by Paul Magrs
He of course had his own erection ground into her buttocks and the sensation was almost shocking to her.
‘I don’t want you to fuck me,’ Liz said. And her voice was dry and lower. ‘I want us to come together, face to face. Both of us held together, in each other’s hands. That’s safest and it’s equal. It makes us one, in a way. Like grafting stems in a nursery.’
‘Like last night?’ he asked. ‘But that was just the first time. It wasn’t really sex. Just messing about. Just wanking each other off.’
She halted each responsive gesture. ‘No, it wasn’t. That’s childish. We’re all wankers, aren’t we? It shouldn’t be a term of abuse.’
He shrugged. She went on, helping him to remove her knickers.
‘We oughtn’t to feel the need to ape the usual cut-and-thrust. Not if we don’t want.’
Looking confused, he took her face in his hands. ‘I’m just trying to say I want you. I do. I do. But how do I want you? All I can say is that I want to fuck you — and I do. But what else is there? What else do I know?’
‘We’ll learn together. It’s never too late, honestly. Last night is a wonderful starting point. Don’t you think?’
She unbuttoned his shirt, drew him tighter to her. Her cock rested nose-first against his midriff and had to be moved as she unzipped and released him. Then one cock met its companion; they nudged against each other familiarly, rasping as their owners collided and fastened this hardness between their bodies.
THIRTEEN
It was raining everywhere. Last night they had forgotten to pull the blinds and the water ran in sheets down exposed glass. Grey waves of light rolled through the room, and Andy woke to find the world television-grey and uninviting.
He woke Vince up. ‘It’s twenty past eight.’
Vince turned over with a groan to find Andy staring pensively at the window.
‘Today is the day I sort my life out.’
‘It is?’ Vince was listening for sounds from his father. He recognised the bass line from ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ somewhere below.
‘I have to find out where I’m going to live.’
‘It’s not a good day to do that on. You should never be decisive on rainy days. It’s a chemical thing. You need sunshine and happy thoughts, you do.’
‘You’re cheerful this morning.’
‘I had a visitor last night. Of course I’m cheerful.’ Vince was quite genuinely pleased and surprised by himself. He rested his head on one palm, speaking from the throat in chalky early-morning tones, the sound raw in the room. ‘Well, bless you for that, anyway.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Sort some stuff out. Loose ends. I’m going to see my good old uncle Ethan. My benefactor. See if he feels at all responsible for my wellbeing.’
‘Back to Darlington then?’
‘He’s here in Aycliffe. With that old woman of his. Somewhere near the boating lake, the address is. Will you give me directions?’
‘Yeah, course.’ Vince sat up and found he was in his T-shirt and nothing else. There were socks poking out of the pillows and clothes all over the floor. It had been one of those nights. ‘Look, I’ll come with you.’
Andy shook his head as if he’d already thought about this. ‘I’ve got to do this just by myself. It’s embarrassing.’
‘What can you possibly be embarrassed with me about?’
‘I mean, I’m sick of getting dependent on people. I want to sort my own life out now.’
‘Right.’ It had been on Vince’s mind to suggest they find somewhere together. That they think about moving in together. As he watched Andy haul himself up off the mattress he considered the glorious, erotic charge of such a thing. His stuff was ready and packed to go. He could imagine unloading all of his belongings in a shared space with Andy and it was a sexy thought. The promise of domestic ease. It was like opening out.
‘I never want to depend on anyone again,’ Andy was muttering.
For the sake of easiness and quickness Jane would take her morning bath with Peter. It made him seem more like a baby. This morning, though, she took her own briefly and alone, scalding herself lobster pink. Then she filled it again and put Peter and Vicki in together. They looked suspiciously at one another.
Vicki said she got a bath each Sunday night. Jane cut her protestations dead, shoved her in and took the dirty clothes downstairs with the rest of the linen. She jammed them all into the washing machine. Although other people’s dirt made her uneasy, her routines went on this morning regardless. When she brought in the milk she saw that there was already a police car parked outside Fran’s house.
Vicki watched her dry Peter first. She exhibited a frank interest and Peter was babbling to show off. Jane sat on the toilet lid while Peter went on about Baywatch, his favourite programme, where people were always in the bath, or was it the sea, and there might be sharks and they might get eaten.
‘My mam’s not coming back, is she?’ asked Vicki, rubbing a heavy sponge into her hair. Her hair was tangled in clumps, with a few wiry strands sticking stubbornly up. She had been washing it herself with soap.
‘She’ll be back before you know it.’
The question disturbed Jane. How was she supposed to cope with this? Just give her the usual day, packing Peter off to playschool, going off to town. She couldn’t do this sort of thing. All of a sudden her usual life seemed something unrecoverable and ideal.
‘I don’t mind about it. I know that she’s gone.’
‘She’ll be back.’ Jane was tugging hard at Peter’s T-shirt. It was trapped over his head and he was squealing. She could feel the nylon fabric shriek and glisten with static under her fingernails.
Vicki sighed and said, ‘She’s gone off with the Dog Man. She said she would.’
‘She what?’ Peter gave a louder shout and Jane slapped him to shut him up. His head came out of the T-shirt with a quivering lip and teary eyes. ‘What did your mam say?’
‘She said, one of these days. With the Dog Man.’
‘There’s no answer next door. Are you the neighbour that’s been helping?’
Detective Inspector Collins stood at Fran’s back door, rain sparking off her black waterproof jacket. Fran, who hadn’t slept a wink, let her into the kitchen. She was worried about Frank, left in charge of bathing the baby upstairs. The baby had been filthy, tattooed with dirt.
‘Nesta’s husband Tony should be in. Have a seat.’ At least the kids were out of the way. The two eldest had gone off to school with no problems this morning, taking Lyndsey to playschool on their way; little Jeff was upstairs supervising the baby’s bath. Leaving Fran to deal with the police.
Detective Inspector Collins took off her hat to reveal almost white hair, cut short like a schoolboy’s. She was about forty, angularly attractive with hard, intelligent eyes. Straight away Fran felt as if she was being sized up and judged.
Collins said, ‘He isn’t there now. I spent a full five minutes shouting through his letterbox.’
Fran rubbed her eyes, put the kettle on, and came to sit down. ‘He was going out last night to look for her himself.’
‘So he knows where she might have gone?’ The policewoman was looking annoyed. ‘Has he got some idea of her whereabouts that he hasn’t reported?’
‘No, he just went out to look by himself. Nowhere in particular.’
‘Ah.’
‘Tea?’
‘No, thank you. I managed to see through their windows.’ Fran could imagine what the officer had seen: lino in the living room, yellow newspaper and drinks cans; in the garden a mould-encrusted three-piece suite, parts of a rusting motorbike scattered; more on the kitchen floor. ‘As a neighbour, would you say that you thought the family had problems?’
Cagily Fran replied, ‘Who hasn’t?’
‘It might be worth getting in touch with social services. Whether or not the mother is found or returns of her own accord. You said yourself that you had to take the chil
dren off the father’s hands last night.’
‘He’s… well, not simple, exactly…’
‘But you wouldn’t trust him to look after two young children?’
‘He’s upset at the moment. He has other things to think about.’
‘Well, I’ll talk to this… Tony, when he comes back. For the moment I could do with a statement from you.’
She started to take down various particulars, writing in a cramped style in a tiny leather notebook. The radio in her top jacket pocket kept crackling and bursting into harsh messages, filling the rain-darkened room with alien chatter, bringing an outer world into Fran’s house. She found that she resented this. She stole a glance at the kitchen clock. Frank would be clumsily attempting to dress the baby. Jeff would be watching with horrified fascination, glad to be grown up.
‘And so when was the last time you yourself saw Nesta Dixon?’
‘I…’ The question caught her out. Fran had no idea. Yet when one of the kids lost something, hair clips, crayons, the first thing she would ask, without even thinking it, was always, ‘Where did you see it last? Where did you leave it?’ As if things were always put down with tags, mental notes attached, and Fran herself moved through life tugged by strings of association connected to all her accoutrements. But that was being a mother. Yet get tied down. Of course she couldn’t remember everything, and much of her daily grief stemmed from her apprehension that she needed to. There were only so many things that she could keep in mind and Nesta wasn’t one of them.
Then up rose a sense of guilt. At having shouted, recently, brutally, at poor, vanished Nesta. It hit Fran plainly and her shame was all too evident on her face. The last time Fran had seen Nesta Dixon was when she threw her out of her kitchen. Over the milk upset, the cigarette-burned jacket. Had the silly cow topped herself because they never asked her to come on the girls’ night out?
She had been going to the Riverside for depression. Who knows how badly she might have taken it?
‘I saw her two days ago… exactly. We… argued. Well, I’d given her some stick for scrounging. Not scrounging exactly. Just a few bottles of milk.’
‘They were badly off, as a family?
‘Who isn’t?’
‘You aren’t making it any easier by making these generalisations. I’m asking whether the Dixons specifically were hard up, whether they were a problem family.’
‘How can you tell? What does that mean?’
The walkie-talkie gave a shriek and the policewoman was forced to reply. As she spoke she kept her eyes on Fran. How can she understand that thing? Fran wondered. It sounded like static to her, with only odd words emerging: ‘vagrancy’, ‘station’, ‘ma’am’. The policewoman snapped the radio off.
‘Tony Dixon is down at the station. He was picked up last night for vagrancy, sleeping under the Burn Lane bridge.’ Collins stood up, sighing heavily. ‘Some family! Not what you would really call a nice one.’
Fran held her door open. ‘I wouldn’t call them what you called them, either. I don’t know, maybe families with problems aren’t very nice. Goodbye. Let me know what happens.’
‘We will.’
Rose had made them both a cup of tea. She brought it up to have in bed. They were having a lie-in. Old people should take it easy, she said, laughing. She patted Ethan’s stump fondly and listened to him talk. The rain drummed at the window, making the floral pattern of her drawn curtains shift.
‘I knew a poet once. A lad in Germany, just after the war.’
‘Did you, love?’ She slurped her tea, fingering the gnarled mauve flesh rounding off his knee. She was becoming quite attached to this truncated limb. Everything was just right. Even the tea was perfect. She wished she had brought the pot.
‘This lad’s poems were good. I wonder what he made of himself.’
‘I used to read poems.’
‘He used to tell me that a poet is there to keep things alive. Like I say, this was just after the war. Keeping things alive was something we used to talk about a lot.’ He had shown Rose the photo of him and the lads, holding up the worn Nazi flag in a cobbled street. They had torn it down, they were grinning, guns relaxed on their shoulders. One of them, Rose thought dreamily, had been a poet.
Ethan continued, ‘He said a poet lives in this world to experience things, not think things. Just take things in, like bombs going off, falling in love, bread baking and things getting born. His poems keep them alive, all them things. I never saw him after we were demobbed. But I remember what he said then and I agreed. I could never write a poem, but I could keep things alive.’
‘It’d be nice if you wrote me a nice love poem.’
‘I learned about taxidermy. I’d keep things in their real forms, before death hit them. It was my little bit.’
‘There’s someone at the door.’ Rose inched forward on the bed, listening hard. ‘The letterbox is rattling.’ She got up and pulled on her dressing gown, a startling red. ‘I’ll go. You finish your tea.’ Before leaving the room she bent to give his leg an affectionate peck. Ethan was far away.
Fran was puzzled. ‘What’s a dog man?’
‘God knows,’ said Jane. They were standing by the bus shelter, Fran holding the baby. ‘I thought I’d better mention it.’
‘I don’t know whether we should listen to anything that bairn says. Bless her deprived heart and all that, but —’
‘I’ve left her at playschool. She should have gone to her real school but we were late. She seems happy enough back with the young ‘uns.’
‘That copper was on about getting social services in.’
‘Might be for the best.’
‘How can you say that? You know what’ll happen.’
Jane shrugged. ‘We don’t want to be left with her rotten kids, do we? We’ve got our own, haven’t we? It’s bound to happen sooner or later, anyway.’
‘We’ll just have to see. She might turn up yet.’
‘I’m just off to buy more beefburgers. I don’t think that Vicki’s been fed in her life. She was up all night wolfing custard creams.’
This time Liz had left a note for Penny. It was waiting for her when she came downstairs, late, at nine thirty. When she walked into the front room she knew something was up because the stereo wasn’t on, there were no curling tongs left lying around, and no one swirling around the place in her housecoat, full of the joys of spring.
Penny dear,
I’ve already gone.
I’ve gone to look at a bus station.
Cliff insisted.
Aren’t you late for school?
Liz was sitting on a wooden bench, one arm flung along the back and legs crossed. She picked idly at a scab of hardened chewing gum with her nails.
She was smoking heavily to cut out the greasy diesel fumes. Everywhere there was the sound of groaning machinery, chain-smokers waking, the early birds lurching into the depot with pneumatic squeals. But she liked this place. Plenty was happening. She was glad, too, that Cliff had brought her at the crack of dawn.
She watched him running about, from the frosted-windowed staff room to the buses, greeting other men in blue nylon trousers, jumping on and off buses, opening their rubber-hinged doors with a proprietorial air, patting the bonnets of the others as he passed. He was showing off, but she would let him, for this morning.
He came up to her, grinning. ‘They all want to meet you. They’ve all seen you sitting here. Everyone wants to know who you are.’
‘The buses?’
‘The blokes. I’ve told them you’re with me.’
He hasn’t got much of a sense of humour, Liz thought. Bless him!
He led her to the staff room. Inside someone was whistling ‘Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing’. The first line only, over and over again. Around a Formica table scattered with fag packets and timetables, six men were having an argument about Daktari. What was the lion’s name; Florence or Elsa?
‘It was Clarence,’ Liz told them. ‘Clarence the C
ross-eyed Lion.’
They all looked at her.
‘This,’ Cliff said, ‘is the woman I love.’
Rose gave Ethan a hand to get his leg back on. She was getting ' the hang of it now. He fumbled dressing, asking all the while 1 why Andy was there. His tetchiness and his slowness took Rose by surprise. This is how he’ll be when he’s old, she thought. An invalid. With me caring for him. His novelty might soon wear off. She hoped not.
‘He didn’t say. He looks upset, mind.’ Rose stood by the doorway. ‘He doesn’t look anything like you, you know. For a relative.’
Downstairs they found him watching This Morning.
‘Now then, Andrew. What’s all this about?’
Andy was keeping his eyes downcast, on Richard and Judy doing the phone-in. Richard had just asked some poor woman if her problem was that she was too dry. ‘They’re discussing women’s health problems,’ he said.
‘What did you have to see me about so urgently?’ His uncle’s voice was full of that menacing power again. Andy turned to look at him.
‘We have to talk about where I’m going to live.’ And suddenly he looked helpless. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Ethan sat down heavily on Rose’s overstuffed sofa. He could manage that now without looking. He’s settling in, Rose thought, and took herself off to make some fresh tea.
Jane was coming up the garden path, looking harassed.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rose asked, head out of the window, afterglow dissipating in the wet breeze. Jane stomped into the kitchen, slamming the door.
‘I’ve been turned into a bloody nursemaid, that’s what!’
‘Who by? What’s —’
‘That Nesta woman round the corner’s done a bunk, and —’ Jane stopped and listened. Two male voices could be heard clearly from the living room. Two male voices and, in the background, agony aunt Denise Robertson.
‘What’s going on here?’ Jane asked.
