‘Someone really likes tomatoes,’ I say.
‘Yeah. Dad.’ He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s wearing old clothes – an old grey jumper fraying at the elbows and jeans splattered with paint – and in that moment I can see Edward Thorn, his father, in him. Stale and grey and sensible, obsessed with conjuring life from the earth. I put the tomato in my mouth and it pops beneath my tongue, as sweet as honey.
‘It looks like a lot of work.’
‘It is.’
‘What do you do with them all?’ I pick another. It’s not like he’s going to run out.
‘Make stuff. Soup, ketchup, passata. We tend to get a glut in the summer and so we end up giving loads away. The season’s tailing off now, though.’
‘Your mum wants you to meet a good woman.’
‘Ha! Is that what she said?’
‘She seems clear-headed today.’
‘I noticed. It’s good. We’re hoping for longer spells of clarity as she recovers.’
‘What happened?’
‘Huh?’
‘When she fell. What happened?’
Alex looks at me steadily. He peels off his gloves and picks up a mug from somewhere among the plants in front of him, takes a long sip.
‘It was late. I thought she was in bed. I didn’t hear her on the stairs. The bulb had gone so the hallway was dark, and she didn’t know where I was. I’d say she tripped over something – a cord maybe, or just the runner where it’s frayed. Either way, by the time I got to her she was unconscious, and there was a lot of blood. Nearly stopped my heart, seeing her like that.’
‘It must have been scary.’
‘It was.’ Alex pushes his hair away from his face. ‘You sound like the policeman who spoke with me afterwards.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the hospital. “Where were you when your mother fell, sir?”, “Is it just the two of you in the house?” I told him right there that if I was planning to kill my mother I wouldn’t push her down the stairs.’
‘Why not?’
‘Too messy. Not sure enough.’
We’re silent, staring at each other. The smell in the room is prickly, like the leaves. It makes me want to scratch at my skin. It’s cold too, a creeping, sinister chill. I fold my arms. I’m thinking of the story William told me, of the little boy who found a dead sheep at the bottom of a well and who went back every day to mark its decomposition. Alex, who, even now, twenty years later, keeps the polished sheep skull over his bed. People think it odd, a man his age still living at home. They talk. How strange that he wears his late father’s clothes, still sleeps in his childhood bedroom, is so close to his mother. William dismisses it as small-town gossip but I know that gossip can sometimes be the thorn on the briar that spikes the finger. Sometimes it can make you bleed.
‘How would you do it?’
He looks up through the glass of the roof, thinking. His Adam’s apple bobs in the column of his throat. ‘Poison,’ he says finally. ‘A little bit in her food each day. You do it slowly enough, it’s insidious and almost untraceable. I know enough about plants to know which ones can stop the heart or induce organ failure. You know foxgloves can kill you? Few years back a woman in Colorado was accused of attempted murder after she fed her husband a meal of spaghetti and salad that had foxglove leaves in.’
I take another tomato and put it in my mouth but this one is sharp, unripe. It floods my tongue with bitterness. Alex is pulling his gloves back on, bending over. He talks to me over his shoulder. ‘Is that why you came in here, Frances? To find out my plans for matricide?’
‘No! I – I was looking for William.’
‘He’s gone to the supermarket.’
‘Okay. Okay, great.’
‘Are you quite sure everything’s all right with you two?’
He’s talking more quietly now, not lifting his eyes. His voice is a purr; low, steady. I move closer to him, through the leaves. He is standing in front of a large earthenware pot full of black soil.
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Sure. You want to pass me that trowel beside you?’
I do so, watching him as he drags a large plastic sack across the floor towards him, digging inside and pulling out an ashy grey powder that he sifts into the turned soil.
‘You know you have a tell, Frances?’
‘A what?’
‘A tic that gives you away. It’s subconscious. You wouldn’t even recognise it in yourself.’
‘Like William?’
‘How’s that?’
‘He pulls at his hair when he’s lying.’
Alex laughs. ‘Okay, yes. Like that. You’ve noticed him doing that, have you?’
‘Yes. Lately it seems he’s been lying a lot.’
Alex lifts his eyes to mine and then drops them again. He digs further into the bulging plastic sack. He moves with such stiffness, as if he has grown too big for his skin. His veneer is so highly polished, so constrained, you sense that at any moment it might crack. Like he is gritting his teeth against some inner flow of filth, some awful toxicity. It makes him hard to like, I’m told, but perversely, it is the reason I find myself warming to him. I like the discomfort I feel in his presence, the way it makes me alert and wary. I like the ripple of anxiety when his gaze lands on me and he does not smile, and his thoughts don’t show on his face like they do in so many other people, all the time. I’ll never look in Alex’s face and see disappointment or regret reflected back at me. He is a man who doesn’t care what I once was.
‘Oh,’ I say, twisting another tomato from the vine, ‘I bumped into your old friend in town. Nancy.’
‘Oh yeah? You talk to her?’
‘I did, yes. Just for a little while. I showed her the photo I found in the shoebox.’
‘Bet she loved that,’ he deadpanned, sifting grey ash through his gloved fingers.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Edie, Alex? About how she went missing?’
He is silent for a moment, looking up at the roof as if expecting the answer to be written there on the dusty glass. When he next speaks it is in a solemn, low voice, without looking at me, not once:
‘One, two, three, four,
rattlesnake hunters knocking at your door.
Give them meat and give them bone,
and pray that they leave you alone.’
‘Cute,’ I say. ‘What’s that? Some old nursery rhyme?’
‘It’s the song we used to sing at the grave of Quiet Mary. Other kids were playing Knock Down Ginger and there we were trying to raise the dead. Isn’t memory a funny thing? I can’t remember the names of any of my old teachers, but I can remember that song, every word. How it used to make me feel like I was hot and cold at the same time, so scared I wanted to throw up. The song scared me and the rhyme scared me and those girls scared me. God, they scared me. Moya, Charlie, Nancy and Edie. Especially Edie. You never knew what she was going to do. She was unpredictable, but in a way that made her frightening to be around.’
‘But you were just a kid.’
‘Yup. And awkward as anything; you’ve seen the photos.’ He sighs. ‘But she – Edie, I mean – the way she behaved meant she got one of those reputations, you know? We could all see the way her life was going to go in this town. Mud sticks, doesn’t it?’