With Your Crooked Heart Read online

  ‘What, all of them?’

  ‘That’s right. Then put it somewhere he’ll find it. And you write something I tell you on a label and tie it on its collar. Very fond of his cocker spaniel is Charlie, or so I hear.’

  ‘How’ll I get at it?’

  ‘He leaves the dog in his car when he goes shopping.’

  ‘Listen, mate, I’m an animal-lover, me.’

  ‘You can give the money to the RSPCA then, can’t you?’

  ‘What do you want me to write?’

  ‘Goodwill.’

  And now he was doing up the flat for Johnnie. It felt good. He’d forgotten how good it felt to make something out of nothing. Every time he loaded a roller with paint, his mother’s flat in Grays grew fainter, like a moon in daylight. Everything was gone, all the dirt and crap and disappointment. It was perfect. He’d paid for Johnnie’s flat in cash, he’d already paid off the men who worked on it, he’d bought and swept and cleared and let the light come in. It was a start: the start he’d never had. Doing it for Johnnie was better than doing it for himself.

  All the time he worked, in some part of him, he thought about Johnnie opening the door and seeing it for the first time. It was unlucky to think about things like that too much, because they never worked out the way you pictured them. He knew it. He wasn’t after gratitude, anyway. Sometimes, in Paul’s mind, he’d drive Johnnie to the flat, stop the car, get out as if it was a building Paul was interested in, that’s all. And then he’d open the door and somehow he’d get Johnnie to go first up the stairway, and then he’d snick the key in the lock and push the door wide so all the light poured through into the hallway. And he’d stay there, holding the door, watching while Johnnie went on in. He wouldn’t say anything.

  Other times Paul thought it would be better to let Johnnie come alone. He’d hand Johnnie a piece of paper with the address on it, toss him the keys. ‘Go on, go and take a look. It’s yours. Anything you don’t like, we can change it.’

  He painted the walls in shades of white. The place looked bigger than ever. He bought a couple of rugs, one for the bedroom, one for the lounge. He bought a huge bronze-framed mirror and hung it over the fireplace. He went looking at chairs and tables and sofas; he even lay full-length on beds in John Lewis, bouncing a little, feeling the give. Then he thought of something better, and wrote a cheque and put it in an envelope with Johnnie’s name on it, in the middle of the dark green Chinese rug. It was time to go.

  It was time, but he didn’t want to let go. He kept finding little jobs to do. He went out, bought dusters and Windolene, cleaned the mirror. He tidied away the coffee jar, wiped the spills of milk inside the fridge. It was getting silly. Then he just stood, watching the dark come.

  As soon as Johnnie stood in the flat, Paul knew that he’d been stupid. The best part was always going to be before Johnnie came, why hadn’t he realized that? Johnnie’d been on his way out somewhere when Paul called. He hadn’t wanted to let Johnnie know what was going on.

  ‘There’s this flat I need you to see, Johnnie. It’s got potential. It’ll only take half an hour.’

  ‘I can’t, I’ve got to meet this guy at four. He’s Dutch, he’s only over here till tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Hasn’t he got a mobile?’ Because they all had fucking mobiles, Paul knew that.

  Johnnie’s eyes flickered minutely. No one else would have noticed. Paul had to give it to him, Johnnie thought as quick as fish swam.

  ‘I can’t muck him about, Paul.’

  ‘Half an hour. That’s all it’ll take,’ Paul persisted, letting go of the weeks and weeks, the smell of paint and sanded wood and sealant, the smell of yeast coming up from a beer can when the aluminium tab tears. Letting go of big shadows on pale walls, and the slash of cars going by through the rain, and the noise of someone whistling which he heard before he knew it was himself. Letting go of the warmest, most secret pleasure he’d ever given himself: giving it to Johnnie.

  Johnnie knew about gratitude. He knew what was wanted and he did it all, inside half an hour. Paul looked back from the doorway as they went out of the door, and there were the keys which Johnnie had forgotten to pick up. But the white envelope with the cheque in it was gone.

  ‘Here, Johnnie,’ he said, ‘you forgot these.’

  That flicker again, that fast look in Johnnie’s eyes as he juggled with giving Paul what he wanted, just as he always gave everybody what they wanted, as long as he was with them. And then Johnnie looked back, too, over his shoulder, into the flat that was as fresh and bright as a nursery for a new baby. He looked at the flat, then he turned to Paul, his face six inches away, his eyes warm and eager, bright as new money. And Paul knew as if the words were written on the wall that Johnnie would sell the flat. He said quickly, lyingly, ‘There was a problem with the title. It’ll take a while to get the deeds transferred into your name. But it’s yours, you know that.’

  He calculated that Johnnie wouldn’t check it. It wasn’t Johnnie’s kind of information. But against his will, without knowing the words were going to come, he heard himself ask, ‘You like it?’

  And Johnnie said, ‘It’s got class.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Paul said. ‘You can make anything you want out of it.’ And he watched Johnnie closely, to see if he’d got the message. Listen, he wanted to say, you see what I’m giving you?

  But he didn’t. He thought of the cheque, already translated into something else in Johnnie’s imagination. He knew he’d been stupid, but mere was no way of wishing it back.

  Eighteen

  Anna kneels by a patch of raw earth. She pats it down with the palms of her hands. At her side is a pile of flowers: twigs of forsythia and flowering currant, wild daffodils. She begins to stick the flowers into the earth, making the shape of a cross. Above her head a blackbird bobs and sways on its branch. She frowns, shoves back a wing of hair, then packs the spaces between twigs with loose yellow flowers of forsythia.

  The sun warms Anna’s pale neck. She sits back on her heels and looks straight up at the clear sky. She peels off her sweatshirt, rubs her bare arms against her face, snuffs her skin, licks it. An early bee swings low, staggering through the spring air on its first flight. Johnnie’s gone. She still has the letter from her mother, warm and soft with the warmth of her body. The paper doesn’t crackle any more. She’s always known that opening letters and getting messages means trouble.

  The dead kitten lies under the earth where no one can see it. It was still and stiff this morning, rolled away into the corner of the box. For a moment she didn’t recognize it as a kitten. She thought it was something else that had got into the box. When she picked it up it was stiff and light. Its eyes were still shut, so she didn’t have to close them, the way she had read in books that you had to close people’s eyes when they died. Suddenly the touch of it made her skin crawl. She dropped it behind a pile of logs, and ran off to get a cornflakes box to bury it in. But the box was much too big. Inside it, the kitten looked like an unwanted give-away toy. She fetched scissors and cut the box down until it was just big enough for the kitten, then she made herself settle it inside, on a bed of folded tissues. She folded more tissues on top until no one would know there was a kitten in the box.

  The spirit of the funeral goes out of her halfway through. With David there she could have kept it up, but on her own it’s flat. Even the cross of flowers is only something she’s thought up and now has to finish. The kitten’s gone. The rest are going to die now, one by one. Johnnie was right, it was better to let them the before they knew they were alive.

  Anna shivers, and reaches for her sweatshirt. She puts it on, but it’s cold from lying on the earth. She sits back on her heels and surveys the bare, flowery soil. It looks stupid. Quickly she stands up, and with her heel she grinds the flowers into the dirt.

  Johnnie’s gone. Paul makes phone calls, sends faxes, e-mails. In the wake of Johnnie’s going, he needs to feel his money move. Roy can go down to Swindon instead of Joh
nnie. He should have gone in the first place. Paul should never have given the job to Johnnie, who knows nothing of heavy-metal contamination and cares less. The surveyor was all set up. Stupid. It cuts at Paul, because there’s nowhere else in his life he’d do anything like that. Only in that place which belongs to Johnnie.

  His computer screens swarm with figures. He likes e-mail. You know it’s there, but you can choose just when to do something about it. People call him all the time, letting him know they’ve done what they are meant to do. Some he’ll answer, some he’ll leave for a while, some have to learn that what they’ve done doesn’t require answers. His expectations are high. He doesn’t go around slapping people on the back for doing what they’re supposed to do. But he knows when to give praise that’s like a message, showing he knew all along, he was aware of everything. Business, it’s a matter of rhythm. If you’ve got it you don’t need to keep thinking about it. When Paul finds himself doing something without knowing why, he just does it. He’ll turn up on a site, not knowing quite why. Follow his nose, drift here, drift there. See whose eyes are watching him, who looks anxious. There are plenty of fiddles and he knows them all. But more important than that he knows which ones to let through, and which ones to come down on like a hammer. Nobody frightens him. There’s nobody he can’t do without.

  He sits back with a sigh. Everything’s OK. His business of profits and secrets is intact. He rubs his fists into his eyes and swivels the chair round so it faces the window. Then he stands. The huge landscape unrolls inside the oblong of his window, making him dizzy. You could never buy a view like this. You could never turn it into property. You could despoil it, that’s all. He thinks of the scarred and stinking land he buys cheap and sells dear, where gasworks have stood, and factories. Carving into clean green ground, that’s where the money is, some developers say. That’s because they’ve got no imagination.

  He looks down. There she is, so strange from this height that he almost fails to know her. Anna. He watches as she walks slowly along the path, her hair blowing, her head bent, her arms couched, carrying something.

  She went into the barn expecting to bury the last kitten. But the kitten in the box is alive. It keeps on being alive. The others are gone, flipped into their quickly dug holes. She couldn’t do any more funerals when they died so quickly, all within an hour of the first.

  But this one is alive. Anna challenges it. She won’t conjure the end of the dropper into its mouth. She lets the little thing squirm until it finds a blob of milk shivering right at the end of the glass bulb. Suddenly the milk isn’t running out of its mouth any more. The level in the glass tube shrinks, pulse by pulse, as the kitten swallows, sneezes, swallows again.

  Anna heaps the box with cotton-wool, stolen from Sonia’s careful store-cupboard. She knows it isn’t safe to leave the kitten in the barn any more. Now that it’s really alive, that’s when a rat will get it. She waits, checking the paths. Everything is silent in the pale sun. Sonia’s car isn’t in the drive: Anna thinks she’s gone riding. Head down, body curved over the top of the box, she scurries from the barn to the back door.

  Away at the stables, Sonia rides a white horse which she has learned to call grey. In her boots and jodhpurs she looks much as Johnnie has imagined, but he hasn’t imagined the way she’s laughing at something one of the other riders calls across to her, nor has he imagined the way a strand of her pale hair comes loose and strokes her cheek and her neck. Shadows fly over the paddock where Sonia is learning to ride. The big, mild mare, chosen for her lack of temperament, seems suddenly to understand every turn of Sonia’s thoughts, and change it into movement. For the first time, Sonia rises to the trot, and there she is, circling the paddock, cheeks bright, eyes fiercely ahead, intoxicated.

  Nineteen

  I’m not saying I didn’t expect him. Johnnie, I mean. It never seems strange when he comes, it seems natural. He fits in. There’s only me to fit in with, I know, but two people make the most difficult jigsaws.

  ‘Johnnie,’ I say. He’s standing in the doorway with the sun behind him. He has his own key, just like he’s always had his own key, wherever I’ve been. And he looks as if he’s just stepped out of a storm, even though everything’s perfect. Leather jacket, soft deep-blue cotton shirt, jeans. Johnnie knows how to wear his clothes.

  So I say, ‘I’ve been thinking of plastic surgery. I’ve been to see a surgeon, but I wasn’t very impressed.’ He just laughs.

  ‘Have you got a drink?’ he asks. That’s nice. Johnnie would never, ever, rub your face in it. As if to say that he knows you must have a houseful of drink, because drinking is what you do. And as it happens I haven’t had a drink all morning, so I say, ‘I was going to make some coffee. I’ll put you a brandy in yours.’

  Which I do. It’s easy to tell there’s something wrong, but I say nothing. We sit down, me on the sofa, him on the wicker chair Paul hates, that creaks every time you open your mouth. I put the brandy bottle down beside him.

  ‘You don’t need plastic surgery,’ he says. ‘You shouldn’t change yourself.’ His face is completely serious.

  ‘I want to recapture my lost youth,’ I say.

  ‘You might as well take a carving knife to yourself,’ he says. He drinks the coffee steadily, quite fast.

  ‘I know; I’m not going to do it,’ I say. ‘The consultant put me off. I thought that if he couldn’t take the trouble to hide what he thought of me, then he might be careless all round.’

  ‘You don’t care what people think of you, do you?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say, without stopping to think whether it’s true or not.

  He looks pleased, as if I’ve confirmed something he wants to believe about me. He wants me to be careless. Lucky I didn’t add that I care what I think of myself. That’s what eats at me.

  ‘Did you see her?’ I ask.

  ‘Course I saw her.’

  ‘I meant, did you give her the letter?’

  ‘Yeah. And the money was still in the envelope, in case you were wondering.’

  He looks dead tired. He reaches down, unscrews the top of the brandy bottle and knocks a splash of it into his coffee. But drinking’s not really Johnnie’s thing.

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘All right.’ He smiles. ‘She’s got some kittens.’

  ‘My God, I bet she has. Not much else for her to do up there.’

  ‘It’s not Nova Scotia, Lou.’

  A bit of an odd expression, but I let it go.

  ‘What did she say?’ I ask.

  ‘She sent her love.’

  I look him over. Johnnie’ll say anything sometimes, if he thinks it’s what you want to hear.

  ‘It wasn’t real plastic surgery I was thinking of,’ I say, ‘just liposuction.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  I stretch out my arms as if I’m hugging a whale, then slowly bring them in. ‘They suck your fat out and make you slim.’ But as I say it I realize this is one of those days when I don’t feel fat at all. I feel sleek and rich, like a whale who can beat anything on earth once it gets into the water. The only problem comes when it beaches itself. It isn’t just missing the sea, or not being able to move. The whale can’t carry its weight out of water.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ says Johnnie. He stands up and rubs his hands down the side seams of his jeans, a funny gesture, nervous, not like Johnnie at all. He’s always so easy in his skin and in his clothes. ‘She wants to see you,’ he says. ‘I can tell she does.’

  ‘Did she say so?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘What about Paul?’

  That’s something else we do. We talk about Paul. Or at least, I do. With Johnnie, Paul is real, still here, still part of my life. And I’m still part of his. When you come to think of it, Johnnie is the only person I can really talk to about Paul.

  ‘Still making money,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘Don’t knock it. He’s been very good to you.’

  Johnnie shrugs, mo
re like a twitch, throwing something off. ‘Listen, Lulu, I’m going away for a while.’

  He hasn’t called me that for a long time. It goes back to when Anna was born. He used to call us Annie and Lulu. He’d come in with his arms full of stuff, flowers and toys which were way too old for her, a big box of glace fruit for me because he knew I loved it. He’d dump it on the bed and ask, ‘How’s my Annie?’ and after that, ‘How’s my Lulu?’

  He was very good with the baby. He was never frightened of her, the way Paul was. Then I thought about it and I realized this was because Johnnie didn’t think Anna was his responsibility. He was always playing with her. Anna wasn’t a laughing baby, but Johnnie found out that if he swung her up and balanced her on top of his head, that would always make her laugh. Unwilling, wheezy laughter as if she didn’t really know how to do it but she couldn’t help herself. Paul used to watch them, and he’d have a smile of pleasure curling on his lips, but I was never quite sure.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I say to Johnnie now. I look straight at him. I play a lot of games with Johnnie, but this isn’t one of them. ‘Listen,’ I say, getting up from the sofa, ‘you sit down here. Get the sun on your face while I make some fresh coffee. I can do you a meal if you like.’ But he won’t change places with me.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he says. ‘But I’ve got to go.’

  He’s frightened. It’s not hard to tell that. He’s mucked something up and in the field where he’s been playing that’s bad news. I feel a tight pain in my stomach, as if I’ve eaten something bad. I pour a little of the brandy into a glass for myself, and sip at it. The tight place begins to loosen. Johnnie’s watching me.

  ‘I thought you said you were making coffee.’

  ‘I am.’

  It was such a little drink and now it’s gone. I pick up the bottle and take it with me to tidy it away. I bang around in the kitchen getting the coffee-maker ready and trying to find where I’d put the coffee.