“Here? No, of course not.”
“How ’bout Lorraine’s?”
She blinked. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He leaned back against the settee. “Bound to have been. A while, at least. They’re not stupid, you know. Not altogether.”
He leaned back against the settee.
“You’ll be wanting to see her, I suppose?” Maureen said. “Lorraine. You’ll be wanting to get in touch?”
“Yes,” he said. “Most likely.”
It was silent for some moments, neither of them moving.
“Michael?”
“Yeah?”
“What … what are you going to do?”
Slowly he smiled. “You’ll see. Soon enough.”
It was dark outside. The last she had seen of Preston, he was watching TV. Only now he wasn’t; he was there in the kitchen, leaning against the door frame, staring. Maureen felt her skin go cold.
“That day,” he said, “the funeral. Back at Lo’s place. You were coming on to me.”
Maureen blinked. “I don’t think so. Was I?”
“You know bloody well you was.”
She half turned away. “I’m sorry, I …”
“What? Didn’t mean it?”
“No.”
“Talk like that to all the boys?”
She tried to swallow but her tongue, marooned, refused to move.
“The way you was leaning across me, touching me, every now and again, just a little. Here.” He stroked the inside of his forearm with the knuckles of his free hand. “You remember?” Staring at her all the while, staring.
“Yes.”
“Making sure I could get a good view of your tits.”
Maureen wanted to go to the bathroom; she needed to pee. Now his hand was back in the pocket of his chinos and she could see the movement, slow and rhythmic, beneath the slightly shiny fabric.
“Fancied me, didn’t you.”
“Look, Michael, I’m sorry …” She moved several quick paces toward him and then stopped.
“All an act, then, was it?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I … I suppose … Well, yes, I was … attracted to you. I …”
He was smiling with his eyes, gray eyes. “Not just a prick teaser, then?”
She shook her head.
“One of those tarts get turned on by someone doing serious time?” He took the slightest step toward her.
“No,” she said, trying to stop herself shaking. “No, honestly.”
He touched her. “Kiss me then. On the mouth. Now. Yes, now.”
She felt his tongue push past her teeth inside her and the movement of his hand accelerating, clear and hard against her side. His teeth bit down into her lower lip, not deep; she felt a shudder travel through his body and then his hand was still, his tongue withdrew.
Maureen didn’t know if she should stay where she was or move away.
After a few moments, he said, “I’m going upstairs, take a nap. I need to catch up on some sleep. Wake me in a couple of hours, right? Don’t forget. There’s a call I’ve got to make.”
Maureen nodded, barely able to move her head.
She needed to feel clean. While he slept, she stood in the shower for a long time, temperature racked up high, and when she stepped out the bathroom was rich with steam. A towel round her body, another round her head, she sat on the toilet seat and sobbed.
The door to the main bedroom was ajar and she could see him spread diagonally along the surface of the bed, naked; hear the faint hiss and whistle of his breath.
She thought she could fetch a hammer and bring it down with all her strength against his head; she thought that she could slip out of her robe and rest her face against the swelling of his chest.
She went downstairs and poured herself a drink, and didn’t go back up until it was time for him to be called, and when she walked across the floor toward him he blinked instantly awake.
Twenty-seven
The first time Lynn woke and rolled over on to her side, reaching for the radio alarm, the face read 4:17. She tugged at the quilt and turned away again, pulling her knees up toward her chest: 4:43, 5:07, 5:29. Beneath the occasional whistle and call of birds, she could hear the hum of traffic, faint yet constant, as it wound its way along the inner ring road, from the old Boots building round by the ice rink and the bowling alley toward Ritzy’s and the Victoria market. Living where she did, in a small block of modern flats near the center of the city, there was never any forgetting where she was or what she did, the choices she had made.
“Oh, Lynnie, pet, why?” Concern deepening the lines on her mother’s already lined face. “Why there of all places? When you’d be so much better closer to home.”
“Let the girl be, woman,” her father had said, one of his rare interjections. “She’s got her own life to live, hasn’t she? Let her be getting on with it.”
So Lynn had applied for her first ever post after finishing training, been measured for her uniform, finally climbed in the battered old Vauxhall, back seat jammed with bags and boxes, one of her dad’s best chickens, double-wrapped in plastic from the freezer, sandwiches and a thermos tucked in by her mum at the last moment, just in case she felt peckish on the journey. Four hours at most, west to east across country.
She could still see her mother lifting her apron to trap the tears; her father squeezing two ten-pound notes into her hand as she raised her face to kiss him, the scrape of his bristles against her lips and cheek.
“You’ll come back and see us, Lynnie. You won’t forget us now. Come back soon.”
And, of course, she did drive back across that familiar landscape skirting the edge of the fens, a slow dual-carriage road bordered by farm shops and market gardens, carrying her to a home from which she felt increasingly remote. Her mother, with round face and fleshy, freckled arms, baking something in the kitchen, making huge jugs of tea, helping out in the packing shed, hosing down the yard; her father wandering with less and less purpose between the long lines of hen houses, weight falling off his bones a little more each time, the skin around his Adam’s apple wrinkled and loose till it resembled that of the birds he raised.
Without even realizing at first, Lynn would make excuses-not this weekend, Mum, I’m sorry; no, not that-a friend’s party, a dinner invitation, overtime. And when she had lived with the cyclist, so much of her time had been wasted, standing hunched in her parka by the side of some arterial road, stop-watch in gloved hand, stamping her feet to keep away the cold.
Almost, she would dread her mother’s weekly call, the painstaking recounting of events so unimportant and small, the pressure to return, the love and need. And when she did-one Sunday a month now at most-the long silences which neither of them could fill, until she would walk out to find her father, who seemed to spend more and more of his time outside now, and sit with him in a silence that was somehow less strained, broken only by the clack and ragged cry of birds with nothing else to do but peck and shit and die.
“Look after your mother, Lynnie. I don’t know what might happen to her, else.”
The nobbled coldness of his hand, dry scrape of his cough, yellow film that spread slowly from the corners of his eyes.
At the Norfolk and Norwich hospital, the registrar had been all smiles behind his rimless glasses, an accent buffed by years of breeding and expensive education. “The one thing I don’t want you to do is worry. Not unduly. This little problem of your father’s, the kind of thing we deal with every day. Run of the mill. Ten a penny.”
Lynn turned the knob round to full and stepped into the shower. Eyes closed, she soaped her body, rubbed shampoo into her hair, the steady stream of water bouncing off her shoulders, coursing down her back, between her legs, splashing across her face. Driving back from the hospital after that first consultation with the doctor, vision obscured by heavy rain and the spray of water from the road, eyes stung by sudden tears, she had swerved from the slipstream of a lorry into the side of the road and cannoned against the verge, thankful for the seat belt which held her fast. She had still been sitting there, shaking, minutes later, when Michael Best had tapped against the window, anxious, smiling, wanting to know if there was anything he could do to help.