Her husband, the silly moo, had left his phone in his jeans before heading off on business again.
The phone stopped ringing by the time she found it. She wasn’t the kind to pry into her husband’s business – partly because she wasn’t very interested in him any more and partly because he was bald and fat now and she felt confident that no one would want him.
WHAT TIME DO YOU ARRIVE? a text from the same number that had just called read.
I’VE BEEN WAITING AN HOUR, said the next.
WHERE R U?
I’M WEARING THE PANTIES YOU BOUGHT ME …
*
It was pretty clichéd, Will supposed, to wipe tears from a crying woman’s cheek then move in for a kiss. Like snogging someone shitfaced at a club. A bad way to start. An accident. But that’s how Will and Linda ended up in bed, with a tear wipe, a kiss and the following request:
‘Do you mind if I hit you?’
Will thought for a moment and then said ‘I’d actually rather you didn’t.’
‘You deserve to be hit, fucking a married woman.’
He turned to face her in bed. So this was the real Linda: scary while naked. He preferred the fully clad version. ‘Do I?’
‘You do. You’ve been a very bad boy. If my husband finds out he’ll hit you even harder, might even kill you.’
‘Can’t I just feel a bit guilty? Go to confession or something?’
‘This is your confession. What have you done, Good Guy?’
‘I’ve fucked a married woman, but her husband is cheating …’
‘What did you say?’
‘Her husband is cheating on her.’
‘No, the first bit. Say it again.’
‘I fucked a married woman. Please don’t hit me too hard.’
Linda did not comply with this instruction. She grabbed a wooden spoon from the bedside table and walloped Will full throttle on the balls. Will cried. He wished he’d noticed the wooden spoon earlier.
‘I’m going to go home now,’ he said, wiping his eyes, holding his testicles and struggling into his clothes.
‘Ah, that was fantastic,’ she said as Will finally managed his shoes. ‘I needed that. Call me later, yeah?’
‘Sure. When I get back from Manchester.’
11
‘Your daughter was supposed to visit me,’ Heath said from his side of the crescent-shaped chair.
Heath had put on weight since Will last saw him. The anger in his jaw was puffy. He oozed a stench of airless sweat, socks and spunk. Fat, stinky and incarcerated, he still scared the living daylights out of Will, who held one hand in the other to try and contain the trembling. They’d never spoken without Cynthia present and Will realised an uncomfortable lynchpin was better than none at all. These were her men, her two men, sitting opposite each other, eyeing each other: one with begging terror, the other with violent disdain.
‘She’s not well,’ Will said. Did he stammer? He hoped not. Did it matter if Heath knew how frightened he was? Did it matter that Will seemed infantile, tiny and feeble in comparison to this brute? Perhaps not, but it annoyed Will no end that Heath Jones still held all the power despite his prison-issue polo shirt.
‘So?’
‘It’s both the girls, Cynthia’s girls.’ (How long since he’d said her name out loud? The hot sound of it travelled through his veins.)
‘Like I said, So?’
‘So I want to find my wife.’
‘Wife!’ Heath paused for a dramatic gangster-style laugh then spoke with a snigger. ‘Do you still take hours to cum? She hated that.’
‘Where is she?’ Will’s hands had separated and were now visibly shaking as they rested on top of his notebook and pen.
He was red. He knew he was red. Inside the red was Cynthia’s voice saying, ‘Get off me, will you? Can you not tell I’ve finished?’
‘What’s it worth to you?’ Heath moved closer. His breath smelt of pus.
Will suggested one hundred pounds.
‘Actually, no thanks, mate,’ Heath said, sliding down his chair, getting comfortable. ‘I’m more than happy to do an old friend a favour.’
Will hesitated. Heath’s fixed smile unnerved him. ‘Well, thank you,’ he managed, after a long pause.
‘No problems.’ Heath leant forward, scribbled something on Will’s notebook, and stood up.
Oh no, Will thought, he wants to shake hands. Is there any way I can get out of shaking hands?
There wasn’t. Will tried very hard to remain expressionless as Heath sealed the deal. This was not possible.It hurt, a lot, and Will’s eyes narrowed with pain before filling with liquid.
Heath turned to leave. He was almost out the door when he stopped and said, ‘Tell me when you’ve found her, eh?’
As Heath disappeared into the bosom of the prison, Will inhaled deeply. He wasn’t sure, but he wondered if he’d forsaken breathing for several minutes beforehand.
Half an hour later, Will left Strangeways having achieved two things:
He had Cynthia’s last known address – a year ago, she had lived in a flat in Finsbury Park, London.
And he owed Heath Jones a favour.
*
It was dark by the time Will found the street. He had to park two hundred metres from the address, which was a large Victorian terraced house near the tube station. At the front door, he knocked three times and waited.
The door had once contained a rectangle of glass. This had been boarded over with unpainted MDF. The doormat was frayed and filthy. Will stared at it, trying to remain calm. Would he see her any second? Would she be as enthralling as she was back then? How would it make him feel? Suddenly, a piece of paper appeared on top of the mat. Someone inside had posted a note underneath the door. He picked it up.
‘Put the money through the bay window at the front,’ the note said.
What? Will read it again, knocked again. Nothing happened. He walked out into the front garden (a strip of concrete, really, three feet long). One of the windows in the bay was open about two inches.
‘I don’t have money,’ he said through the crack. The bent metal venetians prevented him from seeing inside.
‘Well fuck off, then,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘No money, no gear.’
‘I don’t want gear. My name is Will Marion. Cynthia, is that you?’
The pause that followed was interminable. Was it her? Was she fixing her hair for him? Or jumping out the back window, running through lanes, hailing a taxi?
He moved back to the front door and waited. Oh God, oh God, the door was opening.
‘You know Cynthia?’ The woman before him was about twenty-three. Seven stone at the most. Track marks. Her eyes two empty ponds.
‘I’m her ex-husband. Can I see her?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Is she there?’
‘Maybe.’
He would have to pay, he realised.
‘Go get her,’ he said, placing a neat ten-pound note in her hand.
She put the money in her pocket. ‘She’s not here. She left a year ago. Fucking slag. Stole our gear. Far as I know, she went to India with her friend. You find her, tell her we’ve not forgotten.’
‘Where in India?’
The woman had no idea.
‘What friend?’
‘That’s all I know,’ she said, scratching her arm so hard it made Will’s arm feel sore.
*
Before heading home, Will visited someone he should have visited thirteen years earlier.
Meredith was a foster carer, the last person, in fact, to attempt to parent Cynthia, who had arrived at her house at the age of fifteen. Cynthia loved her, said Meredith was the only adult who ever really understood her as a child. Will hadn’t seen Meredith and her then-husband, Brett, since they’d driven all the way to Glasgow for the wedding. The wedding! Cynthia had said she wanted something unconventional and humanist. Somehow, she ended up deciding on the University Chapel and an old hotel in Dumbartonshire. It couldn�
�t have been more conservative. She even wore white and asked Meredith’s husband to give her away.
‘Brett died a year ago,’ Meredith said sadly. ‘An infected finger ended up poisoning his blood and destroying his insides.’
Since the wedding, Meredith had changed from a middle-aged cuddly person into a fat old person. Will counted four chins as she retrieved a postcard from her magnet-infested fridge.
‘Merry,’ it read. ‘You HAVE to come here. There are so many colours!’
The picture on the front of the postcard showed a gorgeous beach with cafes selling lassi. ‘Chapora, Goa’, it read. It was dated eleven months ago.
*
An accident near Penrith and road works at Dumfries meant it took Will eight hours to drive home. The house was quiet – he assumed both girls were in bed asleep.
So her last known address was in India. He went to his office, took out his notebook and wrote: ‘India – Go there and try to find her myself?’
As he jotted pros and cons neatly, he realised this was not a viable option. He couldn’t leave the girls to cope with dialysis alone.
Next, he googled her name – using her maiden name, Burns, her married name, Marion, and Heath’s surname, Jones. Pages and pages later, he realised the search was too wide, and that it was unlikely she’d have built an internet presence considering her busy drug-taking and itinerant lifestyle.
He searched Facebook. The Cynthias with the right surnames as well as head shots bore no resemblance. He began messaging the ones without photos, but became disheartened when he realised he would need to send thousands of them.
He tried Twitter. Got nowhere.
Looked up online missing person’s databases. Needed a drink.
Phoned the UK embassy in Delhi. It rang out for hours, and when someone finally answered the phone they dismissed him with a muffled reply about ‘not being in’ and hung up.
Knowing he needed help with this, he googled Glasgow private detectives. In the end, an agency called The Hunters and Collectors leapt out. Will emailed them the basic details, having decided that he would give the agency three weeks to find her. Failing that, he might have to write another heading on the third page of his notebook.
12
The thing I noticed most about being sick was getting annoyed at absolutely everything. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a grumpy arse, but once I started dialysis, grumpiness became an inadequate description of my reaction to the hot water being off (What lice-infected fuckwit moron used all the water?), to my keys going missing (When I find the bastard who hid my keys I’m going to kill them!), to my favourite white T-shirt coming out of the washing grey and splotchy (Dad, you put black stuff in with the washing. What’s wrong with you – early onset Alzheimer’s? Next-door’s cat could run a house better!).
I got home from nose-dick Eddie’s at around two in the morning. I must have fainted or fallen asleep and he was kind enough not to kick me out. Gathering my clothes, I left a note on the cardboard-box bedside table: ‘Sorry for talking shite and puking on your bed,’ then hailed a taxi on Pollokshaws Road.
Dad and Kay were asleep in bed and I was still sick as a dog. I had a quick shower then fell into bed.
When I woke up the following evening – day and night had switched places since I dropped out of school to be a dead person – I realised that Dad wasn’t there. He had actually gone to find my mother, like he said. There was a note on the hall table: ‘In Manchester, back tonight. There’s soup in the fridge.’ I ate some cereal and tried to imagine him on a mission. Ha! Dad on a mission. How would be get information out of a murderer in Strangeways? How would he get my mother’s kidney? He couldn’t even get me to set the table.
There was nothing I could do to distract myself. Had he found her? Would he come home with news of her? The television was on, but I was staring beyond the screen for hours, excited, nauseous, terrified.
Kay had the biggest bedroom – the bay-windowed one upstairs overlooking the front garden. I’d always wanted this room, but what would be the point of asking? Kay always got the best things – while I got the murky brown teddy, she got the blue one; I got the tiny white radio alarm clock thing, she got the full CD player with speakers; I wasn’t allowed to go on a date till I was fifteen, she went to the movies with the orchestra guy at fourteen. But hell, even I had to admit she deserved to get better stuff than me.
I sat on her bed. ‘Do you think he’ll find her?’
‘Dunno,’ she said.
‘What do you reckon she’ll say?’
‘Don’t care.’ Kay hadn’t even bothered to look up from her chemistry book.
Fucking Kay. How could she not care? ‘Well, when he finds her, I’m getting her kidney. You can have his shitey one,’ I said, slamming her door shut.
*
I was asleep on the sofa when Dad woke me the following afternoon. ‘Georgie, Georgie,’ he said. I opened my eyes excitedly, only to be smacked down with the following: ‘I didn’t find her. She went to India a year ago.’
I closed my eyes. What was the point of having hope nowadays? Nothing good ever happened.
‘So that’s it?’ I said, eyes still closed.
‘I’m hiring a private detective.’
‘Whereabouts in India?’ I asked.
He showed me a postcard she’d sent her foster mum. Why had she never sent me one? I touched her words. She’d also touched this card, my mum. I turned it over. The beach looked beautiful. I wouldn’t have gotten in her way. I would have been happy sitting at that cafe watching her be happy.
‘All we can do is wait,’ Dad said.
‘Excellent. I’m good at that.’
*
That night at dialysis, someone had disappeared and someone had arrived.
The rumours about forty-year-old Jimmy being next to go were right. His transplant was a belter. No problems at all, so far. Lucky guy.
The new boy was Brian and he totally looked like a Brian. He had glasses and neat hair and square shoulders. He and his Alfred seemed very at ease with each other.
‘How old are you?’ he asked, and I told him seventeen.
‘I’m sixteen,’ he said. I wished I hadn’t added a year.
‘Do you think I’m yellow?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Am I?’
‘No,’ I lied again.
When we’d both been purified, I asked Brian if he wanted to go for a drink. Since the whole Eddie endeavour, I knew I couldn’t fall in love sober.
‘Why don’t you come to mine?’ he said. ‘The olds are away and I’ve got some skunk.’
It was looking like a match made in heaven.
‘Are you scared?’ he asked me, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his teenage bedroom.
‘I’ve decided not to think about it.’
‘How can you not?’ He took a grey ring binder from his tidy desk and opened it. Inside were 500 sheets of lined A4 paper. On each line was a date – the first was three years ago. Each day, the sad fuck had marked a cross against the date.
‘Each time the list gets longer, I add the days at the end. According to my current status, I have 1,350 days to wait for a kidney. That’s 771 times at dialysis.’
He’d highlighted four dates each week to indicate his stints at the unit.
‘Jesus Christ, does this not drive you bonkers?’
‘Does it not drive you?’
‘I think about more important things,’ I said.
‘Like?’
‘Like falling in love.’
He leant in as if to say: I am the one you will fall in love with. I am here to fill that role. With me, you will never be scared.
But Brian fainted before reaching me. Both of us should’ve known to go home to bed after dialysing. Twice in a row I’d broken this cardinal rule.
If Brian hadn’t peed himself at the point of unconsciousness, we might have remained friends. Unfortunately, some of the pee ruined some of his A4 pages. He’d pr
obably do new ones as soon as possible, the retard.
*
Despite a distinct lack of success thus far, I still felt it better to concentrate on finding love than on the facts of my life, which were few and negative. I had dropped out of school and was therefore qualificationless. And I was indeed yellow. My next love-falling attempt told me so when I asked.
‘You are,’ said Reece, ‘but I like yellow girls.’
Reece was a nurse. He was around twenty, cuddly (one stone overweight) and funny. He’d been on duty six times in a row since Brian peed on his home-made waiting list.
‘Is it appropriate to fall in love with a patient?’ I asked Reece one session. (Brian heard, but he didn’t look. He hadn’t looked at me since the whole pant-pissing incident two weeks earlier.) Reece had brought me DVDs three times in a row, each more datey than the last. He definitely wanted me.
‘Totally inappropriate,’ he said.
Pause.
Lean in.
Whisper.
‘But I like inappropriate girls.’
Reece met me at a pub called the Bothy. A crappy band was playing on the quarter-inch stage. Grungy types stood and swayed (not too much) at the alternative sounds.
It’s probably not a great idea to take class-A drugs when you’ve just come out of dialysis. Up there with bananas. But, hell, I was with a nurse – and he thought it’d be okay. So in the bathroom, I snorted some of his powder through a cut-to-size straw. Sometimes dancing comes naturally. Sometimes not. When I got back onto the dance floor, my arms seemed ridiculously large and no matter how hard I tried to feel the music, all I could feel was them, dragging my shoulders down as if they were ropes with bricks on the end.
To add to that, a guy with sunglasses on was standing at the bar staring at me. He was much cuter than Reece, and I wanted to impress him. I wanted Reece to bugger off so I could make a move on him. He smiled at me, the sunglasses guy. And romantic-comedy style, I responded by immediately walking into a pillar some fucker had put right in the middle of the room. Somehow I managed to stay standing.
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