by Judy Astley
‘He didn’t do it, you know,’ Monica stated firmly. ‘I wanted to go straight down there and tell them but Jennifer says no, not yet, because they’ll have to let him out in the end. So we’re just going to wait.’ Monica sat down at the kitchen table and took a biscuit from the selection on a plate in front of her. Nina thought the whole scene looked as if Jennifer was setting up a snug midnight tea party. It hadn’t occurred to either woman, clearly, that Graham might really be about to be charged with a horrendous sexual offence and that he might have trouble extricating himself.
‘How did you know where he was?’ Nina asked.
‘Well his car came back, and then he didn’t,’ Monica explained. ‘And then an hour later he still didn’t come back so I started to worry. And then . . .’ she looked rather guilty, ‘I, er, I looked up Jennifer’s number in his address book up in his room. I don’t think he’ll mind, just this once, do you?’
‘No, I’m sure he won’t,’ Nina said, stifling a smile. Monica wouldn’t have had to look up the number; she’d have done it ages ago, as soon as she’d started wondering where he was off to at night. She’d always claimed personal privacy was a devious affront to family life. ‘The truth will out!’ she used to declare when teenage Nina was less than accurate about where she was spending a night and Monica had weaselled out the truth somehow. The only bit of DIY that Graham had been known to do was to attach a bolt to the door of the downstairs loo when he was twelve years old.
‘Haven’t you got school tomorrow, dear? It’s awfully late,’ Jennifer addressed Emily anxiously.
Emily looked startled. ‘So? Don’t you want me to get Graham off this thing?’ she challenged. Nina held her breath, waiting for Emily to start asking what business it was of hers and so on.
‘Oh yes, of course dear, if you think you can help.’
‘You don’t know about what happened to me, do you?’ Emily suddenly said. Monica looked puzzled.
‘Well I’ll tell you. Some fucking tosser flashed at me out on the Common by the bit where the horses go and it was, well . . . So I know it wasn’t Graham.’ Emily shuddered and folded her hands round the hot mug of tea for comfort.
‘We didn’t want to worry you,’ Nina explained into the silence.
‘Well I’m not surprised,’ Jennifer contributed.
‘She didn’t mean you,’ Emily said rudely, glaring.
‘She knows that,’ Nina said gently. ‘Just stay calm.’
‘Don’t you worry about your mother, Nina,’ Jennifer said, resting a claiming hand on Monica’s arm. ‘I’ll stay here for the night and take care of her. And of course Graham will be back soon and I expect he’ll be hungry.’ She got up and went to look in the fridge. ‘Yes, bacon and eggs. I expect he’d like that. And lots of tea, for the shock of being in that dreadful place . . .’
‘She’s even worse than Gran, fussing over Graham,’ Emily commented as she and Nina climbed back into the car. Nina didn’t reply. She was feeling horribly sick again. It had come over her at the mention of bacon and eggs, a combination that made her think about lakes of grease and the smell of stale frying. She started the car and swallowed hard, then reached across and fidgeted in the glove compartment for mints. There was just one dusty one, unwrapped in a corner under the A to Z. She shoved it in her mouth and prayed it would pacify her troubled stomach. It was either nerves or – the weird dream she’d had earlier flashed across her mind. It would have to be thought about properly later. Jennifer still stood in the doorway, waiting to watch her drive away. ‘You’re right,’ Nina told Emily when she could trust herself to speak. ‘Jennifer’s either the best or the worst thing for Graham. I just can’t tell. I do hope it’s the best.’
‘Well he’s old enough to decide.’
‘You’d think so,’ Nina said doubtfully. She didn’t really think Graham doing any real ‘deciding’ was going to come into it.
The bed was still just about warm. Joe snuggled up to the side where Nina slept and inhaled the familiar scent of her body. She was still using Eternity perfume, he could tell, and the usual fabric conditioner could just be identified in the white linen pillowcase. He felt like a small boy, home at last from his first everlasting school trip. There were changes, but not many, not yet. Nothing of his was still in the bathroom – no abandoned recharge flexes from the many electric razors he’d got through, and there was none of his favourite vanilla-scented shower gel left over in the cupboard. But the feel of his bare feet on the nubbly carpet, the way the street lamp up the road caught the top left corner of the mirror by the window, these were familiar.
Lucy hadn’t woken up when he’d arrived, hadn’t stirred when he’d looked in just to see her sweet sleeping face in the room he hadn’t seen her in for almost a year. She looked just the same as when he’d left. Not enough time had passed yet for her to look different from how he went to sleep at the flat imagining her. When she stayed those weekends with him, she was so much more of a visitor than family should be. He wondered, now, lying snugly in his old bed, if he’d ever get used to being apart from his home, his family. He wished, more than he ever had before that he didn’t have to.
They didn’t believe him. Whatever he said, however he said it, they didn’t believe him. Graham didn’t know how to say it any other way. There was no point: they weren’t listening.
He’d told the truth, first to the one who was being matey and had offered him cigarettes and then to the woman who’d crossed her legs and showed her thighs and then glared at him because he couldn’t help but look. He was supposed to, he could tell. She’d hitched her skirt up on purpose, not accidentally. And then he could tell that he shouldn’t have looked. He hadn’t wanted the cigarette either, which had made the friendly one smile a lot less. He knew from television that they liked you to have one, it showed nervousness and weakness and then you had to be grateful and say thank you. But he didn’t smoke, unlike most of the people working up at the hospital who didn’t seem to learn anything from all the coughing and dying they saw. He wasn’t going to start now just to make a policeman’s day. Or night.
He sat alone in the room, wondering if his mother was all right. Jennifer would be asleep by now, in the bed that wasn’t really big enough for two people, with a mattress that dipped in the middle. It made you roll into the hollow together. He wished he was there now with Jennifer’s breasts pressed against him and her cool clever hands taking charge of his body. She’d been married once, she’d told him. But he’d died. He got one of the cancers that had a long name, the sort that doctors at the hospital sometimes mentioned casually in front of the patients as a possible diagnosis, professionally sure that the patient wouldn’t know enough to translate it into a death sentence. He hated it when they did that, as if they were so certain that people outside their sacred building knew nothing. Right now he felt as if he too knew nothing. Certainly he knew nothing about the workings of the communal mind of the Metropolitan Police. No-one had been really horrible to him yet, but it was surely the next step, seeing as he wasn’t about to change his story. And even if he did, just to please them, even if he told them they were right, he’d done those awful things on the Common, how much worse than horrible would they be then? He couldn’t win. No wonder so many people confessed to things they hadn’t done. You could see why.
‘You can go now. Just don’t leave the fucking country.’ Graham took his head out of his hands and stared at the sergeant who’d appeared by the door. ‘Go on then. Piss off.’
‘Is that it?’ Graham asked, still not getting up.
‘Yes. That’s it. Don’t think you’re quite off the list, not yet. Just go before we change our minds.’
They had to check the witness statements. We made them,’ Emily told him in the car as Nina drove Graham home. Graham was still confused and dazed. So Emily had been attacked by some man on the Common, and then so had someone else and they’d thought it might be him because he liked to watch owls and go out in the dark. Emily’s man had be
en in the day. ‘And you wear a Barbour but this man had one of those big long Drizabone riding mac things. And he smoked. You don’t.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Graham was dreadfully tired. His head lolled against the car window and when Nina turned corners he was jerked awake, thinking each time he opened his eyes that the street lamps were the harsh police strip-lights and that the woman with the legs was going to slam her fist down hard on the desk in front of him, or smash it in his face with her diamond cluster ring puncturing his skin.
At the house, all the lights were still switched on as if Graham needed some kind of beacon to find his way back. Lights had been left on when their father had finally gone missing for good, he remembered. It was as if worry and grief overwhelmed the need to be frugal about the burning of electricity, as if it became suddenly a frivolous and irreverent thing to think of.
‘Are you coming in?’ Graham asked, looking with dread at his blazing home.
‘No. We must get back. You’ve got Mother and Jennifer waiting for the prodigal’s return,’ Nina teased gently.
‘Oh. Right,’ Graham said again, climbing slowly out of the car. ‘Good night then.’ He waited awkwardly, shuffling his feet. ‘And thanks.’
Nina wasn’t surprised to find Joe in her bed. Where else would he be, she thought. She could hardly expect a man she’d lived with for nineteen years and had fairly recent sex with to find a spare duvet and try to get comfortable on the sofa. He was only half asleep, and when she climbed into the bed his arm reached round and pulled her towards him, warm and comforting. She was too tired for any prim pretence of pulling away. There was no point, especially as she was absurdly pleased he was there.
‘Was it awful? Is it sorted?’ he murmured into her ear. She could smell faint whisky on his breath. He must have helped himself to the Glenfiddich down in the kitchen, she thought, which made her feel happy that he’d felt at home enough to do it. Or, she reasoned, he could just have been drinking it at home. His home. With Catherine, who might sip virtuous fruit juice and take a sneaky folic acid tablet in preparation for that perfect baby . . .
‘Its sorted. Emily was brilliant, quite stroppy and demanding. They probably just thought she was being kind, trying to get her uncle off.’
Joe chortled. ‘Stupid buggers. Doesn’t it occur to them that if he’d really done it, she might want him sent down because he was her uncle?’
‘Probably not. That would take logic.’ Nina wriggled slightly to get more comfortable. She and Joe were fitted together like spoons, the way they used to fall asleep when they first met. Between them was only the thin silk of her nightdress. Joe, as ever, had got into bed naked. She could feel him crushed against her, hardening.
‘I met Graham’s woman, girlfriend, whatever,’ she murmured.
‘Really? What’s she like?’ Joe propped himself up on his elbow and she turned to look at him. He was still interested, then, in her family business.
‘Well she’s . . .’ Nina hesitated. ‘She’s just like my mother, I think. A bit older than Graham, and she’s been rather pretty, still is I suppose – used to be blonde and she’s got very wide open brown eyes like an eager little girl. Graham seems to be all-important, it never occurred to her for a single moment that he could be guilty, and she’s got a body like dough. I don’t know her yet. It isn’t fair, is it, to say anything till I do.’
Joe chuckled, ‘No I suppose it isn’t. When you say “dough”, do you mean sort of cosy-shaped like those farmers’ wives in Enid Blyton who were always described as looking like cottage loaves?’
Nina shivered. ‘I’m off Enid Blyton,’ she said, giggling. ‘And I’ll tell you why. I met a man . . .’ And she told Joe the awful saga of her date with Mick.
‘I really shouldn’t laugh,’ Joe said when she’d finished, ending with the showering of cash over Mick’s supine body. Joe was giggling like a schoolboy and Nina felt ludicrously content. He stopped laughing suddenly and she could see him looking down at her in the dark, strangely intent.
‘If he hadn’t been married . . . would you have slept with him?’ he suddenly asked. ‘I shouldn’t ask,’ he immediately conceded.
‘No you shouldn’t,’ Nina said, smiling in what she hoped was an enigmatic manner. ‘I don’t ask you what you get up to with Catherine.’
Joe sighed, nuzzling her neck comfortably. ‘Nothing. I don’t want to do anything with Catherine, not any more.’
‘Are you sure? What if she said she’d stay with you and just manage to give up on wanting to be pregnant?’ Unrealistic, she told herself, as soon as the words were out; how could a woman with an intense craving to breed suddenly cave in and say, ‘Oh, all right then, if you don’t want one . . .’ as if they were talking about a puppy or a wide-screen TV? Joe was breathing warm and damply into her ear. She could feel him thinking with every soft breath.
‘No, it’s no good, there’s no Catherine without the baby thing. It’s become all she is just now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to find a way of telling her it’s not what I want.’
‘Just her babies or anyone’s?’ Nina asked.
‘Any babies, her babies, does it make a difference?’ he asked.
Nina hesitated. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘Well, not to Catherine anyway.’
Chapter Eighteen
‘Of course I didn’t know. No-one tells me anything,’ Emily said to Simon over the school telephone. ‘When did she move out?’
‘On the same day he told her about not wanting kids. Monday. No point in hanging around.’
Emily sighed. Simon wasn’t being very communicative. Dad had spent a night, That Night, all snuggled up in bed with Mum just as if they’d never split in the first place and now Catherine and her dad had broken up. One might have led to the other; one probably had, and no-one was saying. No-one had done any explaining at home, as if Dad dropping in and being in the kitchen drinking coffee in his old dressing gown was just not worth a comment. Simon knew all about the Catherine thing and she didn’t, so she’d have liked more details, proper ones, the way another girl would have told it. There was all the important who said what to whom, all the whys and what went wrongs. There was a sulking silence down the phone. Simon was waiting for her to tell him why she’d called, just as if she was some stranger ringing up on the off-chance to sell him something. She thought she shouldn’t have to tell him, they should be on much more advanced terms by now, but things had changed.
‘So. Where did Catherine move on to?’ she asked eventually.
‘Here.’ That did change things, she supposed.
‘Oh. Right.’ She pictured Catherine surrounded by peachy pigskin luggage, sitting on Simon’s unmade bed, tearful with a box of floral tissues and a mirror, mopping mascara.
‘So you see, it’s not a good time . . .’ Simon began, businesslike as if she’d interrupted a deal-clinching meeting and trusting, manlike, that Emily would do the decent thing and fill in the rest of the sentence. Fuck it, Emily seethed to herself, he means piss off, kid.
Behind her at the phone booth a bustling queue of small noisy second-years had formed, all waiting to call their mums and tell them there was an extra pre-contest gym club practice. They pressed close to her and she could smell greasy lunchtime burger and chips. She turned her back on them, leaning out slightly and nudging the first one further back with her hip. There was a scuffling sound as they dominoed into each other and started squealing.
‘Shut up!’ she hissed at them and then turned back to the phone.
‘Why isn’t it a good time? When will it be?’ she persisted. She could hear the tone of her voice rising, an unattractive desperation.
‘I don’t know.’ She could hear his apathy. He might as well be flicking through the car-sales pages of Loot at the same time. Bastard Simon, he was supposed to be blitzed with adoration for her by now. He must be blaming her as well as her dad for the Catherine thing. How juvenile to take sides.
‘Oh forget it,’ she said. ‘Call me when you�
�re more grown up than I am, if ever,’ and she slammed down the phone. There was a chorus of mocking Ooohs! from the queue and she stormed off back to the sixth-form common room where she knew, she just knew, Nick and Chloe would be in a giggling, tickling heap on the battered old sofa and Nick would be mentally counting his condoms.
It was Friday afternoon and she’d now got nothing to do at the weekend except a few hours’ babysitting. Simon was supposed to have asked her out to impress her with a proper adult dinner – Saturday night at the Pont de la Tour or somewhere else that people his age and income went to. Or he should have surprised her with tickets (and Access All Areas passes of course) for Radiohead at the Brixton Academy. She was supposed to be going into the common room now to show off her luck to anyone who’d listen. Now all she wanted to do was crawl onto that sofa and squeeze in between Chloe and Nick and be comforted by both of them. Then, as a last resort, when Chloe was in the Politics class, she could just mention to Nick that she’d be babysitting that night, just across the road from home and that it would be lonely on her own.
She opened the door. The common room was unusually empty. How sleazy and scruffy it looked with no-one in. Posters were torn and hanging, with blutack missing from corners. Chairs were sloppily scattered about, their cushions crushed. The bin overflowed and reeked of stale cigarettes. You could almost hear the mould growing in abandoned coffee cups. The sofa was pulled away from the wall and all the cushions were missing. She crept inside, wondering where everyone was. Then she heard the scuffling noise and a low throaty giggle from the far side of the room. She recognized the laugh. Nick had got someone on the floor behind the sofa and whatever they were doing (at school – couldn’t they just wait?) they’d obviously managed to persuade the rest of the sixth form that afternoon classes were starting early.