by Knight, Ali
The feeling didn’t last long. That evening she put the kids to bed and began tidying up the kitchen after their meal. She had been civil and compliant to Christos all day, keeping quiet about the indignities dished out by Sylvie earlier. She retreated to the bedroom once she’d finished and Christos followed her, holding a glass of wine. He put it down on the bedside table and she took a big swig and lay back on the bed. Another day dawdling to its close, Kelly thought, with none of her compromises resolved. Then he said something that surprised her.
‘You don’t sing any more.’ He lay back on the bed next to her. ‘I love it when you sing.’
Kelly said nothing. The memory was almost too painful. When she first met Christos, she had been a singer, someone who expressed her emotions through the power and range of her voice. Someone who felt great joy when she sang. Her desire to do it had withered with the years she spent with him.
‘You know why?’ he continued. ‘You look like an angel when you sing.’
‘That’s silly.’
‘It’s true. Most people never really look. They think they do, but they don’t study a face, a person. When you sing you go somewhere else, a place no one can follow you to. It’s fascinating to watch. I never get bored of looking at you, I could do it for ever.’
He ran his hand up and down her thigh, up and down again over her knee and shin. He had a way of touching her that was just right. He reached down and took tight hold of her ankle, held her instep. She felt herself relax, her cares begin to float away. He could love all of her, right to the extremities, like no one else she had known.
He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘My darling Kelly.’
In rare moments he was like this: he was the man she had fallen in love with, who could take her away from the pain of her dead husband and child – a man who could work a miracle such as that. She wondered whether Sylvie knew they still had sex. She guessed not. For a second, triumph thrilled through her at the thought of the mistress swallowing the lies about a sexless marriage. She rolled on to her side and he kissed her. She kissed him back.
He was a good kisser. Despite everything, she was still a physical person, she liked to be wanted and occasionally she desired the man she feared and hated. All the lines of right and wrong were blurring and she didn’t know how to pick them apart. Christos rolled on top of her and she opened her eyes. She saw the ceiling light and shame lanced her. Her spy camera would be recording everything. She hadn’t thought that through and felt embarrassed. She tried to push him off. ‘No, not now.’
‘Come on, Kelly, let’s play.’
She could feel his erection hard against her stomach, on her scar. It didn’t hurt. He ran his hands across her breasts, began kissing her neck. He pulled her arms above her head and ran his strong hands up and down them.
‘Kelly, I’m sorry.’ He was thrusting against her on the bed, his head in her neck, nuzzling. ‘I hurt you and I didn’t want to do that. I love you.’
Those words that always softened her scarred heart. He put his hands under her bum and yanked her further up the bed, his heavy weight full on her now. ‘I want you to lie back and do nothing.’
He rolled over so he was underneath and she was astride him. He peeled off her top and undid her bra, massaged her breasts and undid the zip on her trousers. He rolled back over again and sat up, pulling her trousers off in one expert yank. He began to vary the speed and intensity of his touch. She was panting, her limbs writhing with pleasure across the bed. Her hand flew out and knocked the wine glass on the bedside table where it clattered into the lamp base and broke, falling to the floor.
Kelly didn’t care. His face was between her legs, licking, sending darts of pleasure up her back and across her stomach. Her tired and untended soul longed for and needed it. She heard his zip coming down and his erection probing for its home. He slammed into her and she cried out with pleasure, they were moving hard against each other and his head was in her neck again, mumbling, ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over again. Her eyes were closed, the sensations strong and persistent. He was moving faster, she was bucking against him, floating away to a nice place for a few fabulous seconds, her cares forgotten.
She came twice, long and loud, some tears squeezed free with the intensity of it, and he followed her a few seconds later.
He rolled off and stood up, full of energy now as she lay sated on the bed. She saw him through teary distortion looking at her stomach. ‘We could get you some plastic surgery for that, tidy it up a bit.’ He patted her on the leg and walked through into the bathroom.
Kelly lay still for a moment, stunned. She sat up, anger swamping her ecstasy. The bastard. He had caused that scar, that searing pain and fear, and now he was blithely trying to erase it from their history, from her body, as if it was no more important than a cap on a tooth. Fury replaced her anger.
Through her tears she saw a fluttering movement outside the window. A pigeon was on the wrought-iron decoration on the windowsill, beak nudging through a dirty city wing, a stump in the place of one of its feet. She felt a forceful hatred for that deformed bird and wanted to kill it. Yesterday she had seen the same pigeon and had wanted to hold her hand out to it through the glass. Now she felt as stunted as that poor, sad air rat.
Christos was in the bathroom, the shower on. Her outrage was wild in her. She grabbed the broken wine glass off the floor, a pool of dark red like a bloodstain spreading through the carpet fibres by the bed. She held the glass by its stem like a dagger and ran into the bathroom.
He was in the love shower. It was what the workmen had jokingly called it when they installed it. Shower heads at either end of a large rectangle, big enough for two. They had never shared it. Too much day-to-day monotony to be able to make it special enough, too much water splash. The fancy double shower now had a cheap white curtain at the entrance to stop the water spraying the bathroom floor.
He was humming, unaware, the drone of the water unceasing. She felt her breath coming shallow and fast, she was watching herself from high above, as if she were already dead. She could see his outline through the curtain. She was inches from his naked body, moments away from slashing that curtain and freeing herself from the brute behind it. She raised the broken glass to her shoulder, her whole body shaking with anger and purpose. She could already see the blood draining away down the plughole as she imagined stabbing again and again at his neck.
She took a step forward and felt something squish under her foot. It was one of Florence’s socks, blue and mauve stars balled up and discarded on the floor. Kelly paused, the curtain shivering. Florence had already lost her father and her sister. If Kelly did this, she’d go to jail. Florence would have no one.
She retreated back the way she had come, dropping the glass in the waste bin in the bedroom and collapsing down on the bed. A few moments later she heard the scrape of the curtain sliding open along the pole and Christos came back into the bedroom, his face pink with heat and self-satisfaction.
‘That was nice, wasn’t it?’ he said with a grin.
15
Georgie put her right hand behind her and felt for the small bag of chalk attached to her right hip. The moisture in her sweating fingers was absorbed in an instant. She could feel the sharp stone of the narrow ledge under her left foot, the thin rubber soles of her climbing shoes gripping every inch of her foot. Her right foot was as high as her right hip, her body flat against the vertical cliff face. The nylon rope with its red and white pattern snaked away past her cheek to the top of the climb.
She took a deep breath, her eyes fixed on the small groove in the wall above her. She tried to haul herself up, the echoing, early morning sounds of the Victorian water pumping station fading away. She was absorbed in her own private conundrum, her mind empty of everything except getting to the top. She was on the hardest climb at the centre; her arms and legs were beginning to shake, muscles and veins standing proud of her skin as they tried to flood her body with more oxygen. Her fingers couldn’t
find a grip in the groove, the angle was too steep, the rock too shiny. She knew she had to retreat to her former position.
Climbing was a puzzle that had to be solved; brute force and strength would only get you so far. The very best climbers – and her mentor had told her she could be one of the very best – used their brains, not their muscles, to get to the top. It was about shifts in position, working through a maze of tiny protrusions and indentations almost invisible to the naked eye to defy gravity and get to the finish. Changing the angle of an ankle, starting with a different leg, crossing arms over in the right way meant you could climb an overhang or impossible-looking rock face.
Georgie climbed when she wanted to relax, when she wanted endorphins to flood her body and take away the petty stresses at work, the major stresses at home. She balanced on her right leg and swung her left over to a further point. This buttress was thinner but longer, allowing her to get the whole length of her foot on it. It changed her body position subtly, and allowed her to approach the rock face in a new way. She often wondered why she loved climbing so much, but she knew the answer: it was one of the few places in her life she could actually have space around her. She thought of home, to the tiniest boxroom carved off the main bedroom that was all the space she had to call her own, where trying to go out in the evenings involved tense pacing and waiting for the bathroom door to open and racing in before one of her three older brothers barged her out of the way to spend hours primping and preening themselves. Getting ready for work was easier; she was the only one up early, the only one of the family with a PAYE number.
She’d been a mistake. Mum and Dad often told her, with a smile that showed all their love and, until Mum got too weak to lift her arm, a ruffle of a hand in her hair. A fourth – and a girl. There was no room in the house, precious little room in their lives. Old habits clung on; she wondered if they’d called her Georgie because it was easier to stick with boys’ names. She was simply the last and littlest of the Bell gang and expected to tread the same path.
She dabbed more chalk on her fingers and completed the rest of the climb, swung her leg over the top and stood, staring down at the blue crash mats far below. But she didn’t want to follow that path, working for her dad, the suffocating weight of her family on her. She just needed to endure home for six more months, then she would finally have the money to get her own place, carve out a new life at arm’s length from her family. At twenty-eight she could make a start. Work was the solution and the salvation. Pity she was the only one in her family to think it.
She paused for a moment, letting her breath return to normal. The exercise eased her frustrations, her lack of privacy. Hard economic realities kept them all at home, but it wasn’t only that. Duty had kept them there through Mum’s long illness, and grief after she’d gone. She turned to abseil to the ground. It was seven thirty on Monday morning; it was more private showering here than at home.
Four hours later she had Kelly’s name in the computer and was left scratching her head. There was precious little information, which was frustrating. There was nothing filed under her married name, no record of where she grew up, no arrest record. She typed Kelly’s maiden name into the computer. ‘Access denied’ came up across the screen. She hadn’t been expecting that.
Mo came over with a pile of printouts. ‘I’ve got her mobile phone records. Why are you so interested in the wife?’
Georgie didn’t answer. She glanced down the printout of Kelly’s mobile phone use for the past three months. The last month’s stretched to barely half a page. Again, unexpected. ‘Mo, if you had loads of cash and were young and good-looking, what would you be doing? No offence or anything.’
He laughed and sat down. ‘I wouldn’t be here with you, that’s for sure. No offence.’
‘None taken.’
He scratched his chin, warming to the idea. ‘I’d be seeing the world, getting out and about.’ He paused, his eyes glazing over. ‘I’d go to Vegas.’
She was surprised. ‘That’s not very Muslim.’
He roared with laughter. ‘Not very Muslim! If I started a list of non-Muslim things we’d be here all day.’
‘OK, point taken.’
‘I’d go to New York too, though I’d be too scared to get out of my seat to use the toilet on the plane in case they got suspicious of me even standing in the aisle. Before you know it, I could be in Guantanamo or somewhere.’
‘You’re from Cricklewood, Mo, not Kandahar.’ She grinned. ‘The only crimes you’ll be committing are crimes against fashion.’
‘Ouch. Any more of that and I’ll make you listen to my dad’s sitar music—’
Georgie was in the swing of it now. She started singing: ‘Come with me, I’ve got the keys to my Dad’s MPV …’
‘I’ll put all seven seats down for her, make her feel special,’ added Mo.
They both laughed. Mo sat back, thinking. ‘You need money to travel.’ He paused. ‘You know, that’s the thing about poverty, it keeps you indoors. You’ve got no money to go out, so you have to stay in.’
Georgie looked back down at the few phone calls Kelly had made. Poverty stunted friendships, too. No money to go out, no money to have fun. The bill was at odds with the opulence of the house they’d visited. Georgie made a note of that. She came from a family where things that didn’t add up were things that were worth looking into. Kelly Malamatos merited her attention. She got up and walked towards Angus’s office, glancing back to make sure Mo wasn’t watching before she adjusted her bra strap, checked there was nothing horrid stuck to her teeth and tightened her pony tail. Miracles might happen and he might one day notice her …
Angus was trying to fish a tea bag out of a mug and balance it on a pen to get it to the waste bin somewhere at his feet. He glanced up as she entered and the tea bag plopped on to a pile of paperwork on his desk, splattering at least five forms. Angus swore.
‘Sorry,’ she said, as he picked up the paper and slid the tea bag off, she presumed into the bin. Why she felt the need to apologise for his irrational way of making a cuppa she tried not to dwell on.
‘Yes?’
‘I need to run something past you.’
Angus licked the tea off the end of the pen and nodded.
‘I’ve got a file on Kelly Malamatos here, but there’s hardly any information at all. If you type her into the computer it says access denied. What’s that mean?’
‘Don’t get overexcited. It could mean something or it could mean nothing. The file’s been lost, it’s a computer glitch’ – they both nodded – ‘she’s working secretly for the security services … I have no idea, and unless I’m told otherwise by my boss, I’ve learned to stay away from that sort of thing. Get yourself tangled in that kind of politics and …’ He shuddered. ‘You sure this is a fruitful line of enquiry?’ Angus reached behind him for a pint carton of milk.
Georgie ploughed on. ‘Well, that’s my point really. What I did find is that she lodged a complaint about domestic violence by her husband a year ago but then didn’t want to pursue it. We should talk to her, dig a bit deeper.’
‘Your tip-off theory. So bring her in.’
‘I think it might be better to meet her on her own turf. Mo and I could follow her and make an approach—’
Angus put the carton down fast. ‘Ever hear of budgets? This investigation can’t justify the kind of surveillance you’re suggesting.’
She wasn’t going to be beaten. ‘You said yourself that you suspect what we found in that ship is just a fraction of what Christos might be smuggling. If it’s true then it makes sense to make a proportionate effort. You mention politics, but I bet a high-profile environmental prosecution is just the good news the PRs are looking for. Better than airport queuing times.’
Angus looked up at her, his eyebrows raised.
She felt her spirits soar, he was listening intently. She might have a fantasy about wanting him to fancy her, but even more than that she wanted his respect. ‘A rosewood k
ingpin.’ She shrugged. ‘It makes a change from a drugs bust.’
She could see him mulling it over. He was part of the new guard in the service; stories that garnered good publicity were catnip to him.
‘No overtime, no night shifts.’
Georgie nodded.
‘And no rocking boats.’
She smiled at him and left him to his tea.
16
Now Georgie and Mo were waiting for Kelly to come out of her apartment. They worked out that she would appear at some point to collect her children from school, or return with them to the house. But a woman who looked so much like Christos she had to be his mother had come back with the children after school.
Georgie was growing frustrated and irritable. She felt cooped up, she was sick of the endless cans of Tango Mo drank and nothing was happening. It looked like they might have missed Kelly altogether.
‘Woman walking a dog, ten points,’ Mo said, pointing at the far pavement. ‘So it’s two hundred and ten plays ninety.’ They were playing the points game as a way to pass the time. ‘White van with writing in the dirt on the back, thirty points! I’m murdering you.’
Georgie drummed her fingers on the steering wheel with irritation.
‘What’s a couple kissing worth?’
Georgie made a face. ‘Let’s take points away for that.’
Mo sipped his fizzy drink. ‘I doubt there’s a romantic bone in your body. Why’s that, eh? You know I could fix you up with one of my brothers if you liked. They drink alcohol and try to fuck beautiful women like you and they’re not “angry”, like me.’ Georgie gave him a withering look but it didn’t stop him. ‘Why don’t you have a boyfriend? I don’t get it, I really don’t. All I’m saying is: you ever feel like company, I’ve got a queue.’
