The Calling l-1

by Neil Cross

  ‘You’re really going to do this? Today?’

  ‘Seriously, John, when would you like me to say it?’

  ‘I don’t know. When the time’s better.’

  ‘And when’s that? Because I tell you, I’ve been trying. I’ve been trying and trying. And you just never listen. You turn your back on me, again and again.’

  ‘If this is about the leave of absence-’

  ‘Of course it’s not about the leave of sodding absence.’

  ‘I told you, I swear to God, I absolutely swear to God, I put in the request. Christ, I tried to get myself fired today.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You’re not listening. You never do. You think you do, but you don’t.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The leave of absence wasn’t a request,’ she says. ‘It was an ultimatum.’

  ‘I don’t get you. I don’t understand.’

  She laughs again, bitterly. ‘To see if you’d do what you promised, just once. And you couldn’t do it. You said you would, time and time again. But you never did. And finally, I decided: I’ll ask once more. And if he lies to me one more time, I’ll know that he always will. He’ll keep telling me what I want to hear, day after day, but they’re just words.’

  He blinks in hurt. She pities him. She says, ‘Whatever you’re going to say, don’t say it. Because it’ll be a lie.’

  She waits for him to answer. He massages his forehead with the heel of his hand. Takes a breath.

  He says, ‘I know.’

  She turns to him. ‘About what?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘Our baby.’

  Luther gets up and goes to the fridge. He opens the ice tray, removes an ice cube. He rubs it over his forehead. Cold water drips down his shirt.

  He shuts the fridge door. He’s shivering, trembling from his feet to his fingertips. He can hear the tremor in his voice. He hates it.

  ‘I found this little plastic cap,’ he says. ‘Behind the bin in the bathroom. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was for a thermometer. But it wasn’t. And it worried me. It nagged at me, the way things do. At the time, I didn’t even know why. I should’ve just thrown it away. But it was bugging me. I carried it around in my pocket for like a week. And then for some reason, it clicked. I knew what it was. So I went to the chemist. Bought the three most popular home pregnancy testing kits. Sure enough. You bought the market leader. Very wise.’

  She drains her wine. Pours another.

  He says, ‘Was it mine?’

  ‘Of course it was yours.’ Clumsy with nerves, she knocks over the glass. They don’t speak while she gets a roll of kitchen paper and tears off a few sheets. ‘Christ, John. Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I was waiting for you to tell me.’

  She bites her lip, mops up the wine.

  She drops the wine-soaked Kleenex in the pedal bin and leans her back against the worktop. She pulls back her hair, but can’t find anything to tie it with.

  ‘Shit,’ she says.

  Luther’s in a kitchen chair, his elbows on his knees. He’s looking away from her at the interlocking geometric pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen floor; black, white, ten shades of grey. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. I lost it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why do you think? You were busy.’

  He winces at her unexpected cruelty.

  ‘Look, there’s nothing to tell,’ she says. ‘I was pregnant, then I started to bleed and then I wasn’t pregnant. I spent the afternoon in hospital. You didn’t come home that night.’

  ‘I thought you’d had a termination.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Because you were pregnant and then you weren’t. And you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘You didn’t give me the chance.’

  ‘You never wanted them. Kids.’

  ‘Neither did you.’ She trails off. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she says. ‘The bear.’

  She’s talking about the big, plush teddy bear she found sitting at the bottom of Luther’s wardrobe.

  ‘You told me that was for Rose’s granddaughter.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’ he says. ‘It’s for the baby you secretly had aborted?’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do with it. I took it to Oxfam.’

  She stands there.

  He sits. Both of them look at the interlocking shadows on the floor.

  ‘God,’ she says. ‘What a mess.’

  Luther laughs an empty laugh.

  Zoe reaches for her coat.

  He says, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Out.’

  ‘Are you coming home?’

  ‘I think it’s best if I don’t.’

  ‘So where will you sleep?’

  ‘At my mum’s, probably.’

  There’s a tiny flex, a comma at one corner of her mouth, and he thinks she’s lying. But he doesn’t trust his judgement; he’s angry and tired and bereft. He may be seeing lies where there are none. And if he goes down that road now, then however bad it might be right now, it’ll only get worse.

  He watches her put her coat on and smells cigarettes and knows she’s not going to her mum’s or to her sister’s or to her friend’s or to anywhere else he knows.

  More than anything, what he wants is for Zoe to stay here, in this house, the house with the red door, the house with both their names on the title deeds, John and Zoe Luther.

  How proud they’d been, the day they moved in. Their first real house, too big for just the two of them. The area was a bit rough, but it was up and coming and anyway who cared? Luther used to fantasize about being an old man, dying in the room upstairs; it would be a library by then, with leather armchairs. And he’d be the one to go first; she’d come in one morning with a cup of tea in a china cup and few biscuits on a plate and he’d be dead in his leather armchair with a book in his lap, a good book, much loved and well read.

  And now she’s belting her coat, waiting for him to say something.

  He says, ‘There’s no need for you to go anywhere.’

  ‘If I stay, we’ll fight.’

  ‘Look,’ he says, and he wonders if she can hear the desperation in his voice. ‘Look,’ he says again. ‘I’m not going to relax tonight. With all this, waiting for the phone to ring. I’m going to go mad if I hang around the house. So you stay here, okay? You stay here and I’ll go.’

  He reads a flare of disappointment in her eyes. And there’s a dizzying lurch inside him to think that even now, at the teetering edge of their marriage, he’s disappointing her.

  She stands with her coat buttoned and belted. And because of that, because she’s ready to walk out the door, he says it again, ‘I’ll go.’

  She nods slowly, once. ‘Okay.’

  He goes to the kitchen door. Hesitates. ‘Do you want me to call you? Let you know how it goes?’

  She doesn’t answer. When he turns to ask again, she’s crying.

  He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know how to say the right thing.

  He says, ‘Lock up properly. Lock the doors and windows.’

  He steps outside. He shuts the kitchen door and walks away and is lost.

  He thinks about dropping round to see Reed. But if he does, he might have to talk about it. And he doesn’t want to talk about it.

  But he’s got to do something, he’s got to go somewhere. So he stops off to buy a bag of chips and goes to see Bill Tanner.

  He’s holding the chips in soggy paper, smelling faintly of vinegar, when Bill opens the door and gives him a big, bright denture smile.

  Luther knows something’s wrong.

  He walks in, automatically ducks his head.

  They eat chips out of the paper on the Formica table. Bill slathers his chips in brown sauce from a glass bottle. There are snotty
clogs of sauce round the thread of the screw top.

  Bill says, ‘I saw you on the telly.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Luther. ‘Did I look fat? The camera adds ten pounds, apparently.’

  ‘Are you all right, son?’

  Luther considers telling the old man how not all right he is. Instead, he says, ‘You got kids, Bill?’

  ‘Four. Although they’re not kids no more.’

  ‘Grandkids?’

  ‘Great-grandkids, mate. Hundreds of the little sods. Like tadpoles.’

  Luther chuckles. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Who knows? When you get so old even your kids are in homes, you realize there’s nobody in the world who gives a tinker’s cuss if you live or die. So there you go. Rule number one: don’t get old.’

  ‘There’s not much hope of that.’

  ‘Ah. We all think that.’

  ‘I could find them for you,’ says Luther. ‘Your grandkids. Let them know what’s been going on.’

  ‘My eldest grandson’s in Australia,’ Bill says. ‘Went out as a plumber, back in the early nineties. They were crying out for tradesmen back then. He asked me along: Come and live with us, Granddad. But his missus didn’t want me there. You can tell.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘I couldn’t even give you their addresses.’

  ‘Eat your chips,’ Luther says. ‘They’ll put hair on your chest.’

  Bill looks down at his chest. His shoulders shake.

  Luther says, ‘Bill? Are you okay, mate?’

  The old man just clenches and unclenches his crippled fists.

  Luther goes to the sink to wash the chip grease from his fingers, dries his hands on an old tea towel, a souvenir of a long-ago day trip to Blackpool. Then he kneels at the old man’s side, pats his back. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Hey. Hey.’

  When the crying is over, Luther says, ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’

  Bill sniffs, wipes his nose on his hand. ‘There’s whisky in the cupboard.’

  Luther brings down the half bottle of whisky and pours a measure into a cloudy glass. ‘So what happened?’

  Bill’s face is white-whiskered. He looks played-out. ‘I should never have called your lot,’ he says. ‘They mean well. But it’s calling the law that got me into this.’

  Luther gathers up the remains of the fish and chips, shoves them into a carrier bag.

  He twists and ties the handles of the carrier bag and places it in the doorway, ready to dump in a wheelie bin.

  The old man sniffs.

  Luther stares at the carrier bag. He’s so tired, he can’t seem to complete a thought.

  Then it occurs to him.

  He says, ‘Bill — where’s the dog?’

  CHAPTER 20

  At 8.47 p.m., Stephanie Dalton picks up her elder son, Dan, from an evening drama class off the Chiswick High Road.

  Dan’s fifteen and wants to be an actor.

  Steph and Marcus would like for him to be anything but, but what kind of career should they actually be hoping for these days? It’s not like being a bank manager is any safer.

  Steph grew up wanting to teach but fell into modelling at twenty-one, enjoyed a moderately successful career (catalogues, mostly) made some money, got tired of it all, then left and had the kids. Then Dan and Mia grew up a bit and Steph became bored hanging round the house all day.

  She started a domestic cleaning company, called it Zita after the patron saint of cleaning — and of people who lost their keys, apparently. Although she didn’t mention that bit on the website.

  After Zita took off, she started a company called Handy woman, supplying women-only handyman services to women-only clients and the elderly. Handywoman had a rockier start than Zita, but it’s grown into a franchise. All over the country, mothers and daughters, best friends, young mothers, drive around in little white Citroen vans, fixing taps and dry walls and power points. Steph’s proud of that.

  The downturn has hit them pretty hard, but they’re riding it out. Things will turn round.

  And Dan wants to be an actor. He’s already got the looks, in a still-growing, lanky way. He’s got the floppy fringe for it, and a certain way of wearing a shirt. And since he’s been taking the lessons there’s a new confidence in his voice, in his walk. She doesn’t know if it’s real or if it’s an act. But she supposes that’s the point.

  Dan emerges from the shabby doorway and she flashes her headlights. He waves, huddled in his coat, and jogs across the road.

  She reaches over to pop the passenger door. Dan slides in, bringing the night’s cold and wet with him. Sits with his Crumpler messenger bag on his lap.

  Steph sees the look on his face. He’s not that good an actor, not yet.

  She says, ‘So what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She wants to reach out and brush the floppy fringe from his eyes. But she knows it’ll embarrass him. ‘Well, it’s not nothing,’ she says, ‘I can see it’s not nothing.’

  ‘It’s just, we’ve got these agents coming round,’ he says. ‘Like actual agents? We get to, like, quiz them about the business.’

  The business, she thinks, simultaneously cringing and burning with love.

  ‘And then after that,’ he says, ‘or before, or something. We’re putting on this, like, performance? Like the best in the class. And I got chosen to play Rosenkrantz?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘That’s amazing!’

  He beams at her. He looks pure and beautiful — somewhere in the sunlit grasslands between child and adult.

  ‘Don’t call Dad,’ he says, ‘I want to tell him when we get home.’

  She pats his knee. ‘Tell him yourself. He’ll be so proud. He’ll burst!’

  Dan hugs his messenger bag.

  ‘What should we have for tea?’ Steph says, pulling away. ‘Your choice. We’re celebrating.’

  ‘Don’t jinx it,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not jinxing it. We’re just celebrating this bit. Some good news. Everybody likes good news.’

  ‘What about KFC?’

  ‘We had KFC on your birthday.’

  ‘Yeah, ages ago.’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘Yeah. Ages.’

  Not far behind them, Henry and Patrick watch from a stolen Toyota Corolla.

  They watch Steph pull away, indicate, turn onto Chiswick High Street.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Henry says. ‘You’ll lose them.’

  ‘We know where they live,’ says Patrick. ‘We’ve got a key. We can’t lose them.’

  ‘That’s not the point. I like the hunt.’

  Patrick indicates, pulls away.

  Henry says, ‘The kid. The one with the floppy hair. What’s his name again?’

  ‘Daniel,’ says Patrick. ‘Wants to be an actor.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says Henry. He sometimes gets them mixed up — all the second-players on the watch list. He says, ‘I’m going to cut his fucking head off. That’ll make him famous.’

  He grins at Patrick, sidelong and ravenous.

  Patrick’s arms flash with goosebumps. Its proper name is horripilation. Patrick knows that because he once looked it up in an old dictionary. The dictionary lay in what had once been Elaine’s bedroom, but was now Henry’s. It was next to the Bible, both of them water-stained and damp-smelling. They were inscribed inside with long-faded blue ink, given as a spelling prize when Elaine was a young girl.

  So he knows that’s what Henry gives him at times like this: horripilation.

  And that’s what looking in the dictionary gave him, too.

  He thought of it, passing through time, sitting in the room already old the day Henry was born, older still the day Patrick was born. Sitting in the room through all those years and all those hands.

  Only Patrick, the killer’s son, used it to look up the proper word for gooseflesh before throwing the book into the garbage. The book’s owner, once a clever child, lay beneath a compost heap in the garden, a half-ro
tted old lady.

  Marcus Dalton is an architect, currently thanking God he didn’t take the decision to strike out by himself when he was thirty-five. He’s kept the reasonably boring but reasonably safe job with a large firm based in Covent Garden.

  Right now he’s at home, playing on the Wii with Mia. She’s eleven and she’s kicking his ass at Super Mario Cart.

  Marcus delights in getting his ass kicked. It makes him proud of her.

  He’s seen competitive parents at the sidelines of primary school football matches wrapped in parkas and scarves and muddy wellingtons; grown men and women with craziness in their eyes for loss of possession or an uncalled foul during a game played by eight-year-olds.

  Marcus hates that, and hates them, and hates himself for not enjoying his kids’ sporting activities. He’d rather spend time with them in less active ways. Being beaten on the Wii excuses him from congratulating or commiserating from the edge of a divoty soccer field where he sorely does not want to be.

  In the kitchen, Gabriella the Gorgeous is making popcorn. Gabriella’s tiny, Italian American, ravishing. In the early days, the nickname took some of the heat from her swanning round the house in micro-shorts and crop tops.

  But Gabriella’s part of the family now. Any incipient lust Marcus might passingly have felt has long since dissipated, exorcized by damp towels left on bathroom floors, Gabriella playing twee lo-fi rock at ear-bleeding volume, Gabriella never putting the milk back in the sodding fridge.

  She comes in carrying a big Pyrex bowl of hot microwave popcorn, plonks it down on the sofa next to her.

  She says, ‘We had another phone call tonight.’

  Marcus concentrates on the screen. On the second lap of Coconut Mall he keeps driving his avatar the wrong way up the escalator. ‘Not him again?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess. It was a girl this time though.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Kind of threat-type things.’

  ‘What kind of threat-type things?’

  ‘I don’t really know. She sounded drunk or something. I think she was maybe crying.’

  Mia says, ‘Was it your boyfriend again?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Gabriella.

  ‘He’s crazy,’ Mia says.

  ‘He is.’