Buried

Porter rubbed her own chin back and forth against the edge of her glass. She seemed happy enough with the only answer she looked like getting.

‘I’m going to fetch another half,’ Thorne said. He pushed back his chair. ‘Do you want another of those?’

Porter handed him the glass.

On his way across, Thorne caught a glimpse of his father, propping up the bar at a family wedding a year or two before. Holding court, full of it, pissing himself laughing. Telling anyone too polite to walk away that the best thing about losing your marbles was that you could keep forgetting to buy anybody else a drink.

Thorne blinked slowly, and thought about what Porter had said. It sounded like a very long time to be stuck with the old bugger.

He ordered the drinks and moved along the bar to speak to Yvo

‘I’d rather not get too far into it,’ she said. She held a ten-pound note between her fingers and fluttered it in front of her face as though she were hot. ‘But I’m hoping for some good news.’

‘What did you do?’

She argued silently with herself for a few seconds. ‘No, I don’t want to jinx it. I’ll know a lot more first thing in the morning. Can we just talk shit for a while?’

So they did, until Kitson’s drinks arrived, and she turned away from the bar.

Thorne wondered just how much sleep his back would cost him later on. Deciding that he’d need some help, he changed his order from a half to a pint, then leaned on the bar and let his mind go walkabout.

Seven years of grief.

Seven years until you fell out of love and started looking elsewhere.

Could these emotions have sell-by dates? He knew as well as anyone that love was perishable and understood that grief might shrink to a half-remembered taste or smell. Hate, though, he imagined would outlast them all. It could be put away for later, like something frozen in a bag, to be thawed out, fresh and full-sized when it was needed.

He remembered a poem he’d had to learn at school, something about the world ending in fire and ice. A line about ‘knowing enough of hate’. Then he thought again about his old teacher, and in turn about Lardner the probation officer, and there was all ma

Tony Mullen wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there in the dark. Five minutes? Maybe fifteen? How long had it been since he’d lowered himself on to the bed and slid across next to his wife and daughter?

Maggie and Juliet were lying together, curled up like spoons, same as he and his wife had used to do. He’d snuggled in close, fully dressed still, on top of the duvet, lifted an arm right across the pair of them, squeezed them both when Juliet had briefly started to cry again.

The argument had not gone on for too long after Thorne and the others had left. It had run out of steam fast when he’d pointed out that the way he’d spoken to her wasn’t really what they were fighting about; when she’d stopped screaming at him, and remembered, and gone very quiet.

Like she’d been looking the wrong way and had fallen down the hole where Luke used to be.

When she murmured to him from the other side of the bed, he had to ask her to repeat it, the pair of them speaking quietly across the body of their sleeping daughter.

‘Why don’t you go next door?’ she said.

He was fairly sure they weren’t going to start at each other again, but, still, he didn’t want to ask her what she meant. If she didn’t want to be lying there close to him, or if she just thought that things were a bit cramped with the three of them, that he’d have more chance of a decent night’s sleep in the spare room.

It was academic, either way.

‘I don’t reckon I’m going to sleep anyway,’ he said. ‘I was thinking I might just go for a run.’

He waited another few minutes before lifting his arm and rolling away. By the low, green light of the digital clock, he could see that though his wife’s eyes were closed, there was a tightness around her mouth; that sleep was a distant possibility for her, too.

He padded across to the fitted wardrobes, opened the door and bent down for his training shoes.

When Thorne got back to his flat just before two, he was surprised to walk into the living room and find a man asleep on his sofa-bed.

Hendricks opened his eyes and sat up. Elvis, who’d been curled against his chest, jumped to the floor and slunk away, yowling. ‘It’s late,’ Hendricks said. ‘I was getting so worried I almost called the police.’

Thorne walked around the bed towards the kitchen. ‘I knew I should have asked for that key back.’

‘You sound like you’re about to break into “I Will Survive”. You should probably have changed that stupid lock as well.’

‘Do you want tea?’

Hendricks had spent a few weeks staying at the flat the previous year and Thorne had never bothered to get the spare key from him once he’d returned to his own place. He’d used it a couple of times since, but Thorne was fairly sure that Hendricks hadn’t come over to feed the cat tonight.

‘How long do you want to stay?’

Hendricks spoke a little louder, turning towards the kitchen. ‘This is just a one-off,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to stay overnight, but once it got late I just thought, Fuck it, and got the bed out.’

‘It’s fine.’ Thorne walked back in, and headed over to the stereo. He put on a CD by Iris DeMent, a singer/songwriter from Arkansas he’d first heard on Radio 2’s Bob Harris Country. These were mountain songs, about blessings and blood; simple and honest and suited to the hour. Thorne waited for the first few notes picked out on an acoustic guitar, adjusted the volume and went back to get his tea.

‘I didn’t argue with Brendan about “nothing”,’ Hendricks said.

Thorne sat down gently and pulled up his knee. ‘I never thought you did.’

‘The other day, I said I couldn’t remember what we’d fallen out about, that it wasn’t anything important, remember?’

‘I remember you being a bit cagey…’

‘We were arguing about kids.’

‘What, did you finally get round to telling him that you couldn’t have any?’

Hendricks smiled, but it was just punctuation. ‘I want to have them. That’s exactly the point. I know it’s a fucking nightmare and we probably wouldn’t stand a chance in hell anyway, but I wanted to talk about adoption. Brendan wasn’t interested. He thinks I’m being selfish, that I should have told him when we first got together, but I didn’t know I wanted them then, did I?’

The springs of the sofa-bed creaked beneath Hendricks as he shifted position. The guitar had been joined by a piano, and the voice, a rich Ozark twang, snaked between the two of them.

‘So, when did you know?’ Thorne asked.

Hendricks let his head fall all the way back, and spoke to the ceiling. ‘I went to that conference in Seattle last year, remember?’

‘Round Easter, wasn’t it? You were saying how cold it was.’

‘There was a demonstration of some fantastic new mortuary facilities one of the days, and they had these viewing suites. Specifically, for viewing children’s bodies, you know?’ Hendricks cleared his throat. ‘Anything from stillbirths to pre-teens in gangland shootings. We’re starting to get these here now, but back then I’d never seen anything like it. Basically, it’s about trying to minimise the trauma for the parent, to make the process less impersonal… less shocking. So they lay the body out on a refrigerated bed. The whole suite’s done up to look like a kid’s bedroom, yeah? There’s teddies and dolls and what have you for the very young ones, and there’s music if you want it, and it’s all geared towards making it seem like the dead child’s asleep. Creating something peaceful, just for those few minutes, or whatever.