It was a long, long time before you told me what you’d been doing. It must have been the day I left for England. I can’t remember how the subject came up. I remember the greyness of the room, and outside the first big wind of the autumn whipping the tops off the waves. There wouldn’t be any boats going out. I can’t believe I asked you, after all those months of not asking and pretending that the nights didn’t happen and all we had to think about were the days. But I’d had enough. I was beyond all of it by then. I didn’t feel eighteen, or any age. Each time I shut my eyes I saw a boy who was small for his age, going back to where the basketball game had been. I saw you climb until you could reach the little kid who was trapped in a hoop. I saw you try over and over to lift him up with your arms that were still hairless and puny, and each time his weight fell back, jamming him tighter. The hoop was iron and it dug into his belly. He couldn’t see any end to what you might do to him, and he broke up then and started to cry. You were trying to make it all right, but it was too late for that.
Too late for me as well. I was going back to England to make my life.
You began to talk.
‘Sometimes I just have to walk. I can’t stay in the room. It’s like everything’s up in here, buzzing around my head like a swarm of bees. I know I’m not gonna get to sleep. So I go out and I walk miles, along the shore road or round town. The rest of the night sometimes. Mostly it feels better to be out there and moving.
‘I’ll tell you something. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve met another guy walking. A guy my age, dressed the way I’m dressed. We don’t usually talk. He’s back there and I’m back there. One time, this guy stopped me and asked me for a cigarette. I had a pack of Marlboros. He didn’t look like he had much so I told him to take the pack, but he wouldn’t. He said he wasn’t a bum. He asked for a light and he sucked it in deep, like he wanted to suck the flame right down into his lungs. I stayed and smoked a cigarette with him. All the time we stood in the street and smoked we were back there. I heard the leaves hissing. Big, dark-green leaves like hands. They grow so fast, a village can be burned one season and the next you wouldn’t find the site. You fly over it and see nothing. Maybe a wave of brighter green, if you look close, but nobody looks that close. You can hear the jungle sucking and hissing all night long. And you know it thinks it’s gonna get you. Even without people, that’s pretty scary.
‘It was the same for him, the other guy. I knew it. The town was like a paper wrapper you could rip through any time, and you’d be back there. You can’t believe in anything solid, once you’ve seen how quick that jungle moves.’
My time is up. I am behind my desk, my face poised, attentive, neither smiling nor severe. Today I’m glad of the procedure holding me in its rigid embrace. I haven’t got time to think now, only time to respond, to assess, to note, to make my judgment and deliver it. Counsel is seeking an injunction on behalf of his client, Patricia Mary Coogan, wife of John Joseph Coogan of 17b Darley Mansions, Henderton. Counsel is young, thirty or so, glossed with confidence like new paint. His client has received hospital treatment overnight and has been detained in hospital today following an assault by the said John Joseph Coogan. Injuries sustained include a broken rib, contusions to the face and body, and burns to the fingers of the right hand. His client alleges that her husband threatened to kill her if she did not have a proper dinner waiting for him next time he came home.
I lean forward and ask counsel how his client sustained the injuries to the fingers. His eyes widen slightly, he bows his head equally slightly, theatrically.
‘My client alleges that her fingers were forced downwards and brought into contact with the surface of an electric sandwich maker. She was in the process of preparing a cheese-and-tomato sandwich for her husband, at his request, on his return to the matrimonial home at 1.45 a.m., when the alleged assault took place.’ He looks straight at me. What is he thinking? Is this enough for you? Are you satisfied?
‘In addition,’ continues counsel, ‘my client alleges that her husband told her it was a pity she had not been frying chips at the time, or he would have pushed her head into the chip-pan and held it there.’
I look back at counsel, at the smooth, fleshy mouth from which these words have just issued. I imagine what it was like for Mrs Patricia Coogan, to hear them emerging from the mouth of her husband on his return from an evening with friends, at 1.45 a.m.
Counsel and I speak the same language. We know where we are. The embrace that holds me holds him too. He knows that I will grant the injunction. In this case, a power of arrest and penal notice will be granted and attached to the order. But I know that other language, too, the language Mrs Coogan has had to learn. The language of being made to do things you don’t want, one by one, until you end up far down on a path that’s twisted so many times you’ll never find your way back again.
There’s been something else on my mind all day. It’s a section of the County Courts Act 1984, and it relates to the tenure of office of district judges. I read it through last night.
A person appointed to an office to which subsection (I) applies shall hold that office during good behaviour.
The power to remove such a person from his office on account of misbehaviour shall be exercisable by the Lord Chancellor.
Mrs Coogan could have been one of my clients. She would have sat opposite me, her burnt fingers twisting in her lap. I would have offered her a cup of coffee, and put an ashtray on my desk.
Sometimes I still can’t believe I’ve left them all behind. The bull-necked removal man who couldn’t turn his head, after his mate stumbled and sent the weight of a sofa downstairs on top of him. They should never have been trying to do it anyway, it was against their better judgment, but the client was being difficult. Swore the sofa’d go upstairs when any fool could’ve told him it wouldn’t. ‘All right then, we’ll show him,’ said Pete.
The couple who’d had their house on the Bentley estate repossessed, and were living in one room paying off the building society. And now she was pregnant at last, after years of trying. At the end of the interview her husband went down the narrow stairs first. She looked up at me out of the stairwell. Her face was mottled, her hair greasy with the changes of early pregnancy.
She said, ‘We had the nursery all ready, you know, where we lived before. Five years and nothing happened. Well, in the end we shut the door on it. Funny, isn’t it?’ She pressed her lips together, clutched her handbag tightly under her arm, and went away down the stairs.
As I drive home I feel myself drifting. I blink and focus hard on the road, the shine of fallen rain, the low slant of evening sun making the marsh a vivid, liquid green, like the back of a snake. My hands are tight on the steering-wheel. I see her on the edge of the road. It’s Mrs Coogan walking towards me, the chip-pan a halo above her head. I pass her and then she’s there again, still up ahead, her arms stretched out towards me and her hair a crown of fire above the bubbling of her features and the melted pits of her eyes.
TEN
Donald is busy cooking when I get home. I go in to the boys. They are lying on the floor, heads close together, making an electric circuit on a board.
‘It’s going to be a burglar alarm for our room,’ says Joe. I watch Matt as he fits wire into the battery terminal. He doesn’t look up or greet me. Joe may have forgotten the morning, but not Matt.
‘I bought you something,’ I say. Matt catches his bottom lip with his teeth, as if concentrating. ‘I went into a little shop,’ I go on. ‘They had these screwdriver sets.’ I take them out from behind my back. They are well-made, with smooth, heavy handles. There are eight in each set.
‘Here you are. One each.’ Matt’s face flushes, very slightly. He hasn’t expected a present. As I give him his, I slip two pound coins inside the plastic pack. ‘And thank you for looking after Joe.’
‘I didn’t do anything. He’s all right. He could’ve gone to school.’
‘I couldn’t, could I, Mum??
??
‘I don’t think so. The way you looked this morning, Mrs Carmody would have sent you home. Dad’ll look after you tomorrow, then it’s the weekend.’
Matt takes the smallest screwdriver out of the pack to examine it. He won’t use it yet. He likes to pore over new things. Sliding a finger down the handle, he says, ‘A man called.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ His finger again strokes the metal, this time down to the sharp point of the Philips screwdriver. ‘He was an American.’ Joe is watching Matt closely. He knows about this. They’ve been talking about it. Most of the time it’s Joe who needs Matt, but this phone call has left Matt needing his brother. I know how they’ll have sat, heads close together, one talking, the other listening. And when the house made one of its empty sounds, they’ll both have stiffened and looked up, silent, for a long moment.
‘What did he say?’ I ask.
‘He asked if you were home. I said you were in the bath.’
‘That was right.’
‘Then he said he’d call back when you were out of the bathroom. He asked how long I figured you’d be.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘I said you’d be ages because you were washing your hair.’
I can see them. Matt in the hall, holding the phone carefully, soaking up every phrase, and saying what I’ve taught them to say if the phone rings while I am out. Joe at his elbow, watching his older brother’s face.
‘Then he said, Who is that? Am I speaking with Joseph, or is it Matthew?
I hear a stranger’s intonation in my son’s voice, its stresses adult and foreign.
‘Did you tell him?’
‘Yes.’ We are all silent. ‘He asked me!’ cries Matt.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say as lightly as I can. ‘It must have been someone who knows us anyway, or he wouldn’t have known your names. Probably an old friend everyone’s forgotten about. I’ll have to ask Dad who he knows in America.’
‘It was you he wanted to talk to,’ says Matt.
‘Never mind. Forget it. Show me how your circuit’s going to work.’
But Matt sits back on his heels and looks straight at me.
‘He isn’t a friend,’ he says. ‘If he was a friend he’d know nobody ever calls us Joseph and Matthew.’
‘Well, don’t worry about it. You said all the right things.’
Joe squirms close to me. In a sudden rush he says, ‘He said something else as well. Matt didn’t want us to tell you.’
‘Go on.’
Matt flushes. ‘When I said you were washing your hair, he said, “That’s going to take a while then, with all that long hair your mother’s got.” ’ Again the faint, disturbing echo. My face must have changed, because Matt reaches over and punches Joe’s arm. ‘I told you not to tell her.’ But it’s a routine punch. Matt is relieved that I know. The call has frightened him.
‘But you haven’t got long hair, Mum,’ says Joe.
‘No. He made a mistake.’
Matt stirs, as if he’s going to say something more, then he turns back to wiring up the battery.
I stand up. ‘I’d better help Dad with the meal. You two finish this, then you can give us a demonstration.’
There’s the phone, at the bottom of the stairs. I put my hand on it. It is quite still. I can’t remember if modern phones vibrate, the way the old ones used to, before they rang. If it throbbed under my hand now, and began to ring, what would I do? I want it to ring. I want to pick up the phone and ask, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
I find Donald in the kitchen.
‘How did the bank go?’
‘I’ll tell you in a minute. I’ve got to measure this.’ He presses mashed potato down into a cup, frowning. I always remember the smell of the chemistry lab when I watch Donald cook. The gassy smell of the Bunsen burners, the stink of scorched wood where some joker turned the flame onto a desk-top, the smell of iron oxide that reminds me of menstruation. Donald doesn’t like cooking. He has to have a scaffolding of cookery books, scales and measuring cups before he begins. Donald doesn’t improvise.
‘What’re you making?’ I ask, leaning against the counter.
‘Corned beef hash.’
‘Oh. Nice. Let me open the tin, you’ll get corned beef all over your bandage.’
The corned beef is warm from standing next to the stove. It glops out of the tin in an oblong the colour of oxblood polish, coated with melting yellow fat. Donald chops at it with a knife, then forks it into the mashed potato. Peering at his recipe, he adds salt, black pepper and grated nutmeg, then binds the hash with beaten egg. I shut my mouth as he pours sunflower oil into the frying pan, fails to let it heat up enough and then whacks in the hash. It doesn’t sizzle. It flops into the cool oil and lies there.
‘Maybe you could turn up the heat a bit.’
Donald turns the flame up to full. I go back upstairs to change. As I strip off my tights I smell burning and run back downstairs in case Donald is out of the kitchen. He is there, standing with a wooden spatula in his hand while the hash smokes on the table.
‘Look at it, the bastard,’ says Donald. ‘The moment my back’s turned it catches fire. Do you think it’s worth scraping it out?’
‘No, not really. Leave it, I’ll make sandwiches. They like sandwiches.’
I open the window wide and the cool evening air floods in. The marsh is beautiful in the distance.
‘Let’s eat quickly and go for a walk.’
‘Do you think it’s all right to leave them?’
It should be me asking that question. ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘They’ll be fine. We’ll walk down to the sea-wall.’
In the bread-bin there are two white sliced loaves. In the fridge there is a tub of soft margarine, a cake of soapy cheddar and two tomatoes. Donald has been to the village shop.
‘I wish you wouldn’t buy this stuff.’
‘It’s cheap.’
It has nothing to do with cheapness. I know it and Donald knows it. It is to do with punishment. I used to go to the market on my way to work, and fill two shopping bags with tight-skinned, shining purple aubergines, with russet apples, Kidd’s Orange apples, peppers so fresh they spat out juice as you cut them, cauliflowers with firm white curds, turnip greens which I cooked with sesame oil and ginger, big, mild Spanish onions, fresh chillies. I would leave the bags lolling in the cool cupboard where I kept my coat, then bus home with the bags on my lap, thinking of what I’d cook. The fruit and veg from the market was half the price it is down here, in the village shop.
November was the best month for the market, when the days were dark and short and the late apples were piled up in heaps next to satsumas, Clementines and navel oranges. Everything was cheap, before the frosts. I bought green tomatoes for chutney, and purple sprouting broccoli, and celery which had been earthed up and had crumbs of black soil in its grooves. The market began at seven, in the winter dark, and the lights would swing inside the canvas awnings and throw huge shadows when the wind blew. There was a smoky, bonfire smell in the air, and the stall-keepers wore fingerless gloves as they shovelled potatoes out of sacks. Later I bought bunches of Christmas greenery, and a hoop of holly to hang on the door, and mistletoe with fragile berries which dropped to the floor and had to be picked up at once in case Joe ate them. I bought nuts and sage, Clementines with long sharp green leaves still on them, drums of figs and long sticky packets of dates.
Now I spread soft margarine on the bread, cut cheese and lay the tomato slices on top.
‘So what did the bank say?’
‘They want to up the payments on the second loan to £560 a month. They don’t like the way the debt is increasing.’
‘It wouldn’t be increasing if they didn’t charge so much interest.’
‘I looked at the figures. We owe £3,600 more than we did this time last year. It’s gone up to £132,000.’
‘Jesus.’
‘With the mortgage,
that’s £204,000. If interest rates go up again –’
‘Take this in to the children, and we’ll go for a walk. We can talk about it then.’
Donald turns to me, smiling. ‘You’d be better off if I died. With the life insurance, and what you earn, you’d be well-off.’
‘You’re not going to die.’
I want him to stop talking of death and debt and go out and get a job as a petrol pump attendant. But he won’t do that. The worst moment was when he sent away to one of those advertisements in the Sunday papers that promise you a new, lucrative career in your spare time. Thanks to taking your course, one year later am earning £,2,500 a month, I drive a P reg. Cavalier, and the family will be holidaying in Florida this year. Thank you, Erskine Enterprises! I didn’t see the pack arrive, but he must have read through it all day, because when I came home that night he said, ‘I’ve got something I want to show you. Sit down and I’ll make you some tea.’
I scanned his face. He looked alive, optimistic, the way he used to look when he was starting work with a new client. He put the mug of tea in front of me and planked down the sales pack on the table.
‘You have to read it carefully. I’ve gone through it several times and I can’t see any snags. It looks pretty good, Simone.’
I read the first few pages. The pack was all information bubbles, testimonials of success, charts of figures. I could not believe that Donald was taking this stuff seriously. I glanced up at him, hoping it was a joke. But his face was eager. He leaned over my shoulder and pointed out a column of figures.
‘That’s all right, don’t you think? Of course I’d have to go into it carefully.’