I drank tea from a cup with no handles. There were a lot of empty bottles on top of her cupboards. Whisky, vodka and beer. But for all I knew she might have lived there for years.
‘Snow’s forecast tonight,’ I said.
‘I hope it does,’ she said. ‘I love the snow, getting a fire on and cooking up some mulled wine. You like mulled wine?’
I wanted to tell her how Jeff and I stole a crate of red from the back of an off-licence and slowly warmed it for days on a little camping stove. But she might not approve, so I just said, ‘I love it.’
But we were getting too comfortable. Maybe she was conscious the mulled wine comment had come out like an invite to stay.
‘Guess you’ve got some windows to sell.’
I finished my tea. ‘Tell me about it.’
I stood and said thank you. We walked back through the lounge. Leonard Cohen was still singing, asking his darling over to the window.
At the door I turned and told her she was a Samaritan.
‘Well, it’s in exchange for that drink later.’ She then gave me a little wave goodbye, and for a moment I swear I’d lived in that house all my life.
We drove out to Annesley, one of the pit towns that time forgot when the coal ran out, and parked on a rise overlooking fields of frost. The sun set behind leafless trees, as if the black branches were stencilled on its very surface. I told Jeff about my date.
‘Spawny bastard. What’s her name?’
‘Shit.’ I hadn’t asked, and neither had she mine.
Jeff laughed. ‘Don’t hold your breath.’
‘What do you know?’
While Jeff smoked down his cigarette, I watched crows hop around a scattering of breadcrumbs thrown on to a lawn. A lilac haze to the sky flashed their wings with violet, and I was thinking how beautiful the world had become since that cup of tea when Jeff threw his butt from the window. ‘Anyway, you’ve got fuck all to buy her a drink with.’
The crows took flight.
‘Better get your beer money.’
We knocked that whole estate. I got lucky on the first street, a new back door. ‘Said he was sick of snails coming under the gap and sliming up his lino.’
Jeff got nothing. ‘Another skint weekend.’
He was trying too hard. On the estates you needed to be more charity worker than salesman, make out that you’re somehow doing the customer a favour. But I was thinking about the evening, how I wanted to buy her drinks all night.
We sat in the corner of the Western. Her name was Siobhan. I bought her two drinks. When she told me her name she bet I couldn’t spell it. But I took out a pen and wrote it on the back of a beer mat. We swapped CV type biographies for the first drink. Then we broke from the formalities.
‘I’ve been thinking about you all day.’ This is what I told her. Her hair was down, framing her dark eyes.
‘I should hope so.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve not come out in the cold for nothing.’
I was tingling with that remark. I felt drunk, and I hadn’t even finished my pint. I tried making her laugh some more just so I could gather myself. I told her that I had to go because I needed energy for my Saturday job as a male prostitute. She laughed again, then asked how much I charged.
‘About a thousand pounds an hour,’ I joked.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Will you offer me a discount if I buy us a couple more drinks?’
I said I would. And she might have thought she had a bargain. But on that particular night of my life, I’d say the price was about right.
We walked from one pub to another, across the park, my hands pulled inside my sleeves because I’d given Siobhan my gloves. It started snowing as we crossed the bridge over the canal, and we stopped for a while, watching the flakes waft down from the blackness, meeting their own feathery reflections on that very dark water.
When we kissed I was young enough to still dream about the future. Houses, cats and children. Happily ever after.
Not stalking a man on Wall Street.
NAKED. TWO EARTH CHILDREN scrabbling in the dirt under an oak tree, hands and fingers interwoven, her thighs squeezing my pelvis as I came deep inside her.
This is how I picture what never happened on that Cotswolds hillside.
When the police car came we were tangled. Arm in arm, tangled in our clothes, the future.
‘Shit,’ said Kay, looking past my shoulder to the road. ‘Your cop just arrived.’
I was kissing the top of her breasts. The shining patch of skin contained all my focus.
Until the police turned up.
‘Can he see us from down there?’
I turned and looked to the lane. Whether he could or not, the moment was stolen.
‘He’s getting out.’
Perhaps the officer, plump and bearded, switched the beacon on out of habit. I doubt he knew we were the only other people who could see it, a sharp flash of electric blue above the hedgerows.
‘He’s interrupted us,’ said Kay.
Or saved us. Saved a marriage, or two. That’s what I thought but didn’t say. Instead I suggested we hide in the bushes. Like predators, or prey, we watched him walk around the wreck a couple of times, note down the number plate, talk into his radio then briefly scan the fields and the trees before driving away.
I looked at Kay, sitting with her tanned legs stretched out, skirt pushed to the top of her thighs.
‘You know we have to go,’ she said.
‘‘Should or have to?’
‘We should at least move.’ She straightened her clothes. ‘That cop might come back.’
The moment had cooled. I didn’t want to say gone. We walked down the hill from our fairy-tale dell across the bright green fields. From the dappled shade to the stark light, a broken spell.
‘We should hike a little,’ I said, helping her over the gate.
I pulled along her wheeled suitcase, a strange sight, I’m sure, as if a honeymooning couple had chosen this Cotswolds lane as their dream vacation. Conversation returned to the fundamentals, which direction to head, guesses how long until we caught a ride.
Did she feel guilt, right then, for what we’d just done? Guilt for being unfaithful to her husband, guilt for kissing another woman’s man? I don’t know, I never asked her. But I did ask myself, and fleetingly condemned my act as we waited for a lift, convicted myself of a crime against Jenni. But not Segur. My thoughts fluctuated madly between remorse and thrill, a squirm at the bottom of my stomach that was probably the same reaction to both feelings.
We’d only been walking for ten minutes when a car pulled over. A guy no older than eighteen, sporting gelled hair and gold hoop earrings, wound down his window.
‘Guessing that’s your mess in the ditch back there?’
We got in his Golf GTI. He turned down a pulsing house track then told us he was on his way to football practice. ‘But I can drop you off somewhere.’
‘That’s lucky,’ I said flatly. ‘We could’ve been hiking all morning.’
I’d have been happy to hike all day, but once we got within a mobile signal I googled a car rental place on my phone while Kay called Chris.
‘Cirencester, I think. Hertz?’ our driver guessed correctly. ‘I thought so. I go past it when I see my gran.’ He rattled on about which bypass it was, which exit to take, while I was trying, and failing, to tune into what Kay was saying to Chris.
‘We all good with the car?’ she shouted from the back seat, her mobile pressed to her ear.
‘I’ll find out.’
Once I phoned and booked the car Kay confirmed with Chris, ending the call, ‘I’ll talk to you about it later, okay?’
‘No problem,’ answered our Samaritan when I asked if he could possibly drop us there. ‘It’s my good deed for the day.’
‘Looks like you’ll make your flight after all,’ I said to Kay in the back seat.
‘I guess,’ she replied, her voice faltering.
Then I looked at her in the rear view mir
ror. I have to admit I was happy she looked sad. She was staring out of the window, watching the yellow fields flash past. I noticed her hands on her lap, how hard they gripped each other.
FROM THE SPINNING DOORS Segur appeared, smiling, shaking hands with two other men in tailored suits before turning and walking up Wall Street, away from the East River and towards the church.
Finally, my man. My heart thumped in my chest.
I gave him a fifty-metre head start, then followed. It was just before four o’clock and he’d beaten the rush hour. Though I’d been standing there since three, I didn’t really expect to see him so early. Or even at all. I felt like a private investigator, a professional. Or just a man getting lucky on his first ever stakeout.
So far. Because it wasn’t easy to follow him without getting too close. How well did he remember me from that day in August? If the lights at a crossing changed and I carried on walking I was in danger of standing next to him on the kerb. Instead I stopped, tried not to look too conspicuous tying a shoelace that wasn’t undone, then quickly stood and followed once the walk sign illuminated.
His head bobbed above the other pedestrians, his broad shoulders cutting a swathe through a gaggle of German tourists pointing cameras at the Stock Exchange, a gum-chewing police officer posing in front of his squad car.
I nearly lost him in the melee, a squabble of hiking jackets and backpacks, before I saw him going through the doors of the plaza entrance to the subway.
I followed him across a marble court, beneath a glass atrium where homeless men sheltered from the cold around fake palm trees. Then down the escalators into the Wall Street station where I got a little too close when he fumbled in his pockets for his Metro card.
The deeper I followed him into the subway, the more I felt like his assassin rather than the detective I’d imagined myself.
He turned left on to the platform. I couldn’t hear the grind of an oncoming train so let him go out of view before descending, feeling very conspicuous with shades on and no sun in sight. Not that I should have worried about looking a little freakish in New York, considering the anomalies that wander this city.
From the middle of the platform I leant against a girder and watched him pace, head down in thought, until the scrape of the 2 train broke his reverie.
I took the end door of his carriage. Strip lights and empty seats threatened my masquerade, and for the briefest second he did look at me, or the man I was, hat, scarf and shades. I angled my face away, watched him in the window reflection, his mirrored phantom fading in and out with the stuttering bulbs. From his foot-tapping stance I guessed he wasn’t going far, unsurprised when he jumped out at 14th Street.
Up the steps and out on to Seventh Avenue. I trailed him as he walked north, keeping about half a block behind until he crossed at 18th Street and went into the Chelsea Organic Flower Shop.
I stood in a doorway until he emerged with a fancy bouquet of assorted blooms. And my heart sank when I saw this gift, a present, I presumed, for Kay.
When he came back across the intersection I had to turn against the wall and hide. He passed within feet of where I waited. To shield my face I mimicked lighting a cigarette, cupping my hands around the imaginary flame.
Then I followed again, this man with a bunch of flowers, over to Sixth Avenue where he crossed and briskly walked five blocks up to 23rd Street before turning into a flash apartment building called the Caroline. On seeing him nod to the top-hatted doorman I realized I couldn’t trail him any further and walked on, my thoughts following him into the elevator, to his door, to Kay, her face on receiving the flowers.
‘YOU’RE JOKING?’ I’D PHONED Jenni from the car hire office in Cirencester, waiting for Kay to run to the Ladies so I could talk alone.
No, not talk. So I could lie alone.
‘Shit, you’re both okay?’ She was in the hotel restaurant. I could hear the breakfast clatter of plates and cutlery.
‘As long as the traffic’s not too bad on the motorway, we should be fine.’
‘I bet Kay’s not too happy about it. She could miss her flight.’
‘She’s taking it in her stride, actually.’
Jenni hesitated, very slightly, but long enough for me to think about what I was saying and how I was saying it.
‘Well, that’s good,’ she went on. ‘But you need to get her on the plane.’
I agreed. I didn’t tell her that I’d promised to pay for a later flight if I didn’t get her on board her scheduled one. Or how we’d hidden out in the wood from the police.
Or how I’d tended her cut, pulled her lips to mine.
‘Give me a call from Heathrow, let me know how it went.’
‘Fingers crossed.’
Fingers crossed for what, I wasn’t sure.
*
Air-freshened and immaculate, the rental car was wiped clean of any personality. Mine, Kay’s, or the previous drivers’. Like the ground beneath the tree, it was another space cleared of our history, a fiancée, a husband.
‘No crashes this time.’
‘Tell that to the geese,’ I replied, swinging us through roundabouts where a wrong exit might get us lost in the Gloucestershire countryside for days.
‘Cerney Wick.’ Kay read signposts for tiny hamlets tucked in the Cotswold vales. ‘Think you could live in Cerney Wick? What a name. Or how about Cricklade? You want to move to little old Cricklade?’
‘Are you doing an impression of English sarcasm?’ I asked, truly not sure what she meant by such questions.
‘Isn’t that a dream life? A house with one of those straw roofs by some babbling brook. Is that what you say? A “babbling” brook? With ducks. A village green where immaculate mothers have picnics and cut the crusts off sandwiches.’
‘You’ve got the wrong Englishman.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, offhand. ‘That’s the impression. Beautiful fiancée, handsome man, both doing well in the City. You know, why not aspire to that quaint cottage and a nice life, kids and a couple of dogs?’
‘I’m a cat man.’
‘Well, I’m a cat woman.’ She reached into the bag of snacks we’d picked up outside the car hire place and pulled out a pack of crisps. ‘I never have chips.’
‘Crisps.’
‘Tomato, potato. And all those other pronunciations you Brits complain about.’
Kay drank a Coke and put back the crisps. Sun glimmered off cars on the bypass. Patchwork fields and more cows. I scooted along the outer edge of Swindon and turned on to the M4.
‘We should be there in an hour and a half.’ I looked across at her profile.
‘That’s good,’ she said coldly. ‘I wouldn’t want to miss that plane.’
How quickly the atmosphere in the car had darkened. I glanced across again.
‘You should look at the road,’ she scolded. ‘That’s how we crashed this morning.’
We were quiet for a while after this, Kay putting her sunglasses back on, fiddling with the radio in an effort to find some music to fit the mood. Whatever the mood was. The picturesque countryside slipped from the windscreen to the rear view mirrors and we went past the suburban, low level sprawl of Reading and Slough.
I broke the silence. ‘It’s not all castles and quaint villages.’
‘Same way we’re not all hot dogs and burgers.’ Kay looked at her watch. ‘We’re making good time.’
‘Touch wood.’
She sighed, impatiently tapped her knee with her fingers. ‘So?’
‘So,’ I repeated, but my intonation dropping on the ‘o’.
‘Are we pretending it never happened? Is that it?’
‘It happened, I know that.’
‘Does that mean you’re afraid to talk about it?’
Perhaps I was. Before I answered she went on, an impatience in her voice. ‘Maybe I’ve got you all wrong.’ I could feel her eyes burn into the side of my head as I drove. ‘That’s it. You’re just another player, cruising around behind your wife’s back
.’
‘No,’ I said sharply. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘No? You didn’t see this American chick in her yellow dress? Not quite as sweet as your sugar and spice Jenni, but a little different, dirty even. The sort of girl who might fuck you in a field.’
‘Come on, really.’
‘What am I supposed to think? I don’t do this every day, you know.’
‘Remember it was your husband who asked me to give you the lift.’
‘How convenient.’
When I looked over to her, the traffic ahead drew up sharply. I braked hard and we jerked against our belts.
She steadied herself with the dashboard. ‘Two crashes in one day?’
‘Sorry,’ I apologized. ‘And not a goose in sight.’
I slowed down, hung back from the snarl of cars jostling towards Heathrow. I felt hot, my hands heavy on the steering wheel. Then I told her that if I could kiss her again, if I could crash without endangering her, I’d write the car off that very moment.
She shook her head and seemed to study her fingers, perhaps her wedding ring. And she didn’t answer. Though what was she supposed to say?
On the winding roads into Terminal 3, beneath the concrete overpasses and manicured traffic islands, she suddenly said, or rather threatened, ‘Don’t even think of dropping me off like you’re some taxi driver.’
‘Look.’ I pointed at the sign directing us to the main car park.
And I drove on, crunched gears exiting an island, still unfamiliar with the feel of the rental car, unfamiliar with my very own self.
Between following the maze of lane changes, I kept looking at the digital time display on the steering wheel, counting down her flight, working out what the clock would leave us before she disappeared through passport control.
She saw me looking. ‘I did the online check-in. I just have to dump my bag an hour before take-off.’ She paused as I reversed into a tight space, allowing me the concentration, or not wanting to compete with it, before asking, ‘Does it scare you? That in under two hours I’ll be gone?’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 6