“What’s wrong, darling?” he finally said, all those unfathomable looks he’d been getting beginning to make an awful kind of sense. A patch of damp was spreading from where Shell’s face rested on the pocket of his shirt.
“It’s just been a bad morning,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” Arthur replied in a glib tone that Shell missed, which was so unlike her. In so many ways she was like a forgotten language to him now, New Testament Greek.
Next Arthur was led into the living room where for once not a moth flew as Shell told him about her arrest for breaching the peace in Sheffield that morning. Arthur stood there, blinking dumbly while his wife told him about being taken to the police cells. Shell was a proud woman with not a mark against her name, and the police had done that to her. They’d locked her up, threatened her with the riot act. A life sentence Shell could have got and Arthur hadn’t been there.
She had been strip-searched. Pig hands all over her. The police had removed her clothing, bit by bit, checked her thoroughly for what they knew wasn’t there. The methodical nature of so personal an invasion was one of the most difficult things Arthur had ever had to hear.
Because Shell had been defiled. First her mouth and then the pen torch shone against her throat. Then under her tongue, on her teeth and gums. They’d also checked her shoes, removing the inner soles before handing them back to her, telling her to get a fucking move on and slide them back in again. Jacket off. T-shirt off. Chin up. Standing topless in her jeans and trainers while some officer wearing latex fucking gloves checked underneath her breasts. You can put that top back on now, Mrs Newman. Then once you’ve done that can you hand over them trousers? Nothing there. Now turn around, drop them knickers and squat.
A good few nights since then.
A long few days.
Arthur had laid up in the spare room until he found his mettle, insisting on joining Shell in the marital bed. Within a week of reminding Shell he was the husband and if nothing was going on between her and his brother, she’d to prove it, Arthur was permanently restored to the bedroom, even making love to Shell on a couple of occasions. Or perhaps it was just fucking. After all, a long-married pair can commit to the solitary act as they can’t with their child in the house, until it becomes something they almost don’t have to think about, and few things are more impersonal than thoughtless sex in the dark.
Everyone goes on about the eyes but it’s the lips that can’t lie. Arthur was tempted to turn the lamp on so he could check on Shell’s mouth, to see if it was relaxed or not. Because her kisses had felt staged. And where did she go to, his wife? Why could he never get to her? Was her loving him an act of charity? When had a vital component departed from their marriage?
He cricked his neck and swung his legs to the floor, feeling the sweet bobbles of the carpet under his feet. The room was awash with peace. As if Shell and he were collaborating, breathing in tandem.
He entered his son’s room and bore witness to the mute sadness of the empty bed. Behind the curtain, on the sill, were the stacks of magazines Arthur was looking for. Beanos and Dandys, a few footie mags that were as yellow as pre-war foolscap and fuzzy to the touch. Arthur selected a wedge of comics and couldn’t resist putting his nose to the pages. They smelled like badly-dried woollen blankets, the insides of a pencil case. A forgotten something, perhaps, that had taken a weathering in a local park.
In the kitchen his feet stuck to the vinyl. The room felt bizarre as rooms often do at night. The groan of pipes and contracting woodwork. The mass of the airing cupboard describing shadows in which a burglar might hide. Someone like him.
Arthur set to work with the very scissors that had separated him from his hair in the spring. He cut letters one at a time from the straplines of the magazines and glued them with a Pritt-Stick to a sheet of paper torn from the tablet in Lawrence’s desk drawer. The message was for Clive Swarsby, and when it was completed it was wiped clean of fingerprints and the next day popped in an envelope.
Asa kept the car running while the letter disappeared into the box affixed to the gates of Threndle House. For the attention of Clive Swarsby, it said, because it wouldn’t do for young Evelyn to open any funny-looking note, discovering that it was for her that her father was being told to hand over three grand. Arthur had some morals.
The photos were dog-eared now, a thumbprint captured on every bottom right corner from where they’d been pored over several times a day. Arthur’s personal mark that caught the daylight, caught the sun.
It had taken him long enough to work out what he had. Eliminating scenarios, chalking off what you knew. For Clive Swarsby had left the negatives undeveloped. These were far from sentimental snaps; they were evidence.
But of what?
Of who, more like. A friend. An acquaintance, probably a lot of things, seeing as this man was with Clive Swarsby’s daughter, then with another man, too.
Every picture suggested intimacy, visible closeness. The hand on the small of Evie’s back. That elbow pinch.
Then there were Evie’s clothes. In the photo she wore a braided chain outside of a designer V-neck T-shirt over growing A-cup breasts. She was adoring of the older man’s profile, fawning while he stared at something out of shot, all statuesque, the perv. And there he was with another man, two fat-heads knocking their fat skulls together in a fat café. It was the same again in a restaurant, the two laughing into their pâté, then later, under the awning of the Savoy.
The Savoy.
Everything pointed towards Swarsby having dirt on this man.
Now Arthur had it too.
He made his way to his mother’s. He was getting fit as a flea walking everywhere, which was one of the few advantages of being skint. Picket money went on the bare essentials, snap was taken care of at the welfare while Shell’s wage was devoured by the mortgage and the swollen coffers of their friend the good old YEB, though they were behind on both sets of payments. With the strike raging and the overdues mounting◦– Hate Mail, Arthur had taken to calling it◦– there was no choice other than to get this Swarsby racket off the ground.
He arrived at the slate path. He hated coming here. Once, just ten minutes up the road, he had seen his older brother’s boot striking their father’s face. Arthur dragged Sam off beneath the burgeoned mop heads of a neighbouring hydrangea, and Sam bit him, the incisors of the person you were closest to in the world indenting your wrist. That was what you got for spilling the beans. That was what Arthur deserved, all those years ago.
Mam answered the door. It was difficult, her old person’s big nose and ears, the punctured slashes through which her earrings hung. Her liver spots were like crop circles of butterscotch spattering her hands and neck.
“Arthur,” she said, looking blank. She must have forgotten what he was here for: another stab at solving the perpetual problem of his son.
He nodded.
“What a way to greet tha mother.”
“Morning, Mam.”
“Now he says it. Shut door, you’re allowing a draft.”
There was no wind whatsoever. “I’m here for Lawrence,” said Arthur.
“Your little walk.”
“Could you send him down please?”
“Will you not—”
“Mam.”
The old dear slunk away with the same guilty eyes she’d had after phoning the police on Sam. The same eyes that were absent when she let Arthur’s dad break his fucking nose.
Lawrence appeared. Funny how time can blur someone. Arthur leant on the door and said, “How we doing then?”