The True Story of Maddie Bright Read online

  ‘Can I help you?’ I say, in a way that suggests helping is the last thing on my mind. Big brown boots, I notice, and navy work shorts, the ones with hip pockets, a short-sleeved shirt, a pocket there too, a pen clipped to it, Bic, black, the cap on. Building. He looks like a building. A builder, I mean. He looks like a builder.

  ‘I’m Andrew Shaw,’ he says gently. He has a quiet voice you want to hear more of. ‘I’m doing the work next door? I’m here to do the inspection. We spoke on the phone.’ He’s two steps lower, bending his body closer as he looks up at me, nodding.

  ‘Did we now?’ The inspection. Trust the inspection to turn up today, after the news.

  It was not my idea, as I’d said to Ed when he brought in my bin this week. ‘Ed, do you know what they’ve done?’ I said.

  Ed had looked towards the house uphill from mine, not unlike my house, with the sign out front we’d read together, which said its purpose was to give notice of a development application, along with the name and address of someone with whom I could lodge objections. Ed was as close to scowling as Ed ever gets. He’s a sweet boy, so a scowl is not his first favoured facial expression.

  They moved in three months ago, the neighbours, before I broke my leg, and they worried me from the start. He’s a solicitor, he made a point of telling me, in a big city law firm. I don’t remember the name of the firm just now. She was a teacher, she said, as if you can just stop being one, but she was taking time out to raise their children, two noisy beasts, six and eight. I am a teacher, I wanted to say, despite not having been in front of a class for over a decade. I retired—it wasn’t my idea. I’ll always be a teacher.

  Based on my early interactions—you would be forgiven for using the word spoiled in relation to those children—I decided it would be best to discourage early and with firm resolve. I waited until they were playing in their backyard then went out to my own yard and began howling like a wolf—at least that’s what I was trying for—in my singlet and slip. The children looked over, not so much afraid as curious. I redoubled my efforts in an attempt to establish an advantage.

  How was I to know their mother was standing on the back porch out of view? She stepped forward and looked at me, smiled and waved weakly.

  ‘A building inspection will be a big headache for you,’ Ed had said after he’d read the notice, and Ed should know, because before he was fired for drunkenness he used to work on building sites.

  ‘Can they do that, order your house be inspected?’ he asked me then.

  ‘Apparently,’ I said, looking at the notice again for some exit strategy the council hadn’t thought of.

  ‘I can do the inspection,’ Ed said, swaying a little.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ I said. ‘You’re not a builder.’ And you’re drunk most days, I didn’t say, because it wouldn’t change anything if I did.

  ‘S’pose not,’ he said. Ed had been a little drunk that morning, to be honest, and overestimating himself. He’d lost the last job three years before, when someone stole his bag while he was at the pub. Inside was his ticket for the forklift he drove. The next morning, they didn’t let him in at the building site. I pretended to believe the story, knowing full well you only had to look at his poor tortured eyes to know he’d been drinking, was always drinking. You wouldn’t let him within a mile of a forklift if you had any sense.

  Ed had been unemployed ever since he lost that job, sitting on his front steps and drinking. He didn’t go out much, only to take his father, another drinker, to medical appointments in a taxi. His mother had already passed.

  Ed takes my rubbish bin out every week, brings it in after the rubbish man has been. He’s never forgotten, not once in more years than I can recall. That amounts to something in my mind.

  ‘I’m not paying you,’ I say to Andrew Shaw now. I notice my arms are folding themselves, a habit I don’t much like but don’t always have control over.

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ he says. ‘Your neighbours are paying.’ He’s moved up a step now so we are eye to eye, but he’s still leaning towards me in the way some young men lean, disarming rather than threatening.

  ‘Why?’ I say. ‘Are they worried about my safety?’

  He smiles and not sheepishly. He has the loveliest smile, white straight teeth and those eyes you want to look at.

  My neighbours, who are not kind, have ordered an inspection of my house and sent this boy of a builder.

  ‘You know they’ve announced their engagement?’ I say.

  He looks confused then. ‘Simon and Alice?’ Simon and Alice are the neighbours, Simon the lawyer, Alice the teacher, taking time, she said, while the children were small. ‘I think your generation was right,’ she said to me. ‘My grandmother—’ as if I’m old enough to be her grandmother ‘—raised my father and his brothers. I’m going to be there for Atticus and Scout.’ Atticus and Scout! Those are the names of the children, both boys, although Scout was a girl in To Kill a Mockingbird. I wondered if I should tell them. I doubt they’ve read it.

  ‘No!’ I say to Andrew Shaw. ‘Diana Spencer. This morning. She’s going to marry H.R.H. the Prince Charles.’

  ‘Well, I guess you could see that coming,’ Andrew Shaw says.

  ‘Indeed,’ I say. ‘She’s nineteen years old. What do you think of that?’

  He looks unsure. ‘Young?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘Did you see his face?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles.’

  ‘No?’ he says, eyeing me more carefully.

  ‘Good. You seem a nice young man. Don’t be like him.’

  ‘Not much chance,’ Andrew Shaw says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For a start,’ he says, ‘I’m not a prince.’

  ‘Well, I suppose not, but neither is he,’ I say. ‘We live in a world where a dog snatches a baby—’ I bared my teeth ‘—in its jaws.’

  I can see that smile forming at the edges of his eyes. ‘Ayers Rock,’ he says, nodding. ‘The dingo. I saw it on the news last night, the inquest.’ He grins widely. ‘And, yes, it was right after the engagement announcement.’

  We both turn our heads then, because the fledgling crow that’s been making a branch of my front jacaranda its favourite perch has started squawking fit to frighten a cat. ‘Don’t mind him,’ I say to Andrew Shaw, who appears to be looking around for an ambulance. ‘He’s just a stupid baby crow who wants his mother to feed him. He’s been running that routine since the spring. It’s high time you grew up!’ I yell at the bird.

  ‘Oh,’ Andrew Shaw says. ‘He is just a baby. Down feathers.’ He smiles at the bird. I start to think he’s always smiling, odd in a builder, odd in anyone really. ‘Look at that eye.’

  I look at the crow, see what he means; an eye of milky lapis looking not at us but at the future. I’m about to say as much when I realise I can see. Without my glasses, I am seeing. I am seeing Andrew Shaw’s smiling face and the crow’s milky blue eye. I’m blind as a bat without those glasses. Andrew Shaw has been sent by a goodly spirit, I decide, to help me with what’s to happen next, even if what’s to happen next is unclear. A beautiful girl like her; she has no idea what happens next either. But I know. Or I know more than she does.

  Andrew Shaw is a good omen, a sign from the Lord. I’m fairly sure he’s an angel. Or the sun. He has the name of Andrew, the youngest and most favoured apostle. It can’t be a coincidence.

  ‘I think we’re all right,’ he says. ‘You see …’ He looks behind him down my stairs. Two treads have rotted out. When I fell from the roof and onto the steps, the first step gave way. I went over but my leg stayed where it was. It was a bad break, the shinbone exposed, which has turned me vegetarian, the experience of my own meatiness giving me a newfound respect for the meatiness of other creatures.

  The worst part with the broken leg was the awful waiting for someone to notice, and it was Ed who noticed, God bless him, not Alice and the children who left in their Volvo, pretending not to hear my cries.
Ed called the ambulance and brought me whisky to drink until they arrived. I couldn’t abide whisky, I told him, not so early, but would he sit with me? Of course he would, he said, and there we sat, him sipping the whisky. I wish he’d offered sweet tea. But it would never occur to Ed.

  Blessed are the poor, Jesus said, and he meant the alcoholics.

  ‘I just need to get my glasses,’ I say to Andrew Shaw now.

  ‘You’re wearing them,’ he says, pointing to the bridge of his own nose.

  I put my hand to my face. He’s right. Not so spiritual then. He smiles again. Lovely all the same. An angel, I am almost certain.

  TWO

  London, 1997

  VICTORIA BYRD EMERGED FROM THE TUBE STATION INTO Oxford Street, feeling silly in a mac, the day much brighter than first promised. She’d woken late and a glance at the sky registered the kind of clouds that might give forth, but hadn’t.

  If we’d been a crow and asked Victoria, as she’d thrust her blonde curls out the kitchen window of her Brockley flat, was there anything unusual about that particular morning, she’d only have said she’d overslept, which was out of character. Also that a crow was asking questions. Perhaps the fight last night was unusual, although perhaps not, and Victoria wouldn’t mention it anyway. And there were no photographers down in the street. That was definitely unusual now.

  Ben had been celebrating last night. They’d finished the London exterior scenes and that was cause enough. He’d opened a bottle of champagne before dinner, another with dinner, Chinese takeaway because neither of them felt like cooking. Victoria couldn’t have drunk more than two glasses, but now she wondered if the edge of a hangover was circling her eyes, flattening the world while simultaneously throwing it off kilter. The world was definitely off kilter this morning. Ben was happy at the start, smiled his beautiful smile, the one that won her over in the first place, that won everyone over. Yet she’d been unaccountably nervous when he’d opened the second bottle.

  ‘It’s no big deal, Tori,’ he’d said. ‘We can live a little.’ He was still smiling then.

  Victoria had profiled Ben Winter when Zombie Deader came out in London last year, his third film as the action hero professor Jack Kessler. Now he’d finished Zombie Armageddon, or Zomb-arm as he called it in the interview, as if Armageddon were a notion that lent itself to abbreviation. So it’s a quadrilogy, he said, a term she could have worked out the meaning of if she didn’t know it already, she assured him. Zomb-arm was his first film as director, he told her. She already knew that too.

  ‘It’s not nothing to save the world, Victoria,’ he’d said. He waggled a finger so she’d look up from her notebook. She hadn’t known at first if he was joking. She’d thought about that finger waggle at various moments since.

  In fact, he’d annoyed Victoria, confidence bordering on brashness, as if he owned the entire world, but she covered her own feelings to draw him out and found something she took for depth of character as the interview went on.

  ‘You seem unimpressed by me,’ he said after half an hour, tilting his head in a way she found attractive even as she wanted to dislike him.

  ‘You make zombie films,’ she said, surprising herself with her frankness.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re wonderful films, and my friend’s son adores you, but I’m not sure I’m your demographic.’

  ‘Money and power?’

  ‘I imagine you have those.’

  ‘But they don’t impress you, Victoria.’ He said her name softly. She noted that for the article, his voice somewhat at odds with the almost superhuman nature of the character he played and the initial brashness she’d disliked.

  ‘Why do you want to impress me?’ she asked, flirting a little. He was beautiful. The notion he was interested in Victoria’s view was terribly flattering, she admitted to her friend Claire afterwards. Claire didn’t always like the men Victoria dated, but she’d like Ben Winter, Victoria said. ‘I’ve seen his picture on the side of the bus,’ Claire said. ‘Quite the yummy.’

  ‘I want to impress everybody,’ Quite-the-yummy said, rubbing his thumb along the tops of his fingernails, as if he’d just had a manicure and was admiring the work. He probably had. He probably was. ‘Doesn’t everybody want to impress everybody?’

  And it was this, which she took for self-reflection, that she’d liked.

  ‘No’, she said. ‘I don’t.’ She didn’t put this exchange in the magazine piece, but when she transcribed the interview, she listened to it three times.

  ‘Does it surprise you that I could believe that?’ he said. He had a nice grin that came on suddenly, openmouthed, one or two crooked teeth. Each time she’d listened, she remembered the grin.

  His publicist was giving her the look publicists give to suggest a writer is on thin ice, ice about to give way under the weight of the question. Oh God, he was handsome.

  She couldn’t imagine his confidence in an English film star, not even back in the days when England had an empire to brag about. She continued to find it annoying, but also now a little thrilling.

  He’d phoned that afternoon to ask her to dinner that night, fully expecting she’d have no plans, which she didn’t.

  Ben had left before dawn. He’d said the night before that they were driving down to Bath to start filming in the ruins. He was wearing dark blue jeans, brown suede boots and a white t-shirt that showed the lean muscle he’d worked on for the role he was playing. His beauty always seemed so effortless. She’d looked at him and thought how lucky she was.

  She’d found a croissant from the Brockley baker on the bench in the kitchen just before she’d left the flat. Ben must have asked the driver to take him down there and then brought it back and put it on the little plate for her. Next to the croissant was a single rose, picked from Victoria’s garden. Oh, she said, experiencing a feeling that made her heart ache. Oh. It was his way of saying sorry. She peered out the window again. Still no photographers. At least she could go out without being pursued. She’d noticed the baby crow in the front garden as she walked down the path. She was taking her time, despite being late, luxuriating in how her life used to be when she didn’t have to run the gauntlet of photographers in the mornings. And there it was, the baby crow, in the elm that grew into the rock wall, in a low branch, its mother further up in the tree and eyeing Victoria suspiciously. ‘Watch out for the cat,’ Victoria said as she closed the gate. Not that Martha, Victoria’s cat, could catch a bird if her life depended on it.

  She’d nibbled the croissant on the way to the train station, throwing most of it in the rubbish. Not the right food at seven am, she decided. Seven thirty, she corrected herself. She would have grabbed a coffee at Brown’s but the queue was out the door. If she hadn’t been running late, she might have read the paper while she waited. Rushing, she missed the headlines at Waterloo, and the taxi driver—she’d caught a cab at Oxford Street instead of walking—was listening to a cassette tape—Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’—rather than the radio. When he asked where she was going and she told him Knight News, he’d said, ‘Of course. I expect they’ll be needing all hands.’ She hadn’t enquired why; it was clearly something she should already know, and she didn’t feel like being informed of the news by a London cabbie. Victoria was supposed to inform the cabbie of the news.

  By the time she walked in through the big glass doors of Knight News it had just gone eight. At the desk she flashed her ID and didn’t stop to talk to Mac on security as she normally might have. Mac smiled all the same.

  ‘Morning, Miss Byrd,’ he said politely. Mac always called her Miss Byrd, no matter how many times she told him it was Victoria, then, after Ben, Tori.

  Knight News occupied two seven-storey terraces on Norfolk Square, a glass atrium joining the two buildings across a narrow laneway. There were risk-your-life bridges on level three, where The Eye newspaper crossed both buildings, and on level five, where Vicious, the monthly magazine Victoria wrote for, did the same. No one except Mac kn
ew that if Victoria had to go from one building to the other, she never used the walk bridge. She took the elevator down to the ground floor and went up in the elevator on the other side of the atrium, passing Mac each time, which was how she’d come to know him so well.

  Mac had four kids who’d all studied at the university, he’d told Victoria with considerable pride, showing her a photograph of each of them over several weeks as she walked between elevators. He and his family had come from Nigeria, where the future was much harder, he said.

  Here was the face of social change, Victoria would have written, if she’d done a profile on Mac, one reason New Labour was so important, a living example of why Blair’s free tertiary education policy—the one Victoria’s father had authored—was so necessary. She’d write it without ever seeming patronising. She’d mention her father’s name proudly, Michael Byrd, the new prime minister’s education adviser and friend.

  They put on security a year ago, after the IRA Docklands bombing. Now it was standard for news organisations. A target, that’s what the two detectives from Scotland Yard said when they visited afterwards. Media will be a target. Victoria wasn’t in the meeting, but Ewan was. Liars, he said later. She worried Ewan might actually side with the IRA, given a choice. You could never tell which way he’d blow on some issues. But ever since Mountbatten in 1979—fishing trip, young children, the bomb directly under an old man’s fishing chair—you couldn’t side with the IRA publicly. You’d be lynched.

  Victoria emerged from the lift on the fifth floor and saw, through the glass doors, more people than she’d ever seen in the magazine bullpen, staring up at the few screens mounted on the walls while talking on phones. Large plate-glass windows flooded the space with London’s soft summer light. They’d had an architect in when Harry Knight bought the buildings for his empire, and it showed. The light! The light! Ewan used to say, trying, unsuccessfully, to imitate the architect, who did talk about light more than the average person.