Читать книгу Furnace - Muriel Gray, Muriel Gray - Страница 13

Sim was worried about his lemon balm. The leaves were turning brown around the edges and there were aphid casts on the new shoots. He bent over the big terracotta pot and poked pointlessly at the sick plant with a gnarled finger. Herbs were tricky. You had to know when they came indoors to avoid the frost and when they should go out again to harden off. He reckoned this time he’d got it wrong, underestimating once again the bitter spring winds that chilled Pittsburgh, and he tutted as one of the leaves fell off with his touch.

Inside the house, Josh and Elizabeth’s phone rang. The old man straightened up and shuffled towards the open window. Sim liked it when they had their answering machine on. He could hear all their messages clearly through the window, whether open or shut, and it made him feel part of their lives that he knew what was going on, often before they did. Sometimes it was just messages from Josh’s work, and sometimes it was Elizabeth’s family. But he always listened in the hope of hearing something secret and exciting. And there was something else.

Sim had a pointless but amusing little gift. Mostly, although occasionally he got it wrong, he could tell who was phoning while it was still ringing.

He had no idea how he knew, but he did. He liked to play the game with himself as the phone rang its four short peals before the answering machine intercepted.

‘Dispatcher,’ he would say out loud on the second ring, and then slap his thigh when the familiar voice came on, droning, ‘Josh? Got a pretty high-paying load with your name on it. Call me, would you?’

Or he would mouth, ‘Oh oh, Elizabeth’s brother,’ and then look delighted when the sulky sibling’s voice left its disgruntled message. If he were ever forced to explain the process, and he knew he never would, Sim would have to say that he could see not so much the person, but the essence of the person as the phone rang, and the times he got it wrong he believed were simply the times when he just wasn’t concentrating hard enough.

Of course he never mentioned any of this to Josh or Elizabeth. Sim thought they probably knew he listened to their messages but said nothing. They were so kind. They knew no one ever phoned Sim, and he guessed Elizabeth left the window of the office open purposely so he could hear. Maybe one day he would show her what he could do. He would like that, to see her pretty face light up in delight as he performed the trick for her. Only it wasn’t strictly speaking a trick. It was real. He just knew who was on the line.

Today, however, it was habit rather than design that made him move to the window. Sim wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the message after the fight he’d heard yesterday. He’d heard Elizabeth’s car screech away after Josh had come home, and last night her crying had kept him awake, wondering whether he should go upstairs and comfort her or just leave her alone. He’d opted for the latter, so hysterical and forlorn were her wails. How could anything an old man would say heal that kind of wound? Things must be bad, he thought, for such good people to hurt each other so badly. He waited by the window as the four short phone rings completed and the answering machine clicked in.

‘Josh,’ Sim said to himself, supporting himself against the wall with an outstretched hand.

An eavesdropper couldn’t hear the outgoing message, only wait patiently for the caller to start speaking. Sim waited to hear Josh’s voice, but the caller hung up.

‘Josh,’ he confirmed with himself, nodding as he shuffled back to his herbs.

A cold wind eddied around the edge of the house and stirred the lemon balm. Two more leaves dropped from the stem and Sim cursed in Korean. He bent down again and resumed fussing with the plant.

‘Josh,’ he repeated to the herb. It ignored him, and dropped another leaf.

* * *

By Furnace standards, Alice Nevin’s house was pretty ordinary. By anywhere else’s yardstick, it was an expensive and desirable property. But unlike a Bostonian or Beverly Hills house where the lawn is God, here the front garden was littered with toys. Two plastic pedal cars lay on their sides as if there had been a collision. A ragged fun-fur horse was splayed over the porch steps and an odd assortment of tiny plastic figures were distributed so evenly around the property it was as though they had been placed there to serve some kind of gardening function. Josh stood across the street and stared up at its long white wooden porch and colonial dormer windows, wondering what he was going to do next.

She wasn’t here. Why was he?

A figure came to the downstairs window. A man. He had a crying child in his arms that looked about a year old and small heads moved about at his hips betraying the presence of more children. The man was trying to make the baby look out into the garden, pointing at things and jogging it up and down in his arms in a vain effort to comfort it. It was only a matter of seconds until he saw Josh, and when he did, he stopped moving. He stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the window.

Thinking was getting in the way. So Josh stopped thinking and walked swiftly across the street, picking his way through the toys to mount the steps and ring the doorbell. A distant dog barked, as though shut in a room, accompanied by a variety of screams and shouts that reinforced his belief that he’d seen several children. The door opened wide and aggressively fast. The man, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt, cheap stone-washed jeans, and holding his tearful burden, stared at Josh. At this close range Josh could see that the man had eyes almost as red and puffy as his baby’s. He had been crying.

‘Need somethin’?’

It was a challenge rather than a question, a voice and demeanour Josh might have expected in a pool hall if he’d knocked a guy’s pile of dimes off the table. It was way out of place in the doorway of an elegant house. Josh felt colour come to his neck and cheeks. This was all wrong, but there was no going back.

‘Mr Nevin?’

The man’s face crinkled from aggression to suspicious aggression. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

A child screamed from the core of the house. Josh looked past the man at the sound, but it screamed on ignored.

‘I just need to know if you’re Mr Nevin.’

‘There ain’t no Mr fuckin’ Nevin. And I asked you a question.’

Josh remembered. Berry Nevin’s girl. That’s what McFarlane had said. That would mean either that Alice Nevin had kept her maiden name in an unlikely modern fashion for this small mountain town, or quite simply that she wasn’t married. The baby in the man’s arms started a high-pitched whine again and was swayed from side to side by the man in an unconscious act of comforting. It was the action of someone used to holding kids.

Josh lowered his voice and spoke quietly, never taking his eyes off those of the man opposite him. He was glad he was burdened with the child. It would be harder for him to hit Josh when he heard what was coming.

‘My name is Josh Spiller.’ He paused, and when he spoke again Josh’s shame was apparent in his voice. At least to him. ‘Are you Amy’s father?’

Some things happened to his face. Strange things, as if a dial had been implanted that could be turned to a variety of different emotions, and someone was spinning it. His eyes were a mixed carousel of grief, confusion, anger, and most perplexingly, fear.

‘Yeah.’

There was no rise in the intonation of the word that would have made it a question. Inexplicably, Josh wanted to touch the man, wanted to reach out his hand and hold his arm, to tell him it was okay and he understood. Instead he savaged him with his words.

‘I was driving the truck.’

The eyes that had registered that abnormal mix of emotions now became cold, opaque and unreadable.

‘What you want?’

Josh looked at the baby and then back up at that hard face.

‘To say sorry.’

The man took a step back into his house, shaking his head like Josh had drawn a gun.

‘You git off. You fuckin’ git off now. Right now.’

Josh lowered his eyes and stood still almost as though he were going to pray. In truth he was wondering feverishly why he was here. What lunacy was gripping him, making him behave so irrationally?

He could hear the man panting as he turned and made to leave. A babble burst from the figure in the doorway and Josh turned back towards him.

‘It was her fault for fuck’s sakes. The kid was seven days old. You hear that? Seven fuckin’ days old. I says to her to watch it, I says to her, but shit, she never listen to nothin’, that dumb bitch. Never listen. And it ain’t goin’ to be okay. I knows it ain’t.’

He started to cry. A horrible sound, all high and whining like his child.

‘She was so beautiful, my little darlin’. I sees her bein’ born. I ain’t done that with the other six. But I sees Amy come right here into the world and I tells her that everythin’s goin’ to be okay. But it ain’t. I couldn’t do what I had to do. Couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m not man enough, maybe I’m too much of a man. I just couldn’t. She was so little, know how I mean? I don’t know what she was thinkin’. She knows it ain’t goin’ to be safe. I don’t know nothin’ no more.’

He let his whining develop naturally into full-scale weeping, while Josh watched, horrified and baffled. The man was senseless, and the babbling insanity of his outburst was far more terrifying than the violent retribution that Josh had anticipated, and perhaps secretly desired. Still facing him, Josh breathed that he was sorry again, although this time it was more an expression of sympathy with the man’s hysterical condition than remorse for his actions. He backed off down the steps and walked crab-like over the lawn. The sideways walk became a canter, and as he turned his head away from the crying, ranting man at the door Josh broke into a loping run.

He kept running until he was three blocks away, where he stopped, bent over and put his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. The purpose of the visit had been unclear to Josh, an order that was impossible to disobey from some despotic part of his subconscious. But if its secret agenda was to free his head from the maze of craziness, then it had failed spectacularly.

What had he learned? Nothing. At least nothing except a heap more stuff that didn’t make sense. The baby was from a big family. The parents weren’t married. They looked poor and undereducated but they lived in a house a surgeon or a lawyer might be proud of. And the father. The father didn’t blame Josh the way any redneck mountain-bred man would, regardless of circumstance. He blamed the mother of his children.

Josh was sweating from his ludicrous, panicking run and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Reality. Familiarity. Normality. There was only one place where those precious things resided. He had to get back to Jezebel.