She had noticed a chicken-pox scar beneath his eyebrow. Archie had one in almost the same place, a tiny shield-shaped depression in the skin that she supposed would last forever.
His dark hair was flecked with slate. At least he hadn’t done the middle-aged male thing of growing a beard to hide a double chin, not that he had a double chin. He probably wouldn’t look too bad with a beard. When she was younger she could never have imag-ined that she would find middle-aged men with graying hair or beards even remotely attractive. It just went to show. But let’s not forget Julia. Still, she was an actress and he frowned when he men-tioned her name. Two strikes against Julia.
It was odd how you could feel so attracted to someone by the simplest things, the way they handed you a drink and said, “There you go.” The dent of a chicken-pox scar, the cast of despair on their features when they said “Julia.”
Louise slipped her car into the garage. She remembered Sandy Mathieson saying that a garage had just sold for a hundred thou-sand. The thing about Edinburgh was that even some of the best addresses in town didn’t have garages, leaving the rich nobs stuck with the horrors of on-street parking, whereas Louise, in her modern, characterless (but still mind-blowingly expensive) estate house, had a double garage. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The urn that contained her mother was now sitting on a shelf in the garage, between a half-empty two-liter can of paint and a jar of nails. She gave the urn a mock salute as she got out of the car. “Hey, Mom.”
Jellybean was waiting behind the front door to greet her. A deep thumping bass pulsated out of Archie’s bedroom. Jellybean followed her up the stairs, he had to put all four paws on a step before he could move on up to the next, it wasn’t long since he’d been like quicksilver on the stairs. The corkscrew in her heart moved a quarter turn.
“I was a bit of a tearaway, I suppose.” “Tearaway” was a good word, she could use that next time Archie got into trouble. “Archie’s a bit of a tearaway, but he’s okay.” More and more she had this troubling vi-sion of sitting in a courtroom, watching Archie in the dock, seeing his whole life go down the pan, and her life with it. “You placed him in a nursery when he was three months old and went back to work, Ms. Monroe? You have always put your career first, haven’t you? You don’t know who his father is?” Of course she knew, she just wasn’t going to say. Harmless, my ass, she thought. He was a little shit, that’s what he was.
She knocked on the door of Archie’s room and went in quickly, without waiting for an answer. Always try and catch suspects off guard. Archie and Hamish (damn, she’d forgotten about Hamish) were huddled around Archie’s computer. She heard Hamish’s sotto voce warning, “Incoming, Arch.”Archie turned off the computer screen as she came in the room. Porn, probably. She turned the music off. She shouldn’t do that, really. He had rights after all. No, he didn’t.
“Okay, boys?” she said. She could hear herself sounding like an officer of the law, not a mother.
“We’re fine, Louise,” said Hamish, giving her a big, cheesy grin. Fucking little Harry Potter. Archie said nothing, just glared at her, waiting for her to leave. If she’d had a girl they would be having little chats now, about clothes, boys, school. A girl would lie on her bed and look through her makeup, she would share her secrets, hopes, dreams, all the things Louise had never done with her own mother.
“You’ve got school tomorrow, you should be asleep.”
“You’re so right, Louise,” Hamish said. “Come on, Archie, time to go bye-byes.”
Little fucker, she thought as she left the room. She walked away and then tiptoed back to listen at the door. The music remained off, and they seemed to be reading from a book, first one voice, then the other. Not porn, anyway, although they were both sniggering as if it were. Hamish’s confident tones, more masculine when incorporeal, declared, “‘You know,I think there’s more to this than meets the eye,Bertie,’ Nina said.‘Maud Elphinstone seems whiter than the proverbial driven snow, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.’” And Archie’s swooping, cracked voice said, “‘Why, Bertie, I do believe you’re blushing.’”
Were they gay? How would she feel if her son was gay? Actually it would be quite a relief, she wouldn’t have to deal with any of that macho bullshit in the future. Someone to go shopping with, that’s what they (mothers of gay sons) always said, didn’t they? She didn’t like shopping, so that might be a bit of a problem.
“‘I do believe you have a pash on the lovely Maud, Bertie.’”
For a moment, when they were saying good-bye, she thought Jackson was going to kiss her. What would she have done? Kissed him back, right there in the middle of the street, like a teenager. Louise Monroe has a pash on Jackson Brodie. Because Louise Monroe was an idiot, obviously.
34
Gloria spent the evening at the hospital. She watched Graham closely and wondered if he was faking it, if he had decided that being dead to the world was a way of dodging all the problems that were piling up around him. “Can you hear me, Graham?” she whispered in his ear. If he could, he was keeping schtum about it.
The colossal wreck now as weak as a kitten, as quiet as a mouse. Ozymandias toppled. “Half sunk, a shattered visage lies.” Gloria had been very fond of Shelley when she was younger. She had given Graham a beautifully illustrated Folio Society copy of the collected poems for his sixtieth birthday, on the basis that you should give a present you would like to receive yourself.
Naturally, being Graham, he had misread the poem, seeing only the triumphal hubris of “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Gloria couldn’t think, offhand, of a present she had ever received from any member of her family that she had actually wanted. Last Christmas, Emily (“and Nick”) bought her a food mixer, an inferior brand to the one she already owned, and Graham gave her a Jenners gift token, which hardly required much thought and had probably been bought by his saleswoman-cum-mistress-cum-would-be-wife, Maggie Louden. Gloria had had no intuition that the woman standing in front of her Christmas tree, waving away a mince pie, was planning to be the next Mrs. Graham Hatter. “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”
She drank a cup of tea that a nice nurse brought her and flicked through a copy of the Evening News that she had bought from the shop downstairs. “Police are asking if anyone saw a young woman go into the water.” Her eye was caught by the words “earrings in the shape of crucifixes.” She put her tea down and read the short piece from the beginning again. “Go into the water”-what did that mean?
When she got home, Gloria went down to the basement to set the security system for the night. Something moved on one of the CCTV screens, a pair of eyes glowing monstrously in the night- a fox, a big dog-fox, carrying off the remains of Gloria’s supper from last night. Then, unexpectedly, the screen went blank.
Then all the other screens went blank, one by one. No little ro-bots moving this way and that, keeping their electronic eyes on things. The lights on the alarm system flickered and went out, and then all the electricity in the house failed. This was what it would be like for Graham when he died.
A fuse must have blown, Gloria told herself. Nothing to worry about. She felt her way in the absolute dark of the basement toward the wall where the fuse box was. Then she heard a noise. A footfall, a door opening, a floorboard creaking.