Loose Ends Read online

  ‘Want me to do the steak, Mum?’ she said, after a while. ‘Or did you make something?’ As if . . . her mother might stir herself to cook a casserole or a steak-and-kidney pie for her boy, but not for her girl.

  ‘That would be nice, dear. There’s some of them new potatoes in the larder. You put them on and I’ll set the table.’

  The kitchen was exactly as it had been when she was still a schoolgirl, the same round-cornered fridge in cream enamel, the pea-green enamel stove with the black burners, the knick-knacks here and there on the windowsill: a double egg-cup with black boots and yellow socks, a crocheted tea-cosy in the shape of a crinolined lady, photos of long-past holidays at Whitby or Scarborough stuck to the shelves with yellowed sticky tape, earthenware containers for tea, sugar, flour, rice, a picture of her brother in his school uniform. There was a photograph of her dog, too, which Dad had given her for her birthday. She’d called him Cary after Cary Grant in To Catch A Thief (not that Cary the dog ever caught a thief or even a ball), which she’d loved and her brother hadn’t. (‘I hate that ruddy animal, hairs everywhere, licking its balls like it was starving then sticking its filthy tongue right down your throat if you aren’t careful, if I want to French-kiss someone, it wouldn’t be a bloody dog, I can tell you.’) One summer evening, she’d looked out of her bedroom window and seen him in the fading light at the end of the garden, seen him hack Cary apart, splitting the animal like a kipper from anus to nose. Cary had barked, yelped, whimpered, fallen silent, the two halves of his little body spread like an opened book on the bloodied soil, his eyes gradually filming over. She could see his heart still faintly beating, until it slowed and finally stopped, and her brother tossing the corpse behind Dad’s garden shed and then washing his hands under the outdoor tap. She’d never told anyone, cried in bed that night, gone out the next day and covered poor Cary with grass cuttings.

  Removing her own piece of steak, draining the potatoes, adding cream to the steak drippings and a little brandy, shaking the pan until they’d all amalgamated into a sauce, adding salt and pepper and shaking again, she wondered why it was that she didn’t hate her brother, was conscious only of a kind of neutrality about him, on the one hand a cruel and despicable person, on the other, her brother, blood is thicker than water and all that. He’d been good to Mum, at any rate, bought her this house, new washing-machine, microwave which Mum was convinced would cook her brains like sweetbreads in a frying pan if she used it, cordless phone. She hadn’t seen him for years and hoped she never would, perhaps at Mum’s funeral. Would she invite him to her wedding if she (ever) got married? Probably not, she didn’t want to frighten the horses, as Miss Barker was always saying, though she would definitely invite Miss Barker, still distinguished-looking, married to a surgeon at the hospital, with nine-year-old twin girls who went to the same school as Janine had done – funny that, you’d think they’d be able to afford private education.

  Behind her, an owl hooted very loudly, once, and she jumped, looked up at the bird clock over the kitchen door. When she was still at school she’d saved up for four months to buy it for Mum’s birthday, a different bird for each hour, the worst one being twelve o’clock, which was an endless stream of cuckooing, though four o’clock, the blackbird, was nice and so was the thrush at seven. The clock had been up there for years and she always replaced the batteries when they ran down, even though she did not care much for the clock. Perhaps she was just pleased Mum had kept it, though probably it was only from sheer inertia; with her dodgy knee, it would be difficult for Mum to climb on a chair and take it off the wall.

  Over lunch, they spoke of nothing very much, or rather Janine did, while Mum banged on about her wonderful son. ‘He’s doing ever so well, your brother is, starting up businesses all the time, making money hand over fist, to hear him tell it.’

  ‘What does he do, exactly?’ It was a question Janine had often posed and one to which she had never had a satisfactory answer.

  ‘He’s a big businessman, Jane, ever so successful, you know that.’

  ‘But what kind of business?’

  Her mother shrugged. ‘Property, I think. I know he’s just bought a house, says I’m too old to go on working, wants me to move in with him, but I don’t want to, I like it here, and besides, I’d miss my friends, and my garden.’

  Janine glanced out at the patch of ragged grass outside, some sticks which would later bloom into untidy sheafs of golden rod, a crab-apple tree, the ugly tool shed, a shrub which no-one had been able to identify since it never sprouted leaves or blooms, just quietly faded, year by year, rather like Dad, Janine thought. ‘Mmm,’ she said.

  ‘Here,’ continued her mother, ‘you should have seen the coat your brother was wearing the other day, he looked like a millionaire, someone out of those fashion pages for men, I felt ever so proud.’

  ‘Do you ever feel proud of me?’

  ‘Of you?’ Her mother stared at her, a fork laden with grey, overcooked steak (‘I don’t like eating my food raw, Jane, you know that’) halfway to her mouth. ‘Of course I do. But you’re a girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘What difference does that make?’ Janine said tiredly, swallowing her own perfectly done mouthful of fillet in green pepper sauce. Vying for her mother’s affection wasn’t a question of sibling rivalry. Her brother was so far ahead in the maternal-love stakes that he wasn’t even playing in the same league as she was.

  ‘Well, you know . . .’ said her mother.

  ‘I don’t actually. Why don’t you explain it to me?’

  ‘Well, for a start, girls don’t need the same support as boys, do they?’

  ‘I’d have thought they needed more.’

  ‘Boys have to get on, make a living so they can support a wife and children.’

  ‘Oh, is that what it is?’ Janine snorted into her wine glass. ‘Mum, do you have any notion what I do for a living?’

  ‘You?’ A shifty look came into her mother’s eyes as she desperately tried to remember, if she had ever known. ‘Some kind of an agency, isn’t it? Parties or something.’

  ‘I run a travel agency, actually.’

  ‘Well, there you are, then. Didn’t I say so?’

  ‘I don’t just run it, Mum, it’s mine, I own it, it’s called TaylorMade, I started it completely from scratch.’ With a little help from her silent partner, her lover, but Janine wasn’t about to mention that.

  ‘That’s nice.’ Her mother looked over at the cheese dish on the sideboard. ‘What about a bit of Stil—’

  ‘We cater for holidays with a difference,’ Janine plunged on. ‘Out-of-the-ordinary vacations to places you wouldn’t necessarily think of going.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think you make much money if people wouldn’t think of going there.’

  ‘We show them, Mum, we tell them about exciting alternatives to Benidorm and the like.’

  ‘We had ever such a nice holiday in Majorca once, your dad and I. Or was it Minorca? I always get the two muddled up.’

  ‘They’re both in the Balearics, Mum.’ What was the use? She could end up as Pope, Queen, Prime Minister and American President all rolled into one and her mother still wouldn’t be impressed, wouldn’t even be interested. Janine had a fleeting vision of her father in his grey suit, coming through the door, having a beer, ruffling her hair, asking how her day had been at school and listening with real interest to her tales, before shuffling off to the pub. They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, she thought, remembering Miss Barker with warmth, thinking there’d been plenty of weeping and not much laughter when she was growing up.

  Jefferson

  Fifteen

  ‘Hi, Gordon, it’s Jefferson here.’

  ‘Jefferson!’ The voice was warm and friendly. ‘How’re they hanging, old son?’

  ‘Old son’ was stretching it a bit; ‘new’ son was more like it, but taking this to be an enquiry into his general state of well-being, Jefferson indicated that things were fine, thanks, and that he’d like
to drop by, or, rather, down (since Gordon lived some hundred and fifty miles further south) as he had one or two matters he’d like to set out for Gordon’s consideration whenever it would be convenient, but sooner rather than later if that was possible.

  Gordon was his ‘stepfather’, though the man had come into his life far too late to be any kind of father to him, step or otherwise. A more unlikely partner for his astringent mother it would have been hard to imagine, so the union had left both Jefferson and his father completely baffled. ‘People change, I suppose,’ his father said once, ‘but the amount of change that woman’s gone through is so enormous as to make me wonder whether we’re talking about the same person as the one who gave birth to you.’

  The improbable thought of his mother as a gangster’s moll was sometimes the only thing which prevented Jefferson from suspecting that Gordon operated very close to the wrong side of the law, knowing as he did from his intensive study of the works of Bret McDermot that gangsters’ molls chewed gum, wore fishnet tights with a crimson silk garter, had a black bandeau round their head with a red rose stuck into it and were improbably blonde, none of which attributes came anywhere close to a description of his mother. Gordon owned a series of betting shops which Jefferson felt should have pressed almost every one of his mother’s disapproval buttons (cruelty to animals, exploitation of the poor and the oppressed, abuse of the vertically challenged, among others), though Jefferson often wondered whether the betting shops were no more than a (semi-) legal cover for any number of criminal pies into which Gordon’s beefy thumbs were constantly dipping, Jack-Horner-like, and pulling out illicit plums.

  ‘Jefferson! Come in, come in!’ The man was welcoming in a slightly overdone manner which Jefferson, while trying hard not to be judgemental, had long ago labelled Bullshitter Bluff. Gingery hair, ever-expanding gut, Hitlerian moustache, five foot six or less, built like a bollard, Gordon wore cowboy boots, heavily tooled, with bits of bone and turquoise set among the stitched leather curlicues. Jefferson had always wanted to tell him that the heels emphasized rather than diminished his lack of height.

  Gordon reached up and banged Jefferson painfully on the shoulder. ‘Good to see you, mate, long time no see!’

  ‘Same here.’ Jefferson walked into the richly over-decorated house, with its state-of-the-art alarm system, its huge squashy furniture covered in red plush with purple swirls, its shiny tables, its two life-size ceramic leopards sitting on either side of a faux-stone fireplace, its ankle-deep carpeting. On the plus side, although it was decorated in a style which Jefferson associated with bordellos and other houses of ill repute (not that he’d ever entered one, nor had any intention of so doing), it was a warm and comfortable place, and his ‘stepfather’ was never slow in bringing out the booze in heavy crystal decanters and urging guests to help themselves, to make themselves right at home. ‘How’s it going, Gordon?’

  ‘Oh, you know . . . your sainted ma . . . I get a bit down now and then, but what can you do?’ Gordon said unconvincingly, going over to the bar which stood in one corner of the room, a pseudo-frontier-style roof hanging over it, and shelves behind holding all manner of expensive booze, interspersed with fake wooden boards saying things like Leave Your Gun At The Door in lettering supposedly reminiscent of a Wild West saloon. He poured stiff measures of a hugely expensive single malt for them both. ‘I’m through in the study, come and park yourself down.’

  Jefferson followed him into a dark, consciously masculine room, hung with artefacts testifying to the fact that in his younger days, Gordon had spent much time in Australia and the Far East. His study (Jefferson was never quite clear what Gordon was studying: form, perhaps, or porn videos, judging by a glance or two at the top shelves of the bookcase) was lined with panelled wood (‘gotta mate with a panelling shop,’ Gordon had told him once), and had tartan carpet (presumably the Campbell one) on the floor, with red leather club chairs studded with brass-headed nails. There was a boomerang, some many-armed Hindu goddesses, a platypus under a glass dome, which Gordon claimed to have caught and stuffed himself (if true, that must have been so illegal as to warrant a long prison term) and numerous fat-bellied Buddhas, all of which unnervingly resembled Gordon himself when stripped of his clothes, a sight Jefferson had been privileged to view only last summer when Gordon invited him down for a barbecue and swim in the pool which glistened azurely outside the study window. (‘And bring along those kids of your Dad’s, if you like,’ he’d said generously, which Jefferson had done, to the great delight of Monroe and Madison.)

  Gordon put on a sincere face. ‘Now, Jeff, what can I do you for?’

  ‘Probably nothing. I . . . it seemed awkward to ask over the phone . . . I just wondered whether my mother . . . Mum . . .’

  ‘I know who you mean.’

  ‘. . . whether, after the . . . accident, you ever had any worries about whether it really was an accident and not something else.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘No worries, Jeff, believe me. None at all. There were too many witnesses who saw the whole thing.’ Gordon spread his large hairy hands. ‘From what I’ve been told, the weather at the time was atrocious, and the driving conditions not too wonderful; it could have happened to anyone.’

  ‘I know my father was worried about it.’ Whether Gordon had genuinely exercised his taxonomic skills on the thing, or found it in a junk shop, the duck-billed platypus had been given incongruously large blue eyes, which caught and held Jefferson’s gaze in an unnervingly friendly manner.

  ‘Yeah, he rang me up about it when it first happened, wanted me to look into it a bit more, seeing as how I had a connection or two in the area. Know what I said? I said, “Truman, old boy, won’t make a pennyworth of difference to either of us, no point stirring up trouble, best to just let the poor old girl be.”’ Gordon glanced piously up at the ceiling.

  ‘You think there might have been trouble to be stirred up?’

  ‘No way, mate. I just thought, you can’t bring her back now, let’s leave it, get on with our lives.’ He sipped his whisky and eyed Jefferson with more than a little pugnacity. ‘What’s your interest, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing, really. I don’t know if you heard but my father died two or three weeks ago—’

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Jeff, he was a decent sort, your dad.’

  ‘And there were some papers—’

  ‘Papers?’

  ‘Mostly concerning Mum’s accident, I think. His wife asked me to have a look, since he’d been bothered about it when it happened, slightly dubious circumstances and so on.’

  ‘Tell the truth, I had the same thought when I got the info from the local police.’ Gordon leaned back and crossed his short legs, displaying a pair of silk socks featuring at ankle level a golfer who’d just teed off. ‘Can’t trust the buggers further than you can throw them, really. So I not only had a good old gander at the papers myself, I even got my lawyers to go through them, fine-tooth comb sort of thing, and we figured it was all pretty straight up and above board, nothing fishy about the affair, all seemed hunky-dory. Show you their report, if you like.’

  ‘Well, that might be a good—’

  ‘Mind you, it was a long time ago, got no idea where it’d be now, but I’ll take a shufti through my files some time, see if I can dig it out.’

  ‘Probably not worth it, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ Jefferson said.

  ‘Point is, you got to move on, Jeff. We all have, not just you, no point crying over spilt milk, know what I mean?’

  Jefferson might not have been overly fond of his mother but it seemed hard on her to be equated with a toppled jug of Gold Top. ‘I suppose so,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘So, Jeff, what’re you up to these days?’

  ‘This and that, the usual, you know . . .’

  ‘Money-making, that it?’

  ‘I suppose that’s what it boils down to.’

  ‘You know what they
say, no-one can be too rich or too thin.’ Gordon laughed expansively and patted his belly. ‘I’m not doing too well on the thin stakes but on the other . . .’

  ‘Business good, then?’

  ‘Strength to strength, old son. Signed up a couple of deals last week that should see me right for the next few years, and I’m just about to finalize a couple more that should make my fortune.’ He sighed theatrically, Gordon Gecko finally overwhelmed by success. ‘After that, it’s off somewhere on holiday – haven’t decided where yet. I’m looking into something really luxurious, just for a change – I had my fill of budget hotels with your mother, God rest her soul. Thinking about that Atlantis Hotel in Dubai in that palm-shaped thing they built off the coast. What about you, got any holiday plans?’

  ‘As a matter of fact . . . a friend of mine was recommending the Galápagos Islands.’ Jefferson’s heart shifted as he thought of Kate; there had still been no word from her and it was five days now, where could she be? Other unfortunate women who’d disappeared and never been seen again raced screaming through his brain, no, that hadn’t happened to Kate, he was absolutely sure of it.

  ‘Galloping whats? Never heard of it.’ Gordon stared at him, eyes the colour of sucked cough-drops, round with ignorance.

  ‘They’re islands off the coast of Ecuador.’

  ‘Ecuador? Heard of that, course I have. Means equator in Spanish, I think it was your mum who told me that before she . . .’ He groaned, placed a hand over his heart. ‘God, I miss her. How long you staying out there, what you going to be doing?’

  ‘Bit of sightseeing, really, before I move on to the Islands.’

  ‘And what’ve they got to interest a townie like you?’

  ‘Masses of wildlife – finches, volcanoes, giant turtles and, I’m reliably informed, blue-footed boobies.’

  ‘Boobies?’ Gordon chortled. ‘Now you’re talking.’ Despising himself, Jefferson laughed alongside him. ‘Doesn’t sound like my sort of thing at all,’ Gordon went on. ‘South America, isn’t it, godforsaken hole, nothing but bag-snatchers and cheap whores, like as not.’