I Am Watching You(64)

Henry is standing, hands on both hips, crippled by his own turbulent and twisted emotions. Fear. Guilt. Shame. You disgust me. That awful image on the television, which in the end he had to turn away from. That crazy lunatic with a gun to his daughter’s head. All he could think of in that moment was of his own shotgun, which the police have confiscated. Of wanting it back. To point and aim. To shoot him. Karl. Dead. There. Take that. In the chest. In the head.

He paces as Cathy soothes his wife and keeps looking up at him for direction.

‘I don’t want a doctor. I don’t want a sedative. I need to know what’s happening. Oh my God. My baby . . . my poor baby.’ Barbara’s voice is rising again and Cathy is shushing her, telling her to breathe calmly. To take long, slow breaths.

‘She has sleeping tablets but she doesn’t like taking those.’ Henry feels his lip trembling as he watches his wife’s shoulders heaving with the strain of trying to maintain control.

‘I really think you should lie down for a bit, Barbara. Upstairs. We’ll bring you any news. As soon as we hear anything at all.’ Cathy is still stroking Barbara’s back. ‘Are you sure you don’t want the doctor?’

Barbara looks around the room then, as if not seeing what is in front of her. ‘No doctor. I want to be in Anna’s room. I’ll lie down in Anna’s room.’ She gets up with an odd and worrying look on her face, trance-like, at this new purpose.

‘Get Jenny to go with her.’ Cathy is directing this at Henry, her eyes wide with concern. Henry, meantime, is helpless. Pacing. Not quite processing the information. ‘Get your daughter to go upstairs. Sit with Barbara. She mustn’t be on her own.’

Cathy’s mobile is ringing once more, and Henry again feels the shudder that coursed through him when he first saw the picture on the television. Cathy says she must take the call, and so Henry moves back into the sitting room to tell Jenny to go upstairs, please, to help her mother.

Tim stands, clearly wondering what he should do. The television is now muted but the picture is of sports coverage. Henry feels a punch of outrage that the world is moving on already. Less than half an hour since that maniac stood his daughter by the window, gun to her golden hair, and the world has moved on to the football.

‘I really think you’d better go, Tim. Sorry. But it’s all just too much for us.’

Tim just nods, white and shaken, grabbing his coat from the back of the sofa. Henry hears the click of the front door as Tim leaves at last, then moves back into the kitchen, trying to listen in on Cathy’s call. She has gone through to the boot room and closed the door. Infuriating. Her voice is muted by the thick oak door.

Sammy has taken the opportunity to sneak through from the boot room, and sits now at Henry’s feet, eyes pleading for permission to stay with him in the kitchen. Henry looks at his dog. The glint of amber in his dark eyes. The loyalty. The concern, picking up the tension in the room. He is remembering the puppy on the front lawn, yapping and bouncing to and fro as Anna completed cartwheel after cartwheel on the grass. Look, Daddy. I can do three in a row . . .

Henry moves even closer, leaning right by the boot room door, but it is hopeless; he still cannot hear. Cathy is whispering. The desperation to know what is going on burns in Henry’s chest like a tearing of the flesh. He closes his eyes. His breath comes loud and laboured through his nose. Sammy is at his side again, nuzzling his leg. Can I stay, master? Henry pats his dog’s head and feels something inside him break as the dog’s tail begins to wag.

Finally, Henry moves over to the scrubbed pine table, on automatic pilot, sitting in the high-backed farmhouse chair vacated by his wife. Only now does he notice that the blue-checked cushion normally on the chair is lying on the floor, just under the table. For a moment he becomes fixated on the cushion, trying to decide if he should pick it up. For a few seconds this decision feels momentous; too difficult to make. And then he is telling himself how stupid and futile and ridiculous it is to even think about this; how little it matters if all the cushions are on the floor. Every stupid thing in this stupid room on the floor. He glances around, clocking all the china, the plates and the jugs and the bowls, and the paraphernalia on the dresser, thinking for a moment that he would like to sweep his arm across it all. Send it all to the floor, to join the cushion. At last there is the familiar squeak of the boot room door, Sammy standing, tail stilled, wondering if he is going to be exiled.

‘That was one of my colleagues.’ Cathy walks across the room to stand alongside him.

‘News from Spain? From the team? What the hell are they waiting for? Don’t they have tear gas or something? When are they going to end this?’ Henry is surprised at his tone, which is more leaden than angry, not quite matching the words. His head feels the same and he lets it hang down again, looking back at the cushion, noticing a small stain in the left upper corner. Ketchup probably. Another image that makes him close his eyes. Anna lathering ketchup on a bacon sandwich.

‘Nothing more from abroad. No. But there is something . . .’ Cathy’s tone is unusually hesitant. A pause.

‘What now? A ransom?’ He has been waiting for this, actually, and opens his eyes. ‘Because if he wants money, we can get money. As much as he wants. We can sell the farm.’ Henry’s mind is suddenly racing, thinking of all the people he might ring. Who might chip in. Lend. Help.

‘No. Not a ransom. That’s not something the team in Spain would want to countenance, anyway . . .’