I did twelve years ago?” she said, scornfully. “Christ, I wish. Anyway, by then I thought it was all over. The social services hadn’t traced me back to that stupid, doped-up little tart who let her husband beat her kid to death. I thought I’d finally put it all behind me. I’d earned a bit of limelight.” The brief animation went out of her. “Then that fucking detective turned up again.”
“How did Kale take it?” Ben asked.
She glared at him. The bruise stood out lividly on her cheek. “How do you think?”
He looked away, embarrassed.
“That was the first time he’s ever hit me.”
Ben thought about how Kale had thrown her against the fence. His disbelief must have shown. Her face hardened.
“I’d married one man who knocked me about. Do you think I was going to marry another?”
But she seemed to lack the energy to sustain any anger. She sank back against the work surface again, pulling on the cigarette as if it were a lifeline. “God, I wish I’d never heard of you or your son. Why couldn’t you just have left well alone?”
It was something Ben had asked himself often enough. He didn’t have an answer.
“I didn’t ask for this. If your husband had been...” He was about to say ‘reasonable’, but that word no longer seemed to apply even remotely to Kale. “...had been different, I’d have settled for seeing Jacob once a month.”
He wasn’t sure if that was true, though. He couldn’t think of any one point where things between him and Kale could have been otherwise. There seemed an inevitability about it, as though they were both chained by personality and events to tracks that had led to him being there, now, talking to Kale’s wife in that room. And from there — where? He had a dizzying sense of standing outside himself, looking back on something that had already happened. He felt that the conclusion had already occurred, and was simply waiting for him to catch up with it.
Then the feeling passed.
“How did you meet him?” he asked.
“Oh, please.”
“No, I’d like to know. Really.”
He meant it. He wanted to make her lower her guard, but there was also a genuine curiosity.
She looked disgusted for a moment longer, then shrugged.
“After I left Portsmouth I lived near Aldershot, not far from where he was based. I used to knock around with a lot of the soldiers. You know.”
Ben thought he probably did.