Fullepub 
Chapter Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN
On Carla’s bed lay her suitcase, half full. The wardrobe was open too, and bits and pieces of clothing were strewn all over the counterpane. She was having trouble making her mind up what to pack; she’d no idea how long she’d be gone, or what she’d need. The weather had turned cold here, but it would be warm farther south, wouldn’t it? Mindlessly, she grabbed things from her shelves, T-shirts and jumpers, a dress she’d not worn in years. Somewhere in the house her phone was ringing, but then, her phone was always ringing. It never stopped.
She would have to speak to Theo at some point, she knew that, to ask him to forward her mail to wherever it is she decided to go, to deal with solicitors, with the estate, with the sale of Angela’s house.
There would be an argument, inevitably, which is why she was considering taking the coward’s option and calling him from abroad. She wasn’t sure she could do that to him, to just leave, without seeing him again. She wasn’t sure she could do that to herself.
She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t people just tell a story straight any longer, start to finish?
The year before Angela died, Daniel turned up on Carla’s doorstep one Sunday night around eight. He was upset and agitated, a graze across his cheekbone and a cut on his lip; he had a long and complicated story about an argument with a girlfriend, followed by a mugging—Carla couldn’t quite follow the thread, but he said he had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to call the police and he certainly didn’t want to go to his mother’s. “She doesn’t want me there,” he told Carla. “She’s never wanted me there.” Carla said he could stay. She opened a bottle of wine, which they seemed to drink very quickly, so she opened another. About halfway through that, she knew she had to stop.
She went upstairs, showered, teetered unsteadily straight from the shower to bed, still wrapped in her towel. She woke with a fright, the way she often did from drink. She lay still, her heart hammering in her chest, and it took a while for her to realize that she’d thrown off the covers, thrown off her towel. It took a while for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness and for her to realize that she wasn’t alone. That he was sitting on the floor next to the door, looking up at her, his sketchbook in his lap. “Daniel,” she whispered, pulling the covers up sharply, “you scared me.” In the gloom, she could not make out his expression, only the whiteness of his teeth. “Couldn’t help myself,” he replied.
In the morning, she found him sitting at the counter in her kitchen, drinking coffee. “Morning!” he greeted her without a trace of embarrassment. “I was just wondering,” he said as she busied herself filling the kettle, putting the glasses from last night into the dishwasher, “if you could put me up for a few days?”
Carla turned to face him. He was smiling at her, guileless and beautiful. “I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said. His smile faltered for only a second. “I would, it’s just . . . Theo,” she said. “He wouldn’t . . .” She turned away.
“It’s fine,” Daniel said. “I get it. It’s fine.”
When, a month after his mother died, Daniel came to Angela’s house to pick up his things, he looked tired and unhappy. He didn’t want to come into the house; they almost argued about it. “You need to see what there is, Daniel. I can’t sort through everything for you. I can’t choose for you.”
“I just want my things, my notebooks, my stuff. I don’t want anything of hers.”
When eventually he did enter the house, he walked straight up the stairs and into his bedroom without looking once askance. He picked up the box into which Carla had placed all his notebooks. “You haven’t looked at these, have you, because”—he pulled a face—“they’re not great.”
Carla shook her head. “No, you’ve always been clear that they were private.”
He smiled. “Thanks, Aunt Carla.” It always tugged at her when he called her that. It reminded her of him as a little boy, those enormous eyes in his pinched face, wary and vulnerable. The poor little savage. She stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek, and he moved his head at the last minute, brushing her lips with his. “I’ve rented a boat,” he told her as he turned to go, “on the canal, just by the Whitmore Bridge. It belongs to a friend of a friend, so I get mate’s rates. It’s a shithole, but it’s all I can afford at the moment. You’ll come by and visit, won’t you?” he asked. Carla watched him walk out of the room, the box in his arms, watched him scuff the carpet at the top of the stairs with his trainer.
He turned to her and smiled. “Be careful, yeah?”
A day or two later, maybe three. Carla was at Angela’s, doing a final check of the rooms to make sure everything was clear before the cleaners came in, when she discovered a batch of letters in the bottom of Daniel’s wardrobe. Three of them sent by her sister to Marcus, Daniel’s father, the envelopes marked returned to sender, but the letters themselves well handled, read and reread, conceivably by Angela, but since she was the person who’d written them, it seemed more likely that the person who had pored over them was Daniel.
And when she thought of him reading them, she imagined little Daniel, she imagined looking down on his neat head, on his bruised neck. It was that Daniel she imagined reading his mother’s words, not the strange man he’d become, and the thought of it, it hurt her heart.
It hurt her heart to think of him reading all the hurtful words his mother had written to the father who had rejected him. It hurt her heart when she saw how Angela had begged for help for her “impossible” son, a boy who was never framed as anything but a problem, something about which something needed to be done. I am going out of my mind, she wrote. I cannot stand to be near him. You have to help me Marcus, I’ve no one else to ask.
• • •On her way to the canal, she bought a bottle of wine. She tried not to think about why it was she didn’t want to talk to him without a drink in her hand. She tried not to think about the night of the funeral, tried not to think about him scuffing the carpet, which meant nothing anyway, did it? She made her way down to the canal, and next to the Whitmore Bridge she saw two canal barges, one a beauty, freshly painted in racing green with a dark red trim, the next one along a shabby, rusting mess in blue and white. She knocked on its windows, climbed up onto the back deck, and knocked again on the cabin door, which swung open.
“Daniel?” she called out. “Are you here, Daniel?”
He wasn’t, but she was clearly in the right place—the box of notebooks he’d taken from Angela’s house was sitting on the counter, some of its contents decanted onto the bench on the other side of the cabin. The boat itself was awful: the sink and hob were filthy, the main cabin stank of rot while the tiny sleeping area to the back of the boat reeked of sweat and semen. Daniel had obviously been keeping company, and the thought of it provoked a horrible twist in Carla’s stomach, followed by a flush of shame. Daniel was a grown man, he was twenty-three years old, there was no reason why the thought of him being with someone ought to make her feel uncomfortable. It oughtn’t make her feel any way at all.
Retreating from the bedroom, she picked up one of the notebooks on the bench, guiltily flicking quickly through its pages. It was full of pencil sketches, unrecognized faces, disembodied limbs. She replaced it on the bench and picked up a second, this one full of pen-and-ink drawings, more detailed, sophisticated work, a full graphic novel, by the looks of it, with Daniel himself the protagonist. On the first page, she noticed, he’d written a title—The Origins of Ares—and her vision was quickly blurred with tears. Warlike Ares, the most hated of all the gods, the one even his own parents couldn’t stand.
Oh, Daniel.
She turned the pages, her stomach flipping queasily once more as she recognized herself, drawn young and luscious, more beautiful and certainly more voluptuous than she had ever been in real life. Her skin burning with embarrassment, she closed the book, put it back on the bench, and then, almost without thinking, picked it up again. It was still in her hand when she climbed off the back of the boat, when for a second she locked eyes with a woman watching her intently from the back deck of the handsome red-and-green barge moored a few yards away.
Carla zipped her suitcase shut, carried it downstairs, and left it in the hallway. In the living room, she listened to her messages, one from Detective Barker, asking her to call at her earliest convenience, and another from Theo, inviting her for dinner. “Your favorite, lamb chops. Not sure if you’ve heard yet, but there’s good news, Cee. At last. Good news.”
