Marcus seemed to see her. “Oh, Regina, my little Regina, I’m so sorry … It was her, don’t you see?”
“Mother?”
“No, no. Her. She tempted me, and I was weak, and now I am like Atys.” He lifted his hands from his groin. His tunic was raised, exposing his bare legs, and a meaty, bloody mess above them that didn’t look real. He was smiling, but his face was very pale. “I did it myself.”
“You fool.” Aetius stood in the other doorway now, with his strong arm around Julia. Julia was hiding her face in her hands, her head bowed against her father’s shoulder. “What have you done?”
Marcus whispered, “I have atoned. And like Atys I will return …” His voice broke up as if there were liquid in his throat.
“Mother!” Regina ran forward. She was splashing in the blood, actually splashing in it, and now she could smell its iron stink, but she had to get to her mother. Still she kept on, running across the room, past the couch with the grisly, flopping thing that was her father.
But Julia twisted away and fled.
Aetius grabbed Regina and folded her in his arms, just as he had the night before, and no matter how she struggled and wept, he wouldn’t release her to follow her mother.
Chapter 4
I stayed in Manchester another seventy-two hours.
I retrieved my father’s boxes of business material from the loft, and found a few more files downstairs. He’d actually carried on working after his nominal retirement, doing bits of bookkeeping for friends and close contacts. Much of this work concerned small projects in the building trade.
I spent the best part of a day checking through all this material, trying to close down any loose ends. There were actually some bits of work my father hadn’t completed, a few fees he hadn’t collected, but they were all for small amounts, and everything was resolved amicably. I came away with a short list of requests for the return of some material. Most of the contacts were his friends — I knew a couple of them myself — and most hadn’t heard of the death. The round of calls was painful, and the friends’ reactions brought back the immediacy of it all.
I checked through Dad’s most recent bank statements. Most of the statement lines were unremarkable. But I did find a few orders for foreign checks. Some of these were for more than a thousand pounds, and they went out every month, usually in the first week. I had no idea what they were for. I considered calling the bank branch, and wondered if they would tell me what was going on.
But then I came to a month earlier in the year, without the regular foreign payment. It wasn’t like Dad to be so untidy as to leave this gap. On an impulse I checked his check stubs. And sure enough, one stub showed how he’d bought a thousand pounds’ worth of euros from a travel exchange desk in one of the Manchester stations — that transaction showed up in the statement. On the back of the stub he had written, in his neat hand, “March pmnt. To Mry Qn of Vgns, overdue.” I imagined him parceling up the currency and pushing it into the post — an unwise way to handle money, but fast and effective.
“Mry Qn of Vgns.” To the eye of a Catholic boy that cryptic note unraveled immediately: Mary Queen of Virgins. But I had no idea who this was — a church, a hospital, a charity? — nor why Dad had been handing over so much money to them for so long. I found nothing else in his correspondence to give me any clues. I put it to the back of my mind, with a vague resolution to follow up the lead and close down the contact.
The personal stuff was more difficult than the financial matters, of course.
There were photographs around the house: the framed family-portrait stuff on the dresser, the big old albums in their cupboard in the dining room. I flicked through the albums, moving back in time. Soon the big glossy colored rectangles gave way to much smaller black-and-white images, like something prewar rather than early sixties, and then they petered out altogether. There were surprisingly few of them — only one or two of me per year of my childhood, for instance, taken at such key moments as Christmas, and family summer holidays, and first days at new schools. It seemed an odd paucity of images compared to the screeds people produce now. But then, I realized, glimpsing through these portals into sunny sixties afternoons long gone, that my memories of great moments, like the day the training wheels came off my bike, were of my father’s face, not of a magnifying lens.
I tried to be brisk. The Catholic tokens went to the parish. I gave most of Dad’s personal stuff to the charity shops. I kept back the photographs, and a few books that had some resonance for me — an ancient AA road atlas mapping a vanished Britain, and some of his Churchill biographies — nothing I’d ever read or used, but artifacts that had lodged in my memory. I didn’t want this stuff, but of course I couldn’t bear to throw any of it out, and I knew Gina would take none of it.
I swept it all into a trunk and hauled it into the boot of my car. My boxed-up TV21 collection went in there also, thus beginning a migration from one attic to another. I wondered what would happen to all this junk when I died in my turn.
I kept out the little picture of my “sister,” though.
I had the phone disconnected, sorted out such details as the TV license, but left the utilities running, billed to my account, to keep the house dry and intact, the better to present it to prospective buyers. On the last morning I cut the grass, knocked over the anthills, and did a little brisk weeding. It seemed the right thing to do. I was going to miss those big old azaleas. I wondered about taking a cutting, but I didn’t know how to. I didn’t have a garden to grow it in anyhow.
I engaged a house clearance firm — “friendly and sympathetic service,” according to the Yellow Pages. A surveyor with an undertaker’s doggedly glum manner came, glanced efficiently over the furniture and utilities, and made an offer for the lot. It seemed ruinously low. Part of me, loyal to the notion of what my dad’s reaction would have been, was inspired to fight back. But I just wanted shut of the business, as the surveyor surely calculated, and the deed was done.
The last step was to place the house with a real estate agent, where a kid with spiky gelled hair and a cheap suit lectured me about “market stress” and how long it would take to get an offer. We were, of course, negotiating over the sale of the home where I’d grown up; I suspected the Gelled Arsehole sensed my vulnerability. But fuck it. I signed the forms and walked away.
I left the keys with Peter. He promised to check over the place until it was sold. I felt uncomfortable with this — I didn’t like the idea of becoming entangled in some kind of debt to him — but unless I was to house-sit myself I needed somebody to do what he was offering.
I didn’t quite know why I was uncomfortable about Peter. There had always been something needy about him. And if Peter wanted to work his way back into my life, he had found an angle to do it. Perhaps, I thought, he imagined we would become Internet pen pals, swapping reminiscences about TV21. Perhaps, like the Gelled Arsehole, Peter had spotted my vulnerability and was exploiting it for his own ends.
Or maybe I was just being uncharitable. Whichever, as I set off back to London, I drove away watching him waving with a handful of keys.
When I got back to work, there was nothing for me to do, literally. Which tells you all you need to know about my career.
I worked for a smallish software development company called Hyf — a bit of Anglo-Saxon that is apparently the root of hive, for we were all supposed to be busy busy bees. We were based near Liverpool Street, in the upper floor of what used to be a small rail station, long disused. The office was open-plan, save for a small hardware section where minis hummed away in blue-lit air-conditioning. It was an environment of neck-high partitions, trendy curved desks that made it impossible to get close to your PC without stretching out your arms like a gibbon, and everywhere a flurry of polystyrene Starbucks containers, yellow stickies, postcards from skiing holidays, and the occasional bit of “comedy” Internet porn.