The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  ‘But I can’t get the pictures out from here,’ David said, tapping his head. ‘I can’t concentrate on anything else. It’s like I’m in love with it.’ He would say these things quickly, and then become sheepish. ‘What about you? It’s worse for you. What am I complaining about?’

  ‘I’m fine. We’ve got each other, haven’t we? We’re lucky.’

  Though his face did not project feelings of good fortune, though he did not kiss her, she hoped there was time for that.

  ‘Do you ever get that thing where you wake up, and you’re convinced that it hasn’t happened?’ he said, with the first glimpse of a smile.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  On one of those nights, a year after the accident, Louisa saw her father’s car as she was walking to the trailer. He must have worked late. She turned away and obscured her face with her hair, but she could hear him slow down and pull over. He pipped the horn. She carried on for a moment and then relented, marching over to his window. It was his birthday, and she had told him she had to miss supper to stay late at school. He was a man who felt vulnerable and mawkish on his birthday, and he looked hurt as he leaned over and opened the door. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘The school thing finished early.’

  ‘Get in,’ he said.

  ‘No. I’m meeting some friends.’

  ‘I know who you’re meeting,’ he said. He must have seen David waiting by the trailer. ‘I’m not going to take you home. Just get in for a second. It’s cold.’

  She sat in the passenger seat, keeping the door open and one foot on the kerb.

  ‘Happy birthday, Daddy,’ he said.

  Louisa sighed, and felt her father bristle. ‘Shall I postpone dinner until you get back?’ he said.

  ‘No. I’ll get a cob from the van.’ She pointed up the road.

  He shook his head. ‘Eating from a van,’ he said.

  ‘Jesus,’ she whispered, and began to get out of the car.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Just watch you don’t get left behind.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said, quieter, so that she involuntarily leaned towards him. ‘I just can’t understand it. That boy isn’t fit to lace your boots.’

  And with that old sporting phrase, he shocked Louisa for the first time in many years.

  Her world did not collapse, it eroded. School became something of a waste of time; the teachers, she noticed, stopped reprimanding her. Punishments were meted out at arms’ length, with minimal eye-contact, and she was left to drift towards her hawks. She kept company with the older boys who worked with Roy Ogden. Good, gentle types like Baz Tiler, who could have a bird flying free in four days, and harsher boys like squinting Nelly Carter who clicked his tongue whenever he saw her, made remarks about her ‘posh accent’ and one day, when she bent over to peg a bow-perch, said, ‘Eh up, look at that bit a tail. ’Bout creamed me sen.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard you had a hair-trigger,’ Louisa replied, standing and pressing down on his toes as though she was running a red light. Nelly smiled through the pain, and Baz Tiler looked away.

  Sessions concerning further education undoubtedly took place at her school, but either Louisa was not invited, or she failed to attend. In any case, the concerns of the girls in her class seemed alien to her now, and trivial. She scored high on biology tests, and could identify the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus in a closed jar before the teacher, but that was the limit of her academic success. She was so far from comprehending the rites and motivations of her peers, she did not imagine that the same conversations about the future might be taking place in the boys’ school across the road.

  At sixteen, she took a job on an estate in Derbyshire, lived in the old mews, and slept in a woolly hat. Her falcons, and those of the master, resided in purpose-built quarters next door. The master did not bother her, and she felt happy to be left alone with her work. Her father did not object to the residential position, and her mother had become distant since the accident, as if she had fired the gun herself. A few times a year Louisa saw Baz and Nelly, who had taken night-shift work so they could fly their birds by day. They were not bitter about her live-in falconry job, being mammy’s boys, both. The early starts and long days meant their meetings in the Patternmaker’s Arms were swift and moderate, full of bushwhacked whistles and stone-me-youths.

  On her rare free days, Louisa strove to make it back to the van on the outskirts of Oakley. They never discussed the possibility of David making the trip to Derbyshire. His parents didn’t like her to call his home, so she called a phone box near his house at 7 p.m. every Wednesday. There was no phone line in the mews, and Louisa enjoyed the romantic idea of them speaking from identical phone boxes, miles apart. He usually answered, in the beginning. But David’s social life soon resumed. She grew to recognise the strain in his voice, and his tendency to suppress his inquisitive nature, swallowing questions lest they prolong the conversation. Sometimes she thought she heard people talking outside the phone box. She began to feel sick of phone calls which started with the words ‘I’m on my way out, actually.’

  ‘Where to?’ she asked him, one day in May.

  ‘Leavers’ Ball,’ he said, clearly distracted. Another ball, she thought, without her this time. No pointy shoes.

  ‘Leavers’ Ball? Where are you going?’

  ‘Bristol,’ he said quickly, and then swore under his breath. ‘To university.’

  Re-heating cock-a-leekie on the portable stove, she thought of him down there at university, thought of what he might be up to. She had little experience of the social life, but she had a bitter imagination. She had let him slip from her grasp. Warming her hands above the soup, she knew she had made a terrible mistake.

  Louisa went back to Oakley when she heard about the reunion at the OAP hall. She waited outside, in her big shapeless coat, which was as green as the moss on the war memorial against which she rested. She could not help but think back to that night she had first approached him. To say she would do it all the same again was to make a murderer of him, but she could not help what she wanted.

  The revellers came out before midnight, into late spring rain, talking about the bus to town. For a moment Louisa felt superior to their frivolity. A pink, spatulate girl saw her first, took thirty seconds to make the identification and still failed to muster any restraint. ‘Oh God, it’s her. Where’s David? David? Darling?’

  ‘Yes? We’re heading for the Coconut,’ he said, trying to light a cigarette. The girl pointed, and whispered in his ear. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said, half-walking, half-dancing towards Louisa in his suit. Louisa’s eyes had adjusted to the dark hours before, but David’s had not. He stopped suddenly when they did.

  ‘Christ,’ he said.

  ‘Close. The Holy Ghost,’ she said. ‘Boo.’

  He looked over at his friends, who had gathered on the steps of the OAP hall, to watch. ‘Will you give me a minute, chaps?’ he shouted.

  ‘A bloody minute?’ Louisa said. ‘Not much time for an old friend.’

  He smiled hesitantly at her. ‘Or perhaps you could come into town with us . . .’ He pointed over his shoulder, but lost conviction.

  ‘I don’t think so, do you?’ she said, smiling.

  ‘No. Probably not,’ he replied. ‘What brings you to these parts?’

  ‘You, David. I can’t seem to get hold of you on the phone.’

  ‘Been busy.’

  ‘Aye, so I see,’ said Louisa, thankful for the darkness, because the ‘aye’ which slipped out had made her cheeks burn. She saw it all quite clearly: the students had come to this party intent on showing each other how they had matured during their years away. But it was she who had changed most, without wishing to. Perhaps her difference could be used to her advantage. She doubted it.

  In any case, she told him he owed her more than a minute, so he reluctantly waved goodbye to his friends for the night. Louisa watched th
em go, surprised at how few she recognised. She surmised, from their unwillingness to approach, that they all recognised her.

  Louisa and David walked uphill, passing her old haunts, and the places where she had flown Jacko. David looked nervous, scared perhaps that they would somehow arrive at the canal. He’d never had much directional sense. He talked about the reunion, about Bristol, and about the nightclub the others were going to. ‘It’s nowhere special,’ he said, with an unconvincing shrug. ‘Pretty small town stuff, really. Plays some hot music, though. Do you manage to get out much, where you are?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Louisa said.

  ‘Do you go to clubs?’

  Louisa thought of Nelly and Baz, of the colours of the well-lit dartboard in the Patternmaker’s. ‘No. I’m beyond all that, to be honest. I’ve too much work to do.’

  They reached the fenced limits of her old school, from where she had looked down at David running naked across the field. Now, the field was packed tight with tents, erected as part of an open-air sale. The rain, falling forcefully, made a rolling putter as it hit the canvas. The tents were like dull bulbs, their colours diffused.

  ‘Do you still think about what happened?’ she said.

  ‘I try not to,’ he said.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  ‘I mean, I do. Of course I bloody think about it. Every single day. Every time I see a kid. Every time I see—’

  ‘Who do you talk to?’

  ‘I don’t talk to anyone. If it gets really bad, I just try to go to sleep.’

  ‘You used to talk to me,’ she said. ‘About everything.’

  He had grown an inch since she had last seen him, and his hair was now flecked with seeds dislodged from bushes and trees by the rain as they had walked to the top. She kissed him, and pushed him against the coated wire fence which gave slightly with their weight. He unzipped her coat, and put his hand on her waist, ran it up the side of her jumper and took hold of her left breast. Then he pulled away and inhaled audibly as though he’d been underwater. He stared at her with alarm, breathing fast.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she said, unbuckling his belt.

  ‘I can’t do this.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said, but she saw, as she stood back and examined his face, that there were reasons, and she did not want to know them.

  She had read books and seen films, and she knew that most girls would have insulted him, or ran away, shamed, at that point. But she wanted him to think she was something different, that her commitment had transcended such self-regard. So she put her arms around him, and twined her fingers through the fence behind his back. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. He was shaking – cold, perhaps.

  She walked him home, but felt him get twitchy as they neared his road. ‘I’m sorry, Louisa.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said, again. ‘And don’t forget me.’

  ‘How could I?’

  SIXTEEN

  Sensual overload had suppressed Louisa’s morbid outlook for a couple of hours after Adam left the house, but she knew her irascible soul and there was no escape from it. By 2 p.m. that day, she was imagining Adam and Maggie in bed together, laughing at her.

  He had refused any payment. Taken by a crazy mood, she had said, ‘Well then, I’ll have to buy you dinner instead, won’t I?’

  ‘I think you probably will have to, aye.’ He had sounded sad to Louisa, almost resigned.

  He must loathe me, she thought now.

  She did not call him that afternoon, and thanked herself for it later in the evening, when she dressed in last night’s clothes and looked in the bedroom mirror at the place on her neck he had kissed. Tufts of blonde hair curled there, along with a couple of wiry white ones. She pulled her shirt up over her face and left it there for a long time, inhaling and exhaling until she had made a wet patch which felt the same against her belly as his sweat and spit had felt.

  She removed her clothes and sat on the bed with her eyes closed. She thought of his arm going between her legs to take hold of the back of her thigh, and then sliding on up. But in her imagination, her legs became Maggie’s legs. Louisa pondered this vision and let it play for a moment. Then she opened her eyes, picked up the knickers from the pile of clothes and took them through to the kitchen.

  She had been making a bumper leash – an elasticated tether to soften the impact on Diamond’s fragile legs. She punched holes in a strip of leather, sheared off the elastic from the top of the knickers with a knife, and threaded it through the holes. She stitched the ends together, twanged the leash and placed it carefully back on the table, ready.

  By Wednesday she could no longer stand it. She stood at her living room window and watched Maggie’s house. The thought of Adam pulling into her neighbour’s drive made Louisa want to drink fence paint. But he did not. Was she supposed to call him? Wasn’t that the way his job worked, after all? (And it was just a job, she reminded herself.)

  The old voices were back, loud and strong. Maybe he had visited Maggie, but he had driven the courtesy car that replaced his Golf. Maybe she had missed him. Yes, the voices were back, but it was the whisper of a good feeling that sickened her. She resolved to eliminate that in her usual manner. She would follow him, see him on one of his ‘appointments’, and confirm to herself how crushingly pointless the whole thing was. Even as she picked up her coat, she felt the rush of adrenaline.

  Outside, she examined her van. The dent, where Maggie had driven the trolleys into the door still remained, like a sucked-in cheek. If you didn’t want me to see that you were stalking me, he had said, you wouldn’t have done it in that maroon monstrosity. Well, if he could have a courtesy car, then so could she. She got into the van and set off for the garage.

  As it happened, she saw him catching the bus from the top of his road. Even under the cover of a black Corsa, she stayed way behind. When Adam alighted in Duffield, she pulled into the Coop car park. She had to take a deep breath when she saw him. At that cautious distance, she could not see the face of the woman who greeted him at the door of the small end terrace, but she could see that the woman was young. She had dark hair and wore boot-cut jeans and a T-shirt with writing on the front. Louisa turned on the heater and waited.

  She woke an hour later to find him sitting next to her. ‘Oh shit,’ she said.

  ‘New motor?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a courtesy car,’ she said, unable to look at him.

  ‘Well you’re not being very fucking courteous with it, are you?’

  She had a bitter taste in her mouth. She looked at him, feeling the same toppling attraction as she had that night at her house. He was quiet, his breathing quick and shallow. ‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ she said, but even as she spoke she felt herself leaning towards him.

  ‘I don’t even want to say what it looks like,’ he said, but his voice was quiet.

  They kissed and then stopped, Louisa glancing around, seeing kids come out of a nearby school. She looked back over at the house he had just come from, and shook her head.

  ‘You were quick,’ she said, their faces still close. Louisa was frightened of picking up the scent of another woman.

  ‘You must’ve been asleep for ages,’ he said. He kissed her again.

  The disgust she felt had become so mixed with arousal that she could no longer tell them apart. ‘What was she like?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘She’s nice.’

  Louisa wanted to hit him. ‘I see,’ she said.

  ‘I’m biased, mind. She’s my sister.’

  ‘Right,’ Louisa said, relieved, and then appalled with herself.

  ‘She gets mate’s rates.’

  Louisa sighed. He put his hand on the back of her neck, and she heard the unfamiliar vehicle adjusting to their movements.

  ‘I couldn’t get a spare car, on my insurance,’ Adam said. ‘Can you give me a lift home?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You know the way.’

  Louisa had often
wondered about the inside of his house, imagining the earthy smell of football boots and an overflowing bin, a big plasma TV and an unpleasant glass table. She was right about the TV, but the place was tastefully done, if a little sparse. He had clearly bought wrecked wooden furniture and worked it up himself. His coffee table was a school desk with the legs cut off, the drawers still intact. There was a nautical feel to the lounge: a barometer, pebbles and shells, and a caged light on the table, which looked like something from an old boat. ‘You do know that Derbyshire contains the most landlocked inch of Britain, right?’ she said.

  ‘Aye. Exactly. That stuff reminds me of me holidays.’

  A few small family pictures stood discreetely on the bookshelf. In one, a young Adam sat with his mother and sister on a Spanish beach, drinking from a glass bottle of 7UP that was as big as his arm. His skin was darker, but the facial expression was unmistakable – the lips pursed as though he had narrowly avoided some catastrophe. Louisa turned to see him wearing that same expression now. ‘Will you stay for a cuppa?’ he said.

  The afternoon faded fast into that sad hinterland, but he did not bother to turn on the lights. They made love against the door jamb, one foot in the living room, one in the hall. Without alcohol the pleasure was more shocking, their bodies colder but no less willing. They ended up lying on the carpet, his stomach glistening like glass in the almost dark. After a few moments, he turned on the boat lamp and she suddenly remembered what the window looked like from the street.

  She asked him about his sister. He said it was the usual thing: he visited Sophie to hear news of those family members who no longer spoke to him. ‘Bit a joy, bit a torture.’ He hadn’t been back to the family home in Belton for ten years.

  ‘Because of your job?’ Louisa asked.