The Black Country E-Book

Kerry Hadley-Pryce

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Christmas 2015: The top 10 debut fiction books, The Independent Maddie and Harry: she's an estate agent, he's a teacher. They'll say they live in the Black Country. They'll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they'd killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they'll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we'll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it's darker than it should be.

Leseprobe

Maddie and Harry: she’s an estate agent, he’s a teacher. They’ll say they live in the Black Country. They’ll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they’d killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they’ll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we’ll judge them. We’ll judge Harry’s fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie’s previous life. We’ll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it’s darker than it should be.

Praise for The Black Country

‘Begs to be read in one go, tugging the reader onwards through its intense and strangely intimate world.’ ALISON MOORE

‘Obliquely yet menacingly told, increasingly horrific, and full of humour as dark as its title.’ M JOHN HARRISON

‘This is an addictive book that deserves to be up there with the likes of Gone Girl and Girl On The Train it’s as good, if not better, than both. A dark and unsettling read that leaves you feeling like a voyeur of a car crash relationship (where you wouldn’t look away even if you could), I really enjoyed it – 9/10 stars.’ ANDREW ANGEL, Ebookwyrm’s Book Reviews

‘A couple whose uneasy relationship seems as unreliable as that in Gone Girl are driving home, a little the worse for drink, when they accidentally knock someone over, someone they know – but they choose to drive quickly on. The story, and their relationship, becomes increasingly bizarre …’ CrimeTime

The Black Country

KERRY HADLEY-PRYCE was born in Wordsley, in the West Midlands, in 1960. She worked nights in a Wolverhampton petrol station before becoming a secondary school teacher. She wrote The Black Country whilst studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at MMU, for which she gained a distinction and was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for outstanding achievement 2013–14. She lives in the Black Country.

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Copyright © Kerry Hadley-Pryce,2015

The right ofKerry Hadley-Pryceto be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2015

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-78463-050-8 electronic

Inhalt

The Black Country

The Black Country

LET’S BE CLEARabout something from the off: small cats share the same instincts as large cats. The same impulses. I read that somewhere. And I’m sure of it now. Absolutely sure. It’s depressing. And, before we start, it’s lies that kill relationships, not affairs. That’s important. And it’s important that all these bits and pieces of lies are out in the open. It is. We need to be clear on this. And we just have to hope it’s enough.

Maddie’s bits and pieces were all over the floor. The upturned bedside table, the unmade bed, the memory of last night. There it all was. This is what Harry says. Picture it. Maddie Harper’s bits and pieces of lies all over the floor.

‘Maddie,’ Harry would have said, hopeful she might be there somewhere.

He would have opened the curtains, Harry would, he would have seen that outside it had stopped snowing, but the sky sagged grey. To him, the street might have seemed dead. He would, most likely, have seen his footprints crunched into the snow; uneven marks approaching round the corner, past the neighbours’ houses, past the lamp post, across the garden, right up to the door. But from his high angle he would certainly have been able to see another, smaller set of footprints leaving the house and, at the kerbside, where Maddie’s car should have been, a shaded, snowless rectangle, and tyre marks where she’d driven away.

At first, he says he thought she’d left him, again. Says he couldn’t help himself. This was always his first thought. His first fear. He says he tried to stop himself from reliving that moment fifteen or so years back when he’d come home and she wasn’t there. She’d gone, left him. He’s insecure, Harry Logue is. That’s one of his problems. So, when he came home and her bits and pieces were all over the place, he says the thought crossed his mind that she might have found out about what he’d done, that she’d put two and two together. All that guilt. And what was going on in his head – all his thoughts, guilty thoughts, bouncing around his head like a fly against a light-bulb. All those thoughts mixing up and coming to the conclusion that she might have left him, again, like she did before.

But it wasn’t about that, or Jonathan any more, this was about Harry, and he thought she’d gone.

And who could blame her really?

When he looked, though, he could see their suitcases were still balanced on top of the wardrobe and her shoes were still piled in the corner of the room. When he opened a drawer, he says it was still brimming with her underwear. He says he pulled out a pair of her knickers and felt the material – not silk but something like it – and brushed it against his lips, feeling it catch on winter-dried skin. He remembers reaching into his back pocket, getting his mobile phone out, calling her. She still has the message he left on her answerphone, his voice stringy, forced: ‘Hi, Maddie, it’s me. Where are you? Come home. I’m home now. We’ll talk. I want to talk, I do. We can sort it all out. Come home. I’m here now. Just come home.’

He says he sat down on the bed – their bed – and the screen of his mobile phone faded to black in his hand.

And he would have sat and waited, praying, in his own way, that she would come back.

But Maddie was with me. Where else would she be?

Looking back on it all, we might wonder where the beginning is. The beginning of all of this. It might be difficult to see. But for Harry, it’s a funeral. Gerald somebody. His funeral. And Harry might be right. This Gerald person did have a part to play in all this. If it wasn’t for him, after all, they’d never have met.

So this funeral is the beginning for Harry. It’s apt.

He says both he and Maddie had taken the afternoon off work to attend the service. She, probably anxious not to be late, worried about appearing too jovial. She might have just tied up the sale of a house she’d been working on for too long in the estate agency where she’d worked for a couple of years. She was probably careful to have removed her blue nail polish and red lipstick. He, unnerved by funerals, always anxious about saying the wrong thing, amazed he’d managed to get cover for his lessons at the secondary school he’d taught at for ever. Both, he says, arrived on time, but separately. She might have greeted him by straightening his tie (borrowed), he might have made a weak attempt to kiss her (failed, but no matter) and there, just right there, was a glimpse of a deepening sense of something – disappointment or something more – between them. Disappointment, that’s what Harry says now.

According to Maddie, it rained. Great big drops. ‘Wet rain’ she calls it. Rain that blurs things. Rain that makes you run. So they say they ran. They ran into the little church and remember sketchy details like the coffin looking too small for a man who’d spent his entire career in the English department at the University of Wolverhampton, where they’d both met him, studied for their degrees. They remember the vicar talking about how there’d never be another man like Gerald. A good man. A kind man. A man who, despite his twenty a day habit didn’t deserve that horrible, protracted, painful death, or, probably, that small, cheap-looking coffin. No flowers. All donations to Cancer Research. Poor Gerald. And so on.

Old Gerald’s widow, Ava or Eva or Vera, probably sat without crying in that painfully, beautifully brave, washed-out way that new widows do. Next to her, according to Harry, a youngish man, a young Gerald – his son – wearing a pink tie, head uptilted, swallowing hard. He has a part to play in all this, if only he knew. And according to Maddie and Harry, there were very few others in that intensely cold church. And there they were, in the midst of death, watching their own breath.

We’ll have to try to forgive the gaps in their memory. We must credit them with a depth of feeling for Gerald. Lovely Gerald who guided them both during their university years, who had mentored them through their dissertations, who kept them on track.

‘Madeleine and Harry,’ he had apparently said to them at their joint tutorials. ‘You just need to apply yourselves. Keep up with your work, attend lectures, stop asking for extensions to assignments. Procrastination is what you seem to have in common. You should both just get on with it. Life’s too short, don’t mess it up.’

And Harry remembers Gerald lighting up another Rothman’s and sending them on their way.

Procrastination. Old Gerald was right. Maddie’s ideas had all been there, they had. But they were buried deep inside her, banging against the confused, directionless energy of her youth. And Harry, wanting to be all authority-intolerant, but usually exhausted with dread that he might have blinked and missed something, in the social sense only of course. Such a long time ago now, getting on for twenty years. And they thought they’d survived the procrastination, thought they’d applied themselves, got on with it.

So there they were, at this funeral, probably with blobs of faded mottled light rippling through orange and green stained glass; pictures of Mary and Jesus deflecting across their faces, not that they would have noticed, celebrating the life of the man who brought them together. Imagine it.

Harry pads out his memory of this day quite a bit. Maybe what he tells us is important. We’ll decide that. He tells of a time during the service when he reached for Maddie’s hand, prompted by what he calls a ‘prickle of a memory’ – Harry’s the type to say things like that – a prickle of a memory of a time when Gerald suggested the two of them work together, help each other out, pool ideas. So they worked together for the first time, reading some book or other. Harry says he wasn’t sure he got it, but Maddie did. Maddie got it, she understood it. If we let her, she’ll go on about how she found it all so brilliant, and Harry, being Harry, sort of fell for her then. That’s what he says. Fell for her as she was talking about this book he didn’t understand. He’ll recall the way the scene had played out all those years ago, the way Maddie yielded to him, the warmth of her, the smell of her, the simplicity and ease of it all, and so the prickle made him reach for her hand, in that church. It was a reaction to that sentimental memory. Typically, for Harry, he says he wanted to touch her right there, at that funeral, just some contact, some connection re-established. But just as he began to reach out, just as his hand shifted towards hers, just at that very second, he says Maddie sneezed. A quiet squeak of a sneeze, stifled well by covering her nose and mouth with both hands. Moment lost. Prickle gone. Maddie maintains she doesn’t remember this, of course, and Harry, well, Harry’s feelings are different.

Outside, he says, rain continued to fall. It fell on the coffin as it was lowered into the ground, it struck the yew trees and skittered off onto the moss below, it dripped down Gerald’s son’s face and it probably seemed to reduce everyone’s life to blurry shapes; imprecise, hazy, diluted.

Maddie says she was relieved when it was over, the funeral that is. She says she was soaked through, glad to be directed to the local pub where there were post-funeral sandwiches, and drinks. Had she been alone, she would certainly have ordered a large glass of red – very large. She would have. She would have drunk the first one quickly, got the taste. The second one she would have savoured for a little longer, but not until the third would she have sat in the corner and enjoyed the relaxation of it. That’s Maddie.

‘Having a drink?’ Harry remembers asking.

Yes, if she had been alone, she would have followed those glasses of red with a large brandy. Maybe two.

‘Orange juice. Thanks,’ she said, but there was an edge to her voice and Harry says he caught it.

‘You sure? You don’t want something else?’

‘No, just orange juice.’

A pause. It would have been one of those irritating ones, like a cat about to pounce.

‘Sure? I mean I don’t mind if you want a drink. I’ll drive, we can leave your car here.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake Harry. Just a bloody orange juice.’ Maddie would have tried to keep her voice low. ‘That’s what I asked for.’

Now, if we’d have been there, if we could have listened carefully, we would have heard the creak and groan of the foundations of their life. Harry heard it – he says he did – but he says he bought her the bloody orange juice without another word and watched her drink it. Every mouthful. And every swallow will have looked sour, toxic. If we suppose he was enjoying her discomfort, we’d be wrong. Fact was he was looking at her but he says he was noticing how her hair hung like damp cardboard that day, framing a square jaw, very white skin. To him, something seemed to have withered her a little, she seemed smaller, scooped-out somehow. She had been the girl who’d cycled everywhere to meet him, who’d sung rugby songs to amuse him, who’d once written a short story for Pulp Erotica and had read it aloud to him. What had happened to her? This is what Harry was thinking.

‘What are you looking at?’ she apparently said, after a moment or two.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

It’s not that Harry is a complete fool. Not at all. Every day, he says he makes an attempt to take hold of his life, even though it’s not the life he planned. He’ll tell us that most of the anxieties he felt as an undergraduate have gone. He’ll try to convince us he’s developed a calmer approach to life, so, rather than grabbing the rhythm of the day and dancing with it, in reality, he usually just avoids facing the music, tries to avoid worrying about what seems to be the hyper-reality of his life: the rude students in the bottom set groups, the constant pressure, the worry of making each day, each child, matter. Being a teacher, he says, has taught him patience, tolerance, anxiety management. He says his father, a GP, always said, ‘Take three paracetamol to lift depression.’ And some mornings – most mornings – he does just that. Even now, after all that has happened, he says he’ll try to get better. Try to be a better person.

Don’t be fooled by him though. He, like us, finds ways with which to release his various tensions. He does.

When Maddie looks back at the day of Gerald’s funeral, she’ll remember most clearly the pub, its smells and sounds of wine and men. She’ll remember the imprint of working men still visible in every speck of grime in that pub. She’d been there before, in this place, without Harry, many times. She says she thought the barman recognised her but she didn’t acknowledge him, feigning ignorance – something she’s good at. She says she felt a sudden twinge of something and might have said something like, ‘Why do I always forget my umbrella?’ and surprised herself with her own inanity.

Harry’s eyebrows apparently shot up into a furrow and she says she knew he was delaying swallowing a mouthful of shandy.

‘My umbrella would have been useful today.’ Her voice would have trailed off and she probably drained her orange juice in one go.

Harry would have swallowed and said nothing.

To an outsider, they were, are, an odd-looking couple. Harry with his awkward stance, looking uncomfortable, out of place or out of time somehow. Some women, girls, apparently, think he could be attractive, handsome even, if he just made an effort. If he wore different clothes, got a decent hair-cut, bulked up a little. Some girls think all that could make a difference. They do. And leaning against the bar of that pub, he probably looked a little shy, younger than his years, smooth-faced, maybe a little shifty – the man who was the boy who had sand kicked in his face – somehow bereft. Several times, he says he tried to catch someone’s eye, anyone really, and each time they ignored him. It’s because he seems to have very little presence. It’s like he isn’t sure of anything at all. Odd for a teacher really. To look at him, you’d think he was an accounts clerk or a storeman of some kind. His fingers are longish, his hands clean, soft – as if he might use hand-cream or hand-gel. He holds a pint glass, but the drink’s mainly lemonade, a kid’s drink. Next to him, we can imagine Maddie, empty glass in hand. On first glance looking every bit the English Rose, but if you look again you’ll notice there’s a sort of relaxed energy about her features, a defensive strength in her posture that makes it difficult to guess her age. She could be fifteen or fifty, or anywhere in between. If you were a woman, you might wonder where the hell she got that dress – it looks too big, too long, too old-fashioned – it covers too much of her. Figures like hers are the ones women generally crave. Outsiders might ask what do they see in one another? Why are they even together, these two?

And there’s something else. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s as if a sort of seventh veil settled between them some time ago. And it would have been visible, right there as they sat, or stood or whatever, looking in opposite directions. It would have been as if everything that had gone before had silently smothered them, like a fragile membrane. No matter what they say, they didn’t realise that completely then. They just didn’t.

They say they received the invitation the next day, by phone. Maddie had just left for work. Another day of drudgery and pointless cajoling at the office. Probably late, looking tired, but showing other symptoms that morning, maybe a little peaky-looking. Pinched, maybe. Still, she says she had managed a mouthful of tea, fluttered a dishcloth across the work surfaces and as the telephone rang, was most likely crunching into second gear and cursing the clutch. The message on the answer machine, the message that remains there still undeleted, was from a voice sounding chipper for so early in the morning:

‘Ah, thought I might catch you before work. Not to worry, just wanted to thank you for coming to Dad’s funeral. Lovely to see you both, just sorry you had to leave so early. Wanted to invite you to a reunion really. Thought it might be good to get some of dad’s old graduates together, you know . . . Don’t know if you’ll be interested? Well, give me a call if you are. I know dad would have liked it.’ Something like that.

They have replayed this message a hundred times since, Maddie and Harry have. They say they have, anyway.

And that day, it was pretty standard for both of them, so they say: Harry, at work with his ham-fisted attempts at educating today’s youth in Shakespeare and semi-colons. Maddie, shivering in her cardy, cursing each infrequent punter who dared to enter the dreary estate agency. Both of them most likely loathing their shop-bought sandwiches, both stomaching a different brand of cheap, instant coffee and both willing the day to end. At some point in the day, it had occurred to both of them that this was no way to live, and both of them had asked themselves how they had managed to reach this point, this low point. The thoughts weren’t simultaneous of course – Harry says his occurred just after mid-morning break and the unusual arrival of the Principal into his classroom.

‘Not staying,’ the Principal apparently said, in amongst a troupe of girls arriving early for the lesson. ‘Just need you to drop in and see me. Tomorrow before school. 8ish?’

Harry nodded but says he felt his heart battle to keep control. An unscheduled, uncalendared meeting like this was not good. Normally, of course, provided you’ve been doing your job, provided you’ve nothing to hide, there should be nothing to worry about. Harry had been doing his job as best he could, but that’s not necessarily saying much.

And, fact is, we all have something to hide.

And there it was. The thought in Harry’s head: how did we get to this point?

Maddie would have arrived at this question later on in the day. She says one of her sales fell through. In other months, Maddie would have sworn a little, smoked a sneaky cigarette, maybe, and made sure she sold the property to someone else by the time she went home. That day, however, she says she was sick. Physically sick. She received the call from an apologetic vendor, and then, right there, just in time to get to the poky staff toilet, Maddie says she was sick.

And that was when she would have thought: We can’t live like this. We absolutely can’t.

Harry says he came straight home from work that day. He would have been pre-occupied and that’s why he would have missed the red flash of the answer machine, even in the gloom of their hallway. Instead, he would have headed for his computer. We can try to imagine it. And even those who think they know him well would have thought he cut a peculiar figure that day, lurching in as he would have, seemingly unaware of the earthy cold in their house. Most would have expected him to flick on the central heating, curse himself for not having sorted the timer out, maybe boil the kettle, but Harry says he didn’t do any of that. So, it was Maddie who, having so nearly taken the call that morning, caught the urgency of the flashing light, pushed ‘play’ and took the message.

When they look back, when they re-run the scene, try to lay the blame, even they find it difficult.

Recalling that time, that early evening, Maddie says she remembers odd things like the sibilance of the voice on the answer machine and the way it cut through a sort of mustiness that seemed to have been threatening to settle for months, years. She remembers Harry in the kitchen, not at his computer. She remembers a conversation. Something like:

‘Can you smell damp?’ Maddie, asking.

‘Was that Gerald’s son on the phone?’ Harry now.

‘I can smell damp, or something, can’t you?’

‘What’s that he said about a reunion?’

‘So hungry.’

‘Shall I call him back?’

‘Have we got any food?’

‘I’ll call him back.’

Looking back, we can try to imagine Maddie’s head hunched, obscured as she foraged in the fridge. Knowing Maddie, all there would have been was microwaveable lasagne, a pack of out-of-date leeks or the crusty edge of month-old cheddar. Not good. She’s not a good housekeeper is Maddie. But that sickness from earlier had left her feeling empty and nauseous with hunger. What she wanted was something vinegary. Pickles, yes. Beetroot. That’s what she says. We might imagine her starting to get desperate. Desperate with hunger or whatever. Meantime, in the hall, to her, Harry would have been just a hazy silhouette on the telephone. His conversation with Gerald’s son? Functional, probably. A list of mental tick-boxes quickly ticked off, where and when the reunion was to be held, and a swift, polite acceptance. When he returned to the kitchen, he says Maddie was heating soup on the stove. To Harry, watching her standing there, it seemed as if she had used up her entire supply of energy, of life, really. Harry says he spoke first.

‘I talked to him. It’s on Saturday out at Oakhall Manor. A reunion.’