Now the truncheon switched to beneath Joyce’s nose, pushing her head back almost ninety degrees. The blond man in uniform could barely keep from laughing as he said “You’re a member of fuck all, love.”
Shell felt that old crescendo, but the officer just grinned at her. “You’d better shut it,” he said, “before you make this any worse.”
“You’re all right, Shell,” Joyce said, her voice pressured by the angle to which her throat had been forced. “I said, sir…” she said, batting the truncheon away and facing the officer boldly. “That this woman has done nothing wrong. She’s quite mad and incapable of holding her tongue, but that’s it. She shouldn’t be arrested and if she is I shall be making a complaint to your superiors.”
“I’m sorry, I might have misheard, Miss Stride,” said the officer. “Did you just say you’d like to make a complaint?”
“I did, sir. Your conduct has been shocking. You’re an officer of the law and as such should wield your power with the same respect you expect us citizens to abide by it.”
Shell was certain Joyce was going to be struck. Her hands still secured, she broke free of the men holding her and stepped up to the blond officer, his slate-coloured eyes. “You leave her alone,” she began, but was stopped, partly by the large hand that reached out and grabbed her by the cheeks, and partly by the tempting smell of toffees that she could smell on the officer’s breath as he brought her close, the scent washing sweetly over her face.
10
A LOAF OF bread and a jar of potted beef in a plastic bag. Arthur made a point of not looking at the garish orange frontage of the job centre.
Saturday and no idea where the wife was. He’d just stopped at the bakery, opening the door and setting off the funny klaxon. Course she wasn’t in. Si Gaskell was serving customers instead, long hair tied under that daft white hat, ponytail stuffed into one of those nets that look like they should be full of bird seed. The sleazy prick had no idea where Shell was. He’d stared at Arthur’s wracked face and refused to give him a discount on his loaf.
Walking to save on bus fare, Arthur arrived home and entered the kitchen. From the plastic bag he removed the bread, swabbing two slices with margarine and another two with brown sauce. Out came the butter knife Lawrence used when he was a kid and his hands were too small to hold the main cutlery. Arthur stabbed the knife into the jar of potted beef◦– it was the perfect size◦– and spread the meat paste thickly across each buttered slice. These sandwiches he split into neat triangles, piling them onto a plastic plate and carrying the whole lot upstairs on a tray along with a mug of claggy-looking, terracotta-coloured tea.
Outside Lawrence’s room he fished the key from his pocket. It slotted noisily into the padlock and popped the hook. Last night, home from the hill and the second attack on his person in a month, Arthur had unscrewed the galvanised hasp from the coal shed and fitted it to Lawrence’s door. When, as expected, Lawrence arrived home and snuck into bed without so much as a word of apology to his old man, Arthur rose from bed and locked his son in until the next morning. He was no pushover, not like he used to be.
“I’ve lunch,” he said, shoving the door open with his foot. “Kid?”
Little bastard.
Arthur hurried to the open window, tea soaking the sandwiches as the tray clattered on the desk. Judging by the dents in the old toilet and coal shed roofs, Lawrence had done a circus act off the windowsill then escaped into the backs. By the back gate sat a pewter-coloured cat that Arthur could swear was smiling at him.
Into the yard. His balls ached◦– that girl had really clouted him one◦– as he glared over the blunt wall at the sparrows twittering in the sycamores. This was him officially lumbered with a pair of AWOL’s now. They were selfish bastards, his family, the bloody pair of them.
He should have known something was up when the noise died down earlier; the booted door panels given respite, the spherical handle ceasing to rattle. He should have known when there was no reply after he told Lawrence he’d be back with lunch, that they’d talk about what happened then.
It was a mistake slipping into town in search of Shell. Ten minutes wasted, half an hour, forty even, because of her. Just the time it took to get to the mini-mart and the bakery, just the time for Lawrence to escape. Now the lad could be anywhere and Shell was off gallivanting about.
Arthur tried to think logically. The kind of places he’d seek if he were in his son’s position had their synonyms, and these were the places he should check. For the library read the market. For the moorland read the woods. If it was Arthur running away because his friend had just attacked his father, it’d be no contest, he’d take the Litten Path, go down the street rather than up it, defying the little peat canyons and the sinkholes left by the pit ponies, heading past the abandoned Land Rover, sky-blue, rusted and paint-peeled, the springs bursting out of their seats like the components to a broken jack-in-a-box.
There was nowhere better than the moor. Always Arthur could feel it: a mental space as much as a physical one, everything made remote upon its stretch. He’d half a mind to go there now, wading through the bog cotton, up the steeps, buffeted by the weather, witnessed only by the lozenge pupils of the sheep grazing on the bare flat of purple and hazel. But it was out of the question. He set off for Barnes’ Wood. The forest would be perfect for Lawrence to hide in. It was where guilt’s fugitive could disappear beneath the undergrowth like a serpent.
The Ogden was at low ebb. Sludge banks on either side tilted toward the surrounding woods and tracts of milky sunlight glazed through, broken simply by the knuckle, peg and beam of the trees, one of which had a cache of beer cans stuffed in it.
Arthur’s trainers sank in the bog, and he almost slipped on the distorted pages of a porn magazine that lay twisted, sodden in the muck. The paper skin of the naked woman was torn and she had a black stripe hiding both eyes, stars concealing each nipple. She couldn’t quite smile in the direction of a plastic bag woven around a tree root. Arthur stopped for a piss. Silence otherwise.
He arrived at the ruins on the south side of the wood. He’d come exploring here with Lawrence in the past, for the odd tryst with former girlfriend in days gone by, bare arse chafing the cold as he fucked and rocked on the brick, spit collecting in that heavy after-moment. Blinking and becoming yourself again. Pulling out and returning gratefully to being separate.
But that was an age ago and now everything seemed smaller. Two of the ruin’s four walls were gone and nettles as tall as corn sprouted in what could once have been the kitchen. The structure was crumbling until one day it would cease to exist at all.
Further past the ruin Arthur came to the track that fed the tree cave that he and Sam used to visit. He wondered if the elm had gotten any bigger. His mam used to say elms are associated with death because they drop branches without warning and their wood is a preferred material for coffins. Perhaps that was why Arthur liked them so much. The river bridge was nearby. The stretched verticals of the beech trees looked like they had faces in them. There was no chance of going to the den now. Too much of the past was sealed within its boundary.
Traffic. There was a lot more of that these days. It made a steady sound that crept steadily as might a glacier. Lawrence wasn’t here. Maybe Arthur didn’t know this place at all. Maybe he didn’t know his son and never had done.
He headed for home, kicking a stone towards town until a red car sounded its horn and drew in some yards ahead. Arthur approached, drew to the wound-down window, passenger side, bent so he could see the driver and said, “What you doing, you? You’re wasting petrol.”