Читать книгу Entanglement - Katy Mahood, Katy Mahood - Страница 20

12 October 1977

Falling in and out of consciousness, Charlie’s body became his whole world: the sharp stabs of horror, the dull drone of shock. When he woke, his mother was at the foot of the bed, smelling of alcohol and a cloying perfume. He opened his mouth to speak and saliva stretched between his cracked lips like gum.

‘Where’s Annie?’

His mother sobbed and leaned over him. Up close, her face was covered in a fine layer of grease and caked with powder. Lipstick had bled into the creases around her mouth and her eyes were red and clogged with clumps of mascara. She touched his cheek and stared, her eyes empty.

‘It’s your fault she was there.’

Charlie felt a rush of horror, saw the white hand in the darkened bar as a wave of nausea passed over him. He strained to pull himself up, looking for Annie. And then he remembered. He turned away and pressed his face into the clean chemical smell of his hospital pillow. Even as his mother’s voice grew shrill, Charlie did not look up. Eventually a fierce-looking nurse took his mother’s arm and led her away, telling her to come back tomorrow when she’d had some rest.

Several days later, he stood in the basement of the hospital, a small bag of possessions at his feet. His legs felt weak as his mother leaned against him, pungent with brandy even at this early hour of the morning. A squat, red-nosed policewoman walked briskly up and introduced herself. Charlie noticed that her lisp sent an erratic arc of spittle as she spoke.

‘Straight on, sir, madam. Second on the right.’

They walked along the corridor beneath the Artex tiles and fluorescent tubes. A pair of aproned nurses clipped past them, busy with their shift, their patients. Their lives won’t change a bit because a girl they’ve never met is dead, Charlie thought, today is just another day for them. They were greeted by a woman who introduced herself as a family liaison officer. She laid her hand on Charlie’s elbow as she opened the door.

‘She’s through here.’

Annie’s coffin lay in the centre of the small grey room, a vase of white flowers on a stand beside it. His mother gripped his hand and Charlie felt a surge of cold fear. It seemed as if the room was vanishing, its walls fading into darkness, leaving only that box in the centre and whatever was left of his sister. Sweat prickled across his face and his bowels felt suddenly weak.

Retaliation, that’s what the police had called it. The word rang brassy in his head as Charlie stood above Annie’s flawless cheeks and pale hair, aware of an incongruous urge to defecate. He gripped the side of the coffin as he tried to piece together the story of how they had ended up here; how he’d come to lose the only person whom he’d loved without question or conditions and whose love for him he’d never doubted. Beside him, his mother’s knees gave way and he held her, noticing how small she was: just bones and cloth and the sweet smell of alcohol. He led her to a plastic chair and sat with his arm around her as she shuddered hopeless sobs into his chest.

The twisted shell of the pub had been splashed across the papers, which he’d studied with a grim resolve. Now it reeled across his mind, an endless flow of thoughts he could not quiet, an unstoppable spool of images. He stroked his mother’s hair and felt her soften into him, infant-like, as he hummed the half-remembered lullabies she’d sung him as a child. Years later, when he knew much more of daughters and of loss, he would be glad that he had offered her that small moment of kindness.

When he got home, he hung his suit on the back of the bedroom door. In the living room, he picked up the phone and dialled the long string of digits beginning 0033. Beth’s voice, when she answered, was bright.

‘Charlie! How are you?’

He realised he didn’t even know where to begin.

She arrived at his flat the next evening with a bag of dirty clothes and a bottle of Talisker. Charlie pulled her to him, overtaken by a need so urgent that he lifted her skirt and pushed her knickers to one side while they were still in the hallway.

Afterwards, as they lay on the sofa drinking whisky, Beth took his hand and traced a pattern on his palm, remembering her parents’ disapproval the first time she had brought him home. ‘No family, no roots,’ her mother had said. ‘How will he even know how to take care of you?’ But Beth had known that her mother was wrong. A passion that burned as bright as this would take care of itself.

As a child, she’d always thought she would become a nurse, right up to A level Biology, when she’d realised that she couldn’t stand the sight of blood. The desire to make things right for people, though, had never left her. Not during her degree (Anthropology? her father had winced, What’s the good of that?), nor during the year she spent working in Camden to save for her time learning French in Montpellier. It was the reason she’d decided to train as a teacher the following year; it was why she wanted to be with Charlie. Charlie needed her more than anyone had ever needed her before.

Being necessary made her powerful. More than that: it made her feel alive.

‘Beth?’

Charlie’s voice was quiet as he clasped her hand.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you think it’s my fault?’

Beth looked at the fading bruises on his face and the clenched line of his jaw. He was only twenty-five, but he’d been an adult for so long: the person who was always responsible, the one who made things right. And now, faced with a cruel loss and a world he couldn’t control, he was trying to seek out some sense, some version in which he could have prevented the bomb that killed his sister and his friend. Beth looked at him, the golden centre of her eyes gleaming in the lamplight and shook her head. ‘Charlie, it’s not your fault.’

He leaned against the softness of her breasts, her hair falling onto his face and pressed his mouth to hers. Nothing made sense except this.