by Nina Allan
To get to the fabrics and leather department you go right to the back of the store then down a flight of concrete steps into the basement. The smell down there is amazing – not just the leather but all the other stuff: wax polish and clean jersey fabric, enamelled buttons and silk lining fabric and polished chrome zippers. I love that smell. For me the smell of Romer’s basement sums up everything in life that’s most thrilling: the heat inside the stadium on a summer’s night, crazy evenings in the casino bar at the Ryelands, passionate friendships and secret plans, most of all the scent of dreams in embryo, floating in the mind, not yet fully formed.
The first time I came to Romer’s, all I could afford to buy were some small offcuts of purple kid leather from the remnants bin, and I was so afraid of looking a fool in front of the sales clerk that I didn’t count my change, just stuffed it into my pocket without looking. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered I’d left a five-shilling note behind on the counter. I still kick myself for losing that money. What an idiot.
I used the purple leather to make a pair of wrist guards, using a pattern I’d come across inside an old racing magazine. It took me ages to complete them because I was scared of making a mistake and wasting the leather. When they were finally finished I thought they were a bit plain, not quite how I’d imagined them, anyway, and so I embroidered a dragon across one of them, using some bright green metallic thread I happened to find in a skip outside a building works on Braybrooke Road. I thought the dragon made the guards look better, more edgy. They were definitely more eye-catching, anyway. I gave them as a present to Sharon Young, who was a friend of Del’s and one of his runners. She had always been very nice to me when I turned up at the yard or at races.
“No shit, these are awesome,” she said. She insisted on giving me twenty shillings for them, which more than recouped the cost of the leather and made me blush so hard I thought I was going to faint from lack of blood.
I wondered at the time if she was just being kind. When I saw her wearing the guards at the track two weeks later it felt like flying.
~*~
As I was coming away from Romer’s, I saw a magpie. Magpies are common in Sapphire, especially on the edges of town close to the marshes. I always tend to notice magpies if they’re about, not just because of their striking plumage but because of my mother. Mum was terrified of magpies. Not terrified of the birds as such, but terrified of seeing them. She was convinced they brought bad luck. If she happened to see one she’d always pretend not to have noticed it, or else she’d whisper a rhyme under her breath to charm it away.
She wasn’t a superstitious person normally, and so I found her nervousness around magpies rather endearing. I thought of her that day though, outside Romer’s, and just for a moment I too felt afraid.
~*~
I was about halfway home when Claudia’s call came through. The tramway carriage was pretty full by then – it was the middle of the rush hour – and I found it difficult to make out what she was saying. It didn’t help that she was obviously on the verge of tears.
She kept repeating the same three words: Lumey is gone.
At first I thought she meant Lumey had had an accident, that she’d been injured in some way. All kinds of awful images rushed through my head – Lumey being crushed by a block of falling masonry, or caught between the thrusting pistons of a tramway car. Claudia began to cry. The general racket inside the compartment meant I had to shout to make myself heard and people were beginning to stare in my direction.
“Claudia,” I said. “Take it easy. Tell me again.”
“She’s been taken,” Claudia wailed. “Del says I’m not to tell anyone but I had to call.”
“Taken? What are you talking about? Where’s Del now?”
“Lumey disappeared from the backyard. About an hour ago, or perhaps it’s more now. She was playing with her building blocks. When I went out to fetch her in for her nap she was gone. Del’s out looking for her. He says we’re not to call the police, that it could be dangerous for Lumey. He made me swear.”
She choked on the final word and her weeping intensified. As I listened to her sobbing I found I could picture her exactly: pink cheeks shiny with tears, amber hair coming slowly adrift from its army of pins. The idea was exhausting. I couldn’t decide if what she was telling me was real or a false alarm. It didn’t take much to send Claudia into panic mode.
Then out of nowhere I remembered the magpie and went cold inside. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it was.
“It’s all right, Claudia, I’m coming,” I said. “Just try to keep calm.”
Claudia made a noise, a tear-filled gulping. It was difficult to tell if it meant gratitude or terror. I disconnected the call before she could clarify. I didn’t mean to be cruel – it was just that there was no way I could help her from where I was, and having to listen to her crying down the phone was slowing me down.
Del’s place was on the opposite side of town from Romer’s, half an hour away by tramway at the very least. It would be quicker by taxi, but that would cost me a fortune, and there was no guarantee that I would find one at this time of day. All things considered, it seemed more sensible to stay on the tramway. The immediate shock of Claudia’s phone call had worn off by then, and as we started grinding up West Hill I began to feel the first prickles of genuine anxiety. What if something really had happened to Lumey? It was unthinkable. I tried Del’s mobile several times but it went straight to voicemail. Either he had it switched off or he was busy on another call. My mind was spinning with anxiety and frustration. I didn’t care to imagine the state Del was in. If Lumey was missing he would be frantic, and when my brother was frantic he did stupid things.
It didn’t bear thinking about. By the time I got off the tram I was in panic mode, too. Not as bad as Claudia, but getting there.
Del’s tramway stop was Tackleway, a dusty, unmade road that instantly became a mud chute whenever it rained. Tackleway is over two miles long in its entirety. If you follow it right to its end you’ll come to the marshes. Luckily, Del’s place was much closer, about five minutes’ walk from the tramway stop and just below the West Wickham water tower. I half walked, half ran along the road, almost tripping several times on the uneven surface. When I finally arrived at the Cowshed, Del was standing by the gate waiting for me. He looked more angry than devastated, and for those moments before reaching his side I allowed myself to hope that Claudia had got it wrong after all, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding and Lumey was safe in the living room watching TV.
Del walked slowly forward to meet me. His yard boots scrunched on the gravel. There was a rip in his sleeve.
“There was no need for you to come,” he said. “I was going to call you.”
“Where’s Lumey, Del?” I said. “Claudia seems to think she’s gone missing. She sounded beside herself on the phone. How could I not come?”
I glared at him, waiting for answers. The breeze, drifting up from the shoreline, smelled of bladder wrack and sump oil. It tugged at Del’s hair, tugging it back from his forehead like twists of frayed rope. I realised I was holding something in my hands, the parcel of trimmings and the blue leather I had bought at Romer’s. Romer’s seemed an age ago, something that had happened in another life.
“Not out here,” Del said. He sighed with what sounded like irritation. “Come inside.”
~*~
Del rebuilt the Cowshed more or less from scratch. At the time Gra sold him the place, it was a half-derelict barn on an overgrown patch of waste land backing on to the yard. The barn itself was barely habitable – the windows were boarded over, and there was a birch sapling pushing up through the floorboards in the downstairs hallway. Also the roof leaked. Gra offered to have the barn torn down free of charge so Del could put up one of the new prefabs, but Del said no, he preferred to do up the barn, that he’d work on it evenings and off shifts, get the old shack watertight.
It took him a year and a half, but he
did a good job. Once it was finished, the Cowshed made a lovely home, filled with the smells of new wood and old stone, the greenish, liquid light of the surrounding trees. Claudia once told me she found the place creepy, especially at night, and I had the feeling she would have preferred a nice new prefab but Del was crazy about the Cowshed and I could understand why.
When I arrived there in the late pink-tinged light of that dreadful afternoon I expected the place to be buzzing, but the lot seemed deserted. Del strode ahead of me up the path. As he put the key in the lock the front door was snatched open from the inside and Claudia appeared, her face all puffy from crying and pale as goat’s cheese. Her right cheek bore dark streaks of what looked like mascara.
“Get back in the house, Cee,” Del said. “It’s only Jen.”
Claudia stepped backwards and away from the door. Her arms hung limply by her sides. She looked from Del to me and then back to Del again. Clearly she was trying to work out if anything new had happened, if there was something we weren’t telling her. She knew how close Del and I were. There are plenty of women who would have resented that but not Claudia. Or at least she never seemed to.
“There’s no news, Cee,” Del said quietly. “You’d be the first to know if there were.” He touched her shoulder briefly but I could tell from the way his eyes slid off her that he was feeling impatient with her. For the moment at least she was an encumbrance. “Could you fix us some drinks, do you reckon?” he added. “I want to talk to Jen in the office, just for a bit.”
Claudia bowed her head and walked away, to the kitchen presumably. I felt a bright flash of anger, not just for her but at her. How could she let Del talk to her like that? She should have refused, she should have said whatever it is you’re telling that bitch I have a right to hear it. She let him treat her like a servant. I felt angry with myself too, for not insisting that Claudia be included in our conversation. But the truth was I didn’t want her there. I still thought of her as a child, a habit I’d picked up from Del, I suppose. I know that doesn’t excuse it. I guess we thought we were protecting her.
Del led me towards the narrow, L-shaped room that wrapped itself around the most northerly corner of the house, an offshoot of the main living room that served Del as his office and general dossing area. It was the place he went to watch the racing results and the late-night cop shows he liked, porn too probably, I never enquired. The living room itself was huge, taking up more than half the ground floor and with a long, covered veranda overlooking the garden. Claudia normally kept the place super-neat but on that day it looked vaguely dishevelled, as if the house had been slapped in the face and was still recovering from the shock.
Some of Lumey’s toys lay scattered on the floor – a wind-up mechanical rooster Del had picked up in some junk shop or other, and a selection of the ceramic tiles with pictures of farmyard animals and household utensils on one side and letters of the alphabet on the other. Lumey loved those tiles. Until she was about two it was always the picture side she liked best, but more recently I’d noticed letters cropping up more and more often in her little arrangements, and as we crossed the room to get to Del’s den I saw that some of the tiles had been placed together to spell out whole words.
There was ‘lumey’ and ‘dog’, the kind of short and simple words that even younger kids would easily learn to recognise. But there was also ‘raceday’ and ‘champion’ and ‘dear prudence’, words and phrases Lumey might well have heard spoken but was unlikely to have seen written down. Even with my limited knowledge of kids, the spelling seemed advanced for a four-year-old. Dear Prudence was the name of a puppy sired by Limlasker just the year before. Del said she was a talented dog but highly strung, and they were still looking for the right runner for her.
It was weird, to see her name spelled out on the floor like that. It was even weirder knowing that Lumey had been sitting right there, in her favourite place over by the window, playing with her tiles, making the peculiarly sweet little humming noises she used to make, most likely Just a couple of hours earlier everything had been normal. Thinking about it made my guts ache.
We went into the den and Del shut the door, pushing hard to make sure it was closed properly. As soon as we were sitting down I asked him what the hell was going on.
“Why aren’t the cops here?” I said.
“We can’t call the cops,” Del said. He made the same irritated sighing noise he’d made outside. “If we call the cops the people who’ve taken Lumey will most likely kill her.”
“What planet are you on, Derrick? You tell me Lumey’s missing. Claudia’s going off her trolley out there and you’re stuck on your arse doing nothing.” I looked around the room. There were empty DVD cases and stacks of paper everywhere. The place was a mess.
I never called him Derrick unless I was really pissed off with him and both of us knew it.
“Listen,” he said, in that calm, calculating voice he always used when he was playing for time. “There’s stuff you should know.”
“From where I’m sitting that would seem to be the understatement of the century.”
“Hold your rag, Jen, this isn’t helping. You’ve got to calm down.” He leaned forward in his chair, his scrawny arse balanced on the edge of the seat, arms folded across his knees. “For a start, I know that Lumey’s okay.”
“What do you mean, you know?” I was listening now. I knew we were getting to the heart of things. Everything I’d said until then was just a warm up, my way of telling my brother I was frightened and upset. The thing is, I knew Del, and I knew from the moment I came up the drive and there were no cop cars that there was more to this business than first appeared. I understood that Del had sent Claudia away because he wanted to tell me stuff he didn’t want her finding out, either because it was dangerous or because he knew he was in the wrong. Knowing my brother it was probably both.
“I had a phone call about an hour ago. I know who’s done this and I know what they want. I can give them what they want, so there’s nothing to worry about. What I need you to do is convince Cee of that. Everything will be all right, so long as we sit tight and play ball. No one knows, no one gets hurt – simple as that.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, but it was a token protest, my own play for time. I looked Del straight in the face and it was only then that I saw how scared he was really, how scared for his daughter. He was hiding it well and I believed he was telling me the truth about the phone call but he was still scared. Because he knew he was not in control, because he knew as well as I did that he was in the kind of situation where things can go wrong in less than a second.
Because he knew that Lumey was alone and probably terrified.
His eyes were like pinpricks: hard, green water. He looked as if he wanted to kill the world.
“What have you done, Del?” I said. “I’m saying nothing to Claudia until you tell me the truth.” I spoke more gently this time, but I felt certain he would know from my tone that I meant business.
“Okay, okay.” He shifted around on the edge of his seat. He really did look awful, worse than Claudia in a way because Claudia was just frightened, whereas Del also knew he was responsible for what was happening. I wanted to go to him, hug him, tell him we’d sort this shit out together the way we always had. I couldn’t do that, though. I knew that if I let him see I felt sorry for him there was a danger he would spin me a line, that he would tell me the story that suited him, rather than the story that was true.
I made myself hold back. It sounds cruel, but I had to, for Lumey’s sake.
“I lost something that belongs to someone else,” Del said. “Something that’s worth a lot of money. They want their money back, that’s all.”
~*~
Del had been running glass. It wasn’t just a one-off, either, it had been going on for years. He’d been using yard winnings to purchase large consignments of the drug through a gang who had a contact in one of the facilities where the medical-grade stuff was produced. He�
�d then sold it on to another group in London for a considerable mark-up. The glass was transported in canisters of fertilizer via the tramway. It was a foolproof system, so Del said – or at least it had been.
“Last week’s consignment was intercepted,” he said. “Either the cops got wind of it somehow, or they’ve known for ages and this is just their way of letting us know they want a piece of the action. Fuck knows. Only I was intending to pay off the supply guys with the proceeds from this lot and now that plan’s scuppered. Which leaves the supply guys in the red with someone else. I don’t give a shit about their problem, frankly, except that they’ve pulled this stunt with Lumey to twist my arm.”
My heart sank. I knew at once that Del was right, that there was no way we could get the police involved. Not because of the glass – that was the least of it – but because of the supply people. If they found out we’d shopped them to the cops they’d come after Del and kill him. They’d kill Lumey too, of course, dump her body out in the marshes without a second thought.
The police were a lost cause anyway. Everyone knew the glass trade in Sapphire was out of control.
“Can’t you borrow the money from Gra? I’m sure he’d tide you over.”
Del laughed, a hard, bitter sound without a trace of humour. “Have you any idea how much I owe? Clearly not. You might as well suggest we go digging for treasure.” He leaned back in his seat. “Anyway, stuff that, I don’t want Gra involved. I can sort this thing myself – I’ve got it all worked out. You know it’s the Delawarr Triple in just over a fortnight? I know this guy who’ll bet big for a share of the proceeds, and by big I mean big enough to pay him off and the suppliers too. We finalize our account with the supply guys, they return Lumey by close of business. Job done.”
He was grinning now, just a little, with the look of a wolf circling a sheep pen. He was pleased with his plan, I could see that, happy as a cow in clover.
