by Janet Davey
‘I’m not supposed to take lifts,’ she said. ‘It’s best if my dad doesn’t find out.’
He winked at her.
They drove on to the dock. An expanse of tarmac lay ahead, divided by painted lines that were nearly invisible in the darkness. At the far end were cars standing in rows and, beyond, the pale bulk of a boat. The café was to one side – isolated and no more than a brightly lit shack. Ella undid her seat belt.
‘Drop me here, please,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk across.’
‘No,’ her companion said. ‘I’ll see you right.’
He swerved in a half circle and stopped abruptly by the café with a screech of brakes.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said.
He nodded and started to scrabble round in the glove compartment.
She opened the car door and got out.
‘Bye,’ she said, into the night air.
She didn’t turn round again. She hoped he would drive away and join one of the queues but the car wasn’t moving. She only had a few steps to go to the café. In that time she heard the engine switch off. She walked straight through the open door of the café.
‘El.’
She knew whose voice it was. She glanced round. Cans of Fanta were stacked in a pyramid on the counter and behind them a woman with her hair tied up in a scarf was reading a magazine. Beige-coloured water trickled from the tea and coffee dispenser. There was only one customer. He had an empty plastic cup and an empty bottle of beer in front of him. The table he was sitting at was red with a chipped metal edge. Ella couldn’t leave the café. The man in the car was waiting for her. She and Felpo looked at one another. She saw surprise in his eyes but it didn’t spread to the rest of his face.
‘Where’s Jo?’ Felpo said after a few moments. The question was without urgency, as if he’d come back from work and wondered which room Jo was in. He bent slightly, as if trying to see out of the window.
‘She’s in London,’ Ella said.
She sat down opposite him.
‘Oh,’ Felpo said. ‘I thought for a moment she was with you. Stupid. She wasn’t at home when I went back. I kept putting it off – going back. I cleared up and packed my stuff in the van.’ He hesitated. ‘But you say she’s in London.’
‘Yes,’ said Ella. ‘She went with Rob and Annie.’
‘Did she say how long she’d be there?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Did she say anything?’
Ella was silent. Felpo was far off in thought and gazing past her.
‘You weren’t in the shop then?’ she said.
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
He shook his head and seemed puzzled.
‘What would I go there for?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ Felpo said. ‘At this time of night.’ He spoke the last sentence as if it were the punch line of a joke but she wasn’t annoyed.
‘I didn’t want to go with them,’ she said.
‘But why here?’ he said.
‘Something to do,’ she said.
He smiled but he didn’t comment. He never fussed about their safety.
Ella looked at him. He had had that same expression when he came to the shop for the first time – blank but sort of exposed. He seemed to read her mind.
‘You never liked me, did you?’ he said. ‘I kept hoping you’d change your mind.’
She recoiled inside and shifted her eyes away. She didn’t want to have to think about whether she liked him or not.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to answer.’
She could sense his stillness and it unsettled her. It was always there, underneath his liveliness. It never went away. She concentrated on what he’d just said – what he had actually said – isolated from her reaction. She examined it and found it neutral, like the expression on his face. She’d hated him but she had exaggerated. Her thoughts about him had got out and stuck to him, layer on layer. That used to happen to unlucky kids at school, who attracted rejection because of some puny difference: the wrong kind of coat, freckly hands. Once the rejection had got a hold it was added to and added to, until the person inside was invisible, a thing.
‘What did you say to me on Friday morning?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I thought you did most of the talking,’ he said.
‘About seeing me with Trevor,’ she said.
‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ he said.
‘You said,’ Ella stopped. She remembered, but she couldn’t say the words out loud. It was embarrassing to be able to repeat exactly what he said to her. Talk should fly away. She couldn’t stand people who stored up things you said and handed them back to you.
‘Go on,’ he said.
She was silent. When she thought what boys said to her on the street, what they shouted out of car windows. She never cared. They could say what they liked.
She had met him on her way to the beach. He’d parked his van and was heading down to the boats. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him, but she hadn’t been able to avoid him. He asked her if she’d had a good evening. Nice down on the dunes, he said. He kept pace with her. They were going in the same direction. She started to cross the road but a car came past and he caught her elbow and pulled her back. She immediately straightened her arm so that his hand was left suspended. She asked him what he was on about. You were with Trevor. I thought it was you, anyway, he said. He’s a bit of a mystery man, isn’t he? The words had enraged her. What were you doing down there, she said. He told her he had been in the van, on the road before the low bridge. I pulled in, he said. Pulled in. She had fitted him into the picture then, sitting in the van, leaning back, very still, watching her, making up stupid stories about her. She wished a car had come over the bridge too fast and hit him or that a tree had fallen on top of him. You’re weird, she said. He smiled, as if he had some secret information. Don’t worry, he said. I wasn’t that close. Really.
‘I probably did say something annoying. I often do. I don’t know when to stop,’ he said.
She looked down at the table, at the biscuit crumbs lodged in the crack where the metal edge had come away.
‘Who’s that?’ Felpo said suddenly, in a different voice.
‘Who?’
‘That bloke out there. He’s looking at us.’
Ella turned round. The man who’d given her the lift was peering in. He gave a kind of wave and raised both eyebrows.
‘Do you know him?’ Felpo said.
‘No. He was hanging around outside when I came in,’ she said.
‘Shall I tell him to piss off?’ he said.
‘No. He’ll go away now he’s seen you.’
Felpo stood up and made a face.
‘He has done too,’ he said. ‘He’s getting into his car. I must be scarier than I thought.’ He laughed.
She heard the car drive away. The tannoy system began to crackle, then came to life with a voice that advised passengers to rejoin their vehicles.
‘That’s me, then. They’re starting to load,’ Felpo said. ‘Will you be all right, El?’
She nodded.
Felpo stood up.
‘Wait,’ Ella said. ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Well?’ he said.
He didn’t sound interested. He picked up the empty bottle and threw it so that it landed in the bin. Then he picked up the cup.
She and Felpo had been standing on the pavement in the sunshine. She remembered the adverts for price cuts in the window of the Co-op and the hanging baskets of red busy Lizzies waving from the house with the green trellis. A man had gone by on a bike. Everything had suddenly been in the sharpest of colours – clearer than life. She had said, Jo and Trevor were probably looking for a quiet place to have a shag. The words had come ready-made in her mouth as if someone else had put them there – quick as a sneeze – and yet they bore the imprint of her personality. They were her. T
hey were as familiar as the shape of her hands. She couldn’t disown them.
She said he didn’t see anything did he? He made all this stuff up and he didn’t see what was really going on. She said Jo was always shutting the shop for a couple of hours: the blind down and the closed sign up. She and Trevor liked doing it with people walking by outside. It was like being on stage with the curtains down. He wasn’t to think that his turning up was going to stop it. Not for more than five minutes. He was a kind of blip. Jo was probably trying to make Trevor jealous. Whatever it was, it had worked. It was on again. He would soon notice that they were seeing each other every day and calling each other. They would go out in the middle of the night, like last time. Driving to some parking place. They weren’t particularly careful. None of them would mind. Not even Annie. Where did he think she came from when her parents weren’t getting on? Why did he think Trevor was so nice to her? The story was out of control – full of holes and the holes growing bigger. She had left Felpo and started to run. People had stared at her. She’d got to the sea and then she hadn’t known where to go. She was sure he’d tell Jo. There would be a row. She’d have to style it out. She had run back towards home. She had stepped out in front of a lorry. The driver had shouted at her. She’d knocked into an old man. She’d reached the house. She’d run up the stairs. Her mother was there, but it was different from what she’d expected.
Ella realised that she still hadn’t spoken.
‘It wasn’t true what I said about Mum and Trevor. It was me you saw, not her,’ she said.
Felpo paused fractionally – and threw the cup. That went in the bin too.
‘Thanks for telling me,’ he said.
She couldn’t read anything in his face.
‘None of it was true,’ she said.
He still didn’t speak.
‘Doesn’t it make any difference?’ she said.
‘Not really,’ he said.
He sat down again. She waited. Cars were starting their engines.
‘The lie doesn’t matter. It’s the least important thing about it,’ he said.
‘But, if I hadn’t,’ Ella said.
‘Forget it. It was made-up. The rest was real.’ He hesitated. ‘She wouldn’t want me after that. I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it.’
She looked down at her hands; her dirty fingernails, the silly elastic bracelets.
‘You’re tired,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go home?’
‘I suppose I might,’ she said.
‘There’s no point hanging around here,’ he said.
He stood up again.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you back.’
Ella stood up too but she didn’t move. She jammed her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, as if she were afraid to let them out.
‘Why not?’ he said.
Ella dropped her head and her hair hid her face.
‘I understand,’ he said. He gave a sort of laugh. ‘You’re not taking any chances. I don’t blame you. Here, call your dad and ask for a lift. Then I’ll push off.’
He handed her his phone. Ella took it but hesitated, staring at it as if she were trying to read a message in a cryptic code. They told you not to lie but they never told you why. They didn’t say it changed things, that it was some sort of cosmic interference.
‘Do it, El,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to leave.’
She punched in the numbers. Her dad answered, muddled with sleep. She told him where she was, then cut him off. Felpo took the phone and put it back in the frayed bag he always carried around with him. He felt around in the bottom of it.
‘These are yours,’ he said. He pulled out his door keys. ‘Take them.’
Then he left.
Sunday and Monday
1
DILYS WOKE HER, leaning over in her night-dress. Jo hadn’t heard the telephone. She got up from the sofa immediately and went through the open door to the hall, Dilys hovering behind her. She picked up the receiver that lay passive on its side next to the telephone. It had the look of an object she would remember if things turned out badly.
She turned away from Dilys and her expression of worry. She looked at the elongated shapes of red and green and yellow that the coloured panes of the front door had formed on the wall. She listened and, from time to time, cleared her throat to show Peter she was still there. His voice continued. He was very thorough in his account and in his criticism of her. She said yes and no a couple of times, and then all right, and goodbye.
Jo told Dilys as little as she could get away with about the call. Nothing about Ella accepting a lift from a stranger. Nothing about Peter and Tara going to pick her up from the ferry terminal. She couldn’t face the present, so she couldn’t describe it. She told her grandmother she should go back to bed. They were both standing at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Please,’ Jo said. ‘Everything’s fine. Peter’s coming to pick us up. He won’t be here for hours yet. We don’t want to wake the children. Let’s get some more rest.’
Dilys went up without speaking, looking old in her night-clothes, laid bare by the absence of beads and a collar, displaced by the early waking.
Jo returned to the front room, shutting the door on the morning light that filled the hallway and the murmur of voices from her grandparents’ room upstairs. She knew what they would be saying to each other and thought of her mother, Gail, also listening to those voices, the troubled intonation, not of criticism but of fear for the future. And she felt protective towards them because they’d spent half their lives coping.
Peter must have been in a deep sleep when the telephone rang at four in the morning. He would have thought it was a wrong number. He would have asked Ella to repeat her name. When Peter said they were going out to collect Ella, Tara would have got up and put back all the make-up that she had taken off before bed. She would have made herself impeccable. Her eyes would have been spiky with mascara and excitement. She would have dressed carefully as if she were off on a business trip with a colleague she liked the look of. She and Peter would have driven in to Dover and out to the Eastern Dock. On the way Tara would have talked about maniacs, perverts, rapists, antique dealers, drug dealers, emergency vehicles, emergency contraception, alarm bells ringing in her head, which hadn’t, she really couldn’t understand why, rung in anybody else’s.
Tara and Peter knew now about the cut on her face, Ella’s leap from the train, her failure to contact Ella. She didn’t blame Ella for telling them.
Although she hadn’t been to chapel or church for decades, Dilys’s Sundays were corseted. Jo couldn’t list the precise constraints, but she could always feel them. In particular, there were a couple of hours on Sunday mornings to which different rules applied and which accounted for them, at that moment, sitting in the front room and not in the kitchen. Jo had been surprised to discover that Sundays need not be like this, that they didn’t possess an essential property, like the redness of cochineal. Though, as she had grown up, she had come to see that other people’s families built in different tyrannies and that the British Sunday was often part of the trap.
Filling the time could be difficult, but today they had a purpose. They were waiting not for God’s grace, which hadn’t been outpoured on their family for more than a generation, but for Peter to find his way there from the M2. He hadn’t visited for several years and the road lay-out had changed.
‘He won’t know where he is,’ said Geoff. ‘The pubs have all got new names. Ridiculous names.’
‘Don’t worry, Grandad. He’s used to finding his way about,’ Jo said.
‘They shouldn’t have allowed it,’ he said. ‘All those years people turned left at The Plough, and now it isn’t The Plough. He won’t find it easy to park, either. Never is on a Sunday.’
‘It will be all right,’ she said. She leant across and gave him a kiss.
They heard footsteps on the front path.
‘This is him,’ said Dilys. ‘You’d better go, Joanna
.’
Dilys didn’t often call her that.
Jo picked Annie up, although she was getting too big to carry, and left the room. She could see Peter through the glass. He used to press his nose right into the red lozenge shape. But today he didn’t. She opened the door and said hullo. He kissed Annie, then pecked Jo on the cheek. Annie smiled and hid her face in Jo’s shoulder. They stood in the doorway of the front room together, Peter slightly ahead, as Jo had manoeuvred him there. Geoff got to his feet. He and Peter shook hands and exchanged remarks on the motorway traffic. Dilys kept to her chair and bobbed her head. She had asked Jo earlier if she should offer Peter coffee and there was something about the need to ask the question and the word offer which made Jo say not to bother.
‘You didn’t bring Ella, then?’ Dilys said.
‘No,’ said Peter. ‘She stayed behind.’
He glanced round quickly, at eye level. He wouldn’t have been able to describe the room ten minutes ago; he wasn’t good at remembering the look of things. But Jo could see from his face that he knew that it was exactly as it used to be. He didn’t want to re-learn it.
‘I told you she wouldn’t be coming,’ Jo said. He hadn’t used the Tara word.
‘She might have changed her mind,’ Dilys said. ‘How is she?’
‘She’s fine,’ said Peter.
Rob looked up at him.
‘Oh, Rob, I didn’t see you there,’ he said. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ said Rob.
‘It was quite a surprise when you rang this morning,’ Dilys said.
She couldn’t help being chatty. She’d always had a lighter touch with her grandson-in-law. The habit returned, in spite of all the things she’d said and thought about him in the last few years.
‘It was too early to call you,’ said Peter. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’
‘We’re generally up by seven,’ Dilys said. ‘When I heard your voice I thought something had happened to Ella. That was the first thing I thought. I worry about her. It may be daft but I can’t help it.’
‘No, she’s fine,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t mean to give you a fright.’
