by Jessica Moor
Lynne stood, because she was tired of sitting – there had been too much sitting that day – and mechanically peered through the net curtains, Peony in her arms.
At first, she almost forgot to be frightened. She was still chastising herself for getting into a state at the sight of the detective.
But Peony’s frantic waving, her gurgles of delight, made it real.
There he was.
A man. Outside. Again. The streak of him dividing the world in two. Again. Not such a slim man, though his silhouette was refined by a well-cut suit. Not a young man with a veneer of police legitimacy this time. His brow arranged into uncertainty. Staring up at the refuge.
23.
Then
Katie is shrinking.
She notices it every time she steps out of the shower. How the flesh is gradually peeling from the bones, how the skin has started to pucker and cling, hinting at the structure beneath. When she inspects herself in the mirror, front or sideways, she no longer sees those little puffs and bumps, the excesses that made her feel she was spilling out of her shape. Now her ribs are articulated clearly; her hip bones rear up through her skin as if to break out.
Everyone says she looks good.
Jamie’s helping. Jamie always helps.
‘You feel gorgeous,’ he often says, wrapping his arms around her waist and squeezing.
She’s trying to think more about what she eats. He makes her think, makes thinking easier. Jamie goes to the gym. He wants her to go, too, but Katie can’t imagine taking up rigorous exercise – she’s always so tired these days.
The doctor says she’s anaemic and gives her iron pills that she doesn’t bother to take. She hasn’t told Jamie about them, although it’s hard to say exactly why.
* * *
• • •
The sun is out. Jamie has taken his shirt off. The pale skin, dappled in the sun, is stretched over his stomach muscles, which move fluidly, like fish under the surface of water. Katie’s father always had scathing words for men who walk around shirtless in the summer. Katie glances at Jamie sideways and thinks the same words in her head, wondering if Jamie might understand them just from the look on her face.
He catches her eye and smiles.
‘Checking me out, are we?’
She smiles back. She takes care to look at him always, or else he assumes she’s looking elsewhere. Sometimes it’s because she is; sometimes it’s because other men simply cross her line of vision as she stares off into nothing.
But it hurts his feelings either way, so she has to make sure there’s never any room for doubt.
He has a picnic in the carrier bag at his side. Another one. He seems to have got it into his head that that’s what people in love do – they eat picnics by the riverbank in the sunshine.
That seems as good a way to pass the time as any. Katie has never wanted to think too much about how people in love are supposed to behave.
He always buys too much food, and always sits expectantly, waiting for Katie to eat it.
* * *
• • •
‘Katie!’
She should have known. They were walking past the riverside pub, the one where she spent what now feels like so many long summer evenings. Laughing, she supposes, in retrospect. With friends – also in retrospect.
They all try not to see each other, she looking out towards the river, the girls – Lara, Lucy, Ellie – shuffling along the bench and leaning closer together. It is Jamie who says something, Jamie who smiles broadly and waves.
‘Look, Katie, it’s your friends!’
He takes her hand and pulls her over.
‘They didn’t invite me,’ she says, but he pretends not to hear.
When they get to the table, Ellie smiles awkwardly up at her.
‘It was just a spontaneous thing,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry,’ Katie says. ‘It’s totally fine. It’s fine. Anyway, we were just on our way to something, so . . .’
‘Oh, let’s stay for one,’ Jamie says breezily, and puts one leg over the wooden bench of the picnic table.
‘Hang out with your mates, Katie.’
* * *
• • •
She hears them at the bar, on the other side of the oak pillar – Ellie and Lara. They get their drinks, but she knows they’re staying there, and she knows why.
She’s done it, after all – dropped little interludes of casual cruelty into evenings that everyone had agreed were ‘lovely’.
‘He’s not any better this time.’
‘Oh my God, I know. Last time I was thinking, like, Blink twice if you need help.’
A peal of laughter that settles into a glass-clinking quiet.
Then, ‘Do you think we should say something?’
‘No.’
Another wine-sip pause.
‘Like . . . you’ve got to let people make their own mistakes, and sometimes when you’re in a situation like that you don’t want to hear it. And you never know.’
Another sip-pause.
‘Maybe he’s fine. Just a bit dull.’
‘I mean, it’s good to see her. She looks great.’
The soft glug of more wine poured out.
‘She’s lost a lot of weight.’
‘I know. She looks amazing.’
‘Probably worrying about her mum.’
‘Yeah. That’s probably it.’
‘Maybe he’s good for her.’
‘Maybe he is. Seems reliable.’
‘That’s what matters sometimes.’
‘Seems to know what to say to her.’
‘More than you can say for me.’
They go away. Katie stays leaning on the bar.
* * *
• • •
They have sex that night – the sex has become usual so quickly. Katie can time to the minute what will happen when. Jamie has a hell of a sexual appetite. He doesn’t use porn, he tells her, with an intensity that implies she’d asked. Never looks at other girls. Never even takes care of himself. It’s only Katie.
It never varies, and always ends with Jamie labouring jerkily on top of her, his face more in concentration than ecstasy. He looks like a child fearful of passing an exam, so she wraps her arms and legs around him, burying her face in his shoulder so she doesn’t have to see it any more. He doesn’t seem to like it when she looks up at him, anyway.
Tonight, she crunches up a little and leans close to Jamie’s ear.
‘What can I do for you?’ she says. Her voice feels seductive, but more in the sense that she is letting her desire seep out than that she is playing a part. But he leans away, and frowns.
‘Nothing,’ he says. Then he kisses her, putting all his weight on to her mouth, and says into the kiss, ‘You’re perfect.’
24.
Now
Lynne didn’t put her jacket on, instead shrugging her arms around herself against the cold as she stepped out of the front door, crunched across the gravel to the line where the refuge turned into street.
‘What’re you doing here?’ she said to Frank.
He didn’t answer, instead looking up at the house, as if in accusation.
‘What the hell kind of place is this, Lynne? Where’s our daughter?’
‘She’s inside. She’s fine. How did you find me?’
He gave a little laugh and held out his phone. A running app was open. He’d wanted her to get into running.
Good for her figure. Good for her mind.
‘All your running routes led back here.’
All the nights she’d spent staring into the ceiling wondering how a bloated, fanged Frank, the Frank who was something called a ‘perpetrator’, would find her and take her baby away, and here he was. Giving her the same look he always gave her when he was implying
she was useless at technology.
‘I’m not asking for forgiveness,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking for anything. I just have to let you know how I feel.’
He reached out and took her arm as if he wanted to grip it hard, but seemed to think better of it at the last moment, instead letting his fingertips push the fabric of her sleeve over her skin.
‘How I feel,’ he said again.
Lynne was staring hard over his shoulder. Yet what harm could it do to really look him in the face? He was only a man, after all.
‘I can’t tell you how frantic I’ve been,’ he said. ‘With worry. About you. About our little girl.’ A crack formed across his voice. ‘If she’s safe. But it’s okay. I understand. I know it wasn’t you who wanted to come here.’
It wasn’t me. It never was.
‘It was your mum, Lynne. I know that. I know she made you leave me.’
Maybe that was why she had never felt like she was really here. Why she had never felt the physical reality of leaving Frank.
‘She doesn’t understand us, Lynne. She never has. But we don’t need anyone else, do we? It’s just the three of us together.’
His hand moved from her arm to her hair, lightening the touch of his fingertips to nothing as if to marvel at its softness. For a moment she neither leaned into nor out of his touch.
‘Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m no good. Maybe you’re both better off without me. I had the most perfect family in the world, the most beautiful wife, and maybe I’ve screwed it all up.’
He raised his eyes to look at her.
‘But I’ll be damned if I let you go without you knowing just how much I love you.’
* * *
• • •
Lynne slid out of the refuge playroom, seeing on the opposite wall how her shadow’s posture was distorted by Peony’s weight on her hip. She mounted the stairs. They turned several times before reaching the second floor. On each little landing there was a different poster – on the dangers of charming men, a step-by-step guide on applying for benefits, mother- and-baby sessions at the local library.
Peony had seized a fistful of Lynne’s hair and was in turn gently stroking it and yanking so hard Lynne thought she’d soon have a bald spot. She’d tried to detach Peony’s hand, but it was like trying to pry an insect free from a Venus flytrap.
She went past Jenny’s room. The two or three strides that carried her seemed a mile or more, and when she had unlocked the door to her own bedroom and re-locked it again behind her, her thumping heart let up slightly.
Yes, she was scared of Jenny. How could you not be scared of someone who made as little sense as that?
There was little of Lynne in the room – the bedside table held an eclectic range of cosmetics from the donation box. There were a few toys she’d deemed clean enough for Peony. Among these was a little pink Barbie rucksack. A hideous thing, but Peony had adored it on first sight and refused to be parted from it. Lynne set Peony down and started to gather together the few things that were definitively hers. Her bottle of perfume, her few nice jumpers, her hairbrush.
For a second she stood, peering out of the window at the silver four-by-four. Their car. Her car. Her husband.
She wanted life to be easier. Was that so wrong? The whole time she had been in the refuge she had felt as though she was slamming her hands against a plastic ceiling which kept her in a trap where everything was dirty and tiring, where there was no money and there would never be any money.
She thought of Peony. Of all the ways she had failed – was failing – as a mother. Did she really need to add this sense of material hopelessness to the sum of her daughter’s suffering, all for the sake of being the right sort of woman? It seemed too much. Too cruel.
She held out the little pink rucksack to her daughter. ‘Come on, darling. Let’s get your toys together. We’re going.’
25.
‘I’m going to interview the old slapper first thing,’ Whitworth said as they settled into the key-work room again. Val had let them in without so much as a word, as if refusing to acknowledge them made their male presence just a little bit less offensive to her sensibilities.
‘Want me to come in?’ Brookes asked.
‘Nah.’ Whitworth stood up and stretched. ‘I know what I’m doing with these types. Best if it’s just one of us. You understand.’
‘Right.’
‘Oh . . .’ Whitworth slapped his hand on the doorframe, as if reprimanding it for almost letting him forget. ‘Anything on the joker who’s sending . . . you know, who’s twittering at Val?’
‘Oh yeah.’ Brookes twiddled his pen. ‘Melissa’s got the nerds on the case. Tracking his IP address or something. I don’t know. They reckon it’ll be another day or so.’
Whitworth nodded. Val had taken to shoving the print-outs under his nose whenever she spoke to him.
Fuck feminist whores. Feminism is cancer.
The bald accusation in her gaze made it a little hard for him to entirely disagree with the sentiments.
The woman waiting for him in the key-work room could have been one of any number Whitworth had run up against in his detective career.
She was clearly some sort of addict; heroin was his best guess, from her tallow-coloured skin and anchorless gaze. Whitworth knew junkies – they weren’t so much men or women as a pack of hungry foxes, with that loping gait and their eyes like busted headlamps.
This was where he was comfortable. This woman’s wretchedness was chemical, not political; that gave her actions a sort of scientific certainty. She would do whatever, say whatever, be whatever. Chemistry overrides everything else.
She didn’t reply to Whitworth’s ‘hello’.
‘I understand your name’s Jenny,’ he said.
She gave a hooked sort of nod, her shoulders caved. I can be whoever you want me to be, the monotone of her posture seemed to say. It’s all the same to me.
She wasn’t a big, bawdy, blousey hooker, the kind they’d have sung songs about in the pub in olden times: she of the inviting eyes and generous thighs, with entire countries between her breasts. This woman was insubstantial. Tiny-thin. Her teeth weren’t great either.
Whitworth couldn’t for a minute imagine wanting to fuck her. But then, prostitutes could always surprise you.
‘My daughter’s a Jenny,’ he said.
He said it to get her to look at him, even though the connection made him wince.
He had wanted the name partly because it sounded so little like the names of those crumbled remnants of women he’d seen on the streets. A name to be worn by a teacher or a nurse, or just someone who was loved and knew it. Jenny. Jennifer.
‘Heartbreaker.’
The hooker’s words seemed to have no context – they just fell out of her mouth like pebbles before an avalanche.
‘What was that, love?’
‘Jennifer. It’s the Cornish form of Guinevere. She’s the woman who broke King Arthur’s heart. My mum told me that when I was little.’
‘Yeah?’ Just let her talk. Any talking will do. Don’t expect any sense out of her. ‘Mum from Cornwall?’
‘Maybe. I think so.’ Jenny blinked. Long. Slow. ‘From by the sea, yeah. Cornish form of Guinevere. Also, enchantress. White lady.’
This woman was not so much white as colourless. Even her eyelashes. All the dyes had leached out of her, leaving only the pallid film of skin. She wore reddy-pink lipstick, incongruous in her flat face.
It was hideous.
‘White lady. I always liked that. Cornish form of Guinevere,’ she said.
* * *
• • •
Jennifer – his Jennifer – had sailed out the door the night before with her face painted much the same way. Dressed to kill.
‘Going to a film,’ she had claimed.
Bollocks going to a
film. Going to a party.
Uniform had told him later they’d shut down the party where she was. He asked her about it. That was the kind of relationship they had.
‘I told them who you were.’
‘Oho?’
‘And they said, “We’ll let you off, you’ve got enough problems living with that bastard.”’
She laughed in his face. The kind of laugh that made her look like she was still his little girl. It made her features splay across her face.
He’d laughed, too. Big, proper laugh.
‘You look like a prostitute,’ he told her automatically as she made for the front door.
She had looked nothing like. She had looked vibrant and lovely, as exposed as a mermaid flopping about on a rock. She had this look about her, as if she’d got a sense of her own power. Like the dictator of her own body, just waiting to take things too far and bring the world tumbling down.
She hadn’t seemed offended at the comment. She hadn’t needed to. It was his way of saying, Yes, I can see you’re growing up. And her silence was her way of saying, Yes, I know that you’ve noticed, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was surprising how much that hurt.
She hadn’t gone to get changed. He had grumbled. It was what they expected of each other.
‘She’ll learn,’ Maureen had said. ‘She’s just like I was when I was that age.’
That was in the script, too, the knowing look.
That seemed unfair to Whitworth. Perhaps that was the real reason why men craved sons – because there was something so secret, so unknowable, about daughters. That was what was so frustrating about all the fuck-me clothes and the fuck-you attitude. It made it seem like she was an open book, while his real daughter, the one that was small and neat enough to be known, smiled tauntingly as she walked away.
Perhaps the meaning had been hidden in her name like a stowaway all along. Heartbreaker.
It made sense.
