Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, smiling a slightly imbecilic, wrath-deflecting smile. Not that this lady had any particular wrath to give.

‘Mister Seddon. He’s not in. He hasn’t been in all day.’ The woman’s voice was very low, dipping lower still at the end of every phrase as though whenever she opened her mouth she was sticking her head up over a parapet and then reflexively ducking again in case she got shot at.

I tried to look surprised and disappointed as I ambled across the hallway towards her. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Miss–’

‘Mrs.’

‘Mrs . . . ?’

‘Daniels.’ She looked back over her shoulder with a distracted air, then back at me. ‘I can’t really talk right now,’ she said, and then, as if the lapse of manners had to be balanced or atoned for in some way, she added ‘Jean. Jean Daniels.’

‘Of course. Mrs Daniels. Kenny said for me to call today.’ That sentence hung in the air for an over-long moment, while I assembled some other lies to go along with it. ‘For the books.’

The red haired woman frowned. ‘The books?’ she repeated.

I nodded gravely. ‘I’m collecting for the rummage sale,’ I said. ‘At Saint Gary-le-Pauvre. The priest’s a friend of mine, and I like to help out.’

‘Oh.’ The frown didn’t disappear, despite this morally unimpeachable cover story. If anything it deepened. ‘Well, I know Mister Seddon’s not in because my Thomas had to take his post from the postman this morning and we’ve knocked six or seven times to give it to him. You’ll have to come back another time.’

I didn’t take the hint: this was a recon mission, after all, and that included making contact with the local citizenry. ‘Kenny’s a fine man,’ I said, throwing out a random hook. ‘But we’ve not seen each other in a while. I hope he’s well. I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Felix Castor.’

I held out my hand, but Jean Daniels didn’t seem keen to reciprocate.

‘So you’re from the church?’ she demanded again. Her tone was solemn and slow: the tone of someone working through a complex syllogism.

‘That’s right.’

‘And you said “the priest”, so — a Catholic church?’

‘Well . . .’ Too late to temporise. ‘Not un-Catholic,’ I admitted lamely. ‘Definitely on the Catholic side of the equation.’

‘But Mister Seddon is Protestant, isn’t he? Bitter orange, was the way he put it. I remember it particularly because it was one of the first things he ever said to me.’

Bitter orange. It was a resonant phrase for anyone born and bred in the briar patch of Liverpool 9. Mrs D was right, too: I remembered now that Kenny’s dad and all his uncles had been in the Lodge, marching in bright orange sashes and Moss Bros suits along County Road on the Glorious Twelfth.

Fortunately, Mrs Daniels seemed more apologetic than indignant to have caught me out in a flat lie. Or at any rate, she went on talking to cover the social embarrassment. ‘The very next day after he moved in, when I met him for the first time by the lift, Mister Seddon asked me what denomination we were. And when I said we weren’t anything very much he wasn’t happy at all. He said we must have been brought up something, in a Christian country. So I told him my parents were Catholic, my Tom’s were High Church Anglican, and he never had another word to say to us.’ She shook her head in solemn wonder. ‘It’s a shame the uses some people put the Lord to — making hate where there should be love, and turning a good message into a bad one.’

‘Well, Saint Gary’s is an ecumenical mission,’ I assured her, wishing I’d thought up a better cover story: she was sharper than she looked. ‘But it’s never been about the religion for me. I just like to do good for goodness’ sake.’

‘You’re not a priest?’

‘Not in the slightest. My brother ’s a priest,’ I offered, as though that helped to establish my own credentials. ‘Like I said, I really just wanted to check in on Kenny and find out if things were going okay for him these days. We go back a long way. In case I didn’t mention it before, I’m Felix. Felix Castor.’ (I knew I was repeating myself but I reckoned it was time to be persistent.)

I stuck my hand out again. It would have been rude to ignore it twice, and Mrs Daniels seemed deathly afraid of giving offence. She put her own hand in mine, a little limply, and allowed it to be shaken.

Which meant that I finally got to read her. This kind of random trawling is an automatic thing with me: the same morbid sensitivity that lets me see ghosts even where others can’t sometimes allows me to pick up surface thoughts and emotions from people’s minds when I touch them. So I do it even in situations like this one where there probably isn’t much to be gained.

What I got from Mrs Daniels was powerful, narrowly specific, and no use to me at all. She had a shallow cut on her forearm and she couldn’t think how she’d done it. It was making her itch like mad but she didn’t want to scratch in front of a stranger. That was also why she hadn’t wanted to shake my hand, because she’d left the cut uncovered to make it scab faster and she was embarrassed to have it be seen. She was worried about someone — no names, no image, just a conceptual knot that was full of warmth and uncritical love — and worried in a different way about the time she was wasting as she stood here talking to me. She was also embarrassed about the kitchen knife, and she glanced down at it now as she disengaged her hand from my grip.

‘Cooking his lunch,’ she said by way of explanation as she held up the knife for my inspection. ‘I should get back, really. I can’t turn the ring down all the way and the fat might catch. Things aren’t.’

I thought I might have misheard those last two words, because they didn’t seem to be attached to the rest of the sentence in any meaningful way. But Mrs Daniels saw my puzzled blink and went on with barely a break.

‘Well, you asked me if things were going well for him — for Mister Seddon. They’re not. He’s going from bad to worse, really. I don’t think he’s ever got over it. He puts a brave face on, because you’ve got to, but it’s not something that ever goes away, is it? You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done.’

I was lost in this welter of restricted code. I tilted my head in polite inquiry. ‘Anything you could have done to . . . ?’

‘Well, to stop it,’ Mrs Daniels said, looking at me with eyes that carried a full share of the world’s hurt. ‘I mean, you’d be thinking that if you’d seen the signs early enough you could have said something. Got some help. I know they say you can’t, but I think it depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?’

It seemed safest to agree. ‘What were the circumstances?’ I asked earnestly. ‘I’ve never felt able to ask.’

Mrs D shook her head bleakly. ‘I could tell you some tales,’ she said, with a lack of enthusiasm that belied the words. ‘But I won’t. Not now. The time to have said something was before, when it might have done some good. I blame myself. We all should blame ourselves. He deserved better. Whatever was going on at home . . .’ She paused, then went on quickly, nervously, as if she’d just stepped across an unacknowledged abyss and didn’t want to look down. ‘He still deserved better. We’ve all got a responsibility, I think, don’t you? To say what can’t be said? A boy that age has got his whole life ahead of him. I used to see him with the girls, and there were two or three who wouldn’t have said no if he’d asked. But he was lost. He never looked like he was in the same world as everyone else. And then you start to hear the stories, from the other boys. My John’s the same age, but it was my Billy, my youngest, funnily enough, who knew him better than anyone. And he’s said things that pulled me up short, more than once. It was there. He wasn’t hiding it. A hundred people saw it, and twice as many as that knew all about it. But nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. That’s what I meant when I said we were all to blame.’