The thing he was not supposed to know but had known for six months was that his father was having an affair; that on at least three evenings a week Andrzej Kiplas would knock off work early and drive over to Streatham, where he would spend an unspecified number of hours with a woman named Grace Hemingway. Kip didn’t know who she was or how his father had met her. Sometimes he imagined her as one of the peroxide Pirelli blondes on the calendar in the site Portakabin; at other times he saw her as a mousy little librarian with a flat full of dusty books, like the women in films by Wajda or Kieslowski.
Andy Kiplas sometimes didn’t return until ten, eleven o’clock. On the nights when this happened, Kip would slope off to his room as soon as he heard his father’s key in the lock. There would be a short interval without much happening, then his mother would start crying or his father shouting or both. This usually went on for about an hour. Then everything would go quiet, and later he would hear the headboard banging against the wall in his parents’ bedroom.
Andy Kiplas was almost fifty, but his body was still lean and hard from his work on the site. Kip’s mother Lynn was like an overblown rose. When she smiled and if the lighting was right she could still be beautiful, her heaviness transformed into a pink softness that put him in mind of strawberries, candyfloss, September sunsets. But when she was unhappy she turned pallid as lard.
Kip itched to photograph her. With her inflamed eyelids and the ragged cloth in her hands she looked like a war victim, one of the refugee women in the immigrant camps outside Calais. Sometimes on evenings like this Kip would stay downstairs and play cards with her, or backgammon. At some point during the game Lynn would get up from her seat and pour them both a vodka, a double Zubrowka straight from the freezer. The fumes rose up in a smoky cloud as she unscrewed the cap.
“One little nip can’t hurt you,” she would say. She had been saying that since he was thirteen. “Don’t you go telling your teachers.” She would laugh then, a raucous, ribald sound, the same laugh she used with her friends on the phone and that Kip loved to hear. She would knock back her vodka in one, and two bright tears would appear, squeezing like liquid crystal from the corners of her eyes.
They sparkled there, jewel-bright, on the rims of her cheeks. Kip wondered what he would do if she cried for real. No matter how much he loved her he still hated her need of him, the way her fingers twisted together when she told him the pointless lies about his father.
The only thing to do was pretend not to notice. Once the truth was out in the open it would be impossible for either of them to put it back.
They ate supper off a tray, watching the news.
“I’m going out later,” Kip said.
“Where to?” Lynn said. She glanced up from her plate. Her food was still mostly untouched. “I don’t want you roaming the streets half the night, not with that man on the loose.”
“I’m only going to Sonia’s. I won’t be late.”
“Well, make sure you catch the bus coming home.” She took her plate through to the kitchen and Kip heard her scraping her supper into the waste bin. It was the first time she had mentioned the monster, at least to him. He thought it was probably her way of trying to stop him from going out and leaving her by herself.
“I don’t know,” Sonia said. “It could be him, I suppose.” She held the photograph in both hands, tilting it against the light. “They all look the same though, those photo fits. Just think how awful it would be for this man if you got it wrong.”
They were sitting on the grass behind the garage in Sonia’s garden. Sonia’s hair was drawn back off her face in a ponytail. Loose strands glimmered at the nape of her neck like copper wire.
“I suppose,” Kip said. There was a number you could ring, a police hotline. On the way over to Sonia’s he had tried to imagine what would happen if he called it and told the cop at the other end that he had seen the monster. They would ask for his name and address, that would be the first thing, and later on they would make him hand over the photograph. He supposed it was evidence of a kind, evidence that linked him with the monster. The idea was disturbing, not so much because the link existed as because it might become known. Sonia’s uncertainty about the photograph was a relief because it seemed to free him from the obligation of having to do anything.
He leaned in over her shoulder, pretending to look at the photo but in reality just wanting to get closer to her. She smelled of the coarse-grained pine soap the Vardens had in their upstairs bathroom. He imagined her at the sink, her bare feet on the coconut matting. The Vardens’ house was like that, all polished wood and cream-coloured walls. Sonia went to Forest Hill Girls’ School. Sonia’s father Timothy had a good job in the City.
“I really like this photo though,” Sonia was saying. “Can I keep it?”
“’Course you can,” Kip said. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Nothing.” She laughed. “I just like it, that’s all. He looks lonely, don’t you think? The kind of man who’s always alone.” She was still studying the picture, as if she had come upon it by chance in a magazine and was trying to decide whether she should cut it out or not. The way she looked at the photograph made him feel strange, weightless, as in the moments before an orgasm. There was part of himself that wished he had not shown it to her, that felt convinced it was dangerous. And yet the idea that she would want to keep something he had made, that she could like it that much, made his insides hurt.
He began to count the freckles on the back of her neck, concentrating hard to stop himself getting an erection. The freckles were red, like her hair, the glinting vermilion of the jagged patches of rust on the disused water tank around the back of the school toilets.
He’d had sex with Sonia twice, once up in Oxleas Woods, and once in her bedroom, when her parents were out for the day at some barbecue or other. The thought of being with her in her parents’ house had made him almost sick with excitement, but it turned out not to be such a good idea. Every time a car went by on the street outside he thought it was the Vardens, returning home early. The time in the woods had been better. Sonia held his cock, clasping it in her fist and moving her hand cautiously up and down, as if she was afraid she might hurt him. He came too soon of course, but at least he managed to get inside her. He thought it would be embarrassing afterwards, trying to think of things to say, but it had been fine. Better than fine, in fact. They put their clothes back on and lay in the grass, watching planes soar in low overhead on their approach to Heathrow and talking about TV shows they had liked when they were younger. By the end of the afternoon he felt comfortable around Sonia in a way that went far beyond just wanting to fuck her.
He couldn’t imagine what had driven the monster to fuck an eight-year-old. Almost the best part of sex with Sonia was knowing that she wanted it too, and that she liked him enough to want to spend time with him afterwards.
The rape of Rebecca Riding was something he was ashamed to think about, as if thinking about it somehow made him a part of what had happened. Had the monster killed the girl in the end because he wanted to cover his tracks, or because he could no longer stand the sound of her screaming? To erase what he had done, like pulling the wings off a fly and then crushing it beneath your thumb to put it out of its misery.
A crime like the monster’s was so bad it had its own thumbprint, its own identity. If Kip thought about it hard enough he could feel it beginning to infect his imagination, cell by cell, like mildew creeping and spreading on a damp wall.