Page 12 of The Cut
49
9
OCTOBER 1993
The bridge of Mark Cherry’s cello has been bumped and bruised as often as his nose. The tiny scars in the varnished walnut are frequently repaired in his dad’s garage with epoxy resin and a brown felt-tip pen. The damage to his cello can easily be fixed but the other bruises always take a bit longer to heal. Mark’s cello is on loan from the school, and although the sound it produces is decent, Mark longs for an instrument of his own.
The track, worn into the grass by runners and riders, is soft under Mark’s feet as he walks across the recreation ground. Head down, buried inside a grey hoodie, the clouds of his October morning breath trail behind him like a steam train. As the cold weather draws in, Mark’s grateful for an excuse to wear more layers, because that means more ways to hide his face. There’s a weight on his shoulders but it’s not the cello, it’s something else. His silhouette is curved like an old man deep in thought. Shoulders back, lad. Stand up proud. It’s what his dad would say. But he isn’t proud, he lives under a shadow of shame.
Mark passes Lynette and Chris Davis’s house. A detached red-brick box from the 1950s with a pale-blue Ford Cortina propped up on bricks on the front lawn alongside a rusty VW camper van. It’s still dark as Mark turns into the alley, the streetlamps dying as a ribbon of frosty morning haze hovers over the fields. From the edge of the tree line at the top of the rise, something catches Mark’s attention. Someone’s coming. The heavy breath and pounding of feet make him turn suddenly.50Not again! How do they always find him? Out of the gloom, a faceless figure surges towards him. The assailant turns sharply on to the road, skidding on the damp grass and grabbing Mark around the waist in a rugby tackle. They both slam into a concrete lamppost.
‘Oi, watch it, Marcello!’ A furious and sweaty Lynette Davis pulls off a black running beanie. As usual, everything is always someone else’s fault.
Slightly winded, Mark hunches over his cello, checking for damage. ‘You scared the shit out of me.’ He glares angrily at Lynette, scrutinising this walking ball of chaos. Mildly thuggish in appearance, she is considerably taller than everyone in her year, including her twin brother, Chris. Their father is the local bobby, which is why their house has been nicknamed the ‘Pig Sty’. Lynette’s a chip off the old block: untouchable, undisciplined and, like the rest of the Davis family, thinks she rules the village.
‘You burying bodies again?’ Lynette gasps for breath, smirking as she points at Mark’s cello case. Mark rolls his eyes at the joke he’s heard a million times before. His cello does resemble the curves of a corpse, mummified in faux leather. He often has thoughts of how easy it would be to murder someone and carry them around for weeks. They’d keep making their stupid jokes but eventually a trail of blood and the smell of rotting flesh would shut them all up, once and for all.
‘Cat got your tongue? Who’ve you got stashed in there, Gaylord?’ Lynette sneers with her signature charm.
Mark smiles sweetly. ‘Saving that special place for you.’ He runs a finger across his throat like a knife.
‘Sod off, limp wrist.’ She slings one of the bin bags stacked by her gate over the tall leylandii hedge into the garden next door and fishes her hand into the letter box to pull out a front door key51attached to a piece of frayed grey string. Mark brushes the dirt from his trousers and heads off towards Forest Hill.
Dr Sandeep Patel’s surgery is a makeshift conversion in his double garage, separated from the main house by a small porch, which serves as a waiting room. The old vicarage, a sturdy Georgian mansion, is no longer affiliated with St James the Greater, and is set behind a dense hedge of privet with an arch cut into it, leading to a wrought-iron gate. Mark follows the path around to the small blue door and takes a seat in the tiny waiting room, listening to muffled voices from Dr Patel’s first appointment of the day. He glances at the ornate polished mahogany grandfather clock, standing erect against the wall in the porch. Its heavy pendulum marks time and the ominous tick-tock fills the air with a sense of interminable boredom. The clock says 8.55 a.m. but the distant chime of the church bells of St James tells him it is already nine.
On the dot, the door opens and Ben emerges, his complexion pale. He glances at Mark with a scowl, then takes the furthest seat in the corner and pretends to read a dog-eared copy ofAutoTrader. Mark stares at his scuffed Clarks shoes.
On the first day of school, when Mark’s mum, Jean, had dropped him off at Barton Mallet Primary, Ben had been there. The reassuring pictures of trains painted on the wall, the orange carpet and the smell of glue had distracted the nervous five-year-olds from the true horror of waving goodbye. But the tall blond boy from Year 2, sent to help Reception settle into their new school, had made everything seem OK. That day, Mark had peed his ‘Monday’ pants and Mrs Fisher had sent Ben to get fresh shorts from the lost-property box. The older boy told him it had happened to him on his first day too, and from that moment, Mark Cherry had idolised Benjamin Knot.52
An awkward silence hangs in the air before Ben breaks the ice. ‘What’s up with you then?’ He doesn’t look up from the magazine.
Mark clears his throat. ‘Tonsillitis again.’
Ben’s chin juts upwards in acknowledgement and the conversation dies a death.
‘How’s he doing?’ Mark gives him a sympathetic smile.
Ben sighs and chews his lip, swallowing down a ball of emotion. ‘Not good.’
He’s still thumbing through the magazine but his hands tremble. There isn’t anything more to say. Cancer has come for his dad and he knows that the time they have left is fleeting. Mark squeezes out a tight smile of sympathy and glances up to the ticking clock. As they both stare at it, it begins to chime and a pristinely groomed Dr Patel, in a grey pinstripe suit and blue tie, pops his head around the door. ‘He’s ready.’
As Ben stands, his eyes shoot to Mark, wishing him away, wishing he wasn’t here to witness this. A few moments later, he reappears in the doorway of the doctor’s consulting room with his father. Anthony Knot is slumped awkwardly in a wheelchair. There is a blanket covering his legs and he appears to be dressed in a blue pyjama top, with a robe over his shoulders. The stale smell of sweat and urine suddenly fills the room. Mr Knot’s eyes are glazed and unfocused and his once sturdy frame appears shrunken inside his clothes. His mouth is half open with a trickle of saliva dangling from his bottom lip, dripping on to his chest.
Sandeep smiles, his Edinburgh accent enhancing his gentle bedside manner. ‘You can wait inside, young man.’ He holds the door for Mark, who hurries in and takes a seat in front of the desk, but he can still hear everything being discussed in the waiting room.53
‘I’ve given him a shot of morphine and we’ll arrange for a district nurse to visit over the next few days.’ Dr Patel hands Ben a prescription. ‘Is there anything else you need from me?’
Ben stands with his hands on the back of the wheelchair, his shoulders hunched. ‘Um … is he going to be OK?’
‘Let’s just wait for the test results to come back from the oncologist, shall we?’ Sandeep places a hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘Do you need any help at home?’
‘No, I’m fine, I can deal with it.’ Ben’s eyes catch Mark’s through the half-open door. There’s an expression of loathing on Ben’s face, disgust that his private business is within earshot of the weedy little geek, Marcello.
Dr Patel returns to the consulting room and closes the door behind him.
‘That boy deserves better than this.’ He gathers his notes from his desk and places them in a manila file. ‘First his mother, now his father. Life is very unfair, dear boy … very unfair.’ He breathes in deeply and then smiles at Mark. ‘Right then, let’s have a wee look at this throat of yours.’
The Patels are influential. Sandeep’s wife, Akshata, is an investment banker, and they have high hopes for their only son, David. The Patels try to keep a low profile, hiding their wealth with a respectful modesty, but Barton Mallet is such a tight-knit community that everyone knows everyone else’s business. Mark wonders about all the private information the doctor must have to hold on to and how difficult it must be for him to keep everyone’s secrets.
