When the phone shrilled, Maurice jumped, and the knife he was using to butter Josh’s toast clattered to the floor.
‘Hi Maurice, it’s Fee.’
He forced an upbeat tone. ‘Hi Fee. How are you?’ He stooped to throw the hairy knife into the sink.
‘Fine, thanks.’ Fee said. ‘No. Worried, actually. Twitch didn’t come home last night. I was expecting her for dinner, but she didn’t turn up.’
Maurice lowered his voice and left the kitchen, closing the door behind him. In a worried tone he said, ‘You think she's OK?'
‘I hope so.' She relayed Twitch’s story of an outing with her art class friends. ‘I can’t imagine what’s happened to her, but can you keep the boys for a while?’
‘No problem. Try to stay calm, Fee. There’s bound to be an explanation. Let me know when she turns up.'
The bottle of whisky called to him, but he decided that taking his children swimming was now a good idea. It would distract them all.
After the palaver of a swim, he took the boys to Paul, who cooked pizza for the kids. Mick was already there, and while their kids watched television, the three made whispered plans to recruit Gloria, Mick’s mother, to help Fee with the children should Twitch not return.
Maurice was almost convinced by his own acting, until his phone rang and caused his heart to race once more. It was the police, requesting a photograph of Twitch, so he left the boys with Paul, and drove home to meet them. After pulling out the contents of his sideboard, he found a picture that was not too old and passed it over, holding it face down, so he did not have to look at her happy countenance.
~~~
The trolley still perched on top of Maurice’s rubbish, but he was in no state to deal with it. Apathy swamped him, and soon, the new road was completed and his plan to hide the trolley there was thwarted. Summer blazed on, and Lymeshire, like the rest of the country, was beset by drought conditions. In Maurice’s garden, the grass crisped into straw and deep cracks opened in the clay soil. On the TV and radio, messages nagged people to use washing up water on their flowers, take a shower in preference to a bath and put a brick in their toilet cistern to save wasting the precious resource.
In Chelterton Park, where he often took the children, the ground shifted so much that trees collapsed across the footpaths and a fissure snaked from the road at the top, through the woodland, and beyond to the edge of the brown park.
On a walk with the boys, Maurice halted at the edge of the crack. Holding tight to their hands the three stared into a deep crevasse. Together, they ran their eyes along its path into the forested fringe that protected the park from the road. Around them, the roots of displaced trees clawed at the air from trunks that slumped like craggy dominoes. A short distance above, on the road, men with theodolites who had been measured the tarmac surface, departed in a Land Rover, apparently satisfied that there was no danger of subsidence.
That night, when darkness had fallen, Maurice, dressed in black, crept to his garage and lifted the door a grinding inch at a time until it was high enough to duck under. He allowed himself a flash of his torch to identify the position and angle of the trolley, gripped it by its rope and edged it from its perch and onto the drive. All around him, blank windows stared into the darkness, and he waited a minute, straining his ears for disturbance.
Satisfied nobody had heard him, he hefted the trolley into the car and inched the vehicle from the street, leaving his headlights off until he was clear of the estate. Outside the park he struggled to get the trolly through a kissing gate, then loosened the plastic so that the wheels would turn and hauled it up the steep climb to the footpath and woods beyond. Every few feet, he stopped to catch his breath and check his surroundings, and when he reached the crack in the path, he dragged the cart over roots and around fallen trees to the place where the fissure was widest.
The beam of his torch brought the crumbling sides of the hole into brief relief. If he could just get his cumbersome package through the narrow opening, it would drop about six feet into a wide artery deep inside. It was important to get the angle right or the thing would become stuck halfway.
He gritted his teeth and held the parcelled up tumbrel to his chest. It was heavy, like a body - like Twitch’s body. His mind veered from that thought and he cocked one of his legs across the trench. As he stood astride the hole, hugging the cart, he prayed the ground would not give way under his weight. With supreme determination he gave the trolley a twist to line it up with the hole, let go of it and leapt to safety. It dropped halfway then hung, suspended on tree roots that clutched at the wheels. Maurice squatted and jabbed at it with one foot. ‘Go on. In you go,’ he implored silently, and gradually, by miniscule degrees, it struggled past the obstructions and at last, landed in the chamber below and toppled onto its side with gentle bump. Loose soil rained down after it and Maurice kicked at the crumbly edges of the fissure until the cart was lost to sight.
THE MEN, SUMMER 1999
After Paul’s trial, he, Mick, and Maurice galloped through the grandiose court entrance and down the wide, marble steps to the pavement. Paul’s face was stretched into a wide grin. He had not realised how tense he was
