The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  ‘No. They don’t know about that. Other stuff.’

  Sophie knew about his evening work, and she didn’t really want him around her children. She never said it, but he could tell. ‘As if I’d pimp them out or sommat.’

  Louisa pulled a blanket down from the sofa and covered them both. ‘How did you get into this job?’ she asked him.

  ‘Careers Advisor.’

  She cuffed his head. ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Just fell into it, really.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘I’m serious. I had a thing with this lass. Just a thing, like. Sex, you know?’

  Good God, Louisa thought. Just his saying the word was enough to cause that feeling in her stomach.

  ‘Anyway, that finished, but she rings me a few months later and says it’s her mate’s birthday the next week and they’d had a whip round. Asked me if I could do oat. She laid it on thick, like. Said I was dead good in sack.’

  ‘Well,’ Louisa said.

  ‘Said they’d raised two hundred pounds. Couldn’t believe it. I was skint. Birthday girl’d had a bad run, apparently.’

  ‘That was the first one?’

  ‘Aye. Grew from there.’

  ‘Did you – do you – advertise?’

  ‘No. None of that. It’s all word of mouth.’

  ‘Which is the title of your new movie, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘You what? Oh aye. Them kind of jokes are an occupational hazard. Fortunately I’m not too swift on the uptake.’

  ‘Mmm. Uptake.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Can I ask another question?’ she said.

  ‘Aye, go on. As you’re in your stride.’

  ‘Do you take drugs?’

  He frowned. She had offended him again. ‘No. I don’t touch any a that shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just trying to work out why you—’

  ‘I’ve got a kid, an’t I? From when I were young. Send most of the money to her mam.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘It’s nothing I meant to hide. I don’t usually tell folk.’

  She tried to pick through the layers of that remark for a moment. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Out west.’

  ‘Out west?’

  ‘Aye. Shropshire somewhere.’

  Louisa laughed for a second and then stopped. ‘Sorry. Do you see her at all? The child?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That must be—’

  ‘Way it goes, in’t it. I might not be there, but me money’s there.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘My God. You can’t be much older than that yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I’m at least twice that age,’ he said.

  His life began to open up to Louisa. She could imagine his parents’ house in Belton – the damp mossy stone, the tidiness of the rooms, the smell of apples in the kitchen, the thin walls.

  He took a cushion from the sofa, lifted her head from the carpet, slid the cushion underneath. He turned to face her. ‘What’s going on with you and your neighbour, then?’ he asked. Louisa felt her eyes widen. She sat up.

  ‘Why, what did she say?’

  ‘She never said oat.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t talk about other clients. You didn’t tell her about this, did you?’ She was aware of shouting the last few words, but Adam remained calm.

  ‘No. And she’s not my client any more.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She stopped it. It was four or five weeks. That’s all. I knew it would be.’

  Louisa let her head fall gradually back on the cushion. ‘What did you think of her?’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘Looked like she was feeling bad about herself. Oftentimes I see people in that state.’

  ‘She’s grieving.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Lots of stuff.’

  ‘You seemed quite eager to get one over on her.’

  ‘I was looking out for her.’

  ‘No you weren’t.’

  Louisa was quiet. ‘She was my friend.’ It hurt to say it, and she felt, with panic, that she might cry.

  ‘What did you fall out over?’

  She did not have the heart to tell him. She hadn’t spoken to Maggie for weeks now, and she couldn’t imagine doing so after this, but there had been no confrontation. ‘I can’t even remember. Do you think it’s only going to be four or five weeks with me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Different. Completely different thing.’

  She thought of Maggie and Adam together, as she had seen them that night. The vigour and eagerness of them. She felt the blood move inside her. She felt sick. It was tough to hold on to the tears. ‘I want you to tell me what it was like with her,’ she said.

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘That good, eh?’

  ‘Didn’t say that.’

  ‘She had this mark on her neck. It was a love-bite, wasn’t it? It was you.’ Louisa remembered watching Maggie from the doorway of her bathroom. The cold light and the discolouration on her skin.

  ‘You don’t want to talk about this. It’s not your thing, and I’m not fucking telling you, anyway.’

  She nodded and turned away. ‘I’ve managed to piss you off as well, haven’t I?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t get away that easy.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Adam stood just inside the automatic doors at Morrison’s and listened to them opening and closing behind him. His trousers were covered with a pelt of wet grass. He was tired, but he didn’t care, because Louisa was coming for an early supper. They had spent almost every night together for the past two weeks.

  He marched the aisles, picked up the ingredients for steak sauce. At the meat counter he chose a couple of rib-eyes. He turned away to sneeze. ‘You allergic to grass?’ the assistant from the meat counter said, looking at his work clothes.

  ‘Aye. A bit.’

  ‘Looks like you’re in the wrong game,’ the assistant said.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Adam said.

  His mother had worked in a supermarket. He remembered once, when he was eight years old, that she had slipped on some spilt oil at work and broken her arm. Adam had been mute for three days. His mother had raised him with passion and care, but she had always had the power to destroy him with a single sentence. Emotionally annihilate him. Once, in his teens, she caught him talking dirty to a girl on the phone, and lost her rag. ‘If you start getting into all that at your age, you’ll never find out what else you’re good at.’ They both had a fair handle on the future, powerless as they were to influence it.

  Belton, where he grew up, was a town of fine lines. Arkwright’s Mill – a World Heritage Site – was just down the road. It was the home of the Industrial Revolution, the catalyst for the modern world, but half of the current population didn’t have a job. When Adam was young, most of the unemployed lived on St Mark’s Estate, down by the colourworks, where the brook sometimes ran pink. Most of them took smack. But it didn’t have to be that way. Adam’s father had a job, and Adam himself could have followed his old man into construction.

  Now, in the supermarket, he felt the cold of the giant refrigerators. The beeps and pips from the checkout sounded like a life-support machine. The hollow sound of these places always made him remember.

  At fifteen, he had failed to heed his parents’ warnings about the older girl who worked on the checkout with his mother. When he had thought about the trouble he could find on St Mark’s Estate, putting his hand up some lass’s NafCo 54 sweatshirt seemed like the soft option, and he’d be damned if he’d spend his life wringing it out over the blonde one from Roseanne.

  ‘I’m late,’ she had said, meeting him outside the shops.

  ‘No you’re not. We said half past.’

  It had been an honest mistake, and he’d felt sorry for the girl. He had promised to pay for the child, and he was a man of his word. He recalled sitting
in the waiting room during one of the early appointments, staring at the green Nike Air Max he had received for his fifteenth birthday (he knew how hard his parents had saved to get them). The girl’s grandparents had come over from Shropshire, and everyone was shaking their heads and casting glances in his direction. He had expected there to be tests in life, but he had not expected the final exam to come so early, or that his failure would be so irredeemable in the eyes of others.

  These days, his wages from the Golf Club went towards child maintenance, and he used the money he made from his night job to pay the rest, and cover his own bills. He hadn’t accepted an appointment, however, for two weeks. He reached for some broccoli, but decided to go up-market, and chose asparagus instead.

  The last time Adam had seen his daughter, she was four months old. Her name was Elizabeth, although he had once heard her mother call her Lizzie on the telephone. He had thought of her a lot more since meeting Louisa. Of course, he had always thought of her, but now he allowed those thoughts to linger.

  When he spoke to Louisa, told her stories, he could make her laugh under her breath. He knew that took a special sort of skill. Sometimes, when he was on a roll and she was laughing easily, he opened his mouth with this great wish to say something else, to tell her something he could be proud of. He wanted to talk about his daughter. But he knew nothing about her, and so had nothing else to say. He didn’t even know what a Shropshire accent was like.

  The picture in his mind was of a tall, sensible girl with her mother’s features. Perhaps she would look him up one day. The thought made him more anxious than excited – it only seemed to strike when he was leaving the house of a client. She would be disappointed if they met, but he knew that in all likelihood they would continue to live eighty miles apart, without contact, and clever Lizzie would probably despise the idea of him without any details to confirm her instincts. That, perhaps, was the best he could hope for.

  He swung his basket down the frozen foods aisle, trying to guess which ice cream Louisa would like. Plain, she would claim, but he already knew her better than that. A woman in a trouser suit sailed towards him with a deep trolley, holding the hand of a little boy. It was too late for Adam to turn around, and he knew what was coming. The woman raised her eyebrows in recognition, her lips parting with good humour as she prepared to greet him. Adam waited for the circumstances of their meeting to dawn on her. The woman’s face froze, her eyes a little wider. She coloured, averted her eyes, and pushed the trolley on. ‘Thomas, get here. Now,’ she said to the little boy, who had disengaged to look at the desserts.

  Adam stood still and waited for the woman and her son to pass. Last Christmas, that same woman, who had claimed to be called Collette (though Adam had seen household bills addressed to Linda) had pleaded to be allowed to suck his cock. He loitered by the bags of ice for the short time he knew it would take her to curtail her shopping trip, before making his own way to the check-out.

  The machine at the till rejected his debit card. It had been a bad month, with the car repair and his moonlight sabbatical. He emptied his pockets onto the conveyor belt: a wallet with no money in it, £9.20 in change, his keys, half a blister pack of painkillers and a condom which he quickly shifted to his other hand.

  The checkout girl sighed loudly and began to sort through his coins and goods, trying to work out what he could afford. Adam had already done the maths. ‘Can I leave these vegetables here, duck?’ he said.

  ‘No law against it,’ she said.

  ‘I was probably getting ahead of myself, anyway, buying asparagus,’ he said. The girl didn’t even look up.

  As he drove home he thought of Louisa. The previous night he had been to her house. She was always nervous when arranging a meeting, and she’d told him to park in the village and walk up through the pines. Her anxiety soon wore off, and she had reluctantly agreed to play the guitar. He loved the way her face stayed almost still while she played, just the odd raise of the eyebrows, a tightening of the mouth, her scarred fingers sliding smoothly down the neck.

  When he left the cottage, she had walked with him. ‘I’ll just go to the end of the path,’ she had said. And then she had continued all the way down to the village with him, looking away with a little smile, daring him to mention it.

  When he drove away from their early meetings, the purity of his feelings were contaminated by the pull of wherever he was heading next. So he had begun to cancel his appointments.

  In the mornings, the reality of the situation was clear: his choices had been made many years ago; there was no room for the feelings he had now; the whole thing with Louisa was impossible. But throughout the day she would just fill him up. The thought of her enlivened him, gave him an oblivious sense of hope. He’d never asked himself if he could live without his night-job. His feelings of anxiety – the need to please a stranger every day – Louisa was smashing all that to pieces.

  The clouds above his road were blue and yellow. He caught himself checking his mirrors as he passed the take-away, to see if she was following. He smiled.

  Louisa knocked and waited, holding the gift in her fist. She had treated the mouse skull he had picked up that first night at her house and attached an old falcon bell and a chain to make a key-ring. She thrust it at him as he opened the door.

  ‘A say, look at that! Is that the mouse from—’

  ‘The very same.’

  He smiled broadly, revealing the gap in his teeth, and attached the charm to his bunch of keys. ‘That’s mint, that. Eh up, isn’t this what you use to find your hawks?’

  ‘Well, we use transmitters now, but yes. Same principle.’

  ‘So it’s another way of you stalking me.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  Louisa laughed and scratched her neck. Reciprocation was a novelty, and sometimes a frightening one. She could smell meat in the kitchen, and the wild boozy stench of mushrooms cooking in sherry. It smelled like a home.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about my hawks, actually,’ she said above the noise of the extractor fan as he poured her a Guinness. ‘It’s difficult to get them out, what with the weather.’

  ‘And the sex,’ he said.

  Louisa ignored him, trying not to grin. ‘It’s important that they get exercise. There’s a few of them that I’m trying to cut down.’

  ‘Cut down?’ Adam said.

  ‘Reduce their weight.’

  ‘Why?’

  Louisa rolled her eyes. He was evidently interested by what she did, but he was not as intuitive as Maggie. ‘To get them keen and sharp. You feed up a captive hawk and it won’t do the business. It’s not so easy to get a fat bird to do what you want in my game.’

  ‘I’m shocked and appalled.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ Louisa said.

  The food was sticky and good, and she told him that a simple salad was just as tasty as any fancy-dan asparagus when he apologised for the lack of it. They were in bed before seven.

  Adam’s bedroom was quite bare, with white linen and soft lamps with papery shades in the corners. Louisa would have sneered at such décor a month ago. Now, she held his hands beneath the sheets.

  ‘I’m not the first, am I?’ she said.

  Adam frowned. ‘What do you mean? I’m not a virgin.’

  ‘This must be something that happens. A fling. You have this kind of thing with clients all the time, right?’

  ‘I don’t have this kind of thing with anybody,’ he said. It was difficult to distrust him.

  ‘Are you going out tomorrow night?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is business usually so slow?’

  ‘I’m taking a little break from that side of things,’ he said.

  Louisa paused. ‘Do you think that’s wise?’

  She disliked herself the moment she said it, and saw the glimmer of hurt in Adam’s face. He looked at her sincerely. ‘Look. As for Detton, I won’t go—’

  Sh
e shushed him with a finger over her lips.

  For the moment, this was how she dealt with the feelings his job aroused in her: the odd joke, avoidance, and a little snipe now and again. She was always aware of his mobile phone in the room, set to silent vibrate. To her surprise, she found herself wondering about the women in the village – women she had thought boring before. Tim Nettles’ sister, a divorcee, often wore leggings, and her thighs were toned and firm for a woman of her age. When Rosie Wicks served her a pint in the Hart, Louisa tried to imagine the older woman’s desires. Her husband was fat, and often drank ale well into the night with the regulars. Did Rosie ever become lonely or frustrated? And of course there was always Maggie, lean and supple, across the way. Don’t think of it, Louisa told herself. Just don’t. It was easy, at that time, to avoid the issue, because they were together all the time.

  At a corporate hawking display, Louisa addressed a group of account executives on the lawn of a country club. ‘Take a look at the size of Fred’s eyes,’ she said, holding the Harris hawk on her fist. ‘Proportionally, they are much bigger than those of a human.’ She went into her usual rant. As she spoke, she flashed back to her nights with Adam, the roughness of his fingers on her shoulder, the surge of feelings through her skin. ‘The hawk has a sensual world which is far superior to ours,’ she said. She smiled, because, at last, she realised she was wrong.

  EIGHTEEN

  Maggie walked the hardcore paths of the park, early one morning in December, wondering about the lone ibex and where he might be. Could an animal like that survive in the semi-urban wilderness of Derbyshire? There had been no news since the false alarm at the building site.

  From a distance, she saw Button, one of the otters, rise to the surface of the dark pond, sniffing the air for the scent of the little boy who stood by the barrier. Maggie watched their stand-off through the mist, the boy sucking on the end of a Mars bar while Button ducked in and out of the reeds for a better view. The boy bent down, picked up a stone and hurled it at Button, who was quick enough to dodge, but the boy threw another, which hit the surface just as Button disappeared beneath it.

  Maggie raced over to the boy. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she said, taking him by the arm, which had the effect of raising him on to one foot. She had not realised how small he was. He did not seem perturbed.