Jail Bird

‘She’s having her tea,’ said the man, seeming to fill up the small, overheated front room with his size and bad temper. ‘You could have picked a better time.’

No time would have been better for this one.

‘You’ll have to wait a bit,’ he said, and Lily said yeah, okay, and sat down on the sofa. Golden Balls was on, roaring away—Alice’s mother was obviously deaf as a post—and when she had been sitting there for ten minutes watching the damned thing, the son came bustling over and changed the channels, just in case she’d been enjoying it, just to make his point that she wasn’t welcome.

Point taken, thought Lily, getting tired of all this. But, finally, she was granted an audience.

She went and sat in the armchair opposite Mrs Blunt. Mrs Blunt looked at her as if she was wondering why she was here.

Yeah, thought Lily. Me too.

‘I don’t want her upset,’ said the son, removing the tea tray and going off into the kitchen with it, where he crashed the plate and cup into the sink. And fuck you too, thought Lily.

The birds sang on, irritatingly loudly.

‘Do you let them out much?’ asked Lily, unable to stop herself. She was surprised at how distressed it made her feel, to see them caged there.

‘They don’t like to come out,’ said Mrs Blunt. ‘Do you, little ones?’ she cooed at the birds. ‘I open the door, but they don’t come out,’ she told Lily.

Lily could understand that. Inside was safe. Outside–who knew?

‘Mrs Blunt,’ she said, ‘can you tell me what happened with Alice?’

‘You won’t get any sense out of her,’ shouted the son from the kitchen.

Lily looked at Mrs Blunt. She didn’t look stupid, only old. And she had used the phone and given Lily her address with no difficulty at all.

‘Alice,’ Lily repeated clearly. ‘I went to see her.’ She hesitated, looking assessingly at the old woman. ‘Mrs Blunt, I wasn’t entirely truthful with you on the phone. I am–I mean I was–related to Leo King. I was…married to him.’

Mrs Blunt stared at her. ‘But…they said his wife shot him. She got sent down for it.’

‘I didn’t do it, Mrs Blunt.’

‘Hold on a minute.’ The son came full-speed in from the kitchen. Before Lily knew what was happening, he’d grabbed the back of her collar and hauled her out of the chair she was sitting in. Lily’s heart shot straight up into her throat with the shock of it. The budgies screeched and hurtled around the cage, flinging themselves against the bars. Feathers drifted around like a Christmas snow scene. Mrs Blunt cried out as Lily dangled, her feet off the ground.

‘You’re her, you’re that fucking psycho,’ he yelled, shaking her like a dog with a rat.

‘Malcolm!’ yapped Mrs Blunt.

He froze. Mrs Blunt was staring at him. After a tense second or two, he dropped Lily.

‘She’s a headcase,’ said Malcolm defensively.

Lily gulped and tried to get her wind back. He’d startled her badly. She sank back into the chair and kept her attention focused on the old lady.

‘That man,’ said Mrs Blunt, her gummy mouth working with emotion, ‘Leo King. He was bad. He ruined our Alice. Ruined her.’

‘Yeah,’ said the son, nodding sharply and still glaring down at Lily. ‘You’re a bad lot, all of you.’

Oh fuck me, thought Lily, trying to get her heart rate back to normal. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep a bloody Rottweiler than to have this oversized idiot about the place?

‘You were inside for years, that right?’ the son was going on, his expression sneering as he stared at Lily. ‘You done him, that’s it, right? Well–bloody good job too. Wished I’d done it myself, lots of times. He upset our Alice.’

‘And just when we thought Alice was getting on better, too,’ said Mrs Blunt. ‘What with the not-eating and everything.’

‘She was anorexic?’

Mrs Blunt’s eyes were suddenly bright with tears. ‘She went off the rails, our Alice.’

‘She was fucking mental,’ snorted the son. ‘Always was, always will be.’

And now you’re flavour of the month, right? thought Lily, glancing at him.

‘You your mum’s full-time carer?’ asked Lily.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Lily shrugged. Nice cosy job, no getting up for work in the mornings. Just look after your old mum, hold her like a prize trophy, because your sister was mental and you were top of the heap. Sibling rivalry with a particularly nasty edge to it.

‘Then mind your bloody own,’ he said, and went back into the kitchen.

‘She was always frail,’ Mrs Blunt went on. ‘Then she stopped eating much. Some girls teased her at school, something like that, she’d never talk about it. She was hospitalized once, she was bad with it. But then she got over that and got a job in one of his offices.’

‘Yeah, your bloody husband,’ the son chimed in from the other room.

‘And?’ prompted Lily.

‘She was mad about him. Just mad,’ said Mrs Blunt, her eyes dancing in her bony head. ‘He used to send her flowers, and posh presents; there was a gold bracelet in a little blue box…’

The Tiffany receipt, thought Lily sickly. After all these years, finally she knew who’d been the recipient of that gift. Alice Blunt. Poor, weak girl, with her head turned by a rich and powerful man.

‘Alice loved him, adored him.’ Mrs Blunt’s gummy mouth twisted in disapproval. ‘Went crazy when he told her it was over between them.’

‘How long did it go on?’ asked Lily, although it pained her to do it.

The bony shoulders shrugged. ‘Few months. But she was a highly strung girl, our Alice. She couldn’t take it.’ Suddenly the old mouth was trembling. ‘She tried to do herself in. Slit her wrists. I found her…just in time. But she was never right after that. Needed round-the-clock care. He should never have let her down like that, she couldn’t take that sort of thing.’

Lily cleared her throat. ‘Yeah, but he was married. Didn’t she know that?’

‘We don’t like you going near Alice,’ said the son, rejoining them and looming over Lily like a threat. ‘Who the fuck knows what you might do?’

‘Malcolm! Language!’ said Mrs Blunt.

‘Sorry, Ma.’ Suddenly he looked like a little boy slapped down by an adult. But immediately the truculent bruiser was back. ‘But it’s true, innit? She might want to do Alice too; she’s a nutter.’

Lily bit her tongue to keep back a sharp reply. But something had been bothering her and she was going to ask it, no matter what. ‘The clinic,’ she said.

‘Yeah? What about it?’ asked the son.

‘Who pays for Alice’s keep? It must cost a small fortune.’

He shrugged. ‘Government, I s’pose. We can’t afford it, for sure.’

But the clinic was lovely; a really nice place. Not the sort of place she’d envisage an NHS patient on her uppers being shipped to indefinitely.

She looked at the son, and wondered. Wondered just how far he would go to please the mother and gain her approval. Wondered if Mrs Blunt had said at the time: Look, son, he’s upset our Alice, upset her bad, what are you going to do about it? She’d have been looking at him all pleading and cunning, knowing how to manipulate, knowing which buttons to press. And did he then charge out into the night, bent on revenge, and kill Leo?

But there’d been no break-in. The alarm system hadn’t been breached. So…had Leo let the son in, had Leo in fact known Malcolm, since he knew Alice?

She stood up. Felt so tired that she couldn’t bear to think about it any more.

‘Thanks for seeing me, Mrs Blunt,’ she said, and went to the door, the son dogging her heels.