What You Wish For Page 5

  At eleven, as I sat with a sleeping Calico heavy on my lap, the front door opened and I heard Marie come in and go straight upstairs. I pushed the cat aside and jogged up the stairs. Marie sat on the bed. She smelled of alcohol and cigarettes.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I spoke softly.

  ‘I went to see Kathy.’

  Kathy was one of her college friends who lived on the other side of town. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine. She was nice to me.’

  I tried to take her hand but she pulled it away. ‘Marie—’

  ‘You don’t understand. You think I’m a fucking lunatic.’

  ‘I don’t.’ I knelt on the bed and put my arms around her and kissed the tear-tracks on her cheeks. She didn’t push me away.

  ‘We don’t want to hurt Sally,’ she said. ‘Or anyone. I know she’s had a traumatic experience. Andrew’s going to help find her a counsellor to get her help, to help her to deal with what’s happened to her.’

  ‘By which you mean that aliens took her baby, not that she had a miscarriage.’

  She glared at me defiantly.

  ‘I know it’s difficult for you to understand, Richard.’ She paused. ‘I’m going to tell you something now. Maybe it will help you understand better.’

  I waited.

  She breathed in. ‘When I was fourteen my dad left home. He disappeared. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, not his friends, his boss, no one. He just vanished. Like that.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘My mum went out of her mind. For months she searched for him, tried everything she could think of, but she never found him. And do you know what? I was glad. It was what I’d prayed for. Night after night I’d lie in bed, eyes squeezed shut, hands clenched, praying. Please take him away. Please. Please. Let him die. Anything. Just get him out of our lives.’

  I held her hand. I felt sick.

  ‘My dad was scum. Sick, violent scum. He used to beat us. Mum at first. She always had bruises and marks, burns where he’d lean across while they were watching TV and casually stub a cigarette out on her arm. He threw boiling water at her. He punched her in the face, knocked her teeth out, cracked her cheekbone. He broke her arm once. And she took it. She told everyone she’d had a fall – that old fucking chestnut. She cut herself off from all her friends, out of shame. She lived in terror, frightened to say the wrong thing or cook the wrong thing or make a noise when he wanted silence. And she insisted that she loved him, even when he started beating me.’

  She spoke softly, evenly, like she was telling somebody else’s story. But I had no doubt that she was telling the truth. I could see it in her eyes.

  ‘I was only five or six when he started hitting me. I think I’d drawn on one of his books. He collected books on old motorbikes. He loved them more than he loved me. Anyway, he picked this book up and looked at where I’d scrawled across it in red crayon. I grinned up at him. I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong. He took the book – it was a heavy hardback book – and hit me in the face with it. I remember screaming, blood spurting from my nose, and him shouting, and my mum shouting at him, and then he dragged her into their room and I heard her crying. I thought it was my fault.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart . . .’

  ‘It went on for years. And the worst thing was that between the beatings he could be so nice. He was so unpredictable. It was like you could never relax. Even when he wasn’t there, we were afraid of our own actions. You never knew how he would react. Like when we got Calico. A kid at school had kittens they were trying to find homes for. I wanted one so badly I said I’d have one, without asking my parents, and I took the kitten home, feeling elated but utterly sick and scared, part of me convinced that he would throw it out, or kill it. I tried to hide the kitten but it was too noisy. My dad heard it immediately. I braced myself, but he bent and picked up the kitten and stroked it and said, “What are you going to call him?” I was so relieved.’

  I stroked her hair. I tried to imagine how she had felt. There had never been any violence in my home. Quite the opposite. Ours was a placid, repressed home, hidden emotions and feelings. Still, that was infinitely preferable to brutality.

  Marie looked up at me. She reached into her shirt pocket and took out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. She lit one and exhaled slowly.

  ‘When I was twelve my mum announced that I was going to have a baby brother or sister. I was delighted. I was past that age where I’d be jealous of another child in the house and I really started to look forward to having a baby brother – I was convinced it would be a boy – to look after. The whole atmosphere in the house changed. My dad seemed to mellow; he fussed around my mum and started turning the spare room into a nursery. They asked me what names I liked.’ She smiled. ‘I really thought things had changed. I was wrong. I was fucking wrong.’

  She took a hungry drag on her cigarette. ‘Because I was twelve, they thought I was old enough to be left alone without a babysitter and one night my dad took my mum out to the pub. I sat and watched TV. I remember it really well because Close Encounters of the Third Kind was on. It was the first time I’d seen it. It was almost finished when the door slammed and they came in. Almost as soon as they got through the door my dad pushed my mum against the wall and started shouting at her. He kept shouting, “Is it his? You slut!” All this shit. He said she’d looked at some man in the pub like she fancied him. He yelled all these accusations at her. I tried to run over to protect her and he punched me in the face. My mum screamed and he punched her, right in the stomach. I can see it now. I tried to jump on him and he kicked me away. Then he kicked her. He was shouting. Whore, slut, bitch . . .’

  ‘She lost the baby?’

  Marie nodded. ‘The police came and tried to get a statement out of her but she refused. I was too young to do anything. When she was lying in the hospital bed I begged her. “Please don’t make us go back there. Let’s leave. Please.” But we went back anyway. And he was OK for a while. I guess he felt sorry. Then it went back to exactly how it was before. I just completely withdrew. This was when I first got interested in UFOs. When I came to believe. I kept praying that aliens would come and take my father away. Dump him somewhere with no atmosphere.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘So when he did disappear . . .’

  She started to cry, the pain of telling making her convulse, pushing sharp tears out of her, like Sally just a few hours before. She looked up at me through her damp fringe. She said, ‘Hold me.’

  A little later she said, ‘I would never take a miscarriage, other people’s suffering lightly. Do you understand that?’

  I nodded. I still thought she was wrong to encourage Sally in her belief that her baby had been taken by aliens. But at that moment I was more focused on Marie’s pain. I resolved to talk to her about Sally another day. But I never did.

  Life went on. The summer got hotter. My love for Marie got stronger.

  Some nights we would go up onto the hill and lie on the grass, looking at the sky, Marie teaching me the names of the constellations. During the days, she accompanied Andrew on trips to visit the sites of corn circles. They visited fellow believers. I tried to distance myself from her professional life, as if it was a job I didn’t have much interest in. She didn’t bring any more ‘abductees’ home, so there were no more arguments about that. In fact, I didn’t really have much idea about what she got up to during the day.

  Marie urged me to do something about the dead end my career was stuck in. ‘You need to pursue your dreams,’ she said. ‘Contact the big news sites and magazines, send them your work. Hustle. You’re good enough. Too good for the Herald.’

  Spurred on by her encouragement, I set up a new online portfolio of my work and began to send links to picture editors. The fire of my ambition was rekindled.

  The only blight in my relationship with Marie, apart from the submerged disagreement about her work, was that she wouldn’t let me take her photo. I tried to cajole her, asked repeatedly why. She refused to give an
answer. I pointed a loaded camera at her and she put her hand up like a celebrity being pursued by the paparazzi.

  ‘If you ever take a picture of me, I’ll leave you.’

  I smiled like she must be joking.

  ‘I’m being serious, Richard. I promise you. I’ll leave you.’

  I lowered the camera. ‘But—’

  She turned and left the room.

  I didn’t understand it. All I wanted was one photo, just something to put in my wallet and look at when she wasn’t around. Something to show other people, all the other people who kept asking about this new woman in my life.

  I sighed. I was sure, in time, I could persuade her.

  Then, one late autumn afternoon, everything changed.

  It was a Friday. I came home from work early. I was worried about Marie. She had gone down with a virus earlier that week and had taken to her sick bed. I had tried to persuade her to go to the doctor, but she had insisted that she was all right. ‘I just need to rest,’ she said.

  I pushed open the front door and trotted up the stairs. She wasn’t in bed. Perhaps she was asleep in the living room. I ran back down the stairs.

  She was sitting on the sofa with her phone clutched tightly in her hand. It emitted a high-pitched beeping. Her eyes were pink and her face was streaked with tears. Her knuckles were white where she was gripping the phone so tightly.

  ‘Marie? What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Andrew,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

  6

  If it hadn’t been for Marie’s virus she would have been with Andrew when he was killed. She would probably be dead too.

  Andrew had been on one of his trips to the far side of Kent to look at more crop circles and talk to a couple of farmers. The local press were barely interested. These days, crop circles were old news; the methods of the people who made them, using ropes and planks, had been revealed years ago. Or so I thought. Andrew and Marie still believed that some crop circles were created by aliens; that they were messages from the Chorus.

  Andrew was something of a self-styled expert on crop circles. He had been all over the country to study them and had even written a couple of articles, and numerous pamphlets. He had phoned Marie that afternoon and told her that he was convinced these were the real thing. He knew a manmade crop circle when he saw one. He took some photographs and headed home in his car.

  In his excitement, I guess he drove too fast. Maybe he wasn’t concentrating. Apparently, he was driving through some narrow country lanes, far too fast, and as he turned the corner he had swerved to avoid something – probably an animal – in the road. He went through a barbed wire fence and struck a tree. He was killed instantly.

  Along with Marie’s grief came a comprehension that she was lucky to be alive and she spent the few days after Andrew’s death in a kind of stunned silence, contemplating her mortality, while I was filled with relief that I hadn’t lost her.

  ‘If I die,’ Marie said. ‘This is what I want you to do for me.’

  ‘Please don’t talk like that.’

  ‘I’m serious, Richard. This is what I want. Which is how I know it’s what Andrew would want.’

  We had climbed back to the top of the East Hill, where I had first met Marie, and walked along to an area known as the Firehills. It was a beautiful spot, verdant yet rugged, with glorious views across the English Channel. On this late September evening, it was windy and chilly, and it would soon be dark.

  There were five of us. Me, Marie, Fraser – who looked as queasy as the first night I’d met him – plus two young women I hadn’t met before, but who were members of Marie and Andrew’s little group. Melissa was a curvy brunette with trendy glasses and Katie was tall, slim and twitchy. Neither of them spoke much. They seemed as grief-stricken as Marie, and the whole group was solemn and quiet as we made our way towards the cliff edge.

  Marie held a little urn in her hand. It contained Andrew’s ashes.

  ‘Perfect weather,’ Marie said, standing by the cliff, the wind whipping her hair. I was worried she might blow over, go flying into the sea, but she stood firm and strong.

  ‘Didn’t Andrew have any family?’ I had asked when Marie told me of this plan.

  ‘No. His parents died years ago and he was an only child. He’s going to be cremated and then we’re going to hold a ceremony on the hill, to scatter his ashes to the winds, so they are carried up to the sky.’

  I wasn’t sure if this was quite feasible, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Will you come?’ she asked. ‘Please?’

  ‘Of course.’

  So here we were. Marie unscrewed the urn and tipped ashes onto her palm. She murmured a few words which I couldn’t hear well with the wind in my ears, but she said something about travelling well, and then she cast the remains of Andrew towards the cliff edge.

  The others took turns to do the same. Everybody was crying, except me. I wasn’t sure that Andrew would have wanted me to scatter any of his ashes, but Marie insisted. ‘He respected you,’ she said.

  Fraser, who was the last in line, seemed particularly upset, which surprised me. I hadn’t realised he’d known Andrew that well. I guessed they had formed a strong bond over Fraser’s UFO experience. His hand trembled as Marie tipped ashes into his palm. I watched as he turned towards the sea, many metres below, and swung his arm, the wind catching the ashes and carrying them, swirling and eddying, towards the sunset.

  ‘So how did it go?’

  Simon wiped his brow with the grimy cuff of his white shirt. We were sitting on a bench in Alexandra Park to cover a story about dog shit. Simon and I were supposed to be talking to dog owners and finding out how many of them used the poop scoop bins. This was part of the editor’s campaign against dog mess.

  Simon bit into his Magnum. ‘So?’

  The day after the ceremony on the hill, a woman called Theresa Smith had phoned and told me she loved the portfolio I’d sent her. The Sunday Telegram, of which she was the picture editor, was looking to commission a number of unknown photographers to put together a series of articles on modern Britain. She wanted to meet me. By the end of the conversation I was giddy with excitement. This could be my big break.

  It was now a few days after my meeting with Theresa at the Telegram. ‘It went pretty well. She loved my pictures. But I haven’t heard anything yet.’

  He grunted. ‘So you’ll be buggering off and leaving us then.’

  ‘It’s only a commission. Even if I get it I won’t be leaving this job.’

  ‘Yeah, but it will open doors, won’t it? Then you’ll be buggering off.’

  I couldn’t help but smile. ‘Well, that’s the idea.’

  After we’d interviewed and snapped an assortment of criminal dog owners, we walked back into town.

  ‘How’s that bird of yours?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Upset.’ I told him about the ceremony.

  He shook his head. ‘Poor her. But I didn’t like that bloke at all. There was something creepy about him. Sort of slimy.’

  ‘I know what you mean. But he was Marie’s business partner, so—’ I turned my palms upwards.

  ‘Yeah.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Is she still into all this UFO crap?’

  I leapt to Marie’s defence. ‘It’s not crap. I mean, she believes it, and how do we know for sure that it’s her who’s wrong? Maybe we’re wrong.’

  Simon laughed. ‘Fuck, it must be love.’

  ‘Speaking of which, how are things with Susan?’ We hadn’t mentioned his behaviour at the nightclub since it had happened, but he had been acting shifty recently, checking his phone all the time, taking calls and wandering out of earshot. I was pretty sure he was having an affair.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  When I got home, Marie was hunched over the PC, tapping away at the keys. As soon as I entered the room, she swung round, an alarmed expression on her face. She quickly turned back and closed the browser window she had been looking at.

&n
bsp; ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry, it’s private.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She stood up and put her arms around me. ‘You wouldn’t be interested anyway.’

  ‘Let me guess: visitors.’

  ‘You got it in one. I’m sorry, Richard, but now Andrew’s gone, I have to work twice as hard to keep the network and the consultancy going.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You hate it, don’t you?’ she said, standing up, her hands on her hips.

  ‘No, I understand . . .’

  ‘You don’t, though, do you?’

  I stared at her. ‘Marie, why are you being like this? What did I do?’

  She sank back into the computer chair and put her hands over her face. I realised she was crying silently. I tried to put my arm around her but she shrugged me off.

  ‘Please. I need some space,’ she said.

  ‘Is this about Andrew?’ I said. ‘I know you miss him.’

  She wiped her eyes. The tears had stopped as quickly as they’d started. ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll be OK. Just . . . let’s just leave it.’

  I stroked her shoulder. ‘All right. If that’s what you want. But if need to talk—’

  ‘I know.’

  I turned to leave the room to make a drink and Marie said, ‘Richard, there was a message for you. Theresa Smith. She wants you to call her.’

  I listened to the voicemail.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I got the commission.’

  On the sixteenth of October I had a second appointment with Theresa Smith. I had already sent her the photos and now she wanted to meet ‘for a chat’. I had spent the last couple of weeks working hard, taking and editing photos every spare minute I had.

  ‘What time will you be home?’ Marie asked, kissing me goodbye. Over the past few days she had seemed a little brighter, but busy with college work along with her consultancy. She spent half her life on the computer.

  ‘I don’t know. Five or six, I expect.’