And then it became that kind of timeless holiday time, the no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year, when you watch Jason and the Argonauts and stuff like that, and eat chocolates you don’t want. Ruth worked. The factory was closed. I moped about the flat. I’ve always avoided my balcony. I’ve only ever used it during parties and never, ever, gone out on it alone. It’s because it’s directly below her balcony, and if I were to stand here I’d see her with her, rocking, ten feet above my head. It’s been a timeless day and I’ve run out of fags. It’s getting on for the early winter sunset, and I remember the way she was always drawn to stand out there at this time and look at – what? And I think that maybe if I go out there, on my balcony, I’ll see what she saw and maybe I’ll understand better why all this happened. Why she went. So I brace myself and go out. The cold is shocking. I look around. Everything’s gone kind of red. There’s just the river and the windows across the way reflecting light. Nothing to look at really. What did she see that I can’t? What? What? My heart’s battering and I want to shout. I do shout. ‘What?’ and ‘What?’ then ‘What?’ leaning on the railings, craning out as far as I dare, trying to catch something. Anything. The sound disappears with my breath. Nothing.
I wipe my eyes and blow my nose. The cold drives me in and I look around at the mess. Light’s flooding the room. It’s almost the colour of a blood orange. But it doesn’t really matter. She took all the colour with her. And suddenly I realise what she meant, and I know that I’m only going through the motions. And I can’t bear this anymore. I just can’t. I go out for fags for something to do.
I draw out the conversation at Davinder’s as long as I can but they’re not interested. Chit chat obviously doesn’t cover their overheads. For the first time I can remember I don’t want to go back, but I don’t want to go anywhere else either. If nothing else the cold drives me back. There’s a folded envelope under the number plate. The sack? The place is closed and they wouldn’t do it this casually. There’d have to be a proper postman and everything. I unfold it. The writing’s on the folded part but still on the outside. It’s too dark on the landing. I take it into the hall. Ruth’s writing’s crap enough to recognise. I don’t know if she signs it cause I don’t get any further than the first couple of lines. And suddenly I’m at her door, at electrical speed. Either she’s been waiting or she hears me coming. She opens the door and points along the hall. I take her hand and drag her with me. I practically boot open the door, like troops on the telly. I don’t know what I expect. If I’d read the letter right to the end, instead of stopping at her name, it might have explained. I might have an image in my mind that the scene fits onto, like tracing paper or a brass rubbing. The last thing I expect to see is this vague-looking older guy, staring at me and taking stock. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. And he takes out some photos and hands them across. And although he doesn’t say anything Ruth and me know, we just know, that the thing we’ve dreaded so much we were afraid to say the words out loud in case it came true, isn’t true. She isn’t dead. And I don’t remember anything about the next half hour at all till somehow I’m nominated to fix him a fry-up.
PART 4
He is seated in the most reinforced corner of the sofa with a plate of food on his lap. It consists of fried eggs, fried bacon, fried sausages, two hemispheres of a fried tomato and fried bread. All these ingredients appear to have been made in the same pan, at the same time, by simmering everything in half an inch of hot fat. The egg whites have run to embrace their shipmates, before coagulating, and the entire ensemble lifted out with a spatula. On investigation the egg yolks burst open and now flow, lava-like, over the rest. The whole thing is delicious. He had not realised he was as hungry as he was tired. Now that the uncertainty of his reception has been removed, tiredness has hit him like a wave. The mug of tea is replaced twice more. The cupboard won’t yield anything to the dog’s taste, so Ruth returned to the firework emporium to buy him half a dozen samosas. Lolly made the fry-up with great gusto, shouting staccato questions through the open kitchen door. What does she look like? Is she happy? Miserable? Has she asked for her? Why did she leave like that? Who the fuck does she think she is worrying her, worrying them, like that? Does she know her dad’s been drunk since Christ knows when, and tortures himself to stand looking like death warmed up staring into that room? Can she not see what they, gesturing with the pan in a tidal flip of hot fat, have been through? Does she know that she’s even been to a fucking clairvoyant to try and find her, and has even been thinking about going to church, or worse, the polis? Does she think the electric pays for itself and that they’ve got nothing better to do than be fucking caretakers? At this there is a conspiratorial nod above the pan towards Ruth, patting the dog, making Christopher complicit in the secret that she probably hasn’t anything better to do. Where does she get off treating them the way Nick treated her, evaporating like some fucking panto genie? Who, Christopher wonders, is Nick? Doesn’t she know that she’d give anything, anything, to see her walk in that door right now and put her arms round her and...
The sob is like a detonation, so sudden he thinks the pan has caught fire. He has been craning from the sofa, unsure of what’s expected of him, but thinking that this tirade might merit eye contact. Unsure of what to do he stands. Ruth’s beaten him to it. They hug in the kitchen. The outburst stops as quickly as it starts. He is startled. Is that all it took, an instant of human contact to diffuse that much grief? Ruth comes back. He hears the rasp of a match and Lolly is smoking a cigarette over his bubbling dinner. She deftly picks some loose tobacco from her bottom lip, and something else from the fry-up. The whole lot is shovelled onto a plate and presented with another cup of tea. The dog is gnawing a stale samosa.
She plies him with questions while he eats, and, inexplicably, turns on a gigantic and disproportionate television at the same time. He finds the background flicker and drone a distraction, but it seems this is another form of human contact she somehow craves. There is something so compulsively tactile about her that he wants to reach across and stroke her, but thinks this might be misinterpreted. She picks up the dog, samosa and all, and sits so suddenly on the sofa that his meal is nearly catapulted. He answers between slow mouthfuls. She can’t conceal her impatience, or disappointment, at the inadequacy of his answers.
‘Yes – but what’s she like?’
‘In comparison with what?’
‘Was she happy?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Was she sad?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Well that’s no fucking good!’
Ruth moderates her with a touch. He wonders if this is a safety valve against more tears. What cost his antiseptic life, practically hermetic since his mother’s death, punctuated by loveless pokes at Marjory?
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you look as if you’ve had more fun than me.’ He doesn’t know where this non-sequitur comes from: thinking aloud, tiredness, age. It silences her for a moment only.
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, the Count of Monte Cristo on the telly last week looks as if he’s had more fun than you.’
But the break in her flow has allowed him to ask questions and he perseveres, doggedly, in the face of their halting replies. What was she like? Happy? Sad? Because these questions weren’t nonsensical the first time round and he does have something to compare it with. He has the woman in the photographs, the woman fixed to the back of the nursery door who gazes out on that small mausoleum. Because of course the child, Millie, whose name causes them the same difficulty as entering the room does, is dead. And that one deadening fact explains everything: the clotted points of her hair on the approach to the bridge; the vacancy, remoteness, sense of reproach at enjoying anything; the discrepancy, between then and now, of depth in the eyes whose cherished object has been rubbed out of the foreground. It explains everything except where she has gone.
‘By the way, your wee dog’s lovely but a bit rancid.’
She pushes him onto the carpet, causing Christopher’s tea to spill.
‘Perhaps the samosas?’ he suggests.
‘We’ll find him something more suitable tomorrow.’ Ruth says, on her way for a cloth.
* * *
Despite protestations he is given Ruth’s bed. Lolly offers her spare and again he is made complicit in another wary exchange, this time from Ruth. There is abundant green around the flat to walk the dog, and abundant blowing crisp bags to pick up shit with. Their chimed insistence that he stay longer sways him, particularly Ruth’s appeal. He somehow feels Gina’s proxy, that they feel nearer to her when he is here than when he isn’t.
‘But I haven’t enough underwear.’
‘Buy more.’
So the next day he is taken by bus to the city centre, and trundled round Marks and Spencers to buy more of whatever else he needs to postpone his departure. They buy proper food for the dog because he is, as Lolly says, a bit rancid. He is surprised at the Victorian splendour of the buildings. Unknowingly he has lived with the perspective that nothing really exists beyond the capital, except dormitory areas that feed it. If nothing else, the sudden dip in temperature would have told him this is a different country. The atmosphere he encountered, getting off the train, seems to prevail even at midday, a growing boisterousness anticipating Hogmanay. The lacklustre hawker, selling cheap cigarette lighters and cheaper sports socks, sports a halo of glitter.
They take him out one night to meet some other young women of their age, a local place of latent menace he feels thankfully insulated from. These other women go into hysterics at every second thing he says, as if he’s contrived an accent and manner of speech for impromptu performance. Lolly has, it seems, memorised some choicer quotations and trots them out with a passable impersonation.
‘Hey, Christopher, what was that thing you said the other night?’
‘I’m sorry but you’re going to have to be more specific.’
A round of titters.
‘What was it you called that politician guy on that party political broadcast? The one that came on instead of Emmerdale?’
‘Unctuous.’
More laughter like party poppers. What she doesn’t say is that he didn’t volunteer anything but gave opinions to her questions, posed, it now seems, to supply humour. He isn’t offended but feels like some prop from an Ealing comedy, wheeled out for archaic laughs. Emboldened by three spritzers Ruth rubs the back of his hand. They are all nice to him. They call him ‘sweetie’, and ‘darlin’’, and ply him with drinks to prompt more nuggets of received pronunciation. The smuggled dog, beneath the table, contemplates a ring of garish footwear. They say their goodnights and on the way home the three of them suddenly become four, as a taciturn young man appears, perhaps from the shrubbery, and wordlessly accompanies Lolly as she gestures to him. He says nothing the whole lift journey and follows her out a floor early.
The next day, during an unintended afternoon nap when he has slouched into one of the sofa’s depressions, he is roused by the bell. Ruth is working. Lolly has her own key. He feels it takes an age to escape the upholstery. He opens the door with an apology. He hasn’t seen a face this lined since he was eight, a photograph of a Red Indian in the Children’s Britannica, features as rugged as his environment, sunk in a creased moccasin. He had an excuse. This man has an indoor complexion. He brushes past, seemingly unsurprised at a visitor, and pats alternate walls as he sways along the corridor to the nursery door, pushes it open and stands on the threshold, oscillating with grief, or drink, or both, till he turns back and leaves the way he came in, closing the door behind him.
She had to leave. He can see that now, the enveloping hopelessness. And so must he. He breaks it to them that night over an Asda curry. Thankfully he isn’t expected to eat from his lap, poised on the carnivorous sofa. They sit at a Formica table Ruth has produced from somewhere.
‘But she might come back,’ Ruth says, ‘and you’ll miss her.’ He holds back the obvious remark that if she was going to return she would probably have done so before now, and here is precisely what she ran away from.
‘Too many memories,’ Lolly says, nodding in the direction of the nursery. Tears well in her eyes.
‘If she comes back here you can tell me. If I’m at home and she comes back there then we have two options covered.’
The logic is compelling. Lolly dries her eyes on some kitchen roll and focuses her attention on the poppadoms. Ruth prevails on him to stay one more night for the bells.
The following night sees all the girls in the local pub, and later the same crew, with yet another mute male satellite of Lolly’s, crowded on Ruth’s frosty balcony, counting down the seconds. He is worried the structure will give: some of the girls are almost as well upholstered as Lolly. She is already drunk. On the stroke of midnight they burst open plumes of cheap Cava as the fireworks from Glasgow Green burst on the still air. Between explosions, outrollings of the tolling bells pass them in waves. Fizzy wine is sloshed into their meagre selection of glasses. He has a chipped teacup. The dog barks in recognition of the electricity. Lolly calls for silence and shouts over the cacophonous backdrop.
‘Gina.’
‘Gina.’ A collection of clunks as the glasses and cups collide. Lolly hands hers to the mute boy and puts her arms round Christopher’s neck. She is big anyway, and her heels make her of a height with him. The pressure of her forearms force his face into her bare neck. He can feel the heat and vitality rising from her breasts. She holds him at arm’s length, the collision with his back pushing the boy behind indoors, takes both his cheeks in her hot hands, stares into his eyes, pulls him forward and kisses him fully on the mouth. Her lips are cushioned. He closes his eyes instinctively before impact. Now he opens them and finds the boy has insinuated himself back on to the balcony and is observing the exchange sadly. She lets Christopher go, retrieves the glass and takes another swig of Cava. He wanders away, into the living room, not wanting a repetition of the embarrassment caused by Vanessa. He totters slightly. She is potent even at this remove. He feels as if he has been given a glimpse of a carnal vista he should have wandered down as a younger man. He drinks thirstily. Ruth, seeming to understand, refills his teacup.
Twenty hours later he approaches his front door. The reduced service vindictively called at every hamlet on its way south. He was surrounded by crapulous Glaswegians making the same commute and, for the first time in his life, felt a sense of camaraderie. Again the harlequins of light are thrown onto his lawn. He posted keys and a cryptic note through Oscar’s door on his impulsive departure. They were out, thankfully. He imagines Deborah will have collected the post, and lit the place to deter burglars. He sees the blurred shadow of a figure flit past, and recede towards the top of the glass as it climbs the stairs. The dog has sensed it and barks in recognition. The figure stops. So does his heart. He reaches the handle as the outline grows. His key grates in the lock and is pulled from his hand as the door opens. They stand on either side looking at one another. She is wearing his dressing gown. His first reaction is mechanical.
‘How did you get in?’
She points to the planter. He remembers the key beneath.
‘I’d say that shows a chronic lack of imagination. Something out of Cluedo.’ She stands aside. ‘Come in.’
The invitation to his own house sounds strained to both of them. From the speed of his movements she sees he is exhausted, helps him with his things and sits him at the table while she busies herself preparing something.
‘Please, no more fry-ups.’
She looks bemused. He abandons the hard chair for the sofa, luxuriating in sprung upholstery. There is a period of accounting but it can wait till tomorrow.
‘Lorraine says hello.’ It slips out. He realises he has been rehearsing this on the train, envisaging all the permutations of this encounter in the desperate hope that she would be here. She puts down the whisk. ‘And so does Ruth.’ She turns round, gripping the surface behind
her for purchase, and takes stock.
‘You... you went through my things?’
He is back in the Glasgow flat imagining the broadside this would elicit from Lolly: ‘Who the hell do you think... worried fucking sick... cried for two months solid... and now you’ve the fucking nerve...’
‘It went against the grain, I’ll admit.’
‘But you forced yourself.’
‘No. You forced me. You lost the right to privacy when you left with no forewarning.’
She returns to beating the eggs, the strokes marking time in the brittle silence. He tries to read her back. She won’t face him even when there’s no need to supervise the toaster. Assembling the things she finally turns and presents him with a tray.
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