The herd, p.5
The Herd, page 5
‘How’s the barbecue looking?’ Elizabeth asks, peering at the bright orange coals. Ash gives them another judicious poke to show he’s on it.
‘All totally under control, ready to go in twenty minutes as requested.’ Ash smiles up at her.
‘Perfect. I’ll get the meat out of the fridge just before everyone arrives, then.’
She casts her eye round the garden and says, ‘What next? Ahh, cushions for chairs, and let me get you an ice bucket for your wine, and then I think we’re almost there.’
As Elizabeth walks into the kitchen, Ash leans back in his chair and lets the sun land on his face, and thinks, Yep, life is good.
‘Daddy!’ Alba comes skipping out of the kitchen, down the grassy slope into the sunshine, and Ash makes an exaggerated ‘ouff!’ sound as she buries her head in his stomach. Her face has been painted at the fete; the black stripes and orange fading to white make him think she must be a tiger. It was a pretty good attempt, but she’s managed to lick away all the paint around her mouth, a round circle of exposed skin showing exactly how far her tongue could reach. Maybe that was why she’d done it.
Ash kisses her dark, curly head and then Alba skips away from him to walk her new brontosaurus toy on the table. He becomes aware of voices talking over each other in the house: Bry and Elizabeth. Bry’s voice sounds higher than normal. She’s apologising, probably about Ash.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about – it looks gorgeous, beautiful as always,’ Bry says to Elizabeth, as she steps out from the kitchen into the garden. She’s wearing an old dress, white with a delicate flower pattern, that Ash used to love but is now looking a bit worn. Bry hardly ever wears make-up but she’s put some on today. The mascara is slightly smudged underneath her dark eyes; she probably forgot she had it on. She’s carrying her handbag, Alba’s cardigan, Alba’s pink flamingo Fred, a drink for Alba and a bucket full of ice. She looks totally unbalanced, as if she’s about to drop everything and unravel right there on the lawn. The chaos of his lovely wife, the tension in her face, suddenly makes Ash feel stressed, which is annoying – he was having such a nice time. Bry raises one eyebrow at him. It tells him everything he needs to know. That he shouldn’t be sitting there watching her, that he shouldn’t be drinking wine, and that she’s had a stressful time at the fete. He gets up rather ungracefully from his deckchair, which makes him seem drunker than he actually is, and goes over to her.
‘Take the ice bucket, my fingers are fucking freezing,’ she says through a stiff jaw. Ash waits a beat too long and she repeats ‘Ice bucket!’ louder before he snaps into action, grabs the ice bucket and puts it on the table along with Alba’s drink.
‘Bry, don’t forget your wine!’ Elizabeth calls from the kitchen, as the front doorbell rings.
Before he says hello to anyone, Ash dashes upstairs to use the loo as the route to the one downstairs by the front door is blocked by arriving guests. The family bathroom is pristine, the tub glistening white like a bathroom-detergent advert, bath toys neatly stacked in a wicker basket. Ash holds on to the side of the sink as he takes a piss. A small, sensible voice that sounds like his wife tells him now would be the time to slow down on the wine, but he doesn’t want to slow down and he doesn’t want any water. He doesn’t want to worry about Bry and … shit, he splashes the rim of the toilet as he pees. He looks down and sees poking out of a neatly stacked pile of National Geographics a piece of A4 paper, the words Mark Clancy, whose one-year-old daughter Rosie … He wipes the rim of the toilet and pulls up his zip. He knows that name – he can’t figure out where from, but he knows he knows the name Mark Clancy. He pulls the old silver chain to flush the toilet and takes out the paper. There are a few sheets stapled together; it’s a BBC article. There’s a photo of a baby girl laughing at the camera. He reads the headline: Don’t let Rosie’s death be for nothing.
Ash grips the sink again. Mark. Mark Clancy … And suddenly his blurry memory brightens into focus. He used to work with Mark. Yes … Mark was a project manager at Schwartz, the Swiss company where Ash was a partner before he left to set up on his own. He remembers a nice bloke, solid, hard-working, moving through his life with a smile, blissfully unaware of the tragedy waiting for him in the future. The article isn’t long, just a few hundred words, but a quick skim tells Ash that each and every one is a tiny bomb of agony, of regret. An internal wail rips through his whole being. He stares at Rosie’s beautiful face and feels the horrifying lightness of her coffin. He holds the sink tighter and then suddenly the doorknob rattles, spinning left and right, against the lock.
‘Daddy! Daddy, wha’ doing in there?’
He drops like a stone back into the sparkly white bathroom and opens the door in one fluid movement. Before Alba can even squeal, she’s in his arms and he’s hugging her as hard and close as he can without hurting her. ‘I love you, Alba, I love you so much.’
Alba somehow knows he needs her. She wraps her arms around his neck and says, as though he’s one of her teddies that needs soothing, the words she’s heard so many times. ‘Is ’kay, darling. I’m here. I’m here.’
6 July 2019
‘Hello, sweetheart.’ Gerald’s short grey beard clings to his face like a small animal. He’s wearing one of his trademark bright waistcoats, yellow today, and holding a fedora. He kisses Bry with plump lips carefully on both cheeks and says, ‘I saw that naughty man of yours come over here with a whole box of that lovely Sancerre.’
‘He’s in the garden with most of it now, waiting for you, Gerald,’ Bry replies, as Gerald cuffs her hand and raises a dramatic finger to his lips while pointing towards his partner Chris, who is waiting to say hello.
Chris is younger than Gerald by about ten years. He smells warm, like expensive woodsmoke, and as he kisses Bry’s cheek he says, ‘Bry, you look very lovely.’ Bry squeezes Chris’s hand. She feels very unlovely. She’s had a queasy, dull ache in her lower abdomen all morning and she knows it can only mean one thing.
As Jack appears in the hallway from the kitchen, Gerald opens his arms and says loudly, ‘Here’s Red!’ giving Bry the chance to slip away upstairs. Elizabeth has kept her tampons in the same little padded wallet for as long as Bry’s known her. It’ll be under the sink in their bathroom.
She sits heavily on the toilet. Yes, she was right. Her knickers will have to be thrown away, and why the fuck did she choose today to wear a white dress? Ash doesn’t know Bry stopped taking her pill a couple of months ago. Bry told herself it would just be better if she got pregnant ‘as a surprise’. She didn’t want to talk to Ash about it because she didn’t want to hear his answer out loud. She knew it already – he was forty-seven, he already had three kids, four was environmentally and socially irresponsible. These were rational, sane reasons. Bry’s reasons were pure emotion. It would be wonderful for Alba to have a sibling, a proper sibling, not two sullen half-brothers who still look at her as if she stole their father.
It’s fine, she tells herself, at least you can have a few drinks now. Relax, it’s fine. She opens her eyes, sniffs and cleans herself up, wrapping her knickers in toilet paper before hiding them at the bottom of the swing bin. She pinches a couple of tampons for her bag – she didn’t buy any on the weekly shop because, you know, positive thinking. As she stands to wash her hands, the printed photo of a beautiful baby catches her eye, as if some shitty higher power has planted it there for a laugh.
‘Great,’ she mutters, before picking up the article. She reads the headline and immediately feels like a selfish dick for being so consumed with her own momentary, very minor loss. Tears fill her eyes as she stares at Rosie’s dimpled, chubby face. She can’t read the full piece; she is supposed to be at a barbecue after all. Instead she skims to the factual section about meningitis and her tears disappear. No, no, the BBC should have more responsible reporting than this bullshit. The way the article is written makes it sound as though Rosie wouldn’t have died if she’d had the vaccine – but it doesn’t say what strain of meningitis she had. Bry tries to remember the facts from Vaccines: The Hidden Truth, the book her mum Sara sent her when she was pregnant with Alba. Sara had highlighted whole paragraphs for Bry, and one fluorescent yellow passage said the meningitis vaccine only protects against one strain of the infection – so even if Rosie had had the vaccine, she could still have got meningitis. This is just the sort of negligent journalism Sara had warned Bry about.
Laughter trickles into the bathroom through the window, which is open slightly to the garden. Bry shouldn’t let herself get worked up about an article now. She puts it back where she found it and moves towards the window, just enough so she can peek out. Elizabeth is sitting at the table with that god-awful Charlotte. Charlotte looks hot and sweaty already in tight jeans and a fitted, stripy suit jacket. Even from up here, Bry can see she’s got that smug smile fixed to her face, as though she’s constantly having to restrain herself from bursting into laughter at their small, provincial lives. Elizabeth looks around and beckons to Jack, who reluctantly leaves everyone else laughing around the barbecue to kiss Charlotte hello. Their elderly neighbour Jane, resplendent in peacock blue, has swapped sun hats with Gerald. He’s wearing her straw hat, decorated with colourful little flowers, and she’s got his fedora on her white head at a jaunty angle. Alba tries to help Ash carry a chair over for Jane, who bends down arthritically to say something to Alba. Everyone turns towards Row and Lily as they arrive. Elizabeth looks at them and whispers something to Charlotte that makes Charlotte put her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shake, her mirth getting the better of her for a moment. Bry frowns at Elizabeth; it’s not like her to be bitchy.
No one glances up and sees her through the window. She washes her hands and gazes a little further out of the window, over the wall into the garden at Number 8. During the growing season it’s become a sharp swamp of brambles. The woman they saw in the van is in the garden staring at the brambles. She’s wearing a beautiful coral silk kaftan. Her hair looks like it was once blonde but it’s now silver and clasped on top of her head in a large clip. Her neck and arms glint with colourful, exotic-looking jewellery, and even from up here Bry can see she’s striking. The woman turns sharply, as though responding to a noise, and the beautiful young man walks out to stand next to her. He has mop-like, curly hair, the kind of hair most people grow out of or have cut off. He looks broad and agile as a pup, his skin a deep, many-layered brown suggesting season upon season in the sun. The woman motions towards the tangled garden, and the young man nods along with whatever she’s saying, not taking his eyes off her for a second, and then she says something that makes him throw his head back, his shoulders shake. The woman turns to watch him – seeing him happy makes her smile – and the two of them look at each other, and even from so far away Bry sees a spark pass between them.
Bry leans in, her breath clouding the windowpane.
The small space between them closes as the young man moves behind the silver-haired woman. Bry feels his muscles against her own back, the strength of him. She runs her hands lightly along the dark forearms that snake around her waist. She bends her neck towards him – an invitation and a request – and he kisses her slowly, with reverence and confidence; he knows exactly where he’s going.
Bry feels a flash between her own legs.
The woman turns around to the young man, her fingers lost in his hair. She’s still smiling as her hand drops from his head to hold his hand, and as she leads him away, into the house, she looks up, directly at Bry, and she smiles.
‘So anyway, the upshot is that I’m taking her to the seriously lux place in Cornwall instead, but you know, it is her fortieth after all.’ Bry has somehow been trapped with Charlotte in the kitchen for the last ten minutes. Charlotte is thrashing around insisting on making her own salad dressing, waving away the fact that Elizabeth made one earlier. Even salad dressing can be a competition, apparently. Charlotte is a vision of what Bry likes to think she and Jack rescued Elizabeth from becoming. Charlotte is head of HR for some big corporation Bry has never heard of, lives in Chelsea, and is divorced with two kids who grew up calling for their nanny at night rather than their mum. Bry fades Charlotte out, instead imagining what could be happening right now just next door, white legs wrapped around dark torso.
‘So yours must be coming up, no?’ Charlotte asks, turning the lid tightly on the jam jar she’s using for the dressing.
‘Sorry, my what?’ Bry asks, reluctantly turning back to Charlotte. Charlotte rolls her eyes.
‘Your fortieth, Bry. Is Ash going to throw you a big party? I’d love to come.’
‘Oh, I, um, I don’t really like having parties, so …’
‘What?’ Charlotte starts shaking the jam jar, her teeth gritted with effort. ‘That’s so boring of you!’ she shrieks.
Since Bry married Ash and became unexpectedly rich, Charlotte has made more effort with her than she ever has before, texting her occasionally, even inviting Bry to her own recent birthday party – which Bry flatly declined despite Elizabeth’s pleas.
While Charlotte launches into a story about her own flamboyant party, the Victorian glass in the front door rattles a warning as someone unfamiliar with these old houses closes the door too forcefully.
Here’s the excuse Bry’s been looking for.
‘Sorry, Charlotte, I didn’t think we were expecting anyone else …’ Bry walks quickly into the hall where, moving towards Bry, her silk kaftan flowing either side as if she’s swimming, weightless, through the air, is the woman from next door.
‘Hi,’ she says, ‘I’m Rosalyn.’
For a beat Bry thinks Rosalyn’s here to tell her to mind her own fucking business and stop spying on her, but then she sees that Rosalyn is holding a bottle of red wine. She’s here for the party.
‘Elizabeth invited me? I hope that’s OK?’
Bry shakes her head. ‘No, I mean, yes! Great!’ She shakes her head again, at herself this time. ‘Sorry, I was just preoccupied with something else. I … I’m Bryony – Bry.’ She puts her hand out towards Rosalyn. Rosalyn holds Bry’s hand rather than shaking it. She feels warm and she moves forward, kisses Bry on both cheeks. Rosalyn smells of lemons and faintly – or does Bry just imagine it? – the electric tang of sex.
Still holding on to Bry’s hand, Rosalyn asks, ‘Didn’t we see you the other morning, when Rafe and I pulled up in the van?’
‘Oh yes, sorry I didn’t come and say hello,’ Bry replies, her hand now released from Rosalyn’s. ‘I had to get my daughter to school – well, preschool, she’s only four – so we were all a bit frantic.’
‘Don’t worry at all! We were totally preoccupied anyway.’
There are so many things Bry could ask, but all she says is, ‘Ahh yes. You looked busy.’
Rosalyn smiles and Bry blushes. There’s something alluring about this woman, something that makes Bry want to learn everything about her. Bry’s drawn to her at a deep, subtle level she can’t find a word for.
‘Sorry, Rosalyn, come in, come in.’
Bry leads the way into the kitchen where Charlotte is now bright red, still vigorously shaking her dressing.
‘Hi.’ Charlotte swaps the dressing to her left hand so she can hold her right out towards Rosalyn. ‘Charlotte.’ Her hand is rigid, fingers like soldiers standing to attention, her legs slightly apart, braced.
Charlotte looks startled as Rosalyn kisses her on both cheeks and, smiling, looks Charlotte in the eye as she says, ‘I’m Rosalyn. I just moved in next door.’ Charlotte nods as though she’s in a business meeting and this was exactly the news she wanted from an employee.
‘Do you live in Farley, Charlotte?’
Charlotte snorts and starts shaking her dressing again.
‘God, no. Chelsea. Far too quiet for me down here. I come every year for Elizabeth’s barbecue, don’t I, Bry? Old school friends, you see.’
Bry is about to point out that Charlotte means she and Elizabeth are old school friends, not Bry and Charlotte, but Rosalyn moves into the garden and introduces herself to Gerald, who says, ‘The sculptress!’ and immediately starts trying to talk in clumsy-sounding Italian. Rosalyn laughs along with him as though he’s an old, dear friend.
Suddenly, a high-pitched scream followed by a loud cry makes Bry rush further out into the garden. She knows from the pitch it’s not Alba, but she still needs to see her to be able to relax. She exhales when she spots her there at the end of the garden, crawling under the rotting garden bench, pretending to be a puppy.
Row is powering up the garden with Lily in her arms, Clemmie trotting along by her side trying to explain what happened. Elizabeth leaps up from the table and rushes over to Row and Lily, who is curled and crying in her mother’s arms. Elizabeth looks first at Clemmie – like Bry, she needs to know her own little one is safe – before she turns to look at Lily’s bare foot. Lily’s howls grow louder and Elizabeth steams ahead of them, striding towards the kitchen.
‘First aid kit,’ Elizabeth says to the kitchen as she enters, making her way to the utility room and coming back a second later with a green plastic box as if she’s playing doctors and nurses.
‘Bry, can you make Lily an elderflower cordial and give her a meringue from the fridge? The sugar will help with the shock.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Bry, relieved to have a job, heads to the small larder for the bottle of elderflower. Row and Lily make it to the kitchen. Lily’s face is pressed firmly away from the world, into Row’s neck; Row is whispering in her daughter’s ear and holding her foot firmly in her hand. There’s blood dripping down between her fingers. Elizabeth guides Row towards a kitchen chair.
