The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER FOUR





TOM WAS COLD when he arrived home. The temperature had dropped outside, and the skin of his legs was taut and goose-pimpled. He fumbled for his key in the tiny pocket at the rear of his shorts, his fingers unable to get a firm grasp on the Velcro flap. It took him a lot longer than it should, but at last he grasped the key and slipped it into the lock. The downstairs lights were off. Shadows swarmed around his feet, cast by the light that bled down the stairwell from his office.

“Tom?” Helen’s croaky voice drifted towards him from the ground floor. “Is that you, Tom?”

Who the f*ck else would it be? He thought. Then he said: “Yes, it’s me. Sorry I’m late.” He closed the door and walked along the hallway, flicking on the kitchen lights as he entered the room. The spotlights seemed to snap on too quickly, too brightly, and he closed his eyes against the glare.

The breakfast dishes were still in the sink. This morning, feeling lazy and careless, he hadn’t even bothered to load the dishwasher.

“Tom?” Her wavering tone annoyed him, made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle like those of a cat just about to pounce. He closed his eyes again, silently counted to ten.

“Tom!” Impatient now, he could hear her manoeuvring her body in the bed in the other room. Her excessive weight made the timber frame creak.

“Just a minute, love. I’ll bring you some soup.” She always liked soup on a week night. Even when she was fit and healthy, in the days before the accident, she had enjoyed a bowl of cream of tomato or oxtail after coming in from work.

Tom moved quickly, opening the can and pouring its contents into a saucepan on the stove. He stirred the soup as it warmed up, and once it began to bubble slightly at the edges, he buttered two slices of bread. When the soup was ready he ladled it into a large bowl, and then placed the bowl and a plate containing the bread on a plastic tray. He added a spoon and a napkin, and then left the kitchen and walked through the house to her room.

Helen had occupied the reception room since she’d come home from hospital. At first it had been a matter of sleeping in there so that Tom could get some rest. The pain had kept her awake; she didn’t want to cause him any sleepless nights. Now, much to his relief, she stayed in there because she was too lazy to move. He couldn’t stand the thought of her joining him upstairs in the master bedroom – even if their sex life had not died along with her ability to walk, the idea of her massive body beside him was enough to bring a sour taste to the back of his throat. And she was so big these days that he stood no chance of carrying her up the stairs.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The room was dim – she rarely let him open the curtains, and the light she used to read by was fitted with an energy-saving bulb that never cast much light.

“Sorry I’m late, Helen. There was this girl, just a young lass, really. She’d fainted in the street and I had to stop and help her.”

Helen put down her book on the bed. She turned and peered at him over the lenses of her tiny reading glasses. Her jowls shuddered. “Really? Was she okay?”

He nodded. “Yes, she was fine. Just a bit shaken. I took her home to her… her parents. They said she suffers from fainting spells, some kind of seizures. But she was fine when I left.” He smiled. Why wasn’t he telling her everything? Parents? He felt guilty for hiding the fact that Hailey had only a mother – and an attractive one at that – but something held him back, made him give a sanitised account of events. Was it guilt? But why? It wasn’t as if he had done anything wrong or improper. He’d thought about it, yes, but thinking a thing and acting upon those thoughts were entirely different situations.

“Here,” he said, moving towards the bed with the tray balanced on his open palms. “I made your soup.”

“You never forget, do you? Never let me down?” Her smile was big and loose, like a mother smiling at her child. “I’m glad I have you to look after me, Tom. God knows what I’d do without you, you know.”

He set down the tray on her meaty thighs. “Why do you say that? Of course you have me. Why wouldn’t you?” Again, he felt that his own guilt was making him labour the point. She often did this, a sort of passive-aggressive emotional blackmail. He usually ignored it… but now, this evening, what had happened earlier was making him defensive. “Just eat your soup. I have crusty bread; it’s your favourite.”

Her small, spongy hand grasped the spoon and she shuffled up against the headboard, trying to settle into a more comfortable position. When she raised the spoon to her mouth some of the tomato soup spilled down the front of her nightdress. For a moment, Tom thought it looked like blood. She tipped the spoon and drank the soup, closing her eyes to savour the taste.

Tom felt like picking up the bowl and pouring the scalding contents over her head, onto her face… and then he felt ashamed, disgusted with himself for resenting Helen in this way. It wasn’t her fault she’d been partially paralysed, not really. Yes, she had chosen to be there, with That Man, but nothing in life was ever so clear cut that you could fairly apportion blame. Nobody was innocent; everyone was guilty of something. It would be unfair of him to place the whole of the blame onto Helen’s shoulders.

Maybe so, he thought. But it’s her fault that she won’t even get her fat arse out of bed.

Again, he felt a deep sense of shame; a depth charge of emotion detonated in his stomach. The accident – why did they all keep calling it that, even now, especially now? – had left deep mental trauma, like a trench in her soul. Helen was afraid to go out, and she was equally as frightened to remain inside. Her whole life was lived in a state of fear now, and there was very little anyone could do to change that. All Tom could do, all he could really manage, was to collect her prescription drugs once a week and feed and care for her every day, offering her support when she needed it. Washing her armpits, emptying her colostomy bag. Keeping her human. Whatever their marriage had once been, it wasn’t the same now. Everything had changed that day ten years ago, when That Man had crashed the car in which she was a passenger and she’d lost all feeling from the waist down. That day, that terrible, terrible day, was effectively when their love had died.

Oh, they still shared something like love, but it wasn’t the same kind they’d known before. The feelings had changed, mutated, as they were battered and torn in the accident, and then they had re-emerged as a form of duty.

Tom watched her eat, trying to take pleasure from the fact that she was still alive. At least she still lived. But he knew in his heart that living was something she no longer really did: all she was capable of was existence.

When she was done he took the tray and left her bedside. He turned back at the door, looking at her, but she was concentrating on her book. It was a paperback mystery, the kind she couldn’t get enough of these days. It puzzled him that although she was terrified of everything outside the front door, she enjoyed reading about murder and mayhem. Perhaps the fictional horror helped keep her real-life fears at bay.

“I’m going to work for a while. Shout for me if you need anything else.”

She did not look up from her book. “Thanks, I will.” Her eyes blinked behind her small reading glasses and she licked her colourless lips. She had not even noticed the soup stains on her nightdress. She was so utterly unconcerned with how she looked these days that it had passed her by.

She used to be beautiful, he thought. So very beautiful. Like Lana Fraser.

He left the room and closed the door, leaning back against the thin wooden panels and feeling moisture gather in his eyes. He looked at the tray, at the dirty, red-smeared bowl and the crumbs on the plate, and he realised that he’d always f*cking hated tomato soup.

The memory of what he had seen on his way home – the dog with a boy’s face – came back to him. If he was seeing things, imagining monsters, nobody could blame him. His life was a slow implosion of duty and regret. Tom knew that he was going under, that things were getting to him in a way they never had before, and perhaps his strange vision was a result of his conflicted emotions.

Wouldn’t any man who was forced to wipe his wife’s arse after she took a shit in a plastic bowl, and then struggle with her spongy, shapeless form to pull up her pants experience some form of breakdown? Not to mention the fact that once she had deteriorated enough to have the bag and tubes fitted, it was up to him to keep them washed and sterilised. Didn’t that justify some kind of emotional upheaval?

Now that he was home, and away from that grotty estate, he could rationalise what had happened. The thing he thought he had seen out there in the darkness could not possibly exist. His mind had conjured a demon to represent his inner turmoil – that’s what the psychology books and websites he occasionally read would say, anyway, and he was inclined to agree with them.

But still he could not shake the fear he had felt when he thought that he was being stalked – or, to be more precise, when he felt hunted. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was real, and the terror had been so strong, so overpowering, that it had felt like a twisted kind of happiness.

Jesus, was he so messed up that he now equated fear with a feel-good factor? He laughed softly, but even to his own ears it sounded forced, as if he were trying to convince an unseen listener that he was taking none of this seriously.

The truth was, of course, that he was unable to do anything else.

He went back through to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher, wiping down the work surfaces before slipping the washing tablet into its slot and pressing the buttons to set the machine away. The dishwasher thrummed softly, a soft voice singing in a foreign language. He closed his eyes. The sound was almost soothing.

Closing the door on his way out of the kitchen, Tom made his way upstairs to what he still occasionally liked to call his study, a room that had once been the guest room, where their friends had stayed after entertaining dinner parties and drunken conversations. The room had served as his office for ten years now, since Helen had come out of hospital to be cared for at home.

Ten years. It felt to him like a lifetime, a span of time that he could barely make sense of. How had it become so long so very quickly?

He booted up his computer and waited for the programs to load. He knew that he should start work immediately, but felt restless. There was no way he could settle down this evening, not without something to calm him. Internet porn? Meeting Lana had certainly stirred his libido. But no, it didn’t feel right. Maybe he’d hit one of the regular forums and chat for a while with his faceless friends – other lonely carers reaching out across cyberspace to try and make their own lives seem less empty.

The computer screen flared into life.

Tom ran his fingers over the mouse, trying to make sense of his need.

Lana. Lana Fraser.

What’s your story, Lana Fraser?

Tom opened the browser and without thinking about what he was doing he typed her name into the search engine. The name was not uncommon. The search summoned a lot of unrelated hits, but halfway down the first page he saw the one he wanted. His eyes were drawn right to it, as if he were meant to see the details.

It was a link to an article in a local newspaper, dated eighteen months ago:

… Mrs. Fraser has lost her home… murderer… wife and daughter… prominent businessman killed himself…

Tom clicked his cursor on the link and was taken to the relevant page. He read the article, feeling sad and horny and shameful. There was a photograph of a much younger version of Lana, black and white, clearly taken some time ago. She was wearing a dark suit. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She looked glamorous and sharp as a blade.

He had no recollection of the story, but must have read about it at the time. Her husband had murdered three people – shady businessmen with organised crime connections – and tried to make the killings look like gangland assassinations. They were revenge killings, brought about because of an investment that had gone sour. When his crime was uncovered, and he became aware that the police had marked him as their top suspect, Timothy Fraser, aged thirty-eight, had taken a small-calibre handgun and shot himself in the face. He lived on in hospital for a week, in a coma and under police guard, and then he died.

Lana had lost everything: her home, her money, her lifestyle. It had all been taken by administrators to cover the cost of the bankruptcy and pay back her dead husband’s debtors.

Tom needed a drink. He pulled open the top drawer of his desk and took out the whisky bottle and tumbler he kept there. He poured a large measure, knocked it back in one. Then he poured another, smaller amount into the glass and returned the bottle to the drawer.

“Lana Fraser,” he said, his lips burning slightly. “I think we might both be in need of a friend.” He took a sip and closed his eyes, then threw back his head to enjoy the swallowing motion as the harsh liquid flowed down his throat to light up his insides like a flame.