by John Harvey
“You really like them?”
“Of course.”
“If only you knew how much time I spent deciding, well, I think you might be surprised. But the colors, the design, it had to be just right.”
Socks? Resnick thought. A tie?
“Even so, I have kept the receipt. Should you decide to take it back and exchange …”
“Marian, no. It’s lovely.” A tie.
“And the other gift, Charles, what did you think of that?”
The other? He pictured a second package, square and flat, he had taken it for a card. But, no, Marian’s card was in the living room, a starry night over Wenceslas Square.
“It was not too presumptuous, I trust.”
“We’re old friends, Marian …”
“Exactly. This is what I tell myself.”
“You know me well enough …”
“So you will come?”
Come? Resnick swallowed most of a sigh. Come where?
“We will both wear, Charles, what would you say? Our dancing shoes.”
The conversation over, Resnick went through to the hall. Faced with the broad expanse of the chest’s wooden lid, Bud had chosen Marian’s presents to curl up on. The tie was silk, a swirl of soft color, blue on blue. Inside the second package was his ticket to the Polish Club’s New Year’s Eve Dinner and Dance. What was it, this sudden desire of everyone to get him out on to the floor?
The same films were on the television, immovable as the Queen’s Christmas Address. What he wanted was a good old-fashioned first division encounter, Southend and Grimsby, one of those. Where the long ball hoofed out of defense was deemed creative play and tackles thudded in so hard the TV set seemed to shake with the impact. What he got were daring prisoners-of-war, straw men, a sweep of hills on which, if only people would stop singing, you might hear edelweiss grow. Was it Exeter, the name smudged almost out of recognition? Exmoor? Exmouth? Resnick held up the envelope, angled against the light. Through it he saw, in veiled outline, something that might have been a coach with horses, reindeer with a sledge. Let me tell them about the letters, Charlie. All the letters I sent you, the ones you never answered. All the times I rang up in pain and you hung up without a word. With care, he set it back upon the shelf. Tell them all about that, Charlie. How you helped me with everything I’ve been going through.
He had not heard from Elaine for years, not since the divorce. And then they had started arriving, envelopes on which it was sometimes difficult to read his own address. Afraid of their contents he had shredded them into fragments, turned them to ash, pushed them deep to the back of the kitchen drawer. He had not wanted to know and it had taken Elaine to tell him, face to face, her voice strident and off-key, puncturing his seeming indifference with its accusations and its pain; later, in this house, this room, she had outlined with disturbing calmness her journey from miscarriage and desertion to the hospital ward, the treatments, the analyst’s chair.
Resnick had felt sympathy for her then, love even, not the same but a different kind. Almost, he could have crossed the floor and held her in his arms. But guilt had numbed him. That and a sense of self-preservation too.
She had walked out of the house and he had not heard from her again.
Till now.
From the upstairs window he mourned the slow fading of the light.
Coffee, he ground fine and made strong, drank with a tumbler of whisky at its side. Sliding an Ellington album from its buckled sleeve, he set it to play. The notes on the incident at the Housing Office and Gary James’ interview he had brought with him and he scanned them now, wondering again if it had been right to release him, let him return home. Injuries to a small boy consistent with what? Running smack into a door. Smack into his father’s fist. One of the cats jumped into Resnick’s lap, nudged his fingers with its nose, turned twice and settled, lay a paw across its eyes, and fell asleep. Jimmy Blanton’s bass was rocking the whole band. Exmouth or Exeter? A coach or a sledge? Miles stared up at Resnick resentfully as he was set down on the floor. So easy, the act of sliding a finger behind the envelope’s flap, tearing it open, shaking the contents down into your hand. It was a stagecoach, holly at its windows, snowflakes round its wheels; someone akin to Mr. Pickwick beamed from the driver’s seat and lifted his hat. Forgive me, Charlie? it said inside, and then, below, the words close to falling off the bottom of the card, Merry Christmas, Elaine.
No love, no kiss.
Forgive me.
He heard Alice Skelton’s harsh whispers. How much proof d’you need? Catching them doing it, there in your bed?
It had been someone else’s bed, an empty house, the duvet carefully replaced, pillows slightly overlapping, not quite so. When he had lifted the duvet aside and brought his face close to the center of the sheet, there had been no denying it, the lingering warmth, the tang of recent, hurried sex. The smile upon Elaine’s face when he had seen her leaving, minutes before. That smile. When Resnick brought his hand to his face, as he did now, and closed his eyes, he could taste, deep in the cracks between his fingers, that memory, salt like the sea.
Nine
Dana hadn’t given much attention to the compliments being paid her at their Christmas Eve function. Not at first, anyway. The usual remarks about what she was wearing, her hair, her natural contours, the comparisons with Madonna. “Someone’s giving you Sex for Christmas, I’ll bet.” “Come on, Jeremy, you can see, she’s already got it.” For some of them, some of the men she worked with, it came as naturally as breathing. Especially the married ones: all the things they no longer said to their wives. She didn’t even think of it as sexual harassment. She didn’t feel threatened, hardly ever embarrassed; it was constant, within the bounds of the generally acceptable, and even if it did become a little wearing, well, it was better than spending your time with a bunch of yobbos who were likely to break into “Get your tits out for the lads!” at the first opportunity.
The other thing was, she did like to be noticed. And by men. It wasn’t that she flaunted herself in front of them, but it did please her when they knew she was there. As she’d said to Nancy, if you’re never allowed a little sexual repartee, if the flower didn’t attract the bee-well, how was anything ever going to happen? And she had this certain feeling: too much repression was harmful. Tiptoe around each other pretending you’ve got blinkers on, not a word or a glance out of place, and then, suddenly, there’s this guy, can’t control it any longer, hurling you down behind the color photocopier, leaving his unrequited passion all over the floor. “Mmm,” Nancy had said, uncertain, “maybe there’s something in between.”
Well, Dana had thought, when Andrew Clarke, hand just touching her elbow, had guided her out on to the floor, maybe there was.
Andrew was a senior partner, Victorian house in the Park, all the original architraves, things like that. Family car was a BMW, but Dana had noticed recently this little Toyota MR2 in his slot in the parking lot. Red, something to run around in now the days of public school fees were coming to an end. The most provocative remark he’d ever made to her in the office was about the air-conditioning. No, he was scrupulous, correct; she’d never even caught him looking at her as she walked away, admiring her backside.
“Not very good at this, you know. Even though my daughters try to teach me at family parties.”
There were so many crowded on to the small circle of polished floor, it didn’t matter that Andrew Clarke’s attempts to boogie resembled the final struggles of a man trapped in quicksand. In fact, there was something about the earnestness with which he went about it which Dana found almost endearing.
So, when the music switched to some old Stevie Wonder and he pulled her into some kind of smoochy waltz, she didn’t object. Though she was surprised, after a while, to feel something remarkably close to an erection pushing against her thigh.
She was on the steps outside the cloakroom, after one o’clock, when she saw him again. He had on his Crombie overcoat, a little nicked up at
the collar, and his car keys in his hand.
“Going home alone?”
It looked like it; Nancy, despite her earlier protestations, seemed to have found congenial company.
“Still in that place on Newcastle Drive, aren’t you? On my way. Why not let me drop you off?”
The inside of the car smelt of leather polish and cologne. She was ready for the invitation to coffee when it came, had determined to say no, the exact tone rehearsed inside her head so as not to offend.
“Yes,” she said. “A quick cup. All right.”
The family, of course, had headed north that morning, getting an early start. “Little place off the Northumbrian coast. Had it for years. Nothing special.” Dana noticed a photograph of Andrew and his sons in front of what looked like a small castle, Andrew and the eldest boy with their shotguns, smiling as they held up dead birds.
“Still …” pressing a large glass of brandy into her hands “… their not being here, affords us a bit of privacy. Chance to get to know one another better.”
When Dana limped out forty minutes later, her bra strap was round her neck, unfastened, her tights were torn, she had lost the heel from one of her shoes. Andrew’s mood had switched from amorous to angry and back again and when finally she had slapped him hard, pushed him clear, and told him to grow up, he had astonished her by bursting into tears.
Back in her own flat, Christmas Day was already two hours old and no sign of Nancy. Dana only hoped she was having a better time than herself. Quickly, she undressed and showered and made herself some camomile tea. Cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV set, she raised a cup to her reflection in the blank screen. “Happy Christmas to you, too.”
At some point she must have woken cold and found her way into her bed, but when she came round beneath the floral duvet at what felt like half-past six, she couldn’t remember it. The digital clock on the floor read 11:07. The telephone was ringing. Dana stumbled towards the bathroom, rubbing the residue of makeup from around her eyes. On the way, she lifted the receiver from the body of the phone and set it down, unanswered. In the mirror she looked fifty years old.
Thirty minutes in the bathroom reduced that by all of five years. Great! Dana thought. Now I look like my mother just back from a fortnight on a health farm. She pulled on a T-shirt, sweater, and old jeans. There were two mandarin orange yogurts in the fridge and she ate them both, washing them down with some stale Evian. Well, Nancy, midday-must be having a pretty good time.
When she remembered the phone, a woman’s recorded voice was instructing her to replace the hand set and redial. The moment she put the receiver back in place, it rang again.
“Hello?”
It was Nancy’s mother, calling from Merseyside to wish her daughter a merry Christmas. From the background noises, the rest of the family were waiting to do the same.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Phelan, she’s not here now.”
“But we thought she was spending Christmas Day with you. She said …”
“She is, she is. It’s just …” It’s just that she’s not back yet from getting laid. “She’s popped out. A walk. You know, clear her head.”
“She’s not ill?”
“Oh, no. No. Just last night, we went to this dinner-dance …”
There was a silence and then, indistinctly, the sound of Mrs. Phelan reporting back to the family. “Be sure to tell Nancy I called,” she said when her voice came back on the line. “I’ll try again in a little while.”
Which she did several times over the next few hours. And on each occasion the questions were increasingly anxious, Dana’s responses increasingly vague. When she was fast running out of excuses, Mr. Phelan spoke to her himself. “Enough of this pissing about, right? I want to know what’s going on.”
Best as she could, Dana told him.
“Why on earth didn’t you say that before?”
“I didn’t want her mother to be upset.”
“The minute she drags herself back in,” Mr. Phelan said, “you tell her she’s to call us, right?”
Right. At the far end of the line there was a sharp swerve of breath before the connection was broken.
Dana looked at the turkey taking up most of the refrigerator, the black plastic vegetable rack overloaded with several weeks’ supply. She pulled a frozen broccoli lasagna, only two days past its use-by date, from the freezer and put it in the microwave. In the time it took to cook, she had looked at her watch, at the clock on the kitchen-diner wall half a dozen times. When Nancy’s father next phoned, she had the directory open on her lap and was about to try the casualty department at Queen’s.
“Is it like her?” Mr. Phelan asked, no attempt to disguise the anxiety he was feeling. “Not to let you know where she is?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re living with her, girl.”
“Yes, but I mean … Well, it’s not as if there’ve been a lot of occasions …”
“So being down there hasn’t turned her into a tart, her mother will be pleased. Now have I to get in the car and drive down there or what? Because it seems to me you’re not treating this as seriously as you should.”
“I really don’t think we have to worry, I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Yes? That’s what you’d want our Nancy thinking if you were the one not come home, is it?”
A pause. “I was about to phone the hospital when you called,” Dana said.
“Good. And the police, I dare say.”
Ten
Christmas morning or no Christmas morning, Jack Skelton had been for his normal four-mile run, setting off while his wife was still apparently sleeping, returning, lightly bathed in sweat, to find her staring at him accusingly in the dressing-room mirror.
“Have fun last night, you two?” Kate asked disarmingly at breakfast.
Skelton pushed the back of the spoon down against his Shredded Wheat, breaking it into the bottom of his bowl; carefully, Alice poured tea into her cup.
“Like to have seen it,” Kate went on into the silence, “the pair of you, dancing the light fantastic. Bet you were a regular Roy Rogers and Fred Astaire.”
“It’s Ginger …” began Alice, sounding her exasperation.
“She knows,” Skelton said quietly.
“Then why doesn’t she …?”
“Can’t you tell when you’re being wound up? It was a joke.”
“Funny sort of a joke.”
“Isn’t that the usual kind?” Kate said, no disguising the malicious glint in her eye.
“Katie, that’s enough,” Skelton said.
“Your trouble, young lady,” Alice said, “you’re altogether too smart behind the ears.”
“It’s what comes of having such clever parents,” Kate replied.
Half out of her chair, Alice leaned sharply forwards, about to wipe the smile from her daughter’s face with the back of her hand. Kate stared back at her, daring her to do exactly that. Alice picked up her cup and saucer and left the room.
With a slow shake of his head, Skelton sighed.
“Did you have a good time last night?” Kate asked, this time as though she might have cared.
“It was all right, I suppose.”
“But not great?”
Skelton almost smiled. “Not great.”
“Neither was mine.”
“Your party?”
“All so boring and predictable. People getting drunk as fast as they were able, chucking up all over someone else’s floor.”
“Tom there?”
Tom was Kate’s latest, a student from the university, a bit of a highflier; in Skelton’s eyes a welcome change from the last love of her life, an unemployed goth who wore black from head to toe and claimed to be on quite good terms with the Devil.
“He was there for a bit.”
“You didn’t have a row?”
Kate shook her head. “He hates parties like that, says they’re all a bunch of immature wankers.”
Skelto
n managed to stop himself reacting to her choice of word; besides, it sounded as if Tom had got it pretty right. “Why on earth stay? Why not leave when he did?”
“Because he didn’t ask me. And besides, they’re my friends.”
The same friends, Skelton was thinking, you used to take E with at all-night raves.
“I hope you’re not expecting,” Kate said, “me to hang round here all day. I mean, just ’cause it’s Christmas.”
The day wore on in silent attrition. The turkey was dry on the outside, overcooked, pink, and tinged with blood close to the bone. Alice accomplished the moves from sherry to champagne to cherry brandy without breaking stride. Kate spent an hour in the bath, as long again on the phone, and then announced she was going out, not to wait up. As it was beginning to get dark Skelton appeared at the living-room door in his navy-blue track suit, new Asics running shoes.
“In training for something, Jack?” Alice asked, glancing up. “Running away?”
Before the front door had closed, she was back with her Barbara Vine.
When Skelton returned almost an hour later, Alice was sitting with the lights out, feet up, settee pulled close to the fire. She was smoking a cigarette, a liqueur glass nearby on the floor.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Skelton asked.
“There was a call for you,” Alice said. “From the station.” And as he crossed the room. “Don’t hurry. It wasn’t from her.”
The pavement outside the police station was littered with broken glass. Crepe paper and tinsel hung, disconsolate, from nearby railings. In the waiting area, a young woman with half her ginger hair shaved to stubble and the remainder tightly plaited, was nursing a black mongrel dog bleeding from a badly cut ear.
“What’s this, the Humane Society all of a sudden?” Skelton said to the officer on desk duty.
“Every day except Christmas, sir.”
When Skelton went close to the dog it barked and showed its teeth.
Upstairs in his office, door to the CID room open, Resnick was talking to a well-built woman Skelton took to be in her early to mid-thirties. Friend of the girl who’d gone missing, he assumed. Not a bad looker in a blousy sort of a way. At opposite sides of the room, Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were on the phones.
