‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Sure. You want to pass me that trowel beside you?’
I do so, watching him as he drags a large plastic sack across the floor towards him, digging inside and pulling out an ashy grey powder that he sifts into the turned soil.
‘You know you have a tell, Frances?’
‘A what?’
‘A tic that gives you away. It’s subconscious. You wouldn’t even recognise it in yourself.’
‘Like William?’
‘How’s that?’
‘He pulls at his hair when he’s lying.’
Alex laughs. ‘Okay, yes. Like that. You’ve noticed him doing that, have you?’
‘Yes. Lately it seems he’s been lying a lot.’
Alex lifts his eyes to mine and then drops them again. He digs further into the bulging plastic sack. He moves with such stiffness, as if he has grown too big for his skin. His veneer is so highly polished, so constrained, you sense that at any moment it might crack. Like he is gritting his teeth against some inner flow of filth, some awful toxicity. It makes him hard to like, I’m told, but perversely, it is the reason I find myself warming to him. I like the discomfort I feel in his presence, the way it makes me alert and wary. I like the ripple of anxiety when his gaze lands on me and he does not smile, and his thoughts don’t show on his face like they do in so many other people, all the time. I’ll never look in Alex’s face and see disappointment or regret reflected back at me. He is a man who doesn’t care what I once was.
‘Oh,’ I say, twisting another tomato from the vine, ‘I bumped into your old friend in town. Nancy.’
‘Oh yeah? You talk to her?’
‘I did, yes. Just for a little while. I showed her the photo I found in the shoebox.’
‘Bet she loved that,’ he deadpanned, sifting grey ash through his gloved fingers.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Edie, Alex? About how she went missing?’
He is silent for a moment, looking up at the roof as if expecting the answer to be written there on the dusty glass. When he next speaks it is in a solemn, low voice, without looking at me, not once:
‘One, two, three, four,
rattlesnake hunters knocking at your door.
Give them meat and give them bone,
and pray that they leave you alone.’
‘Cute,’ I say. ‘What’s that? Some old nursery rhyme?’
‘It’s the song we used to sing at the grave of Quiet Mary. Other kids were playing Knock Down Ginger and there we were trying to raise the dead. Isn’t memory a funny thing? I can’t remember the names of any of my old teachers, but I can remember that song, every word. How it used to make me feel like I was hot and cold at the same time, so scared I wanted to throw up. The song scared me and the rhyme scared me and those girls scared me. God, they scared me. Moya, Charlie, Nancy and Edie. Especially Edie. You never knew what she was going to do. She was unpredictable, but in a way that made her frightening to be around.’
‘But you were just a kid.’
‘Yup. And awkward as anything; you’ve seen the photos.’ He sighs. ‘But she – Edie, I mean – the way she behaved meant she got one of those reputations, you know? We could all see the way her life was going to go in this town. Mud sticks, doesn’t it?’
I blink rapidly, my vision doubling as tears threaten. Yes, I know.
‘I like to think she cleared out while she had the chance. Started somewhere new without all that hanging over her. It wouldn’t have been hard, not back then. Train to London in an hour, Newhaven Harbour just down the road, then the ferry to France or beyond. She could have gone anywhere.’
‘Is that what you think? That she ran away?’
He shrugs. ‘I think they should have looked more closely at the caretaker for that church. That’s what I think.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t remember his name. Liver, maybe? He was an oddball. Used to hide in the bushes and take pictures of us coming out the youth club they used to have there, although “youth club” might be selling it a bit high. Darts and warm orange squash and custard creams, sometimes table football if someone hadn’t broken it. When the police went to his house they found hundreds of pictures of us kids.’
‘Oh my God. Why didn’t they arrest him?’
‘For what? It’s not illegal. Weird, but not illegal. There was even a rumour going round that he’d kidnapped Edie on behalf of the Freemasons. Another that he was keeping her prisoner in the crypts beneath the church. Edie’s mum got arrested once in that churchyard. She held a knife up to William’s throat. I remember seeing her picture in the papers.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Listen, Frances—’ Alex begins, and then we’re cut off by a cracking sound so sudden we both flinch and put our hands up over our heads as if the roof is coming in. I cry out, and when I finally peer upward I glimpse a smear of blood on one of the panes there.
‘What the hell was that?’ I’m saying, and Alex is laughing shakily, pressing his hands to his mouth. It’s then that I see it. A bird, a blackbird maybe, or a crow. It’s flown into the glass. Slumped body lying like a shadow against the pane. For a moment I think it has survived the impact but then I see it is just the wind stirring its feathers. I can just make out one small claw curled against the dirty glass.
‘Bad omen,’ Alex says sombrely, returning his hands to the earth. ‘It foretells a death.’
‘Oh, come on. It foretells a near-sighted crow. You’ve lived in the countryside too long.’
He doesn’t say anything, but when he looks up at me he smiles. There is a faint dusting of the grey powder on one of his cheeks.
‘You’ve got some of that stuff on you. Here, let me,’
