The new development was out on the Selby Road, near the Temple Newsam golf course. Two models of homes were available: the Commodore (Tudor style) and the Burlington (more Georgian). Theirs was a Burlington. One day, Colin thought, he was going to wake up. He would find himself back in Rowton Crescent, back in the lounge with his mam, the clock ticking and his only future the false dawn of the convector fire’s radiant glow. He still couldn’t believe that this house belonged to him and Natalie, that she was downstairs, putting their new pots and pans into the kitchen (he could hear the clatter). That she loved him, and was living with him. What had he done to deserve this? He had always been slow, teachers jiggling impatiently; the speed of what had happened took his breath away. He still hadn’t caught up with himself.
Colin stood at the window. Maybe none of this existed. After all, a year ago it hadn’t. A year ago, none of these houses had been built. This place was the grounds of an old mansion, now a conference centre. It was overgrown shrubberies, then, and secret places. When Colin was a boy he used to explore here, slashing at nettles with his stick and collecting frogspawn from the pond which, if he remembered correctly, now lay somewhere beneath the turning area for numbers 15–21. The whole place had been concreted over.
The same process seemed to have happened to his life. The dazzling appearance of Natalie (oh, that towel!) had obliterated his past. He still went to work, of course, and returned to Rowton Crescent to visit his mother and feed his livestock, which would soon be removed to his new home when he had prepared their living quarters. But all that seemed strangely irrelevant. Even his reptiles (which Natalie called his pets, though they weren’t pets, they were wild creatures which he was privileged to tend), even they felt distanced from him. They were like pupils whose teacher has lost interest in them once he has a family of his own.
He heard the bare boards creak as Natalie came up the stairs. She put her put her arms around him. ‘Our first day,’ she said.
He crushed her thin body against his. ‘Happy?’
She nodded, her hair rubbing against his face.
‘I was thinking, this could be baby’s room,’ he said. ‘When we have one.’ Disentangling himself, he gestured around. ‘I could make a cot and a little cupboard, I’m handy with my hands.’
‘Hang on, Colin,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit early for that.’
‘Don’t you want a family?’
‘Aren’t we happy just as we are?’
‘You said you wanted children,’ he said. ‘I can look after you, now we’re settled. You could give up your job.’
‘Give it up?’ She looked at him.
‘You’re always complaining—’
‘I’m liking it more now.’
‘Why?’
She paused. ‘I just am.’
She blushed. He had seldom seen her blush; the pink bloomed beneath her freckles. Maybe he had introduced the subject too abruptly; he hadn’t had any practice in this, in any of it.
‘Anyway, I’ve got you a baby.’ She took his hand and led him out of the room.
Baffled, he followed her downstairs. They went into the lounge. Amongst the piles of belongings – suitcases and bulging bin liners – stood a cardboard box.
‘Open it,’ she said.
He pulled open the flaps. Inside, curled in straw, lay a python.
‘That’s our baby,’ she said.
It lay there, its great flanks wedged against the side of the box. Its blond skin was patterned with the palest zigzags – olive green, yellow. It was curled tight; when it started to move, its skin slid in two directions like traffic on the motorway.
Colin, his mouth hanging open, stared at it. Slowly it raised its small, shapely head and looked at him, its tongue flicking.
A reticulated python. An albino reticulated python. So rare were they, so precious, that they seldom came on the market. It was a perfect specimen – two years old, he would guess, still a juvenile.
‘Natty . . .’ His voice croaked; he cleared his throat. ‘I don’t believe it . . .’
‘Like it? She’s a female, they said, two years old.’
He couldn’t speak. The beauty of the snake moved him profoundly. What touched his heart, however, was Natalie. He had had a suspicion that she wasn’t as keen on reptiles as he had believed; after that first day she had expressed little interest in talking about them. What a dolt he had been.
‘I told you I liked snakes.’ Smiling, she unzipped his fly.
‘Natalie—’
‘Got a nice big one in here?’ Her fingers slid in; they caressed him through his underpants.
Colin was a modest young man. Living with Natalie had loosened some of his inhibitions but he suddenly thought: What if my mam came in now? This was stupid, of course; she didn’t even live here.
‘Come on,’ said Natalie. ‘Let’s christen our bed.’
‘But the bloke will be delivering the settee. Saturday p.m., he said.’
‘Fuck that.’
She led him upstairs to the master bedroom where their new brass bed waited. She had driven to Sweet Dreams, just like that, and bought it. No instalments, nothing. She pushed him on to the mattress.
‘And we got to fetch another vanload—’ he began.
Straddling him, she stopped his words with her mouth.
‘. . . presenting the latest government initiatives to tackle crime . . .’ said the radio. Natalie sped along the motorway. It was April, and she was on her way to work. ‘The most recent figures show that throughout Britain the crime rate is rising . . .’
Natalie was in high spirits. It was a beautiful day. The cassettes, warmed by the sun, lay in a heap on the passenger seat. She picked up O-Zone – she had bought their latest – and slotted it in.
‘Giveittome giveittome giveittome . . .’
Natalie shouted along with Damon; the music thumped. Unlike her husband, she was not a country lover. During their walk back in December, she had practically frozen to death. This was how the moors should be seen: at speed, from a car, with the sunroof open and O-Zone belting out at volume 23. In the valleys stood empty mill buildings, their rows of windows glittering in the sun. People had left this area in droves and who could blame them? Here and there, amongst the trees, vast chimneys rose up. She thought: They look like penises sprouting through pubic hair.
This turned her thoughts to Colin. She was filled with affection for him. Oh, she had been fond of him from the start – who wouldn’t be? He was so sweet. But her warmth towards him had grown. He was such a devoted husband. He brought her little gifts, like a dog dropping a bone at her feet, and gazed at her with his spaniel eyes. He carried her tea up in the morning and cooked dinner at night – he was a much better cook than she was, he had learnt it at his mother’s knee. He emptied her ashtray; he picked up her clothes from the floor, folding them reverentially and laying them on the chair, giving them a little stroke. He fussed around her – ‘Won’t you catch cold?’
This could become stifling but as yet she didn’t mind, because most of the time Colin was busy outside, hammering away in the workshop he had erected in the garden. He was an enthusiastic home-maker. Each weekend he was occupied knocking up shelves, whistling happily, or tending his repulsive pets. He kept them away from the house, thank goodness, though she sometimes found evidence of his hobby: fly-traps, painstakingly assembled from wire mesh; a bag of frozen mice in the freezer. She was too contented to mind, however; she could even joke about it. Only that morning she had pretended that the trilling of the crickets was the phone ringing. ‘Hello, Natalie speaking,’ she had said, lifting up the receiver, ‘how may I help you?’ They larked around a lot, in those early months.
Having money helped, of course. If their house closed in on her she could simply jump into her car, drive three miles into the city centre and go shopping. Natalie adored buying clothes, she had an insatiable hunger for it. Briefly satisfied, it would well up again and she would surrender. Their bedroom floor was scatt
ered with tiny plastic T-shapes, dropped when she wrenched off price tags.
They could go to the movies; they could buy a microwave. Every morning, as a matter of routine, they drank Sainsbury’s freshly squeezed orange juice, with bits in it. It surprised her, how quickly one got used to it. Natalie was extravagant by nature, spending recklessly and hoping that when the credit-card bills arrived it would sort itself out, but to tell the truth she had been rather desperate before she got married – panic-stricken, in fact. Now the pressure had eased and she felt an airy sense of liberation. Who said money didn’t buy happiness?
Colin was a worrier but she soothed his fears. All she had to do was put her arms around him and silence him with kisses. That did the trick. He was in thrall to her body; he was hers, utterly. At first he had been shy in bed but she had coaxed him, releasing in him a clumsy passion which had alarmed him – was he hurting her? But she was teaching him how to please her. She would take his hand and move his fingers over her body, murmuring to him, and his eagerness to learn touched her. He really was a nice boy, and though they had little in common their shared life drew them together. They were young, healthy, and well-disposed towards each other. They had never quarrelled, not yet, and they loved their new home; to her surprise, she had even enjoyed a trip to IKEA. It seemed as good a start as any to a marriage, though ‘husband’ seemed an odd word to apply to Colin. Maybe everybody felt like that at the beginning.
So that Tuesday Natalie settled down to work with a sense of benign goodwill towards the world. It seemed ridiculous, that the job had once bored her. Every day now she felt a quickening of the pulse; it gave a zip to things. Each time she picked up an envelope she was a fox, sniffing for a scent. When she slit it open, would she find her quarry? Her senses were heightened; everything seemed in sharper focus. The very desks seemed more desk-like, as if she had never noticed them before. Her separation from her colleagues was palpable; she was amazed they didn’t feel it. They worked and chatted, blithely unaware that she lived in a different world. She thought: spies must feel like this. She didn’t use the word criminals, even to herself. After all, she was just milking the system. And why bloody not?
Some days there were four cheques she could use; some days none. Her secret word for them was hits (two hits today). She only chose those for modest amounts – up to two hundred pounds. Little and often was her motto. That way they were less likely to be detected.
But they wouldn’t be detected. Even if these small shortfalls were noticed, they couldn’t be traced back to her. That was the beauty of it. Her scheme was so clever that even in the years to come, when she would look back on her activities with mixed feelings, even then she would feel a glow of pride at this particular aspect of it.
For if she simply paid the cheques into her own account, sooner or later people would realize that something was wrong. Customers who had presumed they had paid their bill would receive a final demand, or even find their phone cut off. They would kick up a fuss, NT would search its records and discover that the cheques had never been paid in. Presumably this would result in some sort of internal investigation. Only an employee, and an employee in the accounts section, would have access to cheques. It would simply be a matter of time before Natalie was traced.
Her method was foolproof. For security reasons, registering and processing payments were two separate departments. They were served by two separate programs on the computer, but it was easy to access the processing program. All she needed was the password and the name of somebody in that department and she could log in.
It only took a matter of minutes. Natalie tapped in the password, which she had obtained from her friend Belinda, logged in Belinda’s name, and downloaded various customer accounts. She ignored the small, domestic accounts; what she used were the accounts of large companies – multinationals, big industries from all over Britain – whose phone bills were so great that an additional two hundred pounds or so would go unquestioned. After all, what was two hundred quid here or there when a bill was in the thousands? It would either go unnoticed or be written off as staff making personal calls – unitemized local ones. She moved the sum to these accounts, processed the original bills as PAID and pocketed the cheques.
The beauty of this was that the bills were indeed paid, but by large firms. None of Her People – for that was how she fondly thought of them, as her unwitting collaborators – none of Her People who had so helpfully written N.T. on their cheques would know that anything had happened. For their bills would go through and nobody was the wiser.
And nobody came to any harm, did they?
And nobody knew. The only person she had told was Kieran, but he would have long since forgotten. Chemical abuse had wrecked his short-term memory; besides, he and Angie, who was Australian, had moved to Melbourne; he had another life now. Like the white dog, he had disappeared for ever.
All in all, it was going even better than she had expected. That day, however, there was a hitch. Natalie returned from lunch to find the computers down; the server had crashed. People sat around. Sioban played cards with Amir, who had only started work that week; Stacey disappeared to Dispatch to visit Derek. None of them minded, of course. This had happened before; with any luck they could go home early.
An hour passed. In her office the new supervisor, Mrs Coles, was talking to the Financial Director. Through the glass, Natalie saw him shaking his head and looking at his watch. When he had gone she went in.
‘What’s the problem?’ Natalie asked.
‘It hasn’t been traced yet. They’re working on it.’
‘Do you know how long it’ll take?’
Mrs Coles raised her eyebrows. She looked gratified, that a member of staff displayed such impatience to get back to work. ‘There’s a possibility they’ll still be down tomorrow. Such a curse.’
Natalie thought: What the hell. Three cheques had arrived that morning, all final demands. They sat on her desk; she hadn’t had time to process them. Oh well, she thought. Just this once.
So, at the end of the day, she slipped them into her bag. And on the way home, as usual, she stopped at a post box and sent them to three of the various building society accounts she had opened in her new name.
By the time Natalie got home, to the smell of chicken cooking, she had forgotten all about them.
Chapter Three
A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN called Margaret was walking along Brighton beach. April is the cruellest month . . . The poem rose to the surface, sentence by sentence. So many words lurked there, in the sediment of her mind. Stray phrases popped up at unexpected moments, like bubbles of escaping gas.
Margaret had been a schoolteacher; she had taught T. S. Eliot, when he had been on the syllabus, to girls who had listened with varying degrees of incomprehension. They would be grown women by now. She thought about them a great deal, more frequently as time went by. They accompanied her like ghosts, her past pupils. They would have husbands now, and children. Their lives, stopped for her at eighteen, continued in unseen homes, scattered over Britain in unvisited towns. Maybe one of them – Annette, Diana, one of the brighter ones – was pausing as she brushed her hair, to remember the words from her A-level Chaucer: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote . . .
Margaret doubted it. She had lost them long ago. For her, however, the words had resurfaced with horrible potency. April was indeed the cruellest month when she looked in the mirror, the sun’s pitiless rays illuminating the whiskers on her chin. Recently, in Venice, she had picked up a mirror to inspect the Tintorettos on the ceiling of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Instead she had caught sight of the underside of her own throat, the turkey-wattle collapse of it. Talk about ancient monuments, she had joked to her companion.
All her life she had made the best of things, working diligently, heating up her Serves One meals in the evenings, keeping herself well groomed, but now she couldn’t be bothered to make the effort. This was, in some ways, a relief. Her life had run out of steam while
her phantom girls heedlessly matured. And so they should, for hadn’t she wished the best for them? It was they who were striding into the future, it was their world now, tough and brutal, exhilaratingly free compared to the life she had known. However, she had to admit that their relationship with her seemed somewhat one-sided. Were they all too busy to write? Just a Christmas card would be welcome.
Margaret was scrunching along the pebbles, lost in thought, when she realized she was not alone. A dog was trotting beside her. It accompanied her as if they had just been separated for a few minutes and it had rejoined her for the rest of their walk. A dishevelled creature with curly hair, it stayed close beside her, raising its face from time to time to check that she was still there. When she stopped in her usual place, to look at the sea, it sat down next to her leg, panting.
By the time she reached the underbelly of the Palace Pier, its great iron struts sunk into the beach, she felt as if she and the dog had known each other for years. She knelt down, rummaged in its damp corkscrew curls and found a disc. On it was inscribed an address and a phone number, in Kemp Town.
The dog accompanied her home, pausing with her at the traffic lights. Its eyes, barely visible under its hair, were moist with love. She hadn’t been the object of such devotion since an Indian newsagent, many years before, had made her the unlikely recipient of his sexual attentions. When he had pressed a Toblerone into her hand she had taken her patronage elsewhere.
Back in her flat she gave the dog a bowl of water. ‘You’re very appealing, but you belong to somebody else,’ she said. The dog stopped lapping and looked at her, as if it needed permission to continue. Some of her more diffident girls had looked at her like this. ‘To be perfectly honest, I’d love to keep you, but it would only be a temporary thing and I’d hate to have our hopes dashed.’
She checked the number on its disc and went to the phone. The dog’s tail thumped.