She feels a solid, squarish package, clipped at the top, cool to the touch. What could it be? She reaches for it with the very tips of her fingers but, again and again, it slips from her grasp.
‘Goddamnit,’ she mutters, trying to ease the thing towards her, ‘just behave, will you?’
With the oldest, marmalade cat watching from the sideboard with inscrutable interest, Claudette contorts herself so that her shoulder is hunched, her back arched and her hand palm up, and manages to grasp the thing. She has it. She grins triumphantly at the cat, who gives her a slow, impassive blink. She wriggles her wrist free. It is out. Here it is.
Claudette looks down at the thing in her hand. She turns it one way and the other.
It is a packet of Italian coffee, half used, left behind. Innocuous enough in itself but in Claudette’s hands, this particular morning, it is as dangerous as cyanide.
She isn’t going to sniff it, no, she isn’t. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt such a thing. Just a whiff of those smoky, dark, aromatic granules – heated up they always were, at length, lovingly, every morning in this kitchen, for all the years he lived here, the way he would stand waiting for them to brew, looking out of that window, that robe of his loose over his pyjamas, a child, usually, on his shoulder or his arm – would be enough to tip her over the edge. She isn’t going to do it. Certainly not.
Then she does, of course. She removes the clip, she places it on the counter, she parts the top of the silver-and-red packet and she brings it to her face and she inhales, she inhales, she inhales.
Minutes later, the cat makes its sinuous way down off the sideboard and across the floor and towards the woman of the house who, the cat observes, is inexplicably slumped on the floor, hands covering her face. The cat rubs its head against her legs, once, twice, and waits for a response. Nothing. The woman still sits there. The cat winds its way through her ankles. It wonders when the woman might get up and what the meaning is of this odd behaviour and how long it will be before she recalls that the cat has still not had its breakfast.
Daniel takes two of the homeopathic pills. He has no idea what they are. The label, being made of organic paper or somesuch, is so worn and faded it’s impossible to make out the name of the medicine.
Do you, in fact, call it medicine? Wasn’t there some other word for it? He is sure there is. Cure? No. Something else more obfuscatory.
The pills – he remembers you’re meant to call them ‘pillules’, which he always found a most unpleasant neologism – are minuscule and sweet. He rolls them around his tongue until they dissolve into a kind of sugary fairy dust. Delicious. No wonder the kids never minded taking this stuff.
He takes two more. Holds the bottle up to the light. Hundreds of the little things, all perfectly round and uniform. ‘Ignatia’, the label reads, he now sees, in faint, rubbed-away ink, and he is struck with the sudden recollection of Claudette giving these to him as she left this very flat, after she had brought him back from Phoebe’s funeral. They had been separated for almost a year but she still came, when she heard, deposited the kids with Lucas, took a train to London, got him on a plane, held his hand on the flight, drove him to the funeral, picked him up afterwards, watched him get drunk in a hotel that night, escorted him to his room, gently disengaged his hands when he made a clumsy pass at her, then brought him back to London. He remembers her putting this bottle into his outstretched hand, here in this room, then turning away, and he hadn’t been reaching for fucking homeopathic remedies, that’s for sure, but that was what she had given him. Ignatia. For grief, she’d had the gall to say. Do you think, he had roared at her, this pointless bullshit placebo is going to bring back my daughter? Is it going to make losing you OK? Is that what you think? That this will in any way help?
Daniel shuts down the memory. He doesn’t want to think about her leaving that day, walking away from him down the corridor. He did not follow her out into the lobby, he did not. He did not yell at her all the way to the kerb, to the cab door. He did not then switch to pleading and try to grab hold of her coat, her arm, her bag, whatever he could reach. He is sure of that.
He takes another two pills, then another. Is it possible to overdose on these things? Daniel lets out a bark of a laugh. What a turn-up for the books that would be. Death by placebo.
He could phone Claudette and ask her. He could pick up the phone and dial and be put through to that house, their house, her house. What would he say? Hey, honey, I might have exceeded the recommended dose for Ignatia. Does this mean that I’ll die? Or that I’ll be happy for ever?
Daniel tosses the bottle aside. He picks up a newspaper, reads the headline, registers that it’s over a week old and that he’s read it before, cover to cover, but still carries on running his eyes along the lines of words.
Without taking his eyes off the page, he reaches out for the little amber bottle and tucks it back into his pocket.
This is better, Claudette thinks, as she walks along the strand, her coat buttoned against the cold. She is out, she is doing something active, she is coping – more than coping. What was all that in the kitchen, anyway? It was nothing. She’s fine. Crying over some coffee, indeed. What in the world is wrong with her? She’s just feeling a bit down today, that’s all. Who needs a husband when they have all that she has?
She turns to face the water: layers of turquoise under a piled, grey-blue sky, the lace of the surf edging the slick-wet sand. The dogs are dark arrows, far in the distance, circling each other, paws kicking up the spray. She whistles to them and they rear their heads, ears turning in the breeze.
She called Niall, just after she parked the car. They were out on the Causeway and Niall had said something about basalt and polygonal columns, which had made her smile, and he had handed over the phone to Marithe who had talked very fast about geological hammers and the legend of the Giant, and Calvin, when he got his turn on the phone, asked if they could get a new puppy and could they call it Finn?
Yes, she had found herself saying, yes.
In less than twenty-four hours they will be back and life will return to normal and the house will be full of voices and footfalls, just the way she likes it.
Daniel circles the aisles of a supermarket in Belsize Park. He has got himself dressed, after a fashion, and has walked all the way up the hill with the express purpose of coming here and buying some food of a nutritious content. Ari came to see him two, maybe three weeks ago and cooked him dinner. After that, he cleaned the kitchen and filled – Daniel squirms to think of it – the fridge and stuck a note to it, saying, EAT SOMETHING. Like Alice in Wonderland, Daniel thought afterwards. He could visit again, at any time, and Daniel wants to show him that he doesn’t need to worry about him, that he has his head above water, that he’s fine. It’s not that he wants this message to filter back to Claudette, no, not in the least: he just wants the boy to stop thinking he’s in any way responsible for the welfare of his feckless stepfather. God knows Ari has enough responsibilities of his own.
Daniel wanders up an aisle filled with seventeen different types of diaper. He hates this supermarket, he remembers now. It has a particularly low ceiling and very little natural light, and the tills are arranged in a maddening non-linear way so that queues of people waiting to pay snake back through the aisles.
Coming across one of those wheeled stools that supermarket workers use to stack the shelves, Daniel sits down. Just for a moment. To take the weight off his feet, to nurse his head, which is throbbing in sympathy with the muzak filtering into the shop air.
He looks down into his basket. A tin of tuna, a bottle of vodka and a single apple.
The problem is, he thinks, that there seems to be nothing to buy. The shelves are crammed but there is nothing he wants to pick up and take home.
He watches a couple of about his age coming towards him. The woman pushes a shopping cart, which is filled with sparkling water and aubergines and French cheeses and star fruit, and the man walks beside her. They sto
p at a display of crispbreads and study them with serious absorption. The man places a hand on his wife’s back and Daniel has to look away, has to take another couple of the homeopathic pills and grind them between his molars.
When he considers the end of his marriage, there is one moment in particular that haunts him, especially in those sleepless hours before dawn. He is often awake, addressing the ceiling above his bed, redrafting this moment, rewriting it, re-editing it to his satisfaction. (To no avail, of course: the woman for whom these alterations are intended is a thousand silent leagues away.) It was early morning, a few months after they had come back from Paris, and Claudette had been in bed beside him, regarding him from her pillow. Daniel had been sitting up, smoking, unshaven, unslept, and he was reading an old academic textbook that contained a paper by Nicola. He was ignoring Claudette, his wife, the living and breathing woman in bed beside him. He was pretending he didn’t know she was awake because some conversations are too difficult for first thing in the morning, because he didn’t feel like having another dissection of his failings and shortcomings, because he was, in short, an idiot. If he met the man he was that morning, Daniel wants to say to the couple by the crispbreads, you know what he would do? He would take him by the shoulders and shake him and say, get it together. Do you see this woman, this room, this house? You’re about to lose it all. The whole kit and caboodle. So put that fucking book down and turn towards your wife and get a good grip on her and hold on as tightly as you can.
But there was no future self in the room that morning so Daniel carried on reading, carried on smoking, carried on ignoring. And then, beside him, Claudette took a breath.
‘Do you think, Daniel,’ she said to him, rolling over onto her back so that she was able to look out of the window while she spoke, ‘that we might have reached the end of our story?’
Such a Claudette way to put it.
Claudette treads her way up and over a headland and down into a smaller beach where the cliffs curve protectively around the sand. She realises too late that she has arrived at the exact spot where she had first brought Daniel, after she and Ari had met him that day at the crossroads, when they had almost said goodbye for ever, almost missed each other, until Ari said, will you come to the beach with us? and Daniel had said yes, and they had driven him north, along the coast, to here.
Claudette sighs. She considers turning back, not walking the sand where once, a decade and a half ago, a small Ari had stripped off his clothes and run naked in the shallows, shrieking and kicking, and Daniel had been a hulking stranger, dropped into their lives from nowhere, who had made a pile of flattened stones there on the strand and said to Ari that they weren’t going to leave this beach until he had learnt to skim stones.
She walks on, grimly. She will not turn back. She will not let him ruin this place for her. Everywhere has echoes of Daniel. If she tried to avoid everything that reminded her of him then she’d have to dig a hole in the ground and live in that.
So he and Ari had stood at the waves and he had adjusted Ari’s stance, the angle of his arm, and it had taken what seemed like hours. But there he had stood, next to her son, again and again saying, like this, good job, try again, one more time. And by the end of the afternoon, Ari could make his stone bounce three, four, five times on the surface of the sea.
It is possible, Claudette thinks, that she decided she wanted him there and then. Or was it later, when she dropped him back at the crossroads, where they had left his car, and he’d said, in a garbled rush, that he wasn’t leaving Donegal any time soon, that he had some work to do ‘in the area’, that he’d be here for a while and could he take her to dinner, no, not dinner, who would babysit the kid, how about lunch or maybe a walk or could he cook for her or maybe she and Ari would like to go visit a castle the next day or further up the coast or maybe a holy well, if she wasn’t busy?
She picks up a length of driftwood and throws it for the dogs, who both hare after it, jostling and shoving each other.
It didn’t take long, that much she knows. She’d thought it was pretty clear to both of them where they were heading, but when she touched him for the first time, when she held him in her hallway and pressed her lips to his, she was amazed to find that he was shaking, that he had been under the impression that she wasn’t interested, that he was barking up the wrong tree. No, she’d said, putting her arms around his neck, the right tree, absolutely the right tree.
Claudette sinks onto a rock. What is she doing? How did she get to this place, crying as she walks along a beach? How did everything go so wrong?
She pulls out her phone and looks at it. She has banned herself from calling Daniel; it is not allowed, it is not right, it is not fair on him. They are separated; it is over. This, she must accept.
She presses the button that lights up the phone. There is, she is both annoyed and elated to see, a signal. A faint one, but a signal all the same.
Daniel takes a right off Haverstock Hill. There is a library down here that he likes, an old-school place with kids’ storytimes and stern librarians and clanking radiators and ancient computers and geriatrics dozing at tables.
He has left the supermarket, abandoned his shopping basket right there in the aisle. He considered taking the vodka, just slipping it into his coat pocket, but good sense prevailed, just in time.
He walks down the side-street, past lines of parked cars, past wrought-iron gates, past cats sitting on doorsteps, past windows that give views of sofas, dining tables, kitchen cupboards, lit rooms, where other lives are being lived out.
Sometimes he wonders what the hell he is doing here, in this city, where he has no connections, no history, no contacts, other than his stepson, who is a student at the university. He had a job here, of course, for a while, but not at the moment. ‘Compassionate leave’, they called it.
The thing was, Daniel thinks, as he gazes into a house where he can see a child, juice box in hand, staring into a television screen, he had believed his move here to be temporary, a marital blip. He had no idea his split with Claudette would turn out to be permanent. Isn’t that often the way of these things? Shortly after the conversation in the bedroom that morning, he had taken himself (in a state of injured, wronged rage) to London, he had thought for a while. He would take the six-month contract he’d been offered and serve her right. He was entirely of the opinion that he could win her round, when he was good and ready, when she’d had time to see sense. He’d thought he could get her back, fool that he was, but first – first – he had to sort out the Nicola issue.
How do you absorb the idea that you’ve killed someone into your ordinary life? How do you go about the minutiae of the everyday when you know that, because of you, a girl is dead? It’s impossible. The spectre of the girl lying in the woods, the girl in a hospital bed, haunted the rooms of his flat, his new, diminished life in London. She lurked around corners at the university, she hung about on Underground stairwells, she sat in the empty place opposite him at his tiny dining-table.
Then he’d got a call on his cell phone in the middle of the night and he’d seen it was Niall and he remembers being pleased – alone, as he was, in a flat in London, away from everyone he loved. He remembers snatching it up eagerly and saying, hey, how are you?
You know what his immediate thought was, on being told that his daughter had been shot dead in a drugstore? That it was his fault. That it was karma, it was comeuppance, it was punishment for him running away from that forest and not going back. An eye for a eye, a girl for a girl.
Even now, almost a year on, he cannot shake that conviction. He knows it was somehow down to him.
Daniel climbs the steps to the library, holds the door for a woman with a double stroller and seats himself in the travel guides and non-fiction section, grabbing a selection of books at random.
He opens something called The Big Book of Facts: Everything You Need to Know About Everything, questioning the wisdom of repeating ‘everything’ in the title, which is a pr
etty ugly and prosaic word, when you think about it. Here is a page with graphs of world grain consumption per continent, America coming out top of all grain-guzzlers. A diagram of the rate of polar ice melting. A league table of land animals and their respective speeds in kilometres per hour.
Daniel flips the pages and finds himself looking at pie charts of gun crimes.
He shuts the book with a snap. He lays his head on the table, on top of the cover, and the word ‘everything’ stretches away from his eyes, the wrong way round, in vast, unavoidable letters.
‘Maman?’ Claudette says, into her phone. ‘C’est moi.’
During the ensuing pause on the line, it hits Claudette with a plummeting sensation that she should never have rung Pascaline. What was she thinking? She’d only done it to stop herself calling Daniel. Can she hang up, before it’s too late, pretend that her phone ran out of charge, that she lost the signal? Her mother possesses an unnerving ability to decode her moods immediately and she doesn’t want to talk about how she’s feeling right now, not at all.
Claudette tries valiantly to inject an upbeat tone into her voice: ‘Ça va?’
‘What’s wrong?’ Pascaline replies, in English, which she reserves for interrogation purposes. ‘You sound terrible.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Claudette says. ‘I’m fine. How are you?’
Pascaline ignores the question for a second time. ‘Where are you?’ she asks. ‘Who is with you?’
Claudette takes a deep breath. ‘No one,’ she says, and bursts into tears.
The dogs find a length of bladderwrack to squabble half-heartedly over, the clouds move along the coast in a stately procession, the tide pulls off the strand, leaving furrows and ridges in the sand, and Claudette must listen to her mother’s theories as to why her marriage broke down.