Jane.” He turned to face her. “It was you!”
“Should I be angry about this?” Brendan grabbed his wine glass and gripped the stem. “I mean, you’ve been keeping secrets from me. Both of you.”
“No,” said Jane, walking around the table and sitting on his knee. She stroked his face with the palm of her hand. She tilted her head close to his. “Just me: me and nobody else. And I’m sorry. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I think at the start it was because I didn’t want to upset you. Remember, it took you a long time before you could actually talk about your feelings, how you felt deserted by your old friends.” She kissed the side of his face. “I would never do anything to hurt you.” Her smile was warm; her words were like fire.
“I know,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t, but this feels strange. As if I should feel hurt.” He kissed the tip of her nose.
“Okay,” said Simon, pouring more wine. “So you’re not going to punch me?”
“I should. But I won’t.” Brendan picked up Jane’s glass and handed it to her.
“Let’s call this a clean slate,” said Jane, standing. “No more secrets. You two need to work together to get Marty involved in all this, and then the three of you need to sit down and talk —
“Yes,” said Simon, raising his glass.
“Aye,” said Brendan, mimicking the gesture.
“And I’ll stop interfering. I shouldn’t have done that.” Jane lifted her own glass high into the air.
“It worked, though,” said Simon. “I could never forget. The Grove was always in my mind. No matter how hard I tried, I could never get this place, or all of you, out of my mind.” He paused, nodded. “Hell, yes, it worked.”
“Daddy…”
They all looked over towards the door. Isobel was standing in the open doorway, in her white nightdress. Her face was damp with tears. “Daddy… something’s wrong, Daddy.”
Brendan got to his feet and ran across the room, scooping her up in his arms. She was cold. Her body was shaking. “What is it, baby? What’s wrong? Are you poorly?”
The little girl shook her head. Her blonde hair was moist. “It’s Harry. There’s something wrong with Harry. He’s being sick.”
He handed Isobel to Jane and headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time. When he reached the first floor, he moved quickly to the kids’ room. He pushed open the door and saw Harry kneeling on the floor at the end of the bed, his arms ramrod straight, his shoulders hunched. He was retching, dry-heaving, his little body jerking and spasming as his stomach muscles worked overtime.
“Oh, God… Harry. What is it, son?”
“Daddy!” Harry screamed the word and then went into another convulsion. There was dull yellow vomit on the floor, inches from his face. He turned his head to the side, and in that moment Brendan saw that his son’s throat was swollen. His neck was actually bulging, already twice its normal size; his cheeks were puffed out, as if they were filled with hot air. He tried to speak again, but his voice could no longer get past the constriction.
“Harry!” He went down on his knees and grabbed the boy’s shoulders. Harry’s skin was hot and his pyjamas were soaking wet. “Oh, God…”
“What is it?” Jane was behind him, standing in the doorway. He looked back and saw Simon there, too, holding Isobel’s hand. His daughter’s face was pale, almost white. She looked like a ghost.
“Harry!” He turned back to his boy just in time to witness another convulsion, and this time Harry was bringing something up, a small, lumpen mass that Brendan could make out rising in his throat. The boy’s neck fluttered; his eyes rolled back in his head, and his mouth opened, opened…
The soggy object was forced out between his wet lips, and dropped onto the floor, right into the pile of fresh vomit. Harry slumped sideways, possibly in a faint. The small lump began to twitch. Brendan thought it was a giant moth, ready to break out of its sticky pupa.
Nobody moved. For a moment — and that was all it took — none of the three adults could even speak. They all remained locked into position, bound by their fears.
The object rolled on the floor, and then it began to transform. Tiny wings twitched outwards, unfolding from the body, and a tiny head emerged from beneath one of them. The thing made no sound; it just started flapping its wings, slowly at first, and then fast, faster, until they were nothing but a blur of motion. And the hummingbird floated up from the floor, soundless and graceful and totally out of place, an alien object in Harry and Isobel’s bedroom.
Brendan turned his head to follow the bird’s progress, and watched as it flew past Simon and Jane — both of them stepping back from the doorway to allow it out of the room — and into the rest of the house. The sight of the thing triggered a chain of detonations, submerged memories exploding at random inside Brendan’s head, but they went up in smoke before he could grab them.
Then, snapping back into the moment, he bent down and cradled Harry in his arms, moaning and stroking the boy’s sweat-damp head. “Call an ambulance,” he said. “Do it, quickly.”
Outside the bedroom, on the cramped landing, Isobel began to weep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SIMON SAT DOWN on the bed and tried to make sense of everything that had taken place this evening. He was tired and his head throbbed, yet he still felt drunk. Things were changing so fast. Everything was fluid; he could not lock his thoughts in place, not even long enough to examine what they meant.
When he’d first arrived at the Cole house, things had been tense. He had been unable to settle down after the violence he’d perpetrated upon the kid in the burnt-out building, and it seemed to him that Brendan had something of an attitude — which was understandable, really, the way that Simon had been pushing the man.
Jane’s presence, however, had made all the difference: she had calmed the situation simply by being there, and they had all slowly relaxed into an almost pleasant groove. When she had made her revelation regarding all the stuff she’d sent him over the years, things had threatened to become tense all over again, but she’d handled it beautifully.
He still couldn’t understand why she’d been sending him those updates — not fully. Yes, it was a way of anchoring him to the Grove, of forcing him to remember — or, rather, not to forget — that he’d left the other two Amigos behind to live with the mess they’d all made, but somehow he felt that there was something more to it. She did not know what had happened when the boys were ten years old; nobody did, not even the boys themselves. So why would she put her marriage at risk to keep her claws in his life?
It was all too complex, an emotional assault course that he was nowhere near fit to complete. He was out of shape; his stamina was gone. The truth was, he had not been in good enough shape for this kind of onslaught for years.
He lay back and kicked off his shoes, wriggling on the sheets until he found a comfortable position. Outside, a dog barked, children laughed, a distant siren made a tune to which the city danced. The darkness behind his eyelids writhed.
Jane. He could see her now, emerging from that darkness.
He would be lying to himself if he thought that he did not still find her attractive. Her youth had faded, there were lines and blemishes where once her skin had been smooth and flawless, but still there was something about the woman that drew him, sent his blood pumping too quickly around his body. There was a homely quality to her beauty that intrigued him. Natasha didn’t have that. She was too perfect, too model-like: zero body fat; a flat chest; porcelain skin; a way of carrying herself that suggested she was always aware of people watching her. Whereas Jane moved naturally, with an almost slovenly gait. She didn’t give a damn who was watching, or if nobody was. She was her own woman; nobody could own or rent her image. She was real. She was a beating pulse under the skin of life.
When he’d first seen her this evening, his initial reaction had been base: he wanted to fuck her. He felt ashamed of himself for having these thoughts, but that didn’t negate them. Jane was his one regret: back in the day, they’d never made it past the heavy petting stage — a feel of her tit through her lacy bra cup, a hand on her
