by Helen Walsh
Robbie looked at her. Her eyes were smarting with a wired breathless intensity.
‘What happened to you, Robbie?’ Her tone was more tragic than accusatory now.
He stubbed out a cigarette and straight away set to building another. He lit it, turned his stool right round, took the room in and, as though thinking about it for the very first time, popped out his lower lip and shrugged. He turned to her, looked at her for a second, then dropped his eyes. He changed the subject, back to her, back to them. ‘You sure your ma and her fella are deffo out tonight then?’
‘Oh yeah. They’re out all right.’
‘All night? Like you said?’
‘All fucking night.’
Under the table, he touched her leg, gently slid a knuckle up and down her denim-clad thigh. She tossed back the dregs of her drink. Robbie edged further towards her, pushed his thumb a little further into the heat of her groin. He could feel her yield, see the anger and the adrenalin leach from her face, taken over by the swell of desire.
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘I need to see you. Properly.’
The caravan was a pit. He’d only seen it from the outside before, and not even the streaks of rust and muddied windows could have prepared him for this. Roughly split into two living areas by a makeshift curtain strung from a piece of washing line, it smelt and felt damp. On one side were her mother’s quarters which also encompassed the lounge, the kitchen and the bathroom cubicle. The main door in and out opened directly into Jodie’s room which occupied about a quarter of the overall living space. She had a small single bed that pulled down from the wall, and a battered Formica chest of drawers which could only be opened when the bed was packed away. The surface of the chest was littered with the spent relics of old make-up – kohl shavings, sticky lipstick butts, the neon voids of eyeshadow pots. In the middle of the blitz were three or four tea mugs jam-packed with ash and ciggie ends and chocolate wrappers. The entire room was a moraine of junk and dirty plates and unwashed vests and knickers.
‘So this is where it all happens,’ Robbie joked, feeling anything but cheerful, and as far removed from sex as it was possible to feel. He did a sweep of the room, taking in the forlorn intimacies of her life, trying to reconcile this juvenile tip with the girl he had fallen for. He just could not square it. He tried to tell himself that none of this mattered, but to Robbie it mattered very much. Whatever romantic notions he’d fostered about his wild gypsy waif and her makeshift life on the road had been dealt a death blow.
She left the room then came back with a half-bottle of supermarket Scotch. He took a slug, winced and kissed her on the mouth, tasting her sour whiskey breath, getting hard in spite of himself. She squeezed him through his trousers and pulled away, smiling. She flitted around him, briskly shoving things into drawers. Teacups were taken out. Space was created. She straightened the bed covers, pushed Robbie down and, in silence, pulled his boots off, one then the other. Robbie craned his head up at her. ‘You sure your ma and her fella are out for the night?’ he asked again.
She fixed a patient, if slightly disappointed, look. ‘Yes. I’m sure.’
He still could not relax – not here, on her bed, within such close proximity of her mother’s bed. ‘Where did you say they’d gone again?’
She humoured him with an eyebrow, stood up and clicked the deadlock on the caravan’s front door. ‘There y’are. That better?’ She disappeared behind the curtain, popping her head back round the hem. She attempted a coquettish smile. ‘Come and gerrus in a minute, yeah?’
Robbie sat up on the couchette and appraised himself in the dusty pane of her bedroom mirror. His reflection leered back at him, revealing the unsightly jowl of flesh above his hips. Where the fuck had that come from? No Sunday grill for you this week, Fitzgerald, he sighed. It was on with the trainers and off down the canal path first thing before he woke Ellie. He sucked in hard and held his breath, exploding after a moment. What did it matter anyway? She fancied him like he was, didn’t she?
He rolled himself a smoke, turning away from the mirror. The dank, fetid stench of the bedroom smothered him. He sucked on his fag, trying to keep the mood alive. His head hummed with disconnected thoughts on a similar theme. Sheila. The house. The kids. Their life. His conscience had sat easily enough on the back burner. He was a good man, he worked hard, he had talent to burn and he felt he was due something back. However, in this poky, musty sex pit the sheer profundity of his actions, his choices, the thing that he was doing right here and now slapped him heavy in the face. Out there, across the canal, sat his life, just waiting for him to step back into its shoes and walk away in them. The stench and claustrophobia of Jodie’s life here was something he was unwilling to take on. Why? What for? Why did he continue to move forward, to meet this fate head-on? It went beyond folly. This was destructive, and he knew it, and it scared him shitless all of a sudden. He should put his boots on and walk out, walk away right now. But frightened and disgusted as he was, Robbie was already hooked.
He heard her brush her teeth in the cramped toilet next door, felt it through the wobble of the thin hardboard wall. The flush of the Elasan toilet crashed through the caravan, pasting a caustic waft of detergent through the squalid air. He could hear her fussing around in the bathroom now. He pictured Jodie primping and preening herself, getting ready for sex. This was it, then. He’d go through there, in a minute. With a glug of whiskey, he lay back and tried to calm his vaulting mind.
He heard the creak of her mother’s bed. Robbie pushed back the curtains and gasped. She was splayed out, legs slightly apart, in a school uniform. Her shirt was undone exposing the white lace of a bra. He stood there, unsure how to go to her. In passion, or with tenderness? She snapped off the light and a scimitar moon shone in through the window onto the bed. She parted her legs wider. Again that rampant desire and revulsion that came with Jodie swept through him, the need for sex swamping the other.
She kissed him as a teenager would, chomping on his mouth. Yet still he felt himself hardening, an involuntary response to the wrongness of it all, the dirty piquancy of sex in a caravan with a kid. He pulled back, started unbuttoning her schoolgirl’s blouse. He touched the fabric of her bra, running his finger around the frayed, jaundiced straps. Already on fire, she dragged off his belt, pulled his jeans right down so his dick shot out, pulled him towards her by his arse. He entered her hard and fast and the whole caravan seemed to shake with them. He’d had rough, untrammelled sex before when he was a teenager – the kind of needy, cathartic, behind-the-garage sex that had smashed his world right open. But never like this. Jodie was biting and slapping and tearing at his hair, crying out for him to do the same.
‘Hurt me! Fuck yes, Daddy! Tear my fucking hair out!’
He gave as good as he could, but even in the purest resin of desire, he could not bring himself to hurt her – he didn’t have it in him to hit her.
As she convulsed towards orgasm, she called out again. ‘Daddy!’ she whimpered. ‘Oh Daddy, baby! Fuck me like that, Daddy!’
They lay there, side by side, exhausted, sweating, unable to speak. It was Robbie who came round first. He had to know. He just couldn’t let it go. ‘Jodie. What’s with the …’ He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He held her by the jaw, gently. ‘Why was you saying that?’
She rolled over onto her front, propped her face up in her palms and gave a curt laugh.
‘Jodie?’
‘Fuck’s sake, man … you don’t think? My God, you do, don’t you?’ Now she was amused. She sat right up and poked him, every other syllable, with her forefinger. ‘God, Robbie! Surely you – a performer – should know better than anyone?’ She jabbed harder, face close to his now. ‘Don’t tell me you never done no role-play shit with your wife?’ No answer from Robbie. He played with a crust of sperm, drying in the hairs on his groin. ‘Jeez, Robbie! Even my mum and Bob …’
‘All right, Jodie. Let’s … let’s just leave it, shall we?’
She rolle
d over and curled into him, wrapping a long arm and a skinny stockinged leg around him. Robbie turned his head away from the truth of the moonlight and peered into the dank, yeasty room. He was burning all over. He felt foolish and old and alien, totally estranged from the body lying next to him. All he wanted now was to get his clothes on and get out of there. If only he could wash this away, make things right again – the cleansing safety of his own bed, his own woman, all that he knew so well. But the gentleman in Robbie Fitzgerald told him that he should wait a moment, leave a decent interval before making off. So he lay there stiff and stoic, while the young girl with the young boy’s body moulded herself to him. Disgusted with himself, he could not return the intimacy, but he couldn’t bring himself to wholly reject her, either. He moved his face away from her hair and stroked her head, distantly, and waited for her to fall asleep. Only then would he leave. She twitched and muttered like a child as she drifted in and out of sleep. Finally, at long last, her breathing slowed right down, and she sighed and rolled away off Robbie’s chest, dead to the world. Robbie’s eyes throbbed painfully as they flickered to stay awake. The air was cold now, and he shivered at the reality of getting up, getting dressed, getting the car started and waiting for the engine to heat up and demist the frosty windows. His thoughts began to buckle and scramble, surreal fragments of memories pulling him back down. Just a snooze, he told himself – a little nap to clear my head, chase the last of the booze away.
When he woke, it was morning.
It was with a certain sadness that Sheila finally gave in to sleep. At 2.40 a.m. she heard a car’s engine getting closer and hoped against hope. But just as she started allowing herself to believe that yes, this was Robbie, the car throbbed down to a purr, engine in neutral as a door opened and slammed shut again, a voice shouted ‘Ta-ra’ and the car was reversing and heading away. It wasn’t him. She stroked his pillow and turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling and she really, truly, could not work out how she came to be here, in an empty bed in Thelwall, Warrington, Northern England.
Fourteen
‘Mum!’
Dimly, the voice penetrated her troubled sleep. She tuned in to Vincent’s anxious voice.
‘Mum!’
She shot upright. No! Oh, no, no, no – let it not be so. Robbie. The police were on the phone to tell them Robbie had fallen asleep at the wheel … she half rolled, half hopped out of the bed and bumped into Vincent on the landing. He gave her his look and, quietly, said, ‘Liza.’
‘Liza? What time is it?’
‘Nine. You slept in.’
Not even the unexpected fillip of Liza on the phone could drag her from the sadness that gripped her as she knuckled the sleep from her eyes and registered fully that Robbie had not come home.
With no wish for a repeat of last time’s outburst, Vincent bottled up the resentment he felt towards his mother’s growing friendship with Liza Cohen, put on his parka, his gloves, his balaclava – at least the winter’s sting allowed him to cover every telltale patch of brown he might otherwise have to display – and made his way out towards the old railway bridge. It was his place, these days. He’d happened upon it on one of those long treks home from school, taking the most circuitous route to avoid the boots and knuckles of the ambush squad. There was a certain satisfaction in outwitting the yahoos, especially so since he’d found the disused railway bridge over the canal. It spoke to his heart, directly, on first sight: the mossy, overgrown, mighty slab of the disused docking stage, the dank and placid calm of its green-black depths; the bridge itself – beautifully bent, studded iron, unloved and unnoticed these days as it straddled the still black waters. He could sit and stare at that for ever.
The other evening after school, overcome by some lusty sprite, some inner vim he’d never felt before, Vincent had the urge to climb the bridge. It wasn’t so high – a hundred feet, perhaps, at its collar. The dip of its spine was gentle, one huge, head-sized, rounded rivet studding every yard of its broad and smooth back. Giddy with the thrill of what he was about to do, Vincent placed his left foot against the nub of the first stud and, taking the next but one in his right fist, hauled himself up. He fitted his right foot on top of the next rivet and tried to gain some purchase, but slipped, hanging on for a second, then giving in to the ugly drop. He grazed his knee and bruised the top of his thigh, but it was nothing. He’d seen enough. He was going up there again in daylight.
This morning he brought along the bare essentials. Some water and a cheese sandwich – in case he got stuck and the locals were disinclined to trouble the emergency services for a Paki lad – and his jotter. More than anything he wanted to describe the view from up there; and not just the view – the feel. The closer he got, picking his way through the frozen wasteland to the back of the house, the more he was taken over by this senseless onrush of exhilaration. He wanted to preserve it, know it, savour it – then write it all down. Smiling within himself, he got out beyond the damp copse and swallowed up his first view of the hunched iron bridge.
It took a while getting up there. It was wide enough to take him comfortably, but, with his slim feet slipping on the rounded rivets and his hands only gripping once he’d pocketed the gloves, it was slow, piecemeal, step-by-step progress. Halfway up he made the mistake of glancing down at the canal beneath and, for a minute or two, he was frozen to the spot by the shock of its infinity. Regaining the beat of his breath again, he inched his way upwards until the gradual arc flattened out and he was perched on a broad, wrought-iron sill, looking out at the flats and fields of his homeland. And, perversely, it felt like home, from here.
He sat for hours, only dimly aware of the occasional shout from passers-by below.
‘You OK, kid?’
‘You wanna be careful, you know.’
One old fellow stood stock-still with his hands clamped to his waist and, head tilted slightly back and mouth agape, he started laughing. ‘Jump!’ he shouted. ‘Only messing …’ And then he was on his way.
Vincent barely noticed them. His eyes, his heart and mind were drinking it all in, holding it down. He could see for miles. The Runcorn bridge, the oil refineries at Stanlow and Rocksavage, and, tracing his pathway back, the gaunt, towering viaduct and the caravan site beyond. He swooned at the realisation of how high up he was, how far away from home he’d come. The people in the streets below were rolling around like marbles. Licking his gaze over the tiny ranks and rows of miniature caravans, with their awnings and dinky cars outside, his eyeline was snagged by the only moving vehicle, its progress cumbersome as it hesitated at the gates before heading down onto the main road. It was a square, boxy orange car. A Lada. It looked like their car – his tormentors at school had made it abundantly clear there weren’t too many orange Ladas in Thelwall – and right there in his solar plexus he knew it was their car. But where was he going at that time? Where had he been? That morning he hadn’t been around to take Ellie on their Sunday walk. Mum had cranked out some feeble alibi about his gig involving an overnight stay, but Vincent had a strong sense she was reaming. Not wanting anyone to think badly of her dad, Ellie had put on a brave face and sloped up to her room where she immediately succumbed to huge, shuddering sobs. Vincent had tried to jolly her out of her tears with the promise of all the Christmas presents the extra work would buy. But not even the mention of a Tonka Truck could lift the heaviness from her stung face. Her daddy had stood her up and it was almost too much to bear.
And now everything came to Vincent all at once. How it was. How it would be. His father’s secret. His mother’s sadness. The night of the break-in. The nightmares that followed. He pushed it out to the very pits of his soul and told himself it wasn’t there at all. He picked up his pen again and scribbled as fast as the revolutions of his mind.
Fifteen
There were little things about Liza Cohen that made Sheila certain about her, in that innate, instinctive way. One of these things was the way Liza pre-empted and pre-navigated any potential
awkwardness in terms of their relative wealth. As though reading Sheila’s misgivings through the vibrations of the phone line the other morning, she’d bounced an extra level of jollity into her voice in declaring: ‘And we’ll go by bus, of course. The bus to Rusholme is half the thrill of it.’
So they were going to the Curry Mile, and no one was to know of it, and Sheila didn’t need to fret about not driving – though she planned to take lessons soon – or the fact that their Lada was neither a thing of beauty nor a source of envy, after all.
Making her way past the shops to the stop for the Manchester bus, a distant playground chirruping reminded her of Vincent and Ellie. It wasn’t that far out of the way – she could easily pick the bus up two stops further down the road – and, now she’d envisaged her babies at play, she had to go and check on them. Briskly, she checked the time and injected a little brio into her stride.
She hooked her fingers through the rusty wire mesh of the fence, and pressed her face close. It took no time at all to pick out the lusty cut and thrust of Ellie, on the fringes of the central tumult of the playground where the big boys played and fought, but right at the very heart of her own little gang. She could see it in their eyes and in their actions; Ellie was loved. Two buttons popped open over her round pot belly, she was barging around, explaining their roles to them, telling them what to do. Even the tough-looking boy with the sticky-out ears and scruffy uniform was listening intently, giggling nervously as the game was about to start. They split up and ran off to three corners of the playground, ready to hunt each other down. There was no sign of Vincent, though. With the same certainty of instinct that told her Liza was a goodie, Sheila knew her boy was safe. She knew he was OK. And yet she felt his sadness keenly, in a way she now felt her own.