Chapter Twenty-Five
‘We just heard a terrible howl.’
Stevie lived with her parents, Moira and Theo.
Kim wanted to say ‘a vicar and his wife’, but Moira was so dominant and Theo so shrunken that the more appropriate description would be ‘a vicar’s wife and her husband’.
Drab and damp, grey at the gills, the vicarage was lumpen, like the deliberately inconspicuous concrete outpost of an East German police station.
The colourless bricks were speckled black as if hot tar had been flicked at them.
The church had long since sold the original vicarage as a second home.
Still, Moira and Theo had been loving (almost obsessively so) to their adopted daughter.
It was the vicar who had opened the door and spoken, before Kim had said anything. ‘She must have got a message upstairs.’
Moira and Theo were both grey-faced.
Moira said, ‘After she howled, I knocked on the door and got a volley of—’
‘Foul abuse,’ the vicar put in. ‘She shouted about her wedding. There were more f-words than I could count.’ He grimaced.
‘She shouted, “How can I get married on Saturday if they put me in isolation?” She was railing.’ He pulled a strange expression, showing the overlapping greys of bad teeth, leaning at angles over his lower lip like seasick sailors in a rescue dinghy.
Moira also grimaced with eyebrows raised, tilting her head. The two of them stepped back from the front door.
‘We’ve seen the news. They say radiation.’
Walking towards the living room, Theo, in his thin, reedy voice, a voice that sounded as if it was choked by the dog collar on his narrow neck, said over his shoulder: ‘When will we find out exactly what happened in that pizza place? She shouldn’t have run in, should she?’
Kim thought: What I love about Stevie is that she is the one person who will always run in.
‘Why doesn’t our daughter think?’
She doesn’t think, she feels.
They put the TV on. Pictures showed an older woman, face streaked with rust-coloured trails from cigarettes or chemicals.
Her hair was held tightly at the back with a yellow ribbon and she was captioned PROF FLO VEITCH.
The huge inflated suit she had worn was now deflated and hung off her like a wrinkled prune.
She was holding what looked like a lump of dark green metal and spoke in front of a small portico.
‘This isn’t up to the job, a Geiger counter from the Seventies, but thank God I had it.
’ When she lifted it towards the camera, they saw it had an L-shaped handle, like a Victorian clothes iron.
A cutaway showed the top side, where a dial, a light and a circular meter with a needle were riveted into the metal surface.
The reporter said something off-mic. ‘Yes!’ Flo Veitch answered. ‘This thing went completely crazy.’
It was obviously a packaged report, because Flo Veitch’s remarks were sliced short and the viewpoint now switched to the professor’s garden, where six people in hazmat suits lifted a huge paving stone off the top of the hole and then used long pincers to access something inside it.
The object was dropped into what looked like an enormous foil bin bag.
The shot cut back to Veitch. ‘Are you aware that the head of police in Devon is having to answer questions about how you came to be asked to do this?’
‘No comment,’ said the professor. ‘I do science not politics.’ She shook her hair like a horse at pasture.
‘What do you say about the report that the head of Devon Police used a set of chopsticks to move this material?’
‘No comment.’ A big gappy smile from the professor, showing yellowed teeth, one missing on the right-hand side.
Now the report cut to some archive footage of a short policewoman with a square face, walking along a passing-out parade of new recruits, all standing to attention. ‘Devon Police Acting Chief Constable Jane Thorne is under pressure because—’
‘Turn it off.’
Moira and Theo froze.
Kim turned. Stevie was in the doorway.
They all stood in silence for a moment. In her mind, Kim begged Theo and Moira not to say the obvious: Should you be down here, darling, if you’re isolating? But it was Stevie who spoke first.
‘I was sent a number to call.’ She pushed her mobile towards them. ‘It says “Urgent and Personal, from London Metropolitan Police.” I rang and heard a message and I’m sorry, I didn’t take it well. Can you listen again with me, Kim?’
‘Let me see that,’ said Kim.
‘I don’t see how looking at the message helps, considering I just read it out, you bell-end.’
Kim laughed – ah, a precious glimpse of the normal Stevie! – but her parents gasped in shock at the language.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Kim, ‘I love your daughter dearly. I probably don’t get called a bell-end enough. Stevie, let’s go upstairs.’
‘Just keep a little distance. I’m serious.’
Kim followed several steps behind. The gap made the two women almost the same height.
In her bedroom, Stevie opened the window, as if that would send any radiation out with the breeze.
It was dark outside, a summer’s night. Kim sat at the other side of the room in the only armchair, beginning to think that this might be a bad idea.
She had no idea whether radiation on one person could move to another and stick, though they had spent enough time together squeezed into her little sports car that the point was probably moot.
The room was small. Stevie sat cross-legged, at a diagonal.
At least they were in the furthest corners.
‘Am I glowing? Am I fucking glowing?’
‘Put the light out and I’ll take a look.’
To Kim’s surprise, Stevie took the joke seriously and did it. They sat in darkness.
‘You are not glowing.’
‘Listen to this,’ said Stevie. In the darkness she rang the number the police had sent her, and replayed the message on speaker.
This is an AI-recorded message for Stevie Mason.
This is the Metropolitan Police. You may have been affected by the presence of radioactive material at Toppings Pizza Restaurant on 16 May.
You are required to remain isolated pending further advice.
You may not socialize, other than with individuals who are also isolating.
It is better to remain at home. Do not use public spaces, shops or public transport.
If you live alone, please call the number at the end of this message for help with daily necessities.
They listened to the number and sat in the dark. ‘So that’s it for the wedding,’ Stevie said glumly.
‘Is that so bad?’ asked Kim gently. ‘Maybe you could do with a bit more thinking time before jumping into this?’
Stevie spoke softly in return. ‘When I told you about Roddy, I saw you hiding within yourself. I don’t know you well, Kim. I hope one day we do become, I don’t know, besties or whatever, at least mates. But I saw you hated him.’
‘I didn’t hate him!’ Kim protested. ‘But … I thought he was trying to change you, and I don’t want you to change.
’ Stevie’s steady gaze gave her permission to say more.
‘Stevie, I was in a bad marriage. It was a shocker. I got black eyes and broken ribs and I learnt how to brace my shoulders so it hurt less when I got pushed into a wall. He always chose the same bit of wall, by the way. But that wasn’t even the most hurtful thing.
What hurt me was constantly being told I was a piece of shit.
Boobs too small, feet too big, can’t drive a car, having to tell him how I’m voting—’
‘It sounds like living in Saudi Arabia.’
‘That’s it! That’s what it was!’
‘Although I don’t think they have a problem with boob size over there.’
When they had finished laughing idiotically, laughing in the dark like naughty schoolgirls in a school dorm, Kim knew she had complete permission to speak.
‘That marriage ended for reasons you may not know. It didn’t end because I walked out. I’m a successful businesswoman, but I stayed because I couldn’t see the bottom line in my own life – a guy was screwing me up bigtime.’
Outside, the Sidmouth wind picked up, rattling the open window as if heading for Stevie to hear the response Kim wanted.
‘When we met at Nine Chairs and you told us you were marrying Roddy, he turned up and you became … someone who wasn’t you. I saw a little bit of me in you. The quietened, married me. “Quietened” – such a good word for what happens to a victim.’
‘Victim—?’
Kim was in full flow now, she was going all in, and Stevie’s barked objection would not stop her. ‘I wasn’t myself in my marriage. I want you to be yourself! And I know this will sound, Stevie, well, you’d probably say “weird as fuck”, but were you thinking you were lucky he fancied you?’
There was a long pause, so long that Kim wondered if she’d gone too far.
‘Yes,’ Stevie croaked at last. ‘Yes, I did feel fucking lucky. I wear an eyepatch, I have these burns, there’s my scoliosis that makes me five foot two with a spine like a letter “S”. And I can’t control my fucking gob. So yes, I’d say I’m lucky that I caught a di— a guy.’
‘Well, you’re wrong. He’s the one who’s “fucking lucky” – lucky to have a diamond like you. Lucky to have a princess who is going to be a queen one day. And if he can’t see his luck, if you can’t get married at the weekend—’
‘I howled when they told me.’
‘I know. Your mum said. But maybe this buys you some breathing space.’
‘And maybe you should mind your own business.’
‘And maybe I should go.’
A pause. In the darkness, Stevie began to cry.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You’re my only friend.’