In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

  When Paul had gone, and she’d cleared away the breakfast things, Helen stood under the shower for a while, stayed there until she’d stopped crying, and got dressed slowly. A giant bra and sensible pants, sweatshirt and blue and white jogging bottoms. Like she had a lot of choice.

  She sat in front of GMTV until she felt her brain liquidising, and moved across to the sofa with the property pages of the local paper.

  West Norwood, Gipsy Hill, Streatham. Herne Hill if they stretched themselves; and Thornton Heath if they had no other choice.

  More important things . . .

  She thumbed through the pages, circling a few likely-looking places, all ten or fifteen grand more than they’d budgeted for. She’d need to go back to work a damn sight quicker than she’d thought. Jenny had said she’d chip in with the childcare.

  ‘You’re an idiot if you rely on Paul,’ Jenny had said. ‘However much free time he gets.’

  Blunt as always, her younger sister, and hard to argue with.

  ‘He’ll be fine when the baby comes.’

  ‘How will you be?’

  The music was getting louder upstairs. She’d tell Paul to have a word when he got a chance. She moved through to the bedroom, sat down to try and do something with her hair. She thought men who described pregnant women as ‘radiant’ were a bit weird; same as people who thought they had the right to touch your belly whenever the hell they felt like it. She swallowed, sour all the way down, unable to remember the last time Paul had wanted to touch it.

  They were well past the ‘goodbye kiss on the doorstep’ stage, of course they were, but they were well past far too many other things. She wasn’t feeling a lot like sex admittedly, but she would have been well out of luck if she was. Early on she’d been gagging for it, like a lot of women a month or so in, if you believed the books, but Paul had lost interest fairly quickly. It wasn’t uncommon; she’d read that, too. Blokes feeling differently once the whole motherhood business came into it. Hard to look at your partner in the same way, to desire them, even before there’s a belly appearing.

  It was much more complicated, their relationship, but maybe there was some of that going on.

  ‘Poor little bugger doesn’t want me poking him in the eye,’ Paul had said.

  Helen had scoffed, said, ‘I doubt you’d reach his eye,’ but neither of them had really felt like laughing much.

  She pushed her hair back, and lay down; trying to make herself feel better by remembering earlier times, when things weren’t quite as bad. It was a trick that had worked once or twice, but these days she was having trouble remembering how they’d been before. The three years they’d been together before things had gone wrong.

  Before the stupid rows and the fucking stupid affair.

  She could hardly blame him for it, for thinking that there were more important things than her. Than a place for them to live. The two of them and the baby that might not be his.

  She decided that she’d go and have a word about the music herself; the student in the flat above seemed nice enough. But she couldn’t rouse herself from the bed, thinking about Paul’s face.

  The looks.

  Angry, as though she had no idea at all how hurt he still felt. And vacant, like he wasn’t even there; sitting at the table a few feet away and staring at the back of the stupid cereal box, like he was reading about that missing plastic toy.

  As Paul Hopwood drove, he tried hard to think about work; singing along with the pap on Capital Gold and thinking about meetings and stroppy sergeants and anything at all except the mess he’d left behind.

  Toast and fucking politeness. Happy families . . .

  He turned right and waited for the sat-nav to tell him he’d made a mistake; for the woman with the posh voice to tell him he should turn around at the earliest possible opportunity.

  The ghost of a smile, thinking about a lad he knew at Clapham nick who’d suggested they should make these things with voices designed for men with ‘specialist interests’.

  ‘It’d be brilliant, Paul. She says “turn left”, you ignore her, she starts getting a bit strict with you. “I said turn left, you naughty boy.” Sell like hot cakes, mate. Ex-public school boys and all that.’

  He turned up the radio, switched the wipers to intermittent.

  Happy families. Christ on a bike . . .

  Helen had been turning on that look for weeks now, the hurt one. Like she’d suffered enough and he should be man enough to forget what had happened, because she needed him. All well and good, but clearly he hadn’t been man enough where it had counted, had he?

  Mrs Plod, the copper’s tart.

  That look, like she didn’t recognise him any more. Then the tears, and her hands always slipping down to her belly, like the kid was going to drop out if she sobbed too hard or something. Like all this was his fault.

  He knew what she was thinking, secretly. What she’d been telling her soppy sister on the phone every night. ‘He’ll come round when he sees the baby.’ Right, of course, everything would be fine and dandy when the sodding baby came.

  Baby make it better.

  The sat-nav woman told him to go left and he ignored her, slammed his hands against the wheel in time with the music and bit the ulcer on the inside of his bottom lip.

  Christ, he hoped so. He hoped it would all be fine more than anything, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell Helen. He wanted so much to look down at that baby and love it without thinking, and know it was his. Then they could just get on with it. That was what people did, wasn’t it, ordinary idiots like them, even when it seemed as if they had no chance at all?

  Those looks, though; and that stupid pleading tone in her voice. It was killing off the hope a bit at a time.

  The voice from the sat-nav told him to take the first exit off the upcoming roundabout. He bit down harder on the ulcer and took the third. Kennington was programmed in as the destination, same as always. It didn’t matter that he knew the route backwards, because it wasn’t where he was going anyway.

  ‘Please turn around at the first possible opportunity.’

  He enjoyed these trips, listening to the snotty cow’s instructions and ignoring them. Sticking his fingers up. It got him where he was going in the right frame of mind.

  ‘Please turn around.’

  He reached across, took a packet of tissues from the glove compartment and spat out the blood from the ulcer.

  He hadn’t been doing what people expected of him for quite a while.

  TWO

  ‘Fore!’

  ‘Fuck was that?’

  ‘You’re supposed to shout, man. I sliced the thing over onto the wrong hole.’

  ‘So shout.’ He raised his hands up to his mouth and bellowed. ‘Fore mother-fuckers.’ Nodding, pleased with himself. ‘Got to do these things proper, T.’

  Theo laughed at his friend, at the looks from the older couple on an adjacent green. They hoisted up their clubs and trudged off down the fairway. There was no point taking the shot again; he’d drop one near the green. They’d lost half a dozen balls between them already.

  ‘Why you need all that, anyway?’

  ‘What?’

  Theo jabbed a finger into the bag slung over his friend’s shoulder: soft leather with loads of zips and pockets; dark blue with PING emblazoned on the side and along the shaft of each of the brand-new clubs inside. Big, furry covers for the woods. ‘It’s a pitch and putt, man. Nine holes.’

  His friend was a foot shorter than he was, but solid. He shrugged. ‘Got to look good, whatever.’ Which he did, same as always. Diamonds in both ears and a tracksuit to match the bag, with light blue trim and co-ordinating trainers. The plain white cap he always wore; no logo, same as everything else. ‘I don’t need to wear no tick,’ he’d say whenever he had the chance, ‘to tell me I look right.’

  Ezra Dennison, sometimes known as ‘EZ’, but most of the time just ‘Easy’.

  Theo sauntered along next to him in jeans and a
light grey zip-up jacket. He glanced over to see that the older couple were walking in the same direction on a parallel fairway. He gave a small nod, watched the man turn away quickly, pretending to look for his ball.

  ‘This is nice,’ Easy said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  The shorter boy threw a few waves to an imaginary crowd, messing around. ‘Easy and The O, coming up the eighteenth, like Tiger Woods and . . . some other geezer, don’t matter.’

  Theo couldn’t think of another golfer either.

  Theo Shirley, or ‘The O’, or just ‘T’. One letter or another. ‘Theodore’ at his mother’s house, or when his friends were taking the piss.

  What’s the score, Theo-dore?

  ‘So many names you all got,’ his father had said once, laughing, same as he always did before he got to his punchline. ‘What’s the damn point when you ain’t even signing on?’

  Then that look from his mother. The same one he always got when she was bursting to ask him why he didn’t need to sign on.

  Easy dug into his bag, took out a new ball and tossed it down at Theo’s feet. ‘Your shot I think, old boy.’ He raised a hand. ‘Hold the cameras please.’

  Theo pulled out his club from the thin, ratty bag he’d been given at the hut and knocked the ball up a few feet short of the green.

  Ten yards further on, in the rough, Easy found his ball. He stood over it, waggling his arse for an age, then smashed it twenty yards over the back of the green into the trees. ‘The putting thing’s boring as shit anyway,’ he said.

  They walked towards the green. It was bright, but the ground was still heavy underfoot. The laces on Theo’s trainers were brown with muddy water, and the bottom few inches of his jeans were sopping from the long grass where he’d spent most of the previous half hour.

  Almost a fortnight into July and it was like the summer had got held up somewhere. Theo couldn’t wait for it to kick in. He hated the cold and the wet; felt it in his bones, making it hard to stir himself sometimes.

  His father had been the same.

  Sitting out ten floors up on the tiny balcony, in jackets and sweaters, the old man sneaking him sips of barley wine when his mum wasn’t looking.

  ‘We’re not cut out for the cold weather, you see? For the breeze and the bitterness. Why you don’t see no black men skiing.’

  Theo would always laugh at shit like this.

  ‘We’re from an island.’ Well into the wine by this time. ‘Sun and sea, that’s natural.’

  ‘Not too many black swimmers, though,’ Theo said.

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Don’t make sense then.’

  Nodding, thoughtful. ‘It’s a question of natural buoyancy.’

  His father didn’t have too much more to say about that. Certainly didn’t bring it up when Theo was winning all those races in the school swimming gala. Just stood on the side shouting louder than anybody else; making even more noise when the tight-arsed woman behind tried to shush him.

  ‘Jus’ ’cos her boy swim like he’s drowning,’ he said.

  The old man was always talking some shit until Mum told him to stop being so foolish. Even at the end, lying on the sofa, when it was the drugs making him ramble.

  Easy marched across the green, began crashing about in the trees while Theo chipped up and putted out. Looking back, Theo could see people waiting on the tee behind. He was starting to walk off the green when Easy emerged, strolled over and started talking, throwing the flag from hand to hand: ‘What you doing later?’

  ‘Not much. See Javine, whatever. You?’

  Easy threw the flag. ‘Some business in the afternoon.’

  Theo nodded, glanced back towards the people waiting.

  ‘Ain’t no problem, just bits and pieces. You better come along.’ Easy looked for a reaction. ‘Call your girl.’

  ‘Bits and pieces?’

  ‘Little bits and pieces, I swear.’ A grin spread slowly across his face. ‘Seriously teeny-tiny, man, I swear to God.’

  Theo remembered that smile from school. It was hard to remember sometimes that Easy wasn’t a kid any more. He was darker-skinned than Theo, his olds from Nigeria, but it didn’t matter. Both from the same ends, the same part of Lewisham, knocking about with all sorts most of the time. There were plenty of mixed-race boys in the crew; though most were Jamaicans, like him. A few Asians too, and even a couple of white boys drifting around. He got on fine with them, as long as they weren’t trying too hard.

  There was a whistle from the tee behind. Easy ignored it, but Theo walked off the green and, after a few seconds, Easy followed.

  ‘So, you up for it later?’

  ‘Yeah, long as we talking teeny-tiny,’ Theo said.

  ‘Definite. It’ll be safe, T. Besides, stuff comes up, you know I always got everything under control.’

  Theo saw that smile again, and watched his friend patting the side of the golf bag like it was a puppy. ‘What the fuck you got in there?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You high, or what?’

  ‘Here’s the way I see it.’ Easy laid down the bag. ‘A pitching wedge for knocking the ball on the green, yeah? Putter for putting it in the hole. And other things . . . for other things.’ The smile spread even wider. ‘Know what I’m saying?’

  Theo nodded.

  It was hard to remember sometimes that Easy had ever been a kid.

  Theo tensed when Easy drew back a zip and began digging around inside the bag. Tried to let the breath out slowly when his friend fished out half a dozen more balls and dropped them one at a time.

  Easy yanked out a wooden club, pointed with it to a flag in the far corner of the course. ‘Let’s smack a few at that.’

  ‘That’s the wrong hole, man. That’s not the next hole.’

  ‘So?’ Easy took his stance, biting his lip with concentration. ‘I just want to whack some of these little fuckers.’ He swung hard, missing the ball by an inch, sending a huge, soggy clod flying several feet.

  ‘Yeah. Tiger Woods,’ Theo said.

  Easy swung again. This time the ball went marginally further than the clump of mud and grass.

  They both turned at the shout; saw an elderly man waving at them from outside the small hut near the entrance.

  ‘What’s his problem?’

  Theo listened, waved back. ‘You got to replace your divots.’

  ‘My what?’

  Theo walked over and retrieved one of the clumps; came back to where it had been gouged out and stamped it down. ‘That’s the etiquette , you get me?’

  ‘Fuck sort of a word is that?’

  ‘The way you do something. The proper way, yeah?’

  Easy’s face darkened. Never the best at being told.

  ‘What they call it, OK?’ Theo said.

  Easy spat and hitched up his tracksuit bottoms. He reached for another club and marched across to where the rest of the balls lay scattered.

  ‘Fuck you doing?’

  Easy turned and swiped at the ball, sending it low and hard towards the old man. ‘This is the way I do things.’

  The old man shouted again, but more in alarm than anger, jumping to one side as the ball clattered against the side of the hut behind him. Easy took aim again, was wider of the mark this time, but seemed happy enough to keep on swinging. Another ball smashed into the hut as the greenkeeper disappeared quickly back inside.

  ‘He’s going to call somebody, man.’

  ‘Fuck him.’

  ‘Just saying.’

  Easy was already trying to find more balls, swearing under his breath as he reached deep into the bag.

  Theo stood and watched. Thinking that his friend was mental, but laughing like a drain all the same.

  THREE

  Jenny lived north of the river, in Maida Vale, and Helen drove across to meet her in a coffee shop opposite the station. It was not a cheap trip, with the congestion charge and a greedy parking meter on top of teas at nearly two pounds each, but Helen hadn’
t been able to stomach the tube since she was a couple of months in.

  They sat at a table next to the window, watched people beetle past under umbrellas. Jenny waved at a couple of women as they came in; chatted briefly about the upcoming holidays. She had two boys at a school near by, and this was a place where she often met other mothers either side of the school runs.

  It had only been a couple of hours since breakfast, but Helen put away the best part of two almond croissants before she’d finished her first cup of tea. Jenny pointed at her sister’s belly. ‘You sure there’s only one in there?’

  ‘I think there were two, but he’s eaten the other one.’

  Always ‘he’, even though Helen did not know the sex of her baby. They’d been asked if they would like to be told at the twelve-week scan, but Helen had said she wanted to be surprised. She’d realised immediately it was a stupid thing to say; had turned to look at Paul, staring stony-faced at the monitor, and squeezed his hand.

  There was only one thing he wanted to know, and no scan was going to tell him.

  ‘It suits you,’ Jenny said. ‘I thought you were getting a bit thin before. Honestly.’

  ‘Right.’

  Jenny usually had something positive to say, but lately it wasn’t making Helen feel a hell of a lot better. There was a thin line between looking on the bright side and talking bollocks. Jenny had said that hormonal mood swings made you more interesting and kept men on their toes. She’d told Helen how rare it was to be throwing up all the way through, like it was something that should make her feel special.

  Recently, though, she hadn’t been quite so positive when it came to Paul.

  ‘How’s it going?’ The serious face, like doctors slapped on sometimes, and newsreaders.

  Helen sipped at her tea. ‘He’s finding it hard.’

  ‘Poor baby.’

  ‘Jen . . .’

  ‘It’s pathetic.’

  ‘How would Tim handle it?’

  Jenny’s husband. A building contractor with a passion for fishing and car maintenance. Nice enough, if you liked that sort of thing.