We Are Family Read online

‘Rachel!’ A man’s voice was calling from downstairs: Bill’s; it could only be his. Tony’s stomach lurched. Rachel jerked back from him like she’d been shot. She reached for the skylight and pulled it closed.

  ‘Shit!’ she gasped. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ She stared around the room.

  ‘Rachel!’ Bill called again, nearer.

  Footsteps hurried towards them up the stairs.

  Tony looked at the tiny wardrobe in the corner of the room. It wasn’t big enough to hide a mouse.

  ‘I’m fine!’ Rachel shouted down. ‘It’s nothing to –’

  The footsteps didn’t stop.

  There, Tony saw the open trapdoor which led down to the rest of the house. Bill would burst through it any second now.

  Rachel saw it, too. She reached out to slam it shut. Tony grabbed her wrist, shook his head.

  ‘He’ll break through,’ he mouthed.

  Because he would. Tony knew it. After hearing all that noise, Bill would find a way. And then it would be over. Bill would find him here. Then work it out. Then tell his mother. Together, they’d explode. Together, they’d tear him and Rachel apart.

  ‘What’s going on?’ A woman’s voice now: Rachel’s mother.

  Then Bill’s, risen to a bellow: ‘I’m coming up!’

  The creak of the ladder: fourteen stones of muscle and bone coming at them. The terror in Rachel’s eyes. Tony groaned. He shouldn’t have come. He should have been patient. He wished himself invisible . . . And then he saw a way to make it so . . .

  ‘The storm,’ he hissed into Rachel’s ear, diving now, past her, sliding smoothly, silently across the bare wooden boards.

  Then there he was: in the darkness, under the bed, with his face pressed up against the wall. He held his breath and prayed.

  A rush of breath and footsteps and Bill was in the room.

  ‘Are you all right? What happened? What was that noise?’

  ‘The storm. Outside.’ It was Rachel speaking. She’d understood what Tony had meant. ‘The storm,’ she repeated. ‘The roof. It must have been the wind.’

  All around him, Tony felt the dust clinging to him, covering him, drifting into his nostrils, making him want to sneeze. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself into silence.

  ‘Some wind to sound like that . . .’ Bill was saying, ‘. . . like the whole house was falling down . . .’

  Something was moving on Tony’s neck now, slowly and softly . . . a spider? He shivered involuntarily, forced himself still.

  The floorboards started creaking. Bill was prowling now, circling. Tony imagined him looking up, down, around, searching the room, trying to make sense of what he’d heard. Could he see him? Could he see Tony hiding here? Had he already seen? Had this become about Tony’s humiliation now?

  ‘Look, there’s water,’ Bill said. ‘There.’

  Tony shut his eyes, tried to control his breathing. In: one, two. Out: three, four. What water? Where? Was Bill pointing at the floorboards. Had Tony left wet footprints? Was there a trail which led to the bed? Tony’s feet seemed to buzz. Were they shaking? Could Bill see his boots? Were they sticking out, shining wet with rain? He waited for the grip of damning fingers on his ankles, the sudden yank as he was dragged out into the light. In: one, two. Out: three, four.

  Rachel: ‘I opened the window. Because of the noise. The water ran in. It could have been a branch,’ she hurriedly added, ‘falling on to the roof. Or a loose slate . . . or . . .’

  Tony heard the click of the skylight being opened, the hiss of the wind outside . . . then came Bill’s aftershave . . . Tony could smell it, the same as he could whenever Bill had been round to see Emily. In the broad light of day. That’s how Bill courted Emily. Like a normal man. Not like Tony. Not like this, like a thief in the night, a frightened animal skulking in the dark.

  Then another click and the wind dropped back to a moan. Suddenly, Tony wanted to be caught. Suddenly, he wanted the confrontation. He wasn’t a child any more. He shouldn’t have to live like this.

  ‘So long as you’re OK,’ Bill said.

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel agreed.

  ‘I won’t be able to check until morning.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Much too dangerous to go out there now.’

  ‘Yes. The morning. It’ll have cleared up by then.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Their mother again, calling from downstairs . . .

  ‘Go back to bed, Mum,’ Bill shouted down. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. You should think about turning in, too,’ he added to Rachel.

  ‘Yes, I should. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Tony listened to Bill’s creaking withdrawal from the room and back down the ladder. Only then did he risk turning his head away from the wall to face the room. He flicked the spider from his jaw and watched it scuttle across the floorboards into the shadows. He listened to Rachel gently closing and bolting the trapdoor shut. Then he rolled out from under the bed and got to his feet.

  The first thing she did after she’d turned round to face him was try to slap him across the face. With his adrenalin still rushing, he was too fast for her, though, and caught her wrist with inches to spare.

  ‘What?’ He didn’t understand.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she hissed.

  ‘But I wanted to surprise you,’ he started to explain. ‘I wanted to be romantic . . . I thought you –’

  ‘You could have died.’

  ‘But it wasn’t that dangerous,’ he whispered back. ‘In fact, once I got to the top of the tree, it was –’

  ‘No, idiot,’ she told him. ‘I mean Bill could have killed you. If he’d found you. He had a knife.’

  ‘A knife? But why?’

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘How could you be so fucking stupid?’

  He’d never heard her say that word before. He watched her sink down on to the bed. She covered her face with her hands, but not in time to hide the tears.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he then said, as it dawned on him what she was talking about.

  It hadn’t even occurred to him. How could he have been so stupid? Thief in the night: he’d been more right than he’d known. He’d tried to break into her house. Rachel’s house. Bill’s house. This house. In the middle of the night. After what had happened here. After what his brother had done . . .

  He knelt down before her, forcing her hands from her face. She was shaking. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Her eyes stayed shut as tight as mussels. Over and over, he kissed her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think . . . I’m so sorry . . .’

  ‘God,’ she moaned, ‘this is all turning into such a mess.’

  As he continued to hold her, slowly, her sobbing subsided. She leant forward and softly kissed him. Her face was wet with tears. She took his cap off and smoothed her hands over his Brylcreemed hair.

  He knew then that she’d forgiven him, but the guilt he felt over what he’d just done wouldn’t go. ‘Look at us,’ he said. ‘We can’t carry on like this. It’s been driving me mad. And you’re right – now I’ve started acting it too . . .’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she whispered. ‘We’re OK. Everything’s going to be OK.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not. And it’s not going to go away, either. We’ve got to tell them. We’ve got to make them understand.’

  ‘They won’t ever understand.’ He felt the sudden tension in her hands. ‘Oh, Tony, what are we going to do?’

  I don’t know, he almost answered. Then he remembered it, the piece of paper in his jacket pocket, and his belief in them returned. ‘Keep believing in each other,’ he told her instead.

  Delving deep into his jacket pocket, he removed the piece of paper.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘A poem. By Christina Rossetti. Listen. It’s about you. It’s about you and how you make me feel.’

  The first four lines read:

  My he
art is like a singing bird

  Whose nest is in a watered shoot;

  My heart is like an apple-tree

  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

  He lowered the paper, because he found he no longer needed it. It was like the words had become his and, by speaking them to her now, he was making them hers as well. He recited the next four lines:

  My heart is like a rainbow shell

  That paddles in a halcyon sea;

  My heart is gladder than all these

  Because my love is come to me.

  But then he saw she wasn’t smiling, which is what he’d so desperately wanted. Because that’s what it had been all about for him, the whole madness of this evening, about showing her that he loved her, about proving it to her with action and then telling it to her in words. That’s why he’d chosen this poem. Because that’s what he thought it showed.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ There’d been a time when he’d thought he knew all about women. Now he felt he suddenly knew nothing about the woman he wanted to know everything about.

  ‘No,’ she said, pulling him close, holding him tighter than he’d ever been held in his life. ‘You got it exactly right.’

  ‘I love you,’ he told her.

  She seemed to deflate in his arms. ‘And I love you,’ she whispered.

  When she looked at him again, all the anguish had gone from her face. In its place burned fierce hope. She spoke quickly, like everything she was saying was fact, not speculation.

  ‘Once I’ve finished school, and left home, none of this will matter.’

  ‘But what about today? What about tonight? What about tomorrow?’

  ‘We’ll have to wait,’ she told him. ‘Will you? Can you do that? Can you keep believing until then.’

  ‘You know I can.’

  ‘Then we will.’

  He smiled then. Both of them did. At the same time. Like they were one.

  ‘And when you’ve left home?’ He could barely credit himself for asking this. They stared unblinking into each other’s eyes. She knew exactly what he’d just asked.

  ‘We’ll marry,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll marry,’ he repeated.

  ‘And move away,’ she said, kissing him now. ‘To a big city somewhere. And you’ll be an even better chef . . . and I can work as a waitress or something while you do your bit in the army . . . and in the evenings I can study bookkeeping . . . and then after you’ve left the army, if we want to, we can start a hotel or a restaurant . . . and . . . and we can go places and meet people and do things we haven’t even dreamt of . . .’

  She was grinning now, staring wide-eyed around her, like she was seeing it all, like the words she was speaking were altering the very fabric of their world. Climbing off the bed, she pulled her nightdress up over her head and stood there naked before him.

  He stood and she helped him undress, slowly circling him as she did, until they were standing face to face. He cupped her small breasts in his hands, stroking his thumbs across them. As she reached in between his legs, he slid his hand in between hers, slowly stroking his fingers over her soft downy hair. She touched her nose against his, pulling him back with her on to the bed. He pressed his slim hips against hers, and moaned. They’d never done it in a real bed like this before. He wanted it so much. It would be like a taste of things to come, a snapshot of the future they’d one day inhabit together, when they’d have a place of their own.

  ‘Have you got one?’ she asked. ‘A letter?’

  A French letter, she meant. The same as the first time they’d done it, she’d made him wear one every time since. A girl at Rachel’s school had got in the family way the year before and had had to leave. She’d been sent to live with relatives and no one had seen her since. Tony had bought some from the barber’s shop on East Street, but stupidly, he hadn’t any with him now.

  ‘No,’ he admitted.

  He was desperate to carry on. His fingers snaked insistently across the soft smooth skin at the tops of her thighs.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  His whole body pressed against hers, imploring her. He wanted this too much to stop. Already, he knew it was going to be different – gentle, slow and sensuous – because already that’s how their bodies were moving. He couldn’t lose this moment now.

  Then she nodded her head and, kissing him deeply, pulled him closer.

  Chapter XV

  Mallorca, Present Day

  Sam was sitting next to Archie near the top of the great flight of sandstone steps which led up to the worn embattlements of Sant Bartholomew Monastery. Cicadas scratched in the myrtle groves below. The sun blazed down, leaving Sam’s brow glistening with sweat. At the bottom of the steep-sided mountain on which the Benedictine monks had long ago built their retreat, the island of Mallorca stretched away to where it slid into the shimmering sapphire expanse of the Mediterranean sea.

  Tugging his baseball cap down to shield his eyes, Sam breathed in the scent of lavender and wild garlic which rose up from the cracked and dusty ground like the aroma of soup from a pot. He adored being here with Archie, just the two of them. He didn’t spend enough time with his son, he knew, but at least he did whenever he could. Like today – a Sunday – when he’d got up early and left Claire snoring softly in bed.

  It hadn’t been difficult not to disturb her. They’d been lying on opposite sides of the mattress, like magnets which had driven one another apart during the night. She’d still been asleep when Archie and Sam had left an hour later.

  ‘And if you look all the way over there,’ Sam was telling Archie now, ‘you can see Palma.’ He was pointing east, ten kilometres away, to where the city’s whitewashed apartment blocks rose up like ramparts from the rusty earth. ‘And who lives in Palma?’ he asked.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy?’

  ‘That’s right. And can you think of anyone else?’

  Archie frowned. He stared pensively at his T-shirt, a gift from Rachel, which read, I ♥ My Grandma Best. ‘Don’t know,’ he finally said.

  ‘Archie. Archie does.’

  ‘Archie!’ Archie exclaimed, grinning up at Sam as if he’d known the answer all along and had only been teasing. ‘Archie and Mummy and Daddy. Family,’ he then added brightly.

  Family . . . Sam stared into his son’s eyes. He’d never heard him use the word in any meaningful sense before. He fleetingly wondered whether he’d learnt the concept at playgroup, or from a Miramax DVD, or Isabel the nanny, or even Rachel. The last sources he considered were himself and Claire.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam answered, urging a congratulatory tone into his voice. ‘Your family.’

  ‘I’m thirsty now, Daddy,’ Archie complained, tugging at the small canvas bag between Sam’s tanned, sandalled feet.

  Sam rummaged through the spare nappies, baby wipes, biscuits and tiny boxes of raisins which he’d packed before they’d set out that morning. He produced a plastic bottle of fresh orange juice and placed it in Archie’s outstretched hands. ‘Here you go,’ he said.

  From up here near the mountain’s summit, the island looked more like a map than a real place where real people spent their days. Sam had hoped the view might have provided him with a sense of perspective, of objectivity, even. That was one of the reasons he’d chosen the monastery for this Sunday’s outing with Archie: to help Sam see the bigger picture, the way he’d always been able to do in his work. He’d wanted to find a way through the maze his life had become.

  Instead, he found himself seduced once more by the thought of Laurie Vale. And the fact that she was out there now, either alone, or with him, James Cadogan, the man who’d called her gorgeous as he’d kissed her by the pool. But then James faded from Sam’s mind, and only Laurie remained.

  There was no escaping it: Sam had become dazzled by her again, beguiled. Her face had begun to haunt him, not only at night, but in the daytime, too: during meetings, mid-sentence, or as he s
howered, or opened a bottle of beer and drank. Like the retinal image of something incandescent at which he’d stared for too long, he carried her with him all the time.

  How could she have made him feel so much by doing so little? That’s what he couldn’t figure out. He’d wanted to kiss her there on Flight, as they’d lain becalmed in the bay. The urge had reared up inside him like a great wave. All it would have taken for him to surrender to it was the faintest of signals from her. He remembered how he’d stared into her eyes, willing her to close them. He’d wished that the wind would never pick up. The desert island they’d joked about, he’d wanted it for real.

  Archie let out a great sigh of satisfaction. ‘Finished.’ He held up the empty bottle as evidence of his achievement. ‘I’m hot, Daddy,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’ Sam stood and lifted Archie on to his shoulders. Picking up the bag, he turned his back on the view and climbed the last few steps which led to the monastery’s courtyard. ‘What would I do without you, Archie?’ he asked.

  He’d be lost, was the answer which Archie didn’t give but Sam already knew. In the same way that, without Laurie, Sam now understood he’d also been lost these last three years and, without her now, he was lost again. Without either Archie or Laurie in his life, it seemed, a part of Sam died. But to have both was impossible.

  Or was it? He let Archie down and watched him run ahead through the open cast-iron courtyard gates. He imagined another place, then, far away from here. A colder climate. A walk in the English countryside, with Archie running along a frost-webbed path. With Ararat nothing but a memory and Laurie’s hand in his. A different world with different ambitions. Was it really so hard to see?

  He walked through the gateway. Plane trees branched out above the courtyard, casting it in shade. Ivy snaked over the cool stone walls and an old man in paint-spattered overalls and scuffed trainers swept dust and crackling leaves across the cobbled ground with a brier brush. Sam wished him a good morning, and the old man grinned back at him, before returning to his work.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ Archie said, pulling impatiently at Sam’s arm.

  The blackened chapel door was open and Sam followed Archie beneath the low stone lintel. It was as cold as a subterranean cavern inside. A plain ebony crucifix hung on the whitewashed wall behind a dull oak altar. Light streamed through a stained-glass representation of Christ, dappling the wooden pews with colours.