All the Things You Are by Declan Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

idleness. The most recent entries were a couple of days as a special extra on
CSI: Miami
and
Law and Order
, engineered by an old friend working in television to help her get back in the swing after Barbara was born and she was freaking out about the life sentence that is motherhood. But she didn’t get back in the swing. She didn’t like the obsession with her looks she had contracted, the panic over aging, the absence, however fleeting, from her baby. Maybe if the parts had been substantial, had been actual
parts
.
But ‘Four dollars, please’ and ‘Take the back stairs and it’s on your left’ didn’t mean more to her because she was saying them on TV than they would if it had been real life. She knew she was supposed to look at them as somewhere between a refresher course and a new beginning. But for her, they served as the opposite. And then she got pregnant with Irene and that was the end of that. The last entry in her online résumé is:
    Acting Teacher, Madison School of Dramatic Art, 2004–Present.
    It’s not just that she doesn’t use her website: she avoids it.
    She looks out across the backyard to the oak prairies of the Arboretum. There’s just enough light in the sky now to make out the leafy outlines of the trees, just enough days shy of the first big wind of fall for the leaves still to cling. She has lost herself for hours on end at this window, staring out at the heavy old oaks, listening for the lapping sound of the waters of Lake Wingra. She didn’t question that this was where they should live when Danny suggested it, even though he didn’t seem particularly keen; she grew up close to woods and a lake herself. But often over the years she has felt it might have been better for him if they had found somewhere with no trace of his family or his past; somewhere to start afresh. Better for them both.
    â€˜Here you are, babe, forty-eight new messages,’ Dee says, passing the phone to Claire.
    She scrolls quickly through them. None is from Danny. She shakes her head.
    Dee does her scrunched-up you-may-not-like-what-I’m-going-to-say-but-I’ll-say-it-anyway face.
    â€˜The other thing to consider, maybe, sweetheart, is that Danny got some notion about what you were up to in Chicago, and went there – and forgive me if I’m, like,
fishing
, but you know I’m dying to know – found out something he wasn’t supposed to, and went off the deep end and has gone on the lam like a spurned and betrayed Lothario. Care to comment? Paul Casey? Miss Taylor?’
    And Claire, looking at the white filigree of dog hair that coats the floor and feeling her spirits flag, begins faintly to nod her head, thinking of Chicago, yes, Chicago a week ago, that reunion of middle-aged people who were once going to be somebody and only succeeded, if at all, in becoming themselves. It might have looked, if you didn’t know for sure, like something
did
happen between her and Paul Casey, and she’s not one hundred percent sure something didn’t, although it doesn’t matter a damn now.
    But she’s also thinking of Chicago fifteen years ago, when she and Paul got around, and did things they don’t do any more, and met a lot of people she ordinarily wouldn’t have met, including a) one of Danny’s oldest friends, and b) the only people she’s ever met in her life who could have done what somebody did to Mr Smith, or ordered it done, could have, and would have, without a second thought. And now Claire wonders for the first time if what has happened may in fact be her fault.

III Wind
    C laire is usually good, perhaps too good, at locating the detached place inside her head, the one that supplies her with apt wisecracks and quotations from books, plays and films, usually at inappropriate moments, just to make reality that bit easier to bear. But the simultaneous arrival, at seven a.m. on Monday morning, of two deputies