III
The road was quieter than it had been during the day but still some drivers careered around corners as if they were meeting a dare. On long stretches of dark road pinprick lights would appear behind them, filling the mirror a few minutes later, blinding her until she slowed to the side and let them pass.
Dub put the radio onto a pop station and Callum seemed to go into a trance, gazing out of the window at the moonlit countryside without seeing, his eyes steady during the whole course of a song. He didn’t speak unless he was spoken to, she noticed, and it made her feel sorry for him. One day they might talk to each other, a long time in the future, and he might tell her what had happened to him in prison.
She couldn’t quite remember where the turning for the house was so she slowed when she saw familiar hills, irritating a small car on the road behind her. The driver hooted at her to hurry up and Callum turned and looked out of the window. He said it was a really old guy who could hardly see over the steering wheel and he and Dub laughed at her for being so cautious.
She saw the turning up ahead, indicated carefully and took it, the impatient pensioner behind giving her a farewell-and-fuck-you toot on his horn as he passed behind them, making them all smile. When his lights had disappeared all they had to see by were their own headlights. The grass on the driveway had been flattened by Merki’s car but in the dark it seemed deeper and more impenetrable.
She drove on as far as she dared, realizing once they got out that she was much farther into the drive than Merki had gone. In the harsh moonlight the cottage was forlorn and ramshackle. They could almost smell the damp from outside.
Dub and Callum were unenthusiastic but she’d stopped at a garage and bought some bread and butter, some cans of juice, firelighters and smoke-free coal and promised them a fire when they got inside. Back at the house she’d had the idea that they might be able to use the old barbecue as a grate but it seemed a bit stupid now.
They carried the stuff around the back and Dub tried the kitchen door. It was locked so he used a penknife to pick around the lock and the wood crumbled away easily. Chipping at it, he managed to expose the lock and push it out of its nest. He swung the door open.
The sweet-sour smell of mildew hung in the air and a frantic scuttling marked the exit of a brood of mice into the other room. Callum didn’t mind but Dub looked around distastefully at the buckled lino floor and the mouse droppings on the worktop. He was quite meticulous in their house, wouldn’t use the bath unless it had been cleaned and was always throwing things out of the fridge because they had reached their sell-by date.
The room was empty of personal effects, but otherwise it looked as if someone had just walked out. Ten years of gray dust encrusted the elaborate Victorian cast-iron range in the inglenook, the oven doors all firmly shut, lids down on the cook plates. The black stovepipe at the back had collapsed and slouched crazily against the inside of the chimney. She had seen the pine dresser through the window during the day but not the feet swollen and rotting with moisture. A Formica table was pushed back against a wall, a matching chair on either side, backs to the wall. The sink under the window was basic, a white ceramic Belfast box with a shelf on the right-hand side, serving as a draining board. The cottage looked as if the family had spent their savings a generation ago, and this was the dwindled remains of a poorly managed natural advantage.
Dub stood stiffly by the door, his eyes flickering around the room, finding a thousand things to complain about but saying nothing. Callum asked his permission to go and look in the front room, which they both thought was weird but neither of them said so.
“Sure,” said Dub and Callum went off through the door, stepping carefully over the wobbly floor. He shouted back to them that it was darker in there, the mice were in the skirting, he could see a baby mouse. Dub shuddered.
She put the barbecue on top of the range, put four firestarter bricks in the bottom and coals on the top, touched a match to the greasy bit of white peeking out of the coals. Orange light filled the room, highlighting all its shortcomings, and Dub made a frightened face.
Paddy smiled at him. “If you can’t handle it we can sleep in the car.”
“Nope. I’m fine. It’s fine.”
She wanted to touch him again. Callum was in the other room so she slid over to him. “There’s only two sleeping bags. We’ll have to share. Is that OK?”
He looked around the floor. “But where?”
No part of the floor was any cleaner than anywhere else. She suggested seeing if they could find a broom and he liked that.
They found Callum in the front room, lifting the lid on the sloping piano. He tried a key but found it dead, tried the next and the next and the next until a faint twang came from inside the piano’s belly.
Seen from the inside, the room was a good size. There was no fireplace but a fat potbellied stove sat at an angle in the corner. One of its thin legs had sunk into the carpet, ripping a hole and pulling the chimney pipe from its shoring in the wall behind.
Dub held back at the door to the kitchen. “Smells revolting in here.”
Paddy wanted to point out that it was pretty though, the windows were nice, and then she wondered why she was trying to sell it to him. It didn’t matter if he liked it or not. They were only staying a night.
The other rooms were in no better state. A rudimentary bathroom had a blue plastic toilet with a horribly stained dry bowl. The window was broken and leaves had gathered on the floor and in the bath, mulching through the years. Ragged spiderwebs coated the break in the window.
Two bedrooms, both small, one with a fireplace and a dead bird in the grate. There was no broom.
It was a relief to get back to the civilized kitchen, where the smell of damp was tempered by the warmth of the barbecue fire.
Dub said he didn’t think he would be able to sleep at all in here because it was so dirty. Callum took the cardboard box down from the dresser, shook it to make sure nothing was hiding in there, flattened it, and used the edge to brush part of the floor clean for Dub’s head.
Paddy watched him, bent double in the flickering light, scratching at the floor to clear a space for someone he barely knew, enjoying the roughness of everything, adapting to his new life and not at all bitter, and she found herself thinking that if Pete had lived through what Callum had and was like this on the other side, she’d be quite proud of him.
Dub thanked him.
Callum unfurled the sleeping bags and sat down in his, zipping it up to his neck, expertly rolling his jumper into a small cylinder to make a pillow. He lay down with his hands behind his head, shut his eyes, and became still almost immediately.
Dub and Paddy sat up, drinking a can of juice in silence to let Callum sleep, passing it back and forth. Paddy lit a cigarette and Dub gave her a look that suggested she was adding to the smell in the kitchen.
“I like them,” she whispered.
Callum’s leg stirred in the dark. He wasn’t asleep at all. She looked over and saw that he was smiling in the dark. He’d misheard her. He thought she’d said, “I like him.” And she was glad.
Fully clothed, they stood up and tried to negotiate two people in one sleeping bag. They unzipped it and laid it out on the floor, putting the opening in the space Callum had cleared for them. Paddy lay down, Dub lay next to her, and they had to cling to each other to do the zip up.
She looked up at the warm orange light rippling across the ceiling, felt Dub’s heart racing beneath her hand, and fell asleep smiling.
TWENTY-EIGHT. THE DARKNESS IN SUBURBIA
Martin McBree looked back up to the dark windows of Paddy’s flat in Lansdowne Crescent. It hadn’t been hard to get the door open; it was only propped shut and when he got in he realized why: ransacked, the beds pissed on. No one was coming back here tonight. She was lost to him.