The White Stuff

by Simon Armitage

  ‘Which name, please?’ asked the voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Rosales.’

  ‘Is that business or residential?’

  ‘It’s a private number.’

  ‘And which town, please?’

  Felix thought for a few seconds. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  It was a long shot. Maria Rosales might no longer live in Britain. Or she might be ex-directory. Or she could well be married and go under a different name, although Felix had a vague recollection of someone once telling him that Spanish couples took the woman’s surname. There were three listings under the name M. Rosales. The first was very helpful and lived in Brighton, but was called Michael. Michael told Felix that Rosales was a common name in the Spanish-speaking world. The second M. Rosales was also very helpful, and the right sex, but two years younger than Abbie, and as systematic and painstaking as Felix’s flow chart was, it did not allow for the possibility of time travel. M. Rosales number three was not at home. The area code was Derby. Felix rang five or six more times throughout the afternoon. On the last occasion, the phone was answered by a man and Felix hung up. He needed to be careful. There were enough broken marriages in the world without adding to the tally, and it was a distinct possibility that Abbie’s mother had gone on to have a new family without ever letting on about her first-born. Felix was a social worker. He was in the healing game, the business of bringing people together, not lobbing hand-grenades into their living rooms. And yet despite his misgivings, by Thursday he had descended into further subterfuge and was drifting further away from the protocol that governed his working life. Speaking to PC Lily about the Moffat case and police procedure in general, he had made a casual-sounding inquiry about the possibility of tracing an address from a phone number, rather than the other way round. It was an innocent enough question, asked, apparently, out of curiosity. So he was amazed when she produced a pen from her pocket and asked him to write the number on her hand. They were in the police station, at the front desk. PC Lily had asked him to call in and make contact. She was older than PC Nottingham, thirty-five maybe, with sandy-coloured hair pulled back off her face. She had freckles and a nice smile, more like somebody playing the role in an Australian soap opera man an actual police constable. As he clicked the top of the pen and pressed the inky blue ballpoint into the tanned flesh on the back of her hand, he looked around sheepishly and saw a security camera pointing directly at them.

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s no film in it,’ she said.

  Then PC Nottingham came into the reception area through a side door and, seeing the two of them almost hand in hand across the counter, emitted a peculiar noise that seemed to originate from the back of his nose and managed to be both disapproving and lecherous at the same time. He looked as if he was on the point of following it up with an actual piece of language but was brilliantly disarmed by PC Lily’s comment. She said, ‘This hunky young social worker is just giving me his phone number so we can meet up later and have some hot sex.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Nottingham, and squeezed his head into his helmet before leaving the station through the main entrance.

  After the door had swung dosed she said to Felix, ‘He thinks I’m joking.’

  Then, seeing the redness beginning to gather in Felix’s cheeks and the way his eyes had become fixed on some neutral and insignificant place on the desk, she added, ‘Don’t worry, love. I’m spoken for.’

  She held up the back of her left hand. A small, single diamond on a thin ring of gold shone on her finger.

  ‘Mind you,’ she said, turning towards the door behind her, ‘when did that ever stop anyone?’

  Felix had never been to Derby, although he remembered his father going there to watch a football match, the second leg of some obscure knockout competition, and coming home with a black eye. Or was that Chesterfield? The address PC Lily had given him was about two miles outside the city centre. For some reason he had imagined tree-lined suburbs, semi-detached houses with bay windows and herbaceous borders. He had even imagined gnomes. But navigating with the A-Z propped on his lap he eventually found himself among shabby, terraced streets. On a piece of wasteland to his left four or five kids were spinning a burnt-out car on its roof. Every telephone kiosk he passed stood in a pool of shattered glass. Felix was familiar with poverty and deprivation. He encountered it every day of his working life; he understood its causes and was sympathetic towards its victims. But somehow the people he worked with were not real. They were clients, cases, ‘punters’, according to Neville, and when Felix drove home at night they disappeared. Whereas a very real person could be living here, behind one of those grubby windows and tatty doors. A woman called Maria Rosales. His mother-in-law. He had pictured himself parked under a horse chestnut tree or copper beech, watching a middle-aged lady pottering among her roses and lavender, then sitting for a moment with a cup of tea to one side and a pair of gardening gloves to the other. Which would have been his cue to lift the hasp of the gate, walk quietly towards her and say, ‘Is it Maria? Maria Rosales?’ She would nod, and Felix would explain, gently and carefully, who he was, why he was here. There would be confusion, denial maybe. But then tears. Tears of guilt. Tears of relief. He even had a packet of Kleenex in his pocket. Then would come thanks, an embrace, a pot of Earl Grey. Felix realized he had even visualized this woman in the passenger seat of his car in a kind of mercy dash as he drove her north at high speed for an ecstatic reunion with her daughter. Abbie had wanted to come with him, but he had flatly refused. Now he half-wished she was sitting next to him, seeing what he was seeing. That way he wouldn’t have to explain, and that way she would be able to tell him what to do next.

  About a third of the houses on the street were boarded up. Only two houses had numbers, number 29 written in yellow spray-paint on the door and further along number 33 written in black marker pen on the stone lintel. From mat, Felix worked out that 51, the address he was looking for, was a habitable property with net curtains at the downstairs window and a cobalt-blue Ford Orion parked outside. He passed by a couple of times, then pulled up thirty or forty yards away. The tiny pair of red satin slippers still hung from the rear-view mirror, rocking back and forth after the car had come to a halt. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and the street was quiet. Felix let the back of his seat down a couple of notches, opened a large packet of Hula Hoops and waited. At midday two men in their thirties came out of the house and drove away in the Orion. Ten minutes later they came back up the street from the other direction, parked and went into the house. They didn’t look English, but they didn’t look Spanish either. They looked Greek, maybe, although Felix was notoriously bad at guessing people’s ethnic background. He was even worse at detecting accents. He had once asked a man on a training course which part of Scandinavia he originated from and the man had replied, ‘Wolverhampton.’

  There were more comings and goings over the next hour. At quarter past one Abbie phoned to ask what was happening. She said, ‘Have you seen anyone yet?’

  Felix told her that he wasn’t very optimistic and that in all probability this was the wrong address.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Just a feeling.’

  ‘What kind of area is it?’

  ‘Very… working class. A bit of a tip, to be honest.’

  It was a minor detail, but in the absence of a family history, details were everything, no matter how insignificant. Since Abbie had found out about her mother’s surname, she’d started buying Rioja instead of the Australian stuff they usually drank, and on two occasions in the last three weeks had made paella. The knowledge that her mother could be living below the breadline somewhere in Derby was another scrap of information that had to be factored in and acted upon. He could well return home tonight to find her pursuing a sudden interest in fine porcelain and worrying about the economic prospects for the East Midlands since the sale of Rolls-Royce to overseas investors.

  ‘Have you been to the ho
use yet?’

  ‘No, I’m outside in the car. Just trust me on this, Abbie. I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘All right,’ she said after a while.

  She didn’t sound particularly convinced, but at the same time she didn’t have any other choice. Felix wasn’t convinced either. But his state of inaction was brought to an abrupt end about ten minutes later when the same two men plus another, taller man came out of the house and walked towards his car. As they passed, one of them tapped on the glass next to Felix’s head with his ring. As Felix wound the window down, the door of the passenger seat was yanked open and the tall man jumped into the car beside him. The other two climbed in the back, one from each side, and slammed the doors. Instantly, the smell of stale tobacco filled the vehicle. The legs of the man sitting next to him were so long his knees wouldn’t tuck beneath the glove compartment. Like a stick insect in a matchbox. He had to hitch sideways, with his back against the doorpost, and as he shuffled in the chair he reached for the gear stick and knocked it into neutral. At any moment Felix expected an arm to come sliding around his neck or even a knife at his throat, but the man directly behind him sat with his hands by his side and the other stared out of the window, apparently uninterested.

  ‘So what’s going on, feller?’ asked the man in the passenger seat. He had a very thin, almost pencil-line moustache, and what Felix thought was a local accent, although going on previous experience that placed him anywhere from Bromsgrove to Oslo.

  ‘I’m not the police,’ blurted Felix.

  It was a spontaneous remark. Something in his nervous system told him that appearing weak and ineffectual was the right strategy when cornered in a dodgy part of a strange town by three men who probably had little regard for the law. All three men sniggered at Felix’s response.

  ‘We know you’re not a copper. The coppers don’t come round here. Not on their own, like. So either you’re being very smart or very stupid. Which is it, like?’

  ‘I’m being very stupid,’ said Felix emphatically.

  ‘Good answer. Now go and be stupid somewhere else.’

  Again it was a gut reaction, an instinct rather than a reasoned decision, but before the man had fully extricated himself from the confines of the front seat, Felix said, ‘I’m looking for Maria Rosales.’

  Later, he found it interesting to consider that the man who had burst into his car and threatened him was marginally less frightening than the prospect of returning home to Abbie empty-handed. But in the second or so that it took for the -words to leave his mouth and in the pause that followed, Felix was simply amazed at himself. These roughnecks were on the point of leaving his vehicle and exiting his life, and by opening his gob he had stopped them.

  ‘She’s my mother-in-law,’ he added, like an apology, or like a plea.

  The tall man hesitated, then eased back into the car.

  ‘Your mother, yeah?’

  ‘Mother-in-law.’

  ‘Hey, fellers. Maria Rosales is his mother-in-law. Get that!’

  They sniggered again, all three of them, louder and with more feeling. The one who had been gazing absent-mindedly out of the window now seemed interested, almost excited. He leaned forward and in a foreign accent said, ‘Son of a bitch.’

  After that remark they all rocked with laughter for a good few minutes, until the stick insect wiped his nose along the top of his index finger and sniffed.

  ‘Explain.’

  It took a while to go through the details but the men listened, with only the occasional giggle. Felix even got out his identity card at one point to prove who he was. Stick insect nodded every now and again and helped himself to the remaining Hula Hoops, inserting his tongue into the potato rings before crushing them between his front teeth. When Felix had finished, he licked his lips and said, ‘Come with us. There’s someone you should meet.’

  Inside the long, narrow hallway of number 51 the whiff of roll-up tobacco eventually gave way to the smell of cooking - a fatty, meaty smell, strong but not unpleasant. It was lamb, probably. Abbie didn’t like lamb. In a room to the left, eight or nine men sat on white, plastic garden furniture watching a portable telly. One of them stood and pushed the door closed as Felix glanced in. At the end of the hall they entered what would have been referred to by an estate agent as a dining room, which had nothing in it other than two moth-eaten armchairs, an office table and a cassette player on the floor. Several mobile phones of different shapes and sizes were thrown on the mantelpiece. The room beyond, where the steam and the cooking smells were coming from, was a lean-to kitchen.

  ‘You sure about this, like?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Felix.

  The man dapped his hands together. ‘Maria. Get in here. Maria!’

  From inside the kitchen there was a shuffling, stirring sound, then the sound of quick, light feet on bare wood as well as a peculiar squeaking noise, and in the next moment Felix found himself staring into the rich brown eyes of one Maria Rosales.

  12

  Abbie wasn’t upset at all. In fact she thought it was hilarious, and now that Felix had permission, he found it hilarious as well. Hysterical. And when they had finished laughing, which was the most laughing they’d done for as long as Felix could remember, Abbie sat down in the big wicker chair hanging from the ceiling and said, ‘What kind of dog exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know. Old and smelly. Like an Alsatian but with long hair. And it only had two legs.’

  ‘Oh, give up, Felix. I’m going to wet myself in a minute,’ she said, crossing her legs and holding a cushion to her stomach. Her face was alive, lit up, as if she’d suddenly been plugged in and switched on.

  ‘Honestly. It only had legs at the front, and a pair of pram wheels at the back. And it needed oiling.’

  ‘Felix, stop it,’ she squealed.

  She hurled the cushion at him and an arrangement of dried flowers on top of the bookcase went flying. As he gathered them up, one straw at a time, he told her as much as he knew about the dog in the house in Derby. That it had been christened Mario, after the video-game character, but renamed during her first pregnancy. And that because of her lameness she was now entitled to invalidity benefit as well as jobseeker’s allowance and a whole range of other Giros that arrived at the address every week courtesy of the welfare .state. And that Felix wouldn’t breathe a word of this to a living soul, because if he did the stick insect with the pencil tash would send a few of the Kurdish or Albanian men from his ’employment bureau’ up the M6 to ‘do a job for me, like’.

  ‘Not that I was in a position to argue. I shouldn’t even have been there, officially.’

  ‘Why Rosales, though? Did you ask him?’

  ‘Yes. He just held up his hands and said, “Why not?”’

  ‘And why put a dog’s name in the phone book?’

  ‘Don’t know. Authenticating detail?’

  Before he went to bed Felix wondered about his next move and glanced at the carefully constructed flow chart, which was now folded in half and inserted into the back of his Filofax, between the pull-out map of the London Underground and a table for converting imperial measurements into metric. He didn’t want Abbie to see it, in case she accused him of reducing her emotional turmoil to something that resembled an intelligence test or, worse, a game. He remembered the look she’d given him on discovering he’d filed a leaflet on artificial insemination on the bookshelf between The Larousse Field Guide to British Birds and an operating manual for Windows 98.

  ‘I didn’t want to lose it,’ he’d said.

  ‘But why there?’

  ‘Well, where would you have put it?’

  ‘In my handbag. Somewhere close.’

  He’d taken to keeping the Filofax in his briefcase and clicking the lock. It was ridiculous, because this was his way of lending a hand, his way of helping her find the thing she most wanted in life, except for a baby, perhaps, and even the mystery of childbirth could probably be reduced to a troubleshooting guide, given the right
level of expertise. Why couldn’t it be like science and facts? When he took the car into the garage last month because it kept stalling in low gear, a man in blue overalls simply wired it up to a computer, looked at the numbers on the screen and told him what the problem was. Half an hour later he was back on the road with the engine purring like a kitten. Felix flicked through the pages of his diary, looking at the week to come. Each day came printed with a small, round icon, shaded in part, becoming a solid dark circle by Friday. The phases of the moon. The lunar cycle. There would be hope for a few more days, then blackness and despair, and a silver light through the window in the small hours as they lay awake. There would be no baby again.

  The team meeting on Monday took its usual course. Thelma wondered if the air-conditioning might be switched off because she felt sure that a number of harmful air-borne bacteria were being circulated throughout the building. Neville and Mo ignored each other. Roy was attending a Neighbourhood Watch meeting on the estate where he had grown up. They had asked for him by name, describing him as someone with the ‘inside track’. Roy was exactly the right choice, given that he had spent time in many of the estate’s residential properties, albeit fleetingly, in the dead of night, with a balaclava over his head and a holdall over his shoulder. As boss, Bernard chaired the meeting and took the minutes, which spared him having to make any meaningful or sensible contribution to the conversation, and he concerned himself primarily with the dismantling and reassembling of a fountain pen. Thelma watched in horror as he squeezed a droplet of ink through the nib like someone about to administer a lethal dose from a syringe. There were only two files to hand out. Felix took the case of a nine-year-old boy in foster care being advertised for adoption. And Marjorie pointed out that she had a ‘gap’ in her caseload, following the sad death of Matthew Coyne.