The Lamberts and the Gaveys.Connor had been transfixed and now felt haunted—no, that wasn’t an exaggeration—by the way the two families had been presented as a sort of entwined pair, predestined to be enemies to the death; that was what the voice in the pages implied over and over again.
Whose voice was it, for God’s sake?
If only Large would read the manuscript…
“Yes, sir,” Connor said. “All things considered, there’s been an incredible amount of suffering on both sides. Lamberts and Gaveys.”
“We agree, then. No need for any more. Good.” Large sounded jollier. “Is there anything else you’d like to say before you leave and take this malodorous clump with you?”
Connor had sprayed the pages with his wife’s strongest perfume—“1996,” it was called—but for some reason the scent hadn’t stuck and the original odor had reasserted itself: a blend of earthand meat, as if the bundle of paper had been buried in the ground alongside a dead body, then dug up a few weeks later.
“Yes, sir.”
“Pardon?” said Large.
“There is something else I’d like to say.” He had to try. If he didn’t take inspired action now, he never would. He found it alarming whenever Flo started to rant about her willingness to die on hills, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to rest easy until he’d seen the view from the one he was about to ascend. (Last week, he’d have saidclimb.)
“Is it about the Lamberts?” asked Large. “The very finished-and-concluded matter of the Lamberts, about which no more needs to be said, ever?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s it about?”
“My sister’s tattoo,” said Connor.
“Are you being serious, Chantree?”
“Yes, sir. You see…” Was he going to take the plunge? Was he a dickhead?
Yes. Probably.“My mum begged her not to do it, but there’s no telling our Danielle. She’ll always do what she wants, and she enjoys it even more if it pisses you off. So she got inked up, right, and it’s… Well, I don’t mind tats, but it’s pretty bad. Covers the whole of her left thigh, and, sir, that’s not a small area.” Connor made sure not to look at Large’s enormous stomach as he said this. “And Mum thinks everyone who gets a tattoo’s going to be unemployed forever or end up dead or in prison, which is obviously daft, but she’s right about our Danielle’s tattoo. It looks awful.”
“Chantree—”
“Sir, let me finish.”
“Are you trying to trick me into wondering whether a natural death was a murder, via an analogy involving a bad tattoo? My money’s on yes.”
“It’s meant to be an animal skull, but it looks like a motorbike that’s been tortured to death, Mum says. I’ve never seen her so distraught. Couldn’t stop crying for days. Absolutely gutted, she was. It’s hard to explain if you don’t know her—”
“Don’t try,” Large advised. “Just get on with it, if you must.”
These weren’t ideal storytelling conditions, Connor thought. Ideally, his tale would unfold in a more relaxed way and without his audience already having seen through his aim in telling it.
“Mum thought she only had two choices,” he said, “and she hated them both: either change her mind and be fine with the tattoo—try and convince herself it wasn’t the disaster she thought it was so that she and our Danielle could still see each other and have a good relationship—or else stop seeing her own daughter, like, distance herself, maybe just see her for Christmas and birthdays, that kind of thing. Sounds extreme, I know, but, sir, you don’t know how much Mum hates tattoos.”
“I’m starting to get an idea,” said Large.
“And our Danielle wore nothing but shorts that were, like, up here, to show it off. Mum was convinced she had to make this awful choice: her only daughter or her…integrity, I suppose you’d call it.”
“No need for the ‘only,’” said Large.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Her daughter or her integrity: That’s the choice. It doesn’t matter how many daughters she’s got. She could have fourteen.”
“No, she’s only got one,” said Connor. “It’s just me and our Danielle.”
Large shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. The ‘only’ acts as a distraction. We don’t need to wonder if the dilemma would be less painful if she had some daughters to spare. It wouldn’t be.” He eyed the stained manuscript. Leaning forward, he tapped his fingers on the title page, then looked up at Connor expectantly. “Well? Go on. What did she choose?”
