Never Go There Read online

  The inscription on the headstone was clear. Nothing extravagant, just his name: Thomas Luke Bradbury, and a single date, 12th August 2000.

  Below was an empty space, waiting for Maggie, the neighbouring plot already bought, paid for with the last of Tom’s life insurance, saved for the day she would join him. She pressed her palm to the void on the stone, her hand-span filling the gap. The seeping cold of it ran through her fingers, jolted her brain with the frozen image of the doctor, sleeves rolled up and bubbles of carbolic soap gathering in the hairs on his forearm, speaking the words she couldn’t quite decipher. They had come through a fog, the doctor’s mouth filled with cotton wool, Maggie’s ears ringing as she tried to make sense of it.

  Everything Tom had left her, their son, their land, their pub, had slipped through her fingers like sand when he died.

  She knelt, oblivious to the cold soaking through her trouser knees, and brushed away the light covering of moss growing across the rim of the stone, felt the stone rub against the wedding ring she wore on her thumb. Tom’s ring.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love. I’m so sorry,’ she said, her fingers lingering beside his name, her mind on the letter from the bank in her pocket.

  She rested her head on the gravestone, the rim catching in the creases on her brow, tracing Tom’s name with her fingers. She relives the car crash that killed him every day. Every time she starts her car, drives over the hill and sees the place where the car went over, where Tom’s head smashed through the windscreen, where his body broke against a tree. Every time she looks in the mirror and sees the thick, purple scar on her cheek, the shrapnel from the crash permanently marking her.

  So many years and Maggie still hadn’t recovered. Could she really blame Emma for still thinking of James after seven? After everything he’d done?

  Maggie leant forward, head on the gravestone, knees wet and cold on the ground. Tom would have chased James down and … and what? Made him come back? What good would that have done anyone?

  ‘What would you have done, Tom?’ she asked him. ‘What would you do now?’

  But Maggie knew Emma would never forget the past, just as Maggie had never forgotten her own.

  ‘Fix him, please fix him,’ Maggie had begged the nurse, the doctor, the woman who cleaned the ward floor. ‘Fix him, please fix him.’

  ‘The damage was severe,’ said the nurse with strawberry blonde hair, her cap like a striking white halo. ‘There wasn’t anything we could fix. I’m so sorry.’

  The crash had been total, Tom’s car slicing through trees, trees slicing through the car. Three days afterwards, when Maggie awoke, alone in a hospital bed, she thought Tom was waiting somewhere nearby, ready to rush in with flowers the second she woke up.

  She had thought it would all be OK.

  But it hadn’t been.

  And now things were getting worse, she was losing it all. She never thought she’d have to do this alone.

  She thought of the land, the last scrap of land that Tom had left her in his will, waiting high up on the hill. Just the right size for a bungalow, a view of a thin strip of sea on one side. Space for a garden, vegetable patch, greenhouse, a wooden bench to sit upon with her husband, retired and relaxed, leaving the pub for their son to run.

  But their son was long gone. She didn’t even know where he was. At the time social services had told her she wasn’t allowed anywhere near him. It was for his own protection, they had said. He was a fully-grown man now, but had never tried to find her. Why would he, after all Maggie had done?

  ‘What’s the point of building our bungalow,’ she said, sitting on the wet, grassed-over earth, leaning her back on the grave, ‘if I have to live in it without you?’

  What was the point of a garden bench, a vegetable patch, greenhouse, without her husband to tend to it with her?

  And she had no money to build it anyway.

  So, what was the point in keeping the land? Why was it so hard to sell up?

  She pulled out the letter from her overcoat pocket, began tearing the paper to shreds, tiny confetti she plugged into the holes on the vase built into the grave. She’d leave it with Tom. Maybe, somehow, he’d be able to tell her what to do.

  She couldn’t risk throwing it away at home, wouldn’t even risk it on the fire, in case somehow Emma saw it and found out.

  And she couldn’t let Emma find out, not after the girl had entrusted the last of her paltry savings to Maggie, seven years ago. The money left to Emma in her stepmother’s will.

  Maggie leant forward, her gut pressing against her thighs and her hands holding onto her knees.

  ‘I was meant to look after it, save it for her. I thought the pub was an investment, a safe bet.’

  She tugged on the curls at the back of her neck, watched sparrows hopping through the branches of the blackthorn, dismissing the still-too-hard sloes.

  ‘I can’t tell her. I can’t.’

  She rolled onto her side, grabbed hold of the gravestone and used it to hoist herself up. She could still see the white shreds of the letter through the holes in the brass-topped vase. If she’d had any spare money she’d have come with some flowers, or if it had been summer she’d have picked some from the fields, and hidden the letter’s fragments under their stems. As it was, she let the white flecks sit unadorned, under the lid of the vase.

  Now wasn’t the time to tell Emma the money was gone, Maggie reasoned. Not when someone was here visiting Lois Lunglow, not when she might finally have something to hold over Arthur’s head.

  Maggie turned back to the yard, looked at the graves, the crumbling church steeple, the silver birch shedding its bark. But her mind was elsewhere, thinking not of money, or Emma, or land. Thinking of Nuala Greene, wondering if it was her parked outside Lois’s house, wondering if anyone else had seen her, Arthur Bradbury at the top of the list.

  Wondering, too, if that waif of a thing, who’d looked ready to drop with exhaustion, knew what she was letting herself in for.

  Nuala

  Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  ‘It was instant, the police said.’

  Lois didn’t speak, hadn’t said a word since Nuala had told her the news. Her arms gripped each other, one hand tapping her chest; tap, tap, tap, the sound echoing off the walls of her living room, the cold somehow amplifying the sound.

  ‘He wasn’t in any pain.’

  On the doorstep, Lois had crumpled before Nuala could explain. She’d had to carry her mother-in-law inside, the woman light as a child. She hadn’t cried, or screamed, or denied the very possibility of her son’s death, she had just fallen to her knees.

  ‘He would barely have registered what was happening, it was so quick.’

  Nuala sat opposite, rubbing her arms against the cold and looked around her. Two fraying, upholstered chairs, one brown and one blue, a cracked coffee table and a duvet folded in the corner of the room. No photographs hung on the walls. Even the light bulb, hanging from a wire, swung naked.

  ‘It was an aneurysm, the pathologist reported; it couldn’t have been prevented,’ Nuala continued, staring at her hands, at the window, at the bare floor. Anything but the woman’s face. ‘James was dead before he hit the ground, before his bike even swerved into the road.’

  The only discernible change in Lois was her pallor, each word from Nuala reducing it by a shade until it became translucent, skull-white.

  ‘I’ll make us tea, shall I?’ No answer but, after twenty minutes of silence, Nuala hadn’t really expected one.

  The same lack of homeliness, the same deep cold, haunted the kitchen. A table accompanied by two chairs. A single cup, bowl and spoon drying by the sink. An unopened packet of out-of-date biscuits beside the teabags, undoubtedly left in the vain hope that visitors might call. Dark chocolate digestives: James’s favourite.

  No television, no computer, no mobile phone that she could see, though what struck her most was that the cooker was missing. Space had been left for one, the edges of the work surface s
awn away so it could be slotted in. On the counter was a two-ring hotplate. Presumably a life of beans on toast for Lois, but then Nuala noticed that there wasn’t a toaster or grill.

  Her parents’ kitchen had been quite different: countertops a mess of gravy-stained medical journals, old birthday cards and letters displayed on the window sill, love notes Blu Tacked to cupboard doors. The walls throughout their house were once saturated with photographs, so much so that when, as a child, she had raced through the hallway her home became a zoetrope of familiar, shifting faces.

  This house showed no life. The only object offering any hint of personality was a cast-iron doorstop shaped like a dog, black with dirt, the breed indistinct. Nuala touched the animal with the toe of her boot, wracking her mind for any mention of a dog from James’s early years. She came up blank.

  She had braced herself for James. She had expected to be surrounded by him, his very childhood should have leaked out of the walls, but there were no photos, no reminders of him, no evidence he had ever existed. Maybe James had been right all along when he told Nuala about his mother.

  But still, Nuala reasoned, she deserved to know the truth.

  And maybe, once the shock of the news had sunk in, she would let Nuala help her through it. They could get through it together. Nuala was sick, sick and tired and broken from doing it all, all alone.

  She left the kitchen, walked back to the living room carrying the tea.

  The tapping finally stopped.

  ‘You won’t look at me, at my face. Why is that?’ Lois clasped her hands in her lap, the tendons on her knuckles showing white through her skin, just as James used to do when tense.

  ‘You look so alike.’ So alike it was painful. The same thick, sandy hair, the same heavy-lidded eyes, slim nose, strong jaw. The similarity was exacerbated by Lois’s age: early forties at a push, with a son who, this year, would have celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. Had she really been so young when she had him?

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for it. I hadn’t seen him in seven years, not even a photograph.’ Her face brightened. ‘Did you bring any?’

  ‘No, I didn’t think.’ And she cursed herself for her empty back pocket and the phone, full of photos, lying, forgotten, back home. ‘There was one at the pub, though. I’m sure they’d let you have it.’

  ‘And I’m sure they wouldn’t.’ Lois pulled her cardigan closer, the seams at the shoulder stretching, betraying their handsewn stitches.

  ‘Is there anyone I can call for you?’

  Lois waved her hand, swatted the question like a fly.

  ‘There must be someone. A friend, relative?’

  ‘No one.’ Lois pressed her fingers to her mouth, her brow furrowed as she bit back the tears. ‘No one now James is—’

  Nuala looked around the room, the heat of the tea making the cool air feel colder by contrast, and realised it was probably true. Who would let a friend, a relative, live such an existence?

  And then she thought of her own empty home, the phone that never rang, the door only deliverymen ever knocked at.

  ‘I knew that I was never going to see him again.’ Lois huddled into the chair, her shoulders hunching up against her ears.

  Why was she so alone? James’s father was dead, had died in a fall down the stairs when the boy was eleven years old. Had Lois been alone since?

  ‘What must you think of me?’ Lois’s eyes, bloodshot from holding back tears, were upon her, moving from the top of her head to her boot-clad feet and back again.

  ‘I’ve only just met you, Mrs Lunglow.’

  Lois reached for her tea, her hand trembling. ‘Most people would ask me, “Why?”’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I just told you I had never expected to see my only son again. Most people would ask me, “Why?” You said nothing.’

  There was nowhere to look other than straight at Lois, to either meet her grief head on or stare obviously, awkwardly, at the blank wall.

  ‘And still you say nothing.’

  ‘None of it matters.’

  ‘Of course it matters. Why won’t you answer?’

  ‘It’s not going to change anything. Please, is there anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘Tell me what you think of me. Tell me what James said. Tell me.’ Tap, tap, tap on her chest. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me anything!’ The words were hurled into the room, Nuala’s throat dry in their wake. Her skin felt bruised where her hands gripped her thighs, pinching the skin. Her teeth clenched to dam the words that screamed inside her head: He told me you were unbearable, a vindictive, manipulative misanthrope. He told me you hated him, regretted him, pushed him away. He told me you were cruel.

  She held her tongue, flushed, remained silent. What an idiot she had been for not believing him, for thinking he had exaggerated. For thinking, perhaps, Lois had changed from the mother he had left behind. She could picture his face as if he were still alive, the tell-tale twitch of his eyes and the stiffening of his smooth, strong jaw, the disdain that would seep into his expression as he asked her, ‘Why didn’t you just do as I asked?’

  Lois’s hand shook as she raised her cup, the other still tapping her chest. ‘How long were you married?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘I never wanted him to marry young. What were you? Nineteen?’ She pressed the cup to her closed lips, the set of her mouth completely hidden, her red-rimmed eyes turning cold.

  ‘He was nineteen. I had just turned eighteen.’

  ‘You must have met as soon as he arrived in London.’

  ‘A few weeks after.’

  ‘And you married so soon? Whilst he was still studying?’

  ‘He had left university by then.’

  ‘Left?’ Lois’s face blanched and Nuala had to remind herself that all of this was news to her, that the last seven years of her son’s life had been lived through imagination alone.

  ‘University was too much for him, all the people and noise.’ Nuala shifted her weight in the chair, trying to see Lois’s face behind the cup but Lois mirrored every movement. ‘We met in the park, actually. He liked the space, the wildlife. He got a job there, eventually, as a groundsman.’

  Lois nodded at her to go on.

  ‘He loved his job, and he was so good at it, really he was.’ She held back telling Lois about the four years it took him to find work, or that it was Nuala and her inheritance that kept them comfortable, that the house they lived in belonged to Nuala alone. He had instructed her well to keep those things to herself, because it shouldn’t matter whose money it was: they were married. And if he could love her as much as he did in spite of her legion of faults, her stupidity, her laziness, then surely she could forgive him his humble background. Was she really so materialistic, so shallow, to think that these things really mattered? No. No, she wasn’t.

  Nuala looked to the ceiling, following the hairline cracks in the plaster as she spoke, trying to ignore the memory of the bitter look of resentment on James’s face whenever she took out her credit card to pay for the dinner, the shopping, the gas bill.

  Instead, she kept faithfully to the script, James’s script, the lines he encouraged her to spurt out to his friends on the occasions he allowed her to meet them: the country holidays, the flowers and vegetables he grew, the house they had renovated, the OU course he had started. But any ground Nuala felt she had gained was taken by Lois in one fell swoop.

  ‘You’ve rehearsed all of that, I can tell.’ The other woman put her cup on the table, brushed invisible crumbs from her knees.

  More than ever Nuala wished that there was some element of life in the room, something she could look at other than the uncannily familiar face of her mother-in-law.

  Lois took a deep breath, as though mustering her composure, her voice sharp when she did speak again.

  ‘So, you lived for six years in a merry-go-round of happiness and fairy tales? Rubbish. I can’t imagine James marrying you out of lov
e.’ The you was spat out like poison on her tongue, as though the very notion of loving Nuala was a venomous draught in itself. Her eyes stayed on Nuala, her spit landing on Nuala’s knee, her judgement set on the woman her son had married. ‘There must have been something else. Money?’ The woman looked over Nuala again, her designer jeans, expensive boots. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Money.’

  ‘Money?’ Nuala felt her own cheeks grow hot. ‘How dare you? How dare you insinuate that he—’

  But Lois held her hand up for silence, the same movement James used to use whenever Nuala had said something stupid and she was dumbfounded, again, by their resemblance.

  ‘You can hardly blame him,’ Lois said. ‘Look where he grew up, look at this village. It’s not as if I could ever offer him all he deserved.’ Her forehead creased again, eyes rimmed with red, and she stopped talking, looked down at her lap whilst she took another deep, composing breath.

  ‘Six years and you never forced it out of him?’ Lois’s voice was still sharp and Nuala’s cheeks still burned from the talk of her money. It was the grief, Nuala decided, making Lois talk this way, she had to be patient, had to be kind, remind herself that the woman had only just found out James was dead.

  ‘Where are your guts,’ Lois said, ‘your backbone? He could never love someone so spineless. No, it was far too soon for him to fall in love again.’

  Again.

  Nuala’s breath caught in her throat.

  What did Lois mean, fall in love again?

  She tried to push the thought away, tears pricking. She focused on what James had told her; that his mother would lie. Don’t believe a word she says. There wasn’t anyone else, Nuala was the first. The only. James had said so himself: there had never been anyone else. It was what made their connection, their love, so special.

  But there was no time for Nuala to react, stand her ground, defend her marriage. Lois’s next question came like a punch in the gut.

  ‘So, did he leave me any grandchildren?’

  Three months ago