Around the table, the atmosphere was still tight. People sat stiffly as if moving might cause them pain.
Ewan kept his eyes downcast.
‘No, you’re all right,’ he muttered, not moving.
‘Come on, Ewan. There’s something down there I think you’d enjoy.’
She held her breath. The moment stretched out. Finally Ewan lumbered to his feet. And – breathe.
‘It’s down here,’ she called, leading the way through the door separating the kitchen from the narrow staircase that led down to the basement. Only as the latch closed behind them, plunging them into darkness, did she remember the light switch on the kitchen wall outside the door. Damn. But it was just a few steps and then they’d be in the gym where the lighting was low, but better than nothing.
She heard Ewan’s footsteps heavy behind her, and the harsh rasps of his breath.
40
Anne
‘Can I just check my emails on your laptop, Mom? My piece of shit phone is acting up again.’
‘Sure.’
By the time I remember what I have open on the screen it is too late.
‘What are all these news reports up here? A London case? Hey, is that why you were so keen on watching the BBC news? What’s going on? Mom?’
Shannon has always been able to do this, throw out a volley of questions without even stopping to draw breath. When she was a child it used to exhaust me, never knowing which question to answer first.
‘Oh, it’s just something I’m keeping an eye on for a course I’m running.’
Even to my ears it sounds fake. Shannon knows I haven’t added any extra content to my courses for years. That’s part of the reason I’ve stayed all this time. Coasting along without effort left more time for the things that really matter, more time for Shannon.
But now Shannon is frowning at something on the screen, and I can feel cold bumps popping up on my arms and legs.
‘This guy – the one in the photos. He looks kinda familiar. Is that why you’re so interested in this case? Because we know him?’
I open my mouth to say no. But find I can’t get the word out.
Shannon looks up and sees something written on my face that shouldn’t be there.
‘Come on,’ she says, squinting at me across the room. My house has one integral living space and I am sitting on the couch facing the TV, while she is perched on a stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, my laptop open in front of her. We have adopted these same positions so many times over the years, it’s like we have worn a groove in time. I imagine us suspended here for ever, like tiny figures in a doll’s house.
‘Like I’m gonna buy that! We both know your courses haven’t changed since the Dark Ages. I bet you still get your students to write in a quill and ink. Why the interest in this case? Where do we know this guy from?’
For the first time in years, I have a sharp yearning for a neat vodka I could neck down in one to give me strength. Shannon is still gazing at me, waiting for answers.
‘Mom? Who is he?’
‘Shannon . . . Baby . . . He’s your brother.’
41
Ewan
They’d stood there in the wide, white hallway with the light flooding in through the huge arched windows over the stairs so all her lovely things – the paintings, the ornaments, even that funny naked back on the windowsill – seemed perfectly displayed like in a gallery. Rachel was dressed casually in tight dark jeans and a filmy white top with her black hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, smiling at him as if she was genuinely pleased he was there. He’d felt himself begin to unfurl for the first time in days; the fear that had coiled itself up inside him like a rope since Saturday night finally loosening. For a moment, he’d had an image of himself living in this house, or a house like this one, next to this woman, or a woman just like her. Nobody telling him what he could or couldn’t do. Nobody belittling him or limiting him or joining forces so it felt like it was him against the rest of them. And then she’d said that thing about checking his pockets when he left and everything had gone red.
All through the time they’d spent downstairs in that big show-off kitchen, while Rachel had talked and talked until the words formed one big blur of noise in his head, he’d felt as if there was something pressing down on his chest. When he’d first started going to the gym, and bench-pressing weights, Ewan had had an irrational fear that the bar was going to fall on him, crushing him. He’d lie there on his back imagining the pain of all that pressure on his ribs, how they’d crack, how the lungs underneath would deflate like balloons with all the air squeezed out of them. Sitting on a lime-green-cushioned chair at Rachel’s circular white table, he felt just as he’d imagined he would, all that time ago in the gym.