‘Another date,’ says Manon. ‘To be honest, I’d rather look at a thousand hours of local authority CCTV.’
They sit in a row in conference room one, waiting for the child protection briefing, everyone on their smart phones. Manon has just received the latest demand for a dating update from Bryony. She’s next to Nigel, who has turned his back to the room and is hissing into his phone, a hand cupped over the mouthpiece. Dawn, obviously. Colin is downloading confirmation of his Ryanair flights. Kim is yawning, her feet up on the chair in front. The room is an oasis of police-blue – blue foam chairs, blue curtains, blue carpet – and smells of brewing coffee. It is filling up, people shuffling along the rows, slight bend at the knee: ambulance crews from Hinchingbrooke, passport control, CID. People nodding, saying hello. A few uniforms, rustling fluorescent jackets with zips and toggles and crackling radios, which make them seem larger than the rest. Amazing she can’t find a date among this lot.
Davy, to the other side of Manon, is sat bolt upright, his neck straining upwards so he can look at the woman at the podium, who is shuffling papers before she begins.
‘You should listen,’ he says to Manon. ‘This stuff’s important. You wouldn’t believe what’s happening out there.’
But Manon is texting Bryony.
This one’s a poet. Therefore not simply fucktard, but fucktard who cannot pay mortgage.
‘Hello everyone, and thanks for coming,’ says the mousey voice at the podium. ‘I am Sheila Berridge, head of child protection services.’
Manon’s phone vibrates.
You don’t know that. He might be laureate-in-waiting. Anyway, I admire you for being dating daredevil. B
Manon yawns, hears the words ‘cross-sector involvement’ and ‘joined-up thinking’ waft across the room towards her.
‘We all need to be aware of the crisis in our children’s homes and how this spills out into all our sectors.’ Sheila Berridge warns of unprecedented numbers of children entering the care system as more and more families bump and skid below the poverty line. There are currently sixty-seven thousand children in care in England, she says.
Davy leans in to Manon, whispers urgently, ‘Sixty-seven thousand. That’s a city three times the size of Huntingdon.’
‘A city of children,’ says the woman at the podium, as if she and Davy are telecommunicating, ‘children with their attachments broken, the majority – seventy per cent – having experienced abuse or neglect. Once in care,’ she continues, trying to get above the shuffling and bleeping and restlessness of the room, ‘many children experience the instability of multiple short-term placements. They are more likely to go missing, making them vulnerable to harmful situations such as sexual exploitation.’
‘I see this all the time,’ Davy whispers to Manon, ‘at the youth group. I mean, they’re children.’
‘The pattern of neglect,’ says Sheila Berridge’s harried voice, ‘is getting worse. We know of gangs of men who prey on girls in care, getting them addicted to alcohol and drugs, then grooming them for sex. Paedophiles are operating in many care homes. This affects all of us, every agency in this room.’
Manon looks to the other side of her, away from Davy’s keen expression, and sees Nigel yawning. He casts her a look as if to say, ‘Boring, huh?’
‘We must be aware of how difficult these children are to help,’ says Sheila Berridge, her voice now raised and powerful, ‘and to be mindful that they must be listened to, however much they change their stories, however dangerous and unpredictable they seem. We must listen to what they tell us. We must take them very seriously indeed.’
Davy
He smiles at Davy, proffering his hand warmly. About my age, Davy thinks, bit younger maybe, so why do I feel inferior in front of Rollo Hind, whose face is friendly and open – unlike his father’s.
Inferior’s too strong, Davy thinks, sitting behind the table while Manon fiddles with the recording machine. There’s been quite a bit of preamble, along the lines of: ‘Good flight?’ and ‘Thanks for coming all this way, sir, we really appreciate it’, and ‘How was Buenos Aires?’
Suburban, he thinks, putting his finger on it. He feels suburban next to this tall, tanned chap. Perhaps it’s the hair. Davy’s just sort of sits there, on his head – it’d be pushing it to call it a ‘style’ – whereas Rollo Hind has a natty quiff, up from the parting, a bit rockabilly, a bit mod; dead sharp. Or the bright blue eyes, sparkling out from his face, a golden shimmer at the temples. Rollo Hind seems all Hollywood, while he and Manon, their complexions the colour of canteen mash, are rocking the fifteen-hour-shift look.
‘You had a text conversation with Edith on Tuesday, thirteenth of December, which was quite self-questioning, wasn’t it?’ Manon says.
Davy has read the texts, extracted by Colin from Edith’s phone, which had been conducted over WhatsApp, the free texting application.
E: Do u think of yourself as good person, Rol? I mean, do u think your goodness innate?
R: I’m definitely good, yes.
E: But don’t u think everyone thinks they r good, even if they r bad? A bad person wd prob say, ‘I’m essentially good, but there are these extenuating circumstances.’
R: Don’t know what u r on about. Btw, have you seen Natalie Portman in Black Swan yet? She’s HOT.
E: But do u think your goodness innate, or are u good because u hv been told to be good, because u r conforming to societal norms?
R: FFS, Smelly, what’s brought this on?
E: Wondering: what’s core, as in part of self, or what’s there because society demands it. Or is goodness genetic?
R: Not in our family. Praps skipped generation?
E: Don’t joke.
R: What’s up with u?
E: U r lucky, Dad never expected much from u.
R: Thanks! Low expectations = freedom. Listen, am knackered, sis. Can u have yr existential personality crisis some other time?
E: No worries. Love you, Rol.
‘I feel terrible about that now,’ Rollo says, ‘that I didn’t take it more seriously, but it wasn’t that out-of-character, not for Edith. I mean, she’s prone to this sort of thing. She’s a serious person, y’know? Gets fed up with me, says I’m glib about everything. When we travelled around Italy together interrailing, she was always wanting to talk about E. M. Forster and personal freedom versus duty. She likes to … intellectualise things.’
‘So she would text you existential questions like this, without preamble?’
‘Well, OK, this was slightly out of the blue. I mean, it came from nowhere, but it wasn’t enough to make me think … It didn’t make me worry, is what I’m saying. And maybe it should’ve done, with hindsight. She’s a student at Cambridge – they’re all at it, sitting around till 2 a.m. pondering Kierkegaard and the essence of being. I thought it was just part of that.’
‘And now?’
He shrugs. ‘After what Mum and Dad told me, about Helena and all that, I wonder if she’s talking about being unfaithful – about goodness in terms of what she was doing to Will. She would’ve felt really guilty about that.’
Manon
She’s laced them too tight, the boots. The strings dig into her ankles and the cold rises up off the ice, radiating towards her face. Her fingers are cold. Her cheeks are cold. Why have we come inside to get cold? Her shins are painful with the tensing of her muscles. She inches forward, one foot then the other, gripping hard on to the handrail.
‘Really fucking hate skating,’ she mutters, shuffling forward towards the poet, who is ahead of her.
He smiles. He has a meek face under a head of curls, but while her own emanate from her head at wild angles, his hang limp and wet-looking. She nods back at him, her body bent forward from the waist, her legs like scissoring crutches.
He doubles back to her, fast on his skates, and stops with a spray of ice dust, his skates a balletic ‘V’.
‘Are you all right?’ he says, his hand on her arm.
; ‘Fine, yes, all fine.’
‘Try to straighten up a bit. Here, take my arm.’
She holds on to him, his old suede jacket rough under her hand – she catches a whiff of mustiness from it – and tries to push her tummy out to straighten her body but her feet immediately slide forward and out from under her. She hits the ice hard – right on her coccyx. She hisses as the cold follows on from the pain, tries to get up, holding him, but her feet are scissoring wildly and she’s grasping at his smelly jacket while he tries to keep his balance, and then her arms are actually around his body, clambering up him until they are face to face.
‘OK?’ he says, smiling.
‘Take me to the rail.’
At the rail, she says, ‘That’s enough for me,’ and walks through a gap onto the rubber mat, relieved – so very relieved – that her feet can grip something. ‘You carry on. I’m going to get a hot chocolate.’
Two years of sifting through the detritus of the Internet, the sexually incontinent to the intellectually subnormal. Prior to this, she’d spent five deluded years gambling on meeting someone ‘naturally’, though there was nothing natural about turning up to every random gathering wearing too much slap and a desperate gurn, disappointed evenings in the pub, then clip-clopping home on uncomfortable heels. Christ, she’d even gone for drinks with the neighbours, at which everyone was coupled up and about fifty-seven. With this particular outing, she thinks, unlacing and pulling off the skates, she has plumbed a new low.
Her feet, however, are in a state of bliss. She can walk, she can un-tense, she is light as air. It is almost worth ice skating for the feeling of buoyancy of having functional feet back. Why do people do this – create for themselves physical uncertainty when there is so much of it to be had in daily life for free?
Her mind goes back to the child protection woman and the 67,000 children, as it has intermittently since she came out of the briefing, which must be Davy’s doing or perhaps the niggling feeling that there is something she cannot see through the half-closed smear of her sore eye – an irritation she forgets about for long enough to stop her visiting a chemist. She resolves to sort it tomorrow.
The hangar housing the rink is noisy and smells of hot dogs and rubber with the odd whiff of socks. She waits for him at a Formica table which is riveted to the floor, occasionally spots him whizzing round, pushing his body forward, confident and free. She is tempted to do a runner but alas, here he is, edging in front of her, between the plastic stool and table, both immovable.
He smiles but doesn’t say anything. She has noticed he’s a man of few words and when he does speak, it is so softly that she has to crane forward, cup her ear like a pensioner and say, ‘What was that?’
‘You’re a good skater,’ she says.
He nods.
‘When did you learn?’
‘When I was young.’
They look out at the rink – at the laughing skaters on faster dates.
‘So you’re a poet,’ she says.
He nods.
‘Where do you write?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Is it lonely?’
‘Not really.’
‘Least you don’t have to do the office Secret Santa. Thank God for Huntingdon’s pound stores, is all I can say!’
He nods again. The relaxedness of his nodding says, ‘This silence is your failing. You should fill it.’ She notices she wants to dig her heels in: I won’t put you at your ease, she thinks.
He looks out at the rink as if he’s alone.
‘Do they rhyme?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your poems – do they rhyme?’
‘Do you like poetry that rhymes?’ he asks.
A full sentence. There is a God.
‘I’m not a big poetry fan,’ she says, which is an out-and-out lie. She has inhaled everyone from T. S. Eliot to Wendy Cope.
You take up yoga, walk and swim.
And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
‘Really?’ he says, his interest only vaguely pricked. Even jabbing him with a stick doesn’t work. ‘What do you read?’ he asks.
‘Thrillers. Love them. The bigger the gold lettering, the better. So how do you make a living? I mean, poetry doesn’t pay, does it? Are you a poet who also serves pizza?’
‘I couldn’t do that. I prefer to keep my living costs down. I don’t pay any rent … and I sign on.’ He takes a sip of hot chocolate. ‘I live with my ex-girlfriend – at least, I sleep on her sofa. She doesn’t mind. We stopped sleeping together and, well, I never moved out.’
‘Christ, isn’t that a bit awkward?’
‘We’re really good friends. We were always really good friends. More friends than …’ The rest is a mumble.
Manon cups her ear. ‘Sorry, can you say that last bit again?’
‘I said it’s a bit more awkward now she’s got a boyfriend.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘She likes it if I stay out – you know, in the evenings, give them some space.’
Manon looks at him. Smiles. Wonders if she can make him want her. ‘You could always come back to mine,’ she says.
He looks into his hot chocolate, making her wait.
‘We could,’ he says, as if she should do more to persuade him. Another silence which she feels the pressure to fill.
‘I’ve got wine – a nice bottle of red,’ she says.
Her hand feels warm around the paper cup containing her hot chocolate but her heart is darkening. She pictures herself writhing above him, the sex just like the skating – stilted and awkward. He will expect her to put him at his ease, then lay the failure of the exercise firmly at her door. Her life seems as if it’s on a loop, round and round, nothing ever changing.
‘Actually,’ she says, surprising herself, ‘forget that. It’s probably not a good idea.’
‘But you just said—’
‘Yes, I know. I don’t know why I said that.’
‘We could just talk,’ he says. He has reddened.
‘Talk?’ she says. ‘I think there’d be only one person talking and it wouldn’t be you.’
He swallows, watches as she shuffles out between the nailed-down table and the nailed-down stool.
‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I like petite women.’
‘Right, of course. I should have expected that,’ says Manon.
The night air drips with moisture, dank and lonely. Up the broad pedestrian thoroughfare, yellow-smeared from the street lamps, deserted now, past the soldier on the war memorial, deep black stone receding into the night, only the shine on his elbows and knees and helmet are points of light. Aimed at him on all sides, and now shuttered up behind locked grilles, are the pound shops, one after another, which in the day give out a tinny cacophony of jangling and kerchinging, tink tonk, rat-a-tat-tat, dancing Santas, and teddies with drums.
Huntingdon. Beset with mobility scooters. Once described by a Shakespearean drunk in the cells as ‘a pimple on the protruding buttock of England’. Scene of dogged animal rights protests outside the Life Sciences lab. Never short on fog.
She passes the white frontage of the Hunts Post, which signals the end of the high street, and into the darker residential streets, pavements glistening with rain and the last of the melted snows, the houses either blackly empty or glowing with their curtains drawn. She hears her own footsteps slapping on the slush and another’s behind her. A man or woman’s? She can’t be sure, though it doesn’t have the timbre of feminine shoes. Wide steps. A man. Seeming to keep pace with her. She quickens, her heartbeat thudding like a bee against glass, clenching her fists inside her pockets. She puts a hand to her handbag strap, which crosses her body, pulls the bag itself to the front. Purse, keys, phone, badge. Should she put a hand on her badge? He is still behind her and she can hear him breathing. He has taken up a threatening proximity at her back. The street is entirely empty and in front of them, the black river. She steps to the side to allow him to pass – perhaps
a businessman in a hurry. He is forced to go beyond her, a hunched figure in a hoodie, his head in total shadow, his movements edgy, she notices, as he turns.
‘Hello, love, all right?’
She delivers a wan, business-like smile. He is blocking her path now.
‘What you doing out so late?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she says, high-pitched and breathy. She has reached a hand surreptitiously into her bag.
‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘Just bein’ friendly.’
Drunk? He is more quivering and energised. Drugs. Still with his face in shadow. She couldn’t pick him out in a line-up.
‘Can you let me pass, please?’ she says, and she wishes her fear wasn’t so audible.
‘Where you going? Wanna go somewhere together, you an’ me?’
She stops trying to edge around him, looks him in the eye, thinking: this could be it, the moment he punches my lights out or pulls a knife. She feels for her badge and holds it up to his face.
‘Fancy being arrested, mate?’ she says. ‘Police. Major Incident Team. I’m wondering what you know abut the disappearance of Edith Hind, seeing as how you like to threaten women.’
He is taking wide steps backwards, his palms up. ‘Woa, woa, woah,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t doing nothing. I wasn’t …’ Suddenly he turns and runs to the end of the street and onto the towpath.
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