In a fury, he made her naked. She arced to accept him and cried out as he took her.
Afterwards, both of them wept.
KERRA HEARD IT ALL. How could she help it? The family flat had been transformed as inexpensively as possible from a collection of rooms on the hotel’s top floor. Because it was needed elsewhere, very little money had gone into the insulation of the walls. They weren’t paper thin, but they might as well have been.
She heard their voices first-her father’s soft and her mother’s rising-then the shrieking, which she could not ignore, and then the rest. Hail the conquering hero, she thought.
Dully, she said to Alan, “You need to go,” although part of her was also saying, Do you understand now?
Alan said, “No. We need to talk.”
“My brother has died. I don’t think we need to anything.”
“Santo,” Alan said quietly. “Your brother’s name was Santo.”
They were still in the kitchen although not at the table where they’d been sitting when Ben had joined them. With the rising noise from Santo’s bedroom, Kerra had shoved away from the table and gone to the sink. There she’d turned on the water to fill a pan, although she had no idea what she would do with it.
She’d remained there after she’d turned off the taps. Outside, she could see Casvelyn, just the top of it where St. Issey Road met St. Mevan Crescent. An unappealing supermarket called Blue Star Grocery sprawled like a nasty thought at this V-shaped junction, a bunker of brick and glass that made her wonder why modern conveniences had to be so ugly. Its lights were still on for evening shopping, and just beyond it, more lights indicated cars moving carefully along the northwest and southeast boundaries of St. Mevan Down. Workers were heading home for the evening, to the various hamlets that for centuries had popped up like toadstools along the coast. Smugglers’ havens, Kerra thought. Cornwall had always been a lawless place.
She said, “Please go.”
Alan said, “Do you want to tell me what this is about?”
“Santo”-and she said his name with deliberate slowness-“is what this is about.”
“You and I are a couple, Kerra. When people-”
“A couple,” she cut in. “Oh, yes. How true.”
He ignored her sarcasm. “When people are a couple, they face things together. I’m here. I’m staying. So you can choose which thing you’d like to face with me.”
She shot him a look. She hoped he read in it derision. He wasn’t supposed to be like this, especially not now. She hadn’t taken him on as her partner only to have him reveal a side of himself that proved he was someone she didn’t actually know. He was Alan, wasn’t he? Alan. Alan Cheston. Bit of a weak chest, so winters were tough on him, often cautious to a maddening extreme, churchgoing, parents loving, unathletic, sheep not shepherd. Respectful as well. And respectable. He was the sort of bloke who’d said May I…? before he’d tried to hold her hand. But now…this person just now…This was not the Alan who’d never missed a Sunday dinner at his mum and dad’s since he’d left university and London Bloody School of Economics. This was not the floppy-haired and white-skinned Alan who practised yoga and served meals-on-wheels and was never known to dive into the Sea Pit, just above St. Mevan Beach, without sticking his toes in first to test the temperature of the water. He wasn’t supposed to be telling her how things were going to be.
Yet he stood there doing it. He stood there in front of the steel-fronted fridge and he looked…implacable, Kerra thought. The sight of him made her veins feel icy.
He said, “Talk to me.” His voice sounded firm.
The firmness undid her. So what she said in reply was, “I can’t.”
Even this wasn’t what she intended to say. But his eyes, which were generally so deferential, were compelling at the moment. She knew that came from power, knowledge, and lack of fear, and where that had come from was what made Kerra turn from him. She would cook, she decided. They were all going to have to eat eventually.
“Fine,” Alan said to her back. “I’ll talk, then.”
“I have to make a meal,” she told him. “We all have to eat. If we lose our strength, things will get worse. In the next few days, there’s going to be so much to do. Arrangements, phone calls. Someone has to call my grandparents. Santo was their favourite. I’m the oldest of the grandkids-there’re twenty-seven of us…isn’t that obscene, what with overpopulation and that sort of thing?-but Santo was their favourite. We spent time with them, Santo and I. Sometimes a month. Once nine weeks. They need to be told and my father won’t do it. They don’t speak, he and Granddad. Not unless they have to.”
She reached for a cookbook. She had a collection of them, all kept in a stand on the work top, the product of cookery classes she’d taken. One of the Kernes had to learn how to plan nutritious, inexpensive, and tasty meals for the large groups who’d book into Adventures Unlimited. The Kernes would hire a cook, of course, but they’d save money by having the meals planned out by someone other than an executive chef. Kerra had volunteered for the job. She wasn’t interested in anything having to do with a kitchen, but she knew they couldn’t rely on Santo, and relying on Dellen would have been ridiculous. The former was a passable cook on a small scale, but easily distracted by everything, from a piece of music on the radio to the sight of a gannet flying in the direction of Sawsneck Down. As for the latter, everything about Dellen could alter in a second, including her willingness to participate in matters familial.
Kerra flipped open the book she’d chosen at random. She began leafing through pages to find something complicated, something requiring every bit of her attention. The list of ingredients needed to be impressive, and what they didn’t have in the kitchen, she would send Alan out to purchase at Blue Star Grocery. If he refused, she would go herself. In either case, she would be busy, and busy was what she wanted to be.
Alan said, “Kerra.”
She ignored him. She decided on jambalaya with dirty rice and green beans, along with bread pudding. It would take hours, and that was fine with her. Chicken, sausage, prawns, green peppers, clam juice…The list stretched on and on. She’d make enough for a week, she decided. The practice would be good, and they could all dip into it and reheat it in the microwave whenever they chose. And weren’t microwaves marvelous? Hadn’t they simplified life? God, wouldn’t it be the answer to a young girl’s prayers to have an appliance like a microwave into which people could be deposited as well? Not to heat them up, but just to make them different to what they were. Whom would she have shoved in first? she wondered. Her mother? Her father? Santo? Alan?
Santo, of course. It was always Santo. In you go, brother. Let me set the timer and twirl the dial and wait for someone new to emerge.
No need for that now. Santo was decidedly altered now. No more will-o’-the-wisp, no more tripping without a care in the world along the paths that opened up before him, no more thoughtless chase of if-it-feels-good-do-it. There’s more to life than that and I suppose you know it now, Santo. You knew it in the final moment. You had to know it. You crashed towards the rocks without a last-minute miracle in sight and in the precise instant before you struck bottom, you finally knew that there were actually other people in your world and that you were answerable for the pain you caused them. It was too late then to amend yourself, but it was always better late than never when it came to self-knowledge, wasn’t it.
Kerra felt as if bubbles were rising inside her. They were hot, like the bubbles of water boiling, and just like boiling water they burned to get out. She hardened herself against letting them escape, and she grabbed a litre of olive oil from another cupboard, above the work top. She turned to scoop up measuring spoons, thinking, How much oil…? and the bottle slipped from her fingers. It hit the floor just right-as it naturally would-and broke in two neat pieces. The oil pooled out in a viscous mess. It splashed the cooker, the cupboards, and her clothes. She leapt to one side, but she didn’t escape.