OK, I’m sorry. I need help, I admit it.
Annabelle wheezed as she pressed the case down. How…brave of you. You…got caught, that’s all. I’m fed up of…hearing it.
But it’s the truth! I swear, I’m done with all that. I’ll never gamble again. I’m – what’s wrong?
Her daughter’s eyes bulged. She rifled through her bedside table for an inhaler, from which she took several whistling drags. When she could speak again, Anabelle said, In…in the three months since I’ve been…at Kyle’s. I haven’t had a…single attack. But ten minutes back…here, and…
It’s the damp, Corina said.
No, Anabelle said, shakily zipping the suitcase shut, it’s not.
Love, try to understand.
But that’s just it, Mam. I do. Understanding makes no difference.
You’re angry.
Annabelle was taller than she was, and her brown eyes were Max’s. Maybe when I was younger, she said, but not anymore. Look, I just came to get the last of my stuff – I didn’t think you’d be here – but seeing as you are, I’ll tell you this. My whole life I thought my existence took something away from yours, that I was just some unasked-for complication. So I tried to fight it, I tried to be the best daughter I could be…but no matter what I did, no matter how good I was, you wouldn’t see it.
She held her right wrist in her left hand and said, Even when you were there, you weren’t there.
I promise I’m here now. I love you.
Annabelle pushed past her and made her way downstairs.
There had to be something Corina could say to make her stay, some lie or half-truth or distortion to employ. For years, had she not been master of that? The abstract future sacrificed to the tangible present? Perhaps, but that had been before she was caught, before she faced the one consequence all addicts dread: the complete discreditation of their words right when they needed them most.
I’m starting meetings, she said.
In the hall, Annabelle paused. So?
So? So I’m going to meetings and going to get better.
Don’t do this for me, she said.
It was raining out. Despite the dehumidifier, the damp was profound.
When can I see you? Corina said.
You can’t.
Belle, you don’t mean that.
Annabelle wrenched the swollen front door open with both hands. Outside, the estate was saturated in grey, vinyl-crackle drizzle.
Do you want to bet? Annabelle said.
Corina watched her daughter leave. The hand not holding the suitcase was pressed to her still-flat stomach. Una-Lee would be a month away from entering the world before Corina even learned her daughter was with child.
—
The rest of the afternoon passes quietly. As she approaches the book’s final pages, Mrs Terry slows her pace, however, like all stories, The End eventually arrives. When it does, she closes the book and drops it into her bag without fanfare.
The phone rings again but Corina doesn’t answer. When it rings off, she asks, ‘So did the blind sculptor find the statue-woman?’
‘Aye, but she was a wrong ’un. He got with the assistant, like I said.’
‘Good for them.’
Mrs Terry looks out at the precinct. Petrol-blue night descending, a faint persimmon lustre across the rooftops. ‘I’d better get on.’
Corina helps her into her mac. ‘What are your plans for tonight?’
‘Dinner and dancing,’ Mrs Terry says. ‘Got to keep the romance alive somehow. Take care then, lass. I’ve liked it in here all these times, and I appreciate you letting me sit. You know what I mean.’
‘I’ve liked it too.’
‘I don’t know where this Rowan-Tree is shifting me. Like that mouthy cow said this morning, there’s not going to be much scope for little old ladies on housing benefit, so I don’t know if I’ll see you again.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ Corina says, though she’s far from sure.
Mrs Terry shuffles to the door. ‘And whoever’s on that phone, remember what I said. You’ve got a choice.’ With that, the old woman steps outside and melts into the night.
Corina locks the door and breathes. Time to get to work.
She takes down the top row from the cardboard box wall in the back room (OAKFIELD TINNED CARROTS, NON-TOXIC FIRELIGHTERS, McADAM’S CHICKEN IN WHITE SAUCE) and starts packing any stock that can be sold back to the wholesaler. The phone rings but she ignores it.
Box by box, the back wall reveals itself.
The final box (McADAM’S HEARTY IRISH-STYLE STEW) hides the dent. It’s barely there, really, the dent – just a little hole in the plaster, easily attributable, say, to a careless boot or hastily moved chair. The ghostly brown stains around it the result of mud or bike-oil.
—
She never told Gambler’s Anonymous this.
Two men muscled the door at closing time, just as she was turning the lock, one wearing a baggy grey suit and eyebrows like two fat strikes of permanent marker, the other in cuffed denim, a long porpoise face grinning in anticipation, his right-front tooth blue-green and dead.
You know what this is, Suit said.
As Corina backed towards the brainsuckers, a bewildering peace washed over her. That it was all finally coming to a head was almost a relief.
My husband will be here any minute, she said.
Deadtooth spat on the floor. Good one.
You owe Martha, Suit said.
I don’t know any Martha. What is this?
Suit spoke as if she were a slow child. You owed Derek Beecham. Derek owed Martha. He sold you. Now you owe Martha.
I’ve got some things lined up, she said. I’ll have what you need then.
He got closer and Corina realised Suit’s eyebrows were actually an inexpertly plucked monobrow.
Nah, man, he said. That’s not how this works.
The back of her head touched a brainsucker. Over the approaching men’s shoulders, across the dark green, the intermittent lights of Alexander Terrace twinkled. She saw herself reflected, cornered. No, this wasn’t a relief at all. Now everyone was going to know. She ran into the backroom, but the door’s latch was no match for Deadtooth’s brawn.
Don’t play silly buggers, Suit said.
Corina grabbed the phone and Deadtooth twisted her arm flush against her spine.
This lad gets a bit carried away sometimes, Suit said.
Air rushed into the salon. They hadn’t locked the door behind them.
Cor?
Max. Why was he here? She’d lied before – Max wasn’t coming. They hadn’t spoken since their last fight a few days ago. It had been years since he’d stepped foot in the salon. Deadtooth’s hand reeked of kebab meat when he clamped it over her mouth. Suit went out to meet Max.
Corina only heard the next part: Max saying and you are? followed by a series of grunts and slaps. Deadtooth threw Corina into the table and went to help. They dragged in Max by his armpits, his chin pitter-pattering blood. Inexplicably, there was a rose petal stuck to his cheek. They hurled him at the wall head first. Deadtooth went back into the Salon. There were voices. He returned.
Bill, there’s a fat cunt out there says he’s called the police.
Bill turned the jet discs of his eyes onto Corina. Consider this your only warning, he said. Then they left.
The dent in the wall above Max’s head ran with blood. He lay unconscious and contorted, made cubist like a figure in Annabelle’s art books. She touched his cheek and flipped through a mental Rolodex of denials and half-truths, running damage-limitation scenarios, postulating blame.
Gary huffed into the doorway.
I saw them, he said. I saw. The police are on the way.
The whole scene felt unreal, had a sea-shell echo. Gary helped her to the sink where, catchi
ng a whiff of the mildew rising from the plughole, she vomited.
Stem roses lay trampled on the salon floor, along with a card written in his dainty hand: I’m sorry. I love you. Max. The petals were the same colour as his blood and made it difficult to separate the two…
…and as she looked at the crushed roses, she remembered this:
Max sniffed the rose on the table their first night at Stockton Dogs.
Sorry, Cor. I think it’s plastic.
I prefer that. I feel bad watching them die.
They were celebrating the grand opening of Hair by Corina. Max’s treat: a two-course meal (Corina had lamb, Max half a roast chicken and chips) with a complimentary bottle of Asti Spumante. But why the dogs? Plain curiosity, really. Those spotlights had been carving the night her entire life, and yet she’d never once been.
A bookie came to take their bets.
Go on, Max said. Who do you fancy?
She opened her programme to the next race. It was baffling, but a name leapt out.
That one, she said. Klaus.
Max frowned at his own programme. Cor, it’s 50/1.
She gave the bookie a pound. Klaus to win, please.
Max bet on the second favourite and the bookie went away.
Why Klaus? he asked.
She sipped her wine. Something told her that whatever was at work would unravel the moment she tried putting the significance of the dog’s name into words.
Max ate some chicken skin. Why are you smiling?
—
Product sorted and boxed, Corina fills a bucket with warm soapy water (pipes rattling) and goes to work on the brainsuckers and chrome chairs. When they’re clean, she starts on the counters.
The actress’ polaroid is still by the phone. The woman is singing into a beer bottle as if it’s a microphone, the loose sleeves of her jumper rolled to the elbows. The jumper is test-card pattern awful. She looks at it a moment longer before dropping it into the bin bag.
—
Like most single-digit children, Corina was largely indifferent to how she was dressed. At that unselfconscious age, the concept of fashion simply didn’t register except as an external evil to be endured. What child has not been lectured against grass-staining their ‘good’ trousers? Not felt the crushing disappointment of realising that there, under the tree, Santa’s left a cardigan? However, all that changed for Corina come comprehensive school; come crops tops and lipstick and pierced ears and boys. Boys who only liked mature girls, not ones in jumpers knitted by their mams. Imagine a boy she liked seeing her in one? She’d, like, literally die.
At first, she simply stopped wearing them. Pushed them to the back of the wardrobe, and was vague when her mother asked why she no longer wore them. But her mam wouldn’t take the hint, and soon Corina would walk into her room to find the pullovers laid out on her bed, arms thrown wide as if expecting a deep embrace. It was too much.
They had to go, but how?
Plan A was brutal. She stuffed the pink zig-zag number – knitted for her last Christmas – into a bin in town and, when Mam enquired as to its whereabouts, she told her she’d left it on the bus. Her mother was disappointed, but beyond a brief chastisement, nothing further was said. There was now one less horror in the wardrobe. Success! But while the tactic was effective, the guilt she felt over the callous disposal of the sweater eclipsed her joy at being rid of it. She took the next one to a charity shop in the city centre, thinking at least that way someone might get some further wear out of it. She told Mam someone had stolen it from the swimming baths; the one after that from the back of her seat at the Ritzy. Her mother rang these places – Hello? Yes, has anyone handed in a puce sweater with lime green triangles down the arms? – but while Corina’s guilt remained palpable, it was at least now at manageable levels. Until a new problem occurred. Several jumpers were now in circulation around the city. What if, say on one of her Saturday shopping trips, Mam came across one? Draped over a Salvation Army mannequin, even?
It consumed her. She existed crouched in a state of readiness, prepared at a moment’s notice to reel off excuses from that mental Rolodex of denials and half-truths she would one day put to a very different use.
But then she opened her wardrobe and the jumpers were gone.
I’ve taken them down the rec. centre, Mam said. You’re too old for them. I didn’t think you’d mind.
A strange feeling dwelling in the Venn intersection of Regret and Shame crept over Corina. For the first time, the true effort her mother had put into those jumpers hit home; all those knitted hours, all that purled love, thinking – hoping – that her only daughter might love them too. It was almost enough for her to ask her mother to knit her another, but to have done so would have been to crack the seal on a swell of emotion she wasn’t sure she could even articulate.
Not that her mother put her needles down. Far from it. If anything, her output increased. There was always Irene’s boy Ricky who could do with some new mitts, or an Aran cardigan for Old Tommy down the Labour Club, who lived in a one-bed and couldn’t afford to run his heating in winter. Then there were the never-ending rounds of Tenants’ Association fundraisers requiring a steady stream of scarves and booties and hats and jumpers and knitted animals for prizes. Not to mention Jim’s new-found appreciation. Once acid music sunk its fangs into him, the only clothes he’d be caught dead in were luridly baggy.
But something was wrong. Gradually, Corina noticed what was issuing from the ends of her mother’s needles wasn’t quite right. One arm of a jumper a little too long. Slightly fin-shaped mittens. In the tried and true tradition of one not wishing to engage with the awfulness festering beneath the surface of things, Corina put this down to her mother’s prolific output. She was cutting corners, winging it, dropping stitches – that was a knitting thing, right? –because she feared letting down the community she was now so deeply involved in.
Mam, she said, they’re taking advantage of you. Dad’s words coming out of her mouth.
So she continued turning a blind eye to the scarves ballooning like impacted intestines, the drooping, eight-fingered bogeyman gloves, the Cyclops balaclavas. Baby booties which sagged with woollen tumours. The socks fit only for a creature from one of Jim’s monster films, something of cloven hoof.
It’s these bloody patterns, her mam said. The people at Knitting World need shooting.
Thus began The Era of the Terrible Thing: the amorphous waves of shapeless wool spilling across the carpet, until Corina, able to kid herself no longer, finally picked up the phone and called a doctor…
—
Sirens interrupt her thoughts. Corina goes to the window just as the ambulance passes. The police officer standing beside Gary’s newsagent waves the vehicle in, its lights now flashing silently.
Two medics unload a stretcher and guide it swiftly through the narrow doorway, past the officer who steps aside. The officer is a young woman with a brunette chop under her cap. A community support officer, actually, not police proper. Corina’s seen her around. Beside her, Yvette stands stunned.
‘What’s this?’ Corina asks.
‘I just went in for some beans,’ Yvette said, ‘but the shop was empty. I got one of my feelings, so I went round the counter and he was lying there, on the floor.’
‘On the floor?’
The support officer looks Corina up and down. ‘A man’s been found collapsed on the premises.’
‘What do you mean collapsed?’
‘That’s all we know for now. Please move back.’
‘But I know him.’
There’s sympathy in her voice. ‘I understand, but you have to move back.’
‘I just went in for some beans,’ Yvette says.
A police car pulls up and two regular PCs get out. The driver is a tall woman with a simple, mousy ponytail. The other is a young man who looks
barely out of his teens.
‘He’s in there,’ the support officer says, letting them inside.
Yvette moans.
Corina cranes her head round the door. The stretcher is wedged between the depleted shelves, below the blank gazes of the women on the covers of the pornographic magazines. The medic’s heads bob up and down behind the counter as the older PC prompts the younger to ask if there are abrasions, contusions, or suspicious marks of any kind on the body.
The body.
The support officer gently but expertly pulls Corina away.
‘I knew it,’ Yvette cries, ‘I told him! And for what, eh? For what?’
Moths flit in the ambulance’s headlights. Corina lights a cigarette. ‘I nearly went behind myself today for paracetamols…what if he was already there? What if I could’ve helped?’
A few minutes later Gary is rolled out under a sheet. They put him in the ambulance and drive away, sirens dead, lights dead.
The older PC has faint acne scarring at her temples. Her radio hisses with words Corina identifies as English, yet are still somehow incomprehensible. ‘Did you know the owner?’ the PC says.
‘He’s dead?’ Yvette asks.
‘I’m afraid so. It was most likely a heart attack.’
Yvette turns away. The PC ignores her. ‘Our system tells us Mr Kinnear lived in the flat above, is that right?’
‘Aye,’ says Corina.
‘Does he have any next of kin? Nothing’s coming up.’
‘He never said. It was just him and his wife, but she died years ago.’
‘What about the keys?’
‘On a hook behind the beaded curtain. Should be, anyway.’
The PC thanks her and turns back to the shop.
‘Wait,’ Corina says. ‘Suzy. He’s got a budgie.’
The PC hooks a finger.
Inside, the rookie is bagging up the till. Corina follows the older PC behind the counter (not looking at the floor there), through the beaded curtain and up to the flat. Suzy isn’t hard to find – they just follow the radio. The powder-blue puff ball cocks her tiny head as they approach her cage. Corina signs a chit to say she’s taken the bird and then they leave, but not before Corina sees how Gary lived: the stacked cases of Irish-Style Stew in every corner, the water stains on the ceiling reminiscent of MRI-scanned brains. On one wall there is a framed picture of a young woman holding aloft a giant marrow. It, like everything else, is veiled in dust.
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