Point of Impact

by Point of Impact (retail) (epub)

  ‘I know,’ Drew said, ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

  Josie shrugged. ‘It’s all right. It gave me time to do some thinking.’

  ‘That sounds ominous.’

  She gave a brief, brittle smile and looked away.

  Puzzled, Drew went on hesitantly. ‘While I’m apologising, I haven’t got your present either. It’s ordered, but I just didn’t have time to pick it up. I’m really sorry. I’ll get it for you tomorrow.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not unless you’ve ordered it from Copenhagen, Drew. You’re going on detachment, remember? That’s why we’re doing this tonight instead of on my birthday.’

  Drew began to stammer out another apology, but she held a hand up. ‘Don’t worry. It honestly doesn’t matter at all.’

  ‘On Monday then,’ he said, but Josie just gave another thin-lipped smile.

  He studied her face for a moment, half hidden by her long, dark-brown hair, then shrugged and signalled to the barman.

  When the champagne arrived, Drew raised his glass to Josie. ‘Happy birthday. You look sensational.’

  ‘Thanks. You bought the dress for me last year, remember, so you deserve some of the credit.’

  He smiled. ‘I do remember some things, Josie. Green suits you. It goes with your eyes.’

  It was a joke – Josie’s eyes were dark brown – but she barely registered it. Instead she returned the scrutiny, shaking her head. ‘You look like hell.’

  He grimaced. ‘Yeah, I know, tough day at work.’

  She waited for a further explanation, but there was none forthcoming. A frown flickered across her face and her expression became even more set.

  They ordered their meal and then exchanged desultory small talk, neither seeming to have their heart in it. Drew remained preoccupied, Josie even more distant and brooding. She answered most of his questions in monosyllables. Drew felt himself floundering.

  After they were seated at their table, he made a last effort to rescue an evening apparently slipping into terminal decline. ‘So how was your day? Not good, I’d say.’

  She grimaced. ‘I’ve been working on a story for weeks. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever been involved with. I’ve built it up from nothing, tracking down sources, following up every lead, sweating blood to make it absolutely watertight. Do you know what happened to it?’

  Drew could have made a pretty fair guess, but he prudently shook his head.

  ‘It’s been spiked. Not because it’s not true – every word of it is – but because, and I quote, “there may be legal complications”. That’s editor-speak for, “the fat-arsed industrialist involved is a substantial donor to Conservative Party funds and his libel lawyers are like rottweilers, so thanks for the story, Josie, but why don’t you go and do a feature on the fashion industry or six interesting ways to serve potatoes?”’ She gave a bleak smile. ‘So I suppose you could say it wasn’t the best day I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Is that why you’re so quiet?’

  As she was about to reply, the waiter arrived with their first course. She checked and changed the subject. ‘How was yours?’

  ‘Not the best one I’ve ever had,’ Drew said, staring blankly at his plate.

  Josie waved away the hovering waiter and as Drew looked up she held his gaze for the first time that evening and asked gently, ‘Want to talk about it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not really.’

  She bit her lip and lapsed back into silence.

  ‘What’s the matter, Josie? Is it just work?’

  She smiled fleetingly to herself, drained her glass and laid her hands, palms down, on the tablecloth in front of her. ‘No, Drew, I’m not like you. When I go home at the end of a day, I try to leave all that stuff behind me.’

  He mechanically refilled her glass. ‘I try not to bring it home either.’

  ‘But you leave a part of yourself behind. You’re not really here with me now, are you? A part of your mind is somewhere else. Isn’t it?’

  Her stare challenged him to deny it. He nodded.

  ‘So where are you right now, Drew?’

  He shook his head, his gaze downcast.

  When he looked up again, her eyes had filled with tears.

  ‘Josie, I’m all right, really I am,’ Drew said, reaching across the table to take her hand.

  She pulled it out of reach and shook her head, gulping back the tears. ‘You don’t understand do you? It’s not that at all.’ Josie took a long drink from her wine. ‘It’s not going to work, Drew. It’s never going to work. We can’t do this any more.’

  ‘You mean split up? Move out?’

  She gave a sad smile. ‘You can hardly call it that, Drew. I’ve never really moved in. I’ve never been allowed to be part of your life. I’m just permitted to drop in for a visit occasionally, to take my toothbrush for walks.’

  Even as Drew began to argue, he knew in his heart that she was right. ‘I can’t ask you to share the sort of life I lead,’ he said quietly, as if trying to convince himself as much as her. ‘When I go to Germany, we both know you’d never be happy to tag meekly along behind. Three years of loyalty and submissiveness, flower-arranging classes and coffee mornings isn’t really your style.’

  Drew read her expression and fell silent for a few moments, knowing what she was thinking.

  ‘I can’t tell you what you want to hear, Josie.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. I wouldn’t want you to. You’d be doing it for the wrong reasons. If you passed up the posting to Germany, it would always be lying there for the rest of our lives, ready to be picked up and thrown in my face in an argument.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Perhaps. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, does it?’

  She blinked away another tear and met Drew’s gaze with a level stare. ‘You know it’s the only thing to do, don’t you?’

  Drew looked away, remembering the night he had told Josie for the first time that he loved her. Later he had lain awake with her sleeping body cradled in his arms. Filled with a love so intense it almost hurt him, he had looked down at her face, hungrily absorbing every detail. Her lips were slightly parted in a smile as she slept, showing the faint gap in her front teeth that he still found ridiculously attractive.

  Stooping to kiss her, he had made a vow to himself. If ever he was tempted to break with her, he would recall the way he had felt at that moment. He was doing so now, but the intensity of feeling had faded like a sepia photograph. The intimacy between them had once seemed as constant and natural as breathing; all he felt now was an aching hollowness. He nodded slowly.

  They continued to sit in silence, Josie seeing him as if for the first time, taking in every detail and committing it to memory – the ruffled black hair, dark-brown eyes and the slightly crooked nose, broken when he was a child and clumsily reset. It contrasted oddly with his classical good looks, as if vandals had attacked a statue of a Greek god with a hammer.

  Drew stared at his hands.

  As if reading his thoughts, she said, ‘Remember what you once told me? “Never let us part on a cross word. Too many pilots go flying and don’t come back. If my number comes up, I don’t want our last words to each other to have been angry ones.”’

  He nodded.

  She reached for the bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Let’s not part on cross words or long silences now, let’s just enjoy what’s left of the evening.’

  He smiled gratefully and raised his glass in a toast. ‘To Drew and Josie, the ones that got away.’

  She laughed, a little too harshly, and Drew pretended not to notice.

  She searched his face, then said, ‘It’s nobody’s fault, Drew.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re being polite.’

  ‘Perhaps a little,’ she conceded, ‘but you’ve got your career, I’ve got mine and there just aren’t enough points of contact between them. Even when you were in the country, you might as well have been operating on Eastern Standard Time for all I saw o
f you.’

  ‘It’s called daytime, actually. You wouldn’t recognise it since you don’t have to crawl in to your office until eleven. By the time you get home again, I’m already yawning and counting the hours to my next dawn briefing.’

  She smiled. ‘Was it my imagination or was there an edge creeping back into that last remark?’

  He bowed his head in mock shame. ‘We could scarcely have found two more mutually antagonistic occupations, could we?’

  Josie laughed, this time an unforced one. ‘Nor two more hostile groups of friends. Do you remember those disastrous evenings when we tried to put your Air Force mates and my media friends in the same room?’

  Drew nodded, wincing at the memory. ‘It was like having six Arthur Scargills sitting down to dinner with half a dozen Margaret Thatchers. They either argued furiously or just sat and gazed at each other in total incomprehension.’

  Josie smiled at the memory. ‘When they’d all gone home, we used to howl with laughter.’ She gave a bright, brittle smile. ‘At least we’ll avoid the usual problem in break-ups: our friends having to choose between us. I can’t think of a single friend we’ve got in common.’

  ‘Nick and Sally?’

  She shook her head. ‘Hardly. Sally’s always been much too fond of you for my liking. Anyway, you’re even worse. I bet you can’t name a single one of my friends that you’d willingly meet for a drink.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Drew said, grinning. ‘I can’t name a single one of your friends. It’s not just them, though. I call the people on squadron mates, but if I’m honest Nick’s the only really close friend I’ve got there. I can’t think of anyone else that I’d actually phone when I was away from the base and say, “Fancy a drink?”’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s true. You’re all thrown together, you work together and inevitably you socialise together, particularly when you’re overseas. You even entrust your lives to each other, but…’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not just talking about yourself ? It sounds awfully like Drew Miller syndrome to me – show no emotion, reveal no weakness.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s everyone. Perhaps it’s just self-protection. If you don’t get too close to people, you don’t feel as much pain when they don’t come back from a sortie one day.’

  He fell silent again, his face clouding.

  ‘Drew?’

  He spoke in a low voice, staring down at his hands as they traced patterns on the tablecloth. ‘You know when you asked me where I was earlier on?’ She nodded. ‘I was back on a hillside in the Dales. I’d been helping to scrape a mate’s brains off the trunk of a tree. We put all the bits of him we could find into a black rubber body bag. When we’d finished doing that we had to start all over again with the even more mangled remains of a pilot so young that he probably didn’t start shaving till last week. I was at the site all night.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was gentle.

  He shrugged, trying again to distance himself from his memories of the crash site.

  She watched as he wrestled with his thoughts, fighting the urge to wrap him in her arms. ‘This one seems to have hit you really hard.’

  ‘This one was different.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s the first crash where I’ve seen a real mate, a true friend, killed. Not just killed, but mangled, mutilated, torn apart. There’ll be no viewing of the body at his funeral.’

  He pulled himself back to the present and gave her a sheepish smile. ‘Sorry to lay that on you.’

  ‘Don’t be. I wish you’d been like this more often. You never tell me anything about what you do.’

  Drew looked wistfully at her. ‘It’s funny, now we’ve decided to split up we’re getting on better than we have for months.’

  She laughed, though her eyes remained sad. ‘It’s because we’re demob happy, Drew. It’s like the end-of-term party: even if you didn’t like school, you always enjoyed the bit just before you got the hell out of it.’ She saw the hurt in his eyes and added, ‘I don’t mean it quite like that…’

  ‘Josie…’

  She shook her head. ‘We’d better go.’

  Drew signalled for the bill. ‘Do you want to come back to the flat?’

  ‘I’ll come back, but only to pick up my toothbrush and a couple of bits and pieces.’

  ‘Get them another time.’

  ‘No, Drew, it’s better if there isn’t another time. Really.’

  They left the restaurant and walked back to his flat in silence, their footsteps echoing across the deserted town square.

  He opened the heavy front door and switched on the light. As usual, it cut out again before they had walked the length of the cavernous, oak-floored hallway and he had to grope his way to the next switch at the bottom of the stairs. It was an odd but altogether typical touch of parsimony from the owner of the house: the vast crystal chandelier, studded with a dozen light bulbs, was operated by a time switch to save money.

  As soon as Drew unlocked the door of the flat, Josie disappeared into the bathroom to collect her things. She came out a few moments later and stood facing him by the door. She gave him one last searching look, her head tilted to one side. ‘I hope you’ll be really happy with someone one day, Drew. I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.’

  ‘Me too.’

  She kissed him quickly on the cheek and then slipped out. Drew heard her heels clicking on the wooden floor. There was a dull thud as the front door swung shut, and then silence. He ran to the window and watched her walking out across the gravel in the moonlight. She turned in the gateway, as if she knew he was watching, and raised a hand in farewell. Then she was gone.

  He closed the curtains, sat down and stared dully around him. He had lived there for four years, but the flat still had an air of impermanence. It was well, if austerely, furnished, but could easily have passed for a hotel suite, save for the stack of paperbacks on the floor, patiently waiting for Drew to put up some shelves. In those four years it had acquired none of the clutter or the patina of use of a family home and there were times, as now, when it felt as hollow as a drum.

  He walked through to the bedroom, undressed and got into bed. He tried to read, then switched the light off, but lay awake a long time, staring into the dark.

  * * *

  The alarm rang at six, jolting Drew out of sleep. He showered and dressed and went into the kitchen to make some breakfast. The fridge was barren but for a pint of milk, a tub of yoghurt and some cheese. He sniffed the milk, then washed both it and the yoghurt down the sink.

  He picked up his bag and was on his way out when he saw a note on the doormat. He opened it eagerly but then groaned as he saw the microscopic, anal-retentive handwriting of his next-door neighbour: ‘If guests are leaving late at night, please ensure that the front door is closed quietly, avoiding disturbance and annoyance to others.’ He crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it back through his neighbour’s letterbox, then walked out, shutting the front door with a crash that resounded throughout the building.

  As he unlocked his Audi, he glanced up at the first floor. On the nights when she had stayed there, no matter how tired she was, Josie would always be at the window to wave to him as he drove off.

  Only ghosts looked down at him today. He swung the car around fast, carving crescents into the newly raked gravel, then drove off through the gates and across the square, heading east. After half a mile he turned off into a tree-lined suburban street to pick up his navigator.

  Drew pulled up outside a red-brick Victorian house, once the vicarage for the church at the bottom of the road. He opened the gate and walked round to the back door, picking his way through a forest of kids’ toys, bikes, buckets and spades.

  He rapped on the glass and stepped inside. Nick’s wife, Sally, was standing in front of the Aga, cooking toast and trying to soothe the baby bawling in her arms. Nick was chasing their elder son, Martin, around the big pine table in the centre of the kitchen, while the
other boy, Simon, sat at the table yelling encouragement and spraying cornflakes in all directions.

  Their little daughter, Jane, was lecturing her teddy bear loudly as she tried to feed it bread and jam. The kettle was whistling, the dog was barking furiously and, ignored by everyone, breakfast television was blaring out of a portable TV in the corner.

  ‘Uncle Drew. Uncle Drew.’ Martin ran over and hugged Drew’s legs. Drew ruffled the boy’s hair and then released him back to the chase.

  He sat down at the table and within seconds the two-year-old was clambering up on to his lap, clutching a book, her face a mask of raspberry jam. ‘Read story, Drew. Read big story.’

  A flannel came flying across the room. ‘Give her face a wipe, Drew, or we’ll have to hose you down before you go to work.’

  Nick glanced at his watch. ‘Sorry, princess, no time for stories. We’re going to be late.’

  Nick scooped up each of his children in turn, then slipped an arm round Sally’s waist and kissed her tenderly. ‘I’ll miss you. Look after yourself and look after the brood, especially this one.’ He kissed the baby, who babbled and smiled back at him.

  Drew watched them, then looked up to meet Sally’s amused gaze. ‘Bit of a soft face there, Drew. I’d say it won’t be too long before you and Josie are having a couple of little ones yourself.’

  His face clouded. ‘Don’t buy a new hat just yet. Bye everyone.’

  As he turned towards the door, Sally shot a questioning look at Nick, but he just shrugged his shoulders and followed Drew out to the car.

  Nick flopped into the passenger seat, banging the door as always, while Drew winced.

  ‘Created by robots, destroyed by morons.’

  ‘And a vorch sprung durch technik to you too! Great morning, Drew.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Uh-oh, what’s the problem this time – sex or money?’

  ‘Josie. It’s her birthday tomorrow, but as we’re going to Denmark I took her out for dinner last night instead. I think it would be fair to say that the evening didn’t go quite as I planned.’

  ‘A big row?’

  Drew shrugged. ‘Not really, but we did end up agreeing to part.’