By the time Niamh had pulled the Volvo into the drive, Gracie was in full blub mode. She seemed to think if she sobbed loud enough, their mother would turn the car around and take them back to Grange-over-Sands instead of what she had planned, which was to give them the boot just to mind-fuck their father and then dash off to Milnthorpe to body-fuck her poor twit of a boyfriend in the kitchen of his stupid Chinese takeaway.
“Mummy! Mummy!” Gracie was crying. “His car’s not even here . I’m scared to go inside if his car’s not here ’cause he’s not home and — ”
“Grace, stop it this instant,” Niamh snapped. “You’re acting like a two-year-old. He’s gone to the shops, that’s all. There’re lights on in the house and the other car’s here. I expect you can work out what that means.”
She wouldn’t say the name, naturally. She might have added, “Your father’s lodger is at home,” with that nasty emphasis that communicated volumes. But that would be to acknowledge Kaveh Mehran’s existence, which she had no intention of doing. She did say, “Timothy,” meaningfully, and inclined her head towards the house. This meant he was to drag Gracie from the car and march her through the garden gate to the door because Niamh didn’t intend to do it.
He shoved his door open. He tossed his rucksack over the low stone wall and then jerked open his sister’s door. He said, “Out,” and grabbed her arm.
She shrieked, “No!” and “I won’t!” and began to kick.
Niamh unfastened Gracie’s safety belt and said, “Stop making a scene. The whole village will think I’m killing you.”
“I don’t care! I don’t care!” Gracie sobbed. “I want to go with you, Mummy!”
“Oh, for the love of God.” Then Niamh was out of the car as well, but not to help Tim manage his sister. Instead, she grabbed up Gracie’s rucksack, opened it, and threw it over the wall. It landed — this was a mercy at least — on Gracie’s trampoline, where its contents spilled out into the rain. Among those contents was Gracie’s favourite doll, not one of those hideously misshapen fantasy women with feet in the wear-high-heels position and nippleless tits at attention but a baby doll so scarily realistic that to toss it out to land on its head in the middle of a trampoline should have been considered child abuse.
At this Gracie screamed. Tim shot his mother a look. Niamh said, “What did you expect me to do?” And then to Gracie, “If you don’t want it ruined, I suggest you fetch it.”
Gracie was out of the car in a flash. She was into the garden and up onto the trampoline and cradling her doll, still weeping, only now her tears mixed with the falling rain. Tim said to his mother, “Nice one, that.”
She said, “Talk to your father about it.”
That was, of course, her answer to everything. Talk to your father, as if he, who he was, and what he’d done comprised the excuse for every rotten thing Niamh Cresswell did.
Tim slammed the door and turned away. He went into the garden while behind him he heard the Volvo take off, bearing his mother to wherever because he didn’t much care. She could fuck whatever loser she wanted to fuck, as far as he was concerned.
In front of him, Gracie sat howling on her trampoline. Had it not been raining, she would have jumped upon it, wearing herself out, because that’s what she did and she did it every day, just as what he did was what he did and he did it every day as well.
He scooped up his rucksack and watched her for a moment. Pain in the arse, she was, but she didn’t deserve what she’d been handed. He went over to the trampoline and reached for her rucksack. “Gracie,” he said, “let’s go inside.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m not, I’m not.” She clutched her doll to her bosom, which caused a little tear in Tim’s own chest.
He couldn’t remember the doll’s name. He said, “Look, I’ll check for spiders, Gracie, and I’ll get rid of cobwebs. You can put… whatsername… in her cot — ”
“Bella. She’s called Bella,” Gracie sniffed.
“All right. Bella-she’s-called-Bella. You can put Bella-she’s-called-Bella in her cot and I’ll… I’ll brush your hair. Okay? The way you like it. I’ll do it up the way you like it.”
Gracie looked at him. She rubbed her arm over her eyes. Her hair, which was a source of unending pride for her, was getting wet and soon enough it would be frizzy and unbrushable. She fingered a long and luxurious lock of it. She said, “French braids?” so hopefully that he couldn’t deny her.
He sighed. “All right. French braids. But you got to come now, or I won’t.”
“’Kay.” She scooted to the edge of the trampoline and handed him Bella-she’s-called-Bella. He stowed the doll headfirst into Gracie’s rucksack and carried this along with his to the house. Gracie followed, scuffling her feet in the gravel on the garden path.
Everything changed when they got inside, though. They went in through the kitchen at the east side of the house, where a roast of some kind stood on the top of the primitive range in the fireplace, its juices congealing in the pan beneath it. A pot next to this pan held sprouts gone cold. A salad was wilting on the draining board. Tim and Gracie hadn’t had their dinner, but by the look of things here, neither had their father.
“Ian?”
Tim felt his insides harden at the sound of Kaveh Mehran’s voice. Cautious, it was. A little tense?
Tim said roughly, “No. It’s us.”
A pause. Then, “Timothy? Gracie?” as if it might actually be someone else mimicking his voice, Tim thought. There was noise from the fire house, something being dragged across the flagstones and onto the carpet, a bleak “What a mess,” and Tim experienced a wonderful moment in which he understood they’d probably had a fight — his dad and Kaveh going after each other’s jugular with blood everywhere and wouldn’t that be a treat. He headed towards the fire house. Gracie followed.
To Tim’s disappointment, all was well within. No overturned furniture, no blood, no guts. The noise had come from Kaveh dragging the heavy old games table from in front of the fireplace back to where it belonged. He looked down-in-the-mouth, though, and that was enough for Gracie to forget that she herself was a walking emotional smash-up. She hurried over to the bloke straightaway.
“Oh, Kaveh,” she cried. “Is something wrong?” whereupon the bugger dropped onto the sofa, shook his head, and put his face in his hands.
Gracie sat on the sofa next to Kaveh and put her arm round his shoulders. “Won’t you tell me?” she asked him. “Please tell me, Kaveh.”
But Kaveh said nothing.
Obviously, Tim thought, he and their dad had had an argument of some sort and their dad had taken off in a temper. Good, he decided. He hoped they both were suffering. If his dad drove off the side of a cliff, that would be excellently fine by him.
“Has something happened to your mummy?” Gracie was asking Kaveh. She even smoothed the bloke’s greasy hair. “Has something happened to your dad? C’n I get you a cup of tea, Kaveh? Does your head hurt? D’you have a tummy ache?”
Well, Tim thought, Gracie was taken care of. Her own cares forgotten, she’d bustle round playing nurse. He dropped her rucksack inside the fire house door and himself crossed to the room’s other door, where a small square hall offered an uneven staircase to the first floor of the house.
His laptop occupied a rickety desk beneath the window in his bedroom, and the window itself looked out on the front garden and the village green beyond it. It was nearly dark now and the rain was coming down in sheets. The wind had picked up, piling the leaves from the maples beneath benches on the green and tossing them helter-skelter into the street. Lights were on in the terrace of houses across the green, and in the ramshackle cottage where George Cowley lived with his son, Tim could see movement behind a thin curtain. He watched for a moment — a man and his son and it looked to him like they were conversing but what did he know, really, of what was going on — and then he turned to his computer.
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