by Ros Carne
As she headed for the phone in the hall, she heard the scratch of metal on metal. His key in the lock. Relief washed through her. She waited.
He stopped in front of her. Something about him was drawn away from her, inward, as if he didn’t wish to meet her. She detected a new crop of spots on his forehead. His hair looked greasy, uncombed.
‘Sorry, Mum. I thought you’d be in bed.’
‘I was worried.’
She noticed his right arm was held across his stomach, the hand and wrist tucked inside his cotton jacket.
‘I need the loo,’ he said.
He strode past her into the bathroom. She heard the tap running and waited a little before walking in behind him. He was standing at the sink with his back to her. She took a step forward to see what he was doing. The water was pink with blood.
It was a cut, about half an inch long. As he lifted his arm from the water she could see the white edges of the wound, the open flesh. Her stomach turned as it always did when she saw blood, anyone’s blood. She reached for the towel and held it towards him.
‘Here,’ she said.
Without a word he extended his arm, let her wrap it. Staring down as the scarlet seeped into its fluffy whiteness.
‘Hold it,’ she said. He obeyed, and she dived into the cupboard to get lint and gauze. Her first aid training was rusty, but she remembered enough to fashion a rough bandage and stem the bleeding.
‘You’re going to hospital,’ she said.
‘No, not hospital.’
‘You need stitches.’
‘I’ll be fine. It’s tiny. It’s not deep.’
‘Deep enough.’
‘Leave off, Mum. I’m all right.’
‘It needs to be checked. You don’t want a scar.’
‘I don’t care. Anyway, it’s tiny.’
‘Was it a knife?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Something unyielding settled inside her, the tough persistence of cross-examination.
‘I said, was it a knife?’
‘Maybe.’
‘For Chrissake, Jacob. You can’t just… You’ve been attacked. We need to go to the hospital. We need to tell the police. We need to report it.’
He turned and faced her and she saw the hard certainty of his father, the man who wouldn’t be argued with, the man who could make his own submissions, had his own cross-examination ready to hand.
‘No, we don’t. We don’t need to report it. I’m fine and I won’t let you take me to the hospital.’
She knew this Jacob. It was the teenage version of the three-year-old who had screamed for thirty minutes when she tried to put on his shoes.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’ll try a different tack. We’ll sit down have a cup of tea. You can tell me what happened.’
‘I need to sleep.’
He was right. She too needed to sleep. It was after 1:30 a.m. and she needed to be up at six to prepare her cross.
‘What happened, Jacob?’
‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Did you hurt someone?’
‘I said I’m going to bed.’
‘Jacob, I need to know. Who hurt you? Did you hurt them? What happened?’
‘No, you don’t need to know. You don’t need to know anything.’
‘Jacob…’
‘I’m not your property.’
He walked past her out of the bathroom and down the corridor to his room. She followed and stood staring at the closed door, listening to him move about until there was silence. The cut would heal. There might be a scar, but it was small and looked clean. She felt the gulf between them. She couldn’t hold him, couldn’t control his life.
Chapter Sixteen
Mel
The alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. Still in her pyjamas, she made herself a cup of tea, skimmed once again through the social worker’s statement and refined her lines of cross-examination. By 7:15 a.m. she had showered, thrown on her court gear and a pair of trainers and was sprinting out of her front door to the tube.
Worry about Jacob clouded the journey from Finsbury Park to Hatton Cross; the wound, his secrecy, her frustration, all nagging like a rotten tooth. For the first half hour she’d been standing squeezed between commuters, hanging from the overhead rail, avoiding eye contact, her bag on the floor between her legs. But as the train pulled away from Knightsbridge she found a seat and was able to look over her papers. At one point she sensed a neighbour glancing at the typed script. He was about twenty years old, stick-thin, wearing paint-stained jeans and a faded brown T-shirt, unlikely to be involved in the hearing. Instinctively, she shifted to block his view.
On the bus to the court, more thoughts about Jacob filled her head. She pushed them away. She had a job to do and she would do it well.
The West London Family Court is a solid rectangle of two-tone brick and grey tinted windows, set back from the A312 behind a car park, trimmed with low hedges. As she walked down the broad walkway to the sliding glass doors and the security desk it seemed to Mel she could have been in any country in the world.
She queued at the entrance desk, allowing her bag to be searched and her person to be frisked by a hatchet-faced security woman with cropped brown hair. She pondered how it would be to have a proper job, one where you went to the same place every day, had your own office, your own desk, plants on the windowsill, your name on the door, paid holiday leave, set hours.
Like Paul, she thought, remembering their frantic coupling, in the North Bank University Politics Department, crushed against a pile of stacked boxes. The top half of his door was frosted glass, but if you stood behind the bookshelf you could not be seen from the corridor. She recalled balancing on one foot as the stack of boxes behind her threatened to collapse at any moment, after which there was some complicated shifting, both she and Paul ending up, cramped and half-clothed, on the carpeted floor beside the desk. Throughout their glorious contortions there had been the thrilling awareness that anyone, at any moment, might knock on the locked door.
The security woman brushed down Mel’s body, looking for hairspray, lens cleaner or any other weapons a barrister might attempt to smuggle into the Family Court.
‘Right,’ said the woman, ‘you can go through.’
Mel turned towards the robing room, halting briefly in surprise to see the skinny young man from the tube journey, seated on a hard chair in the reception area. She offered a faint smile. Either he didn’t see her, or he decided not to react. Whatever the reason, there was little chance he was involved in the same case.
She was wrong. The young man turned out to be Ezra, feckless father of five-year-old Mason, whom she was endeavouring to have returned to his alcoholic mother. Ezra was twenty-one years old. He had never looked after Mason and it was clear from his monosyllabic evidence that he had neither the desire nor the capacity to do so now. Mel was reassured. The last thing on Ezra’s mind would be reporting her to the Bar Standards Board for reading court documents on public transport.
It quickly emerged that the local authority had failed to obtain the required evidence. Mel managed to expose every shortcoming. After that it was easy to persuade the District Judge of the merits of removing Mason from his apparently capable foster parents to the care of his irresponsible mother. Her spirits lifted as she strode out through the sliding glass door to the walkway. In the bright summer sunshine, the municipal architecture had a new stylish appeal.
For two hectic hours she had not thought about Jacob, but she was thinking about him now. It was after midday and he would surely be awake, though not necessarily out of bed. She must speak to him. Yet she feared what she might discover. When she was busy she could contain such fear. With any lull, the fear jumped out.
There was no one at the bus stop. She pulled out her phone and tapped on Jacob’s number. No reply. But he would see she had called. She zipped the phone into the side pocket of her bag. When the bus arrived, she jumped on and found a window seat from which she could gaze at
the grey suburban landscape gliding by in the summer heat. As the bus was pulling up at the station she heard the ringtone. She looked at the name on the screen. Not Jacob, but Paul.
‘Hi Mel.’
‘Hello.’
‘Can you talk?’
‘I’m about to get off a bus.’
‘Are you going back to chambers?’
‘Yes.’ She needed to show her face. Her diary was looking sparse.
‘Call me when you get there.’ He sounded peremptory. ‘I’ll be in my office. There’s something I need you to look at. I’ve had an email. I’ll forward it. Ring me when you’ve read it.’
It sounded ominous. Had Caro found out? In some ways it would be a relief.
She waited till she was alone in one of the downstairs rooms, before opening the email. It was from Natasha.
Hi Paul, Remember me? I was on Politics and Law a few years ago. Guess what? I got a pupillage with your mate Melanie Goddard! How cool is that? Hope you’re OK. Thanks for all your help on the course. Maybe meet up sometime. Natasha x (Baker)
She stared at the screen. Was Natasha crazy? She rang him.
‘I read it,’ she said.
‘How does she know we’re friends?’
‘You must have told her.’
‘Well, I didn’t. I barely know her. Did you?’
‘Of course not,’ Mel shot back.
‘You see her every day. You must have got to know her.’
‘In a way.’
‘So, did you mention me?’
‘I don’t recall.’ As she spoke it came to her. The Attendance Note. Accessing Mel’s computer. Natasha’s inevitable trawl around Mel’s otherwise uninteresting cyberworld. There were one or two messages no lover should put on email. Mel knew her instincts had been right. For no good reason she added, ‘She didn’t get the tenancy.’
He said, ‘I don’t give a fuck whether she got the tenancy or not.’
A pause. She knew what he was thinking, the words he wouldn’t say because to speak that thought would blow the two of them apart. ‘But you give a fuck if she wrecks your marriage.’
She wouldn’t tell him about the likelihood of Natasha accessing her emails. He would freak. ‘She and I we went for a drink. A few weeks ago. I don’t remember exactly when. She told me she was at North Bank. I may have mentioned you. What does it matter now, anyway? It’s not like she says much. Nothing she shouldn’t know.’
‘But why tell me?’
‘She probably wants an excuse to write to you. Maybe she fancies you.’
‘She doesn’t.’ She refrained from asking how he knew. ‘I hope she doesn’t cause trouble.’
Of course she would cause trouble. It was what Natasha did. Why they couldn’t offer her a tenancy. She was about to speak, about to tell him that Natasha had nothing to gain from wrecking his marriage when the door flew open. Georgie and Jess burst in, deep in conversation.
Mel pointed to her phone, Georgie uttered a loud, ‘Oops,’ and Mel walked out into the corridor.
‘Sorry, Paul. Too much racket here.’
‘Are we going to meet?’ he said.
‘I don’t know.’
He’d been absent when she needed him, when she’d been sitting in the dark on a wet pavement, and when she’d been lying awake in the small hours, worrying about her son’s wound. Did he think of her as he boarded the plane to New York with his family? Did she exist for him outside the bubble of their private world?
‘I’m free now,’ he said.
His low voice stirred her as it always had.
‘Let me ring Jacob,’ she said. ‘He’s been in a bit of trouble lately.’
‘What sort of trouble?’ he sounded genuinely concerned. Might she speak to Paul, pour out everything, share her untold fears?
‘I’ll tell you later.’
There was no reply from Jacob’s phone. Nor from the landline in the flat. It was two p.m. He had been asleep when she left, but she remembered he was going into the sixth form college to speak to staff about next year’s A level options. She left a message telling him she’d be back by six. She called Paul again.
‘I can’t get through to Jacob. He’ll be at the college.’
Jess from emerged from the room into the corridor, raising her eyebrows in interrogation and making drinking gestures as she walked past Mel towards the tiny kitchen. It crossed Mel’s mind that she hadn’t talked to any of her colleagues since the tenancy meeting. She flashed Jess a quick smile as she shook her head and moved further down the corridor where no one could hear her.
‘Where do you want to meet?’
What would he suggest? Last time it had been a coffee bar, echoing with the clatter of cups, strident voices and background disco.
‘Can you come to my office?’
‘Your office?’ She remembered the tumbling boxes, the frantic contortions as they copulated half-standing, half-sitting, against the thin partition wall. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘If you’d rather not, that’s OK. We could meet in a pub.’
She wanted him. She looked down the now empty corridor and a voice emerged. Her own, shocking, surprising.
‘What about the Premier Inn?’
Chapter Seventeen
Mel
His curly grey hair was inches away on the pillow and she could hear his soft breath mingling with the hum of the air conditioning. He moaned, turning to face her, flopping an outstretched arm across her breast. After their lovemaking he had, unusually for him, drifted into sleep and now she watched him, studying his fine, angular face. Despite the name, he didn’t look Jewish. He had once told her he took after his Irish Catholic mother, with her long straight nose and the hint, now more than a hint, of bags beneath his green-brown eyes. The shadow of stubble on his cheek touched some unmet need in her and she leant over and kissed him. He stirred and mumbled something incomprehensible.
She looked away to the room around her. The walls were off-white, punctuated with neutral flower prints, the closed curtains a plain loose weave that filtered the afternoon light. The air smelt of cleaning fluid and air freshener. Everything was horribly familiar, the television, kettle, sachets of tea and coffee, the tiny fridge and dull wooden furniture. The place had a hard, unbreakable feel. Whatever you threw at it, nothing would change. She turned back to Paul, nuzzling up to his fragile human warmth beneath the bedclothes.
He shifted, letting his hand drift down her body to her thigh. It had been more than a month since they had shared a bed and their first moments had been tense and disjointed. Strangers would have met more easily. But now she waited, unhurried, eyes closed as he emerged from his private dream to launch her on a wave of pleasure. This second time he was gentle, slow, holding back till she was ready.
Afterwards, they lay together in silence in the half-light. Minutes later, she had no idea how many, he said, ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For seeing me. For putting up with me.’
She didn’t know how to reply. Then, before she could speak, he said, ‘Do you think she’ll say anything?’
His question was a cold draught from the world outside. He must have sensed her stiffen because he said, ‘Mel, are you OK?’
‘I’m thinking.’
But she had no control over the thoughts that tumbled about her like falling debris. That he could bring her to this hotel, stroke her to ecstasy, then ask the one question that showed where his heart lay. He was a frightened man. She looked again at the face that minutes ago had seemed so appealing. How quickly it could change. The fine lines were strained in apprehension, the eyes freighted with anxiety. He had not asked about Jacob and she had not said anything. That story would remain untold.
But it was she who had suggested the hotel, she who had made her wants so brutally clear. A few minutes ago, she had clung to him in lust. Now she wanted to scream and throw things around this horrible room which had been so perfectly designed to withstand the destructive outburs
t of a hysterical woman.
She pulled away, stood up and moved to the bathroom, conscious of his eyes following her naked body as she walked. After less than a minute under the hot jet of the shower, she stepped out onto the soft white mat and began to dry herself.
‘Are you all right?’ he called through the open door.
‘Sure, I just need to get back.’ She picked up her things and went back into the bedroom to dress.
He was standing naked by the bed. ‘You’re angry with me,’ he said.
Please, she thought, don’t start, we both know how it is. While he was in the bathroom, she quickly dressed and looked in her bag for cash. He preferred not to use a card or cheque and she insisted on going halves. She placed the money on the table.
When he emerged from the bathroom and saw the notes, his face tightened with discomfort. He tried to protest, and she shook her head slowly. ‘No, Paul. We’ve talked about this before. This is how it is.’ Then, while he was dressing, she said, ‘I don’t think she’ll say anything.’
But she had no grounds for the prediction. It was no more than an attempt to reassure them both.
‘But why now?’ he said. ‘You said she just missed the tenancy. The timing feels significant.’
She knew what Paul was thinking. What had Natasha got to lose? But she said nothing. They walked out of the room and down the stairs to the hotel foyer. She stood back as he handed over the cash. Once she had offered to use her card to avoid him embarrassment: a few painful moments at the reception desk after their two-hour session, her lover hovering by the exit. Since then Paul had always made the payment.
They walked out together into the heaving rush hour that surged around the Kings Cross gyratory. The air was thick with fumes, gritty on her throat. Sometimes they stayed in a country house hotel, sometimes pubs. Once they had been for a weekend to Paris. But wherever they stayed it would always end in the same bleak misery of separation.
He kissed her cheek and she kissed him back. She knew he would head for the tube.