by Mick Herron
It was sometimes necessary to form alliances, though it would be a mistake to take this as a sign of weakness.
In the bathroom she took care of the usual, then had a quick wash standing at the sink. A bath would have been nice, but the hot water system made a noise like anti-aircraft cover. This was a compromise, it was true – and compromises laid end to end were indistinguishable from surrender – but such things happened in enemy territory; you took time to check out the terrain, then drew a line in the sand you could defend. She rehearsed this silent theory to the face in the mirror, and the face in the mirror relayed it back.
(This face, for the record, was a round face; its eyes brown, its mouth a straight line. Judy was fifty-three. No; Judy was fifty-four. Her last birthday had snuck in under the wire; unnoticed, uncelebrated. And Judy smoked, and this was written in the lines round her eyes; the million squints that prove that songs come true: smoke gets in your eyes. Her hair looked painted on. Literally: her hair looked like it belonged on an Action Man doll; moulded close to her skull like a punishment, a scold’s bridle. There was something else, too, in those brown eyes, in that linear mouth, which spoke not only of disappointment, but of a constant mission to avenge that disappointment. This would be why she held her head at an upward tilt in company: the better to spot an opportunity for scoring points. Anything taken from somebody else was added to what was hers, even if what was taken was only a moment’s peace. She was owed a lot, and the debt was everyone’s.)
Washed, dressed, she made her way downstairs.
‘Boys –’
‘Dad.’
‘Daddy.’
‘Boys, could you quieten down a bit? Daddy’s trying to concentrate.’
7.36.
Eliot was in the car; the boys in their seats behind him. Strapping twins into carseats was an activity that, on a bad day, encompassed emotions traditionally associated with the classical definition of tragedy. On a good day, it wasn’t much more complicated than juggling traffic bollards. Today was a good day. The boys went through phases when they seemed to achieve communication the far side of speech, and were too intent on developing this to create problems on a mundane level. ‘Twins,’ people said knowingly when Eliot or Chris mentioned such things – twins being one of those subjects on which everyone’s an expert. Everyone bar Eliot, who often resisted the temptation to mention the Midwich Cuckoos when discussing the boys.
Today they were wrapped in a strange dialogue deeply meaningful to both, but incomprehensible to humans. It didn’t require Eliot’s involvement, but was a little noisy when he was trying to drive.
Usually, this was part of Chris’s routine. Like almost everything involving the boys, she had full charge of it, and took his offers of help as an attempted putsch. Which caused conflict, but mostly only in Eliot’s mind. He still keenly remembered the Chris he’d been married to until about four years ago; the Chris who reckoned that those peasant women who gave birth in the fields then carried on working had it right. She was a legal secretary: hardly field work, but the hours were long. But discovering that she was carrying twins had changed her attitude, as if something more fundamental than a simple mathematical substitution – two for one – had taken place, and overnight had gone from a breezy acceptance of impending change to a siege mentality; one in which all the world’s workings had to be weighed and measured for their effect on this primary unit: Gordon + Timmy + Christine. Eliot being optional.
A burst of giggling from the back seat underlined another joke from which he’d been excluded.
This morning, Chris was paying a visit to her old office. Which would have been a more welcome development if it had been her idea, instead of something Eliot had badgered her into over what was probably weeks rather than the months it felt like. Returning to work had always been the plan, he’d reminded her, as if the Plan had been chiselled into the same rock the Ten Commandments were hewn from, and equally impervious to circumstance. Which, in this context, included the fact that it would be pleasant to have a second income again, given the doubling of their expenditure these past few years. But some-times, when trying to introduce such subjects in a non-contentious way, he’d had the feeling he was attempting conversation with somebody who wasn’t there any more; somebody who, tidally struck by the advent of children, had been, quite simply, washed away . . .
‘Dad –’
‘Daddy –’
‘– Can it wait, boys?’
‘We’re building a castle.’
‘A real one.’
‘. . . That’s nice.’
Which it was. If his sons were building a castle, it might as well be a real one. That way, whatever happened later in life, they’d always be able to look back and say Well, at least we built a castle.
But they’d returned to their republic of two. He tried to concentrate on driving; feeling, as he did so, the Memory hug him tighter, as if something he wore was shrinking round his shoulders – there was an ache involved in this; more pressure than you could define as comfortable. But it was good, too, to be held so close, and his heart beat faster as he dropped a gear.
Louise closed the door behind her as gently as she could; this, too, causing her guilt – that the chunk of the latch might wake her mother. But with the noise came a sense of release; she was out in the world again. Now that home territory had become shared, it was somewhere to escape from rather than a refuge from everywhere else. Walking up the road, she had the sense of her own footsteps receding – becoming a departing tip-tap – as if they were a measure of the distance between herself and her mother; bringing, of course, more guilt.
It wasn’t a long journey. A matter of minutes. There wasn’t much life on the street at this time; she was, naturally, ahead of the mothers delivering children to school; ditto those with nine-to-five jobs up in town, but behind milk-men and commuters, and never quite in synch with the dogwalkers, who enjoyed a society all their own on the Ham. As a matter of course, though, she’d nod Good Morning to anyone whose path she crossed, sometimes wondering whether they recognized her, or knew where she was headed. Neighbourhoods held few secrets, she suspected. Which was not an especially welcome thought, given last week’s Incident – an episode she was hoping to write off as an aberration, without seriously believing it would be without consequence.
At the time, she’d thought it involved just the pair of them, but of how much could you truly say that? Every connection plugged you into someone else’s network. A neighbourhood was a web, with any thread plucked here reverberating there. Even in the big city, secrecy wasn’t straightforward. Louise remembered visiting a mobile phone outlet more than a year ago, looking to upgrade her deal now her calls had gone through the roof. ‘Has there been a change in your life lately?’ the boy on the counter asked, leafing through her bills and seeing the same number again and again . . . She’d found herself blushing; had blushed since at the memory. What irked was the realization that great chunks of private life – once the province of confidantes and therapists – were now open to teenagers with McJobs. Secrecy was a professional skill these days; amateurs were crying out to be discovered. Yup: the Incident would have consequences. The best she could hope for was, they wouldn’t threaten her new career.
Speaking of which, she turned left at the corner, and the nursery school gates came into view.
By now, George Trebor’s morning had caught up with Louise’s – long spells of nothing happening had swallowed the time she’d taken to breakfast, smoke, and walk up the road. Not that entirely nothing had happened, of course – an ambulance had arrived, swiftly followed by two police cars, followed in turn by a third; traffic, mean-while, was backing up as far as the motorway turnoff and probably beyond – but his participation had not been called upon. He couldn’t leave, though. Leaving the scene of an accident might cost him his licence: they could get you that way. And Man Two, he was pretty sure, had noted his plate.
He’d tried talking to Man Two, once the ambulan
ce arrived.
‘Your friend – is he going to be okay?’
‘Do I look like a doctor?’
‘. . . He was still alive, though? I could see you were . . . ’
George didn’t want to say kissing him. But introducing the phrase artificial resuscitation into this sentence was sud-denly beyond him.
Man Two said, ‘Go and wait in your truck. They’ll want to talk to you.’
Something about the look on his face drove George back to his lorry, where he leaned against the door, heartily wishing he’d not stopped to shave this morning. He watched the policemen approach Man Two; saw Man Two show them ID. Saw the glance they shared before one backed off and started talking into a radio.
And George understood that whatever he’d witnessed this morning, it was nothing to do with a rent boy running out of luck.
* * *
The kitchen didn’t enjoy much light even on the sunny side of the year, so the overhead strip was needed, though its effect was like too much caffeine: if you stood long enough in the glow cast by tubular lighting, your blood would start to fizz. Children who grew in the shadow of pylons turned out to have leukaemia. But the alternative was to muddle in the half-light, so Judy pressed the switch, and there it was: the kitchen, drenched in unforgiving electricity. Smaller than she deserved. Small should equate with neat: rooms could be compact, tidy. But this small aspired to grubby. That was what Judy thought, looking at the kitchen. That its size was a badge of failure, and failure was streaked and grimy, and anyway she was a lodger, and strict prohibitions on certain cupboards and any shelf of the fridge bar the third applied. So there wasn’t even pride of possession attached to the badge of failure. If these circumstances were anyone else’s, they’d be funny.
The view from the window was equally cramped. It gave straight on to pavement, on the other side of which sat a blank wall made of the same brick from which the house and all its neighbours were built. This served as a rampart shielding these houses from the road, which was only partly residential – it was mostly car park and ice rink; plus a PO collection point, the College of Further Education, a garage, and a deadly nightclub. This row of housing was the northward edge of a modern estate, the choicest properties of which enjoyed small, mossy patios facing the river and the meadow beyond. Which wasn’t quite a rural idyll – a hotbed of dogging, apparently; certainly a jousting ground for winos and junkies, and nowhere to linger after dark – but on a misty morning, at least you could look out from the kitchen window of those houses and pretend beauty wasn’t a stranger; you could admire geese on the meadow, and the occasional heron. But round this corner, it was beyond pretence. Your view was a brick wall, and that summed it up as far as Judy was concerned.
She drank a cup of tea and – after checking at the door for signs of Deirdre, her landlady – removed a Tupperware container from the fridge’s third shelf, and from it took a clingfilm-wrapped chocolate éclair, which she unwrapped and ate hurriedly, standing up. No enjoyment bothered her face while she did so. It might have been a pleasure endured for someone else’s sake; a ludicrous sexual demand, or a children’s party game. Afterwards she rolled the clingfilm into a tight ball, and pushed it down a few layers into the swingbin. She couldn’t swear that Deirdre examined her Tupperware while she was out – couldn’t positively say Deirdre would swing the bin’s lid to survey its most recent deposits – but Judy wasn’t certain, if their roles were reversed, that she’d not be doing those things. And of course, Deirdre had all day to do them in. Deirdre didn’t need to work. Deirdre was a woman of property.
That done, routine locked into place. Judy checked her necessaries: keys, purse, cigarettes, lighter. Shuffled slippers off and fastened shoes. Slipped into her anorak – a green number, long past best – and out the front door; headed right, negotiating the pair of overlapping railings (there must be a name for these) planted to confound cyclists, then pacing another fifty yards before turning right again, to make her way between flats and garages: a wasteland of cracked paving stones, litter, and the ever-present possibility of an encounter with a dog – one of those bullet-headed breeds familiar on such estates, whose owners don’t so much like dogs as not like people. And all of this just part of Judy’s everyday; nothing to comment on later, if there’d been anyone to listen. So far, this morning bleached into every other: a series of moments that would grow closer together as the day wore on; would blend until she couldn’t tell one from the next; until – thankfully – it would be time to switch off again; turn out the lights, and hope for sleep. Which never lasted long enough, and always broke the moment you noticed it.
These weren’t her thoughts, precisely, but she would have recognized and agreed with them if they’d been presented to her. But for the moment, having crossed the pedestrian bridge at Friars Wharf, she was walking down the street towards her place of work; chin tilted upright; bad thoughts painted on her face; cigarette jammed into a mouth that was a straight line, except for the downturn at the corners.
7.41.
Eliot glanced into the rear view mirror for what he could see of his boys – heads together like a pair of squirrels – and caught sight of part of the upper left quadrant of his own face as he did so: one blue/grey eye sheltering under a dark eyebrow he should trim really, except only old people did that, didn’t they? Or needed to, anyway; their eyebrows like GM hedges. His weren’t that bad yet, but the operative word was yet . . . Face facts, the prevailing condition was ‘yet’. Because Eliot was looking at forty; or rather, forty was looking at Eliot: suppressing a snigger, wiping a grin off its face. Forty wasn’t in itself anything to worry about, but everything that followed it exercised his imagination. Forty sounded the starting pistol on hair-loss and paunch extension; it was the point at which – time would tell – you discovered whether your penis was going to drop off, or develop its own mindset and acquire start-ling new inclinations. Schoolgirls, if you were unlucky; or, if you were really unlucky, schoolboys. All of which sup-posed, of course, that you weren’t securely bedded down in a warm and loving relationship with wife or long-term sex-partner. Eliot, for his part, had Christine, who was beautiful and warm and loving, it was true, but for whom sex had slipped off the agenda the same time everything else had, with the exception of her children.
As this familiar complaint reared up, it was banished almost immediately by the Memory.
And then somebody – definitely one of his boys – said, ‘Daddy, when we’ve builded our castle, you can visit it.’
‘Thank you.’
(He was touched, actually.)
‘Will you bring cake?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll definitely bring cake. Can mummy come too?’
‘Mummy’ll live there.’
‘Oh.’
‘With us.’
‘Yes. With just us.’
‘. . . Okay.’
A whole different memory threatened his composure now – a vague daydream he and Christine had concocted back in their summer of love; something about a chateau in the woods where they’d live alone forever – but swam out of reach before he’d taken a grip on it.
. . . So what else? Eliot was dark, lean, reasonably tall; had somewhat gaunt features which, when he was pursuing an idea with particular intensity – something he was prone to when alone – tended to cast themselves into shapes usually associated with melancholy; expressions which could earn him a ‘Cheer up, mate, it might never happen’ on the street. Which was fair comment, unless what you worried about was having fatuous platitudes flung at you by strangers, in which case it just had. Truth was, though, he was inclined to introspection, which usu-ally took the form of self-grilling; a minute examination of where he was, and where he’d expected to be by now. The destination had grown hazy, but a hollowness he’d grown used to – it lived in the pit of his stomach – reminded him he’d had ambitions once, though it was no longer clear how he’d expected to achieve them. Or even what they’d been, beyond the unspecific
I-expect-I’ll-be-successful variety that went with having been top of the class at school, and never having had to struggle to get there. The gap between never having had to struggle and never making an effort, though, made itself felt around the forty mark. As for the others who’d been in the same class, he Googled them occasionally, to confirm their continued obscurity, but worried that it was the names he’d completely forgotten that were lighting up the search engines. That was the nightmare. That it was the unconsidered, the unremembered, who were carving their initials on the world’s windows, while he’d achieved nothing.
The twins shifted behind him, as if sensing this deep injustice.
Nearly there. Making a right after Folly Bridge – leaving the main road just before it descended into its constant chaos of roadworks – Eliot navigated a channel between two rows of tightly parked cars, thankfully reaching the end without anything coming the other way. As he turned left, Gordon, unless it was Timmy, gave a high-pitched squeal, and Timmy, unless it was Gordon, dissolved into giggles in reply.
‘Boys, please. I’m driving,’ he said.
This was funny enough that both laughed harder.
The Memory wrapped him again, the way bandages wrap a mummy . . .
He didn’t notice, and wouldn’t have given it a moment’s thought if he had, the squat, anorak-clad figure he drove past now, making its way down the road on his right; chin tilted upright; bad thoughts painted on its face; cigarette jammed into a mouth that was a straight line – Judy Ainsworth, who’d not long crossed the river herself, though she’d used the pedestrian bridge at Friars Wharf.
