Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

I really have been losing touch, he thought.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes.” She stood up and stretched, affecting indifference. “Things don’t always turn out how we’d like, do they?”

Ben drank the water and pretended he hadn’t heard.

Kale propped the car door on top of the wrecked bonnet, manoeuvred it until it balanced, studied it, then shifted it slightly. He picked up another, unrecognisable car part and placed that with it, going through the same careful process before he was apparently satisfied. They were part of a selection of new parts he must have gathered over the previous week.

It had become too dark in the evening for him to do much when he arrived home at night, but each weekend he would still be out in the garden, arranging his recent additions with all the care of a stamp collector gumming in a Penny Black.

A few feet away, Jacob sat in his usual place on the car seat, a thick duffel coat buttoned up to his chin as he tilted and spun a puzzle block. His father’s sole concession to the weather was that he now wore track-suit bottoms instead of shorts. The breath from the two of them misted in the cold air, exhaust from biological engines.

Ben cupped his hands and blew into them without taking his eye from the images in the viewfinder. It was, without a doubt, fucking freezing. The chill cut through the woollen hat that he wore pulled down over his ears and the fleece-lined Gore-Tex coat. His fingers were numb from handling the camera, but gloves would have been too cumbersome to work in. He rubbed the tip of his nose and considered having another coffee. He was eking out his flask, knowing that once it was gone there would be nothing to warm him until he was back in the car. The long-term view won. He thrust his hands into his coat pockets instead.

“Come on, do something,” he said to the magnified figure of Kale. But Kale typically showed no inclination of obliging. He continued his rearranging with the same painstaking deliberation as ever, moving the tortured pieces of metal around as if seeing how they would fit. Ben felt something almost work its way from his subconscious.

He grabbed for it, but it was gone. He sighed impatiently as Kale moved the battered car door from the position he’d seemed happy with five minutes before, and carried it to another part of the garden.

“It’s just scrap,” he muttered. “As if it matters.”

He shifted his attention to the house. Kale and Jacob had already been in the garden when he arrived, but there was no sign of Sandra.

Judging by the drawn bedroom curtains she still hadn’t got up. Ben hoped the idle bitch was enjoying her lie-in. He’d spoken to her the night before, taping the conversation as a matter of course as he reminded her that it was his weekend for contact with Jacob again. She’d replied that Jacob’s cold had flared up, but neither of them made any pretence that the lie was anything other than a formality. Their tone had been quite bantering. Flirtatious, almost. When Ben had put the phone down he’d had a hard-on.

He stared at the closed curtains, willing her to open them.

They remained drawn. Fuck it, he thought.

He sat back from the camera and reached for the Thermos flask. The hot steam from the coffee condensed on his cheeks as he cupped his hands around the plastic cup, huddling himself around it. The air was damp and smoky. A crow caw-cawed from somewhere nearby, but other than that the woods seemed to have shut down. In the last week the autumn colours had given way to the dripping blacks and browns of winter, a time of year and colour scheme that Ben found depressing at the best of times, let alone when he had to sit out in it. The small oaks that formed his den were stripped bare except for a few dead leaves that still clung to them like early Christmas ornaments.

He no longer felt invisible in them, although the branches themselves overlapped so densely that he doubted that anyone could see him from more than a few feet away. But it gave an added insecurity to the time he spent in the woods, and on those occasions when he heard other people in them he wouldn’t dare move until he was sure they’d gone.

He took a king-sized Snickers bar from his pocket and tore it open. The chocolate was hard and brittle with cold. He took another drink of coffee to wash it down and found that it had already turned tepid.

“Piss,” he said. He drank it anyway and ate half the Snickers. The rest he put back in his pocket before looking through the viewfinder again. The curtains remained resolutely shut.

He tilted the camera so he could see Jacob and Kale in the garden again. Kale had started the balletic movements of his warm-up routine. Ben watched him stretch and twist without interest.

He had seen it all countless times, but still not caught him doing anything else that threatened Jacob. He no longer really believed that he would. The single incident he’d witnessed seemed like something even Kale wouldn’t be reckless enough to try more than once.

He didn’t let himself consider why, in that case, he continued watching them.

Since he’d discovered that Kale and Jacob spent their days together at the scrapyard, surrounded by the crushed and wrecked remains of cars, Ben’s entire perspective had somehow altered. Some of it he could put down to jealousy and anger that Kale was selfishly spending so much time with his son. But the apparent obliviousness they displayed towards each other in the garden now seemed to him more like an acute familiarity, each so conscious of the other’s presence that it was taken for granted. There were times when he could almost believe that Jacob’s tireless absorption with his puzzles and Kale’s behaviour were somehow linked, their apparently separate tasks both working towards the same obscure end.

Then he’d remind himself that Jacob was autistic and Kale had one foot in the funhouse, and wonder if his own sanity wasn’t flapping in the wind.

He sat back and blew on his hands again, bored. A flutter of movement showed on the first floor of the house. He looked through the camera and felt animation return as the bedroom curtains were jerked back. Sandra Kale squinted against the daylight and quickly turned away. Ben expected her to leave the room, but she went to the bed and sat on its edge, rubbing her temples. He grinned. Heavy night, was it?

He quickly slipped the polarising filter on to the lens and refocused. The inside of the bedroom opened up to him. Sandra’s hair was dishevelled, the dark roots forming a ragged dark line down the centre of her scalp. The grubby bathrobe was belted loosely around her waist. It fell open as she pushed her hands back through her hair, revealing a breast and nipple. When she lowered her arms the breast remained carelessly exposed. His finger pressed reflexively on the shutter release as she stood up wearily and the robe hung open, affording him a quick glimpse of her navel and the tuft of black hair at her crotch before she turned and went out.

The small frosted panel of the bathroom window became yellow as the light was switched on. Ben waited, only dimly aware of the touch of the camera’s icy case on his fingers. The bedroom. Go back to the bedroom.

The bathroom light winked out. The bedroom door opened and Sandra reappeared. Her hair was wet, slicked straight back on her head like an otter pelt, the chemical blond now darkened to a metallic sheen. Her face looked both younger and less formed without its covering of make-up. She hadn’t bothered to fasten the bathrobe, and now she slipped it off. Her nipples were erect. He wondered if she’d had a shower, and his guess was confirmed a moment later when she used the bathrobe to dry her back. Dropping it on the bed she opened a drawer in the dressing table and rummaged around.