Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

Further along another girl was walking slowly up and down in the dim blue glare from a closed newsagent’s window. She had dark hair and her face was in shade, but for some reason Ben thought of Sandra Kale. His gut tightened again, and for an instant there was a tug of something so dark and illicit he didn’t recognise it. Then it was gone, leaving an unspecified sense of depression. He tried to lift himself out of it by thinking about going to Tunford the next day, but that only made him feel worse. It seemed to him now that there was something not quite wholesome about his eagerness to return. The justification that it was for Jacob rang false. He was struck with the sordidness of what he was doing, skulking around with his long lens like some sweaty voyeur.

And enjoying it.

His self-loathing was so thick he could taste it as he paid off the taxi driver and went inside. He stood in the dark hallway, listening to the sound of the untenanted rooms. The house pressed in on him, claustrophobic in its vastness. No Jacob. No Sarah. He realised he was crying. He lashed out and punched the wall and felt the jolt sear from his knuckles to his shoulder. Goaded by the pain, he seized the cherrywood cabinet and tore it down. It toppled against the wall on the other side and lodged at an angle. There was a crack of breaking wood, a chime of the telephone falling off. He thought of how he and Sarah had bought the cabinet when they were first married, and the stab of remorse incensed him. He kicked wildly at it, punishing himself with each splintering blow, stamping on it until it crashed over sideways and its mirror shattered in a cascade of silver fragments.

Ben stood over it, panting. The rage dwindled and vanished.

He looked at the shattered cabinet and felt a sadness so great he thought he would never climb out of it. He stepped over the wreckage and went into the lounge. There was enough light coming through the window to guide him to the sideboard. He groped inside until he found the bottle of vodka and took it with a glass to the settee.

Then he sat down and set about getting drunk.

The light was shining directly into his face. It seemed to have a physical weight, pressing on his temples and eyelids like a vice.

He turned away from it, trying to retreat from the pain back into sleep. The movement made it worse. His head throbbed and there was a stiffness in his neck that stabbed from his shoulder to his skull. Dimly he became aware that something was wrong. His posture was cramped and uncomfortable, the surface under his head too firm to be a pillow.

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.

A textured pattern, like seaweed, swam into focus. Ben blinked at it, but the distant panic at not recognising what it was paled in the face of the way his head was hurting.

The pain seemed to increase with consciousness, until finally the discomfort of his position outweighed his reluctance to move.

He rolled over. The banging pulse behind his eyes made him shut them. When he tentatively opened them again he found himself looking up at the living-room ceiling. He was on the settee. The seaweed pattern had been the tasselled edge of a cushion he’d had screwed up beneath his neck. He lay there as memories of the previous night returned to him.

He sat up and sucked in his breath at the sudden pain.

Holding his hands to his temples, he slowly swung his feet to the floor. They struck something hard and cold. He looked down and saw an overturned tumbler lying in a stained patch of carpet. The memory of vodka nauseated him. He took a few deep breaths through his mouth until the feeling had passed, and then stood up.

He’d been expecting the clamour in his head, but it was still almost enough to make him sit back down again. He swayed on his feet, waiting until the worst of it subsided, and then gingerly made his way into the hall. It was the first real hangover he’d had since he’d been out with Zoe.

His body felt as though it had been taken apart during the night and badly reassembled, so that none of the parts fitted together properly. He paused when he saw the wrecked cabinet. It was ruined beyond any hope of repair, but just then he felt too ill for the regret to make any impression. One self-punishment at a time.

He took two paracetamol, followed them with a glass of liver salts, and splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck. Then he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and waited for it to stop hurting.

The self-disgust he’d felt the night before had been pushed aside by the more immediate misery of his hangover. It seemed inconsequential now, and he was already forgetting it as he looked at the clock and estimated how soon he could pull himself together and go to Tunford.

When the worst of the shivers had passed, he poured himself a glass of orange juice and went to load his camera.

By lunch-time his hangover had subsided to a general malaise.

It lingered as a dull throb behind his eyes as he peered through the viewfinder at the Kales’ back garden. Kale and Jacob were in the central clearing surrounded by scrap. Jacob sat in the car seat while his father moved pieces of scrap around. Sandra was at the kitchen sink, still wearing her bathrobe. During the half-hour that Ben had been watching, none of them had spoken.

He’d hoped he might see them all together, since it was a Sunday, and he’d been so eager to reach his vantage point that he’d almost blundered into a group of children playing in the woods. They were too close to the huddle of oaks for him to risk going to it, so he’d had to wait until their game took them out of sight before he could go down to his den.

He’d urinated against a nearby tree before he’d settled himself inside, knowing that if the children returned he might be stuck in there indefinitely. He’d heard them — or another gang — playing in the distance, but so far they hadn’t come back. He hoped the dying leaves still clinging to the branches would be enough to screen him if they did. As he set up the camera and lens, he entertained notions of camouflage netting before deciding that would be going too far. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, he told himself.

Not really.

He massaged his temples as he watched Kale place a last piece of scrap and stand back to regard his handiwork. Ben couldn’t see what difference any of it made, but he presumed there must have been some reason. Even Kale wouldn’t shift heavy lumps of metal around for the fun of it.

He yawned as Kale went inside the house. Jacob played on, regardless. He had a puzzle game in his hands, a complicated arrangement of steel hoops, and every now and again he would stop and hold one close to his eyes. Trying to catch a glimpse of the spectrum in the reflected sunlight, Ben thought, smiling.

He seemed well enough. There were patches of what looked like oil on his shorts and T-shirt, but that wasn’t exactly surprising considering his father’s choice of garden furniture.

There was a movement in the doorway. The bull terrier hobbled down the steps like a muscle-bound golem. Ben had forgotten about the dog. He willed Kale or Sandra to reappear as it sniffed around the garden. There was no sign of either of them. He drew in his breath as it approached Jacob and lunged up at him, but the animal only licked the boy’s face. Jacob irritably pushed it away. The dog wagged its tail and flopped down at his feet, tongue hanging from its grinning mouth.

Ben had risen half out of his seat. He sat back down, the thud of his heart echoing painfully in his head. Now Kale came out of the house again, carrying something. He stepped in front of Jacob, blocking him from Ben’s view, and let the object fall to the ground.

It was a crumpled car wing. The chrome rim of the headlight was still set in it, spiked with jagged shards of glass.