TAINTED LOVE

by Anna Chilvers

  43. Ali

  The train wasn’t very crowded. We put the bike in the space at the end of the carriage near the door and stayed with it on the flip-down seats opposite. Lauren sat in between us and leaned her head against Richard. She was quite rosy now, and smiling. She still looked like she was on drugs.

  ‘Have you spoken to your mum?’

  Lauren and I both looked at Richard.

  ‘Yes I have,’ said Lauren

  ‘Is it ok?’

  ‘My dad told me what happened. Your mum wanted to turn him.’

  Richard looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you…’

  ‘You were in Paris.’

  I met Richard’s eyes above Lauren’s head. Suddenly we were together and I felt responsible for Lauren, like he did.

  ‘Your mum must be angry,’ Richard said.

  But Lauren had fallen asleep.

  Richard met my eyes again.

  ‘She’s pretty far gone,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought I could go back to how things were before, but I was wrong. Everything’s different.’

  ‘If you leave her alone, what will happen? Will she get better?’

  ‘Yes, once this has healed.’

  He pulled back the hair from her neck and showed the remains of a wound, a small dark piece of scab.

  ‘That will be gone soon,’ I said.

  ‘A few days. But she’s going to get worse, and she’ll be hard to resist.’

  ‘Keep away from her.’

  ‘Then she’ll be in pain.’

  ‘Idiot!’

  ‘I know. I should have waited.’

  I looked away this time. I didn’t ask him what he should have waited for.

  When we arrived at Hawden we woke Lauren, but it was like trying to walk with a really drunk person. It was a mile up to Hough Dean. We managed to get her through the town, but once we got onto the lane Richard carried her on his back while I pushed the bike. She fell asleep again like a dead weight, her head dropped forward over his shoulder and her hair falling down the front of his jacket.

  He took her straight upstairs and put her to bed in the attic room at the back of the house. When he came back we looked at the bike.

  ‘Heavy duty,’ he said. ‘Look at the tread on those tyres.’

  I never had a bike when I was a child. Emma did. She had a white bike with pink flowers painted on near the handlebars. She thought it was the coolest thing ever.

  ‘Aleesha, would you like a ride on my bike?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  She pulled a face then, raising her eyebrows and smirking a bit, a face which said: I know you’re lying, how could you not like this bike? You’re just jealous.

  ‘It’s ugly. It looks like Barbie’s bike.’

  Emma loved Barbie. She had lots of them in her room. She smiled at me.

  ‘Maybe Mum and Dad will buy you a bike when you’re older. You could have a brown one.’

  She was wearing shorts and white sandals and her legs were tanned. She swung onto the bike and rode off down our road. She wasn’t very good on it yet and she wobbled, but when she stopped at the end and got off to turn it round she looked as pleased as anything, like she knew she was a princess and I was a worm.

  A year or so after that, Gran offered to get me a bike but I said I didn’t want one. Emma and her friends all had bikes and rode them up and down the street, and leaned them against walls whilst they chatted and admired their nails. I knew what she would say – or if she didn’t say it, what she would think. She’d think I wanted to be like her but that I just couldn’t get it right. That I was failing to keep up with her.

  I said, ‘I don’t think bikes are my thing.’

  And Gran gave me a look, trying to work out what I was thinking. I smiled at her.

  ‘You could get me some books instead. You could buy a lot of books for the price of a bike.’

  ‘I can’t ride a bike,’ I said.

  Richard looked at me in surprise. ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘No time like the present. Get on.’

  I hesitated, but he stood there holding the handlebars like the reins of a horse, waiting for me to mount. I laughed and lifted my leg over so I was straddling the bike.

  ‘Sit on the seat, feet on the pedals.’

  I glanced at him anxiously and he grinned.

  ‘It’s ok, I’ve got it steady.’

  I leaned forward and put my hands on the handlebars next to his, shuffled back so my bum was in contact with the leather seat, then gingerly lifted one foot and put it on the pedal.

  ‘And the other one.’

  I lifted it and put it back on the ground. The bike wobbled.

  ‘Again.’

  I tried again and this time managed to get my foot onto the pedal. I was completely off the ground.

  I grinned. ‘What now?’

  ‘You have to push with your feet.’

  ‘Then the bike will go forward.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the point.’

  ‘But you’re standing in front of it. I’ll run you over.’

  He laughed. ‘I see you’ve spotted the flaw in my teaching method.’

  I put my feet back on the ground and he went to the back of the bike.

  ‘Ok, let’s try again.’

  This time it was even harder without Richard to look at, but I managed to push off and move the bike a few feet, before I panicked, wobbled, and put both feet back on the ground.

  ‘What did you do that for? You were flying.’

  ‘Hardly,’ I said, but I was grinning.

  Richard was very patient and, after an hour or so and a lot of laughing, I rode around the yard with Richard hanging on to the bike behind me.

  ‘My turn now,’ Richard said.

  I was still sitting on the bike and he swung himself in front of me.

  ‘Tuck your legs in and hold on,’ he said.

  He stood on the pedals and we were moving, speeding down the lane. I held on to his jacket, but my hands slipped on the leather, and after a moment I put my hands inside. He pedalled hard as the lane rose and I could feel the tightness in his stomach muscles. We crested the hill and freewheeled the rest of the way down to the bottom, both of us whooping in exhilaration. One circuit of the Craggs car park and we were back on the uphill slope.

  ‘Lean forward,’ he called out.

  My face was against his back and I could smell the leather of his jacket, could smell his hair, his skin.

  When we were back on the level we heard a vehicle behind us. I looked behind and there was a red van.

  ‘We’ll beat him,’ shouted Richard.

  We raced in front all the way to Hough Dean, curving in through the gate and coming to a stop in the middle of the yard as the van came in behind us. We fell off the bike laughing. A man got out of the van.

  ‘Hi Jimmy,’ Richard called to him.

  Jimmy eyed Richard with something which wasn’t friendliness. ‘I’ve come to get my tools.’

  ‘Why, have you finished?’

  ‘I’ve finished with you lot. You’ll have to find someone else to finish the work.’

  Richard looked surprised.

  ‘Does Mum know?’

  ‘I don’t want anything else to do with your mother,’ Jimmy said.

  He went into the barn and came out with a bag of tools, then some sacks of sand and plaster, a couple of buckets. He loaded them into his van.

  ‘Had your mum got her teeth into him?’ I asked Richard.

  ‘She’d taken a shine.’

  ‘But he’s not succumbed?�
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  ‘She’d only got to first bite. His friends have warned him. And he has a girlfriend.’

  ‘Don’t you check out that sort of thing first?’

  ‘Usually. We’ve not been very clever this time. Either of us.’

  The laughter had stopped. I thought of Lauren lying asleep in the bedroom upstairs and felt as though I’d swallowed something very heavy.

  Jimmy put the last of his things into his van, got in and drove away.

  ‘Bye Jimmy,’ Richard called out to the van as it disappeared through the gate. We watched it go. ‘I liked Jimmy,’ Richard said.

  ‘What about this bike?’

  ‘You’re doing ok for the first time.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I mean, a bike. Smith isn’t a bike dealer you know. That’s not what the police are after.’

  ‘No.’

  We stood and looked at it leaning against the side of the barn. It was neon green with big wheels, an aluminium frame.

  ‘It’s very heavy,’ Richard said.

  ‘Heavier than it ought to be?’

  ‘Yes. When I lifted it on to the train it was hard work. It shouldn’t be, not really.’

  ‘What about riding it uphill? With me on it, too.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  I looked at him. ‘For an ordinary person it would be hard work.’

  He shrugged.

  He started fiddling with the bike, trying to get the seat off. I looked at the handlebars. At each end there was a black plastic stopper, and after a few moments I managed to get one of them out. It was hollow and I put my fingers inside and touched plastic.

  ‘There’s something in here,’ I said.

  Richard had succeeded in getting the seat off and was looking inside the frame.

  ‘Here too.’

  We looked at each other. He had his shades on and I could see myself reflected in them.

  ‘Let’s take it into the barn. In case anyone comes.’

  I nodded and we wheeled the bike inside. Richard switched on the light, a bare bulb hanging from a string, illuminating the big empty barn. He took off his shades and his eyes were shining.

  He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got first.’

  My fingers could just reach the plastic inside the handlebars. I slid it out. A polythene tube, filled with tiny white pills. Hundreds of them, thousands even.

  Richard was trying to get the packet out from the frame beneath the seat.

  ‘We need something to grab it with,’ I said.

  ‘Tongs,’ he said, and ran off to the house.

  While he was gone I picked up the seat and looked at it. The top was brown leather, but underneath it was covered in black plastic. Where the plastic reached the edges it was joined with a rough line of glue. I pulled at it, but it was stuck fast.

  Richard reappeared with a pair of tongs.

  ‘Have you got a knife?’ I asked him.

  He fished a penknife out of his pocket and handed it to me. I cut the black plastic, carefully with the tip of the knife. Underneath, packed in tightly, was a bag of white powder. Richard had just fished another out of the hollow tube of the frame.

  ‘Heroin?’ I asked.

  Richard opened the end of one of the bags with the knife. He licked his finger and got a few grains of the powder which he put in his mouth.

  He shook his head. ‘Cocaine. It’s pretty good.’

  ‘Not cut with anything?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  We looked at the two bags of powder, the bag of pills.

  ‘We should use the twenty pound note,’ I said. ‘The one with the code on. It would be appropriate.’

  He laughed. ‘Not much though. It’s strong stuff.’

  He went back to the house again to find something to cut it on. I walked around the bike. I lifted it a couple of inches off the ground. It still seemed heavy. I didn’t know anything about bikes, but I could imagine it would be difficult to ride it up a hill.

  Richard came back with a hand mirror and used his penknife to cut a couple of small lines.

  ‘I think there’s more,’ I said.

  He looked at the bike. ‘In the frame?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It would be too difficult to get to; we’d have to take the bike apart.’

  ‘The wheels?

  I nodded. ‘I think those tyres are packed with the stuff.’

  He squeezed one of them.

  ‘Could be.’

  He found the twenty with the code on and rolled it up tightly. He handed it to me and I snorted one of the lines, watching the white grains disappear from the mirror, feeling the hit on the back of my nose. I blinked. I’d never had stuff like this before, unadulterated. I could feel it rushing into my bloodstream.

  Richard took the rolled note from me and hoovered up his line. He looked up. Our faces were inches apart and I could smell him. I could hear blood thudding in my ears.

  I rested my fingers lightly on his knee.

  ‘Shall we have a look?’

  ‘Let’s.’

  Richard had changed the tyres on a bike before and knew what he was doing. The first one was off in a few minutes. A long plastic sausage was wrapped around the wheel, covering the inner tube and packed with more of the white powder. I whooped and danced around the bike while Richard laughed.

  ‘Can I do the next one?’

  I crouched at the side of the bike and Richard knelt behind me, showing me what to do. I could feel him at my back, his breath in my ear.

  His hands and mine moved on the wheel, eased the tyre away from the frame, revealing another sausage. I lifted it from the bike and laid it next to the rest of the hoard on the barn floor. The tubes from the tyres were over six feet long.

  Richard stood next to me and I took his hand.

  ‘That’s a fuck of a lot of drugs,’ I said.

  ‘A fuck of a lot of money,’ he said.

  ‘No wonder Smith and Jeannie wanted to find me.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  We turned and looked at each other. We were really close, almost touching.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered.

  We moved closer. My blood was racing now, and it felt so good I could hardly bear it. Our noses bumped against each other and we moved them, him one way, me the other.

  ‘Richard!’ Meg yelled across the yard, tearing in between us so we stepped back from each other.

  ‘Richard! Are you there?’

  He walked to the barn door.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she called. ‘Can you come in?’

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said.

  I stashed the drugs in a cardboard box in the corner of the barn and covered it with some empty sacks that Jimmy had left behind. Richard put the tyres back on the bike. We replaced the stoppers in the handlebars, the seat. It took fifteen minutes to put the bike back together.

  Meg was calling from the door of the house again. ‘Richard, are you coming?’

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said to Richard.

  But he grabbed my hand. ‘You’re coming with me,’ he said.

  44. Meg

  The window to my room has a wide ledge, low enough to use as a seat. I’ve put cushions on it, a blanket. From here I can watch all the comings and goings at the front of the house. No one notices me. Even if they were to look up they wouldn’t see me, as I sit slightly back from the window, in shadow.

  That afternoon I was rereading Against Nature by Huysman, but his clever decadence was not holding me. My eyes slid from the page and I found myself looking down at the yard, watching.

  Richard arrived with Andy’s girl on his back, slumped as though she wer
e half dead. I heard him come up the stairs to the room at the back of the house. Frances’s granddaughter was with them and she waited in the yard with her bike while Richard brought the sick girl in. Ali’s hair had grown and she had colour in her cheeks. There was a bit of Frances about her in the way she held her limbs, loosely, completely confident in her ownership of them. She was growing into herself. Even in the week or so since I’d seen her, she looked more at ease.

  Richard came back out of the house and she lit up. I sighed. That poor limp girl sleeping in the back room, she was taking it badly. She must have a very strong link to life for her body to react in this way. If only Richard could have waited a while and found out a bit more about her before he started down this path. If he had told me she was Andy’s daughter I would have warned him to back off.

  In the yard Richard and Ali were laughing. The sound rang through the air and out onto the moors where it was answered by the calls of sheep and crows. They didn’t notice, intent on each other and the game they were playing.

  When Jimmy turned up I put my book down. No point in pretending to read any more. I felt my gaze harden with self-pity. Not an emotion I often play host to. You win some, some you lose, and the game goes on. No point in dwelling on what might have been. But here, this place, it seems to keep giving me the losing but never the winning.

  First I lost Daniel, my husband and my first love. Then Charles my son and my friend, who taught me more than I taught him, whose brain and body have long rotted in the grave. Then I lost Frances. I followed her here but it wasn’t the same as in Paris. The years had passed and she had grown old, created a life for herself with her daughter and her friends. I suppose I wrecked that life for her, but that wasn’t my intention. It was then that I met Andy, who could be my greatest love of all. He could outshine even Daniel. If he stopped clinging to life that decays, love which can only shrivel, if he gave himself to me we could shine like twin stars.

  I nearly had him. One day he came to my house to play chess, and after the game, which I won, I asked him to look at the car. He lifted the bonnet and looked inside the engine. I stood very near to him so that when he straightened up our bodies were as close as lovers’. He turned and we breathed each other’s breath.