The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Those were the days when the local news rechristened the town Dodge City, when two rival gangs of drug dealers started killing each other in the shopping precinct and at the supermarket and at the nightclub in the High Street. You could find yourself walking along the pavement thinking about a loaf of bread or whether you needed milk, and you might not even notice the heavy brown bloodstain on the paving stone.

  It was as if Nathan existed in a parallel universe of guts and bullets. Once night fell all the monsters came out and Nathan and his colleagues had to wrangle them. In a world lit by electric bulbs he stepped over gunshot corpses, and questioned men perfumed with drugs and lapdancers and vomit.

  Nathan was first on the scene for two of the three major murders. A head spiked onto the railings outside a councillor’s expensive home. The councillor implicated in the drug running. Everything Nathan saw was on a spiral downwards and he could trust nothing. Except, apparently, some quiet gardening woman with a dirt-besmirched face who waited for him in the walled garden at Cromwell Park.

  You can think back and see that the shadow was the reality. You can think back because now you are skewed too and see the differing angle. But then, then he seemed like a knight, armoured and brave and worth something. But Knights crave battle. Armour shiny. Sword sharp.

  It was not so much a courtship, more a wearing down. Nathan was always going to have her. He had decided that long ago. There were secrets he kept from her even as she felt he was revealing everything. She thought she was his refuge. She was aware that when the day had been harsh he could come through the gates to the walled garden and he could breathe again.

  She thought she could ask at first, thought that he might need to talk. He shook his head. He needed, he said, to slough off the dirtied skin. So she handed him the small piece of pumice she kept by the sink.

  ‘Who do you think I am?’ he said, reaching for the soap, slicking his hands around and around so that he looked as if he was wearing white lace gloves. Jeannie watched him for a moment. Wondered what answer he was looking for.

  ‘Good guy? Bad guy?’ He held her gaze. Jeannie did not look away. Did not want to look away from that face ever.

  ‘I think you’re Nathan Flynn.’ And threw him the towel.

  Then work would mean he had to stay away for a couple of days. On his return he would seem more battered than before. If this was a fairytale, and at the time it seemed that way to Jeannie, then he was off battling dragons daily, and he came back to her scorched.

  She remembered the first day that she missed him and the jolt of surprise, of desire two days later when he arrived at the walled garden mid-morning. She knocked into the potting table and sent a leaning tower of terracotta plant pots shattering across the paved patio. She saw his face react.

  Jeannie made coffee and he stood in the doorway. Asking questions. This is your territory isn’t it? You enjoy what you do? Jeannie had come to realise that he took in details, even the smallest small talk was logged into his memory. He took notice. He gave her security advice for the tool shed and the equipment. Talked about the bouts of car thefts the park suffered from. Just recently the carpark nearest the golf driving range had been targeted. Nathan had used it as an excuse, as if he was only here for the car thieves. Windows were smashed, petty items taken. Gloves. CDs. A muddy pair of hiking boots. An umbrella. But they reckoned without Nathan and his detailed mind.

  The day he apprehended the teenage car thieves and handcuffed them to the castle in the adventure play area Jeannie felt flustered and wild. What she wouldn’t give for this man to handcuff her to the castle. He would have to keep his raincoat on. His shirt buttoned up. His white, white, white shirt.

  He made her feel that she was what he needed from the world. Each day he would move away from the dark world of work towards the place where Jeannie was. The place of sunshine and plants. Things living and being nurtured. Jeannie found her days being regulated by whether or not she saw him, by whether or not she was thinking about him. It was like hypnosis. He insinuated himself into her landscape so that after a while she forgot the time before Nathan. If his car wasn’t parked outside the wall on the gravel it felt as jarring to Jeannie as if someone had cut a tree down.

  * * *

  They had been talking about the boats on the lake. She was moving out of the confines of the shed towards the pear trees. She’d picked up her string and her secateurs, took the three steps to the doorway. He blocked the doorway. A brief standoff moment in which he could probably echolocate her heartbeat, feel the sound of it vibrating through the air. She didn’t back off. Jeannie stood as close as she dared, the blade of her secateurs glinted in the afternoon light, tilted and glittered across his face, like a shooting star. It seemed like a test. She tilted her head upwards. His hand reached for her, his thumbs tilting her chin. His eyes, taking in every detail of her face, then, his mouth on hers. Time stopped for a moment. All the birds silent, beaks open in the tops of trees.

  At the bottom of the hill he stood closer than before. Her arm brushed against that white shirt as she moved past him, as he opened the gate for her, ushered her through, the bus chugging towards them, brakes hissing.

  ‘This is my bus,’ Jeannie said, as she had said many nights before. Only this Wednesday was different. It was past nine-thirty in the evening. The light around them was purplish and warm as the sun set. The sky seemed inflated with the heat as if it was stretching lazily outwards after a hard day. Summery clothes and white cars seemed to shimmer around them. Nathan was wearing a crisp white shirt and it was cooling to look at it. Jeannie felt the day’s grime and sweat at the roots of her hair, felt the skin of her hands, dry and papery. Wanted to lean against that shirt’s smoothness. Lean against him.

  ‘This is my bus,’ she said. Now she thought that he might not say it. He might not cast the spell this time, because she had cast it off so many times before. The bus doors hissed open. Hot and bothered.

  ‘Miss it.’

  Canada geese flew above them, an arrowhead, she remembered. Jeannie and Nathan walking, his hand, resting in the small of her back. Up the hill. Together.

  Lunaria annua

  honesty

  repelling monsters

  * * *

  It was a slow-burning fuse that he lit. Nathan let you know what was on his mind. He didn’t care if he shocked you or upset you, there were things you needed to know, things he needed to know.

  ‘Your mum ran off. What was that about?’

  Or when she asked about him, ‘You don’t want to know, not the details. My dad’s a turd. Curled and brown. Waste of space.’

  Or: ‘You ever think the lowlifes and the shitfaces are winning?’

  He said this one afternoon, as matter of fact as if he’d asked what she thought the weather was turning to. And later, helping himself to more coffee, rooting out the tin he knew contained biscuits, ‘Look at this fucking place Jeannie. Fucking wasteland before you got here. Fucking Bash growing his hash and what the hell. Those fucking bizzie-lizzies in all the colours of some Seventies fucking rainbow. Look at it Jeannie. Fucking look around. You’ve made this place. You.’

  Kissing her. Knotting his hands into her hair as if she was a lifeline. Hugging her to him until she thought a vertebra would snap. He always swore more when the day was hard. She could only guess at what he was involved with. Only the previous week someone had shot a traffic officer who’d pulled them over for a faulty brake light. The morning’s paper had been full of a local stabbing, the victim bleeding all over the front pages even before they had been wheeled from the scene on the ambulance gurney.

  The air ambulance helicopter hovering over town. Jeannie had been in the garden with Geraldine watching it yaw and tack over the back gardens before landing on the other side of the dual carriageway, fusing the traffic into a metallic spine through town. Dad calling on his mobile from the middle of it. Drivers getting out and the rumours seeping quickly. The air ambulance was down but not going back up, t
herefore whoever it had been summoned to help was beyond it. At first the rumour was that it was an accident, some hideous nudge-and-shunt catastrophe but by seven o’clock everyone knew. Someone was out there. A murderer. Someone being pursued.

  That evening Nathan waited for her. But instead of walking to the bus Jeannie moved to the car, put her hand on the passenger door handle. It was locked. There was a moment of eye contact and then Nathan chachunked the door. The car unlocked, Nathan moving towards her, opening the door.

  They didn’t get home. Instead he drove them to the farthest, wildest part of the nature reserve. To the Watch-tower bird hide. In the reeds. By the lake. With only the distant trundle of traffic to remind them of reality.

  Clues. He gave you the clues Jeannie. You just didn’t know there was a crime.

  He hid the dark-circled side of himself from others. In company he was always hail-fellow-well-met. Everyone knew you could ask Nathan. Nathan’ll do it. Be up for it. Help out with it.

  It reminded Jeannie of her old, school self. Nathan’s strong smile would stretch across his face, his hand out ready to grasp yours. Smiling as if this time he was Miss World. He remembered names. He recalled the details. He surprised and impressed. Jeannie loved him. Wanted to be with him for all the days that God sent. To be the beacon calling him home at the end of a hard day with the lowlifes.

  Geraldine approved of him from the first moment she opened the front door to him.

  If only. If Jeannie could ravel time she’d barricade the door. Nail boards across it. Duct-tape Geraldine to a chair. Give Nathan the wrong address so that he would never arrive. But he was handsome and kind and beloved and so they let him in. You assume that a bell tolling doom will have a sonorous quality, it will be vast and cast in bronze by the bastards of the gods at least. It will be patinaed and cold. You don’t think it plays Westminster Chimes or Friesland.

  Most people knew Nathan. He’d done the road safety talks at the schools before he became a detective. He was a local man. A community man. He was on the Buzzards rugby team.

  They were known as the Bastards, unofficially. Big. Tall. Bruised. Battered. Boozy. Jeannie didn’t feel at home at the club but then, she reasoned, she wasn’t supposed to. They ran gentlemen’s smoking evenings, not needlework nights. Nathan’s job was stressful and he needed to let off steam.

  Jeannie showed her face when she had to. She noticed that the marriages fell like dominoes and girlfriends were interchangeable. It was smoky and rank. Not even a few hundred thousand pounds of refurbishment the previous summer could rid the clubhouse complex of the underlying aroma of sweating testicles and picked-at athletes’ feet.

  It was their anniversary. A year since the day they had met. Nathan remembered. It coincided with the Bastards club dinner. Nathan had said they would show their faces and then leave. But that wasn’t possible where the Bastards were concerned. One drink led to another and then Nathan was presented with The Players’ Player award and they just had to stay. Jeannie watched them worship him. Loud singing, beer after beer after beer. Jeannie considered that he was, as they put it, The Bastard in Chief. They didn’t see him, she thought. Only she had that privilege.

  ‘Five minutes more,’ he said, kissing her. ‘Five more. I just have to catch Jez and we’re free.’

  More kisses and then she was abandoned. After a wave of jealous women and their fake congratulations that she, of all of them, was with the Chief Bastard, the Grand High Bastard of Bastards, after their fake smiles, their air hugs and air kisses, faint and insubstantial as the cigarette smoke that smarted in her eyes—after them, the land mass that was Liam.

  Liam. A dark-haired man, six feet five tall and almost as square, he positioned himself like a brick wall in front of her. He had a way of leaning down to try and hear what she was saying over the loud music and in the leaning down he kept trying to snatch a kiss. His breath hot and herbal from the bitter he was drinking and Jeannie found herself squirming away, trapped. Jeannie couldn’t see Nathan in the crowd at the bar, in fact she couldn’t see daylight beyond the looming figure of Liam. He brushed a meaty hand across his shaved scalp. There was a pale moon of a scar that she noticed above his forehead. A patch of sweat on the armpit of his shirt wafted out a harsh soapy masculine smell. The moment when, in pressing forwards to let someone squeeze past them his hand reached up, taking his chance in the confusion to squeeze at her breast. Jeannie pulling herself away, Liam not budging. Laughing into his beer. Jeannie excused herself. Endured a brief dance of thisway-thatway as Liam blocked her this step, that step. In the end he was jogged from behind and his beer sprawled all over her. Soaked, she took her chance with the gap created as Liam turned on his beer wrecker. Jeannie took refuge in the toilets.

  She splashed her face with water, dotted at the dampness with a paper towel. As she opened her eyes Liam closed in behind her. Hands clamped around her hips, pushing and lifting her skirt as he manhandled her towards a cubicle. Jeannie fought back, grazing herself against the surface of him and then Liam seemed to lift into the air, blood fountained from his lips. His teeth fell like stones and a deep animal groan, like a stag rutting, blew out of him. The metallic partition walls around her trembled and blattered. A cistern smashed. Water flooded out. Cold. Soaking into her clothes. Nathan sodden and angry stepping over Liam as he stooped to her, peeling off his jacket and wrapping her inside it. The soap and grass smell of him seemed to cover her, seal her into safety again. His face close to hers as he knelt to pick her up.

  They left like thieves. One of the girlfriends, someone redhaired who’d come in with Liam was hanging around in the corridor. Nathan swept by her, putting himself between her eyes and Jeannie’s prone form.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he snarled at the woman and Jeannie saw her smile.

  Nathan putting Jeannie gently into his car, chunking her seatbelt. His face set hard as he sat in the driving seat, turned the key.

  In the darkness they drove. Later, in her kitchen her hands shook as she reached for the tea caddy. He touched her hands with his hands. Then with his kisses. Jeannie Gaffney thought she knew what love was.

  She did. Don’t short-change Jeannie on this one. She loved him. It’s such a short word and so overused it has become like ‘nice’ and ‘fine’. There needs to be a new word, something Jeannie could use to describe what she felt for Nathan Flynn. Because what she felt was unique to her, for him. Don’t deny her that.

  * * *

  Nathan had come to help collect the fruit trees from the Hanging Gardens of Barbara. It was the independent garden centre that clung to the side of a steep hill on the edge of town and Barbara had spent years terracing it. Years when she was an apprentice to Mr Rigger and years after he sold her the business. As a teenager Jeannie had had a Saturday job there for a while until exams and Sean Ryan distracted her.

  When she was a child Jeannie and her dad had come here often, for plants, for the company. Sometimes for a sandwich in the small coffee shop, run by the sour Irene. The coffee shop sat in a shed at the bottom-most terrace. There was a steep drop towards the gardens of the bungalows littered below. Barbara had screened it off with berberis and whitewash bramble. You could sit for hours on a bench and look the length and breadth of the valley, see the whole town spread out before you. Jeannie had liked to watch thunderstorms from there as Irene crouched in the coffee shop shed sucking on one of her eternal cigarettes warning, ‘You’ll get struck sat out there.’

  Barbara greeted Nathan with a kiss. In his earlier days as a uniformed officer, he’d dealt with a spate of robberies at the nursery and at her home. Petty theft and some vandalism. Barbara had come to rely on the quiet, serious young officer. That was when Barbara’s hair turned white. She’d been bothered by it at first, she was only in her forties, but somehow the white looked better than the vanished sleekness of black. The whiteness of her hair made her face stand out.

  Jeannie loved that face. Barbara was what is called a handsome woman. Strong featured, she h
ad what Jeannie’s mum had called ‘bone structure’.

  Now Barbara mentioned that she’d been to Cromwell Park and seen Jeannie’s work. In Barbara’s opinion the place had never looked so well tended. Jeannie was pleased and Nathan gave a wry smile.

  ‘Couldn’t send Morag a written testimonial could you?’ he asked. Lovely Morag with her wellies and organisation, unwilling to promote Jeannie.

  ‘I’d have thought you’d want to be your own boss Jeannie?’ Barbara remarked and then they were distracted trying to fit the fruit trees through Nathan’s sun roof. Later, over a pot of tea, Barbara said she’d thought of retiring, but wanted to pass the nursery on to someone who would really care.

  ‘Not that bastard from the estate agents’ who keeps bargaining for the developer and showing me artists’ impressions of the block of bloody flats they’d like to build.’ As Barbara spoke, Jeannie caught Nathan’s meaning look but said nothing.

  ‘Hint, hint,’ he joked on the way home, and Jeannie laughed. Barbara had just been talking, mulling things over.

  ‘Besides. I’ve got a job.’

  Morag looked flustered the next time Jeannie met with her and she couldn’t seem to meet her eye. Then, as they checked out the new arched bridge that crossed over the wildlife pond she blurted it out.

  ‘I might be in a position to officially offer you the job proper. I might be. In about a month. They want to get Britain in Bloom out of the way.’ Morag spoke quickly, embarrassed.

  ‘The job proper?’ Jeannie asked. ‘Which job?’

  Morag looked harsh.

  ‘You know which job. Bash’s job. In fact, above Bash’s job. They need someone to take on Watersfoot Gardens and the Scented Arbor Gardens too. There’ve been meetings. Your name cropped up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Morag looked infuriated.