He took the commuter train home, had to pull his warrant card every few months or so – pissed-up city boys, school kids with screwdrivers, office girls getting humped in the toilet. One asked if he wanted to join in once, cheeky tart. She didn’t know he’d been on the slack since three weeks after the computer detail started. Fran did, but she’d got it all wrong. Did she want this marriage to work, after her last one? Yes, she did. Did she want him back in uniform? No, she didn’t. He loved her, but she broke his bollocks sometimes.
He walked home from the station, mile and two clicks by his dashboard clock and he needed every step. Fran didn’t understand why: he rented a tape about airtraffic controllers he saw on Discovery once, tried to tell her afterwards how he felt the same as those guys: when they finished their shift they pulled up a pew to the canteen fishtank, sat and monged out in front of the guppies and whatnot till they felt ready to go home and deal with their wife’s day. All she’d said was that he was hardly an airtraffic controller and maybe he’d stop giving her colds all the time if he let her pick him up in the evening.
The streets around the station were terraces: a paperboy’s dream, doors fronting straight on to the street, walk along with your sack and bang-bang-bang – no driveways, no dogs, no problem. As you walked, you could look straight in, out of the corner of your eye, bang slap into the middle of other people’s quiet time. The rest of the way home you could only do it in winter, in the hour between people turning on their lights and remembering to close their curtains, but round here you could do it all year round. He smelled coal smoke, wet brick, drains, walking slowly, frowning, like his eyes were moving because he was thinking, like the last thing on his mind was seeing what people were watching.
There was no one downstairs when he got home. The TV said NO MESSAGES [PRESS MENU TO EXIT], white on blue like MS-DOS: pre-Windows, when his job hadn’t existed. He called “Hello”, trying to make it sound less like a question than an admission. There wasn’t any answer, so he put the kettle on, went to the foot of the stairs.
“Fran? Sweetheart?”
“Min the bath” came muffled back from upstairs. “Joo pay the gas?”
“Yeah,” he called. “Cuppa tea?”
“Nye get out.” Irritably.
There was a time when he could’ve taken the cup into her – soaped her back, whatever – while she talked about her day. But he hadn’t fucked her in four months and he didn’t have to see it to know that the bathroom door was closed. The kettle was starting to rumble. He went back into the kitchen, made the tea, cupped his hand under the spoon while he carried the bag to the Addis in the corner. Then he sat down at the table, started on the post.
Two for Fran, both handwritten, wonky stamps: Mount Pleasant and N4. Three for him, printed, C-thru windows showing mailmerge type, return addresses on the back to Southend, Guildford and Leeds. When he’d split up with Charlie and got his transfer, he couldn’t get arrested by a bank. Two years down the line, new mortgage, new PEP, new wife, and they were practically buzzing his house with helicopters. 7.9% till August! £250 cheque back! As a valued customer . . .
Fran came down, hair up in a turban, body wrapped in the pink fuzzy bathrobe and matching slippers he’d got her last Christmas after she’d said absolutely no more underwear this year. She went to the kettle without looking at him, so he said, “You smell nice,” to her back.
“You don’t,” she said, pouring the kettle on to the bag he’d left in her Far Side cup.
He sniffed theatrically at his armpits as she pulled the belt of the robe tight, dropped the bag in the sink and turned to look at him, cradling the cup in both hands.
“I smell like a man,” he said, Captain Caveman voice.
She didn’t crack a smile. “Lori’s back tonight,” she said, looking at him over the rim of her cup.
He frowned. “She allright?”
Fran hitched her shoulders. “She broke up with that fella.”
“The black guy?”
“He was Nigerian.”
“Right.” The guy’d said his name was Echo, the one time he’d met him – he’d thought it was either a street name, or it was some art-college joke he didn’t understand. You ask someone a question, they come back saying Echo. Some student thing. But Ekow, it must’ve been. He’d only seen it written down before, had thought it was pronounced like the green binbags at Sainsbury’s.
“I’ll pop round Londis, get some more Persil,” he said, trying to show he was a parent here too. When Lori was here he felt like a lodger in their family, and he’d wanted that to change for a long while.
“She’s upset actually,” Fran said. That “actually” sounded like “back off, but probably just meant her Sloggis were up her arse about something.
“When’s she get in? I could go and pick her up.”
“I think she’s making her own way.”
“No trouble,” he began.
“She’s making her own way,” Fran said, like that settled it, put the cup down and shuffled out into the lounge. Twenty seconds later he heard her hairdryer start, and that was it, couldn’t get a word in if he’d wanted to.
Didn’t get the chance later, either. Lori’s connection from town got in at eight-fifteen, crafty little cow: too late for tea at home, just in time for her mum to treat her to a Harvester. Feeding up disguised as girl talk: Fran was a good mother – a good woman – and he tried to remember that. He cooked up a Sizzle and Stir with a microwave nan, took it to the sofa, forked it off his lap with the TV on. They’d both been through the let’s-make-an-effort-to-eat-like-a-family in their first marriages and sometimes – most of the time – talking was the last thing you needed. When you had his job you wanted to leave it in the locker room, not come home and run through it all again. Even before the pictures.
And after them, as soon as she found out about them, all she wanted was him off the job. He told her that’d mean uniform, and did she know what uniform was like after all the balls-ups in the papers? Pensioners to puberty-dodgers calling you racialist, couldn’t do your job without everyone getting their oar in.
But that wasn’t where this was coming from: this was coming from they hadn’t fucked in four months, and if her first husband hadn’t been such a tosspot they wouldn’t have a problem. Him and Charlie, his first, had worked through the three-times-a-day to the once-a-fortnight-if-you’re-lucky, then sat down and agreed that if one of them felt like it they should just say it, and the other should accept that they’d both feel better afterwards, even if a Typhoo and Trio was more in the way of what they fancied. That was what you did when you were married. Fran’s problem was she’d got fucked too much along the way, one-nighters no repeaters, expected to be chatted up, fawned over, flattered like men in clubs do when they’re after a swift bunk-up. Marriage was supposed to be different from that, wasn’t it? Not for her it wasn’t; and instead of talking about it she blamed it on his job.
He wiped the plate with the nan, watched a nature show about a skeleton in Africa, a twelve-year-old boy dead of a gum abscess way back when. Kept showing him howling in the bushes to cover up the lack of facts – he was supposed to be the missing link or something, the first one they’d found with a skull big enough to worry about a mortgage. Homo Erectus. He went upstairs for an empty-house wank after, but couldn’t get the hippy egghead from the show out of his mind; turning over the dead boy’s vertebra in his fingers, showing the opening for the spinal cord: the aperture is wider – see? – than that which you or I have. The boffin said the Neanderthals thought with their spines as well as their brains. That made him feel weird, wondering if the spine in his back was thinking, if it had memories he wasn’t aware of. His cock seemed to: its mind was elsewhere tonight, like so often lately. He tried the usual – armpits of Fran’s dirty workshirts, face in her pillow, business end of her vibrator – but no cigar.
He put his trousers back on, found a raw silk shirt from an Orlando factory outlet year before last, let it hang down over his strides, Fl
orida-style. Twenty bucks – he never forgot what he paid for clothes – and made you feel like a million; the sensation against his shoulders made him long for warm air and he was hooking the ladder down from the loft before he remembered ER: screw it. Wasn’t the same since Clooney left anyway. He took the steps gingerly, ridged aluminium cutting into his bare feet, but he took the weight on his arms till he was out on the nailed chipboard and heading for Fran’s binbags by the cold water tank.
It was Florida up there allright, the spring’s central heating thermals supplemented by the sun on the roof all week. There wasn’t room to stand up straight as you got towards the tank, and he stooped low, hands dangling down by his knees. The stuff he wanted was underneath the bags, in the suitcase. He took a careful note of the position of the black bags, then eased the case out from under, doing the magician’s tablecloth trick in slo-mo and not making a bad job of it. He undid the belt around it, checked his watch – still be making trips to the salad cart, if he knew those two – and opened it up.
The Dolcis shoebox he passed over: letters, postcards, stuff he knew he shouldn’t read. Similarly the Saxone: Lori’s baby pics, family snaps from Fran’s marriage to Marc, the wanker. He took them out and placed them side by side on the hardboard. Underneath was the Dudley box file, lifted from some stationery cupboard years ago and home to Fran’s personal snaps ever since. He cross-legged on the floor in front of it, glanced once over his shoulder at the top of the ladder – like a kid up a treehouse with a grot mag – told himself not to be so stupid and got on with it.
The trick was to remember the order they came out of the box. He lifted off the top layer, put it flat on his left; took out another handful, put them next to it. When they were all out, he started anti-clockwise, the pics from the bottom first: trikes, paddling pools, Southend; feeding a peacock on Canvey Island. Her frown, at five, was the same at forty-five. He loved her, wanted to put them all back in the box now and go down, get a round of Irish coffees ready for when they got back. Instead, he replaced them carefully into the bottom of the box, set his face as he picked up the next pile.
But it was still recs and Jungle Gyms, lions at Longleat, ponchos, tartan-trimmed flares. Grinning at the camera with her first blue eyeshadow and shiny pink lipstick, little bumps under the chest of her V-neck T-shirt. He’d been in his room above the pub then, wanking over Richard Allen paperbacks, lifting Number 6 from the newsagents when old Farnsworth was still groggily marking up the Express and Mirrors. Number 6 or Navy Cut, for the push-up pack: suave in Shoeburyness, thinking someone – some girl – would notice. He’d had his first Knave from Farnsworth’s too; skimmed it off the return pile round the back one morning. No wanks were ever like your first ones. He still remembered the big, felt-tip “X” on the cover to prevent resale, could still see this one girl from it, apple-tits, had a hat with a veil on. A way of looking at the camera. His cock was rearing out of his fly and sliding between the folds of the shirt before his brain – or his spine – caught up. It felt fucking marvellous.
When it was over, his temples were thumping from the heat, the cooked air, the sudden exertion. He thought he’d better sit still a moment, not get up till the blood had rushed back from its day-trip. He took the shirt off, dropped it in a smeary puddle behind him and sat, breathing slowly. He only turned over the next pile because it was there, started leafing through the pictures, feeling bad about it because he’d just come. Lots of red-eye in these, and Fran wearing make-up for real now: weddings and birthdays, back gardens, Margate, Dymchurch, Clacton, Terry bikini sets; I’M WITH STUPID through to FRANKIE SAYS and a full set under the cotton. A noise downstairs made him snap his head round, see what he was: a forty-year-old squatting over his second wife’s teenage snaps, toss-rag festering on the floor behind him. He was down the ladder – shirt wadded up and thrown behind the water tank – and halfway down the stairs before he saw the pizza and ruby flyers feathered on the doormat. Some kid doing the rounds after school, whacking them through the letterbox, that was all. Did it pay better than papers? The hours were better, though you’d miss that feeling, dawn to drivetime, that the world was your own, shiny and clean, that this was your turf. He didn’t know if people even had papers delivered any more. He went into the bedroom for a shirt.
They wouldn’t be back for an hour at least, by the bedside clock. Stupid to jump like that, could’ve given himself a heart attack. Wanking on the sly put ants in your pants the moment your tackle was back in them: he bet it was the same for everyone, the kid in the toilet to the scrapheap geezer in his allotment lean-to. The guilt was like riding a bike, you never forgot it.
He went down to the kitchen, put the kettle on, found the Bushmill’s and the squirty cream for the round of Irishes. The trick was to load the coffee with sugar, two or three spoons a head, or else the cream – even squirty – started to sink and you just got mush. He spooned Gold Blend into a jug, lined up the wine glasses. Everything ready, so the moment he heard the car he could get cracking, come through with a tray just as they sat down in the lounge. Everything ready, nothing to do but wait. He went back up to the loft to get the silk shirt, give it a rinse, hang it behind the boiler where – if Fran found it – she’d think it’d hung there since last summer.
He’d forgotten about the photos, still 52-card-pick-up’d on the chipboard floor; he knelt down, started gathering them up, putting them back how they were. He had to turn over the untouched piles to do it, stopped himself before he started going through the boyfriend-era again. Why was he doing this? He’d seen them all before. It made him feel bad to pry like this, and he was always off with Fran after. After four months without sex, off was what they didn’t need.
Spotty herberts in hair gel and patterned jumpers: why did he need to look at them? They made him feel sick somewhere, even the first few as he turned them over. He could tell just by looking at them that they’d had horrible cocks – turkey-necks, or wonky round the bell-end – had he been looking at too many bell-ends lately? This particular train of thought had never come upon him when he’d looked at these pictures before.
Five gets you ten that was what it was. He hadn’t asked for this job and it wasn’t his fault he was conscientious at it: he had his pension to think about, and you never knew what was around the corner, most likely uniform again. You kept your nose clean and showed willing, so the day some Volvo who’d read too many Guardian specials tried to hang one on you, you had nothing to show but white space on your sheet. It was hard being married to a civilian. Say what you like – and he loved her – but they could never really understand. And as for Lori . . .
She’d have been telling Fran about her course all night. Art, she called it. What he had to look at all day every day she chose to make pictures of and called it Art. The art bit came in because she took the cocks out – spit-roast, doggy, cowgirl, crossbow, the men airbrushed out pixel by pixel, mouths and holes yawning wide but empty – called them things like Nature Abhors a Vacuum. Horrible things they were. Her tutors said she had real potential. Real potential for fucking her mum’s marriage up, the selfish little mare. And him paying her course fees, expected to be grateful for the privilege. He stuffed the photos back in the box, any which way, shoved it all back in place, went downstairs and made the kettle boil so many times that when the car finally pulled up he had to trip the cut-out himself, slosh it still bubbling into the jug with the coffee grains.
The trick was the sugar.
September
He had a bad moment as they pulled up and saw the house, feeling like he was out of his depth here, feeling like he was flushing the last six months down the pan. He told himself not to be stupid – this was the pay-off, the watershed, he was convinced of it. Do this and get back on track. He followed the line of cars parked two hundred yards along the verges – 4 × 4s, Hyundais and Daewoos, the odd Jag, had to be a good sign – and pulled in at the first space, let the engine idle a moment before cutting it.
“You ready?�
�� he said.
“Yeah,” she said, looking at the house. The tip of her tongue came out, put a fresh gloss on to the wine-dark lipstick. “You?”
“Ready and willing,” he said, trying to keep it light. She didn’t ask about the able.
There were two bouncers in DJs under the too-bright carriage lamps, took their twenty quid and membership number, directed them to a room off the hall for their coats. They made him feel like the greeter at the swank hotel in Orlando had, the first real night of his honeymoon with Fran, welcoming him effusively back into the restaurant every time he’d stepped out for a slash. He took her shiny black mac off her shoulders, put it on top of his own on the piled-high sofabed in there, looked at her standing there in her boots, sheer tights, mini and tight top, her eyes done dark as Dusty’s. The dresscode for the party was fetish, but mail-order took three weeks even with the web, and she’d drawn the line at going uptown to some perv shop. He’d offered to go himself, but she’d pointed out that he’d never yet got her size right, and in more forgiving fabrics than rubber as well. She’d said that what she had would do – they were only going to test the water, see what it was about, after all – but if he wanted to look like a deep-sea diver himself then he was welcome. He wore black slacks and a black silk shirt he’d found after a long hunt, hanging behind the boiler in the airing cupboard.
“I look all right?” she said.
“You look fantastic,” he said, trying to mean it with his eyes.
She tugged at the scoop-neck on her top. “Yeah?”
He growled, made to paw her. She slapped his hand away playfully but when he went to kiss her she turned her head.
“My lipstick,” she said.
They sat on a window ledge in the lounge, sipping warm Red Bulls and avoiding eyeballing anyone. In front of them a bloke in accountant’s glasses and a Hard Rock café T-shirt was getting tossed off to Celine Dion by a naked woman whose tits put Derek in mind of a couple of snooker balls dropped into a pair of nylon socks. They’d been there an hour and these were the most active people they’d seen: a couple in their thirties had been there at first, dressed up to the nines like a rap video, but they’d not seen them again; everyone else looked like pub landlords and nail salon proprietresses, and they all seemed to know each other, talking about their holidays. There were people wandering around down the garden but Fran hadn’t wanted to go down there until they knew what the score was. The bloke in the Hard Rock shirt kept looking at Derek like he was asking him for something.
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