by Peter May
Slater pushed the child into the bedroom then closed the door on her screaming. He was grotesquely pale, his lightly freckled face almost grey against the red of his hair and beard. He looked viciously at Bannerman. But the young woman stepped into the room before he could speak. ‘Your dinner’s in the oven, Mr Slater. It’ll be about fifteen minutes. I have to go.’
Slater plunged a hand into his pocket and threw a bunch of keys to Bannerman. ‘Take my car and run her home, will you?’ he said curtly. ‘And do me a favour. Eat out. I want the child asleep before you get back.’
Bannerman shrugged and nodded. The young woman untied her apron and lifted her coat from over the back of the settee. ‘You still want me tomorrow night, Mr Slater?’
Slater nodded distractedly. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Only I won’t be able to make it on Sunday.’
Slater’s head snapped up. ‘Why the hell not?’ His anger was sudden and unexpected and even she seemed surprised.
‘Personal business.’ She was suddenly defensive.
‘Shit!’ he muttered. He opened the door of the child’s room and went in, slamming it behind him, leaving Bannerman and the girl in an embarrassed silence.
She tried a smile which didn’t quite work. ‘Well, it looks like we’re dismissed. I’m Sally Robertson.’
Bannerman picked up his coat. ‘Hello, Sally,’ he said. ‘I’m Neil Bannerman. It seems I’m taking you home.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or since I’m going to have to eat out, maybe I can take you to dinner.’
Sally smiled again, and this time it was her real smile, lips spread wide across a disarmingly open and pretty face. And her green, impish eyes smiled even more than her mouth. ‘Well, there’s an offer I can’t refuse.’
II
Outside the night air was thick and humid, great dark clouds clustering overhead, having blown in from the west during the day. There was still a winter edge of cold, but when you walked you were warm and the air felt soft on your face.
‘Leave the car,’ Sally said when they came out of the apartment block. ‘We can walk and then take the Métro. It’s a good night for walking.’
Bannerman allowed her to take his arm and they walked the length of the Rue de Commerce and turned up into the Rue de la Loi.
‘I suppose you must feel pretty bad about the kid,’ she said. He gave no sign that he had heard her. ‘They can be that way sometimes, autistic kids. Some worse than others. A break in the routine, a stranger, or maybe a pet phobia. Any of these can set them off on a screaming fit. Sometimes it can last an hour, or two hours, or even more. But they always come through.’
Bannerman kept an even pace and did not look at her. Ill-pasted posters flapped on the hoardings, behind which workmen sweated under floodlights on excavations for the foundations of yet another office block. ‘What’s she like?’ he asked. ‘The kid.’
Sally swept her hand through a vague gesture. ‘It’s difficult to know. She doesn’t speak, you see. It’s not that she can’t, physically I mean. It’s just that . . . well, she doesn’t. She can write a little when the mood takes her, but she can’t construct sentences. She gets what she needs by gestures. A kind of sign language. But you’ve got to know her pretty well to understand it. The doctors say she comprehends what’s going on around her, but her only positive responses to anything are the fits. She takes it all in, but she can’t seem to communicate what any of it means to her.’
Bannerman tried to imagine what that might be like. To be trapped inside yourself. Your body a cage. The world can come in but you can’t get out. He conjured the child from his memory of her. Straight-cut shoulder-length brown hair. A small, plain, expressionless face dominated by large, dark eyes. A grey jumper and skirt. Heavy black shoes. Clumsy limbs.
‘But she can draw like I’ve never seen a child draw,’ Sally said. ‘Fantastic living drawings that she does with a pencil. Drawings that leap out of the page at you. She has this tremendous sense of depth and perspective. A compensation, maybe, for everything else she lacks. They’re worth seeing.’
The streets were poorly lit and quiet here, still in the commercial sector, and they climbed the hill then in silence to the Métro at Schuman below the Berlaymont. There no longer seemed a need to speak, and the lack of words between them was an easy thing. Bannerman felt relaxed in the company of this woman with her hair cropped short like a boy’s, but with a smile and touch and smell that were warm and feminine. Still, he could not shake off his distress, and she seemed to appreciate his distance and disquiet.
The child had touched some inner nerve end, a severed memory, and in his mind he kept replaying the scene in Slater’s flat. Her eyes were always the focal point. Sad, appealing eyes, deceptive in their dark passivity, even at the height of the screaming. Only now, with the short passage of time, were they having their full effect on him. He knew why. Somewhere inside he knew why, but would not or could not admit it.
He remembered the small, gloomy office of the weekly newspaper where he had got his first a job as a reporter. A gauche young man full of anger at the world. Cynical already, although he had not yet fully shaken off his youthful idealism. Insecurity, however, had manifested itself as arrogance, which had not endeared him to the other reporters. They had made it hard for him there, and he had learned the toughest way you can – without friends. It was during this period, of transition from adolescence to adulthood, that he had met the girl, forming a relationship that would seal his future.
She had been a timid teenager in telesales, fresh out of school, impressed by his apparent self-confidence, starry-eyed at what she saw as the romantic world of newspapers and newspapermen. He had embodied all that she, as a young girl, might have dreamed of in a young man. And he had grasped her vision of him, as an insecure youth does, and played to it, built on it.
He had allowed her adoration to puff up his ego, and he would lie awake at night in his attic digs overlooking the canal, playing the game, making the rules and breaking them. He felt the way it gave him power to have her love him when he did not love her. Though when you play that kind of game, sometimes the division between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, and that is when it becomes dangerous.
It had been a small, cold room high up in the roof of the stone terrace, and he hated it. The dull, damp wallpaper. The miserable view across the canal, the railway line and the dark empty trees. The dirty, threadbare carpet over the blackened linoleum and the smell of stale cooking that drifted up from the floor below where an elderly woman lived in a room you could smell when you passed the door. She peed in a bucket, the students in the room below her said. They would wake up at night and hear the squirt of the old lady’s urine against the side of the galvanized bucket. They hoped she had a good aim, they said. And Bannerman had lain in the darkness, hating himself for all the falseness that he needed, remembering how he had made the girl who loved him cry, how they had fought and he had made her unhappy.
And there had been his own tears in all this unhappiness, there in that room. The tears of a callow eighteen-year-old boy trying to find in himself what others always seemed to find with such ease, but resorting in the end to the hollow pursuit of self-deceit. It had never really occurred to him at the time, in the midst of his own selfish unhappiness, that it was not only himself that he was hurting, but that piece by piece he was also destroying another human being whose trust and love he was betraying.
He had thought of her as a rather foolish, if attractive, girl. And it occurred to him bitterly now that he could not even remember her face, and how he had never seen the child she bore him.
*
They went down into the Métro on escalators, through vast empty marble halls. Sally bought them tickets and they queued on the platform under fluorescent lights.
‘Where do you want to go?’ she said. ‘We can ride anywhere in the city on these tickets.’
Bannerman looked at her. ‘Somewhere to eat and get a little drunk and talk,’ he said.
A shining orange carriage whisked them through the new Brussels Métro, along broad lit tunnels to De Brouckere, where they changed and caught one of the trams that run on the prémétro below the city centre before burrowing upwards like moles to run overground into the suburbs. They ate in a steak house on the Boulevard Adolphe Max; steak au poivre washed down with a rich Côtes du Rhône.
Their conversation was desultory, a little awkward at first, each inhibited by the other’s strangeness and the memory of the scene at Slater’s apartment. But Bannerman liked the smell of wine on her breath and the way she wore no make-up except on her fine lips. He found it easier to look at her than to talk. He saw now that she was older than he had first thought. Her thick, short hair was a rich auburn flecked with the first signs of a premature grey. Her eyes, below finely stretched lids, were a deep, solemn green speckled with brown. Only the finest of lines etched out from their corners betrayed her youthful appearance. Her nose was short and a little pinched around the nostrils. It was a delicately structured face without being beautiful, and you thought you could tell from her smile and her eyes that she knew how to look after herself. She had a bright laugh, and always when she laughed she flicked back her head in a small, careless way. And Bannerman guessed she must recently have worn her hair long. She would be about thirty, he thought.
They left the steak house a little warmer and a little closer, and walked further down the boulevard towards the Place Rogier, where the towering Manhattan Centre of concrete and glass rose powerfully into the night sky. ‘You’re a strange, quiet sort of man,’ Sally said without looking at him, her eyes fixed high up on the Manhattan building on a large Martini neon.
‘Only when I’m strange and quiet.’
She smiled. ‘You still want to get drunk?’
‘Not drunk. Gently . . . tipsy.’
‘We can go in here.’
The Manhattan was a small, upmarket café near the end of the Boulevard Adolphe Max, emulating the American bars of Thirties movies. A row of tall stools stood along a bar of polished mahogany, below a wooden canopy hung with beaten copper light shades. Small round tables and chairs stood in clusters in little alcoves. The walls were panelled in the same polished mahogany, and behind the bar stickers advertised Scotch, American beer and Stella Artois. It was almost deserted, and they filled two empty stools along the row. A bored waiter in black waistcoat over a white shirt and bow tie had been leaning against the end of the bar smoking a cigarette when they came in. Now he snapped to attention and approached to take their order. They asked for whiskies, which he brought in short glasses to be placed on mats on the counter in front of them. Bannerman raised his glass. ‘Slainthe.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s Scots for good health. Gaelic.’
She smiled. ‘Slainthe then.’
They took their first sips in silence before Bannerman said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘There’s nothing much to tell.’
‘Now why do people always say that?’
‘Maybe because it’s true.’
He shook his head. ‘No. Everyone’s got a story to tell.’ He took another mouthful of whisky, allowing it to slip back easily over his tongue and down his throat so that it left a seductively warm sensation in its wake. ‘The editor of a paper I worked for once used to say that behind every window there’s a story.’
‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Can I stop you?’
‘Why do reporters always ask questions?’
He grinned at her. ‘It’s their job.’
‘Is it?’
‘We’re a nosy breed.’
‘Only you seem quite different from Mr Slater, or some of the other reporters I’ve met.’
‘That’s probably because I am.’
She tutted, partly with irritation, partly with amusement. ‘Why do you always have to be so clever?’
‘I don’t. I’m just enjoying breaking the ice on our relationship.’
‘Oh? We have a relationship now?’
He shrugged. ‘Not yet, maybe.’ He paused. ‘So, anyway. You were going to tell me something about yourself.’
‘Was I?’
‘I think you owe me that, at least. We met during a scene, we’ve travelled together across half of Brussels, had a meal together, and all I know about you is that you’re English and you keep house for Slater. Or do you?’
She sighed and gave in to a reluctant smile. ‘All right. Yes, I’m English. I’m thirty-two years old, unmarried – and, no, that’s not an invitation. I’ve lived in Brussels for two years and teach English at a private college three days a week. On the other days I keep house for Mr Slater and take Tania to and from her special school. I look after her on Sundays and sometimes babysit in the evenings when he goes out with his fancy woman. Is that enough, or would you like my life story from day one?’
Bannerman smiled. ‘Quite talkative when you like. Why do you need to work for Slater when you’ve already got a job?’
‘Because I don’t make enough from teaching alone. Brussels is an expensive place to live.’
He paused. ‘So what’s an attractive young lady like you doing living alone in a place like this?’
‘None of your business.’
Her sudden sharpness surprised him. There was an uneasy silence for some moments, then, ‘Tell me about Slater’s fancy woman.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Because I’m asking.’ He drained his glass and saw that Sally’s was empty too and he signalled the ever-watchful waiter to order them another two.
She shrugged. ‘His lady friend is about thirty. A good-looking woman, plenty of money – or do they call it class nowadays? You get the impression she’s a little out of her comfort zone with Mr Slater.’
‘You mean slumming it?’
‘Not exactly slumming it. They’re a strange couple, that’s all. Not exactly a match made in heaven. And she’s not exactly what I would call affectionate.’
‘She’s Belgian?’
Sally nodded. ‘Marie-Ange Piard. Divorced.’ She half-emptied her glass then looked at him seriously. ‘You know, it occurs to me that I know as little about you as you did about me. How about me asking some of the questions for a change? Like, why don’t you tell me something about yourself?’
Bannerman grinned. ‘There’s nothing much to tell.’ He looked up and saw that she was smiling too.
‘Bastard,’ she said.
Bannerman raised an eyebrow and drained his second glass. ‘So I’ve been told.’
Her smile faded slowly and there was a long silence. Then, suddenly self-conscious, she turned her eyes away.
‘Do you want another drink?’ he asked.
‘No.’ She pushed her half-finished glass away from her. ‘I’d like to go home now. It’s late.’
They left the Manhattan and she insisted on taking a tram home on her own. ‘Will I see you again?’ he asked.
She said, ‘Maybe.’ And he watched the tram move off along the tracks, carrying her away into the night.
III
Bannerman rode the Métro over to the east side and found the door of Slater’s apartment off the latch. He went in and closed it quietly behind him. As he walked the length of the hall, he felt the quiet of the house like a presence within it, and found Slater sitting in the dark of the living room. His cigarette end glowed red as he drew on it.
‘She’s asleep,’ Slater said. He seemed very subdued. ‘Your bag’s in your room. Along the hall, the last door on your right.’
Bannerman could barely see his face, but he nodded and felt all the disquiet returning through the gentle whisky haze in his head. ‘I’ll find a hotel on Monday,’ he said.
Slater tur
ned towards him, and his face caught the soft light of streetlamps beyond the window. ‘Okay. Thanks. What will you tell Tait?’ Bannerman said nothing, and Slater waited in the silence. Then he said, ‘I’ve got to go out tomorrow night. A social function. EEC officials, some politicians, folk from NATO. Dull stuff. But you’ve got to keep up your contacts.’ He paused. ‘Well, you know that.’ Then, ‘I suppose you’d better come with us. I don’t want to leave you here.’
‘Us?’ Bannerman cocked a quizzical eyebrow.
Slater shifted uncomfortably. ‘Three years is a long time for a wife to be dead. A man needs a woman.’
*
Bannerman lay in the bed with a faint grey light creeping in through the shutters. He thought that, after all, he had no right to intrude on the private pains of a man like Slater. And then his mind turned to Sally. Her bright pretty face, her sudden withdrawal just when it seemed they were beginning to make contact. All the loneliness of the first night in a strange bed closed around him like a fist, before the drowsiness of approaching sleep scattered his thoughts and numbed his depression.
He was not sure how long he had been dozing. It might only have been a matter of minutes, or it could have been hours. And he was not certain at first what it was that had reached into the depths and forced him up to break the surface of consciousness. The moment of waking was one of confusion; the strange room, the unfamiliar bed, the smell of damp. The room was washed with the same grey light. Then beyond those first seconds of confusion came an awareness of another presence. Nothing he could see or smell or hear. He just felt it, and there was a momentary flutter of apprehension in his chest. He jerked up on to one elbow and saw the child standing in a long, shapeless nightdress, bare feet on the bare linoleum. She was only a couple of feet away, watching him. Big dark eyes. That peaceful, passive expression resting easy on her face. She seemed small, more fragile, more childlike. His first thought was that she might scream and he felt his body tighten with tension. But she just stood there.