‘Who wants to get married anyway? It’s only a bit of paper.’
‘Didn’t know you were thinking about it—’
‘I wasn’t. Not really.’
‘I mean, if you really want—’
‘Forget it. I didn’t mean it.’
Oh, the embarrassment, the horror of it. Natalie got up and went into the kitchen. Clattering and banging, in a fury of mortification, she washed up last night’s dishes.
They didn’t speak of it again. All week the conversation lay between them like a dead weight. I thought I knew him, Natalie reflected bitterly. How could I have got him so terribly wrong? She told none of her girlfriends about that humiliating night; their pity, their contempt for Kieran, and their rallying female solidarity would have been too much to bear.
To an outsider they carried on as before. Kieran was out most evenings. He was helping his dad, who was an electrician, refurbish a bar. This sudden interest in work was obviously an avoidance tactic. Back home they were polite with each other, as if they had recently met; Kieran was uncharacteristically solicitous – no flare-ups, no irritability. He even took their washing to the launderette. Natalie had no idea what was going on in his mind, none at all.
She had forgotten the conversation that had prompted this whole business. Tampering with cheques . . . how ludicrous it seemed now! How could she have entertained such a thought? Maybe it had spooked him. She tried to convince herself of this: that her plan had shaken him to the core and it would take him a while to recover. She tried to justify it this way, but it didn’t work. The truth was simpler: he didn’t love her the way she loved him.
On Friday her wages were smaller than usual. She took the pay slip to Mrs Roe, her supervisor, a woman with a mole on her chin, a woman who, until this week, Natalie had considered past it. But things were different now. Mrs Roe was a woman somebody had loved enough to marry; no doubt there was a Mr Roe around, oiling his lawnmower ready for spring. No doubt there were Roe children, grown-up now, who dropped in for Sunday lunch. Natalie gazed at Mrs Roe with venom.
‘There must be some mistake,’ she said.
‘Ah yes,’ said her supervisor. ‘I presume you were informed. It only affects the smokers.’ She gazed out of the window, at the rain-lashed car park. ‘You should have received a letter.’
Natalie shoved official-looking letters behind her toaster. ‘I never got a letter,’ she said.
‘Those who smoke, and choose to do so in the designated areas, are from this month onwards subject to a mandatory time penalty.’
‘A what?’
‘The equivalent minutes are deducted from their wages – seven minutes, to be precise, mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Fourteen minutes in total.’
Natalie stared at her. ‘You must be joking.’ Mrs Roe was unmoved. She didn’t care; in a month she would be retired and living on Lundy.
‘It’s so unfair!’ said Natalie. ‘They don’t give a toss, not about us. You know how much profit they made last year?’
She was sitting with Kieran in a Slug and Lettuce. Though outraged, a small part of her was secretly gratified by NT’s behaviour. It would draw Kieran closer to her, in sympathy.
Friday night, and the place was heaving with people. Natalie had to shout to make herself heard. ‘They don’t give a toss, what a dump! Monday morning I’m going to give in my notice.’
Things were easier between them; she felt it. A good moan put things back to normal. Happiness swept through her. So what if her boyfriend didn’t want to marry her? Until recently she had felt exactly the same.
‘Fuck ’em,’ she said. ‘Fuck them all.’
Natalie was a spirited young woman, toughened by life, for she had learnt resilience at an early age. It had been a humiliating week but all that was over now. She had an adorable boyfriend; he might be feckless, but in his own way he loved her. He just wasn’t the marrying kind.
Kieran traced a puddle of beer with his finger. She gazed at his bent head, his hair scraped back from a centre parting. To tell the truth she didn’t like his long hair, it made him look girlie, but what the hell. He was the best lover she had ever had. He could make her come just by touching her nipple with his finger.
He hadn’t spoken, but then he had never been overly interested in her work. It was beyond his comprehension, how people could work at office jobs, nine to six, day in day out. So she just thought that his mind had drifted. They were going to a Michael Douglas film later.
He looked up. ‘Natalie, we’ve got to talk.’
‘What?’
‘This is kind of hard, sweetheart . . .’ He stood up. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
His mate Dexter arrived with the van he drove, for kids with learning disabilities. Natalie, sitting on the bed, heard the thuds in the hallway as they removed Kieran’s belongings.
After a while the thuds ceased. Down in the street the van drove away. The engine rattled; there was something wrong with the exhaust.
Kieran tapped on the door, already a visitor. He put his set of keys on the bed. Under the leather jacket he wore the green sweater she had given him for his birthday, back in August. This was the first time she had seen him wearing it.
‘Let’s stay in touch.’ He hesitated, then he kissed her forehead. ‘You going to be OK?’
What reply could she give to this? She took the piece of paper he gave her. A phone number was written on it. Dex had apparently found him a room; maybe they had spent all week looking for one. She didn’t have the energy to speculate.
Kieran gazed around the walls. Maybe he was checking he hadn’t forgotten something; maybe he was remembering this bedroom for later. She doubted this; he lived simply, in the present. He had already disappeared from this place.
‘Take care,’ he said, and then he was gone. A moment later she heard the roar of his motorbike, for the last time.
Natalie, who seldom phoned her mother, tried the last number she had been given. It was somewhere in the Dundee area.
‘Nobody of that name here,’ said a voice and rang off.
Later, after a spell of inaction sitting in the kitchen, she went to collect her car from the garage. It was already dark; Saturday’s meagre spell of daylight seemed to have come and gone without her noticing it.
The garage was up an alleyway, under a bridge. The cobbles shone greasily in the lamplight.
‘Thursday last, a girl was stabbed along there,’ said the mechanic. ‘She was a Hungarian.’
Natalie leaned against her car. She had drunk the best part of a bottle of wine – maybe all of it, she couldn’t remember.
‘Can’t take no chances,’ he said. ‘You’re a wise girl, getting an alarm fitted.’ He moved closer. ‘This here activates it . . . series of beeps, listen . . . you press this, here, it immobilizes the engine.’
She tried to concentrate. They were alone. Outside, a train rattled past; the tins on the shelves trembled.
‘And I fitted you a nice new radio.’
She said: ‘Looks like I’ve bought back my old one.’
‘Naughty naughty.’ The mechanic wiped his hands on a rag. His nose was red and spongy, as if made from different material to the rest of his face. Yesterday, when she had brought in the car, it had been another man here. The garage seemed changed too – more cramped and lurid, with girlie calendars on the wall. Overnight her old life had gone, and been replaced by things that were entirely unfamiliar. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find, when she returned home, that her flat had disappeared.
The man took her credit card and swiped it through his machine. ‘Oh oh,’ he said, ‘who’s been a bad girl then?’
‘What?’
‘Won’t take it. You’ve exceeded your limit.’
She paused. ‘Can I pay by instalments?’
He passed her the card. ‘Only if I can look at your tits.’
Natalie’s head swam. I’m drunk.
‘Let’s take a look at those boobies.’ He moved to the d
oor. It was one of those up-and-over ones. Grasping the lever, he started to slide it down.
‘Don’t close it,’ she said. ‘There’s nobody around.’
It was freezing. Her fingers fumbled as she unbuttoned her coat. It seemed to take ages. She pulled up her sweater and T-shirt; then she pushed up her bra around her throat.
A moment passed. ‘They do you proud,’ he said, and turned away.
The concrete floor was stained, as if an ox had been slaughtered there. His face averted, the man blew his nose.
She readjusted her clothing and wrote him a cheque for the first instalment. He opened the car door for her.
‘My wife lost her hand,’ he said.
Gales blew across the moors, those dark November days. Sheep were battered by the rain. Trees cracked and split, exposing their wounds. Natalie was adrift, an ice floe broken loose. Oh, her friends were sympathetic. I never liked him, they said. Typical bloke, they said, afraid of commitment. You can do better than him, they said. But they were preoccupied, flat-hunting in the evenings, absorbed by their own futures. Nobody wanted to go out any more, drinking and clubbing, staving off the darkness. They were becoming too old for that. They had found their own pockets of light and had disappeared into them, one by one. Even Farida, her closest ally at that time, was preoccupied by her wedding preparations.
Natalie returned at night to an empty flat she could no longer afford. Bills silted up behind the toaster; the landlord had left a message on her answerphone. Outside, whoops echoed from the multistorey car park. She missed Kieran, desperately. That a man is worthless, in the eyes of the world, fails to ease the pain. In fact it makes it keener. How could she have been such a fool?
And then, two weeks after Kieran’s departure, she came home to find the lights fused. Blundering around in the darkness, her lighter flickering, she suddenly burst into tears. She sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Where was her father, now she needed him? The last she had heard, he was living on a beach in Thailand, with a girl called Phoo Long. She was alone in the world, lost, her breasts exposed to men with handless wives.
Through the wall, a woman shrieked with laughter. Kieran knew about electrics; it was he who had found them this rotten flat in the first place. How she longed to hear his voice. He would come round and fix the lights. He would gaze at her, in a blaze of illumination, and realize what a mistake he had made.
Natalie found the piece of paper and dialled his number. A machine answered. It was a woman’s voice.
‘Hi. Angie and Kieran aren’t at home but please leave a message . . .’
Revenge, like love, is a driving force, blind to consequences. Like love, too, it is a form of madness. Looking back, later, Natalie realized that she was possessed by something beyond her control. She had done some wild things in the past, but nothing as bold as the plan that began to form in her head.
Maybe it was triggered by Stacey’s doodlings . . . MRS S. WINDSOR . . . STACEY WINDSOR . . . the married names that existed in a dream, holograms of hope superimposed over a reality that lay beneath, stubbornly problematical. Natalie had done this herself, when she was a teenager.
She could remember the moment, however, when it all fell into place. They were huddled in the smokers’ doorway, three of them, shifting like cattle in the cold. It was four o’clock and already dark. Up on the roof of the building, amongst the masts and satellite dishes, glowed the sign: NT: IT’S YOUR CALL. They stood there, smoking their way through seven minutes of wages. The top-floor windows were lit; those were the management offices and the corporate hospitality suites. Needless to say, none of them had been invited up there to nibble canapés.
They were talking about love, and for a while Natalie didn’t listen. For the hundredth time, she was picturing Kieran and Angie in their love nest. He hadn’t wasted any time, had he? How long had he been seeing her, on the sly? Had he been planning it for weeks? Natalie had met this Angie once in the pub; she was his friend Dexter’s ex-wife, a mousy woman whose features Natalie could scarcely recall. Kieran had left no address, only a phone number. His new life existed in limbo, but the images were horribly real. Was he pinioning Angie against the kitchen units as she tried to dish up dinner? Was he nuzzling her ear, the way that made Natalie swoon, and sliding his hand between her thighs? The setting for these excruciating tableaux was, for some reason, a dated, soap-opera domesticity that was entirely alien to the life she and Kieran had shared. It pained her, to make it too real. Besides, try as she might, she couldn’t picture Angie and Kieran together. She was not his type. One’s successor, however, always gives one a jolt, it reveals the unknowableness of the man one had thought so familiar.
Natalie suddenly realized: it was for Angie’s benefit that he had cleaned his teeth. In their three years together he had never once visited the dentist.
Belinda, the other smoker, was cross-questioning Farida about her impending wedding. The girls at work kept returning to the subject of Bashir, it fascinated them.
‘He might be a mass-murderer for all you know,’ said Belinda. ‘How can you do it?’
‘It worked all right for my mum and dad,’ said Farida. ‘I mean, marriage, it’s all a matter of chance, isn’t it?’
‘What about love?’
‘Love comes later,’ said Farida. ‘You have to work at it. It’s all a lottery anyway . . .’
Headlights swung across the car park; far away, Natalie heard the hum of traffic on the slip road that led to the motorway. The warehouses were bathed in a sodium glow. She had never seen a sign of life there but people must be working in those pointless places, just as she did.
‘It’s all luck. You never really know what you’re going to get, even if you think you know somebody.’ Farida flicked her butt into the darkness. ‘My mum says it’s like raw ingredients.’
Natalie inhaled a lungful of smoke. Something stirred in her brain.
‘. . . they don’t mean anything till you start to cook them . . .’
Like the white dog, Natalie’s earlier plan had long since disappeared. The one that replaced it was so staggeringly bold that it took her breath away.
She leaned against the doorway. She wanted to burst into laughter and grab the others. Guess what I’ve just thought of! She wanted to see their faces.
Why not give it a try? After all, she had nothing to lose.
The wind blew down from the moors. It blew, with it, the faint sound of sheep bleating. Such a flustered, female noise; so silly. They sounded more nervous than she did.
Back at her desk, Natalie remained calm. She told herself: it’s just a game, just a lark. Casually, she downloaded the NT staff list. Bella in Personnel had opened the file for her. Natalie scrolled down the surnames and stopped at T. She gazed at it.
After all, she had made some stupid choices in the past. Why not try pot-luck this time? It seemed as good a way as any. And if it didn’t work, nobody would be the loser. Nobody would even know.
‘Nat!’
She jumped. Beside her, through the partition, Farida burst into laughter.
‘Nat, come and look at this.’
On her screen was a woman’s face. Hi, I’m Tiffany. Come and lick me for a fiver!
‘Surely your tongue would stick to the screen.’
Natalie laughed. Suddenly, what she was doing struck her as ridiculous. Worse than that, as mad. Touching the Print key, she already felt like a criminal. The paper slid like a tongue out of the machine.
She only printed up the T page, of course. There were nineteen of them, of whom six were men. Tring, Mr P.: Product Development, Room 812 . . . Talbot, Mr L.: Office Services . . . She scanned the list as if the names would tell her something, as if she could learn some detail about these men simply by inspecting their initials. Few of them looked familiar; NT was a large organization, over two hundred people worked in the building and there was little fraternizing, not in that godforsaken place; after work everybody simply got the hell out of there.
&nb
sp; She held the sheet. The room drained away from her, like waves retreating hissingly from the shore, and she sat there alone in the echoing space. She thought: I’ve done nothing yet. I need do nothing. Across the partition, Sioban told Farida: ‘They did it in his Datsun.’
Time passed. Natalie sat there. Her pile of envelopes remained unopened, but nobody noticed. Mrs Roe was in a meeting. At five thirty people started leaving for home.
‘Know that girl in Huddersfield, the one who was raped? My brother was at school with her. He threw her asthma inhaler out of the window.’
Rapes, murders . . . crime was in the air today. Natalie sat there, twisting the ring around her finger. It was the E-string from Damon’s guitar, his Martin; before she had left that night she had sliced it off with his coke-cutting knife. Later she had plaited it into a ring, her small, erotic memento.
Natalie rallied. She thought: I’ve got nothing to lose. After all, I only have to look at the guys and see if any of them takes my fancy. Where’s the harm in that? And if one of them delivered her from this, from the boredom and debt, the helplessness of it all, then who would care later what means had been used?
Natalie went outside. It was freezing. Hailstones bounced off the roofs of the cars. She thought: This time next year I’ll be lying on a beach. This time next year I’ll be free.
And how sweet that revenge would be.
Chapter Two
NATALIE, WHO COULD be kind to strangers, once helped an old man across the road. Afterwards she said: ‘Shame you can’t see me, because I’m really pretty.’
She was stoned at the time; that excused her. But it was true. She was slim and freckled, with delicate shoulder blades that melted the heart. Her body was firm; she worked out, she took care of it. In those days, before she changed her appearance, her hair was tinted red – curly, wayward hair pinned up with butterfly clips. People could imagine her at school – bright and restless, up to mischief – for there was a vibrancy to her, she radiated energy; next to her voltage other people dimmed. This came from the simplest of sources: she was basically happy. She had sloughed off her past; she travelled through life singing loudly in her car, living for the moment. Kieran had thrown her off-balance, but what the hell. She would show him.