Simon and Damon’s class had swimming today, so there was no time to go back to the office after the morning drop-off. Instead, I went with Ken to his choice of venue to while away forty minutes. The guy must know every budget café in a ten-mile radius, I thought to myself, squirming as the split leatherette on the seat pinched my bum. It was better than the other seat, with the duct-tape mend that rolled back and stuck to you, but only just.
‘Piles?’ Ken said.
I stopped squirming. The guy wasn’t fifty; he had to know that was harassment. He was carefully piling a soft fried egg on top of the split sausages he’d already laid on a slice of bread. He added another slice and pressed the sandwich together. I had to hand it to him: the sausages stayed put and the yolk seeped up into the top slice, not out on to his plate. He lifted it tenderly and tore off a third with his first bite.
I wound the string of my teabag round my finger and dipped it in and out of the cup, watching the water swirl pink.
‘What is that anyway?’ Ken said. ‘Bloody honking.’
‘You’re kidding,’ I said, pointing at his sandwich. ‘It’s blackcurrant. It’s nice. It’s refreshing.’
‘Don’t stain the sheets,’ said Ken, nodding at the clipboard by my place as he took another gargantuan bite. Fat dripped out on to his plate and the table around it and Ken mopped the drops up with the crust.
‘Are they sticklers?’ I said, glad of the opening.
‘Is who?’
‘Records,’ I said. ‘Finance? I dunno. Who is it that reads them?’
‘Reads what?’ Ken had stuffed the last of his sandwich in and was chewing on both sides of his mouth.
‘The logs,’ I said. ‘All this lot. Who is it that says I can’t get a wee pink spot of blackcurrant tea on them? Make a change from butter and bacon, wouldn’t it?’
Ken made a scornful noise and blew out some half-chewed sandwich with it. ‘Read them? Nobody reads them. We’re in trouble if anybody ever reads any of them.’
‘What? Trouble how?’ I said. ‘I’m doing my best to fill in what they’re asking for. Is there something else?’
‘Calm down, calm down,’ Ken said. He had put his cake plate on top of his empty sandwich plate and was slicing open the iced bun. ‘I’m sure you’ve dotted all your Ts. I meant the only time anyone ever opens the files and starts hoicking out forms is if there’s a case hearing and the social workers are in arse-covering mode.’
‘Wait. What?’ I said. ‘You mean none of this lot I’m killing myself to keep up with is ever going to see the light of day until someone comes checking up on us?’
‘Bingo.’
‘And does that ever happen?’ I said. His eyes narrowed. Did he think I was accusing him of something? I covered it by adding: ‘Tell me you’re not really going to butter that thing and clap it back together.’
‘It’s helluva dry without a wee scrape,’ Ken said. He was wrestling with the butter pod, trying to work out what corner of the foil top was meant to be the opening. His fingers, meaty, nails bitten to the quick, looked unlikely ever to lift the tiny little cow-lick of gold. I watched him, buggered if I was going to help an obese man add more fat to the sugary treat that rounded off the second meal of his morning. Then, remembering that I was crawling, I held my hand out.
‘Give it here. Jeez!’
‘Ta,’ Ken said. And as I had hoped, in gratitude, he started up again. ‘Not in my time. I have had a clean record since they put it out to contract. And I did fourteen years for the council direct before that. Nothing ever happened on my bus to make any of the busybodies call a meeting.’
I nodded. ‘And none of the parents ever ask for record-sharing?’
‘Naw. Calm down.’
‘Do they actually keep them?’ I said, flicking the sheets in front of me. ‘Bet they get binned.’
‘What?’ said Ken. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn. Binned? Nothing, ever, gets binned, Trixie lass. Not one single sheet. This lot’ll still be in a box-file in long-term off-site secure storage when …’
‘The sun burns up the Earth?’
‘Exactly.’ He took another bite and I took another sip.
‘I’m glad about the parents,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know they’re in their rights but I don’t think I’d feel the same about them if they were always checking up on me.’
‘They’re not likely to come checking up on you,’ Ken said. ‘You’re up the lift instead of waiting at the foot. Laying on birthday treats. You’re flavour of the month, you are.’
But he said it friendly enough, I thought. He was the perfect partner for me. He truly did not care.
‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Have they been arsey to you?’
‘Me?’ said Ken. ‘I’m an institution. I’m in with the bricks and I’ll leave in a box. Never a day sick, never ask for leave in term-time, never late when it’s icy or early when the footy’s on. See, that’s what you need to learn, hen. You don’t need to go sooking up to them. Just do your job, no more and no less.’
I couldn’t help the smile. I had landed in clover here. I would fill in the sheets all by myself. I would file them all by myself. And I was partnered with a driver who’d never been checked up on in all his long years of service.
‘What’s with the smirk?’ he said.
‘Just thinking,’ I said, buying time. ‘I’m glad I’m paired with an old-timer to keep me straight.’
‘Seasoned alpha,’ Ken said. ‘Not old-timer. But yeah, I’m coasting now. I’ve got three years to go till my lump sum.’
‘You’re looking well on it,’ I said, recalculating his age.
Ken finished the bun, sat back and slapped both sides of his stomach. ‘You have to choose between your face and your figure when you get to my age,’ he said. ‘Liz Taylor knew that.’
I could almost feel sorry for him, thinking about the trouble I was going to cause him, down the line. Maybe I could do what I was here to do quickly, in the next couple of weeks, and then annoy Ken so much he’d ask for me to be shifted to a different driver. I’d miss our kids, though.
‘Can I choose where we go for our lunch?’ I said. ‘Near the swimming pool.’
‘How?’ said Ken. ‘What’s wrong with Mickey D’s?’
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ I said. ‘You’ve had two breakfasts. You can’t have a burger at dinnertime.’
‘Me and Liz Taylor know better,’ Ken said. ‘Where is it you’re dying to go?’
‘Tapas bar,’ I said. ‘I’m kidding! Upstairs in Tesco’ll do me. Anywhere there’s a vegetable that’s not pickled.’
It was the high point of my working relationship with Ken, that swimming-day morning at the greasy spoon with the split seats. I decided he wasn’t so bad after all and he let me drag him to a café just beyond the bypass, minutes from the leisure centre, where we’d never been before. It had lorry bays in half of the carpark and slot machines by the front door but I managed to get a salad out of them. Ken deigned to try the ham and Swiss panini with home-made crisps and grunted that it was passable. Then he took a look around the rest of the clientele and nodded towards a light-skinned Black woman sitting alone at a table working on her laptop while she spooned soup carefully.
‘Rougher crowd than Mickey’s,’ he said.
I tried and failed to think he meant something else. He kept chewing, a leer on his face, daring me to say something. I ate my salad with my head down, managing to stop feeling sorry for myself only by thinking how it must feel to be a Black girl in Dumfries, sticking out like a sore thumb everywhere you went. When I passed by the woman’s table on my way to the loos, I smiled at her as if we were long-lost friends and then felt a flush as she looked right through me. Ken saw the smile and the look and snorted.
I really had flushed, I saw as I looked at myself in the mirror, an angry stain spreading over my neck and up my cheeks. Even my ears had darkened. ‘Snotty bitch,’ I muttered, banging into the cubicle. ‘Smile costs nothing.’ Then I caught mys
elf. Chances were condescending smiles from people like me were harder to stomach than flat stares from people like Ken. That girl didn’t owe me a thing. So when I’d washed my hands and I came back out again, I kept a neutral look on my face and strode by, only realizing once it was too late that this time the woman had turned to smile back. Maybe she was shy. Or maybe she reckoned her in her business suit with her laptop out on the table didn’t have to respond to the likes of me in my Hi-Vis unless she felt like it. Or most likely, she hadn’t noticed me at all because she was watching for someone. He was here now and it was him she was smiling at.
But he stayed by the door, looking around. His eyes drifted over the three women with pushchairs in a huddle by the big windows, the retired couple whispering together over a shared scone, and the woman with the laptop, before his gaze came to rest on me.
He started forward uncertainly. ‘Martine?’ he said, flicking a look at the logo on my polo-shirt.
‘Over here,’ said the laptop woman, standing and starting forward with a huge smile on her lips now but a look in her eyes that could take down a charging bull. She was dressed in the female version of the guy’s get-up, maybe better quality, but otherwise identical: a black suit, black shoes and a white shirt. ‘Are you David?’ she asked him.
‘Oh!’ the man said, wiping his hand on his trousers before sticking it out, maybe as if it might be clammy. But just maybe as if the idea of cleanliness was on his mind suddenly.
I tried another shared look, in light of this fresh outrage, but ‘Martine’ was staring at the man who’d come to meet her and didn’t notice. ‘I like your hair,’ he was saying.
‘Snotty cow,’ Ken said, nodding at the pair of them as I rejoined him. ‘Face like a skelped arse. You’d think she’d be happy.’
‘About what?’ I said.
‘Being welcome. And don’t start on me.’
‘Welcome where?’ I said. ‘She’s obviously local. She sounds just like you.’
‘Better than sounding like you. Edinburgh, is it? Morningsaaiide?’
I wanted to slap him with the truth – Grangemouth, over from the dockyard, great view of the refinery – but if he thought I was from somewhere else, I wasn’t going to argue. ‘Yep, Edinburgh,’ I said. ‘The posh end, obviously.’
‘You did something wrong to wind up here then,’ Ken said, and even he slumped as he looked around, at the sticky floor, the grime on the windows, the belching exhausts of the lorries outside restarting in the cold.
A wave of homesickness passed through me like the first shudder of a flu bout and I turned my mind away from the stark truth, that home was gone. Instead, I pictured files – unguarded and unread – lying forgotten behind the grey fronts of a wall of drawers like my own private bank vault. I found myself smiling down at the first few that lay crumb-strewn and smudged on the table before me.
NINE
Martine had never been in Hephaw before. She had never been in any of the string of workaday towns that meandered, one into the next, through this scarred, tired county. The buckle of the Bible Belt was a title claimed by the oddly proud burghers of many a hick town in the American South, with their megachurches and their huge houses for wholesome blond families of nine, perfect smiles and terrible clothes. Martine knew that. She’d become somewhat obsessed by the South, a few years back, before the genealogy. She had wondered for a while if ‘he’ maybe wasn’t a Londoner at all, but American, and in her ignorance she thought all the Black people in America lived down there, in the humid shade of those raggedy trees she couldn’t name. So she’d watched documentaries and reality shows, expecting Gone with the Wind and Alice Walker, finding megachurches instead.
That one phrase had stuck. The buckle on the Bible Belt. She remembered it now, driving through West Lothian. ‘The buckle on the Central Belt,’ she said to herself. ‘Ingliston, Livingston, towns that could have been anywhere. Newbridge and Avonbridge, English-sounding somehow. Dechmont and Pumpherston, exotic in name, drab in reality. Then three towns all named Calder – East, Mid and West – as if even the town planners couldn’t be bothered.
And now Hephaw. Martine caught sight of the sign announcing it or she wouldn’t have known she had left the last town behind. There were no outskirts, no suburbs, certainly no fields between one and the next. Just this endless road, with shops and flats, cheek by jowl, then depots and garages, spread out in space unwanted for anything else, the odd pub with a carpark and maybe a skittle alley tacked on, as the speed limit rose to forty. Then there’d be a proud sign, announcing twin towns and claims to fame and the speed would go back down to thirty, the traffic lights for pedestrian crossings would start up and the garages and depots would give way to strings of shops again.
Hephaw was no different from all the rest of them. Cheap clothes shops and charity shops, because sometimes new clothes couldn’t get cheap enough; bakers and butchers with names picked out in gold on painted backgrounds; burger, kebab and pizza joints, with plastic sheeting bolted over the original shopfronts; pub after pub after pub; closed phone shops and computer repair – remnants of short-lived hopes; open nail bars and tanning salons – current hopes still afloat, but always with signs saying ‘walk-ins welcome’.
Martine’s satnav showed the red pin worryingly close. Kate had said she’d love their house but she hadn’t said anything about the area and 1a Loch Road looked to be just off this straggling High Street of newsagents and saver stores. Martine indicated, turned and began peering out of the passenger window for her first glimpse of the place.
‘Your destination is on the right,’ the satnav told her. She pulled in and parked by an iron gate between hedges, thinking here goes.
She had seen endless photographs now since that night at the Family Forest when her life changed. She’d seen faded snaps of a young man in his twenties, bell-bottom trousers and a striped V-neck T-shirt. He wore sunglasses and beamed out of the picture. Martine tried to see her face in his – her smile, her nose, her chin – but the original was overexposed from the start and had faded over the years, the flash on Kate’s phone doing the rest of the work of hiding him. There were more: he was there in the back row of a school photo, with a thick black ring round his face that had smeared until it nearly obscured him; he was there at a party with a crowd of drunk friends, all of them with open shirts and shiny faces. Useless, Martine thought. He didn’t even look like the same person in all these photos and in the one of him with two little white girls, she would never have said either was Kate.
She shouldered her messenger bag, gripped her overnight bag, and let herself in at the gate. The garden was long and uncared-for, scrubby old trees standing in tussocky grass and a long straight path that led to a wooden door, its varnish starting to lift and flake. Martine was sensitive to disorder. Who wouldn’t be, after her childhood? Between the chipped veneer and thin carpets in her gran’s flat, clean enough but worn through long before Martine arrived on the scene, and the smeared chaos of her mum’s place, greasy dust on every ledge and stains on the wall above the open bin where lobbed teabags had missed, an endless line of black bags outside the front door waiting for the day that never came when someone would take them away, Martine sometimes thought that, even more than her new car and her good job, her bank balance and her credit rating, the solid ground in her life was the gleam on her polished taps, the Hoover swipes in the thick pale nap of her whole-house carpet, the sparkle of her windows, washed every month inside and out, reflecting her headlights in an unbroken streak of pure shine without a single fingerprint whenever she came home after dark.
Sometimes she wondered if dogs’ noses and children’s hands messing up her perfect windows would have been nice too, then she stepped inside, threw her keys in the bowl, hung her coat on a hook and stepped out of her court shoes, breathing in lemon polish and hearing nothing but the soft surge as her heating came on.
Whatever lay behind this peeling door was something quite different. She knew that before it opened a
nd Kate peered round it, beaming at her.
‘Come in!’ she said. ‘You made it. Is that your car at the gate? The navy blue one? Lovely. We can move it round later, can’t we? It’s fine for now. Come in, come in.’
She pressed Martine into a hug and Martine hugged back, guessing from the slightly vinegary scent coming off the shorter woman’s hair that she was nervous enough to be sweating. Again, Kate was dressed in clothes far too old for her actual age: a cardigan on top of a round-collared blouse, with a pleated skirt and pale tights. She had tartan slippers on and kirby grips holding her hair off her face. Martine was touched to see all this evidence of intimacy. She was family, Kate’s bare face and tea towel over the shoulder seemed to say. No need to be putting on airs and graces.
‘How do you like our fairytale cottage?’ she said. ‘I’m in the scullery. Come and keep me company. But do you need …? I mean, how long was your drive?’
‘I’m fine,’ Martine said.
‘Because the gentlemen’s cloakroom is through the card room there—’
‘The what?’
‘And the powder room is off the ladies’ withdrawing room at the back.’
‘The … what?’
Martine looked at the closed doors leading off the wood-panelled hallway and then back at Kate, frowning, but with a smile too – that smile that was her core policy, her best defence.
‘It’s a ballroom,’ said Kate. ‘The Doctor’s Ballroom. Georgian, you’ll see – if you care about architecture or interiors at all. See. This is the ballroom itself through here.’
Martine left her bags in the hall and followed.
‘And this is the supper room.’ Kate’s slippered feet thumped softly on the patterned wood floors. Martine followed her silently, her flat crepe soles not even squeaking. ‘Let’s have a toast!’ There was a tray already set out, three glasses and an open bottle of something fizzy. Martine took a glass and clinked it against Kate’s. She took a polite sip. It wasn’t flat, as she’d expected from it sitting there open, but it wasn’t good.
A Gingerbread House Page 9
