The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  ‘Don’t you have that sort of stuff in your flat in London? Couldn’t someone bring it for you?’ Maureen asks; perhaps glad to change the subject. I explain that the flat has already sold. Cash buyer came along immediately. The stuff is going into storage. All arranged via phone and email and being packed up by a removal firm as we speak. Like Helen and Alice, Maureen seems to want to make this into something momentous. She actually stops walking and says: ‘Your entire flat? You didn’t want to wait and do it yourself?’

  ‘I’m not sentimental. Helen got the best stuff when we divorced anyway. I’ll get it out of storage when I find somewhere permanent. Or longer term at least.’

  Maureen seems curiously concerned by this.

  ‘It’s radical, though, isn’t it? Leaving everything behind like that?’

  ‘Maybe. But it makes sense – ah, here we are. This is the High Street, is it? Look at that. Cadge: Gentleman’s Attire. In my day cadge meant scrounge, you know, cadge a lift. Weird name, for a clothing shop.’

  It doesn’t looking promising. A bookmaker’s, a pound store. East Anglia’s biggest bridal wear shop. The usual war memorial dedicated to the Brave Men of St Ives. A green statue of Oliver Cromwell on a raised plinth, pointing at someone. (I follow the line of the statue’s outstretched finger to a bloke sitting on a bench eating a sandwich.) A bistro aptly called Nuts. Unlit Christmas lights already festoon the streetlamp beside it. There’s a busker in the doorway. He’s singing Wild World. Wild indeed. His version is the tamest I’ve ever heard.

  I stop, hand on the door, and find myself smiling while I rummage in my back pocket for a quid. How soft this man’s voice is. Although now I look at him, he’s more of a boy than a man, despite the fifties effort with his clothes: the denim jacket, part-quiff and the roll-up parked above his ear.

  I stand and listen: it’s so quiet. Not just his voice: I’ve never heard quiet like this in a town before. I am sure I can hear a bird twittering. I definitely hear a plane rolling over and the tick of a bike as somebody wheels it past; the swish of a pushchair being pushed. Soft ticking. The sound of watch enveloped in cotton. This busker is singing really, really softly – it’s exquisite. He’s giving it his all; he’s really – what’s the phrase? I lean against the doorway to listen. And as I look up from the strum of his guitar, glancing at the stetson on the floor at his feet, hearing my pound coin make a tiny – a jingly, tinny splash – I feel something shift.

  I see Maureen looking at me. I’m standing half in, half out of this café and she’s waiting for me to join her inside. She’s taken off her hat and is ruffling her hand through her tufty haircut, her cheeks glowing; she’s fresh and luminous and brilliantly coloured: just the same way Helen looked when I first saw her in the hospital. My actions feel strange to me, a dim memory of how as a little boy I sometimes asked myself: am I really doing this because I thought of it – lifting my hand, tapping my fingers – or is someone else, something else, directing me? (That was back in my religious phase, again, no doubt.) My ears are cocked, the blood is pulsing in my veins, the strange little town of St Ives is presenting itself to me; music trickling under my skin. The busker is so young that he is reddening, it’s clear that singing in public is embarrassing to him, that he only half believes he can do it. But his voice is good: he hits all the notes.

  I realise I’m blocking the doorway; a woman with a pushchair is trying to get out. I hold the door for her, mumbling apologies. And then I reach for my wallet and find all the money I have – forty, sixty, eighty quid, four twenties, and bend down to put it in the stetson. The boy stops mid-strum, reaches down and pockets it instantly. His mouth is open.

  ‘I love that song! Cat Stevens,’ I say. We grin foolishly at one another.

  Maureen has found us a table. She makes no comment as I drag out a chair and sit opposite her, though her eyes are wide. She hands me the laminated menu. I put my hand to my chest and take one or two deep breaths, putting the wallet back in my pocket.

  ‘Well, I guess I’d better buy the coffees,’ she says, ‘since you’ve gone and given all your money away. Or have you got another stash in there?’

  I try to figure out the tone of her voice – is she mocking me, admonishing me? My heart is racing slightly.

  ‘Thanks. I – I like that song. I really love it. I – well—’ I murmur, turning my attention to the menu, trying to get back to some sort of ordinary feeling.

  Maureen stares at me for a moment too long. Then, ‘We’re obviously celebrating,’ she says, sitting back with a big smile. I’m grateful to her. This habit women have – a role Helen often claimed not to want – of telling me what I’m feeling. Tremendously helpful. Like having an interpreter at hand to translate you to yourself.

  I glance shyly at her. I notice that smell of sweets again. Pear drops, sweets that smell like nail-varnish remover to me. Where has that smell come from? Has she been eating them? I wonder if I should tell her that her cardigan is done up all wrong, there at the centre where the buttons are pulling rather tight? I don’t want her to think I’m staring at her breasts.

  ‘You just know the coffee here’s going to be terrible,’ I whisper instead.

  She follows my eyes in any case, looks down at her chest, laughs; unbuttons and rebuttons the cardigan (she’s wearing something underneath though. Some sort of camisole). ‘Got dressed in a hurry,’ she says. An image then of Maureen at home, perhaps the shadow of some dark male figure lying in her bed, buttoning up her clothes.

  The busker is singing again. A jazz number. ‘Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum.’

  ‘He sure did!’ I say, nodding towards the stetson where I laid the notes. I’m euphoric somehow. So happy to be somewhere new. Driving again, doing ordinary things. Maureen laughs.

  I find myself smiling widely. The boy sings in the same mild way, with the same absence of flourish, but in its place he offers plainness, precision. Yes, I love his singing. It’s joyous. I’m tapping my fingers on the table. Fantastic. Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum. Isn’t that a Frank Sinatra number? Tum tum ta-dum ta-dum ta-dum ti-ta-ta-duum. Maureen gives me another funny look, and then returns my smile. That was a bit random, as Alice would say. Yes, but, poppet, at the danger of sounding corny, you must admit: I do have so much to celebrate.

  After the café, I go to a cash machine, and Maureen waits while I get more money out. The sale of a two-bedroomed flat in Highgate makes a balance in there of a ridiculous sum. You could buy a six-bedroom house in St Ives for less, I notice, after staring in a few estate agents’ windows.

  We buy the forks, knives, plates from a small department store. Maureen makes small talk about her girls, her plans for Christmas (I notice that no man is included in these, no boyfriend or partner or ex-husband) and while she chats we wander down towards a river, pass a Methodist chapel in a disgusting, shit-coloured stone. Opposite is a low stone building. It’s some kind of local museum and Maureen suggests we go inside. It’s free, she says.

  We enter via a little courtyard garden, the wintry trees decorated with children’s drawings of snowmen and Santa Claus.

  The usual flickering yellow light; glass boxes full of bones; damp smell; lumpen plastic shark hanging from the ceiling. Fading leaflets, closed blinds and no visitors. History. About as dusty and foreign as it’s possible to make it. Maureen points out a framed newspaper piece about John Bellingham, pinned to a wall in a windowless ante-room with other newspapers and a few dark oil paintings. It looks as unappealing as any museum display could ever hope to be.

  ‘Assassinated the prime minister? I never knew we had a British prime minister who got assassinated!’ Maureen says, diligently reading the notes.

  ‘Yes. Spencer Perceval, wasn’t it? In 1812. Bellingham was a nutcase. He meant to shoot someone else, I think, some ambassador he had a beef with because he said he had been unjustly imprisoned and they owed him. I didn’t know he was from round here.’

  Bellingham was from
St Neots, the newspaper report says. I read the display. He was hanged.

  ‘There was a buzz at the time by some of the crowd to cheer him but it was a far greater number who called: Silence.’ And some Frenchman in another document suggests: ‘Farewell, Bellingham, you have taught ministers that they should do justice, and grant audience when it is asked of them.’

  ‘They’re a rebellious lot round here, aren’t they?’ I say. Maureen agrees with me. It’s a noted Fen trait.

  ‘Depressing, isn’t it,’ Maureen says, back in the car, ‘how they suck all the life out of history? No wonder kids hate it.’

  I mumble something in defence of history. In defence of teachers.

  ‘Yeah, but good teachers are like hen’s teeth,’ Maureen says. ‘Each school gets only one, if they’re lucky. I don’t know who it might be at Cassie’s school.’

  ‘Was she – is your daughter at this same school as the – as this boy Drew?’

  Maureen gives me that look again. The one that says I’ve transgressed. But after a pause she says:

  ‘No, Drew went to the other local school. But he was expelled. I probably shouldn’t tell you this. But there was – a lot of gossip about it. He ended up at the Pupil Referral Unit in Littleport – that’s what happens when kids are excluded. Something happened. Littleport’s a small place. At his funeral—’

  ‘You went to his funeral?’

  ‘Of course. In my role as support to the donor family—’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m getting tired of keeping secrets.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘You did ask . . .’

  ‘Yes. I did indeed.’

  And unbidden, it all comes to me now: a funeral. A modest turnout, a modern church, small, one of those buildings lacking in sacredness; that feels like a village hall, that doubles up for jumble sales and tombolas. More than the usual amount of young people: girls and boys, friends of his, kids just a bit younger than Alice and Ben. Girls from this Pupil Referral Unit place who look and speak like the physiotherapist at the hospital, girls I’ve learned to think of as ‘Fen girls’ or local, with names like Cassie and Chloe – the names, I dimly realise, of Maureen’s daughters. Plump girls in tracksuits who never wear coats, even in the coldest weather.

  This is how it happens. One thing leads to another. One image, one name, one phrase, tumbles another along, like beads on a necklace. You are not sure if you are dredging them up, or making them: it feels like the same thing, and you know that whatever these details are, they’re it, how it’s done, they’re the story, the truth.

  Now I can smell the place, too. Lilies, of course, waxy and haunting, a jasmine smell. The smell of coffee too – for later – and chemicals used to clean the carpet. The feel of narrow benches under the buttocks. Running your hand underneath and feeling the scratches under your fingers, someone else’s graffiti. And the sounds. Coughing and shuffling, the odd stifled burp. Papers rustling as the hymns are announced. What would he have, on the order of service, a boy like Drew? ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’, perhaps? No. Some verses. A prayer. To give and not to count the cost. That’s what he did, didn’t he? And at that line, murmured softly by the elderly vicar, the family vicar, the same one who did her husband’s funeral, and her son’s christening, this Ruth Beamish, dark, vivid, heaves into view and turns her long sharp gaze on me: you, she says. That’s all. She looks at me. She has dark eyes and she looks a little like my own mother, she’s a woman of uncommon beauty, she throws her gaze the way a fisherman throws his hook. I’m sorry, I say. Or: What can I do?

  ‘A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh . . .’

  Ezekiel. Chapter thirty-six. ‘And I will give you a heart of flesh.’ Funny how I remember that, but I just do.

  I raise the blind to a misty morning and know that today is the day I’m going to re-read the letter from Ruth Beamish. I tell myself I’m not interested but I’ve nothing else to do and, apart from a solicitor’s letter to deal with, nothing to occupy me. After all, I’m just checking the address: Black Drove, Littleport. It’s too soon to see if I can visit this woman, satisfy my curiosity a little more – Maureen’s right, that would be insensitive – but no harm just in looking at where it is, now, is there? I get the map from the back of the car, venturing out in the cold in my pyjama bottoms and socks. I’ll have to change them, they’re so wet. Returning to my bedroom I pull on pants, T-shirt, jeans – I pull the belt tight, I’ve lost weight – but in fact before I know it I’m outside, locking up the flat, punching a postcode into the satnav and starting up the car.

  On the back seat I notice the book that Maureen gave me and I decide to take it out, and leave it in the flat. Then I start up the car again.

  But I’m soon frustrated. The day is so foggy it’s treacherous and there’s nothing of the landscape to see. Pointing the nose of the car down the long empty roads is like staring into a deep well with white smoke billowing up towards you and trying to see the bottom. And then the sudden rearing of two yellow headlights like the glinting eyes of an animal. I give up, drive back. My first drive on my own since the op. Probably better if I come back from it in one piece.

  And then a funny thought forms: better for whom?

  The answer comes back: this Beamish woman. Better for her, perhaps. That I treat her son’s gift with respect. Perhaps that can be a small comfort to me. It’s too soon to say. Her first Christmas without her son. I can’t think about that. I can’t imagine that.

  My first Christmas without Cushie. I got drunk. Eleven years old and home from school for the holidays and I found my Dad’s whisky bottle in a cupboard and since it tasted disgusting and Dad had forgotten about all essentials like tangerines in red string and a Christmas tree with an angel on top and ginger wine and a brandy-soaked cake and cards strung up on little pegs, I poured the whisky into a mug with lime cordial and that seemed to do the trick, I could slug it down in one. And then – this bit I had to be told about, later – I apparently went into a bakery in Chester-le-Street to buy a Christmas cake and said to the woman who wrapped it up for me: Will you be my mam? I was brought back home in a police car and was sick on the front steps, while every Christmas-lit window in the neighbourhood twitched its net curtains as one.

  ‘This isn’t the flipping exchange department in Marks and Spencer,’ the woman had said.

  Dad promised the policeman he’d ‘give the lad a good talking-to; or, better still, a jolly good hiding’. He never did. I’d been a weekly boarder; he said I could change to day boarding. He made that concession. The Grandstand-theme-tuned Saturdays continued: frankfurter sausages out of a can. Him on the sofa, me on Cushie’s armchair, the smell of unwashed socks and cigarettes. Later we progressed to watching the snooker: the soft clack of the ball against the cue, those long silences when someone walked around the table, looked at it from another angle, walked around it again, stuck their bum in the air. We both preferred the safety play of the clipped Steve Davis to the brilliant mayhem of a player like Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins. ‘He’ll press the self-destruct button one day, you’ll see,’ Dad liked to say. We disapproved of Higgins. The passion, the risk-taking. The naked desire. Nothing held back at all.

  He was right about Higgins, though it took a while. He died last year of throat cancer, I think. Same disease that took Dad, though Dad went sooner in the end, for all his conserving. Fifty years old, the same age as I am now.

  Somewhere on a slip of paper I have Maureen’s mobile number. She gave me it when we arranged our trip to St Ives, in case she was late, she said, or got delayed. I dial it now and she picks up almost immediately. I ask her if she would like to come to dinner sometime, try out the new cutlery. Maybe in the New Year, when this malarkey with my family is over. It will have to be something simple, I say, like pasta: I’ve got limited pans and kitchen stuff. I hope you like pasta, I say.

  ‘I can bring a colander,’ M
aureen replies.

  Part Four

  Nobody ever called me Andrew. I was Drew Beamish, the first Drew in a long line of Williams, like our ancestors, or Billys, like my dad, and somewhere along the line our family name Beamiss got an ‘h’ where that last ‘s’ should be. Yes, I knew about the rioters, I loved hearing about Willie Beamiss. We learned it all in Reception, along with Cromwell and Hereward. I was in Hereward, that was our team. Mum was the busy type. Hyper, you know: in and out like a dog at a fair. But I had a strong personality, too, as Beamish as the days when the Soham mere was forming, she said. The first words I spoke made Mum laugh: I would point my finger at whatever caught my eye and shout: mine!

  I was born at the Hinchingbrooke, Huntingdon. Mum told me it was an easy labour: she bloody nearly popped me in the car. The old boy – my dad – would have been driving: one hand on Mum’s arm, trying to keep her calm, and her squirming and clawing and squealing at the window like a cat trying to escape its basket. He should have been at work, a busy time a late harvest. October 24th 1995. They didn’t get paternity leave, farm labourers, so it was a stolen day, and would have to be made up later. I was their first baby. They’d been married a bare two months.

  Mum had already been on the whist drive with Dad before they married, as the old boys say round here. Dad was thin as a yard of pump water in photographs from those days. I never remember him like that. Solid, he was, by the time I remember him. Secure. Safe. Drove a tractor and moved hay bales around. Every day of his working life; he loved it. If Mum ever started up with: ‘The way they treat you,’ he would just laugh and ruffle her hair and call her his little firebrand. Was he a lily-liver then, my dad, too easygoing for his own good? No, he was on a slow fuse, that’s all. He was fair. He thought the best of people. Soft-hearted, you might say. Kind. That’s not a crime, is it? Mum was the clever one – top of her class, she told me. Mum liked taking tests, I knew that much; always trying to prove something, she was.