AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The sign on the render to the side of the door says Sandalwood. The next cottage along says Bay. It’s tiny, two rooms deep. Jen walks a clockwise loop around it. At the back are two old-fashioned sliding patio doors, the glass stained with a blush of moss.
A dark-wood dining table sits in a teal-carpeted room inside, like a doll’s house. No chairs. An empty kitchenette to the left, nothing out on the work surfaces, not even a kettle. She presses her hands around her forehead to lean against the patio doors, peering in, and her fingers come away green. It’s uncared for, but not derelict, maybe recently emptied.
She circles back around to the front. The windows to the living room are mullioned, every other square a distorted circle of blown glass. The living room is preserved, like a museum or a set. A pink three-piece suite sits in the centre, its arms covered in what were once white pieces of lace. A remote control rests on an empty coffee table at a diagonal angle. A full bookcase, nothing she can make out. Two dusty champagne flutes on the top. She’s about to stop looking when she notices something right in the front of her field of vision: the distinctive black velvet back of a double photo frame, right here on the windowsill that’s littered with dead flies on their backs. The distorted glass meant she almost missed it. She shifts against the window to get a closer look.
The air seems to soften and still as it comes into focus, the molecules of the universe settling around her. This is not a wild-goose chase. This is not madness.
Here it is.
It’s a photograph of Kelly – clearly Kelly – that guarded, small smile. He’s much younger, maybe twenty, standing next to somebody else. A man with a shaved head. Their arms around each other. The frame is thick with dust, and she’s a foot away from it, but she can see that they look like each other. Their eyes. And something intangible, too. The way families sometimes bear resemblances that aren’t obvious. Bone structure, the shape of their foreheads, the way they stand: the way they seem to hold potential in their bodies, like runners on the starting blocks.
So who is he? This stranger who looks like her husband? Kelly says he has no living relatives: another thing she’d always believed. She considers this as she stares at the figures in the photograph. It’s one thing to lie about knowing an acquaintance who’s been in prison. It’s quite another to lie about your family, about where you came from.
And why would her husband have a photo of himself if this house is in any way the site of something dodgy? He wouldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t. He’s not stupid.
She walks back to the Uber. He has Kelly’s eyes. He has Todd’s eyes. That’s all she keeps thinking. Three sets of navy-blue eyes. Her husband, her son, and somebody else. Somebody she doesn’t know, won’t be able to find. Even if she breaks in, takes the photograph with her, she won’t have it tomorrow.
Eri is playing some platform game on his phone, holding it horizontal, pressing at the screen as tinny music plays. ‘Sorry,’ he says, then locks the screen. Jen gets in the front, next to him.
‘What …’ he says, in the tone of voice of somebody who feels that they have to ask.
‘I don’t know. It’s empty.’
Jen opens the app and looks back at Find My iPhone. Kelly now looks to be heading to the Lake District, where he always said he was going. But via here, this abandoned house.
‘Who owns it?’
‘Hang on,’ Jen says. You can find out who owns any property from the Land Registry for three pounds.
She downloads the title and scrolls to the registry. The proprietor is the Duchy of Lancaster. That’s the Crown. Unclaimed property reverts to the Crown. The first thing any property lawyer learns. Jen holds her lit-up phone in her lap and stares up at the house.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ Eri says as he winds his window down.
‘Go ahead.’ He rasps at the lighter, two flares, and the car is briefly illuminated. He smokes, and she thinks. His cigarette smells of the past: summer evenings outside wine bars, standing at train stations, the docks at night.
‘We should go,’ Jen says.
‘Will you confront him?’ Eri says, his cheekbones jutting out as he sucks on the cigarette.
‘No. He’ll only lie.’
They travel in silence, Jen thinking about the two men in the photograph. Her husband, and somebody else. Somebody who looks like him. What does it all mean?
When Jen arrives home, two pizza boxes sit on the counter. One empty, one full. Todd had his without her. He must have ordered it himself, alone.
Ryan
Ryan is doing push-ups on a grimy living-room floor. Bits of fluff and dirt keep sticking to his palms. He’s working out for two reasons: one, he can no longer go to the gym, and two, because he cannot, cannot, cannot get the missing baby out of his mind.
The gym aside, Ryan can do hardly anything he usually can. He can’t go home to see his family. He can’t go out with his friends. He can’t even go back to his old place of abode …
It happened so fast.
He moved here last night, to a bedsit in Wallasey. He’s to live here, eat here, sleep here. It’s two rooms: a bathroom and everything else in one space. Pretty economical, really, he thinks. A sofa that folds out into a bed. A row of kitchen cabinets against the far wall. A television, a landline. What more could he need? He doesn’t mind. It’s exciting. And, even better, it’s temporary.
He arrived here at one o’clock in the morning, last night, made sure he wasn’t followed, let himself into the bedsit with the key he was given at the station. As he swung his rucksack off his shoulder and on to the grim carpet, he’d let a breath out and thought: I am here.
Leo had finally spelled it out the other day in the cupboard. ‘We want you to go undercover in this group, Ry, now,’ Leo said. ‘Today.’ He held eye contact, not breaking away for even a millisecond, not blinking, nothing. ‘The legend we set up is … well. It’s you.’
