Dead Man's Grip

Kes and Tyler had been close, not just father and son, but proper mates. They went to football together to support the Albion every home match during the season. In the summer they went fishing, or to the cricket, or more often than not to Tyler’s favourite place in Brighton, the Booth Museum of Natural History. They were so close that at times she’d found herself almost feeling jealous, thinking that she was being left out of some of their secrets.

After Kes’s death, Tyler had moved his drum kit indoors, up to his room, and she had never seen him go to the summer house again. He’d been withdrawn for a long time. She had made a big effort, even taking him to football and to cricket herself, and on a fishing trip on a boat out of Brighton Marina – and she had been violently seasick for her troubles. They’d developed a certain closeness, but there was still a distance between them, a gap she could never quite close. As if the ghost of his father would always be the elephant in the room.

She stared at a spreading brown stain on the wallpaper opposite her. Damp coming in. The house was falling apart around her. She was going to have to get to grips with it, either give it a massive makeover or finally move. But where? And besides, she still liked the place. She liked the feel of Kes’s presence. Particularly in this living room.

They’d made it cosy, with two big sofas in front of the television and a modern electric fire with dancing flames. On the mantelpiece above it were invitations to parties and weddings and other social events they’d been planning to go to in the months after Kes got back from his annual boys’ skiing trip. She still had not had the heart to remove them. It was like living in a time warp, she knew. One day she would move on. But not yet. She still wasn’t ready

And after the traumas of the past few days, she was less ready than ever.

She looked up at Kes’s photograph on the mantelpiece amid the invitations. Standing next to her on the grass outside All Saints’ Church, Patcham, on their wedding day, in a black morning coat, striped trousers, holding his top hat in his hand.

Tall and handsome, with slightly unruly jet-black hair, he had a certain air of arrogant insouciance about him. That was if you didn’t know him. Behind that facade, which he regularly used with devastating effect in courtroom appearances, was a kind and surprisingly insecure man.

She drank some more wine and batted away a particularly dense and smelly fart from Otis, who was asleep at her feet. Then she increased the volume on the remote. Normally Tyler would come running into the room and curl up on the sofa beside her. This was his favourite programme, and one of the few times they sat and watched anything together. On this particularly gloomy, rain-lashed night, she felt more in need of his company than ever.

‘Tyler!’ she shouted. ‘ Top Gear ’s starting!’’

Her voice woke up Otis, who jumped to his feet, then suddenly pricked up his ears and ran out of the room, growling.

Jeremy Clarkson, in a louder jacket and even baggier jeans than usual, was talking about a new Ferrari. She grabbed the remote again and froze the image, so that Tyler wouldn’t miss anything.

He’d had been in a strange mood these past few days, since her accident. She was not sure why, but it was upsetting her. It was almost as if he was blaming her for what had happened. But as she replayed those moments again, for the thousandth time since Wednesday morning, she still came to the same conclusion: that she was not to blame. Even if she had not been distracted by her phone, and had braked half a second earlier, the cyclist would still have swerved out and then been hit by the van.

Wouldn’t he?

Suddenly she heard the clack of the dog flap in the kitchen door, then the sound of Otis barking furiously out in the garden. What at, she wondered? Occasionally they had urban foxes, and she often worried that he might attack one and find he had met his match. She jumped up, but as she entered the kitchen, the dog came running back in, panting.

‘Tyler!’ she called out again, but still there was no answer from him.

She went upstairs, hoping he wasn’t watching the programme on his own in his room. But to her surprise, he was sitting on his chair in front of his desk, going through the contents of his father’s memory box.

Tyler had an unusual ambition for a twelve-year-old. He wanted to be a museum curator. Or more specifically the curator of a natural history museum. His ambition showed in his little bedroom, which was itself like a museum, reflecting his changing tastes as he had grown older. Even the colour scheme, which he had chosen himself, of powder-blue walls and pastel-green wood panelling, and the gaily coloured pennants criss-crossing the ceiling, gave the room an ecological feel.

His bookshelves were covered in plastic vegetation and models of reptiles, and crammed with volumes of Tintin and Star Wars stories, natural history reference books, palaeontology books, and one, so typical of him, called Really Really Big Questions.

The walls were covered with carefully selected and mounted photographs, wild life and fossil prints and some cartoon sketches of his own, all divided into sections. One of her favourites of his drawings was headed: Tyler’s Dream. It depicted himself looking like a mad professor, with a crude skeleton of a prehistoric monster to his left, labelled Tylersaurus, and rows of squiggly little objects to his right, labelled Fossils. At the bottom of the cartoon he had written, I want to be a fossil expert at the Natural History Museum… Have the biggest fossil collection in the world… Discover a dinosaur.

There was also a Tintin section, on part of one wall, neatly plastered in cartoons. And his music section, where his drum kit was set up. A guitar hung from the wall, along with a solitary bongo, and his cornet lay on a shelf, with a book beside it entitled A New Tune a Day.

‘Tyler, Top Gear ’s on!’ she said.

He didn’t stir. He was sitting in silence, in his grey cagoule with NEW YORK JETS on the back, with the old shoebox that he had filled with items that reminded him of his dad in the months following Kes’s death in front of him. She wasn’t sure where he had got the idea of the memory box from, some American TV series he had been watching, she thought, but she had liked it and still did.

He’d moved his computer keyboard and mouse pad aside, and was laying the contents out on the small amount of space not already occupied by his lava lamp, telescope, microscope and slide projector. She saw him take out his father’s spotted silk handkerchief, his blue glasses case, fishing permit, a Brighton & Hove Albion season ticket, a box of trout flies and a small cartoon he had drawn, depicting his dad as a winged angel, flying past a signpost directing him up to heaven.

She eased her way carefully around the drum kit and placed her hands on his shoulders.

‘What’s up?’ she said tenderly.

Ignoring her, he removed his father’s fishing knife. At that moment there was a dark snarl from Otis. A second later she heard the bang of the dog flap, then Otis was out in the garden again, barking furiously. Puzzled, she walked across to the window and peered down.

It wasn’t fully dark and there was some lighting from her windows and those of her neighbours. She looked up the steep lawn, past the ponds, towards the summer house, and saw Otis running around, barking furiously. At what? She could see nothing. But at the same time it unsettled her. This wasn’t his normal behaviour. Had there been an intruder? Otis stopped barking and rushed around the lawn again, nose to the ground, as if he had picked up a scent. A fox, she thought. Probably just a fox. She turned back to Tyler and saw to her surprise that he was crying.

She walked the few steps back over to him, knelt and hugged him.

‘What is it, darling? Tell me?’

He stared at her, eyes streaming behind his glasses. ‘I’m scared,’ he said.

‘What are you scared of?’

‘I’m scared after your crash. You might have another crash, mightn’t you?’ Then he looked at her solemnly. ‘I don’t want to have to make another memory box, Mummy. I don’t want to have to make one about you.’

Carly put her arms around him and gave him a hug. ‘Mummy’s not going anywhere, OK? You’re stuck with me.’ She kissed his cheek.

Out in the garden, Otis suddenly began barking even more ferociously.

Carly got up and moved to the window. She peered out again, feeling a deepening sense of unease.