Jamie Thief, brashness beset by the same gnawing anxiety which devoured Christopher Stott, tried to assess if he really had anything to fear from the police, and knew he need only fear Dewi Prys, whose intuitions and leaps of imagination had coloured their childish play with magic, when they larked together in the streets, down in the woods, along the railway lines and under the viaduct at the far end of the council estate; the closest of friends until Jamie was caught out in his first adventure on the far side of the law. Imprisoned then by his nain in the cage of respectability, Dewi could only stare from the windows of his council house as Jamie mooched the streets alone, a hardness growing in his eyes as it made a stone of his heart. Jamie sometimes wondered how his own life might be had he not craved the excitement of thievery, had not learned at such an early age that something could indeed be culled from nothing. He sat in his mother’s kitchen, and decided a little absence might be prudent. Packing a holdall with jeans and sweatshirts and trainers and underclothes, he pulled up the floorboard in his bedroom, and extracted what remained of the proceeds from his last trip to Manchester in the Scorpio car delivering a package collected from the pilot of a small boat anchored in Benllech Bay. He left the house, with no note for his mother, no intimation whether he might return this week or next year or never, and walked to the main road, to catch a bus to the small caravan lodged behind old railway cottages dismal in the lee of Dorabella Quarry, where he knew he could safely hide, from Dewi Prys at least, for as long as necessary.
The postman brought one letter for McKenna, which he dropped unopened on to the kitchen table. He felt rather better, having slept well and eaten a good breakfast. He made coffee, and sat in the parlour, the letter on his lap, thinking about Denise, who became more distanced with each passing day, too remote even for nostalgia to reach. He wondered how she might spend the rest of her life, and saw her only as two-dimensional, a cutout pasted on the board of recollection, with no force to her presence to make an impact in his own surroundings. He thought too of Emma Tuttle, and felt a tug of some emotion less than agreeable beneath the warmth his thoughts evoked, as if he stood at the edge of a pool of water, its surface luminescent, reflecting the heat of some sun, hiding treacherous, fathomless depths into which he would plunge if he so much as touched one finger to the mirrored calm to let its heat warm the cold blood running in his veins.
He opened the back door for the cat, watched her stalk the little patch of soil before leaping the wall and disappearing. He went upstairs to dress, thinking a walk would be pleasant, despite low cloud heavy with rain behind the university building. His reflection in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door showed colour returning to his pale cheeks, life to the eyes, and he dared to hope that bodily health might bring with it a wholeness, an individuality rubbed away by the friction of living as half of an ill-matched pair. Unused to seeing himself thus, he stared at the man in the mirror, behind which, or within, lay still a sense of something lacking, of some deficiency, as if he too might be merely two-dimensional; and wondered, if he looked long enough, whether the orphan child still dwelling within the man would emerge, take hold of his hand, and lead him bravely into that light the man was too afraid to let into his life. But then, he thought, the child he had once been was dead, slain by time, no more than a ghost in the darkness, and no help to the living.
Trefor Prosser’s pale and motionless form was wheeled away for a brain scan and skull X-rays, although in the experience of the neurological registrar, coma victims returned to the world when and if they wished to do so. He suspected this man preferred the cushioned peace of unconsciousness, would elude as long as possible whatever terror had forced him into his car and into a wall at sixty miles an hour. Having seen the police report on the accident, and read with particular interest the statement of the bus driver, the registrar was convinced Prosser had tried to kill himself. Not only would memory return with consciousness, but the risk of another suicide attempt hard on its heels, Trefor Prosser yet another lost soul who wished to relinquish all control over his life in an act which was no statement of defiance, but the final act of subjugation, of the worthless, and the last and most abject apology for having dared to live.
Jack thought he might fill the hiatus in his work by taking leave, and wondered if Emma would object too much if he applied for a transfer, for there was a vague feeling deep inside his head that it might be wise to move her as far away from McKenna as possible. Working carefully through the log of outstanding offences, coding them for urgency and the likelihood of successful solution, he found his attention overtaken by other matters, by nagging thoughts of Emma and Michael McKenna, the way she had looked at McKenna yesterday, the expression on Denise’s face when she noticed, the spasm of rage which had twisted Emma’s mouth when Dewi Prys escorted Denise down the staircase into McKenna’s parlour.
McKenna took his walk, returning to find both the cat and Denise waiting on his front doorstep. He hoped the air of disarray about Denise had no cause other than the ravages of weather, of wind and rain in her hair and on her face. He offered her coffee and lunch, and felt a great lightness when she left, having said very little at all and nothing of consequence, spending most of the visit staring blankly through the parlour window at the university building on the hill opposite, its contours misted and twisted by rain sweeping down the valley. As she stood at the front door, putting up her umbrella, he noticed nicotine stains on her fingers, chipped nail varnish, a patchiness to her complexion where make-up was carelessly applied. Daylight that day was cruel to her, marking the lines and shadows of age, signs of disintegration and impending chaos. He told her to take care of herself, and she turned, surprised from her apathy, to see the door closing behind her, and McKenna’s form behind its glass panes, walking away.
Sitting on a wall beside the main road, spiky fair hair darkened by rain blowing in from the west, Jamie watched a Purple Motors bus, bound for the mountain villages, take the sharp bend by the entrance to Port Penrhyn, and career past, water spurting from tyres making a swishing noise on the tarmac. The driver never so much as glanced at him; would not, if asked by anyone trying to piece together Jamie’s movements that day, even be able to recall the drab anonymous figure by the roadside.
Jamie wondered why he should put himself to the trouble of catching a rickety bus, then walking almost a mile in the pouring rain to the caravan, when there were people down the road who owed him, and whose debt had no completion date. His conscience, perhaps aborted like an unwanted foetus in his early years, did not trouble him with questions about debts of his own. He snatched whatever he could from wherever he could, on a presumption never disproved that the world had no scruples about stripping him of the most primitive rights, the most humble dreams.
Picking up the holdall, he began walking towards the city, down Beach Road, past the haunted Nelson Inn, the bistro which was once a funeral parlour, and then turned right into a small warren of narrow streets. Two-up-and-two-down cottages, once home to seafarers and dockers whose industry kept afloat huge vessels carting slate from the quarry to ports the world over, faced each other across cobbled strips dribbled with a slurry of black asphalt. There were sea-scents in the air, salty and slightly fishy, and on the wind sneaking around corners, slapping bits of litter up and down the street and against the huge blocks of undressed stone which formed the cottage walls. Jamie turned into Turf Square, and walked up a little flight of concrete steps under the front porch of one of the new houses, small poor-looking houses, as mean as the old cottages but without any of their charm. Rendered walls stained and scabby, paintwork salt-scarred, the houses bore already the miserable faces of slum dwellings.
The front door opened. ‘He’s not in. He’s at work,’ the woman said, and began to close the door in Jamie’s face.
‘I know.’ Jamie’s face showed no emotion. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
The woman stared at him. ‘You’d better come in, then,’ was all she said, before opening th
e door a little wider.
‘Why has all our leave been cancelled for tomorrow, sir?’ Dewi asked.
Jack looked up from the police federation circular he was reading. ‘What’s that, Prys?’
‘Why has all our leave been cancelled.’
‘It’s that wedding, that’s why.’
‘What wedding?’
‘I’m trying to read!’ Jack snapped. ‘If you’d listen to what’s being said at briefings, you wouldn’t need to ask damn fool questions! Haven’t you got anything to do?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then bloody do it!’ Jack snatched the circular from the desk in the squad room and stalked out.
A two-page memorandum in the briefings’ file from Divisional Headquarters gave notice of the double wedding of couples from the ‘itinerant peoples of Britain’, with some 600 similar guests expected. Dewi wondered what politically correct diminutive might be gleaned from ‘itinerant peoples’ which would have the universal appeal of ‘gippo’, the same pejorative ring. The double wedding at the city’s Roman Catholic church would be celebrated later at the Octagon Nightclub, and he hoped the rain would blow out to sea before morning, for no normal person wanted to be wed on a dismal day, and there was nothing to say such feelings were denied to the gipsies. He wondered too if the man who roamed Salem village and the woods around Snidey Castle would be one among the 600.
Donning his waterproof, he went a-wandering in the High Street, tramping in and out of shops, looking for Devil’s work abroad on streets awash and near-deserted.
McKenna dozed in front of the fire, the cat draped across his lap, to wake late in the afternoon, the parlour dim and scented with dampness. Carefully moving the limp animal, he switched on lights, and went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea and cut a sandwich, carrying plate and mug back to the fireside. Lethargic in body and restless in mind, his thoughts were those which disturb, become uncomfortable by trespassing beyond the safe boundaries of thoughts and ideas necessary for survival and enjoyment, into realms of the imponderable and impenetrable. In childhood, he would spend hours staring through his bedroom window on a starlit night, imagining the sky a velvet cloth stitched with jewels, then a gauzy wisp through which those same jewels glittered softly, before seeing the sky as the beginning of infinity, beyond which lay nothing the human brain could conceptualize.
Age dulled the excitement of abstracts, bringing in its place a pernicious notion that all life was futile, all its activities merely the filling in of Time before Death came calling. What lay beyond that event he envisaged akin to the nothingness beyond infinity, where the state of grace his religion told him to seek without telling where to look mattered less than nothing. McKenna sighed, as he did much too often, about no one thing in particular but most things in general, and decided to acquire a television, to acquire one opiate even if the other was of no assistance.
Dewi walked the High Street between the Plaza cinema and Jewson’s Yard, a mile each way, overshadowed by dark cloud behind Bangor Mountain. Kicking at litter on the pavement, irritable and bored, he wanted to be part of that great war raging between good and bad which the newspapers reported daily, yet twice in and out of Woolworths, he failed to apprehend a single shoplifter, found not a single vehicle along those miles illegally parked or untaxed. No urchins scavenged the street picking pockets, no vandals smashed windows, no elderly citizens sat dazed and panting, beaten and robbed. He saw only Jamie’s distant cousin, a little the worse for drink, staggering half on and half off the pavement at the bottom end of the High Street. Sheltering by Jewson’s gate, he watched until the man turned up Penybryn and disappeared from view, wondering if it was true, as the old-timers said, that bad weather was the best policeman of all, and hoping again for sunshine and a stirring of blood on the morrow.
Chiding herself for being untruthful as well as spiteful, Emma told the twins that another serving of fish and chips would worsen their spots, and that her casserole was their only choice, boring though it might be. As each girl examined the other’s face for eruptions of acne, Emma said millions of people all over the world starved every day, and would be grateful for such a meal. One of the twins, meeting fire with fire, said, ‘Why don’t you put your horrible stew in a parcel and send it to the Red Cross, then?’ Sulking in the kitchen, Emma stirred the thickening mess in her big copper stew pan: rightly a stew, she admitted, but less so than it might have been without the benefit of a bottle of red wine.
Tea was a quiet meal, not pleasantly so, but sullenly, with explosive potential. Jack paused every so often in the act of spooning food into his mouth to give her puzzled looks brimming with questions to which he could not give shape.
‘Done anything interesting today, Em?’ he asked at one point.
‘No. Have you?’
‘Not much.’ He finished his casserole, wiping the plate with a hunk of bread. ‘You must have done something.’
‘Depends what you call interesting.’ Emma countered. ‘I changed the beds and cleaned upstairs this morning. Then I went to Safeways for the groceries. Then I came back and peeled the vegetables and cut up the meat and put it all on to cook. Then I did some of the ironing. Oh, and I’ve had a sandwich and a few cups of tea.’
‘Mummy could’ve saved herself all that trouble if she’d let us have fish and chips like we wanted.’
‘Mummy’s in a bad mood,’ the other twin told Jack. ‘She said we’ve got spotty faces, and it’s not true.’
Jack surveyed his daughters’ peachy luminous skin. ‘Why say that to the girls, Em? It’s not fair to upset them.’
‘I didn’t say they’ve got spots.’
‘Yes you did, Mummy.’
‘Well,’ Jack said, looking from his wife to the children, ‘maybe you got hold of the wrong end of the stick. You haven’t got spots, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘Mummy’s pre-menstrual again,’ one of the girls said with authority. ‘You know how she always gets crabby and spiteful.’
‘Maybe she’s menopausal,’ the other observed. ‘Are you, Mummy? Are you having hot flushes?’
Face reddened with anger, Emma lurched to her feet, snatched plates from the table, and stormed into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.
‘Oh, God!’ Jack moaned. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’
‘Mummy started it when we came home from school.’
‘Well, there’s no need for you two to keep it going, is there? Clear the table, and go and offer to wash up. Both of you.’
‘We haven’t had our pudding yet.’
‘And she’ll only shout if we go in there. We don’t see why we should be nice to her when she’s horrible to us!’ The other twin folded her arms, her sister following suit. Both stared at their father, mutiny blossoming in pretty brown eyes.
Jack followed his wife. He found her leaning against the kitchen sink, staring on to the misty rain-soaked garden. ‘What’s the matter, Em?’ he asked. She kept her back to him. ‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, come on, Em. This isn’t like you.’
As he approached, she swerved away towards the counter, and began moving plates around. ‘Leave me be. And stop calling me Em. My name is Emma.’
Jack left the room, once again at the mercy of the female psyche and its climatic changes, once again with no alternative than to weather the tempest as best he could. As he sat alone in front of the television, sound turned down and people cavorting through a game show, the worm of doubt began to wriggle towards the heart of the rose he believed his marriage to be, carrying decay and destruction.
Jamie tossed and turned in his narrow bunk, kept from sleep by the strident silence of the countryside at night eating into his nerves. The inside of the thin caravan shell was stale and unaired, the musty scent of sodden earth beneath seeping upwards and into the back of his throat.
Prosser remained unconscious, for which Jamie would have thanked God if he thought God remotely interested in his gratitude or otherwise. Prosser was th
e weak link, which might snap and send the taut chain leaping and writhing into a stranglehold around their throats. Christopher Stott was weak too, a weakness of spirit as well as of flesh recognized and held in check by his wife. She and Jamie were the temper in the steel, without which it became brittle and useless, each with their own reasons for staying true to bargains struck and obligations accepted. Chilled and restless, Jamie crawled from the bunk and opened one of the precious packets taped to its underside. He rolled a cigarette, opened a can of lager, and lay back on the pillow, sipping his drink until the can was drained, watching the glowing end of the cigarette spark and fade and spark and fade in the blackness around him until the cigarette was a small mound of scented ash. His body drifted into a languor, his mind into a haze, and thence to sleep.
Chapter 25
Emma placed a mug of black coffee on the table beside Denise, wrinkling her nose at the acrid smell of cigarette smoke despoiling the clean air of her front room. Denise panted slightly, in short little puffs tainted with the heady scents of spicy food and cheap wine.
‘I’ve no sympathy for you,’ Emma announced. ‘So don’t bother whining to me. People choke to death on their own vomit when they get as drunk as that. You should count yourself lucky you’ve only got a hangover. Even if you’ve no respect for yourself, you should have more consideration for Michael. He’s a reputation to consider, and I’m sure he won’t take kindly to having a drunk for a wife.’
Denise picked up the coffee, her hands shaky. Watery sunshine flowed through the window, washing her face and figure with clear cruel light.
‘And don’t spill anything,’ Emma instructed. ‘God! You’re like a spoilt brat! You didn’t know when you were well off, did you?’ Emma surveyed the woman crouched on the edge of the sofa in dishevelment and despair. All her gloss stained and dull with tarnish, Denise was like a piece of jewellery, cast from base metal and gilded to fool the eye. The roots of her sweat-stained hair showed dark, her skin blotched and goose-bumped, her expensive clothes like rags about a scarecrow, the fine wool of her skirt embroidered with a mosaic of creases and rucks. ‘You know, Denise,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘Skid Row is just around the corner from Easy Street. But you’ve never realized that before, have you? You thought it was all right to sneer and make bitchy remarks about other women when their husbands walked out, didn’t you? All right to blame them for it, all right to say they deserved it. I mean,’ she added mercilessly, ‘you’ve been quite eloquent about women getting thrown back on the muck-heap of dirt and desperation where they belong, dying from the incurable diseases of poverty and loneliness. Haven’t you? I’ve seen you cross the street rather than say hello to women who used to be your friends until their husbands legged it. Well,’ she went on, ‘you must’ve caught whatever it was they had, because it looks to me as if you’re going the same way. You’ll end up dragging from day to day on Valium and sleeping pills and dragging yourself from man to man for a bit of company or a free drink. And each man you take up with will be more of a slob than the last, and they’ll all toss you back on that muck-heap, and nobody’ll want to soil their hands on you in the end. I shouldn’t think Michael will come charging to the rescue, because he’s got his own life to lead, hasn’t he? It’s up to you what you do with yours, like it is for all of us. You can swim or you can sink, and right now, I’d say you’re not far off drowning in self-pity.’
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